Last week's roundup of civic tech research had a lot of absurdity, from presidential tweets to SCIGen, plus findings on when online activism provokes responses from authoritarians and who adopts online reporting platforms first.
Roundup: formal organizations campaign more online, instructive failure in scaling engagement, and weedsy methods for measureing #open
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.
Roundup: circumvention on the rise, costing closed contracting, better case selection, and a check list for digital methods
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.
Roundup: participation is up in Latin America, nobody’s paying for the data revolution, and somebody finally asked the activists what research they actually want
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.