Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data

This paper explores the costs and benefits of four avenues for achieving open Form 990 data: a mandate for e-filing, an IRS initiative to turn Form 990 data into open data, a third-party platform that would create an open database for Form 990 data, and a priori electronic filing. Sections also discuss the life and usage of 990 data. With bibliographical references

Rights-Based and Tech-Driven: Open Data, Freedom of Information, and the Future of Government Transparency

Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its data online for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to a collaborative one, centered around using information to solve problems together. This Essay explores the theory and practice of open data in comparison to FOIA and highlights its uses as a tool for advancing human rights, saving lives, and strengthening democracy. Although open data undoubtedly builds upon the fifty-year legal tradition of the right to know about the workings of one\u27s government, open data does more than advance government accountability. Rather, it is a distinctly twenty-first century governing practice borne out of the potential of big data to help solve society\u27s biggest problems. Thus, this Essay charts a thoughtful path toward a twenty-first century transparency regime that takes advantage of and blends the strengths of open data\u27s collaborative and innovation-centric approach and the adversarial and monitorial tactics of freedom of information regimes

Not only base rates are neglected in the Engineer-Lawyer problem: An investigation of reasoners' underutilization of complementarity

The standard Engineer-Lawyer problem (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) points to reasoners' failure to integrate mentioned base rate information as they arrive at likelihood estimates. Research in this area nevertheless presupposes that reasoners respect complementarity (i.e., participants ensure that competing estimates add up to 100%). A survey of the literature lends doubt to this presupposition. We propose that participants' non-normative performance on the standard problem reflects a reluctance to view the task probabilistically and that normative responses become more prominent as probabilistic aspects of the task do. Three Experiments manipulated two kinds of probabilistic cues and determined the extent to which a) base rates were integrated and b) the complementarity constraint was respected. Experiment 1 presented six versions of an Engineer-Lawyer-type problem (that varied 3 Levels of cue-to-complementarity and 2 base rates). Results showed that base-rate integration increased as cues-to-complementarity did. Experiment 2 confirmed that Gigerenzer, Hell & Blank's (1988) random draw paradigm facilitates base rate integration; a second measure revealed that it also prompts respect for complementarity. Experiment 3 replicated two of our main findings in one procedure while controlling for the potential influence of extraneous task features. Approaches that describe how probabilistic cues might prompt normative responding are discussed

Rights-Based and Tech-Driven: Open Data, Freedom of Information, and the Future of Government Transparency

Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its dataonline for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to a collaborative one, centered around using information to solve problems together

Dimpled-Hanging-Pregnant-Chad.com: the impact of Internet technology on democratic legitimacy

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht den Einfluss der Internet-Technologie auf die demokratische Legitimität. Die Autorin stellt zwei Positionen gegenüber - eine geht davon aus, dass das Internet eine Wohltat für die Demokratie ist, die andere, dass es die Demokratie zerstört - und zeigt, dass keine der beiden Positionen ganz richtig ist, da es sich bei der aktuellen Entwicklung nämlich um einen Prozess der politischen Illegitimität handelt, der über das Internet verbreitet wird. Da die Technologie bestimmend dafür ist, wie Regierungen mit Bürgern und diese miteinander kommunizieren, ändert sich zwangsläufig die demokratische Qualität der staatlichen Institutionen, wenn sich die Technologie verändert. Aus drei Gründen wird diese neue Technologie als Bedrohung für die Demokratie und die Legitimität angesehen: (1) Die globale Netzwerktechnologie respektiert keine staatlichen Grenzen und unterminiert deshalb die Legitimität und Durchsetzung nationaler Gesetze. (2) Da das Internet durch englischsprachige Webseiten aus den USA dominiert wird, werden dadurch kulturelle und lokale Unterschiede verwischt und es entsteht ein neues globales kommerzielles und konsumbezogenes Wertesystem. (3) Das private Umfeld des Internet trägt dazu bei, öffentliche Demokratie und öffentliche Räume zu zerstören. Die Autorin definiert zunächst den Begriff 'Legitimität' und charakterisiert die speziellen Wesenszüge der neuen Technologie. Danach beleuchtet sie den Zusammenhang zwischen Internet und politischem Wandel unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der oben erwähnten Punkte. Abschließend werden Möglichkeiten diskutiert, die demokratische Qualität des Internets zu verbessern und die Technologie zu nutzen, um die politische Kultur zu erhalten. (ICD

The positive side of a negative reference: the delay between linguistic processing and common ground

Interlocutors converge on names to refer to entities. For example, a speaker might refer to a novel looking object as the jellyfish and, once identified, the listener will too. The hypothesized mechanism behind such referential precedents is a subject of debate. The common ground view claims that listeners register the object as well as the identity of the speaker who coined the label. The linguistic view claims that, once established, precedents are treated by listeners like any other linguistic unit, i.e. without needing to keep track of the speaker. To test predictions from each account, we used visual-world eyetracking, which allows observations in real time, during a standard referential communication task. Participants had to select objects based on instructions from two speakers. In the critical condition, listeners sought an object with a negative reference such as not the jellyfish. We aimed to determine the extent to which listeners rely on the linguistic input, common ground or both. We found that initial interpretations were based on linguistic processing only and that common ground considerations do emerge but only after 1000 ms. Our findings support the idea that-at least temporally-linguistic processing can be isolated from common ground

Innovations in Open Grantmaking

Grantmaking, in short, plays a vital role in helping our government, our researchers, and our communities confront 21st-century challenges. Despite grantmaking's importance, we have a decidedly 20th-century system in place for deciding how we make these billions of dollars of crucial public investments. To make the most of limited funding—and help build confidence in the ability of public investments to make a positive difference—it is essential for our government agencies to try more innovative approaches to designing, awarding, and measuring their grantmaking activities.Innovations in Open Grantmaking seeks to provide inspiration and early proof of concept regarding innovative practices at every stage of the grantmaking process. The examples and lessons included can act as suggested guidelines for future research and experimentation around more openly and effectively providing access to public money

What's in a voice? Prosody as a test case for the Theory of Mind account of autism

The human voice conveys a variety of information about people's feelings, emotions and mental states. Some of this information relies on sophisticated Theory of Mind (ToM) skills, whilst others are simpler and do not require ToM. This variety provides an interesting test case for the ToM account of autism, which would predict greater impairment as ToM requirements increase. In this paper, we draw on psychological and pragmatic theories to classify vocal cues according to the amount of mindreading required to identify them. Children with a high functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder and matched controls were tested in three experiments where the speakers' state had to be extracted from their vocalizations. Although our results confirm that people with autism have subtle difficulties dealing with vocal cues, they show a pattern of performance that is inconsistent with the view that atypical recognition of vocal cues is caused by impaired ToM