#citizenfeedback

(image cc D. Zinnbauer)

Continuing a flurry of great physical feedback mechanisms here another fascinating one that I have just come across at Riga airport: donate your foreign currency leftovers to a charity and cause of your choice - and see which causes and orgs are most popular. Monitoring and evaluation staff at NGOs take note!

And this also reminded me of an in-store charity voting system that a UK supermarket chain pioneered in 2014. Shoppers receive blue tokens at check-out to vote on their favorite local charity  and the supermarket would then split up a fixed donation according to the relative voting shares. 

(image: c Tesco)

(image cc Globe-trotter at wts wikivoyage)

A fascinating RCT in Indonesia yields amazing evidence that ambient accountability has enormous potential to complement or even replace conventional anti-corruption interventions. How to reduce high leakage rates in the distribution of subsidized rice for the poor in Indonesia? Mailing information about entitlements to eligible beneficiaries made a huge difference and led to significantly more subsidized food reaching the intended beneficiaries. Adding more specific information on prices etc. further drove up fulfillment. And, most interestingly, posting list of entitled recipients publicly across the village and communicating related information via mosque loudspeaker led to another significant increase in flows to the poor. So beyond proving true impact, what else do these numbers tell us with regard to ambient accountability:

- first: people equipped with the right information can indeed haggle successfully with corrupt officials and prevent them from all too blatant corruption

- second: the more detailed and targeted the information intervention, the better the outcome for the beneficiaries

- third: going public with entitlement information generates one of these super-interesting feedback loops around what game theorists tend to call second order or higher order beliefs: with the information visibly posted out in the public now I know for sure that other previously cheated beneficiaries also know and the corrupt officials know that all the people they are cheating know and also know that they know. The result: even significantly less leakage (on top of the two effects described above)  AND a higher degree of collective action- villages that benefited from this type of public posting experienced public protest related to those issues more frequently. 

So a clear validation of the power of ambient accountability, as well as a confirmation of the plausibility of some of the central transmission mechanisms that I had posited as working assumptions re. how targeted information interventions in the built environment might work.  

The reporting platform that this news clipping describes is pretty standard, but the idea to deck out a car in slogans about specific corruption problems and park it outside the very government offices where such corrupt transactions take place is a very nifty one. Confront the fraudulent civil servants and affected citizens on the spot and advertise a reporting hotline right where it is needed is the core idea of ambient accountability.

http://designingforfreespeech.org/gallery/vote-with-your-feet/

A pair of gates, a binary question and people vote by walking through the respective turnstile.

Ambient polling the amusing and profitable way - as seen at my local coffee place at the cash check-out: "have you been kissed today?" and two tip jars - one for "yes", one for "no". Answer via your tip - a scheme that seems profitable, tips have gone up significantly with this entertaining micro-polling system according to the baristas.

Rate as you pay - more ambient feedback channels

Inviting your peers to collectively assess the quality of services - it might have started pre-Internet with the Zagats of the world that polled their friends to compile restaurant reviews.

And it has now turned into a digital surge, by some tech cheerleaders embraced as the ratings revolution. A new crop of online rating tools make it easier than ever to register your opinion and look up what others are saying about any kind of private business and service under the sun. Who dares venture for dinner in an unfamiliar city without checking the Yelp or Google reviews of that place (the latter actually snapped up and integrated Zagat into its review system)? These tools have by now become a staple of the discerning (and at times righteous) consumer, giving rise to ever more sophisticated metrics and review compilations.Yet two ideas / more recent developments make such online rating platforms also super-interesting from an ambient accountability perspective: