Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Beth Simone Noveck, Nicholas Biddle and Alex Fischer: “Two trends are converging in countries around the world. Public anxiety about artificial intelligence is growing while communities satisfaction in how they participate and shape government is declining. Emerging examples from Bogotá, Hamburg, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere show how AI can sharply improve the quality and experience of public engagement while reducing its time and cost. If done poorly or without safeguards, it can also introduce new risks. However, these can be managed with appropriate design, regulation and delivery by skilled practitioners.

This paper examines how artificial intelligence and digital platforms are changing what is possible, and suggests that a key opportunity is to build public-sector capability to deliver meaningful engagement.
The paper makes three claims: 

1. First, meaningful public engagement is a professional skill that requires practitioners to define clear goals, identify and reach appropriate participants, design effective tasks, interpret public input, and connect participation to decisions. Evidence from Australia and New Zealand suggests that public servants want these skills but rarely receive systematic training in them. 
2. Second, the very technologies driving many parts of public concern could also help governments listen and respond more effectively, make better decisions, and rebuild democratic trust. AI and digital platforms can reduce the time and cost of large-scale engagement, making forms of participation feasible that were previously difficult to sustain. The binding constraint is no longer cost or technology but capability to design and use. These technologies, however, need to be designed and used in ways that support democratic values and human judgment.
3. Third, realising this potential requires not only skilled practitioners but also appropriate digital infrastructure and regulation, alongside organisational support and demand.

The paper then explores opportunities for Australian institutions to teach a nine-step framework for AI-enabled engagement and sets out a research agenda to test whether such training changes practice. It introduces an approach to building these skills across public service and public-impact organisations, starting with a new free, self-paced online course developed by The GovLab and InnovateUS at Northeastern University, and Harvard’s Ash Center for Democracy Renovation, with input from more than 50 practitioners and experts across 24 countries. A pilot in Australia will follow the online course, testing how in-person workshops and skill-building can reinforce and apply those skills.

The paper concludes by recommending that governments invest in engagement skills, in platforms designed for democratic engagement, and in making public engagement a routine part of policy design, service delivery, and implementation…(More)”.

Article by Mehr Demokratie: “In autumn 2026, a randomly selected Citizens’ Panel will discuss measures to strengthen democracy in the European Union (EU). Until the end of the year, all EU residents can submit their questions and ideas on the subject online and at events organised on the topic… Perspectives on key aspects of democratic life, such as access to reliable information, media literacy, awareness of citizens’ rights, participation in decision-making, and the skills needed to engage in democracy in a digital world can be contributed. 

This debate follows up on the European Democracy Shield. It will feed into ongoing and future EU initiatives aimed at strengthening democracy and will inform future participatory processes, including a European Citizens’ Panel on Democratic Resilience. 

The Citizens’ Forum will meet from September to November 2026. Contributions from the online debate and events will feed into the Forum. The mini-public will discuss the contributions from the online debate and the in-person events and make recommendations to the European Commission….

From 22 May to 7 June 2026, the Sortition Foundation was on the road to recruit participants for the Citizens’ Forum. In collaboration with local partners across the EU, they knocked on doors and approached citizens from 150 randomly selected locations in all EU countries.

From the original pool of interested individuals, the final group of Citizens’ Assembly members will be selected at random to reflect the diversity of the EU population, taking into account gender, education, occupation and the spectrum between rural and urban areas…(More)”.

OECD Dashboard: “Rising uncertainties and geo-political tensions, together with more complex trade relations, have increased the demand for timely data and tools to monitor global trade. At the same time, advances in Big Data analytics and access to large quantities of alternative data – outside the realm of official statistics – have opened new avenues to track trade developments. These data can help identify bottlenecks, disruptions and emerging trends in near real time, but need to be carefully cleaned, validated and interpreted.

One such alternative data source is the Automatic Identification System (AIS), developed by the International Maritime Organisation on to facilitate the tracking of vessels across the globe. The system includes messages transmitted by ships to land or satellite receivers and is available in quasi real time. While AIS was primarily designed to ensure vessel safety, it is particularly well suited for providing insights on trade developments, as over 80% in volume of international merchandise trade is carried by sea. AIS data also provides granular vessel information and detailed location data which, when combined with other data sources, can support analysis at the country, port and berth levels, by vessel type, product group and trade flow.

New work from the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate builds on previous OECD research using AIS data. It refines the identification of ports by exploiting information at the berth level and combines AIS vessel movements with satellite imagery and a rule-based approach to map maritime activity to 23 commodity groups worldwide. This makes it possible to derive timely, experimental estimates of trade by product, with broad global coverage across ports and berths.

The updated OECD AIS Tracking Dashboard visualises key indicators on maritime activity, ports and trade flows. It retains the country-level indicators on vessel activity, capacity, trade estimates and efficiency measures, while adding new product-level breakdowns that allow users to compare developments across selected commodity groups and identify the main ports for imports and exports. The dashboard also includes a new chokepoints section, currently covering Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz, where users can monitor vessel composition and product-level flows through selected strategic maritime passages…(More)”.

Paper by Suoyi Tan et al: “Poverty mapping is increasingly important for monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda, which aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. Yet timely and fine-resolution poverty estimation remains difficult because conventional census- and survey-based approaches are costly, infrequent, and often sparse precisely where deprivation is most severe. As poverty emerges from complex socioeconomic systems shaped by human mobility, social interactions, infrastructure, and economic activities, emerging computational methods and nontraditional data sources have created new opportunities for poverty estimation and mapping. At the intersection of statistical physics, complex systems science, and data science, these approaches enable poverty estimation at finer spatial and temporal resolutions. This review summarizes the main concepts of poverty and the principal frameworks used to measure it, and examines recent advances on poverty estimation and mapping using satellite imagery, mobile phone data, social media data, and multisource data fusion. The review also discusses persistent challenges related to representativeness, transferability across regions, interpretability, and uncertainty quantification. Finally, the review clarifies both the analytical promise and the practical limits of contemporary poverty mapping…(More)”.

Book edited by Christophe Geiger and Bernd Justin Jütte: “Access to knowledge and information is essential to foster innovation. In the EU, existing copyright rules pose significant barriers to research and education. Instead of promoting access to knowledge resources, copyright creates legal uncertainty for researchers and educators and enables information intermediaries to exercise strict control over the use of protected works. This edited volume proposes ways out of the copyright conundrum by rethinking copyright as an access right…(More)”.

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Cosima Lenz: “…Significant knowledge gaps remain regarding conditions that disproportionately affect women, sex-specific differences in disease presentation and progression, and the ways in which health systems respond to women’s needs across the life course. These gaps have tangible consequences. Clinical guidelines, diagnostic pathways, health technologies, and policy decisions are frequently informed by evidence that inadequately accounts for sex and gender differences, contributing to delayed diagnoses, poorer health outcomes, and persistent inequalities in care.

Fortunately, momentum is building to address this imbalance. On July 15, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Society for Women’s Health Research, and the Women First Research Coalition released a National Strategy to Close the Women’s Health Gap, calling for a “women’s health moonshot” comprised of $20 billion in federal research investment over ten years. It was subsequently endorsed by dozens of organizations. This ambition is welcome and overdue. And it complements the various new strategies, investment initiatives and advocacy efforts that have emerged across Europe and globally.

But all these proposals for more funding also raise a fundamental question: if substantially more resources become available for women’s health, how should we decide where they should go? For instance, the US strategy calls for various pathways to increase funds for research and evidence but doesn’t prioritize specific areas that could be transformative if funded and studied more.

Closing the women’s health gap is therefore not only a funding challenge. It is also an agenda-setting challenge; and a questions gap. Investment decisions inevitably reflect assumptions about what counts as women’s health, which gaps matter most, what evidence is needed, and whose priorities should shape the research agenda. Getting those questions right is essential if new investment is to address historically neglected needs rather than reinforce existing patterns of attention and funding.

Women’s health encompasses an extraordinarily broad range of issues spanning biological, social, economic, technological, and environmental dimensions. In a context of finite resources, priority-setting becomes essential. Determining which questions matter most is not simply a technical exercise; it is a strategic process that shapes the future direction of research, policy, and investment. Yet, we lack sufficiently systematic and inclusive mechanisms for determining which unanswered questions matter most, to whom, and for what purpose…(More)”.

Blog by Beth Noveck: “…As The GovLab’s Open Data Policy Lab notes(opens in new window): open and accessible government data can “improve the quality of the generative AI output but also help expand generative AI use cases and democratize access to open data.” 

By opening up their own data(opens in new window), governments can build new and better services for all of us.  In Indiana, for example, the Indiana.gov(opens in new window) assistant sits on top of agency documents and databases. Instead of sending residents spelunking through PDFs, it answers questions in plain language and points to the right form or program, thanks to the underlying information that has been cleaned up and exposed in ways a model can use.

South Korea’s AI Hub has already provided millions of records to train applications like TTCare(opens in new window), a mobile application to analyze eye and skin disease symptoms in pets. The app’s AI model was trained on roughly one million pieces of data—half of which came from the South Korean government’s AI Hub. 

In Abu Dhabi, Bayaan(opens in new window) ingests official statistics and lets policymakers pose natural-language questions—“How did youth unemployment change after 2022?”—and get back charts and citations that trace every claim to the source. The output is useful because it’s accountable to public data.

With secure access to administrative data from the UK Biobank and validated against Denmark’s national health records, European researchers built the Delphi-2M Model(opens in new window). Delphi doesn’t just predict whether someone might get cancer or diabetes; it can simulate the course of more than a thousand diseases over a lifetime. That kind of leap is only possible because governments invested in collecting, standardizing, and securely sharing their data…(More)”.

Report by Anastasija Nikiforova, Paula Rodriguez Müller, And Luca Tangi: “Proactive public services (PPS) – that is, services that are initiated by public administrations without a prior request from citizens or businesses – are increasingly discussed as a way to reduce administrative burden, prevent non-take-up and improve access and equity across the EU. The study documented in this report shows that the real challenge is not whether such services are technically possible, but whether administrations are sufficiently prepared to pursue them in a lawful, legitimate and sustainable manner.
Drawing on a systematic literature review, 20 expert interviews across 12 EU Member States and two consolidation workshops, the study finds that progress towards PPS remains uneven across the EU, mostly due to legal clarity, organisational capacity, interoperability, accountability and public trust all often lagging behind the technical capability. While AI is widely discussed as a key enabler of PPS, mature use cases remain rare. Responsible AI considerations are often addressed only implicitly or reactively in practice, suggesting that there is a gap between policy ambitions and implementation realities.
To support analysis and implementation, the report develops a PPS readiness framework and a five-level maturity model that support self-assessment, identify bottlenecks to scaling and highlight readiness gaps across key governance dimensions. The study concludes that PPS should be treated as a governance and service design choice, not as a universal technological end point, and that EU and Member State action should focus on strengthening readiness, providing context-sensitive support, improving legal and operational clarity and fostering trust in proactive service delivery…(More)”.

Book Review by Tim Christiaens of The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud. Cecilia Rikap. Verso. 2026: “…Big Tech corporations and their products have infiltrated nearly every aspect of our everyday lives, from Apple smartphones to Amazon grocery deliveries and from OpenAI’s ChatGPT (and its many competitors) to Meta’s recently launched smart glasses. The pace at which this infiltration is happening is accelerating: a handful of American tech firms have colonised our lifeworld and there is almost no island of refuge left.

Most recent books on AI and Big Tech domination explore how Silicon Valley dominates workers, consumers, and/or governments. Exemplary publications by, among others, Kate Crawford, James Muldoon, Shoshana Zuboff, and Cathy O’Neil have built the genre. But in The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud, Cecilia Rikap shows the type of corporate domination underlying these news stories. A crucial gap about AI and Big Tech is how tech corporations exert control over other businesses to expand their corporate empire. We still often think about “big corporations” through the lens of Fordist monopoly capitalism, when businesses would dominate markets through vertical integration. One company then tries to own and control all elements in its supply chain. Such businesses grow by reinvesting profits in their own self-expansion, by acquiring competing smaller firms, and by managing internal research labs to establish R&D that keep competitors out of the race.

The rise of intellectual monopolies

Today’s networked capitalism, however, no longer favours vertically integrated firms. It prefers more nimble companies that coordinate an assemblage of subordinate yet nominally independent organisations. Big Tech establishes its monopolistic hold over everyday life not by growing one single corporation, but by managing an extended universe of supposedly autonomous organisations. Just like you might watch different Marvel movies which are all in fact the same Disney-owned intellectual property, you can have seemingly separate interactions with Google, YouTube, an AI ethics department at an American Ivy League University and your local municipal government, without knowing that these are all different faces of the same Alphabet extended universe…(More)”.

(Open Access) Book by Andreas T Hirblinger: “This book explores how we can make sense of the increasing use of digital technology in peacebuilding. It studies digital peacebuilding at different stages of conflict, including conflict prevention, conflict mitigation, peace mediation, and sustainable transitions from armed conflict. Moving beyond a focus on individual tools, the book encourages a ‘post-digital’ posture that enables a reflexive position vis-à-vis the appeal of digital innovation. It suggests exploring how technologies are always socially embedded, and how the socio-technicality of digital peacebuilding conditions prospects of conflict transformation. To this end, the book develops the concept of apomediated peacebuilding, which suggests that authoritative knowledge about conflict and peace that underpins digital peacebuilding is generated in decentred peer-to-peer networks that involve both humans and machines. It also encourages a critical-reflexive engagement with how claims about technology and society shape digital peacebuilding. In addition, the book is interested in how these dynamics and outcomes differ globally depending on variations in the degree of digitalization of the conflict context and levels of political repression. The book presents comparative empirical research on digital peacebuilding initiatives in South Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland, as well as illustrative examples from several other cases. It delves into a variety of applications, including social media monitoring to counter harmful speech, the use of mobile phones and mobile apps to enable localized early warning and early response, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital dialogues to support peace processes, and everyday online interactions that can foster societal reconciliation and political change…(More)”.