Paper by Carla Bonina, Kari Koskinen, Ben Eaton, and Annabelle Gawer: “Digital platforms hold a central position in today’s world economy and are said to offer a great potential for the economies and societies in the global South. Yet, to date, the scholarly literature on digital platforms has largely concentrated on business while their developmental implications remain understudied. In part, this is because digital platforms are a challenging research object due to their lack of conceptual definition, their spread across different regions and industries, and their intertwined nature with institutions, actors and digital technologies. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the ongoing debate in information systems and ICT4D research to understand what digital platforms mean for development. To do so, we first define what digital platforms are and differentiate between transaction and innovation platforms, and explain their key characteristics in terms of purpose, research foundations, material properties and business models. We add the socio‐technical context digital platforms operate and the linkages to developmental outcomes. We then conduct an extensive review to explore what current areas, developmental goals, tensions and issues emerge in the literature on platforms and development and identify relevant gaps in our knowledge. We later elaborate on six research questions to advance the studies on digital platforms for development: on indigenous innovation, digital platforms and institutions, on exacerbation of inequalities, on alternative forms of value, on the dark side of platforms and on the applicability of the platform typology for development….(More)”.
Using “Big Data” to forecast migration
Blog Post by Jasper Tjaden, Andres Arau, Muertizha Nuermaimaiti, Imge Cetin, Eduardo Acostamadiedo, Marzia Rango: Act 1 — High Expectations
“Data is the new oil,” they say. ‘Big Data’ is even bigger than that. The “data revolution” will contribute to solving societies’ problems and help governments adopt better policies and run more effective programs. In the migration field, digital trace data are seen as a potentially powerful tool to improve migration management processes (visa applications; asylum decision and geographic allocation of asylum seeker, facilitating integration, “smart borders” etc.).1
Forecasting migration is one particular area where big data seems to excite data nerds (like us) and policymakers alike. If there is one way big data has already made a difference, it is its ability to bring different actors together — data scientists, business people and policy makers — to sit through countless slides with numbers, tables and graphs. Traditional migration data sources, like censuses, administrative data and surveys, have never quite managed to generate the same level of excitement.
Many EU countries are currently heavily investing in new ways to forecast migration. Relatively large numbers of asylum seekers in 2014, 2015 and 2016 strained the capacity of many EU governments. Better forecasting tools are meant to help governments prepare in advance.
In a recent European Migration Network study, 10 out of the 22 EU governments surveyed said they make use of forecasting methods, many using open source data for “early warning and risk analysis” purposes. The 2020 European Migration Network conference was dedicated entirely to the theme of forecasting migration, hosting more than 15 expert presentations on the topic. The recently proposed EU Pact on Migration and Asylum outlines a “Migration Preparedness and Crisis Blueprint” which “should provide timely and adequate information in order to establish the updated migration situational awareness and provide for early warning/forecasting, as well as increase resilience to efficiently deal with any type of migration crisis.” (p. 4) The European Commission is currently finalizing a feasibility study on the use of artificial intelligence for predicting migration to the EU; Frontex — the EU Border Agency — is scaling up efforts to forecast irregular border crossings; EASO — the European Asylum Support Office — is devising a composite “push-factor index” and experimenting with forecasting asylum-related migration flows using machine learning and data at scale. In Fall 2020, during Germany’s EU Council Presidency, the German Interior Ministry organized a workshop series around Migration 4.0 highlighting the benefits of various ways to “digitalize” migration management. At the same time, the EU is investing substantial resources in migration forecasting research under its Horizon2020 programme, including QuantMig, ITFLOWS, and HumMingBird.
Is all this excitement warranted?
Yes, it is….(More)” See also: Big Data for Migration Alliance
Ten computer codes that transformed science
Jeffrey M. Perkel at Nature: “From Fortran to arXiv.org, these advances in programming and platforms sent biology, climate science and physics into warp speed….In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope team gave the world the first glimpse of what a black hole actually looks like. But the image of a glowing, ring-shaped object that the group unveiled wasn’t a conventional photograph. It was computed — a mathematical transformation of data captured by radio telescopes in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Spain and the South Pole1. The team released the programming code it used to accomplish that feat alongside the articles that documented its findings, so the scientific community could see — and build on — what it had done.
It’s an increasingly common pattern. From astronomy to zoology, behind every great scientific finding of the modern age, there is a computer. Michael Levitt, a computational biologist at Stanford University in California who won a share of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational strategies for modelling chemical structure, notes that today’s laptops have about 10,000 times the memory and clock speed that his lab-built computer had in 1967, when he began his prizewinning work. “We really do have quite phenomenal amounts of computing at our hands today,” he says. “Trouble is, it still requires thinking.”
Enter the scientist-coder. A powerful computer is useless without software capable of tackling research questions — and researchers who know how to write it and use it. “Research is now fundamentally connected to software,” says Neil Chue Hong, director of the Software Sustainability Institute, headquartered in Edinburgh, UK, an organization dedicated to improving the development and use of software in science. “It permeates every aspect of the conduct of research.”
Scientific discoveries rightly get top billing in the media. But Nature this week looks behind the scenes, at the key pieces of code that have transformed research over the past few decades.
Although no list like this can be definitive, we polled dozens of researchers over the past year to develop a diverse line-up of ten software tools that have had a big impact on the world of science. You can weigh in on our choices at the end of the story….(More)”.
How Elvis Got Americans to Accept the Polio Vaccine
Hal Hershfield and Ilana Brody at Scientific American: “Campaigns to change behavior thrive on three factors: social influence, social norms and vivid examples…In late 1956, Elvis Presley was on the precipice of global stardom. “Heartbreak Hotel” had reached number one on the charts earlier that year and Love Me Tender, his debut film,would be released in November. In the midst of this trajectory, he was booked as a guest on the most popular TV show at the time, The Ed Sullivan Show. But he wasn’t only there to perform his hits. Before the show started, and in front of the press and Ed Sullivan himself, Presley flashed his swoon-worthy smile, rolled up his sleeves and let a New York state official stick a needle loaded up with the polio vaccine in his arm.
At that point, the polio virus had been ravaging the American landscape for years, and approximately 60,000 children were infected annually. By 1955, hope famously arrived in the form of Jonas Salk’s vaccine. But despite the literally crippling effects of the virus and the promising results of the vaccination, many Americans simply weren’t getting vaccinated. In fact, when Presley appeared on the Sullivan show, immunization levels among American teens were at an abysmal 0.6 percent.
You might think that threats to children’s health and life expectancy would be enough to motivate people to get vaccinated. Yet, convincing people to get a vaccine is a challenging endeavor. Intuitively, it seems like it would be wise to have doctors and other health officials communicate the need to receive the vaccine. Or, failing that, we might just need to give people more information about the effectiveness of the vaccine itself…(More)”.
Mining Twitter Data to Identify Topics of Discussion by Indian Feminist Activists
Brief by the Center on Gender Equity and Health at the University of California at San Diego (UC San Diego): “Over the past decade, social media platforms have become ubiquitous, serving as a democratic space for activism and providing new opportunities for social movements. Twitter has emerged as a popular tool used by feminist activists for spreading awareness and organizing. Research examining feminist movements on social media have highlighted the role of Twitter in emphasizing issues related to gender-based violence (GBV) victimization including the MeToo movement, as well as calling out male privilege and regressive gender norms.
Scholars have examined the high levels of engagement in Twitter discussions and debates by grassroots feminists, as well as the effect of this activity on advancing the feminist agenda in the digital space and amplifying minority voices. Studying Twitter conversations of feminist activists can help identify gender issues that need attention but are underprioritized politically. This brief presents findings from
our analysis of a corpus of tweets by 59 Indian feminist activists, tweeted between March and August 2020. The analysis examines how the feminist community in India has used Twitter as a tool for activism during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to providing insights related to mainstream gender issues in India, this analysis hopes to contribute to methodological advancement in gender research….(More)”.
Digital contention in a divided society
Book by Paul Reilly: “How are platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland? What do these contentious episodes tell us about the potential of information and communication technologies to promote positive intergroup contact in the deeply divided society?
These issues are addressed in what is the first in-depth qualitative exploration of how social media were used during the union flag protests (December 2012-March 2013) and the Ardoyne parade disputes (July 2014 and 2015). The book focuses on the extent to which affective publics, mobilised and connected via expressions of solidarity on social media, appear to escalate or de-escalate sectarian tensions caused by these hybrid media events. It also explores whether citizen activity on these online platforms has the potential to contribute to peacebuilding in Northern Ireland….(More)”.
Guide to Good Practice on the Use of New Technologies for the Administration of Justice
Report by México Evalúa: “This document offers a brief review of decisions, initiatives and implementation processes of various policies designed by the judiciary to incorporate the use of new technologies in their work. We are interested in highlighting the role that these tools can play not only in diversifying the means through which the public accesses the service of imparting justice, but also in facilitating and improving the organization of work in the courts and tribunals. We also analyzed the way in which the application of certain technological developments in justiciary tasks, in particular tele or videoconferences, has redefined the traditional structure of the judicial proceeding by allowing remote, simultaneous and collective interaction of the subjects involved. We also reflect on the dilemmas, viability and not always intended effects of the use of new technologies in the administration of justice.
(…)
We chose to analyze them from the focus of the procedural moment in which they intervene, that is, from the user’s perspective, because although technological solutions may have a wide range of objectives, it seems to us that, behind any technological development, the goal of facilitating, expanding and improving citizens’ access to justice should always prevail. We report several experiences aimed at reorganizing the processing of legal proceedings in the various phases that structure them, from the activation stage procedural (filing of lawsuit or judicialization of a criminal investigation) to the execution of court rulings (judgments, arbitral awards), passing through the processing of cases (hearings, proceedings). We would like to emphasize that access to justice includes everything from the processing of cases to the timely enforcement of court rulings. That vision can be summarized with the following figure:…(More)”.
Scholarly publishing needs regulation
Essay by Jean-Claude Burgelman: “The world of scientific communication has changed significantly over the past 12 months. Understandably, the amazing mobilisation of research and scholarly publishing in an effort to mitigate the effects of Covid-19 and find a vaccine has overshadowed everything else. But two other less-noticed events could also have profound implications for the industry and the researchers who rely on it.
On 10 January 2020, Taylor and Francis announced its acquisition of one of the most innovative small open-access publishers, F1000 Research. A year later, on 5 January 2021, another of the big commercial scholarly publishers, Wiley, paid nearly $300 million for Hindawi, a significant open-access publisher in London.
These acquisitions come alongside rapid change in publishers’ functions and business models. Scientific publishing is no longer only about publishing articles. It’s a knowledge industry—and it’s increasingly clear it needs to be regulated like one.
The two giant incumbents, Springer Nature and Elsevier, are already a long way down the road to open access, and have built up impressive in-house capacity. But Wiley, and Taylor and Francis, had not. That’s why they decided to buy young open-access publishers. Buying up a smaller, innovative competitor is a well-established way for an incumbent in any industry to expand its reach, gain the ability to do new things and reinvent its business model—it’s why Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram, for example.
New regulatory approach
To understand why this dynamic demands a new regulatory approach in scientific publishing, we need to set such acquisitions alongside a broader perspective of the business’s transformation into a knowledge industry.
Monopolies, cartels and oligopolies in any industry are a cause for concern. By reducing competition, they stifle innovation and push up prices. But for science, the implications of such a course are particularly worrying.
Science is a common good. Its products—and especially its spillovers, the insights and applications that cannot be monopolised—are vital to our knowledge societies. This means that having four companies control the worldwide production of car tyres, as they do, has very different implications to an oligopoly in the distribution of scientific outputs. The latter situation would give the incumbents a tight grip on the supply of knowledge.
Scientific publishing is not yet a monopoly, but Europe at least is witnessing the emergence of an oligopoly, in the shape of Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor and Francis. The past year’s acquisitions have left only two significant independent players in open-access publishing—Frontiers and MDPI, both based in Switzerland….(More)”.
Digital Technology and Democratic Theory
Book edited by Lucy Bernholz, Helene Landemore, and Rob Reich: “One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.
To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution….(More)”.
Privacy and digital ethics after the pandemic
Carissa Véliz at Nature: “The coronavirus pandemic has permanently changed our relationship with technology, accelerating the drive towards digitization. While this change has brought advantages, such as increased opportunities to work from home and innovations in e-commerce, it has also been accompanied with steep drawbacks, which include an increase in inequality and undesirable power dynamics.
Power asymmetries in the digital age have been a worry since big tech became big. Technophiles have often argued that if users are unhappy about online services, they can always opt-out. But opting-out has not felt like a meaningful alternative for years for at least two reasons.
First, the cost of not using certain services can amount to a competitive disadvantage — from not seeing a job advert to not having access to useful tools being used by colleagues. When a platform becomes too dominant, asking people not to use it is like asking them to refrain from being full participants in society. Second, platforms such as Facebook and Google are unavoidable — no one who has an online life can realistically steer clear of them. Google ads and their trackers creep throughout much of the Internet1, and Facebook has shadow profiles on netizens even when they have never had an account on the platform2.
Citizens have responded to the countless data abuses in the past few years with what has been described as a ‘techlash’3. Tech companies whose business model is based on surveillance ceased to be perceived as good guys in hoodies who offered services to make our lives better. They were instead data predators jeopardizing, not only users’ privacy and security, but also democracy itself. During lockdown, communication apps became necessary for any and all social interaction beyond our homes. People have had to use online tools to work, get an education, receive medical attention, and enjoy much-needed entertainment. Gratefulness for having technology that allows us to stay in contact during such circumstances has thus watered down the general techlash. Big tech’s stocks have been consistently on the rise during the pandemic, in line with its accumulating power.
As a result of the pandemic, however, any lingering illusion of voluntariness in the use of technology has disappeared. It is not only citizens who rely on big tech to perform their jobs: businesses, universities, health services, and governments need the platforms to carry out their everyday functions. All over the world, governmental and diplomatic meetings are being carried out on platforms such as Zoom and Teams. Since governments do not have full control over the platforms they use, confidentiality is uncertain.
Enhanced power asymmetries have also worsened the vulnerability of ordinary citizens in areas that range from the interaction with government to ordering food online, and almost everything in between. The pandemic has, for example, led to an increase in the surveillance of employees as they work from home4. Students are likewise being subjected to more scrutiny: by their schools and teachers, and above all, by the companies on which they depend5. Surveillance for public health purposes has likewise increased. Privacy losses disempower citizens and often lead to further abuses of power. In the UK, for example, companies collecting data for pubs and restaurants for contact-tracing purposes have sold on that information6.
Such abuses are not isolated events. For the past two decades, we have allowed an unethical business model that depends on the systematic violation of the right to privacy to run amok. As long as we treat personal data as a commodity, there will be a high risk of it being misused — by being stolen in a hack or by being sold to the highest bidder (which often includes nefarious agents)….(More)”.