Stefaan Verhulst

Development Initiatives: “Staging a Data Revolution

Accessible, useable, timely and complete data is core to sustainable development and social progress. Access to information provides people with a base to make better choices and have more control over their lives. Too often attempts to deliver sustainable economic, social and environmental results are hindered by the failure to get the right information, in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. Worse still, the most acute data deficits often affect the people and countries facing the most acute problems.

The Data Revolution should be about data grounded in real life. Data and information that gets to the people who need it at national and sub-national levels to help with the decisions they face – hospital directors, school managers, city councillors, parliamentarians. Data that goes beyond averages – that is disaggregated to show the different impacts of decisions, policies and investments on gender, social groups and people living in different places and over time.

We need a Data Revolution that sets a new political agenda, that puts existing data to work, that improves the way data is gathered and ensures that information can be used. To deliver this vision, we need the following steps.

12 steps to a Data Revolution

1.     Implement a national ‘Data Pledge’ to citizens that is supported by governments, private and non-governmental sectors
2.     Address real world questions with joined up and disaggregated data
3.      Empower and up-skill data users of the future through education
4.     Examine existing frameworks and publish existing data
5.     Build an information bank of data assets
6.     Allocate funding available for better data according to national and sub-national priorities
7.     Strengthen national statistical systems’ capacity to collect data
8.     Implement a policy that data is ‘open by default’
9.     Improve data quality by subjecting it to public scrutiny
10.  Put information users’ needs first
11.  Recognise technology cannot solve all barriers to information
12.  Invest in infomediaries’ capacity to translate data into information that policymakers, civil society and the media can actually use…”

“Welcome to The Open Standard.

Matthew Wall at BBC News: “While emergency response teams, medical charities and non-governmental organisations struggle to contain the virus, could big data analytics help?
A growing number of data scientists believe so….
Mobile phones, widely owned in even the poorest countries in Africa, are proving to be a rich source of data in a region where other reliable sources are sorely lacking.
Orange Telecom in Senegal handed over anonymised voice and text data from 150,000 mobile phones to Flowminder, a Swedish non-profit organisation, which was then able to draw up detailed maps of typical population movements in the region.
Authorities could then see where the best places were to set up treatment centres, and more controversially, the most effective ways to restrict travel in an attempt to contain the disease.
The drawback with this data was that it was historic, when authorities really need to be able to map movements in real time. People’s movements tend to change during an epidemic.
This is why the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is also collecting mobile phone mast activity data from mobile operators and mapping where calls to helplines are mostly coming from.

Mobile phone data from West Africa is being used to map population movements and predict how the Ebola virus might spread

A sharp increase in calls to a helpline from one particular area would suggest an outbreak and alert authorities to direct more resources there.
Mapping software company Esri is helping CDC to visualise this data and overlay other existing sources of data from censuses to build up a richer picture.
The level of activity at each mobile phone mast also gives a kind of heatmap of where people are and crucially, where and how far they are moving.

“We’ve never had this large-scale, anonymised mobile phone data before as a species,” says Nuria Oliver, a scientific director at mobile phone company Telefonica.

“The most positive impact we can have is to help emergency relief organisations and governments anticipate how a disease is likely to spread.
“Until now they had to rely on anecdotal information, on-the-ground surveys, police and hospital reports.”…

Will Knight at MIT Technology Review: “On your way to this article, you probably took part in several experiments. You may have helped a search engine test a new way of displaying its results or an online retailer fine-tune an algorithm for recommending products. You may even have helped a news website decide which of two headlines readers are most likely to click on.
In other words, whether you realize it or not, the Web is already a gigantic, nonstop user-testing laboratory. Experimentation offers companies a powerful way to understand what customers want and how they are likely to behave, but it also seems that few people realize quite how much of it is going on.

This became clear in June, when Facebook experienced a backlash after publishing a study on the way negative emotions can spread across its network. The study, conducted by a team of internal researchers and academics, involved showing some people more negative posts than they would otherwise have seen, and then measuring how this affected their behavior. They in fact tended to post more negative content themselves, revealing a kind of “emotional contagion” (see “Facebook’s Emotion Study Is Just Its Latest Effort to Prod Users”).
Businesses have performed market research and other small experiments for years, but the practice has reached new levels of sophistication and complexity, largely because it is so easy to control the user experience on the Web, and then track how people’s behavior changes (see “What Facebook Knows”).
So companies with large numbers of users routinely tweak the information some of them see, and measure the resulting effect on their behavior—a practice known in the industry as A/B testing. Next time you see a credit card offer, for example, you might be one of a small group of users selected at random to see a new design. Or when you log onto Gmail, you may one of a chosen subset that gets to use a new feature developed by Google’s engineers.
“When doing things online, there’s a very large probability you’re going to be involved in multiple experiments every day,” Sinan Aral, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said during a break at a conference for practitioners of large-scale user experiments last weekend in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Look at Google, Amazon, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook—all of these businesses run hundreds of experiments, and they also account for a large proportion of Web traffic.”
At the Sloan conference, Ron Kohavi, general manager of the analysis and experimentation team at Microsoft, said each time someone uses the company’s search engine, Bing, he or she is probably involved in around 300 experiments. The insights that designers, engineers, and product managers can glean from these experiments can be worth millions of dollars in advertising revenue, Kohavi said…”

In cities around the world, digital platforms are bringing together citizens and service providers in innovative ways. In a recent post on Medium Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief of R&D and Julia Root, Adjunct Fellow at the GovLab write about the ways in which we observe cities re-imagining themselves. We point to four distinct ways that cities are redefining how they plan, build and invest in their futures. Each way deploys a different set of technologies and tools that when combined with urban thinking and design, is changing not just our urban environments, but the pace of change as well.
Read full article here.

U.S. Department of Commerce Press Release: “The Governance Lab (GovLab) at New York University today released “Realizing The Potential of Open Government Data: A Roundtable with the U.S. Department of Commerce,” a report on findings and recommendations for ways the U.S. Commerce Department can improve its data management, dissemination and use. The report summarizes a June 2014 Open Data Roundtable, co-hosted by The GovLab and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with the Commerce Department, which brought together Commerce data providers and 25 representatives from the private sector and nonprofit organizations for an action-oriented dialogue on data issues and potential solutions. The GovLab is convening a series of other Open Data Roundtables in its mission to help make government more effective and connected to the public through technology.

New book edited by Paul Knox:  “More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and that proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters by 2050. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, but the way cities are developing, the experience of city life, and the prospects for the future of cities vary widely from region to region. The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be going in the future.
Each chapter explores a particular type of city—from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome and the networked cities of the Hanseatic League, through the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris and the industrialization of Manchester, to the green and “smart” cities of today. Expert contributors explore how the development of these cities reflects one or more of the common themes of urban development: the mobilizing function (transport, communication, and infrastructure); the generative function (innovation and technology); the decision-making capacity (governance, economics, and institutions); and the transformative capacity (society, lifestyle, and culture)….
Table of Contents;  Introduction[PDF] “

New book edited by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich: “The early 21st century has presented considerable challenges to the problem-solving capacity of the contemporary state in the industrialised world. Among the many uncertainties, anxieties and tensions, it is, however, the cumulative challenge of fiscal austerity, demographic developments, and climate change that presents the key test for contemporary states. Debates abound regarding the state’s ability to address these and other problems given increasingly dispersed forms of governing and institutional vulnerabilities created by politico-administrative and economic decision-making structures. This volume advances these debates, first, by moving towards a cross-sectoral perspective that takes into account the cumulative nature of the contemporary challenge to governance focusing on the key governance areas of infrastructure, sustainability, social welfare, and social integration; second, by considering innovations that have sought to add problem-solving capacity; and third, by exploring the kind of administrative capacities (delivery, regulatory, coordination, and analytical) required to encourage and sustain innovative problem-solving. This edition introduces a framework for understanding the four administrative capacities that are central to any attempt at problem-solving and how they enable the policy instruments of the state to have their intended effect. It also features chapters that focus on the way in which these capacities have become stretched and how they have been adjusted, given the changing conditions; the way in which different states have addressed particular governance challenges, with particular attention paid to innovation at the level of policy instrument and the required administrative capacities; and, finally, types of governance capacities that lie outside the boundaries of the state.”