Three weeks of civic tech research includes findings on NGOs digital vulnerabilities, why civic tech tools fail in the field and questions about whether there's any point to democracy. Plus, my skeptic's take on the Skeptic's Guide to Open Government.
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.
Findings There’s lots of findings on inclusion and exclusion this week. A study of Fix My Street platforms in Brussels suggests that they “marginalize low-income and ethnically diverse communities,” while a Dutch survey suggests that citizen forums aren’t increasing political engagement as much as we’d like. primarily due to problems with representation and drop-out...
The weeds are deep in this one. Findings All the findings: @3ieNews has mapped out existing evidence on citizen-state relations, put together a linked matrix organized according to the interventions and outcomes measured, plus confidence levels. It includes “18 completed systematic reviews and two systematic review protocols, 305 completed impact evaluations reported in 280 papers, 60...
Findings @bbcmediaaction sums up research on social media in development, finds little evidence of impact, and notes that most researcher on the subject is focused on the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012. Community @GlobalIntegrity continues to set the standard for best practice in governance assessments. They’re about to release provisional 2016 African Integrity data for a 2 month peer...
Findings Politically marginalized groups have less access to the internet, worldwide. This shocker based on network measurements over 8 years and identification of politically relevant groups as defined by the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR). The relationship between online and offline activism is messy, according to a survey of 1023 adolescents from five Balkan countries, while a year-long study in...
Papers and Findings A new Brookings report aims to answer the question “Does Open Government Work?” NBD. Not surprisingly, the report doesn’t provide a definitive answer. It does suggest six structural conditions for open government initiatives to achieve their objectives. The framework is nuanced and useful, but it’s not at all clear how the authors came up with it. It...