Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Benjamin Farrand: “From the rise of China as a technological superpower, to wars on its eastern borders, to the belief that the US is no longer a reliable ally, the European Commission sees the world as more unstable than at any other time in recent history. As such, the Commission has become the Geopolitical Commission, working to serve the interests of the Geopolitical Union. Central to many of these conflicts is technology – who produces it, where it is produced, and who controls it. These questions are central to the Commission’s pursuit of digital/technological sovereignty, Europe’s attempt to regain control of technology regulation. Focusing on topics such as setting technological standards, ensuring access to microchips, reining in online platforms, and securing rules for industrial data and AI, this book explores the EU’s approach to lawmaking in this field; increased regulatory oversight and promotion of industrial policy at home, while exporting its rules abroad…(More)”.
Paper by Joshua Garland et al: “Social media platforms frequently prioritize efficiency to maximize ad revenue and user engagement, often sacrificing deliberation, trust, and reflective, purposeful cognitive engagement in the process. This manuscript examines the potential of friction—design choices that intentionally slow user interactions—as an alternate approach. We present a case against efficiency as the dominant paradigm on social media and advocate for a complex systems approach to understanding and analyzing friction. Drawing from interdisciplinary literature, real-world examples, and industry experiments, we highlight the potential for friction to mitigate issues like polarization, disinformation, and toxic content without resorting to censorship. We propose a state space representation of friction to establish a multidimensional framework and language for analyzing the diverse forms and functions through which friction can be implemented. Additionally, we propose several experimental designs to examine the impact of friction on system dynamics, user behavior, and information ecosystems, each designed with complex systems solutions and perspectives in mind. Our case against efficiency underscores the critical role of friction in shaping digital spaces, challenging the relentless pursuit of efficiency and exploring the potential of thoughtful slowing…(More)”.
Book by Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei: “For many decision scientists, their starting point—drawn from economics—is a quantitative formula called rational choice theory, allowing people to calculate and choose the best options. The problem is that this framework assumes an overly simplistic picture of the world, in which different types of values can be quantified and compared, leading to the “most rational” choice. Behavioral economics acknowledges that irrationality is common but still accepts the underlying belief from economics of what a rational decision should look like.
In this book, Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei offer a different way to think about the choices we make every day. Drawing from economics, psychology, and philosophy—and both inspired by and challenging Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow—they show how the focus on rationality, narrowly understood, fails to fully describe how we think about our decisions, much less help us make better ones. Notably, it overlooks the positive contribution that framing—how we determine what aspects are most important to us—contributes to good decisions. Schwartz and Schuldenfrei argue that our choices should be informed by our individual “constellation of virtues,” allowing for a far richer understanding of the decisions we make and helping us to live more integrated and purposeful lives…(More)”.
CivicPlus: “Resident engagement today looks very different than it did even a few years ago. Expectations are higher, attention is harder to earn, and residents want to interact with local government in ways that fit their daily lives, not just during meetings or election cycles.
Across the country, local governments are responding by rethinking how they communicate, listen, and involve residents. Some initiatives are digital. Others are in-person. Many blend the two. What they have in common is a focus on meeting residents where they are and making civic participation easier, more relevant, and more meaningful.
The 12 examples below highlight how local governments are putting those ideas into practice right now, from small, low-lift programs to larger, more visible initiatives that help strengthen resident engagement over time.
1. Visual Storytelling on Pinterest, Banff, AB
The Town of Banff uses Pinterest to visually showcase its community through curated boards featuring landscapes, seasonal moments, and local experiences.
Pinterest allows the town to share high-quality imagery while linking pins back to related content, making it easier for audiences to explore Banff beyond a single post. Unlike fast-scroll social platforms, Pinterest supports long-term content discovery. Pins remain searchable and shareable over time, helping Banff extend the reach of its visual content to residents, visitors, and people planning future travel.
Why it works: Pinterest gives communities a way to tell their story, promote local experiences, and reinforce civic pride, all while directing audiences to deeper information through linked content…
8. Citizens Academy Program, Rockingham County, NC
Rockingham County, North Carolina, offers a program that gives residents an inside look at how the county government operates, from budget and policies to procedures and day-to-day operations.
The free, eight-week program is designed to help participants better understand county services, departments, and decision-making processes through guided sessions and direct interaction with county staff. Participants leave with a clearer understanding of local government responsibilities and opportunities to stay involved beyond the program itself.
Why it works: Educational programs like a citizens academy help residents better understand how local government works, which helps foster stronger community engagement and potentially develop future local leaders…(More)”.
UK Government: “Local plan consultations can generate thousands of responses from members of the public, the development industry and statutory consultees. For local planning authority (LPA) teams, that means weeks of reading, categorising and summarising before the real work of analysis can begin.
With the government committed to faster local plan preparation, we’re exploring whether artificial intelligence (AI) can help reduce the time spent on some of the administrative tasks without compromising the quality of the consultation analysis while continuing to support greater citizen engagement.
Where this started
Through support from our PropTech Innovation Fund, we funded Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (GCSP) – the shared planning service for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils – to explore how AI could transform the consultation summarisation process. GCSP partnered with the University of Liverpool to develop a tool.
Working with the planning team, the University built a bespoke large language model (LLM) trained on 15 years of Cambridge’s consultation data and key planning terminology.
In a trial last year, the tool, called PlanAI, successfully summarised 3 planning consultations, on supplementary guidance documents, in 16 minutes – a task which took 18.5 hours to do manually. As well as the significant time difference, the quality of the summaries was also compared, with the AI-generated reports providing clear breakdowns of the themes, patterns and insights from the responses. ..(More)”.
Resource by Begoña G. Otero and Stefaan Verhulst: “Data governance has become a catch-all term, used to describe everything from data quality and metadata to privacy, compliance, and digital strategy. This ambiguity is not harmless: when concepts remain unclear, responsibilities blur and decisions stall. Demystifying data governance therefore requires two things: clarifying how it relates to neighboring concepts, and understanding the components and trends that are reshaping governance in an AI- and data-intensive world.
Our new resource, What Is Data Governance? 30 Questions and Answers, is designed to demystify the concept. Instead of offering yet another definition, it takes one already tested through the Broadband Commission’s Data Governance Toolkit and it clarifies how data governance relates to terms like data management, stewardship, privacy, and compliance.
The Q&A uses the same working definition as the Toolkit: data governance involves the processes, people, policies, practices and technology that seek to govern the data lifecycle toward meeting the purpose of increasing trust, value, and equity, while minimizing risk and harm in alignment with a set of core principles…(More)”
Article by Giulio Quaggiotto: “…So when RIL – Red de Innovación Local, a South American nonprofit that connects more than 10,000 public servants across 800 cities in 30 countries, set out to improve how municipalities build strategy, its founder, Delfina Irazusta, knew the challenge would not be technical; it would be cultural.
To tackle it, she took the old idiom “eat your own dog food” to heart. She decided that her team would first try out a new strategy process for itself before bringing it to municipalities. This way, they would have the street credentials from having done the work, and they would be in a better position to provide advice on implementation.
The experiment centered on PortalRIL, RIL’s AI-powered platform trained on over a decade of local government knowledge. But as Stefaan Verhulst has observed, “The most consequential failures in data-driven policymaking and AI deployment often stem not from poor models or inadequate datasets but from poorly framed questions.”
Starting With Inquiry
It is for this reason that RIL team members were asked to start their strategy process in a rather unconventional manner, through a “Questions Tree,” or a structured reflection process guided by questions focusing on 3 different levels:
- Organisation-wide issues
- Individual questions on each member’s role
- Team level questions.
This team exercise produced a collaborative document summarizing the key questions informing RIL’s strategy going forward…(More)”.
Paper by Jiahao Lu et al: “Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a new frontier of digital infrastructure that can support a wide range of public-sector applications, from general purpose citizen services to specialized and sensitive state functions. When expanding AI access, governments face a set of strategic choices over whether to buy existing services, build domestic capabilities, or adopt hybrid approaches across different domains and use cases. These are critical decisions especially when leading model providers are often foreign corporations, and LLM outputs are increasingly treated as trusted inputs to public decision-making and public discourse. In practice, these decisions are not intended to mandate a single approach across all domains; instead, national AI strategies are typically pluralistic, with sovereign, commercial and open-source models coexisting to serve different purposes. Governments may rely on commercial models for non-sensitive or commodity tasks, while pursuing greater control for critical, high-risk or strategically important applications.
This paper provides a strategic framework for making this decision by evaluating these options across dimensions including sovereignty, safety, cost, resource capability, cultural fit, and sustainability. Importantly, “building” does not imply that governments must act alone: domestic capabilities may be developed through public research institutions, universities, state-owned enterprises, joint ventures, or broader national ecosystems. By detailing the technical requirements and practical challenges of each pathway, this work aims to serve as a reference for policy-makers to determine whether a buy or build approach best aligns with their specific national needs and societal goals…(More)”.
OECD Report: “Digital transformation is an imperative for modern governments. It enables better services, smarter decisions, and collaboration across siloes and borders, and is crucial for meeting citizens’ expectations in a context of rapid change. To succeed, governments need a bold, balanced approach grounded in coherent and trustworthy systems and governance structures. This paper presents the 2025 results of the Digital Government Index (DGI), which benchmarks the efforts made by governments to establish the foundations necessary to achieve a coherent, human-centred digital transformation of the public sector; and of the Open, Useful and Re-usable Data Index (OURdata), which measures governments’ efforts to design and implement national open government data policies. Data were collected in the first half of 2025, covering policies and initiatives from 01 January 2023 to 31 December 2024. A full analysis of the data, including drivers of change, major trends and country notes, will be included in the 2026 OECD Digital Government Outlook…(More)”.
Article by Tassallah Abdullahi: “Current guardian models are predominantly Western-centric and optimized for high resource languages, leaving low-resource African languages vulnerable to evolving harms, cross-lingual safety failures, and cultural misalignment. Moreover, most guardian models rely on rigid, predefined safety categories that fail to generalize across diverse linguistic and sociocultural contexts. Robust safety, therefore, requires flexible, runtime enforceable policies and benchmarks that reflect local norms, harm scenarios, and cultural expectations. We introduce UbuntuGuard, the first African policy-based safety benchmark built from adversarial queries authored by 155 domain experts across sensitive fields, including healthcare. From these expert-crafted queries, we derive context-specific safety policies and reference responses that capture culturally grounded risk signals, enabling policy aligned evaluation of guardian models. We
evaluate 13 models, comprising six general purpose LLMs and seven guardian models across three distinct variants: static, dynamic, and multilingual. Our findings reveal that existing English-centric benchmarks overestimate real-world multilingual safety, cross lingual transfer provides partial but insufficient coverage, and dynamic models, while better equipped to leverage policies at inference time, still struggle to fully localize African language contexts. These findings highlight the urgent need for multilingual, culturally grounded safety benchmarks to enable the development of reliable and equitable guardian models for low-resource languages. Our code can be found online..(More)”.