Stefaan Verhulst
Study published by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and the Europeana Foundation: “This document identifies a pathway to establishing the core of the European Books Data Commons: a shared infrastructure that would make the full text of millions of digitised public domain books held by libraries across Europe available for re-use in forms optimised for AI developers and researchers working with large-scale language datasets. If implemented, the EBDC would constitute a significant contribution to the European Commission’s 2025 Data Union Strategy, which aims to ensure that European AI developers have access to high quality data including cultural heritage collections.
The remainder of the document is structured as follows. Section 2 sets out the proposition — the demand for digitised public domain books and the supply-side constraints that currently prevent access to existing collections. Section 3 presents the recommended implementation scenario, arrived at through a process of developing, testing, and progressively refining a set of options with library partners and the steering group. Section 4 addresses the governance of the system and its relationship to related European initiatives. Section 5 outlines the way forward, including a two-track implementation approach, an integrated timeline, and indicative cost estimates. Section 6 makes the case for acting now to build the European Books Data Commons…(More)”.
Project developed by iMMAP, CartONG, HOT and Kobo with the formal support and endorsement of ICVA Network, InterAction, H2H Network and Sphere: “… Humanitarian Information Landscape Assessment (HILA) is an innovative framework designed to measure the health of humanitarian information ecosystems and identify the systemic barriers that prevent evidence-based decision-making on the ground.
Building on country-level applications, the global HILA combines a standardized online survey for humanitarian practitioners with a live public dashboard — updated in real time and repeated twice a year to track change over time.
The result is a global monitoring system — not a one-off snapshot — providing humanitarian leaders, donors, and operational partners with a unique, comparable evidence base to guide investment, coordination, and response…(More)”.
Report by DemNext: “Cities are messy, complex, diverse, beautiful places – they are where most people live. Even for those who don’t live in a city, there are policies, budgets, and place-based strategies implemented by decision makers which shape the places they call home. From the neighbourhoods we live in, the public services we have access to, and how we move around, cities and regions are the places where decision making impacts us greatly. At the same time, most people don’t have opportunities to truly shape these decisions. Citizens’ assemblies offer a way to tackle this when they are embedded as part of our democratic infrastructure.
Establishing an ongoing citizens’ assembly while building supportive civic infrastructure requires a completely different mindset than implementing a one-off assembly. It needs to be approached like a marathon, not a sprint. Investing early in what comes after a first assembly is fundamental to building new democratic institutions. Doing so leads to catalytic ripple effects that impact how we fund, innovate, reimagine, and intentionally cultivate new forms of democratic infrastructure.
Those ripple effects begin with decisions made long before assembly members convene for the first time. Starting with this mindset makes it easier to consider how a citizens’ assembly, and those involved in implementing it, are not only people delivering a process, but catalysts for wider change with enduring impact. (Chwalisz & McKinney, 2026).
To us, this means establishing citizens’ assemblies not as one-off events, dependent on political will at a moment in time, but as new institutions, to which power can be shifted. It’s about the establishment of an institution that is embedded in law, parliamentary rules, or binding policy frameworks and the shift in norms and cultures that goes along with this.
We offer guidance and inspiration about how to get there, reflecting on the lessons from DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme and our experience as advisors to two cities and two regions across three continents – Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, Vilnius, Lithuania, Kerewan, The Gambia, and Central Oregon, USA. We also dive into the impact that the assembly has on members and others involved in the entire process...(More)“
Report by the UK Government Office for Science (GO-Science): “… first developed a set of AI 2030 scenarios in 2023, which were published in 2025 (Government Office for Science, 2025). These aimed to help policymakers navigate uncertainty surrounding the future of AI and prepare for its risks and opportunities. They have been used widely across government and are in regular demand.
Since 2023, the AI landscape has changed profoundly, with AI capabilities, investment, and adoption having increased significantly, alongside dramatic shifts in geopolitics. GO-Science has therefore produced an updated set of scenarios to account for these developments, outlined in this report…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst: “Across a range of fast growing urban markets, private developers are constructing a version of the smart city that operates largely outside the purview of municipal government, often at the explicit invitation of city officials seeking to shift the cost and complexity of digital infrastructure onto private capital. Gated residential and mixed use developments are increasingly marketed not merely on the basis of security and amenity, but on their smartness: integrated home automation, app mediated access control, and centralized energy and resource management, among other features. We refer to this phenomenon as the smart compound. Despite its rapid proliferation, it has received comparatively little sustained scholarly attention: the literatures on smart cities and on gated communities have developed largely independently of one another, even as developers are, in practice, merging the two. This paper introduces the smart compound as an emerging real estate and urban development phenomenon, considers the opportunities and risks it presents, and examines how questions of data governance differ when smart urban infrastructure is built and owned privately rather than publicly. It concludes with a set of research questions intended to orient researchers, planners, and regulators toward a phenomenon whose growth is outpacing the scholarship meant to account for it…(More)”.
Article by Rekha Balu and William J. Congdon: “Federal economic data and statistics are essential for both public and private sector decisionmakers across the United States. They make it possible to monitor and understand the performance of the economy, craft public policy to effectively address challenges facing households and the nation, and make informed business and financial decisions. Their collective value to the users of these data—from policymakers to businesses to researchers—is immense.
Changing needs, and the need for changing data
At the same time, the needs of data users are evolving. Policymakers and businesses increasingly demand more timely, localized, and detailed information. Economic research continues to identify new relationships and concepts that are important for data to capture, and for statistical series to incorporate and reflect.
Most of all, economic data and statistics require constant innovation to keep pace with a dynamic and changing economy. Factors like the rise of artificial intelligence, gig work, digital assets, and increasingly complex sources of income and wealth can pose challenges for traditional economic data. Consider examples that arise across four key domains of economic data: employment, prices, income, and wealth:
Employment data: Understanding evolving labor markets
Federal employment statistics are among the most widely referenced economic indicators. These data—tracking labor market conditions, measuring job growth, calculating the unemployment rate, observing trends in and the distribution of wages across workers, and so on—are closely followed by policymakers, financial markets, researchers, voters, and the media…(More)“.
Book edited by Akhil S.G., Latha Poonamallee, Simy Joy, Joanne Scillitoe, and Anita Howard: “Technological and scientific innovation does not simply emerge; it is designed. From organizational systems and data infrastructures to platforms, policies, and everyday tools, design choices shape how power operates, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits from innovation. Technology, Management, and Design for Social Justice brings together global scholars and practitioners to critically examine how design, management, and technological systems reproduce inequality, and how they can be intentionally reimagined to advance equity, dignity, and planetary wellbeing.
Moving beyond views of technology as neutral or inevitable, this volume positions design as a moral and political practice embedded in institutions and governance. Through conceptual frameworks and global case studies spanning algorithmic management, climate-oriented innovation, indigenous digital infrastructures, youth innovation ecosystems, and welfare technologies, the chapters show how justice is designed into (or out of) sociotechnical systems.
Written for scholars, advanced students, and practitioners across management, design studies, science and technology studies, and social justice, this book offers critical tools for rethinking how innovation is shaped, and for whom…(More)”.
A Curated Compilation of 100 Use Cases (2024-2026) by Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable: “The rapid digitization of society has fundamentally transformed the data landscape. Every day, billions of interactions with digital platforms, mobile devices, sensors, financial systems, satellites, connected infrastructure, and other technologies generate unprecedented volumes of information about human behavior, economic activity, environmental change, and public systems. While these data are typically created for operational, commercial, or technological purposes rather than official statistics or research, they increasingly offer valuable opportunities to address public-interest challenges when reused responsibly.
This so-called non-traditional data (NTD) has emerged as an important complement to conventional sources of evidence such as surveys, censuses, administrative records, and official statistics. It can provide information that is more timely, granular, continuous, and behaviorally rich than many traditional datasets, enabling governments, researchers, humanitarian organizations, and civil society to better understand rapidly changing conditions and respond more effectively.
From tracking disease outbreaks and population displacement to monitoring environmental degradation, estimating economic activity, improving disaster response, and informing urban planning, NTD is becoming an increasingly important part of the evidence base that supports public decision-making.
At the same time, the landscape for accessing and reusing non-traditional data is becoming more complex. Growing concerns around privacy, commercial sensitivity, cybersecurity, intellectual property, public trust, and the governance of artificial intelligence have led many organizations to restrict access to valuable datasets, contributing to what has been described as a “data winter”.
This has created a paradox: just as the potential public value of non-traditional data continues to expand, access to many privately held and platform-generated datasets is becoming more constrained. Unlocking that value therefore depends not only on technological innovation but also on effective governance, trusted stewardship, sustainable partnerships, and institutional arrangements that enable responsible data reuse.
Against this backdrop, the purpose of this report is to document how non-traditional data is already being reused in practice. Over the past two years, we have periodically identified and highlighted emerging examples of NTD reuse from around the world. This report brings together 100 curated use cases published between late 2024 and 2026 into a single resource. The compilation does not offer a comprehensive inventory of all existing applications, but seeks to provide a representative snapshot of the current state of practice across different sectors, geographies, and data types.
The cases illustrate the remarkable diversity of both the data being reused and the public-interest questions they seek to address. They span public health, humanitarian response, climate adaptation, environmental monitoring, disaster management, mobility, labor markets, economic measurement, agriculture, digital governance, education, and urban planning, among other domains. They also demonstrate how organizations are increasingly combining non-traditional data with traditional evidence sources, machine learning techniques, and domain expertise to produce more timely, actionable, and context-specific insights.
To provide a structured overview of this rapidly evolving field, the use cases are organized into seven broad data domains: (1) digital communication and online interaction data; (2) mobility and geolocation data; (3) health and biomedical data; (4) financial and commercial data; (5) work and labor market data; (6) in-home and Internet of Things (IoT) data; and (7) environmental, geospatial, and infrastructure data. Within each domain, examples are further grouped according to more specific data types. Each use case follows a common structure, describing the public-interest challenge being addressed, the role played by non-traditional data, and why the reuse of those data matters…(More)”
Article by Christoph Koettl: “For two decades, satellite imagery has been my window into the unreachable.
I’ve used it to expose North Korean oil smuggling and to uncover a mass grave in Burundi. In 2022, the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times used images to rebut Russian claims that the killing of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, occurred after their soldiers had left. And in the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, these eyes in the sky have been similarly revealing.
I surveyed the damage in Tehran from space shortly after Israeli strikes hit the compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killing him. Our team tracked the damage that Iranian attacks wrought on regional U.S. bases. An image we captured through a satellite company even helped to determine U.S. responsibility for the strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 150 people, many of them children. And just last month, we showed how the United States bombed what appeared to be a drinking-water facility, a strike that if done deliberately could constitute a war crime under international law.
We reported some of these stories despite five U.S. satellite providers cutting off access to high-resolution images of Iran and surrounding countries shortly after the war began. The main reason for these restrictions is that Iran might use the imagery to target U.S. troops. This blackout applies to customers who regularly publish satellite imagery, such as news outlets and think tanks…(More)”.
Report by DemNext: “Democracy is under strain, and one of the most promising responses to that strain is the growing global movement around deliberative assemblies: citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, and related forums that bring randomly selected, broadly representative groups of people together to weigh evidence, listen to one another, and make shared decisions on complex public issues. Over 1,000 such processes have now been run worldwide, and a growing body of evidence suggests they depolarise opinion, generate well-reasoned recommendations, build trust, and reconnect people to political life.
However, these processes are also resource-intensive, slow, and hard to scale, and have thus become a site of intense interest for AI integration. The pitch from many technologists, practitioners, and funders is consistent: AI can make deliberation cheaper, faster, more accessible, and more scalable.
In this paper, we argue that AI, when designed with care, can indeed play a powerful role in strengthening deliberation. But the very efficiencies that make AI attractive also risk undermining what deliberation is for in the first place. Whether AI strengthens or weakens deliberation or strengthens is not predetermined, however; it is a matter of design.
Our starting point is that deliberative assemblies are not decision-making machines whose sole value lies in the recommendation they produce. They are also spaces in which participants exercise and develop the civic capacities that democratic life depends upon. If we automate too much, we may end up with smoother processes that hollow out the productive friction that makes them valuable, while simultaneously reducing people’s ability to participate in democratic life.
These considerations are relevant to all places where deliberation takes place – workplaces, schools and universities, museums, financial institutions, corporations and cooperatives, membership-based associations, and other organisations.
We make three contributions.
First, we argue that one of the most important and most overlooked virtues of deliberative assemblies is that they build deliberative muscles: the cognitive, dispositional, and relational capacities that citizens need to do the work of democracy together. We use the language of muscle deliberately. A muscle is not an idea one holds; it is a capacity one maintains through practice, weakens when unused, and improves when trained.
Second, we offer a typology of seven deliberative muscles: self-reflection (examining one’s own values and beliefs), reasoning (engaging critically with evidence and expertise), dialogue (listening attentively, responding, and giving reasons), vulnerability (sharing feelings and reflections, tolerating conflict, feeling the weight of others’ experiences), collaboration (moving from individual reasoning to shared judgement), imagination (envisioning futures and alternatives concretely enough to deliberate about them), and facilitation (guiding small-group deliberation productively and inclusively)…(More)”.
