Archive for 2014

New article with Helen Margetts in Policy & Internet: Governments and Citizens Getting to Know Each Other? Open, Closed, and Big Data in Public Management Reform

By | Published Monday, December 22, 2014

Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to “open up” government operations to citizens. New forms of “big data” analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens' behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain “closed” and under-exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).

 Available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1944-2866.POI377/abstract 

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IRSPM Pre-Conference Workshop on Data Visualization

By | Published Monday, March 31, 2014

Evert Lindquist (University of Victoria) and I are hosting a pre-conference workshop on data visualization in the run up to this year's International Research Society for Public Management conference (Ottawa, April 8-12th). The workshop will be held on April 8th at the Canada School of Public Service, from 1:30 to 4:30. Registration is free. 

 We have a great panel of speakers, discussing social network analysis and visualization, user experience testing and border security, expenditure analysis, Geomatics and Arctic research, and more. After our panel we'll break into a discussion on the skills and research needed for data visualization to become a more mainstream technique in the study and practice of government.

 You can register here, but move fast - there's only a few spots left.

More info below:

The Data Visualization Movement: Implications for Public Management 

April 8, 1:30 – 4:30 pm
Hosted by the Canada School of Public Service
Canada School of Public Service
373 Sussex Drive, Ottawa
Based on a growing interest about the possibilities of visualization techniques to inform policy development and engagement with elected leaders and citizens, this workshop considers how visualization techniques have been applied to the various domains of public management practice, such as policy development, service delivery, budgeting, and central monitoring, and in various policy sectors, such as environmental and land regulation, and intelligence and security. Practitioners and proponents of these techniques argue that, regardless of cognitive and learning styles, we have always been visual thinkers, and digital technologies have only accelerated the extent to which citizens and leaders alike can analyze and represent complex problems, design and convey approaches for addressing such problems, and improve analysis and dialogue. The first part of the workshop will be comprised of presentations from practitioners describing their experiences with selected visualization techniques, animating a dialogue with participants about take-up, value-added, limitations, and future potential. The second part will move from the practice of visualization to the study and teaching of visualization. The goal of the workshop is two-fold: for participants to outline an agenda for research in this area and to consider whether the emerging mix of visualization techniques should or could be more assiduously reflected in the curricula of MPP and MPA programs and in professional development programs of public service institutions.





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