Reimagining the Role of Cities & City Diplomacy in the Multilateral Order

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The Berggruen Institute: “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the foreground the important role of cities in responding to global challenges. Through informal and established international networks, city leaders are connecting across borders and shaping the global pandemic response. City and municipal governments were some of the earliest to turn toward their peers to share information, collaborate, and identify solutions, even as national-level cooperation was often delayed or challenged. 

While the pandemic has revealed the necessity of international cooperation, it has also shown the limits of current systems, especially in how multilateral institutions learn from and meaningfully include city leadership. City and municipal governments occupy an increasingly visible and important position in international affairs, are already working together through city-to-city networks on many issues, and engage in international activities often described as “city diplomacy.” Looking forward, rapid population growth in urban areas means many global challenges and the responses to them will be concentrated in cities. Cities will be at the center of the global response to climate change, migration, violence and injustice, health security, economic inequality, and security. Yet the current international system was designed by countries for countries; it is not structured to channel city voices and lacks pathways for cities to influence global governance.

The Berggruen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the City of Los Angeles, and the United Nations Foundation co-organized a virtual workshop in July 2020 titled “The Rise of Urbanization and the Role of City Diplomacy in the Multilateral System” to explore these dynamics further. By bringing together current and former national diplomats, representatives of and diplomats in multilateral organizations, city directors of international affairs, and specialists in international relations under the Chatham House rule, the workshop aimed to reimagine how different levels of government can work together more effectively on issues of global governance. Together, these actors form a novel group to grapple with the issue of city voice in multilateralism. In particular, the group explored opportunities and challenges to building cooperation between cities and the current multilateral system and considered practical, researchable ideas for how the multilateral system might adapt to engage subnational actors to address global challenges….(More)”.

The Use of Mobility Data for Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report, Repository and set of Case Studies commissioned by the Open Data Institute: “…The GovLab and Cuebiq firstly assembled a repository of mobility data collaboratives related to Covid-19. They then selected five of these to analyse further, and produced case studies on each of the collaboratives (which you can find below in the ‘Key outputs’ section).

After analysing these initiatives, Cuebiq and The GovLab then developed a synthesis report, which contains sections focused on:

  • Mobility data – what it is and how it can be used
  • Current practice – insights from five case studies
  • Prescriptive analysis – recommendations for the future

Findings and recommendations

Based on this analysis, the authors of the report recommend nine actions which have the potential to enable more effective, sustainable and responsible re-use of mobility data through data collaboration to support decision making regarding pandemic prevention, monitoring, and response:

  1. Developing and clarifying governance framework to enable the trusted, transparent, and accountable reuse of privately held data in the public interest under a clear regulatory framework
  2. Building capacity of organisations in the public and private sector to reuse and act on data through investments in training, education, and reskilling of relevant authorities; especially driving support for institutions in the Global South
  3. Establishing data stewards in organisations who can coordinate and collaborate with counterparts on using data in the public’s interest and acting on it.
  4. Establishing dedicated and sustainable CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) programs on data in organisations to coordinate and collaborate with counterparts on using and acting upon data in the public’s interest.
  5. Building a network of data stewards to coordinate and streamline efforts while promoting greater transparency; as well as exchange best practices and lessons learned.
  6. Engaging citizens about how their data is being used so clearly articulate how they want their data to be responsibly used, shared, and protected.
  7. Promoting technological innovation through collaboration between funders (eg governments and foundations) and researchers (eg data scientists) to develop and deploy useful, privacy-preserving technologies.
  8. Unlocking funds from a variety of sources to ensure projects are sustainable and can operate long term.
  9. Increase research and spur evidence gathering by publishing easily accessible research and creating dedicated centres to develop best practices.

This research begins to demonstrate the value that a handful of new data-sharing initiatives have had in the ongoing response to Covid-19. The pandemic isn’t yet over, and we will need to continue to assess and evaluate how data has been shared – both successfully and unsuccessfully – and who has benefited or been harmed in the process. More research is needed to highlight the lessons from this emergency that can be applied to future crises….(More)”.

Many in U.S., Western Europe Say Their Political System Needs Major Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research Center: “A four-nation Pew Research Center survey conducted in November and December of 2020 finds that roughly two-thirds of adults in France and the U.S., as well as about half in the United Kingdom, believe their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Calls for significant reform are less common in Germany, where about four-in-ten express this view….

In all four countries, there is considerable interest in political reforms that would potentially allow ordinary citizens to have more power over policymaking. Citizen assemblies, or forums where citizens chosen at random debate issues of national importance and make recommendations about what should be done, are overwhelmingly popular. Around three-quarters or more in each country say it is very or somewhat important for the national government to create citizen assemblies. About four-in-ten say it’s very important. Such processes are in use nationally in France and the UK to debate climate change policy, and they have become increasingly common in nations around the world in recent years.

Chart showing citizen assemblies and referendums are popular ideas in all four countries

Citizen assemblies are popular across the ideological spectrum but are especially so among people who place themselves on the political left.1 Those who think their political system needs significant reform are also particularly likely to say it is important to create citizen assemblies.

There are also high levels of support for allowing citizens to vote directly to decide what becomes law for some key issues. About seven-in-ten in the U.S., Germany and France say it is important, in line with previous findings about support for direct democracy. In the UK, where crucial issues such as Scottish independence and Brexit were decided by referendum, support is somewhat lower – 63% say it is important for the government to use referendums to decide some key issues, and just 27% rate this as very important.

These are among the findings of a new Pew Research Center survey conducted from Nov. 10 to Dec. 23, 2020, among 4,069 adults in the France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. This report also includes findings from 26 focus groups conducted in 2019 in the U.S. and UK….(More)”.

How We Built a Facebook Feed Viewer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Citizen Browser at The MarkUp: “Our interactive dashboard, Split Screen, gives readers a peek into the content Facebook delivered to people of different demographic backgrounds and voting preferences who participated in our Citizen Browser project. 

Using Citizen Browser, our custom Facebook inspector, we perform daily captures of Facebook data from paid panelists. These captures collect the content that was displayed on their Facebook feeds at the moment the app performed its automated capture. From Dec. 1, 2020, to March 2, 2021, 2,601 paid participants have contributed their data to the project. 

To measure what Facebook’s recommendation algorithm displays to different groupings of people, we compare data captured from each over a two-week period. We look at three different pairings:

  • Women vs. Men
  • Biden Voters vs. Trump Voters
  • Millennials vs. Boomers 

We labeled our panelists based on their self-disclosed political leanings, gender, and age. We describe each pairing in more detail in the Pairings section of this article. 

For each pair, we examine four types of content served by Facebook: news sources, posts with news links, hashtags, and group recommendations. We compare the percentage of each grouping that was served each piece of content to that of the other grouping in the pair.  

For more information on the data we collect, the panel’s demographic makeup, and the extensive redaction process we undertake to preserve privacy, see our methodology How We Built a Facebook Inspector.

Our observations should not be taken as proof of Facebook’s choosing to target specific content at specific demographic groups. There are many factors that influence any given person’s feed that we do not account for, including users’ friends and social networks….(More)”.

Financing the Digital Public Goods Ecosystem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA): “… we believe that digital public goods (DPGs) are essential to unlocking the full potential of digital technologies to enhance human welfare at scale. Their relevance to one or multiple sustainable development goals (SDGs), combined with their adoptability and adaptability, allows DPGs to strengthen international digital cooperation. Stakeholders can join forces to support solutions that address many of today’s greatest global challenges in critical areas such as health, education and climate change. DPGs are of particular importance for resource constrained countries looking to accelerate development through improving access to digital services.

Still, precisely due to their nature as “public goods” – which ensures that no one can prevent others from benefiting from them – DPGs can be difficult to fund through market mechanisms, and some of them should not have to prioritise generating profit….

Sustainably funded infrastructural DPGs can become a reliable core for broader ecosystems through community building:

  • For the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) core code management and evolution is fully funded by grants from a group of philanthropic and bilateral donors.** This enables the team responsible for managing and evolving the generic platform to focus exclusively on maximising utility for those the platform is designed to serve – in this case, countries in need of foundational digital identity systems.
  • Similarly backed by grant funding for core code development and maintenance, the team behind District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) has prioritised community building within and between the 70+ countries that have adopted the software, enabling countries to share improvements and related innovations. This is best exemplified by Sri Lanka, the first country in the world to use DHIS2 for COVID-19 surveillance, who shared this groundbreaking innovation with the global DHIS2 community. Today, this system is operational in 38 countries and is under development in fourteen more.
  • The data exchange layer X-Road, which is publicly funded by NIIS members (currently Estonia and Finland), demonstrates how infrastructural DPGs can use community building to advance both the core technology and the  quality of downstream deployments. The X-Road Community connects a diverse group of individuals and allows anyone to contribute to the open-source technology. This community-based support and knowledge-sharing helps local vendors around the world build the expertise needed to provide quality services to stakeholders adopting the technology….(More)”.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein: “Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
 
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions….(More)”.

Government Reform: Lessons from the Past for Actions in the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Dan Chenok and John Kamensky: “This report provides an overview of the evolution of various federal government reform efforts over the past 30 years, with a focus on How government works to get things done for the American people, and the leaders in government who have and continue to implement important agency missions.

This overview of government reforms and actions provides important lessons for leaders today and tomorrow.

Reform approaches will vary, depending on the types of reform are being pursued. Each type relies on different strategic implementation approaches, with different lessons learned that the authors hope will be of value to leaders today.

Strategic Approach 1: Overarching Reform Initiatives: examines reforms that affect the broader governance systems of the federal government and its organization. Examples include the Reinventing Government reform initiative in the 1990s.

Strategic Approach 2: Governmentwide Mission Support Initiatives: examines the evolution of a series of mission support “chiefs” in each agency, often by congressional mandate. These would include positions such as chief financial officers, chief information officers, chief human capital officers, and most recently, chief data officers.

Strategic Approach 3: Initiatives That Enable Mission Delivery: various presidential administrations place an emphasis on developing different capabilities that can improve agencies’ ability to better deliver on their missions. Examples include open government, improving customer service, and fostering innovation….(More)”.

The Norms of Algorithmic Credit Scoring

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nikita Aggarwal: “This article examines the growth of algorithmic credit scoring and its implications for the regulation of consumer credit markets in the UK. It constructs a frame of analysis for the regulation of algorithmic credit scoring, bound by the core norms underpinning UK consumer credit and data protection regulation: allocative efficiency, distributional fairness and consumer privacy (as autonomy). Examining the normative trade-offs that arise within this frame, the article argues that existing data protection and consumer credit frameworks do not achieve an appropriate normative balance in the regulation of algorithmic credit scoring. In particular, the growing reliance on consumers’ personal data by lenders due to algorithmic credit scoring, coupled with the ineffectiveness of existing data protection remedies has created a data protection gap in consumer credit markets that presents a significant threat to consumer privacy and autonomy. The article makes recommendations for filling this gap through institutional and substantive regulatory reforms….(More)”.

Liberation Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Keary at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Human traffickers have forced hundreds of women, children, and men into sexual slavery in Colombia during the past decade. According to Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior and Justice, 686 cases of human trafficking occurred within the country from January 2013 to July 2020. Many of those seized were women, children, and Venezuelan migrants.

To combat this crime, Migración Colombia, the nation’s border control agency; the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM); and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched a mobile application called LibertApp last July. Pressing the app’s panic button immediately sends the user’s live geolocation data to the Colombian Ministry of the Interior’s Anti-Human Trafficking Operations Center (COAT), where an expert anti-trafficking team investigates the report.

The app also functions as a resource hub for information and prevention. It offers an educational module (available in both English and Spanish) that explains what human trafficking is, who is the most at risk, and the most common strategies that traffickers use to isolate and exploit victims. LibertApp also includes a global directory of consulates’ contact information that users can access for support.

While COAT and Migración Colombia now manage the app, IOM, an international organization that supports migrant communities and advises national governments on migration policy, developed the original concept, provided technical support, created user profiles, and built the educational module. IOM saw LibertApp as a new tool to support high-risk groups such as Venezuelan migrants and refugees. “It is necessary to permanently search for different strategies for the prevention of trafficking” and to ensure the “rescue of victims who are in Colombia or abroad,” says Ana Durán-Salvatierra, IOM Colombia’s chief of mission….

PRM funded the app, which had a budget of $15,000. The investment was part of the department’s overall contribution through the United Nations appeal known as the Refugee and Migrant Response Plan, a global initiative that had granted a total of $276.4 million to Colombia as of November 2020.

In less than a year of operation, 246 people have used the app to make reports, culminating in a handful of investigations and rescues. The most notable success story occurred last summer when COAT received a report from LibertApp that led to the rescue of a Venezuelan minor from a bar in Maní, in the Casanare region of Colombia, that was being run as a brothel. During the raid, authorities captured two Colombian citizens alleged to have managed the establishment and who coerced 15 women into sexual slavery….(More)”

Unlocking Responsible Access to Data to Increase Equity and Economic Mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Markle Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF): “Economic mobility remains elusive for far too many Americans and has been declining for several decades. A person born in 1980 is 50% less likely to earn more than their parents than a person born in 1950 is. While all children who grow up in low-opportunity neighborhoods face mobility challenges, racial, ethnic, and gender disparities add even more complexity. In 99% of neighborhoods in America, Black boys earn less, and are more likely to fall into poverty, than white boys, even when they grow up on the same block, attend the same schools, and have the same family income. In 2016, a Pew Research study found that the median wealth of white households was ten times the median wealth of Black households and eight times that of Hispanic households. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existing disparities, as communities of color suffer higher exposure and death rates, along with greater job loss and increased food and housing insecurity.

Reversing this overall decline to address the persistent racial, ethnic, and gender gaps in economic mobility is one of the great challenges of our time. Some progress has been made in identifying the causes and potential solutions to declining mobility, yet policymakers, researchers, and the public still lack access to critical data necessary to understand which policies, programs, interventions, and investments are most effective at creating opportunity for students and workers, particularly those struggling with intergenerational poverty. Data collected across all levels of governments, nonprofit organizations, and private sector companies can help answer foundational policy and research questions on what drives economic mobility. There are promising efforts underway to improve government data infrastructure and processes at both the federal and state levels, but critical data often remains siloed, and legitimate concerns about privacy and civil liberties can make data difficult to share. Often, data on vulnerable populations most in need of services is of poor quality or is not collected at all.

To tackle this challenge, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the Markle Foundation (Markle) spent much of 2020 working with a diverse range of experts to identify strategic opportunities to accelerate progress towards unlocking data to improve policymaking, answer foundational research questions, and ensure that individuals can easily and responsibly access the information they need to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing environment….(More)”.