Optimising services in the public sector

Improving the public sector for the benefit of the citizens is, maybe, the (quiet but constant) wish of citizens and the (occasional but loud) promise of politicians. Quite rightfully so, especially in countries where considerable sums of public money are channelled to support the various social state functions, such as education, healthcare, welfare services, etc.

'Winner' by Alessandro Capurso
under a CC license

So, why not try to optimise the public sector as would any business do with its core processes?

Interesting idea, probably not-that-new, certainly always tempting, but with its pitfalls. So, not so fast!

Optimisation, in the mathematical sense, is the selection of the best element(s) against a pre-determined set of criteria. This implies that, in order to optimise something, one needs data to for performance and cost parameters. In the typical scenario, one would have a large set of variables, with the corresponding datasets, and would need to select the target for the optimisation process, providing any constrains that may apply to the variables. It sounds easy but it's not.

Doing good

Doing good or, at least, doing something good, is very much within the spirit of these days (Christmas, New Year's Eve, Epiphany). People are willing to be more open, to give to those in need, to contribute to good causes and to feel that they are doing their (little) bit to make world (or, even, a tiny part of it) a better place.

'Donation box' (cropped
and size-reduced), originally
by Yukiko Matsuoka
under a CC licesne

I won't say that doing good is in our very nature, while - to some extent - it most probably is. Altruism is a characteristic that has been examined by many different viewpoints (scientific, evolutionary, philosophical, religious, etc.) and, while not unique to humans, it has contributed to what humanity is today.

Instead, I'll stick to the simplistic view that, given the right chance and the right environment, most people would choose to do good, regardless of the exact reason behind their choice.

Indeed, our social ecosystem includes numerous local, trans-regional and international organisations devoted to good causes. Charities, as non-governmental organisations, have a recognised status in many countries, giving them privileges, such as tax exemptions or administrative simplifications, so as to facilitate their work. Some doing-good-oriented organisations go after a higher profile (and have catchy names, e.g., the Do Something Great Today Foundation, Doing Something Good, DoGoodVolunteer, etc.). Some are lucky enough to have lots of resources, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and can, thus, work on diverse projects and places. Others, like the Medecins sans frontieres are much more "thematically" focused.

There are also non-governmental charity organisations that are contributing to society in a very different way. Think of the Mozilla Foundation (that is behind the Firefox browser), the Wikimedia Foundation (which is behind Wikipedia), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, etc. These are organisations with a mission that is relevant and has an impact to the public' s normal, everyday life.

There also non-profits that provide funding mechanisms to help those in need. Kiva, for instance, facilitates people to provide microloans to people all around the world. While those are not donations but loans (i.e., people will have to return the capital + interest) they are thought to help local development since they address "investments" that are not within the core business of typical banks. They may provide, for instance, the money a farmer needs to get fertiliser for this year's crop, i.e., they normally provide small amounts of money.

Microcredit organisations are not the only type of crowdfunding. The crowdfunding category is very diverse and, altogether, as an alternative way to get funding is becoming increasingly available and popular. Although not a clear charity mechanism, crowdfunding platforms allow people with a vision to address the wide public and ask for support. The rules of the game vary greatly amongst the different platforms. Indiegogo and Kickstarter are popular examples for individuals (you can also have a look at the 7 most supported Indiegogo campaigns and at the most funded Kickstarter projects) but there numerous other services with very different operation styles, some of which are best suited for businesses.

In other cases, there are business entities that include charity support in their business model (e.g., Humble Bundle Inc.). And, of course, there is the - thankfully increasing - trend of corporate social responsibility, where enterprises - of any size or business sector - give back to the society.

Then there is volunteering (e.g., Global Volunteer Network, International Volunteer Programs Association, etc.. As a means, it has been used extensively both at times/ places of need and as an additional assistance to the normal mechanisms in place.

So, are we having enough charity to make sure that our world is enjoying a life that meets - at least - the minimum "acceptable" standards?

No. Really, we are far from that.

The resources made available through our current charity ecosystem, together with the resources allocated by governments, international organisations, etc., cannot meet the actual demand, which is substantial, even in middle- and high-income countries (albeit for different things than low-income countries).

Yes, there are also concerns regarding efficiency in the mechanisms used to channel resources from those who provide them to those who need them. Fraud is another concern that occasionally arises.

But that doesn't make giving, donating, volunteering and supporting good causes pointless. Despite current shortcomings, doing good always counts!

Even if it helps a single individual for a finite amount of time...

Full disclosure and disclaimer: As of writing this post, I have not been affiliated to or have been supported by any of the organisations mentioned in this post. Also, I have not specifically enquired for or used their services. Thus, I am in no position to endorse them (or not) and my mentioning them herein is not meant to constitute an endorsement. Any organisation or organisation type mentioned in this post is for information purposes only. Most likely, there many similarly-minded organisations out there. If you want to donate or contribute to a cause or if you want to receive assistance, do take the time needed to find and compare the alternatives suitable for you.

If we want innovation we may need to re-think on the right to fail

'Failure' by Beat Küng
under a CC license

Success and failure are two terms that we come to meet very early in life. The paradox is that, while we learn and develop through failure, ultimately reaching success, later in life, we tend to look down on those who do not succeed.

Certainly, there must be an evolution element involved in that attitude of ours. Clearly, success is the desirable outcome. When it comes to making breakthroughs, though, regardless of whether those are disruptive innovations or smaller forward-leap ideas, trial-and-error or - in plain english - failure is part of the process. Our stance on somebody 's failure normally includes elements of constructive or not-so-much criticism and sympathy at ratios that vary according to our ties with the individual in question and the impact of the individual 's failure.

At any rate, despite the fact we know that failure is part of life, which may even lead to success, we often 'forget' that people have the 'right to fail', at least to some extent.

Interestingly, our legal and business norms seem better prepared to handle failure than our social instincts. Entrepreneurs can go bankrupt, for instance, and start over after a while. First offenders get a 'lighter' treatment in the justice system. In each case, of course, the impact of failure on the individual does vary - and there is always some negative impact and maybe even some longer lasting effects.

So the question is, how do we shape things in such a way that the fear of failure does not hinder innovation, including innovative thinking, innovative design, innovative practices, etc., while the impact of a likely failure is contained reasonably well?

I'm not sure I have the answer to that. But there are things, both related to the effort towards success and to the (potential) failure, most of there already tested and proved, that may help:

• Make advice easily available to innovators. That may be through free research or business development services, through subsidies available for consultants, etc.
• Develop a network of mentors available to support innovators. Having a mentor solves the problems of 'what is the right question to ask a consultant?' and 'how to I prioritise tasks?'. Such schemes - to my knowledge - have been limited to mostly within academic and large corporation environments. Maybe it worth considering how to deploy such scheme to emerging innovative entrepreneurs.
• Encourage step-wise development. Such steps would limit the cost of failure at each step with the added bonus of better awareness of all opportunities as the 'product' matures.
• Encourage pooling of resources and diversify investment. Now that is a tricky one. It can apply to both enterprises and investors, including financial institutions. The former may not have the capacity to adopt such approach but the latter, most likely, have something like that already in place. The problem is how to correctly estimate the risk for each investment, so as to allocate reasonable funds in a reasonable way. There, both underestimating the risk and overestimating it leads to serious problems for the innovation system.
• Provide guidance after (potential) failure. Yes, seriously. Failure doesn't always have to be an abrupt halt but innovators should have the means to access what went wrong and if/ how it can be fixed. And yes, the next step is to provide resources after (potential) failure, should things prove to be fixable.
• Promote success stories.
• Encourage the innovative thinking of students within the education system. That should be a no-brainer, yet in practice we choose to be on the conservative side. There many ways to do that; gamification of the challenge could be one of the alternatives. To be fair, however, that is no easy task - especially if the education system runs under limited resources. In any case, it should include advice on how to deal with failure at the factual and - possibly - at the emotional level.

The list, above, is only indicative. The bad thing is that they all come at a cost and that the potential benefit is linked to the (perhaps risky) innovation at the end of the chain. The good thing is that such measures can be applied within different environments and at suitable intensities, minimising risk while still being able to reach (and study) results.

And, for the end, a couple of relevant TED talks. As usual, inspiring to watch :)

What does it take to make an active citizen?

'Smile! It's Contagious' by
Daniel Go under a CC license

An active citizen is a citizen with the proper sense of responsibility towards society. That's, indeed, a vague and ambiguous statement that can hardly serve as a definition. Just to contribute more to confusion, active citizens are not necessarily activists - at least not under the negative light that occasionally has been shed on the term. The problem is that there is no formal definition for active citizens, just examples placing them as the good guys of society, the ones doing the right thing, from respecting the environment to voting and from properly voicing their opinion to volunteering for a good cause.

Does a society need active citizens? Certainly yes! Could a society do without those? Maybe. But it would need to heavily rely on other mechanisms to ensure its proper function, should the majority of its members choose not to fulfill their responsibilities. Imagine, for instance, a society where people would neglect the environment and, instead, only pollute.

Active citizens can drive societies further ahead of what laws and established norms could, on their own, achieve. They could do that possibly at a lower total cost, mobilising more diverse resources and, most likely, managing them more effectively.

The question is, how does a society (or a state) encourage active citizenship. Especially in times of weak economy and overall uncertainty. What do people need in order to grow from plain individuals to active citizens within a dynamic society?

Inevitably, I'll be doing some not-properly-documented brainstorming here but feel free to correct me:

• People need to be inspired by someone or something. This could be done via a role model, a motivational speech, work experience, culture, personal interactions with others, etc.
• People need the time to process ideas, to reflect, plan, discuss and reach decisions.
• People need the space and the means (or resources or support) to implement their decisions, to setup, run and monitor their plan.
• People need to have margin for failure.
• Should success come, people need to be able to benefit, at least morally and emotionally so as to, in turn, inspire others.

That's a small collection of 5 rather naive and quite ideal points. In practice people won't have the privilege of all those - at least not at the same time. However, there are feasible steps that societies/ states can take to make the environment friendlier to active citizens. For instance:

• Setting/ improving a clear and easy-to-comprehend legal framework for citizen welfare (health, education and further development, employment). Just for the sake of the argument, having healthy work environments with proper time of paid leave and decent minimum wages would allow people to think beyond work as a means of survival. Adding incentives could help a lot (e.g., leaves for charity work).
• Encouraging corporate social responsibility both in the private and in the public sector so as to benefit society directly but also to further expose people on (some) values with relevance to active citizenship.
• Establish policies providing a framework for citizen initiatives and (some) access to resources, e.g. simple processes for establishing non-profit CSOs, providing access to data, allowing access to and use of public spaces, providing public funding for certain citizen initiatives, providing legal advice and business plan support, etc.
• Promote the culture of active citizenship, e.g., via education or via promotion of successful initiatives.
• Interact with citizens - active and not-so-active - in motivational ways (invite input, listen, discuss, provide feedback).
• Adopt good practices, invest on results and work towards causes highlighted by active citizens, etc., thus demonstrating that getting actively involved leads to positive change and benefits society.

I'm sure that there is more to add to the list. I'm also well aware that measures to that direction do exist in nearly all countries in the EU. However, there is always more that can done, even with little resources available. At challenging times, this is a promising path worth investigating...

[Of course, many, many others have voiced (a variety of) thoughts on this topic in the past. The video below is from the TEDx talk of Dave Meslin. Some of his points do have local only relevance but most apply rather widely.]

Nomads

'Formationsflug' by loop_oh
under a CC license

I've been tempted many times to write on the current financial mess the world is in. I am by no means an expert on financial issues, let alone world financial issues, but I sort of feel part of the equation. To be frank, living in Greece today and having spent the last decade or so in the country, I believe that most people in the world think that finances are merely stand alone - but of extreme importance - math formulas, with a vague, not necessarily clear connection to the real world.
Well, yes, there is math involved but - here is the catch - not only. And, yes, they have a huge impact on how the real world works.

I won't go on with this topic, though. Too many people, professionals of all sorts, as well as individuals have reported, analysed, commented, reviewed and - at any rate - written too many words on the issue from many different vantage points. The chances are that they will continue doing that and, also, that I will continue following them up. However, I need to express a question: Do we (mankind) know how wealth and society interact with each other?

Seriously.

I don't mean whether we have socio-economic theories and models available and in practice. That, we do. (and, currently, it is clear that they need a bit of tweaking to keep us on a sustainable path).  I'm wondering whether we know how the various societal elements interact with the wealth-generating mechanisms. I do understand that this is no easy thing; in my mind it sounds a bit like asking for the single, all-inclusive math model that is capable of correlating the reduction in the production of feta-cheese in Greece to the change of the rate of oil exploration in the Arctic circle and quantify the effect of that correlation to the (im)migration of early-career civil engineers from south Chile to Norway. [btw., this is a purely fictitious example!]

I am sure that, as you read these lines, there are scholars around the world that are trying to connect the dots, refining formulas, adapting theories, etc. By the way, immigration is a topic that has been receiving a lot of attention the last few decades. Mathematical models do exist and work on those still continues.

For societal stakeholders the challenge goes above and beyond merely producing a formula that manages to model the phenomena we witness. In fact, with or without such formula the critical question is how to manage change in the most "productive", "civilized" and "sustainable" way. I used quotation marks because, really, those three words have been assigned a wide range of meanings so far. What I'm trying to say is that we need to find out how to use the advantages of any change, regardless of how minor those may be, in order to mitigate, completely negate or even exceed the associated disadvantages.

Immigration is a nice example. Whenever we hear the word, we tend of thinking of working hands with no or little qualifications. Often, the word is associated with discussions on unemployment, violence and crime, burden to the social system, etc. Sometimes, brain-drain gets attention, as well. But, as you imagine, there is an other side, too: increase of the available workforce, widening of the tax-basis, cultural (and other) diversity, strengthening of the intra-societal dialogue potential, expansion of the internal market, enrichment of the skills pool, transfer of innovation, etc. The rule of thumb is that you can't have all the pros without any cons but there have been plenty of examples of countries that managed quite well by receiving and integrating immigrants (the US, Germany and Australia being just a few strong examples), both with low and high skills and qualifications.

Going a bit beyond that, mobility is strongly explored as a way to boost innovation. The Marie Curie Actions (implemented by the European Commission) have led to numerous success stories. Of course, researcher mobility and immigration of the general population are neither synonyms nor equivalents but they do share some common elements.

Some express views where immigration contributes to local communities in the same way that genetic diversity contributes to the survival and expansion of a species (similar thinking has been expressed for cultural diversity). I wouldn't go that far, though. To what I perceive, migration, be it within borders or cross-border, has led to variety in life and has come hand-in-hand with internationalisation (again, a word with more than one faces). If I stick to simple things, the languages with speak, the way we think, the foods we taste, the way we work, the fashion we follow, have been shaped through numerous "exchanges" with groups of people from "somewhere else". That doesn't mean that immigration shouldn't be carefully thought of by the states. But, nevertheless, it can also lead to better thinking, which sometimes is really, really needed...

Hearth, Fireplace, TV and Facebook

Once upon a time, families would gather close to a house's hearth to cook, eat, warm themselves, talk and socialise. Years passed and the custom still persisted. The hearth managed to cover so many human needs at the same time that was a hub of the household. Ancient Greeks even had Hestia (Εστία) - a goddess - for that.

Much, much later in history, when houses became bigger and the household functions could be separated, it was the fireplace (or the gas heater) that became the centre of a house's social life (at least in winter).

And then, came the TV. It didn't (and it doesn't) cover the heating part, which is why TV sets and fireplaces often shared the same room, but it did (and it does) cover the story-telling/pseudo-social part. The TV sets became really quickly the household animators. Numerous voices have critised the effect of television on human society, although - to be fair - the television is also associated with a number of exciting possibilities, making it one of the most disruptive technologies, equivalent to the written languages, the typography or the radio.

In our digital age the traditional TV faces a number of competitors: The internet gives the potential for interaction, communication as well as information and entertainment. More and more parts of the world gain access to the digital world. More and more people acquire a digital presence. An e-mail address at first, a blog screen name at a second stage, a youtube alias maybe, an avatar on an online game, or even a piece of property in a digital world.

The social life, as most of us know it, had a clear impact on the digital world, from its early days. As "expected" (but that is said retrospectively) when people got the tools to reproduce their social links in the online world, those tools became massively successful (see irc, myspace, orkut, facebook, tweeter, picassa and flickr and - of course - the various blog- and forum- hosting sites - to name just a few).

Now, it has started working the other way round. Our digital presence is beginning to become the point of reference. It is our online profiles that are up-to-date and it is those profiles that maintain the link with the people of our social circle. Do you want to get to know somebody? Meet him/ her online! Link your digital existences!

Don't get me wrong. There is no dismissive criticism behind my words (questions and surprise, maybe). After all, just a few years ago, a person's social toolbox would include the telephone (still on the list), letters, postcards and even the local press. When "free time" is currently under redefinition, employing IT for a similar purpose seems the natural thing to do...

:-)

(Photo: "Hearth & Hound", CC by Woody)