Case Study Library

Louisville, like many cities, experienced a spike in homicides starting in 2016. Recent deployment of gunshot detection technology has been effective at pinpointing where and when gunshots occur. On average, police officers arrive long after the critical, first ten minute window to stabilize injuries. Placing drones strategically throughout our city, we will be able to deploy a camera to the scene within 90 seconds of when a gun is discharged and rapidly dispatch emergency medical personnel.

Education in Open Government is a project whose main objective is to foster social and civic competences for the exercise of one's democratic citizenship in children and young people. It involves three phases: 1) Teachers' training via a massive online open course (MOOC). 2) Implementation of educational projects in schools: for this purpose, 3 guides of Education in Open Government have been published: Primary Education, Secondary Education and High School. 3) Evaluation of the experiences.

The Korea Power Exchange (KPX) set students and parents as policy targets and systematically connected electricity-saving activities with the performance of volunteer hours which reflected in grades of school students. This program, which estimates electricity savings as a service rather than money, is leading to changes in consciousness that are perceived as social values in the future. The People's Virtual Power Plant will eventually be fused with advanced technology (blockchain, AI, big data)…

The Government of Colombia has developed the Economic Transparency Portal, www.pte.gov.co, a web-based initiative to make visible to the citizens the national and regional public budgets and all public contracting. A strategy was designed with the objective of inviting citizens to carry out social control and oversight of public resources based on the data published on the Portal. Hackathons, rallies and other contests have been held in 2018 in order to achieve feedback and public participation.

The Queensland Government is using machine learning and computer vision to automatically map and classify land use features in satellite imagery. Successfully applied to the mapping of banana plantations, the method is extremely efficient compared to current methods of mapping compilation. Using this technology the Queensland Government can accurately map and classify the land use in a timely manner, aiding response to biosecurity and natural disaster events.

East Africa has an urgent need for innovative accountability mechanisms, as many public services are inefficient and corrupt. SEMA helps to improve the quality of public service delivery, by gathering real-time citizen feedback and presenting this data in digestible formats. We use low-tech tools, such as custom-made hardware devices and interactive voice response technology, that help citizens from all backgrounds to have a voice in evaluating their public services.

The Internet has facilitated online services for citizens, but it has also facilitated Internet searches of service-seeking citizens by public officials, triggering conscious or unconscious bias. Via freedom of information (FOI) requests, academics provided evidence of this phenomenon at work. Brazil's Comptroller General (CGU) responded by implementing a check-box in its online FOI requesting system so that requesters could choose to remain anonymous. This innovation is a first for FOI regimes.

AUSTRAC  is the first known government law enforcement or intelligence agency to run a global Codeathon forum. AUSTRAC leveraged innovation, collaboration and exploited technology to improve its business operations, develop efficient new solutions in consultation with government partners, industry, academia and the private sector.

The Canada Learning Bond, a government education savings program providing a financial incentive to low income Canadians, turned to behavioural insights (BI) to tackle persistent low take-up. Following unsuccessful BI trials based on academic literature and expertise, we turned to Design. In a Government of Canada first, combining lessons learned from human centred design processes including stories from citizens and BI we developed outreach that significantly improved the take-up of the Bond.

Experimentation Works (EW) is a Government-of-Canada initiative to build public servants’ capacity in experimentation skills and practice through a learning-by-doing model that supports and showcases 5 small-scale experiments in the open. EW seeks to generate practical examples of experiments and ensure open access to learning materials, progress updates and results for broad impact. It works by connecting project teams with each other, and with experts in a open-by-default “cohort model."