The new life of data beyond reporting
Fecha de la noticia: 26-08-2021
Public administrations and international organisations are increasingly using new, more practical and creative approaches to problem solving, focusing on real data and how to better understand people's needs. This will enable them to propose solutions that meet those needs more directly and effectively, rather than designing policies or products in isolation and independently, and then trying to make the recipients conform to them.
A good example of this trend is the growing popularity of people-centred design methodologies - such as design thinking - among legislators, public service designers and policy innovators. Thus, we can see how institutions such as the United Nations or governments such as those of Australia or Hong Kong have been exploring the opportunities and advantages that user-centred design offers them for some time now.
This change of mentality also means that the way in which the analysis and results of these public policies have traditionally been presented through macro-reports is also evolving to adapt to the new needs of participatory and collaborative development. Here are three current examples of how this change in philosophy is already being put into practice.
World Bank Global Development Report
About a year ago we shared the first draft of the World Bank's Development Report and already then it was striking that they had prepared a series of public consultations through which they sought to answer the main questions presented in that initial draft. Now that the rounds of consultations are over and a few months after the publication and presentation of the final version of the report, it is also pleasing to note that the World Bank is once again going a step further in presenting the results and offering us a range of options, including the following:
- Highlighted examples: A series of thematic case studies showing how data can be used to drive development in areas as diverse as road safety, environment, gender-based violence, public debt management, and weather forecasting.
- Data and analysis tools: Providing access to and the ability to explore and download all the data underpinning the report. This includes a number of time-series indicators for more than 170 countries, data on laws and regulations affecting data governance in 80 countries, and indicators on the maturity of countries' data governance practices.
- In-depth research: Provides a series of research articles that delve into some of the more detailed aspects of the issues covered in the report, such as the factors limiting internet adoption in West Africa and the cost to countries of enforcing and implementing personal data regulation.
- Case studies: where the World Bank will be incorporating real cases where it is working with countries to facilitate the implementation of appropriate data governance systems, although at the moment it only has a single case study on the data ecosystem in Jordan.
On the other hand, we can also see how this trend towards collaborative design and development not only seems to be consolidated, but also reinforced and extended through a series of online seminars in which the World Bank has been collaborating with other entities and organisations such as the G20, the OECD, the United Nations, Paris21, the Internet Society, the Open Institute or Data2X to continue analysing the results of the study from different points of view.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Another good example of this trend can be seen in the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals project promoted by the United Nations, which, due to its size and complexity, needs to be supported by a variety of other tools beyond the traditional global reports on sustainable development that they also continue to publish on a regular basis. This is why they offer us a huge amount of additional documentation that includes detailed information on each of the 17 development goals, summaries of each goal through infographics and detailed information on their goals and actions, as well as hundreds of publications related to each goal in particular.
But that's not all: they also have a multitude of conferences, events and webinars so that anyone who wants to learn more about the goals or become more actively involved in their development and implementation can have an opportunity to do so. There are also specific high-level forums for the direct participation of member countries ultimately responsible for implementing the goals, as well as specific training and capacity building programmes for them. And, of course, they have their own social media presence through Facebook and Twitter, where they regularly report on all developments and news of possible interest to the general public.
Finally, in addition to all of the above, the UN also provides a range of resources for the scrupulous monitoring of member countries' conversations and dialogues around the goals, as well as the extent to which the goals are being met at any given moment. These monitoring tools include data explorers, interactive maps, country profiles, and stories told through data - which offer a variety of information and visualisations, whether promoted directly by the agency itself or by the community, or carried out by other institutions specialising in more specific issues such as energy or agriculture.
ITU Digital Development Indicators
Finally, a third good example of how to go a step beyond the traditional report can be seen in the statistics that the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) publishes regularly through its digital development measurement reports, which are not limited again to the publication of traditional reports, They offer a whole range of complementary alternatives including interactive reports, a complete multimedia kit to help us disseminate the main findings of the report and a whole series of events through which we can go deeper into different aspects of the results, ranging from international symposia, online seminars, expert group meetings or courses.
In addition, the ITU has created a series of interactive websites through which you can access the main digital development indicators and check their evolution over the last few years in the different countries, or review some more specific indicators such as those related to the cost of digital services, again including historical series and comparisons between different countries. Finally, they also offer us a complete data portal dedicated to collecting all the historical data of the main statistics and indicators available to the institution. And of course, we still have the option of accessing the raw data - including several specific time series and secondary indicators - to do our own analysis.
The above examples show how this shift in thinking about high-impact policy beyond reporting puts a whole new range of tools and methods at our disposal. These in turn will help us to breathe new life into the data we work with, moving from one-way procedures and reporting to increasingly collaborative processes in which data will flow between all participants at different stages of the process, from generating evidence about the problem we want to solve, building partnerships to find solutions, collaboratively developing those solutions, and finally channelling the actions needed to put them into practice.
Content prepared by Carlos Iglesias, Open data Researcher and consultan, World Wide Web Foundation.
Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.
