Stefaan Verhulst

Jon Kolko at HBR: “There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture….

Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems.

For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Center for Innovation has used a design artifact called a customer journey map to understand veterans’ emotional highs and lows in their interactions with the VA….

In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following….(More)”

Ellie Ward at PioneersPost: “A group of leading foundations and NGOs, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Oxfam and the Skoll Foundation have launched a peer-to-peer platform to make solving pressing social issues easier.

Sphaera (pronounced s’faira) is a peer-to-peer online platform that will collate the knowledge of funders and practitioners working to solve social and environmental issues around the world.

Organisations will share their evidence-based solutions and research within the portal, which will then repurpose the information into tools, processes and frameworks that can be used by others. In theory a solution that helps fishermen log their catch could be repurposed for healthcare workers to track and improve treatment of contagious disease. …”Sphaera makes it easy to discover, share and remix solutions. We put the collective, practical knowledge of what works – in health, finance, conservation, education, in every sector relevant to wellbeing – at the fingertips of practitioners everywhere. Our hope is that together we are better, faster, and more effective in tackling the urgent problems of our time.”

Arthur Wood, founding partner of Total Impact Capital and a global leader in social finance, said: “With the birth of cloud technology we have seen a plethora of models changing the way we use, share, purchase and allocate resources. From AirBNB to Uber, folks are now asking why this trend has had zero impact in Philanthropy.”

Wood explained that Sphaera is “designed to liberate the silos of individual project knowledge and to leverage that expertise and knowledge to create scale and collaboration across the philanthropic landscape… Or simply stated, how can a great idea in one stovepipe be shared to the benefit of all?” (More)“

Opinion by Sophia Ayele at Oxfam: “The data revolution has arrived. ….The UN has even launched a Data Revolution Group (to ensure that the revolution penetrates into international development). The Group’s 2014 report suggests that harnessing the power of newly available data could ultimately lead to, “more empowered people, better policies, better decisions and greater participation and accountability, leading to better outcomes for people and the planet.”

But where do NGOs fit in?

NGOs are generating dozens (if not hundreds) of datasets every year. Over the last two decades, NGO have been collecting increasing amounts of research and evaluation data, largely driven by donor demands for more rigorous evaluations of programs. The quality and efficiency of data collection has also been enhanced by mobile data collection. However, a quick scan of UK development NGOs reveals that few, if any, are sharing the data that they collect. This means that NGOs are generating dozens (if not hundreds) of datasets every year that aren’t being fully exploited and analysed. Working on tight budgets, with limited capacity, it’s not surprising that NGOs often shy away from sharing data without a clear mandate.

But change is in the air. Several donors have begun requiring NGOs to publicise data and others appear to be moving in that direction. Last year, USAID launched its Open Data Policy which requires that grantees “submit any dataset created or collected with USAID funding…” Not only does USAID stipulate this requirement, it also hosts this data on its Development Data Library (DDL) and provides guidance on anonymisation to depositors. Similarly, Gates Foundation’s 2015 Open Access Policy stipulates that, “Data underlying published research results will be accessible and open immediately.” However, they are allowing a two-year transition period…..Here at Oxfam, we have been exploring ways to begin sharing research and evaluation data. We aren’t being required to do this – yet – but, we realise that the data that we collect is a public good with the potential to improve lives through more effective development programmes and to raise the voices of those with whom we work. Moreover, organizations like Oxfam can play a crucial role in highlighting issues facing women and other marginalized communities that aren’t always captured in national statistics. Sharing data is also good practice and would increase our transparency and accountability as an organization.

… the data that we collect is a public good with the potential to improve lives. However, Oxfam also bears a huge responsibility to protect the rights of the communities that we work with. This involves ensuring informed consent when gathering data, so that communities are fully aware that their data may be shared, and de-identifying data to a level where individuals and households cannot be easily identified.

As Oxfam has outlined in our, recently adopted, Responsible Data Policy,”Using data responsibly is not just an issue of technical security and encryption but also of safeguarding the rights of people to be counted and heard, ensuring their dignity, respect and privacy, enabling them to make an informed decision and protecting their right to not be put at risk… (More)”

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch: “.. jEugene…helps the drafters of legal documents catch mistakes that could be fatal to such documents’ validity or enforceability.

The original idea of Harry Zhou, who, as a first-year lawyer, was tasked with proofing a 250-page contract and wanted more than his supervising lawyer’s assurance that “you did great,” jEugene scans through a legal document and highlights in text potential drafting mistakes in the document.

The product is being used by White & Case LLP and is undergoing trial at Fenwick & West LLP. Tens of smaller law firms are accessing jEugene through Clio, a provider of cloud-based legal management software. Other clients are under NDA.

Errors that jEugene currently detects may seem innocuous at times, but could lead to hefty costs. For example, millions of dollars that certain creditors recently failed to recover in a famous bankruptcy case could have been avoided had jEugene been used; and jEugene’s analysis of legal documents disclosed on SEC EDGAR routinely reveals similar errors missed by some of the most sophisticated law firms (they say).

Here’s how it works: A user uploads a document, waits a few seconds, and downloads the resulting file. This emulates handwritten markups that lawyers are used to seeing, and highlights potential drafting mistakes in the document with different colors. The user then reviews the results to determine whether any revision is necessary….(More)”

Wired: “Data is immensely powerful. The trick lies in organizing the stuff. The good news is that so many organizations are now offering tools that help with this—and so many of these tools are open source.

The White House is among the many who are tapping into this trend. Today, the administration revealed a new tool meant to help anyone visualize government work across the country. Built in partnership with more than 15 Federal agencies, it’s basically a huge map of the country—with data layers you can select or deselect—that lets you see where certain community-based initiatives are gaining ground.

“This new approach focuses on the direction that cities and small towns want to go rather than the laundry list of programs the government has,” a representative from the White House Office of Management and Budget tells WIRED.

The initiatives include My Brother’s Keeper, a program designed to help residents succeed in education, in their careers, and beyond; Climate Action Champions, a program aimed to help local leaders address climate change issues; and Promise Zones, which hopes to increase economic security and expand educational opportunities within the community. The map also includes demographic information, on things like US Census data on counties of persistent poverty and data from Harvard about upward economic mobility by county.

“From the start, [the map] has been built in the open, and source code is available on GitHub,” the White House says, inviting data enthusiasts to make use of the map—which the administration also promised would get the benefit of regular data updates.”

“The ICT4Peace Foundation is pleased to release ‘Peacekeepers in the Sky: The Use of Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles for Peacekeeping‘, authored by Helena Puig Larrauri and Patrick Meier.

As recently noted by Hervé Ladsous, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, the United Nations “cannot continue just using tools of 50 or 100 years ago.” The United Nations Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) is thus on course to create a “force for the future” by adopting and making increasing use of new technologies like Unarmed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also referred to as Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles (UUAVs). These remotely piloted aircraft systems, which are becoming increasingly cheaper, smarter and more robust, aim to provide peacekeeping missions with greater surveillance capabilities and thus more timely and enhanced situational awareness. This is expected to render peacekeeping missions more effective and cost-efficient in terms of keeping the peace and protecting civilians. According to DPKO’s vision, UUAVs “represent a new way of ‘seeing and knowing’ in peacekeeping and can dramatically improve peacekeepers’ access to information.” One strong proponent of UUAVs claims that they are a “major step forward towards much more discriminating use of violence in war and self-defense – a step forward in humanitarian technology.”

Yet the use of UUAVs is complicated by a number of issues related to perceptions, politics, ethics and empowerment. The use of surveillance technologies by the UN may at times be politically unpopular among those UN Member States that fear technologies like UUAVs will inevitably compromise their territorial and political sovereignty. In fact, arguments against the use of UUAVs sometimes resemble arguments against the “Responsibility to Protect” norm adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 as a framework for justifying military intervention as a last resort to protect civilians from mass atrocities. This admittedly narrow set of concerns is not always an issue; they can vary greatly based on the context of a given peacekeeping operation.

Download the full report here.”

IODC 2015: “The 3rd International Open Data Conference held in Ottawa, Canada May 28-29, 2015 was a great success. With over 1000 participants, 58 panels and workshops, ten parallel tracks, over 200 speakers, and more than 29 fringe events over 9 days, IODC was truly a global gathering.

We are excited to introduce the 3rd International Open Data Conference Final Report titled “Enabling the Data Revolution: An International Open Data Roadmap”.

This report draws upon the many discussions that took place in Ottawa at IODC, providing a summary of key topics and debates, and providing a shared vision of the road ahead for the IODC community. It is designed not as a single statement on open data, but rather as a curated record of discussions and debates, providing a snapshot of key issues and setting out a path forward based on the visions, ideas, and agreements explored at IODC.

New study by Ceren Budak and Duncan J. Watts in Sociological Science: “Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer “yes,” pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: “influence” (change in attitude caused by interacting with other participants); and “selection” (individuals who participated in the movement were generally more supportive of other groups beforehand).

We tease out the relative importance of these mechanisms by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals changed in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other parties all along. These findings suggest that both mechanisms were important, but that selection dominated. In addition to our substantive findings, our paper also makes a methodological contribution that we believe could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest, our method relies on ex post panel construction, and hence can be used to study unanticipated or otherwise inaccessible events. We conclude that despite the well known limitations of social media, their “always on” nature and their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data….(More)”

Commentary in Governance: “In the United States, the presidential race is heating up, and one result is an increasing number of assaults on century-old ideas about the merit-based civil service.  “The merit principle is under fierce attack,” says Donald Kettl, in a new commentary for Governance.  Kettl outlines five “tough questions” that are raised by attacks on the civil service system — and says that the US research community “has been largely asleep at the switch” on all of them.  Within major public policy schools, courses on the public service have been “pushed to the side.”  A century ago, American academics helped to build the American state.  Kettl warns that “scholarly neglect in the 2000s could undermine it.”  Read the commentary.

Society’s biggest challenges are also its most complex. From shared economic growth to personalized medicine to global climate change, few of our most pressing problems are likely to have simple solutions. Perhaps the only way to make progress on these and other challenges is by bringing together the important stakeholders on a given issue to pursue common interests and resolve points of conflict.

However, it is not easy to assemble such groups or to keep them together. Many initiatives have stumbled and disbanded. The Biomarkers Consortium might have been one of them, but this consortium beat the odds, in large part due to the founding parties’ determination to make it work. Nine years after it was founded, this public-private partnership, which is managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and based in Bethesda, Maryland, is still working to advance the availability of biomarkers (biological indicators for disease states) as tools for drug development, including applications at the frontiers of personalized medicine.

The Biomarkers Consortium’s mandate — to bring together, in the group’s words, “the expertise and resources of various partners to rapidly identify, develop, and qualify potential high-impact biomarkers particularly to enable improvements in drug development, clinical care, and regulatory decision-making” — may look simple. However, the reality has been quite complex. The negotiations that led to the consortium’s formation in 2006 were complicated, and the subsequent balancing of common and competing interests remains challenging….

Many in the biomedical sector had seen the need to tackle drug discovery costs for a long time, with multiple companies concurrently spending millions, sometimes billions, of dollars only to hit common dead ends in the drug development process. In 2004 and 2005, then National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni convened key people from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the NIH, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to create a multistakeholder forum.

Every member knew from the outset that their fellow stakeholders represented many divergent and sometimes opposing interests: large pharmaceutical companies, smaller entrepreneurial biotechnology companies, FDA regulators, NIH science and policy experts, university researchers and nonprofit patient advocacy organizations….(More)”