Civic tech research last week included deep dives into measuring and assessing open government in Mexico, insights on why governments choose collaboration, and field experiments that hint at the limits of scaled engagement strategies. Plus, funding, resources for mapping legal regimes, and smart thinking on how to think about civic tech impact.
Last week saw new evidence on the costs of closed contracting, features for participatory engagement, and the positive outcomes of collaborative and adaptive development programming. Plus there's new resources for using Stata and guidance on digital and econometric methods. Plus, smart phones make us do silly things.
Last week in civic tech saw a new index on civic engagement in Latin America, findings on government run crowdsourcing initiatives, lessons from m-health pilots, and some excellent summaries from the world of development research. Plus major geekdom on QCA methods, and for the first time I'm aware of, actual research on what kind of research activists want.
As noted, I’ve been away. Here’s a quick update on some of the pickles I’ve had in my jar. They’re all wrapping up now, which means more snark is en route. The Teaching Pickle I’ve been teaching a class at Georgetown this spring on Technology, Transparency and Accountable Government Under Trump. It’s a mixed grad/undergrad seminar offered at the School of Foreign Service program on Science...
So I’ve been away from this blog since the new year. That’s pushing four months un-snarked, which is sad. But capacity has been tight. I subscribe to the pickle jar theory of time management (pickles are the big things that demand your time, spices are the small tasks you pour into the jar after you know how many pickles you can fit). Simply put, the snark had to make way for a couple other...
Recent reflections about the irrelevance of academic political communication research should help prompt the civic tech community to think critically about why no one is using all the research that gets produced these days. It's time for a frank conversation that's frankly overdue.
Highlights from civic tech research last week included calls for intermediaries to build safe spaces for government data, an unsurprising stocktaking on open data research, and a productive research takedown by someone who's not me. Plus, there's piles of almost useful learnings, useful help for contribution analysis and data analysis with visualization, and tips for making research useful. Also...
The title of this report promised a lot,, so I was disappointed to see how little the document had to offer. It's essentially a read of the Bank's GIRG data relevant to participatory rule-making, but fails to offer much insight. This is disappointing given so much dynamic work being done in the field, like GovLab's crowdlaw project.
Last week had interesting findings on political mobilization, now with brain scans. Lots of discussions about appropriate methods for measuring government performance, improving statistics and facilitating adaptive programming. Useful resources from the Engine Room and Beautiful Rising. Oh, and Disco!.
Recent MAVC-supported research on South African urban municipal politicians is refreshingly open, and important for the very specific context it studies. But we should think carefully about how, when, and if niche research can be applied to other contexts, and that means being thoughtful in how we tweet and talk about it.