Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
Whitepaper by the Global Government Technology Centre Berlin: “…explores how agentic AI will transform ten functional layers of government and public administration. The Agentic State signifies a fundamental shift in governance, where AI systems can perceive, reason, and act with minimal human intervention to deliver public value. Its impact on key functional layers of government will be as follows…(More)”.
Article by Andreas Pawelke, Basma Albanna and Damiano Cerrone: “Cities around the world face urgent challenges — from climate change impacts to rapid urbanization and infrastructure strain. Municipal leaders struggle with limited budgets, competing priorities, and pressure to show quick results, making traditional approaches to urban transformation increasingly difficult to implement.
Every city, however, has hidden success stories — neighborhoods, initiatives, or communities that are achieving remarkable results despite facing similar challenges as their peers.
These “positive deviants” often remain unrecognized and underutilized, yet they contain the seeds of solutions that are already adapted to local contexts and constraints.
Data-Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) combines urban data, advanced analytics, and community engagement to systematically uncover these bright spots and amplify their impact. This new approach offers a pathway to urban transformation that is not only evidence-based but also cost-effective and deeply rooted in local realities.
DPPD is particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments, where expensive external solutions often fail to take hold. By starting with what’s already working, cities can make strategic investments that build on existing strengths rather than starting from scratch. Leveraging AI tools that improve community engagement, the approach becomes even more powerful — enabling cities to envision potential futures, and engage citizens in meaningful co-creation…(More)”
Paper by Janet Freilich and W. Nicholson Price II: “A large literature on regulation highlights the many different methods of policy-making: command-and-control rulemaking, informational disclosures, tort liability, taxes, and more. But the literature overlooks a powerful method to achieve policy objectives: data. The state can provide (or suppress) data as a regulatory tool to solve policy problems. For administrations with expansive views of government’s purpose, government-provided data can serve as infrastructure for innovation and push innovation in socially desirable directions; for administrations with deregulatory ambitions, suppressing or choosing not to collect data can reduce regulatory power or serve as a back-door mechanism to subvert statutory or common law rules. Government-provided data is particularly powerful for data-driven technologies such as AI where it is sometimes more effective than traditional methods of regulation. But government-provided data is a policy tool beyond AI and can influence policy in any field. We illustrate why government-provided data is a compelling tool both for positive regulation and deregulation in contexts ranging from addressing healthcare discrimination, automating legal practice, smart power generation, and others. We then consider objections and limitations to the role of government-provided data as policy instrument, with substantial focus on privacy concerns and the possibility for autocratic abuse.
We build on the broad literature on regulation by introducing data as a regulatory tool. We also join—and diverge from—the growing literature on data by showing that while data can be privately produced purely for private gain, they do not need to be. Rather, government can be deeply involved in the generation and sharing of data, taking a much more publicly oriented view. Ultimately, while government-provided data are not a panacea for either regulatory or data problems, governments should view data provision as an understudied but useful tool in the innovation and governance toolbox…(More)”
Book by Anne Trumbore: “From AI tutors who ensure individualized instruction but cannot do math to free online courses from elite universities that were supposed to democratize higher education, claims that technological innovations will transform education often fall short. Yet, as Anne Trumbore shows in The Teacher in the Machine, the promises of today’s cutting-edge technologies aren’t new. Long before the excitement about the disruptive potential of generative AI–powered tutors and massive open online courses, scholars at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s were encouraged by the US government to experiment with computers and artificial intelligence in education. Trumbore argues that the contrast between these two eras of educational technology reveals the changing role of higher education in the United States as it shifted from a public good to a private investment.
Writing from a unique insider’s perspective and drawing on interviews with key figures, historical research, and case studies, Trumbore traces today’s disparate discussions about generative AI, student loan debt, and declining social trust in higher education back to their common origins at a handful of elite universities fifty years ago. Arguing that those early educational experiments have resonance today, Trumbore points the way to a more equitable and collaborative pedagogical future. Her account offers a critical lens on the history of technology in education just as universities and students seek a stronger hand in shaping the future of their institutions…(More)”
Paper by Anu Masso, Anniki Puura, Jevgenia Gerassimenko and Olle Järv: “The European Strategy for Data aims to create a unified environment for accessing, sharing, and reusing data across sectors, institutions, and individuals, with a focus on areas like mobility and smart cities. While significant progress has been made in the technical interoperability and legislative frameworks for data spaces, critical gaps persist in the bottom-up processes, particularly in fostering social collaboration and citizen-driven initiatives. What is often overlooked is the need for effective citizen engagement and collaborative governance models to ensure the long-term viability and inclusivity of these data spaces. In addition, although principles for successful data sharing are well-established in sectors like healthcare, they remain underdeveloped and more challenging to implement in areas such as mobility. This article addresses these gaps by exploring how gamification can drive bottom-up data space formation, engaging citizens in data-sharing and fostering collaboration among private companies, local governments, and academic institutions. Using bicycle usage as an example, it illustrates how gamification can incentivise citizens to share mobility data for social good, promoting more active and sustainable transportation in cities. Drawing on a case study from Tallinn (Estonia), the paper demonstrates how gamification can improve data collection, highlighting the vital role of citizen participation in urban planning. The article emphasises that while technological solutions for data spaces are advancing, understanding collaborative governance models for data sharing remains crucial for ensuring the success of the European Union’s data space agenda and driving sustainable innovation in urban environments…(More)”.
Article by Simon Makin: “In 1785 English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the perfect prison: Cells circle a tower from which an unseen guard can observe any inmate at will. As far as a prisoner knows, at any given time, the guard may be watching—or may not be. Inmates have to assume they’re constantly observed and behave accordingly. Welcome to the Panopticon.
Many of us will recognize this feeling of relentless surveillance. Information about who we are, what we do and buy and where we go is increasingly available to completely anonymous third parties. We’re expected to present much of our lives to online audiences and, in some social circles, to share our location with friends. Millions of effectively invisible closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and smart doorbells watch us in public, and we know facial recognition with artificial intelligence can put names to faces.
So how does being watched affect us? “It’s one of the first topics to have been studied in psychology,” says Clément Belletier, a psychologist at University of Clermont Auvergne in France. In 1898 psychologist Norman Triplett showed that cyclists raced harder in the presence of others. From the 1970s onward, studies showed how we change our overt behavior when we are watched to manage our reputation and social consequences.
But being watched doesn’t just change our behavior; decades of research show it also infiltrates our mind to impact how we think. And now a new study reveals how being watched affects unconscious processing in our brain. In this era of surveillance, researchers say, the findings raise concerns about our collective mental health…(More)”.
Paper by Amirhosein Shabrang, Mehdi Pourpeikari Heris, and Travis Flohr: “We investigated the spatial shade patterns of trees and buildings on sidewalks and bike lanes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We used Lidar data and 3D modeling to analyze the spatial and temporal shade distribution across the City. Our analysis shows significant shade variations throughout the City. Western city areas receive more shade from trees, and the eastern regions receive more shade from buildings. The City’s northern areas lack shade, but natural and built sources of shade can improve shade coverage integration. This study’s findings help identify shade coverage gaps, which have implications for urban planning and design for more heat-resilient cities…(More)”
Book edited by Michael Lewis: “The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.
Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers, including Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, to join him in finding someone doing an interesting job for the government and writing about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.
Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. Expanding on the Washington Post series, the vivid profiles in Who Is Government? blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters…(More)”.
Book by Patricia McKenna: “In exploring artificial intelligence (AI) in urban life, this book brings together and extends thinking on how human-AI interactions are continuously evolving. Through such interactions, people are aided on the one hand, while becoming more aware of their own capabilities and potentials on the other hand, pertaining, for example, to creativity, human sensing, and collaboration.
It is the particular focus of research questions developed in relation to awareness, smart cities, autonomy, privacy, transparency, theory, methods, practices, and collective intelligence, along with the wide range of perspectives and opportunities offered, that set this work apart from others. Conceptual frameworks are formulated for each of these areas to guide explorations and understandings in this work and going forward. A synthesis is provided in the final chapter for perspectives, challenges and opportunities, and conceptual frameworks for urban life in an era of AI, opening the way for evolving research and practice directions…(More)”.
Book edited by Esmat Zaidan, Imad Antoine Ibrahim, and Elie Azar: “…explores the governance of smart cities from a holistic approach, arguing that the creation of smart cities must consider the specific circumstances of each country to improve the preservation, revitalisation, liveability, and sustainability of urban areas. The recent push for smart cities is part of an effort to reshape urban development through megaprojects, centralised master planning, and approaches that convey modernism and global affluence. However, moving towards a citywide smart transition is a major undertaking, and complexities are expected to grow exponentially. This book argues that a comprehensive approach is necessary to consider all relevant aspects. The chapters seek to identify the potential and pitfalls of the smart transformation of urban communities and its role in sustainability goals; share state-of-the-art practices concerning technology, policy, and social science dimensions in smart cities and communities; and develop opportunities for cooperation and partnership in wider and larger research and development programmes. Divided into three parts, the first part of the book highlights the significance of various societal elements and factors in facilitating a successful smart transition, with a particular emphasis on the role of human capital. The second part delves into the challenges associated with technology and its integration into smart city initiatives. The final part of the book examines the current state of regulations and policies governing smart cities. The book will be an important asset for students and researchers studying law, engineering, political science, international relations, geopolitics, economics, and engineering…(More)”.