This feature showcases one video each Friday that captures the essence of innovation, technology and new ideas happening in government today.

This week’s video is courtesy of Stanford University.

Description: Measuring the quality of governance is a challenge for social scientists trying to assess a country’s ability to deliver public services to its citizens.

Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, recognized that many of the current ways to assess good governance are too general and do not account for the variations that occur within complex societies such as China or the United States.

The Governance Project was launched in January 2012 at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law to engage scholars around the world in the exercise of evaluating the quality of state institutions and government effectiveness.