ProgressVote
From Open Knowledge Foundation
ProgressVote is a proposed OKF-project on social progress measurement.
Overview
Relevance
European governments are currently looking for measures of social progress beyond economic growth. Their initiatives, however, are running into a problem. We may have a solution to suggest.
Problem of current initiatives
- Inconsistency: Current initiatives for measuring social progress focus on composite indices. But these are invariably based on arbitrary assumptions.
- Complexity: Initiatives recognising the index problem use dashboards of indicators, but these are too complex for standard use in public debate, hence unfit to balance the dominance of GDP
- Isolation: The large number of existing but unknown indicators show how problematic mainstreaming new indicators is. Successful mainstreaming would need to engage the public, but the index- and dashboard approaches exclude participation.
- An intermediate solution seems absent.
Our approach
Background
ProgressVote builds on Yourtopia, where we tested a methodology to which you find 'here' a quick introduction. Please do read this first, so we are all on the same page.
- While Yourtopia build country rankings, ProgressVote would trace one country's progress over time, using high frequency data.
Input
What the user sees: A ProgressVote website would present the user with two things:
- visualisations of a few key high-frequency data series of social progress
- anonymised expert statements interpreting the big picture shown in these data series.
- These expert statements consist of two parts:
- a small text evaluating the illustrated development and how these components sum up in terms of total social development in the eyes of the respective expert.
- an index number, by which the expert ranks social development quantitatively, so that his/her view of progress over time can be measured.
What the user does: The user selects the expert opinion he most agrees with. This means: The user decides implicitly the relative importance of the different data series visualised (weighting, proxies, shadow prices - in daily life we compute them unconsciously, here as well).
Output
The number of users selecting an expert determines the weight that expert gets in generating an overall index of social progress.
- I.e. Assume there are 4 experts, providing an evaluation of progress on a set scale; then the overall index of social progress is generated from all of the experts evaluations (their index numbers) weighted by how many users agreed with each of them.
- It is this index, generated by the public and the experts together, which traces progress over time.
These votes are carried out every quarter and presented in an Open Letter to the government as the public's overall synthesis of social progress, to be considered next to GDP.
Benefits
- Social progress is expressed as a single index figure (i.e. avoiding the over-complexity of indicator dashboards) without the arbitrary weightings normally associated with composite indices.
- The public can communicate its view on non-GDP issues quarterly, not once every legislative cycle.
- The public learns about actual data developments (and how pleasant an experience this is depends on how hard we work on good visualisations) which will help build a more informed, fact-driven debate on social progress.
- The app would build a rare point of interception between the public and experts (e.g academics). Academics have to present their view short and accessible, and a much wider audience (the users) learns about them. After voting, the users could also see which person they voted for and get links to publications by that person, if they want to learn more. The app hence contributes to building ONE debate between policymakers, experts and public.
- We get a measure of social progress beyond GDP that circumvents all the classic arbitrary assumptions.
