Citizen data standards clash reduces data value across institutions
Data Patching
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Sometimes data collected by one government office doesn't match the rules or standards of another office, making the data less useful. The authors call this problem cross-institutional data devaluation. They talked to 41 people in Bangladesh to understand why this happens and found that normal data checks don’t fully solve the issue. They suggest a new way called Citizen-centered Cross-institutional Data Audit (CCDA) to help fix these mismatches and improve how citizens receive services.
What this means in practice
- •For government it teams: Use CCDA to design data checks that keep citizen data useful across different departments and service phases.
- •For policy makers: Create or revise policies to ensure data standards align and reduce data devaluation when data moves between institutions.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
ATM Mizanur Rahman, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Sharifa Sultana
Abstract
To provide data-driven quality services to their citizens, every institution determines the acceptability of the citizen data and datafied mechanisms through institutional protocols, including preset standards and policies. However, data meeting standards at one institution might fail to meet a different institution's standards in subsequent phases of the intended citizen services due to mismatched protocols, leading to data devaluation in the citizen service ecosystem. Terming this phenomenon cross-institutional data devaluation, we investigate its causes and workarounds through interviews with 41 Bangladeshi participants. We found that traditional data auditing mechanisms cannot solely address data devaluation; hence, we draw on our findings and theory of cross-institutional AI audits to propose the Citizen-centered Cross-institutional Data Audit (CCDA). We also discuss design and policy implications of CCDA in HCI and datafied citizen services.