Counting people

By Jianggan Li | 6 September 2011 | Permanent link | 0 comments

Millions are mobilised, leaflets are posted in every street corner, radio broadcasters repeat announcements. War? Election? No, it is national census, ladies and gentlemen.

Each country might collect slightly different set of data through this complicated endeavour, but the usefulness of census in understanding the population, household structure, employment and education status as well as home occupancy is undoubted. Such information (and the accuracy of it) plays a vital role for a country to plan for national and social development polices and master plans.

Because of its complexity – censuses are often conducted with a ten year interval. The government obviously does not have that much manpower, so a lot of provisional employees are employed. In the recent Hong Kong Census, 18,300 temporary staff participated. The endeavour cost the government HK$520 million (US$67 million).

In China, six million surveyors were employed last year for the census which cost the government RMB8 billion (US$1.25 billion). The population count was 1.37 billion.

For a census to be meaningful and useful, cooperation of the population is very important. That’s why the governments spend lots of effort publicising about censuses. Technology and internet give authorities opportunities to complement traditional means of neighbourhood posters, TV advertisements and radio announcements. In January, I took a flight from Shanghai to Mexico City. On every boarding pass, it is printed “In Mexico we count ourselves”. Hong Kong’s Census and Statistics Department (CSD) advertised on the home page of Yahoo!.

“Such channel is considered an effective means for publicising the census having regard to the large number of Internet visitors, who should be amongst the potential users of the online e-Questionnaire newly introduced,” CSD’s Assistant Commissioner Alvin Li explains.

Social media platforms are not spared. Australia this year uses Twitter to broadcast satire to promote its census. And Indian Government’s Census 2011 Facebook page is ‘liked’ by 21,645 people as of the 6th of September – not many Indian agencies are on Facebook, but tens of millions of Indians are.

The internet is not only used for promotion of censuses, but also its undertaking. Self enumeration online is used for both Hong Kong and Taiwan in their recent censuses. Australians were given the option of ‘eCensus’ in 2006, and 8.4 per cent of the households logged their data online. The peak hour saw 72,000 online forms submitted. This year (Australia conducts census every five years) eCensus is again an option.

And GIS has been extensively used in census. For this year’s census Hong Kong has spent HK$1.5 million (US$ ) on enhancing a Digital Mapping System, which will be explained in detail in a feature interview in the October 2011 issue of FutureGov Asia Pacific magazine.

CSD, before this year’s census, had also tested some mobile data collection software for field workers. The system was, however, not used in full scale as the Department could not find a device which is as easy to use as pen and paper.

The key here is to make sure the device is easy to use, and the data input is accurate. With the current pace that mobile user experience evolves, we can see such convenient tool emerging from the horizon.

A friend, who recently retired from a government CIO position in Taiwan, tells me that the government has proposed to use tablet computers for surveyors for the next census.

Census takers, who might or might not be government employees, sometimes have to travel to remote areas to conduct surveys. Personal safety is always an issue. Hong Kong equips some surveyors with sticks and ultrasonic dog chasers. Government also exercised extra cautions for surveyors going into areas with recorded cases of molestation. Incidents still did occur. Two surveyors were injured while being chased by dogs, and there were reports of molesting cases against female surveyors. In China, the surveyors even caught a few wanted criminals while conducting their business.

“In future the surveyors should have better communications capabilities,” my retired-CIO friend from Taiwan says. “Perhaps an emergency button as what first responders have on their walkie-talkies.”

Such design has already become sophisticated – allowing users to reach to ask for help easily in real emergency, and prevent them from sending alarms by mistake under normal circumstances. I’ve seen studies about people’s stress level during emergency, and how important the system they use is intuitive in such time.

In fact, the two Hong Kong surveyors had dog chasers with them – but in a highly stressful situation they forgot to use them.

In addition, how to equip everyone with such a device could be a challenge. As we do with the cloud for desktop applications nowadays, in future why can’t people use devices they are comfortable with, while the bulk of data and applications sit in the cloud?

Census data was among the first social statistics to be studied and in 1850s sociologists had already derived patterns from it. With analytics being increasingly introduced to different area of government operations, the census, which accumulates much valuable data about the demographics, could offer much more value than before.

Obviously, there is debate on whether censuses remain relevant, since people are much more mobile than they were twenty years ago. A few weeks ago the Economist ran a full feature on this. Many believe that once-every-ten-year exercise could hardly be meaningful in an era where maps have to be updated every three months.

A few countries which have sophisticated population registration system have ditched comprehensive survey to sampling of a certain percentage of the population. Increasing privacy concerns also make surveys more difficult.

India’s Unique ID project, when reaching to the entire population, will offer a solid database of population-related information. Censuses will probably continue, but with less workload and better accuracy – and more opportunities for meaningful data.

In fact, regardless of the methodologies we use, the population data collected through censuses (or other means) would remain and even become more relevant.