The Governance Innovation Clinic
The Governance Innovation Clinic is a public entrepreneurship training program designed to help the next generation of leader know how to solve problems more openly, collaboratively and with better evidence.
By matching teams of graduate students to governments and nonprofits to solve problems, the Clinic supports the strengthening of democratic institutions by using legal, technological, and management innovations to create more effective and legitimate solutions to complex public problems.
The goals of the clinic are three-fold: to help institutions innovate in how they work and become more effective using both big data and collective intelligence; to promote the public’s right to participate in governing in ways that access people’s talents, creativity, and interests; and to empower students to become 21st century public leaders and problem solvers armed with a diverse and powerful toolkit for social change.
Clients have included the US Patent Office, the Delaware Secretary of State, Presidencies of Mexico and Argentina, Poverty Action Lab, Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, Inter-American Development Bank, Brazilian Parliament, Brookings, Connecticut Commissioner of Prisons and The Legal Aid Society.
Why a Governance Innovation Clinic?
We live in an era of unprecedented technological innovation with ingenious new advances for achieving clean energy, eradicating disease and providing greater wellness, more equitably and effectively delivering education, and improving the quality of human existence and expression. At the same time, we are experiencing clear deficits within centralized institutions of government and civil society: deficits of agility, innovation and capacity. Reinventing our governing institutions has become both imperative and possible as a result of the advent of: sensors to collect large quantities of data; communications tools to gather information and insights from people; and technologies of expertise to target and match the demand for know how to the supply of it for improved decision-making.
How Does the Clinic Work?
Participants in the clinic form small teams to take the lead in working with client-partners.
The course always includes a “think” and a “do” component. Class is a discussion-style seminar where we examine advances in technology, their impact on how we govern, and the interplay with related law and policy. We also focus on the ethics administrative, information, and open government laws. This alternates with the “do” portion focused on skills training.
We do not write abstract policy papers. We work with clients to implement and test the projects in practice. Hence students usually must conduct ethnographic research — today called Human Centered Design to understand human behavior and incentives for changing it. This means interviewing biomedical researchers about how they use data, to the end of designing a decision support tool to ensure legal compliance but that makes for how they work.
The output always involves written work but students also learn to deliver whatever persuasive material is needed to solve the problem. For our project on the 21st century government counsel last semester, for example, they created a persuasive presentation for their very busy clients who don’t have time to read, making sure to address cost offsets and how to pay for the recommendations they were making.
Finally, as the world comes to expect evidence- and results-based decisionmaking, we do deep dive intensives on data analytical thinking (including data science workshops) and how to measure results.
How Does the Clinic Choose Projects?
Although we address impact of technology on government, we choose our projects carefully. We will not, for example, build a Muslim registry. We aim only to undertake projects that fail to advance social justice and progressive governance. Therefore we do:
1) Transparency projects — Students worked with a British non-profit on evaluating models for responsibly using administrative data to conduct impact evaluations while safeguarding privacy.
2) Citizen engagement projects — A team worked with Madrid’s city council to design Madrid’s first law on citizen engagement.
3) Data-driven social policy projects –A team helped the Legal Aid Society in New York dive into their 30 years of untouched data to improve how Legal Aid delivers services and to identify broader policy reforms.
We invite projects that:
Projects:
- Have the potential to improve people’s lives;
- Can be developed in one semester and are implementable in a one-year time frame;
- Involve innovative leaders as clients willing to experiment and test what works;
- Involve the design of technology as well as the study of the legal implications of technology;
- Give students the opportunity to design and implement new products and projects and to do original, publishable research and writing.