Dopamine controls the flow of information in the frontal lobes from other areas of the brain. It is commonly associated with the pleasure system, providing feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement to motivate a person proactively to perform certain activities.
Dopamine disorders can cause a decline in neurocognitive functions, especially memory, attention, and problem-solving. Reduced dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex are thought to contribute to attention deficit disorder. Without enough positive experiences, the reach and the action potential of dopamine as a neural transmitter becomes limited.
I mention this because behavioral science and economics hold some possible answers to questions about how can we improve the efficiency of resources and quality of care across public and commercial services, and for many the answers can’t come soon enough.
In the midst of public spending cuts and ongoing recession, the burden of management of government agencies is magnified. It may become potentially overwhelming. The need exists to find new ways to free up resources, to work together on the continuous improvement of local communities, to create more efficient and collaborative gain.
Couple this burden with a disengaged and increasingly cynical public constituency and it’s enough to generate a severe social dopamine shortfall, however. There are already signals of cognition and engagement diminishing, of collective problem-solving running the risk of impairment. Many people neither know nor care about what potential exists in their communities and the benefits of local management beyond their own doorstep.
And it’s in this context that the lively, warmly welcomed and stimulating session at the London’s DataStore Workshop (@londondatastore) happened on Saturday, a great initiative led by Emer Coleman and the GLA Data Team and facilitated brilliantly by Paul Clarke. (Thanks to Emer too for the pictures used here).
GLA’s Help Us Free London’s Data #londondata discussed the why’s and how’s at the heart of a more open approach to data, what it might take to make it happen and a great bunch of intelligent people gathered to get the ball rolling. Alongside the hmg.gov.uk.data initiative, this is a fine approach to shared problem-solving, using data to unlock the hidden value of social communities collaborating in public services and looking at practical data-driven applications that can find new ways to manage them.
Yet the aches and pains of an impasse were evident. Developers are ready to get excited and make things, but the ease and convenience of accessing the data to do it is limited. Local government may dream of a reduced cost of management, but open data opens up risk and well as reward. In this context, to a behavioural scientist, the dopamine is already on a bit of a downslide.
So, what to do? The gap between intended and actual benefit of an initiative like this will be a margin of some measure until data visualizations and the proof points of data applications can inspire imagination, the dopamine required to encourage release of more data, to create a tipping point.
From the GLA and London DataStore’s point of view the crucial audience is the public agencies in London that have problems to solve. As the risk of stating the obvious, they have to ‘get excited and release things’ and, importantly I think, to be given the social capabilities to know how to deal with the consequences.
In Jonah Lehrer’s excellent book ‘How We Decide’, he describes how a real and specific value has been identified at the heart of learning from one’s mistakes and how the process of decision-making starts with fluctuations in dopamine. Errors are internalized by dopamine neurons, and the consequent shortfalls provide the stimulus to realize it. This is an iterative and formative feedback loop.
The dopamine neuron is an urgent and primal pulse. Put it together with data that’s open and it offers opportunity for local community management to improve, to do more with less, in ways that local and public services can benefit from.
At the heart of it all though is a new mindset, where public agencies re-evaluate what they stand for. To be favourably looked upon as adding value in an economically squeezed environment they have to see themselves as facilitators, instead of process managers, they have to have brands that champion their local communities, not themselves, and they need to learn to work like retailers of their local communities and their capabilities by harnessing the power of open data.
The reiterative learning that open data development can provide has the ability to insulate local public agencies from perceived management incapabilities. The creative value of @londondatastore and the developer community can really help visualize the benefits of this.
Navigating the way towards ease and convenience through use of data is a journey and it’s of paramount importance.
Congratulations are due to the whole GLA Data team involved with @londondatastore for the steps taken on Saturday. Now let’s work out where the biggest wins are so that data and dopamine combined can improve the health and function of public services, local community management and get us to the results we need.
