Collaboration technology has been invaluable during the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

TechRepublic: “The pandemic forced the enterprise to quickly pivot from familiar business practices and develop ways to successfully function while keeping employees safe. A new report from Zoom, The Impact of Video Communications During COVID-19, was released Thursday.

“Video communications were suddenly our lifeline to society, enabling us to continue work and school in a digital environment,” said Brendan Ittelson, chief technology officer of Zoom, on the company’s blog. “Any baby steps toward digital transformation suddenly had to become leaps and bounds, with people reimagining their entire day-to-day practically overnight.”

Zoom commissioned the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct a survey and economic analysis to evaluate the economic impact of remote work and video communications solutions during the pandemic. BCG also conducted a survey and economic analysis, with a focus on which industries pivoted business processes using video conferencing, resulting in business continuity and even growth during a time of significant economic turmoil.

Key findings

  • In the U.S., the ability to work remotely saved 2.28 million jobs up to three times as many employees worked remotely, with a nearly three times increase in the use of video conferencing solutions.
  • Of the businesses surveyed, the total time spent on video conferencing solutions increased by as much as five times the numbers pre-pandemic.
  • BCG’s COVID-19 employee sentiment survey from 2020 showed that 70% of managers are more open to flexible remote working models than they were before the pandemic.
  • Hybrid working models will be the norm soon. The businesses surveyed expect more than a third of employees to work remotely beyond the pandemic.
  • The U.K. saved 550,000 jobs because of remote capabilities; Germany saved 372,00 jobs and France saved 250,000….(More)”.

Using FOIA logs to develop news stories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yilun Cheng at MuckRock: “In the fiscal year 2020, federal agencies received a total of 790,772 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. There are also tens of thousands of state and local agencies taking in and processing public record requests on a daily basis. Since most agencies keep a log of requests received, FOIA-minded reporters can find interesting story ideas by asking for and digging through the history of what other people are looking to obtain.

Some FOIA logs are posted on the websites of agencies that proactively release these records. Those that are not can be obtained through a FOIA request. There are a number of online resources that collect and store these documents, including MuckRock, the Black Vault, Government Attic and FOIA Land.

Sorting through a FOIA log can be challenging since format differs from agency to agency. A more well-maintained log might include comprehensive information on the names of the requesters, the records being asked for, the dates of the requests’ receipt and the agency’s responses, as shown, for example, in a log released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency.https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20508483/annotations/2024702

But other departments –– the Cook County Department of Public Health, for instance –– might only send over a three-column spreadsheet with no descriptions of the nature of the requests.https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20491259/annotations/2024703

As a result, learning how to negotiate with agencies and interpreting the content in their FOIA logs are crucial for journalists trying to understand the public record landscape. While some reporters only use FOIA logs to keep tabs on their competitors’ reporting interests, the potential of these documents goes far beyond this. Below are some tips for getting story inspiration from FOIA logs….(More)”.

How video conferencing reduces vocal synchrony and collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Maria Tomprou et al: “Collective intelligence (CI) is the ability of a group to solve a wide range of problems. Synchrony in nonverbal cues is critically important to the development of CI; however, extant findings are mostly based on studies conducted face-to-face. Given how much collaboration takes place via the internet, does nonverbal synchrony still matter and can it be achieved when collaborators are physically separated? Here, we hypothesize and test the effect of nonverbal synchrony on CI that develops through visual and audio cues in physically-separated teammates. We show that, contrary to popular belief, the presence of visual cues surprisingly has no effect on CI; furthermore, teams without visual cues are more successful in synchronizing their vocal cues and speaking turns, and when they do so, they have higher CI. Our findings show that nonverbal synchrony is important in distributed collaboration and call into question the necessity of video support….(More)”.

Freedom of Information Act—How Open is Public Access to Government Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

US Government Accountability Office: “The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) establishes a legal right for individuals and organizations to request access to government information. In FY 2019, federal agencies reported that they processed nearly 878,000 FOIA requests for government information, an increase of 32% since FY 2012.  

In honor of Sunshine Week—an annual observation that promotes open government—today’s WatchBlog post looks at our recent reports on agencies’ implementation of laws that seek to improve the public’s access to government information.

What does the government disclose as part of open government laws?

FOIA requires agencies to publicly post certain information without waiting for specific requests and report on these disclosures annually. These proactive disclosures include final opinions, administrative staff manuals, and records that have been requested 3 or more times.

In our March report, we assessed agency policies related to these disclosures. Among other things, we found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development did not report proactively disclosing any records from FY 2017 through 2019. Similarly, we found that the Veterans Health Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration did not report the number of records disclosed for all required categories in FY 2019.

We made 8 recommendations to help improve compliance with these requirements.

What might the government not disclose under FOIA?

FOIA requires agencies to provide the relevant records in response to a request unless an exemption applies to limit the disclosure of that information, such as withholding classified national defense or foreign policy information. The graphic below provides more detail on FOIA’s 9 exemptions.

Pie Chart showing federal exemptions to FOIA by category

In FY 2019, agencies denied approximately 34,000 requests based on exemptions. More than half of these requests were related to law enforcement and investigations….(More)”.

What Data Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hannah Fry in The New Yorker: “Tony Blair was usually relaxed and charismatic in front of a crowd. But an encounter with a woman in the audience of a London television studio in April, 2005, left him visibly flustered. Blair, eight years into his tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister, had been on a mission to improve the National Health Service. The N.H.S. is a much loved, much mocked, and much neglected British institution, with all kinds of quirks and inefficiencies. At the time, it was notoriously difficult to get a doctor’s appointment within a reasonable period; ailing people were often told they’d have to wait weeks for the next available opening. Blair’s government, bustling with bright technocrats, decided to address this issue by setting a target: doctors would be given a financial incentive to see patients within forty-eight hours.

It seemed like a sensible plan. But audience members knew of a problem that Blair and his government did not. Live on national television, Diana Church calmly explained to the Prime Minister that her son’s doctor had asked to see him in a week’s time, and yet the clinic had refused to take any appointments more than forty-eight hours in advance. Otherwise, physicians would lose out on bonuses. If Church wanted her son to see the doctor in a week, she would have to wait until the day before, then call at 8 a.m. and stick it out on hold. Before the incentives had been established, doctors couldn’t give appointments soon enough; afterward, they wouldn’t give appointments late enough.

“Is this news to you?” the presenter asked.

“That is news to me,” Blair replied.

“Anybody else had this experience?” the presenter asked, turning to the audience.

Chaos descended. People started shouting, Blair started stammering, and a nation watched its leader come undone over a classic case of counting gone wrong.

Blair and his advisers are far from the first people to fall afoul of their own well-intentioned targets. Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be counted, unintended consequences abound. That’s the subject of two new books about data and statistics: “Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters” (Liveright), by Deborah Stone, which warns of the risks of relying too heavily on numbers, and “The Data Detective” (Riverhead), by Tim Harford, which shows ways of avoiding the pitfalls of a world driven by data.

Both books come at a time when the phenomenal power of data has never been more evident. The covid-19 pandemic demonstrated just how vulnerable the world can be when you don’t have good statistics, and the Presidential election filled our newspapers with polls and projections, all meant to slake our thirst for insight. In a year of uncertainty, numbers have even come to serve as a source of comfort. Seduced by their seeming precision and objectivity, we can feel betrayed when the numbers fail to capture the unruliness of reality.

The particular mistake that Tony Blair and his policy mavens made is common enough to warrant its own adage: once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number. This is known as Goodhart’s law, and it reminds us that the human world can move once you start to measure it….(More)”.

Unlocking benefits for agriculture with FAIR data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit by CABI: “The Data Sharing Toolkit contains seven eLearning modules with supporting case studies, checklists, cheat sheets and guides. All the modules help demystify how to use, collect and share Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and safeguarded data for you, and, for the people in agriculture you wish to empower.

Step 1 Login or sign-up for a free CABI Academy account to get started

Step 2 Start at Module 1 if you are new to data, or simply —

Step 3 Start with whichever module resonates most with your project needs, as you don’t need to do all seven to upskill in FAIR data.

Seven modules with seven guiding questions:

Each question supports best practice for FAIR and safeguarded data in investments in agriculture around the world, in support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees and program officers….(More)”.

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Jacobs at the New Atlantis: “Neil Postman was right. So what?… In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).

The proper response to this situation is not to shun technology itself, for human beings are intrinsically and necessarily users of tools. Rather, it is to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices (Borgmann) that embody those ends. A table becomes a center for family life; a musical instrument skillfully played enlivens those around it. Those healthier technologies might be referred to as holistic (Franklin) or convivial (Illich), because they fit within the human lifeworld and enhance our relations with one another. Our task, then, is to discern these tendencies or affordances of our technologies and, on both social and personal levels, choose the holistic, convivial ones.

The Standard Critique of Technology as thus described is cogent and correct. I have referred to it many times and applied it to many different situations. For instance, I have used the logic of the SCT to make a case for rejecting the “walled gardens” of the massive social media companies, and for replacing them with a cultivation of the “digital commons” of the open web.

But the number of people who are even open to following this logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive, manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?…(More)”.

Connecting parliaments: Harnessing digital dividends to increase transparency and citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Julia Keutgen and Rebecca Rumbul: “…The overarching argument of this paper is that parliamentary digital transformation is a relatively underfunded area of work, but a vitally important one in achieving the very common overarching goals of open, accountable, inclusive and participative government. Improvements in how parliamentary digital capacity building can be done better are possible with better strategy, funding and cooperation, and when parliaments are enthusiastic and willing to take the opportunities offered to them to improve themselves.

Now more than ever, digital transformation has become essential for parliaments. Such transformation can have a significant impact in making parliaments more transparent and accountable and can enable them to leverage greater public interest and engagement in the legislative and electoral processes.

Good external digital engagement requires parliaments to review their own internal digital structures, assess where development and investment are needed, and how digital improvement will assist in achieving their goals. Differential priorities in the needs of the parliament or societal actors can form a guide, according to which specific areas for digital development might be prioritised. These steps require long-term investment, which should go in parallel with the digital transformation of the Executive. However, because a country’s digital transformation is primarily the preserve of the Executive, it can bypass the legislature and may be almost disproportionately influenced by the ruling party. Uneven digital transformation between public bodies and the legislature may weaken the profile and legitimacy of the legislature itself. Furthermore, governments that effectively restrict digital development within the legislature are essentially restricting democratic integrity.

Besides the long-term process of building and developing infrastructure, short-term pilot projects can be useful to test approaches and begin building the digital infrastructure of the future. Properly targeted funding, to achieve specified digital transformation goals, agreed in collaboration with the development agencies operating in target areas, can yield significant dividends in improving the digital democracy ecosystem. This approach can neutralise harmful, short-termist and wasteful approaches to digital deficiency, and remove the ability of the more unscrupulous parliaments to play development agencies off against each other to leverage greater rewards or resources.

Digital transformation of parliaments requires better strategy, funding and cooperation on the part of donors and implementers as parliaments are enthusiastic and willing to take the opportunities offered by digitalisation….(More)”.

A Victory for Scientific Pragmatism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Arturo Casadevall, Michael J. Joyner, and Nigel Paneth:”…The convalescent plasma controversy highlights the need to better educate physicians on the knowledge problem in medicine: How do we know what we know, and how do we acquire new knowledge? The usual practice guidelines doctors rely on for the treatment of disease were not available for the treatment of Covid-19 early in the pandemic, since these are usually issued by professional societies only after definitive information is available from RCTs, a luxury we did not have. The convalescent plasma experience supports Devorah Goldman’s plea to consider all available information when making therapeutic decisions.

Fortunately, the availability of rapid communication through pre-print studies, social media, and online conferences have allowed physicians to learn quickly. The experience suggests the value of providing more instruction in medical schools, postgraduate education, and continuing medical education on how best to evaluate evidence — especially preliminary and seemingly contradictory evidence. Just as physicians learn to use clinical judgment in treating individual patients, they must learn how to weigh evidence in treating populations of patients. We also need greater nimbleness and more flexibility from regulators and practice-guideline groups in emergency situations such as pandemics. They should issue interim recommendations that synthesize the best available evidence, as the American Association of Blood Bankers has done for plasma, recognizing that these recommendations may change as new evidence accumulates. Similarly, we all need to make greater efforts to educate the public to understand that all knowledge in medicine and science is provisional, subject to change as new and better studies emerge. Updating and revising recommendations as knowledge advances is not a weakness but a foundational strength of good medicine….(More)”.

Open data in action: initiatives during the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by OECD and The GovLab: “The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for access to timely, relevant, and quality data. This demand has been driven by several needs: taking informed policy actions quickly, improving communication on the current state of play, carrying out scientific analysis of a dynamic threat, understanding its social and economic impact, and enabling civil society oversight and reporting.


This report…assesses how open government data (OGD) was used to react and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic during initial stage of the crisis (March-July 2020) based on initiatives collected through an open call for evidence. It also seeks to transform lessons learned into considerations for policy makers on how to improve OGD policies to better prepare for future shocks…(More)”.