Stefaan Verhulst
Announcement by The GovLab: “Questions shape what becomes visible, what is investigated, what is funded, and ultimately what societies come to know. They are fundamental not only to scientific inquiry but to a wide range of sectors and practices—from education and journalism to policymaking, medicine, law, and business, among others. Despite this foundational role, questions are seldom treated as objects of systematic study. Established fields examine intelligence, knowledge production, and decision-making, yet few, if any, take questions themselves as their subject.
Today, questions are most often discussed in narrow, instrumental terms: as prompts to feed an AI system or as items on a survey. Beyond these framings, we tend to assume that we are all naturally competent questioners, drawing on the innate urge to ask that emerges in early childhood and drives how we learn. Yet the capacity to ask does not guarantee the capacity to ask well.
How should we define a good question? Which questions are most likely to serve as stepping stones toward breakthrough insights? What kinds of questions inform different types of decisions? Who determines which questions matter most? How do we architect a line of inquiry: that is, how does one question productively lead to the next? How are curiosity and questioning related? Which questions endure across generations, and which quietly fade?
What, in short, do we actually know about questions?
At present, we lack a science of questions: a field dedicated to understanding how questions emerge, how they evolve, which questions make the greatest impact, and how they shape the trajectory of knowledge across disciplines and generations…(More)”.
Blog by Adam Zable, Stefaan Verhulst, and Sruthi Raghavan: “Data governance has become foundational to how organizations create public value, manage risk, and deploy AI responsibly. As data becomes embedded across more organizational functions – and as AI expands how data can be combined, analyzed, and acted upon – the question is no longer whether organizations need data governance, but whether their governance arrangements are fit for purpose.
Are responsibilities and decision rights clear? Do the right people have the authority and capabilities they need? Can data be accessed, shared, and reused responsibly? Are governance arrangements aligned with organizational priorities and the needs of the people affected by data use?
Answering these questions is harder than it sounds.
To help organizations do so systematically, we developed the Data Governance Self Assessment, an interactive tool that helps organizations examine the maturity of their data governance practices, identify gaps, and set priorities for action. It translates the UNESCO Data Governance Toolkit: Navigating Data in the Digital Age into an operational diagnostic that organizations can use in their own context…The Assessment can be completed by an individual, but its value can be even greater when used collectively. Senior leaders, data stewards, legal teams, technologists, policy teams, and program managers may have very different understandings of how data is governed within the same organization. Those differences are themselves useful information. Comparing perspectives can reveal responsibilities that are unclear, practices that exist but are not widely understood, institutional bottlenecks, or areas where formal principles are not yet translated into day-to-day practice.
Used in this way, the Assessment can offer more than a simple diagnostic. It can also provide a starting point for dialogue about where an organization is today, what matters most, and what should happen next.
The Assessment forms part of a broader ecosystem of guidance, capacity development and multistakeholder collaboration that aims to help translate responsible data governance principles into context-appropriate action in the digital and AI era.
Take the Data Governance Self Assessment: https://datagov.opendatapolicylab.org/..(More)”
Article by Elie Dolgin: “This kind of AI-assisted brainstorming is becoming increasingly common. Researchers have already used Co-Scientist, developed by Google in Mountain View, California, to find a drug combination that kills leukaemia cells in a dish and identify a treatment that, in the lab, regenerates liver tissue damaged by disease.
And Co-Scientist isn’t the only game in town. Frontier AI labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, and start-ups such as FutureHouse and Phylo (all four based in or around San Francisco, California) are rolling out systems that can tackle tasks once reserved for human scientists, freeing researchers to focus on the most consequential questions and decisions. “We imagine it to be like a collaborator — a partner with you,” says Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher at Google, who helped to develop Co-Scientist.
That could change not just how scientists work, but also how they are valued. For generations, scientific progress has depended on researchers who could pose difficult questions, devise ways to answer them and make sense of the results. As machines take over more of that work, the scarce resource could end up being human scientific judgement: knowing which questions are worth asking and which lines of enquiry worth pursuing. “The most valuable part now is actually asking the question,” says Ajay Agrawal, an economist at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management in Canada, who studies AI’s effects on innovation and entrepreneurship…(More)”
Book by Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw: “Peer production describes a unique form of global collaboration that is responsible for creating some of the most vital parts of the internet. Information ecosystem powerhouses like Wikipedia and the Linux operating system were founded on principles of open cooperation, and only exist today due to the contributions of thousands, and in some cases, millions of people. In Peer Production, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, and Aaron Shaw describe the central role that peer production plays in today’s information environment, and how it is a much broader phenomenon than the handful of famous projects that are now household names.
The book offers three core ideas: peer production functions as a critical mode of collaborative knowledge production; represents a novel type of social collaboration; and has unique advantages over previous forms of collaboration. The authors show that peer production is not just the foundation of the internet as we know it, but also the engine driving the global digital economy to generative AI. Finally, the book also charts the uncertain future of peer production as it confronts new threats and a changing digital landscape…(More)”.
Article by Alicja Gniadzik, Ruth Susana Pasquin, Daniel Köberl and Mateusz Tokarski: “Citizen Assemblies are meant to create opportunities for citizens to contribute to policymaking. The main task envisioned for citizens is to learn, deliberate and develop recommendations, and as such, assembly members rarely contribute to the assembly design, implementation and follow-up. There are a growing number of exceptions – some youth and children assemblies have been co-designed with participants to ensure the process meets the needs of young people, whilst in permanent assemblies, members steer some aspects of the process, selecting the topic, and taking decisions as to how the Assembly should be run, or monitoring follow-up.
In this article we share our insights from working within an Assembly that aimed to both meet young people’s needs and strengthen collective agency. We share our experiences as participants and organiser on the role and contribution of Task Forces to enhancing agency, functionality and relationality of Citizens’ Assemblies.
The Young Citizens Assembly on Pollinators (YCAP) aimed to provide young people across Europe with an opportunity for more direct involvement in EU policymaking on environmental issues. The Assembly gathered 100 young people from across all EU countries, selected by democratic lottery to represent the diversity of the EU youth population. During three in-person weekends and two online sessions, Assembly members learned about the issue and biodiversity governance mechanisms from experts, discussed different perspectives with stakeholders, and exchanged with EU officials on the existing policies…(More)”.
Paper by Hongyi Zou et al: “Urban analytics has developed as an interdisciplinary field to understand and address urban complexity. Despite rapid growth, the field remains fragmented, lacking conceptual clarity and interdisciplinary dialogue. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of 427 publications across relevant disciplines. Information about publication details, publication type, research objectives, research fields, methods, main data and data source, data accessibility, data representativeness, geographical and temporal scopes, ethical concerns and policy implications of each study are extracted and categorised. The following analysis traces the evolution of urban analytics, identifies methodological or thematic paucity in current research, and evaluates whether existing studies have approached urban issues in methodologically sound, ethical, and appropriate ways. The findings reveal persistent challenges in definitional contestation, data “firehose” and flood of bias, interdisciplinarity, fragmentation and uneven integration, as well as institutional and practical limits. This review further identifies emerging directions that integrate theory and practice, support responsible innovation, and promote more actionable insights for urban analytics. It also contributes a conceptual framework and research roadmap for developing responsible, context-aware and practical urban analytics that support equitable and sustainable urban futures…(More)”.
Article by Joseph Donia and Luca Marelli: “In this article, we trace expectations associated with efforts to promote secondary use of health data in Canada and the European Union. In Canada, we focus on initiatives enabling cross-jurisdictional data access in a highly devolved federal system with parallel commitments to Indigenous data sovereignty. In the EU, we focus on the European Health Data Space, a new regulatory regime intended to facilitate access to health data for clinical care, research, policymaking and innovation across 27 member states. Drawing on a comparative analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews across nine EU member states and four Canadian provinces and one territory, we find that despite institutional differences, secondary use in both jurisdictions is characterised by strikingly similar promissory vocabularies. We argue that these expectations are fundamentally ones of scale: They seek to render health data interoperable, comparable and usable to different ends. At the same time, we document shared frictions: between sovereignty and integration; between access and control; and between private assets and public goods. We understand these as spaces where competing valuations of health data are negotiated. We suggest that secondary use logics are progressively reorienting health systems, with implications for public value, equity and political collectives…(More)”.
Article by Jason Koebler: “The Trump administration is using an anti-drug trafficking grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the country to funnel their ongoing collection of automated license plate reader data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, according to public records and court documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The records show the workings of a complex system in which the federal government is using the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA) program to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. In some cases, data that goes to HIDTA is then also shared to a larger program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency called the “National License Plate Reader Program” (NLPRP).
Through HIDTA systems, local license plate data can be accessed by various federal agencies, including those who may not have contracts themselves with the ALPR companies. The program raises significant privacy and transparency concerns; as cities begin to place restrictions on how their Flock data can be used, it represents an end-around for federal law enforcement to access data that it might not normally be able to, and to do so without any obvious oversight body. HIDTA falls under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and it recently won an award from the Trump White House for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”
Many of the documents used in this article were obtained using public records requests by Cris van Pelt, the creator of the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com and its associated investigative blog, Footnote4a. “When local police and private vendors promise community control over surveillance, they obscure a broader agenda. The DEA and ONDCP are already aggregating local data behind the scenes,” van Pelt said. “This bypasses democratic processes entirely. The public has made it clear that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights, even when it is laundered through fragmented systems, private companies, and regional task forces.”..(More)”.
Report by The World Bank: “Digital technologies have significant potential to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, yet many government digital services fail to achieve widespread adoption because they are designed around administrative processes rather than user needs. This report examines how behavioral barriers create a “lost path” for users, resulting in low awareness, poor uptake, high dropout rates, and limited repeat use of digital services. It introduces Behavioral User Journey Mapping (BUJM) and the COM-B Model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, Behavior) as practical tools for identifying and addressing user pain points throughout the service journey. Drawing on case studies from around the world, the report demonstrates how behavioral science can improve service engagement, increase completion rates, and enhance user trust. It concludes with recommendations for user-centered design, iterative testing, inclusive service development, and behavioral performance metrics to help governments successfully close the “last mile” gap in digital government…(More)”.
Handbook by the United Nations Democracy Fund: This handbook is a ‘how-to’ guide for commissioning, designing, and operating citizens’ assemblies to achieve a more informed, substantive, and representative way to make trusted democratic decisions. While there are many ways to consult the community, the focus of this handbook is on deliberative approaches, of which the citizens’ assembly is the best-known model. Citizens’ assemblies combine civic lottery (also known as sortition or selection by lot) with deliberation to bring a diverse group of people across ages, genders, locations, and perspectives together in an environment where they learn, think, discuss, and work toward finding common ground to address a given problem.
An assembly aims to provide commissioning authorities with a set of recommendations that assembly members have agreed to, supported by their reasoning and evidence. This handbook walks you through each step of the journey: identifying when a deliberative approach is appropriate, designing the key features of a process, preparing and running the assembly itself, and understanding how to translate recommendations into action…(More)”.