crowdsourcing – Looking Forward

July 27, 2015

Why Do We Need A Fixed Budget?

Ah, a boring subject – government budgets – except that the average American turns over a quarter or so of family income to the budget makers.

And although most taxpayers haven’t thought about it much, to make matters worse, the standard approach that most governments use each year to prepare their budgets is, at least in the USA, almost a hundred years old. Of course, a hundred years ago a budget was the latest reform 🙂

This is just the summary portion of New York City’s latest budget.

Typically, agencies are asked to start planning their budget proposals way ahead of the fiscal year. So it’s possible they could be proposing a spending plan 18 months or more ahead of the actual time they need to deliver services – without knowing all the factors that could change during that time.

Do they know how much snow will need to be removed? How many people will need unemployment insurance? Whether there will be an outbreak of the flu that affects everything from school attendance to public employees being able to work? How much money will there be from income or sales taxes in an economy whose future is not certain?

Is it any surprise that a fixed budget leads to mis-allocation of public funds considering the real problems that might exist at any moment after that budget is approved?

This fixed budget process was developed in an era before readily available computer technology, “big data” and the frequent changes that government has to deal with today.

As I wrote about fixed tax brackets, technology now makes it possible fix the traditional fixed budget. It is no longer the reform it once was – indeed, it stands in the way of running a more efficient and adaptable government today.

There have been variations on the theme, such as performance-based budgeting, zero-based budgeting, etc. But not much has changed about budgeting in most governments for a long time, except that now the budgets are kept on computers instead of printed documents.

Experiments to get out from under the old fashioned budget have had various names – conditional budgeting, priority budgeting, flexible budgeting.

All of these approaches, in one way or another, try to match the priorities among the demands on government with its possibly changing revenues.

Perhaps the most interesting innovations have been around priority budgeting. In its 2011 report, titled “Anatomy of a Priority-Driven Budget Process”, about Snohomish County, Washington State, the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) summarizes the approach.

This is an especially useful area for citizen input, including the use of web-based collaboration platforms. The average person is much better at defining the relative importance of various outcomes to himself/herself than in understanding the implications of a dollar amount that sits on a line in a budget.
Some of the other associations of government officials have In addition to GFOA, the International City Managers Association (ICMA) and the National League of Cities have been trying to educate their members about priority budgeting. They have been working with the Center for Priority Based Budgeting.

Variations of priority-based budgeting have been used in Boulder, CO which ICMA has reported on. It has also been used in Cincinnati, OH among a few dozen other jurisdictions.

An important assumption underlying this more flexible budgeting is that government decision makers cannot foretell the future with precision. So, even the priority-based budget may need to be changed during the course of the year as the public and its leaders learn from what they’ve spent on so far and as new needs arise.

Technology today makes possible a more dynamic approach to managing government finances than in the past because it makes these four key aspects of flexible budgeting feasible:

Identify the cost of delivering each kind of outcome the government has in mind
Prioritize those outcomes through some combination of public values and cost-effectiveness
To get things started, estimate the revenue expected to come in and the volume of demand for each outcome.
Adjust on a monthly basis

This obviously requires some flexibility in the allocation of human resources to. Some aspects of government are not that flexible – for example, you can’t train a new police officer overnight – so there are bound to be some inflexibilities even in this approach, but much less than the entirely rigid traditional approach.

Besides, such a situation might encourage people in government to get creative. If crime is going up, maybe people will realize that not all tasks assigned to police officers require an officer. If crime is going down, maybe there are some on the police force who can work on other things.

But getting more creativity in government is a story for another time. For now, please let me know if you’re aware of more flexible budgeting in the public sector or you want to explore this more for your government.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/125170193142/why-do-we-need-a-fixed-budget]

July 2, 2014

Keeping Citizen Engagement Engaging

Starting at the national level with the Obama Administration’s open government initiative in 2009, there have been many attempts at crowdsourcing in various governments and public agencies.

From his campaign, President Obama realized that we can now scale up collaboration and participation – and create a 21^st century version of the old New England Town Meetings that, while not perfect, did a pretty good job of engaging residents.

Unfortunately many of these efforts have been disappointing in various ways:

Fewer people participated than expected.
The forum was “hijacked by fringe groups” – this was one criticism of the early Obama open government efforts because decriminalizing Marijuana turned out to be one of the more popular proposals. (But see my earlier post “Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?”)
The site went stale, with early excitement evaporating and participation going to zero. As an example, see the Texas Red Tape Challenge.
Citizens were encouraged to participate and did so, only to find that their ideas were disregarded by public officials, which only increased the frustration among both citizen and officials.

Nevertheless, when they succeed, citizen engagements can satisfy several public purposes. They are a great way to get help and new ideas, test proposals, understand priorities of voters and educate citizens about the complexities and realities of governing. Moreover, in response to the general decline in respect for major public, nonprofit and private institutions, crowdsourcing is a way of earning back respect and trust – and convincing a skeptical public that public officials really care. All of these benefits make it easier for public officials to govern better.

And the successes have provided important lessons. Most important, like lots of other things, crowdsourcing requires some thought before implementation.

You won’t get the best results if you take a “just build it and they will come” approach. At the other extreme, you can bury any government initiative in “analysis paralysis”. A reasonable balance is to plan how public officials will:

Set realistic expectations within their own organization as well as with the public;
Target the appropriate audience for the discussion;
Set up the topic/question in a clear, unbiased way;
Start the conversation with citizens;
Figure out how to manage the conversation and keep citizens engaged; and last but not least,
End the engagement in a way that provides a positive experience for citizens and the government.

When these engagements actually engage citizens, they help redefine the relationship between public officials and the people they serve. And they can provide a core of solid support from the public that any public official would desire – the kind of support that will carry officials through those bad times when they also make mistakes.

More later.

[photo credit: http://community.weber.edu/WeberReads/meeting_21922_md.gif]

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/90556112242/keeping-citizen-engagement-engaging]

June 4, 2014

Crowdsourcing For Legislators?

[This blog is a slightly early contribution to the dialog of the annual Personal Democracy Forum to be held tomorrow, June 5, 2014, in New York City. See http://personaldemocracy.com/conferences/nyc/2014 .]

In a previous post, “Is The Voice A Model For Crowdsourcing?”, I noted that crowdsourcing can be a modern manifestation of the civic involvement that is the foundation of successful democracies – by providing public officials a good sense of the priorities of citizens, in addition to giving them new ideas.

When he took office in 2009, President Obama made crowdsourcing a key element of his open government initiative, using the IdeaScale platform. So did other elected officials in national and sub-national governments around the world.

In some respects, it is surprising that public officials with executive responsibilities have taken to crowdsourcing more than those in legislative positions. Most legislative bodies in democracies have encouraged petitions and testimony from the public as they consider new laws. The National Conference of State Legislatures of the USA prominently features the importance of citizen engagement, mostly focused on ways this has happened for decades.

So, in the Internet age, crowdsourcing would seem to be a natural extension of that traditional pattern. But that’s happening slowly.

I would expect this to pick up as legislators realize it is in their professional interest to better engage with their constituents. That engagement helps to even the playing field in the frequent contests between legislators and public executives – a situation where most voters have much less awareness of their legislators than of the executives and so can provide less support for the legislative side.

There are two interested examples of crowdsourcing in the legislative arena.

Last year, the Ministry of Environment in Finland used crowdsourcing to draft a new law on off-road traffic, a subject with conflicting public priorities so it was good to encourage wider involvement in the debate than would normally occur.

A GovLab report, at the end of last year, noted these ways in which this was a positive experiment:

Almost all the comments were constructive, with a very small percentage weeded out.
Participants as a group were realistic about their expectations and the fact that their input would need to be refined.
The participants learned from each other which helped to elevate the level of the debate and presumably made it easier for the government to arrive at a reasonable compromise.
The “crowd preferred commonsensical and nuanced ideas, while rejecting vague and extreme ones”

Clearly the experience of the Finnish would indicate that some of the fears public officials have had about crowdsourcing haven’t come about. The public is trying to participate as reasonable adults in a governmental process; they’re not attacking officials with their “virtual pitchforks”.

Earlier this year, in what he said was a first for the USA, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto of Los Angeles did the same for a proposed new probate law. The number of people who took advantage of the opportunity was relatively small, not surprising considering that probate law is perhaps not the most exciting topic for most people. Nevertheless, he plans to shepherd the ideas from the crowd through the legislative process as part of a larger effort to modernize the way that citizens interact with government.

As crowdsourcing in legislation – both big and small – continues to develop a good track record, I would expect to see many more legislators and legislative bodies begin to use the modern tools for gathering ideas and priorities from the public.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/87794829020/crowdsourcing-for-legislators]

May 7, 2014

Is The Voice A Model For Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing — using the wisdom of the crowd on the Internet — has been especially intriguing to public officials. It gives them access to new ideas as well as an assessment of the popularity of those ideas.

Of course, not all of these crowdsourcing projects have worked so well.

In many cases, these efforts have failed to meet the criteria that James Surowiecki identified in his book, “The Wisdom of the Crowds”. Among other factors, he pointed out that the crowd’s assessment is most useful when they have a great variety of viewpoints based on diverse experience and their judgments are independent of each other. It has been too often the case in public sector crowdsourcing that these criteria are not satisfied.

There has often been a sense by the public that their suggestions get lost and are no one pays attention to them, which leads to low participation. For their side, the professional staff ask “where do we come in?” Is there no role for expertise anymore?

The very popular and Emmy-award winning reality TV series, “The Voice”, may provide a model. The show is intended to identify new singing talent.

The Voice starts with open auditions in many cities, much like crowdsourcing sites are open to anyone to propose an idea. Then in the winnowing process, the professionals enter the picture.

At the beginning of the televised season, professional and well-known singers select candidates for their team. So they act as a filter. This, in a sense, parallels the selection of the public’s ideas that professional staff in government decide they will actually consider.

Then the professional singers do something else – they provide mentoring, advice and training to the candidates on their team. So far as I know, I haven’t seen anything like this in the government or corporate use of crowdsourcing, but it is something they should be doing in order to refine and improve on ideas that arise from the public.

After a few additional trials of their talent, the professional singers select a final set candidates. At that point, the public re-enters the picture. (And the Voice does seem to follow the characteristics of successful crowdsourcing that Surowiecki found.)

Over the rest of the series, it is the votes of the public which determine ultimately who walks away with the number one position and the prized recording contract. In a twist on the usual way people vote, The Voice allows multiple voting – a measure of intensity of support, which also parallels many political situations where intensity is as important as the raw numbers.

While the producers of the show likely do this to enhance their ratings and the public’s involvement with the show, there is a lesson here as well for public officials. While these officials may sometimes dismiss the public’s ideas as misguided, that easy dismissal or failure to follow up on public suggestions only serves to increase the cynicism of voters about the government.

Instead, perhaps like The Voice, after initial rounds of public suggestions, the experts in government could work with the most best ideas to hone them and then present those back to the public to identify which they like the most. This provides the experts a meaningful role in the process and it also brings in the public in what is the ultimate step in a democratic decision process – the priorities of the citizens.

This final step would certainly lessen the cynicism that has accompanied government crowdsourcing efforts in the past and increase participation in those efforts, which would only help to make them even better.

©2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/]

February 26, 2014

Zooniverse: The Next Wikipedia?

Nearly everyone who uses the Internet has heard of Wikipedia and likely used it at least once. Wikipedia has often been held up as the poster child for the way that the Internet enables people all over the globe to collaborate with each other and produce an incredibly valuable result.

While Wikipedia itself has had some growing pains – or is it maturity pains? – there have been other more recent examples of virtual collaboration.

One of my favorites – and a potential successor to Wikipedia as the poster child for virtual collaboration – is Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/ ). Recently, Zooniverse passed the 1,000,000 mark – that is more than a million people have registered to help out.

This is a large number that is even more impressive when you consider that Zooniverse is not a fan site or a fantasy sports site, but is all about the participation of “everyday people” in science.

Their projects range from analyzing data collected in space to biology, nature and the environment. They even have room for what might be considered scientific analyses applied to the humanities.

Unlike Wikipedia whose users vastly outnumber its contributors and whose rules specifically exclude original research, Zooniverse is intended to make everyone a volunteer and to create new science.

It’s a very ambitious goal, one that seems to be working well under the leadership of the Citizens Science Alliance (CSA). CSA describes itself as:

“a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators.”

It’s exactly this kind of project that provides hope for the positive value of the Internet as an unprecedented tool of the knowledge age.

And it also should raise the awareness of public officials about their citizens’ thirst for participation of all kinds.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/77908986686/zooniverse-the-next-wikipedia]

February 6, 2014

Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?

Almost five years ago, President Obama launched an open government website that asked for average citizens to suggest the most pressing public policy issues and then vote on the relative importance of those issues. In the words of IdeaScale, the company that has developed the software platform for these kinds of crowdsourcing activities, these efforts at Internet-based collaboration are intended to bubble up the best ideas.

So it was with some embarrassment on the part of the White House that the subject of the legalization of marijuana came out as one of the top issues in 2009. The opponents of the President took him to task about letting a tiny fringe minority dominate his Open Government efforts. As reported in an article “Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise”, this resulted even in one of the leading scholars and advocates of crowdsourcing discussing checks and balances on full national scale popular engagement on public policy.

Various explanations were given and there was lots of hand-wringing by the digerati and open government advocates, including this one in Wired and this one on the Personal Democracy Forum blog. The White House ultimately responded only to those important issues it thought politically acceptable to respond to – not including marijuana.

Then all this passed into arcane history. But I was reminded of this history when Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana in the elections last year, various governors announced their reduction in enforcement of anti-marijuana laws or even effective decriminalization and, indeed, even the Obama Administration has softened its stance.

Whatever you might think of these decisions as matters of public policy, it seems that the rush to negative judgment about the marijuana issue “bubbling up” in 2009 was perhaps inappropriate. It may well be that these crowdsourcing efforts, while not perfect and potentially manipulated, can act as a kind of leading indicator of public opinion. Clearly the supporters were a bit more than a tiny, fringe minority.

For now, we see that public opinion on marijuana laws is the opposite of what the media commentators would have had us believe in 2009. For example, there have been two stories this past year about the survey work of the respected and non-partisan Pew Research folks:

“Americans skeptical of value of enforcing marijuana laws” (August 13, 2013), in which they found “roughly three–in-four Americans say government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more than they are worth” and
“Majority Now Supports Legalizing Marijuana” (April 4, 2013) which seems to indicate the shift to the majority was identified in a 2010 survey.

In 2009, this was apparently still not a majority but on its way to becoming one. That is perhaps one reason that the organizations who use crowdsourcing also have found it to be a valuable means of developing innovative ideas and solutions – which are not yet, but will be, conventional wisdom in a few years.

So we do indeed need to get smarter about open government efforts, which is not the same thing as saying they don’t work. As leaders represent ever larger constituencies and thus have more difficulty understanding what’s on the minds of those constituents, crowdsourcing can be a useful instrument.

It is also something that voters will very much appreciate as a promising countervailing tendency to the disengagement from civic affairs that many have felt in recent years.

On top of that, leaders may also realize how much wisdom there is “out there” and look smart for adopting it early.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/75798707019/do-good-ideas-bubble-up-from-the-crowd]

June 18, 2011April 15, 2018

Gold Mining

[Published 6/18/2011 and originally posted for government leaders, July 6, 2009]

My last posting was about the “goldmine” that exists in the information your government collects every day. It’s a goldmine because this data can be analyzed to determine how to save money by learning what policies and programs work best. Some governments have the internal skills to do this kind of sophisticated analysis or they can contract for those skills. But no government – not even the US Federal government – has the resources to analyze all the data they have.

What can you do about that? Maybe there’s an answer in a story about real gold mining from the authors of the book “Wikinomics”[1]:

A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp was in trouble. Besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, the company had terminated mining operations…. [M]ost analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold. Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle.

Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property … [he] published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The “Goldcorp Challenge” made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates. Every scrap of information (some 400 megabytes worth) about the 55,000 acre property was revealed on Goldcorp’s Web site.

News of the contest spread quickly around the Internet and more than 1,000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries got busy crunching the data. Within weeks, submissions from around the world were flooding into Goldcorp headquarters. There were entries from graduate students, management consultants, mathematicians, military officers, and a virtual army of geologists. “We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry,” says McEwen. “When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair.”

The contestants identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, more than 80% of which yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding 8 million ounces of gold have been found – worth well over $3 billion. Not a bad return on a half million dollar investment.

You probably won’t be able to offer a prize to analysts, although you might offer to share some of the savings that result from doing things better. But, since the public has an interest in seeing its government work better, unlike a private corporation, maybe you don’t have to offer a prize.And there are many examples on the Internet where people are willing to help out without any obvious monetary reward.

Certainly not everyone, but enough people might be interested in the data to take a shot of making sense of it – students or even college professors looking for research projects, retired statisticians, the kinds of folks who live to analyze baseball statistics, and anyone who might find this a challenge.

The Obama administration and its new IT leaders have made a big deal about putting its data on the Web. There are dozens of data sets on the Federal site data.gov[2], obviously taking care to deal with issues of individual privacy and national security. Although their primary interest is in transparency of government, now that the data is there, we’ll start to see what people out there learn from all that information. Alabama[3] and the District of Columbia, among others, have started to do the same thing.

You can benefit a lot more, if you too make your government’s data available on the web for analysis. Then your data, perhaps combined with the Federal data and other sources on the web, can provide you with an even better picture of how to improve your government – better than just using your own data alone.

“Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration”, Business Week, Feb. 1, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070201_774736.htm
“Data.gov open for business”, Government Computer News, May 21, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/05/21/federal-data-website-goes-live.aspx
“Alabama at your fingertips”, Government Computer News, April 20, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/04/20/arms-provides-data-maps-to-agencies.aspx

June 18, 2011

Gold Mining

[Note: This was originally posted on a blog for government leaders, July 6, 2009]

What can you do about that? Maybe there’s an answer in a story about real gold mining from the authors of the book “Wikinomics”[1]:

A few years back, Toronto-based gold mining company Goldcorp was in trouble. Besieged by strikes, lingering debts, and an exceedingly high cost of production, the company had terminated mining operations…. [M]ost analysts assumed that the company’s fifty-year old mine in Red Lake, Ontario, was dying. Without evidence of substantial new gold deposits, Goldcorp was likely to fold. Chief Executive Officer Rob McEwen needed a miracle.

Frustrated that his in-house geologists couldn’t reliably estimate the value and location of the gold on his property … [he] published his geological data on the Web for all to see and challenged the world to do the prospecting. The “Goldcorp Challenge” made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates. Every scrap of information (some 400 megabytes worth) about the 55,000 acre property was revealed on Goldcorp’s Web site.

News of the contest spread quickly around the Internet and more than 1,000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries got busy crunching the data. Within weeks, submissions from around the world were flooding into Goldcorp headquarters. There were entries from graduate students, management consultants, mathematicians, military officers, and a virtual army of geologists. “We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry,” says McEwen. “When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair.”

The contestants identified 110 targets on the Red Lake property, more than 80% of which yielded substantial quantities of gold. In fact, since the challenge was initiated, an astounding 8 million ounces of gold have been found – worth well over $3 billion. Not a bad return on a half million dollar investment.

“Innovation in the Age of Mass Collaboration”, Business Week, Feb. 1, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070201_774736.htm
“Data.gov open for business”, Government Computer News, May 21, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/05/21/federal-data-website-goes-live.aspx
“Alabama at your fingertips”, Government Computer News, April 20, 2009, http://gcn.com/articles/2009/04/20/arms-provides-data-maps-to-agencies.aspx