Uganda: Data Strategy and Capacity Building

As part of Uganda's commitment to the Sustainable Development Agenda, the country has made substantial progress toward improved national development data—including the launch of a Development Data Hub supported by Development Initiatives and a review of open data readiness jointly undertaken by the government and the World Bank. Uganda however, lacks an organized framework for collecting and sharing reliable and comparable data on philanthropy. As such, the newly established Uganda National Philanthropy Forum (UPF) represents a key mechanism for the sector to consolidate its e orts and hone its contributions to national development. The forum was established in October 2015, facilitated by the East Africa Association of Grantmakers (EAAG), in partnership with Independent Development Fund (IDF), Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations (DENIVA) and GoBig Hub. Its objective is to explore strategies for consolidating and organizing the philanthropy sector in Uganda.As a follow up to the UPF agenda on advancing philanthropy data in Uganda, EAAG and the Foundation Center in partnership with IDF and DENIVA hosted a Data Scoping Meeting on October 25th 2016. The objective of the meeting was to explore opportunities to strengthen data sharing and management to enhance the sector's coordination and in uence on national development policy. The meeting brought together 35 foundations, trusts and other local philanthropy organizations

Delivering on Open Government: The Obama Administration's Unfinished Legacy

This report examines progress made during President Obama's first term toward open government goals outlined in a comprehensive set of recommendations that the open government community issued in November 2008, titled Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda. We examine activity in the three main areas of the 2008 report: creating an environment within government that is supportive of transparency, improving public use of government information, and reducing the secrecy related to national security issues

Public Reporting and Transparency

Provides a short history of efforts to report information on health system performance; identifies policy issues to consider when advancing such efforts; and offers lessons from the experience of public reporting efforts to date

A Time for Action

This is the second and final report the LA 2020 Commission will publish. This report contains a series of concrete measures which, if adopted, will enhance transparency and accountability in City Hall, put Los Angeles on a path toward fiscal stability and renew job creation in the region

The Internet and the Future of Financial Services: Transparency, Differential Pricing and Disintermediation

The Internet has had a profound effect on the financial service sector, dramatically changing the cost and capabilities for marketing, distributing and servicing financial products and enabling new types of products and services to be developed. This is especially true for retail financial services where widespread adoption of the Internet, the standardization provided by the world-wide web, and the low cost of Internet communications and transactions have made it possible to reach customers electronically in ways that were prohibitively costly even 5 years ago; indeed, pre-Internet attempts at the online distribution of retail financial services were outright failures in the mid-1980s. The concurrent growth and de-facto standardization of Internet-enabled personal financial management software (e.g., Quicken and Microsoft Money) have also contributed to an increasing array of low cost and potentially richer ways to provide information and transaction services to customers. The growth in Internet-enabled products and service has been rapid in some sectors and slower in others. Retail brokerage has seen a dramatic change with more than 15% (Salomon Smith Barney, 2000) of brokerage assets now managed in on-line trading counts, and substantially more if "traditional" brokerage accounts and mutual funds with on-line access are included. Similarly, approximately 10 million US customers currently use on-line banking (O'Brien, 2000) and 39 of the top 100 banks offer fully functional internet banking (ePayNews, 2000). Many banks and brokerages are on their second or third release of their on-line delivery platform. Credit cards, while not radically transformed in operational aspects of the business, have begun to have some volume of new origination on-line. In addition, leading credit card companies such as Capital One Financial have been some of the largest "traditional" companies in the use of Internet advertising (see www.adrelevance.com, 1999). More regulated and complex financial products such as mortgages and insurance have had some origination volume on the Internet (an estimated $17Bn of mortgages will be originated and ~$400mm in insurance premiums will be sold online in 2000). For these sectors, the adoption of on-line origination has been much slower and concentrated in entrants, rather than incumbent firms. However, despite the small level of originations, the Internet has become a significant and growing source of product information - it is estimated that about 10% of insurance customers and 15% of mortgage customers have used the internet to shop for these products (Forrester, 1998; McVey, 2000). This may ultimately affect product purchase and pricing structure, irrespective of the delivery channel. Internet companies have also played a role in many other segments of the industry such as financial information and news, rating and comparison services, and even some areas where one might think the Internet would have a less significant role, such as financial planning and investment banking. While the continued growth rates are uncertain and the penetration for the more complex products has not yet been shown to be widespread, it is safe to conclude that the Internet will play a significant role in consumer financial services for a large subset of customers, and that this role will be significantly different across different sub-sectors of the financial industry. In discussions of the Internet impact on the financial services sector, the emphasis has often been placed on the direct cost-saving effects of using the Internet to provide transaction services. These potential cost savings are indeed significant and in the long term may lead to significant creation of value. However, there also substantial barriers to realizing much of this value. In some industries, such as the credit card industry, many of the potential gains from automation have already been realized, and in others, the gains may be concentrated in only a few areas of the value chain. For products which are sold through branches or agents (banking, mortgage and insurance), realization of cost savings will require a difficult and time consuming redesign of the retail delivery system. Finally, many of these efficiencies are accompanied by improved customer convenience. To the extent that consumers respond by consuming more services, particularly those that generate costs but not revenue, overall costs may not be substantially reduced. This has been the experience of previous innovations in retail financial service delivery such as automated teller machines (ATMs). Computers, and more recently the Internet, are best described as "general purpose technologies" (Brynjolfsson and Hitt, 2000), like the electric motor or the telegraph (Bresnehan and Trajtenberg, 1995). For general purpose technologies, most of the economic value they create is associated with their ability to enable complementary innovations in organization, market structure, and products and services. However, at the same time, these complementary changes are often disruptive to the existing structure of an industry (Tushman and Anderson, 1986; Bower and Christensen, 1995), leading to significant redistribution of value among industry participants and between producers and consumers. To understand the true impact of the Internet on the financial service industry, it is therefore necessary to identify how the Internet affects the critical drivers of industry structure, and how it enables or necessitates changes in products and services. This will necessarily be difficult, as it is hard to isolate the contribution of the Internet separately from the effects of other complementary innovations, and to distinguish Internet effects from other of long-term industry trends and exogenous factors. While obtaining precise numerical estimates of the productivity effects will be hard, in many cases the direction and general magnitude of the impact on productivity, profitability and consumer surplus (consumer value) will be clear. We see three principal issues that will determine the transformation of retail financial services: Transparency, or the ability of all market participants to determine the available range of prices for financial instruments and financial services; Differential pricing, in which finer and finer distinctions must be made among groups of customers, setting their prices based upon the revenue streams they generate, the costs to serve them, and their resulting profitability; Disintermediation or bypass, in which net-based direct interaction eliminates the role previously enjoyed by financial advisors, retail stock brokers, and insurance agents. Each of these will affect the roles to be played by financial service providers, the sources of profits available to them, and the strategies they may choose to pursue in order to earn those profits. However, different financial products will be affected differently by each of these issues in both the nature and the magnitude of the effect. In addition, these factors are often interdependent - for example, differential pricing is often a necessary response to increasing price transparency to prevent erosion of margins, and the ability to deliver sophisticated (although typically not complex) pricing strategies to customers may be affected by the incentives and structure of the distribution system. For these reasons, we will organize the remainder of the paper around the discussion of these effects as they apply within different sectors in financial services. The emphasis of our analysis will be on the primary sectors in retail financial services: credit cards, deposit banking, mortgages, brokerage, and insurance. Our focus is the retail segment because it has been the most radically transformed by the Internet to date, primarily because the retail business has the most to benefit from the reduction in customer interaction costs, the ability to reach mass markets, and the reduction in the role of geography in determining the strategies of financial services providers. Much of the computing- and communications-enabled transformation in the relationships among financial institutions or between financial institutions and consumers of wholesale financial services (for example, brokerage houses and exchanges, or large firms and their commercial lenders) have already occurred or were well underway before the Internet was commercialized. For these markets, the economics of computing and networking were still favorable under previous generations of technology. Many of the commercial financial services that are likely to be transformed by the Internet, at least in the medium term (3-5 years), are those that closely resemble retail services (such as commercial mortgage, short term lending, leasing, cash management, and the like). That is not to say that business to business (B2B) e-commerce opportunities do not exist in the financial sector - only that many of the medium term opportunities that are directly a result of the Internet are closely analogous to changes in the retail sector, and the others are probably more closely related to organizational and market innovation rather than a result of ubiquitous and low-cost communications technology.

Revealing the unseen: how to expose cloud usage while protecting user privacy

Cloud users have little visibility into the performance characteristics and utilization of the physical machines underpinning the virtualized cloud resources they use. This uncertainty forces users and researchers to reverse engineer the inner workings of cloud systems in order to understand and optimize the conditions their applications operate. At Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), as a public cloud operator, we'd like to expose the utilization of our physical infrastructure to stop this wasteful effort. Mindful that such exposure can be used maliciously for gaining insight into other user's workloads, in this position paper we argue for the need for an approach that balances openness of the cloud overall with privacy for each tenant inside of it. We believe that this approach can be instantiated via a novel combination of several security and privacy technologies. We discuss the potential benefits, implications of transparency for cloud systems and users, and technical challenges/possibilities.Accepted manuscrip

Health Insurance Exchanges: Organizing Health Insurance Marketplaces to Promote Health Reform Goals

Examines whether and how the proposed health insurance exchange to organize an efficient marketplace would address problems individuals and employers face in buying insurance and thereby increase coverage. Considers lessons learned from earlier efforts

At a time of insurgent parties, can societies believe in election polls?. The Spanish experience

The main purpose of this paper is to use the Spanish case, through an econometric analysis of 226 electoral polls, to explain why polls are making more mistakes in times of great socioeconomic slumps, political instability and the emergence of new political parties. In this context, it is the very instrument with which society tries to reduce the reigning uncertainty that, paradoxically, can ultimately drive uncertainty up. Our results show that the prediction error for the new emerging parties is significantly higher than for the traditional parties and this error is not sensitive to solutions for increasing the reliability of surveys, such as increasing sample size, transparency constantly conducting periodical surveys, the closeness of the approaching election or the survey mode that is used. It can be observed that pollsters do not want to make predictions that vary greatly from the average of the other polls. Finally, editorial bias appears to play a significant role, especially in the case of traditional parties.El principal objetivo de este artículo es explicar por qué las encuestas electorales cometen más errores en épocas de crisis económica, inestabilidad política y con partidos emergentes como Podemos y Ciudadanos. Para ello utilizamos una base de datos de 226 encuestas previas a las elecciones generales españolas de 2016. En este contexto, paradójicamente vemos como el instrumento que la sociedad utiliza para reducir su incertidumbre puede acabar aumentándola. Nuestros resultados muestran como el error de predicción de los nuevos partidos es significativamente mayor que los tradicionales e insensible a las soluciones clásicas para aumentar la precisión de las encuestas, como el tamaño de la muestra, el método de muestreo, la experiencia del encuestador, o la proximidad de la cita electoral. Además, se observa que las empresas que desarrollan las encuestas realizan de forma sistemática predicciones muy próximas a las que han realizado las encuestas recientes de sus competidores. Finalmente, el sesgo editorial parece ser una variable relevante, especialmente en lo relativo a las predicciones de los partidos tradicionale