Stefaan Verhulst
Article by William Eggers: “…in a Deloitte report entitled Creating the Government of the Future my colleagues and I identified five principal domains of government activity that are ripe for technological transformation:…
Service delivery: In Estonia, taxpayers can file taxes online simply by approving forms auto-populated with their income data. This ease represents the future of service delivery: focused on the user, automated for no-touch government that serves people without them having to fill out long forms. (Think hospital data of a birth triggering a birth certificate, Social Security card and health-care record for the child and family allowance payment to qualifying parents.)
Services will more and more tailor to such anticipated life events. Ideally, a single login omnichannel experience provides access to tasks as varied as collecting unemployment benefits to registering to run for office. With once-only government, citizens and businesses need only provide their data once, and it’s then shared across departments with appropriate privacy protections.
Operations: Government operations should take a cue from the private sector, where technologies like data analytics and cognitive automation converge to create serious efficiencies. Operations from HR to procurement can combine in an integrated center office, creating insights from shared, analyzed data about what to expect and how to improve. “As-a-service” acquisition allows contractors to provide basic infrastructure, such as cloud services, leading to faster scaling. To transform operations, strike teams of specialists and subject-matter experts meet in digital factories, using agile processes without traditional bureaucracies.
Policy- and decision-making: Evidence-based policymaking can identify what approaches produce the best results. With artificial-intelligence-based scenario analysis, machine learning can test the relationship between factors in systemic problems. Potentially, understanding these relationships could allow policy to be self-correcting. Likewise, increasingly sophisticated statistical models will allow government by simulation — a cheap way to A/B test systems like traffic management, disaster response and city planning. Meanwhile, mass-communication tools enable crowdsourced and distributed policymaking, in which ordinary citizens contribute their expertise.
Regulation and enforcement: The future of this governmental domain is tied to the predictive abilities of AI and analytics. In a form of risk-based regulation, for example, AI can identify factors likely to contribute to a food-borne illness outbreak, helping food inspectors focus energies on restaurants more likely to violate. Modeling systems to identify beneficial behaviors can enable positive enforcement strategies, which reward a business’ focus on the big picture and going beyond the bare minimum. Lastly, countries like New Zealand have experimented with legislation written as software code. The bureaucratic effects of the legislation could be simulated ahead of time.
Talent/workforce: Flexibility will be the hallmark of the future public workforce. NASA and other agencies are trying a talent marketplace model, in which some workers have the ability to move from project to project, even between agencies, based on their documented skills. Talent won’t go to waste in this just-in-time civil service. Such a talent marketplace would cover an open talent spectrum, from freelancers to career employees….(More)”.
Paper by Paolo Cavaliere: “This article claims that the practices undertaken by digital platforms to counter disinformation, under the EU Action Plan against Disinformation and the Code of Practice, mark a shift in the governance of news media content. While professional journalism standards have been used for long, both within and outside the industry, to assess the accuracy of news content and adjudicate on media conduct, the platforms are now resolving to different fact-checking routines to moderate and curate their content.
The article will demonstrate how fact-checking organisations have different working methods than news operators and ultimately understand and assess ‘accuracy’ in different ways. As a result, this new and enhanced role for platforms and fact-checkers as curators of content impacts on how content is distributed to the audience and, thus, on media freedom. Depending on how the fact-checking standards and working routines will consolidate in the near future, however, this trend offers an actual opportunity to improve the quality of news and the right to receive information…(More)”.
Paper by Antonios Saravanos: “This work shares unexpected findings obtained from the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform as a source of participants for the study of technology adoption. Expressly, of the 564 participants from the United States, 126 (22.34%) failed at least one of three forms of attention check (logic, honesty, and time). We also examined whether characteristics such as gender, age, education, and income affected participant attention. Amongst all characteristics assessed, only prior experience with the technology being studied was found to be related to attentiveness. We conclude this work by reaffirming the need for multiple forms of attention checks to gauge participant attention. Furthermore, we propose that researchers adjust their budgets accordingly to account for the possibility of having to discard responses from participants determined not to be displaying adequate attention….(More)”.
Interview with Paul Fockens of Sustainable Rescue: “Human trafficking still takes place on a large scale, and still too often under the radar. That does not make it easy for organisations that want to combat human trafficking. Sharing of data between various sorts of organisations, including the government, the police, but also banks play a crucial role in mapping the networks of criminals involved in human trafficking, including their victims. Data sharing contributes to tackling this criminal business not only reactively, but also proactively….Sustainable Rescue tries to make the largely invisible human trafficking visible. Bundling data and therefore knowledge is crucial in this. Paul: “It’s about combining the routes criminals (and their victims) take from A to B, the financial transactions they make, the websites they visit, the hotels where they check in et cetera. All those signs of human trafficking can be found in the data of various types of organisations: the police, municipalities, the Public Prosecution Service, charities such as the Salvation Army, but also banks and insurance institutions. The problem here is that you need to collect all pieces of the puzzle to get clear insights from them. As long as this relevant data is not combined through data sharing, it is a very difficult job to get these insights. In nine out of ten cases, these authorities are not willing and/or allowed to share their data, mainly because of the privacy sensitivity of this data. However, in order to eliminate human trafficking, that data will have to be bundled. Only then analyses can be made about the patterns of a network of human trafficking.”…(More)”.
Paper by Martin Sweeney, Peter John, Michael Sanders, Hazel Wright and Lucy Makinson: “Local authorities in Great Britain are required to ensure that their electoral registers are as accurate and complete as possible. To this end, Household Enquiry Forms (HEFs) are mailed to all properties annually to collect updated details from residents, and any eligible unregistered residents will subsequently be invited to register to vote. Unfortunately, HEF nonresponse is pervasive and costly. Using insights from behavioural science, we modified letters and envelopes posted to households as part of the annual canvass, and evaluated their effects using a randomised controlled trial across two local authorities in England (N=226,528 properties). We find that modified materials – particularly redesigned envelopes – significantly increase initial response rates and savings. However, we find no effects on voter registration. While certain behavioural interventions can improve the efficiency of the annual canvass, other approaches or interventions may be needed to increase voter registration rates and update voter information….(More)”.
Paper by Tammy Katsabian: “Much has been written on technology and the law. Leading scholars are occupied with the power dynamics between capital, technology, and the law, along with their implications for society and human rights. Alongside that, various labor law scholars focus on the implications of smart technology on employees’ rights throughout the recruitment and employment periods and on workers’ status and rights in the growing phenomenon of platform-based work. This article aims to contribute to the current scholarship by zooming it out and observing from a bird’s-eye view how certain actors use technology to manipulate and challenge basic legal categories in labor today. This is done by referring to legal, sociological, and internet scholarship on the matter.
The main argument elaborated throughout this article is that digital technology is used to blur and distort many of the basic labor law protections. Because of this, legal categories and rights in the labor field seem to be outdated and need to be adjusted to this new reality.
By providing four detailed examples, the article unpacks how employers, giant high-tech companies, and society use various forms of technology to constantly disturb legal categories in the labor field regarding time, sphere, and relations. In this way, the article demonstrates how social media sites, information communication technologies, and artificial intelligence are used to blur the traditional concepts of privacy, working time and place, the employment contract, and community. This increased blurriness and fragility in labor have created many new difficulties that require new ways of thinking about regulation. Therefore, the article argues that both law and technology have to be modified to cope with the new challenges. Following this, the article proposes three possible ways in which to start considering the regulation of labor in the digital reality: (1) embrace flexibility as part of the legal order and use it as an interpretive tool and not just as an obstacle, (2) broaden the current legal protection and add a procedural layer to the legal rights at stake, and (3) use technology as part of the solution to the dilemmas that technology itself has emphasized. By doing so, this article seeks to enable more accurate thinking on law and regulation in the digital reality, particularly in the labor field, as well as in other fields and contexts….(More)”.
Blogpost by Kristen Himelein and Lorna McPherson: “Mobile phone surveys have been rapidly deployed by the World Bank to measure the impact of COVID-19 in nearly 100 countries across the world. Previous posts on this blog have discussed the sampling and implementation challenges associated with these efforts, and coverage errors are an inherent problem to the approach. The survey methodology literature has shown mobile phone survey respondents in the poorest countries are more likely to be male, urban, wealthier, and more highly educated. This bias can stem from phone ownership, as mobile phone surveys are at best representative of mobile phone owners, a group which, particularly in poor countries, may differ from the overall population; or from differential response rates among these owners, with some groups more or less likely to respond to a call from an unknown number. In this post, we share our experiences in trying to improve representativeness and boost sample sizes for the poor in Papua New Guinea (PNG)….(More)”.
Paper by Verena Zimmermann and Karen Renaud: “Nudging is a promising approach, in terms of influencing people to make advisable choices in a range of domains, including cybersecurity. However, the processes underlying the concept and the nudge’s effectiveness in different contexts, and in the long term, are still poorly understood. Our research thus first reviewed the nudge concept and differentiated it from other interventions before applying it to the cybersecurity area. We then carried out an empirical study to assess the effectiveness of three different nudge-related interventions on four types of cybersecurity-specific decisions. Our study demonstrated that the combination of a simple nudge and information provision, termed a “hybrid nudge,” was at least as, and in some decision contexts even more effective in encouraging secure choices as the simple nudge on its own. This indicates that the inclusion of information when deploying a nudge, thereby increasing the intervention’s transparency, does not necessarily diminish its effectiveness.
A follow-up study explored the educational and long-term impact of our tested nudge interventions to encourage secure choices. The results indicate that the impact of the initial nudges, of all kinds, did not endure. We conclude by discussing our findings and their implications for research and practice….(More)”.
Rohinton P. Medhora at the Financial Times: “From contact-tracing apps to telemedicine, digital health innovations that can help tackle coronavirus have been adopted swiftly during the pandemic. Lagging far behind, however, are any investigations of their reliability and the implications for privacy and human rights.
In the wake of this surge in “techno-solutionism”, the world needs a new era of data diplomacy to catch up.
Big data holds great promise in improving health outcomes. But it requires norms and standards to govern collection, storage and use, for which there is no global consensus.
The world broadly comprises four data zones — China, the US, the EU and the remainder. The state-centric China zone, where individuals have no control over their personal data, is often portrayed as the poster child of the long-threatened Orwellian society.A woman scans a QR code of a local app to track personal data for the Covid-19 containment in Zouping in east China’s Shandong province © Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Yet the corporation-centric US zone is also disempowering. The “consent” that users provide to companies is meaningless. Most consumers do not read the endless pages of fine print before “agreeing”, while not consenting means opting out of the digital world and is seldom useful.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation goes furthest in entrenching the rights of EU citizens to safeguard their privacy and provide a measure of control over personal data.
But it is not without drawbacks. Costs of compliance are high, with small and medium-sized companies facing a disproportionately large bill that strengthens the large companies that the regulation was designed to rein in. There are also varying interpretations of the rules by different national data protection authorities.
The rest of the world does not have the capacity to create meaningful data governance. Governments are either de facto observers of others’ rules or stumble along with a non-regime. One-fifth of countries have no data protection and privacy legislation, according to figures from Unctad, the UN’s trade and development agency.
Global diplomacy is needed to bring some harmony in norms and practices between these four zones, but the task is not easy. Data straddles our prosperity, health, commerce, quality of democracy, security and safety.
A starting point could be a technology charter of principles, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It may not be fully applied everywhere, but it could serve as a beacon of hope — particularly for citizens in countries with oppressive regimes — and could guide the drafting of national and subnational legislation.
A second focus should be the equitable taxation of multinational digital platforms that use canny accounting practices to cut their tax bill. While the largest share of users — and one that is growing fast — are in populous poorer parts of the world, the value created from their data goes to richer countries.
This imbalance, coupled with widespread use of tax havens by multinational technology companies, is exacerbating government funding gaps already under pressure because of the pandemic.
A third priority is to revisit statistics. Just as the UN System of National Accounts was introduced in the 1950s, today we need a set of universally accepted definitions and practices to categorise data.
That would allow us to measure and understand the nature of the new data-driven economy. National statistical agencies must be strengthened to gather information and to act as stewards of ever greater quantities of personal data.
Finally, just as the financial crisis of 2007-08 led to the creation of the Financial Stability Forum (a global panel of regulators now called the Financial Stability Board), the Covid-19 crisis is an opportunity to galvanise action through a digital stability board….(More)”
Report by UNICEF and United Nations University (UNU-EGOV): “Digital technologies continue to change the dynamics of our economies and societies and, in so doing, have the potential to alter the character of modern government permanently. The ‘digital revolution’ has come with the promise of improved governance and more inclusive and responsive service delivery and there are now many public websites, digital platforms and applications through which governments inform and assist citizens using information and communication technologies (ICT).
A central tenet of the transition to e-government is the digitization of public health, education, social and identity management services offered by national and local governments. Digitization in these areas is undertaken to expand service access to the public and, in particular, to traditionally underserved groups. The 2020 United Nations E-Government Development Index finds that 80 per cent of 193 United Nations (UN) Member States now offer some digital content or online services for youth, women, older people, persons with disabilities, migrants and/or those living in poverty.
While these services are increasingly common in the 21st century, they have become essential during the global COVID-19 pandemic — not least, for children and families. Amidst the digital transformation of government, technology has an increasing impact on a child’s ability to enjoy the benefits of public health care, education and welfare initiatives, and the COVID-19 pandemic has now brought the potential — and challenges — of digital services for children to the fore of policy planning discussions. As a result of school closures in over 190 countries and the suspension of many vital face-to-face services, more than two-thirds of countries have introduced a national online learning platform for children during the pandemic, leading to a re-examination of the efficacy of these services for continuity of learning.
Despite this, there is surprisingly little systematic exploration of the discourse and practices that ensure that
e-government services can advance and protect the rights of children and young people…(More)”.