This roundup dumps 3 months of links, with evidence that participation boosts, trust and policy satisfaction, but info might not empower communities as we like to think. Plus insights on boosting civic engagement, the state of ICT4D, and lots of useful research for designing open data and government crowdsourcing initiatives.
This month saw a series of research collections guides and databases, plus several assessments of open gov research, and research on what motivates citizens to take action, why M&E is broken, the demand side effects of R2I portals, and lessons from the civic tech graveyard.
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...
Findings: tech and elections Comparative research indicates that SMS is the most effective messaging platform for voter mobilization, while Brazilian research shows a that e-voting has had dramatic effects on both mobilization and enfranchisement. Meanwhile, a US survey suggests that competent poll-workers boost voter confidence that votes would be counted. Well, yeah. A global poll by the pew...