Stefaan Verhulst
Compendium, prepared by the Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government (DPIDG) of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA): “…aims to capture emerging trends in digital responses of the United Nations Member States against the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a preliminary analysis of their main features….
The initiatives listed in this compendium were submitted by Member States in response to a call for inputs launched by UN DESA/DPIDG in April/May 2020. The compendium lists selected initiatives according to major categories of action areas. While this publication does not list all initiatives submitted by Member States, the complete list can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/EGOV_COVID19_APPS .
Major groupings of action areas are:
- Information sharing
- E-participation
- E-health
- E-business
- Contact tracing
- Social distancing and virus tracking
- Working and learning from home
- Digital policy
- Partnerships…(More)”.
Felix Oldenburg at Alliance: “What are the best investments for a foundation? This important question is one many foundation professionals are revisiting in light of low interest rates, high market volatility, and fears of deep economic trouble ahead. While stories of success certainly exist and are worth learning from, even the notorious lack of data cannot obscure the inconvenient truth that the idea of traditional endowments is in trouble.
I would argue that in order to unleash the potential of foundations, we should turn the question around, perhaps back on its feet: For which assets are foundations the best owners?
In the still dawning digital age, one fascinating answer may stare you right in the face as you read this. How much is your personal data worth? Your social media information, search and purchase history, they are the source of much of the market value of the fastest growing sector of our time. A rough estimate of market valuation of the major social platforms divided by their active users arrives at more than $1,000 USD per user, not differentiating by location or other factors. This sum is more than the median per capita wealth in about half the world’s countries. And if the trend continues, this value may continue to grow – and with it the big question of how to put one of the most valuable resource of our time to use for the good of all.
Acting as guardians of digital commons, data-endowed foundations could negotiate conditions for the commercial use of its assets, and invest the income to create equal digital opportunities, power 21st century education, and fight climate change.
Foundation ownership in the data sector may sound like a wild idea at first. Yet foundations and their predecessors have played the role of purpose-driven owners of critical assets and infrastructures throughout history. Monasteries (called ‘Stifte’ in German, the root of the German word for foundations) have protected knowledge and education in libraries, and secured health care in hospitals. Trusts have created affordable much of the social housing in the exploding cities of the 19th century. The German Marshall Plan created an endowment for economic recovery that is still in existence today.
The proposition is simple: Independent ownership for the good of all, beyond the commercial or national interests of individual corporations of governments, in perpetuity. Acting as guardians of digital commons, data-endowed foundations could negotiate conditions for the commercial use of its assets, and invest the income to create equal digital opportunities, power 21st century education, and fight climate change. An ideal model of ownership would also include a form of governance exercised by the users themselves through digital participation and elections. A foundation really only relies on one thing, a stable frame of rights in its legal home country. This is far from a trivial condition, but again history shows how many foundations have survived depressions, wars, and revolutions….(More)”
Article by By Vilas Dhar, Amy Brand & Stefano Bertozzi: “We need a transformation in how early data is shared. But the urgent need for peer-reviewed science, coupled with the potential harms of unreviewed publication, has set the stage for a public discussion on the future of academic publishing. It’s clear that we need rapid, transparent peer review that allows reviewers, authors, and readers to engage with one another, and for dynamic use of technology to accelerate publishing timelines without reducing academic rigor or researcher accountability. However, the field of academic publishing will need significant financial support to catalyze these changes.
Philanthropic organizations, as longtime supporters of scientific research, must be at the vanguard of the effort to fund improvements in how science is curated, reviewed, and published. When the MIT Press first began to address the need for the rapid dissemination of COVID-19-related research and scholarship—by making a selection relevant e-books and journal articles freely available, as well as developing a new, rapid publication model for books, under the imprint First Reads—senior staff were interested in undertaking bolder efforts to address the specific problems engendered by the pandemic. The proliferation of preprints related to COVID-19 was already apparent, as was the danger of un-vetted science seeding mainstream media stories with deleterious results.
Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19) is an innovation in open publishing that allows for rigorous, transparent peer review that is publicly shared in advance of publication. We believe that pushing the peer review process further upstream—so that it occurs at the preprint stage—will benefit a wide variety of stakeholders: journalists, clinicians, researchers, and the public at large. …
With this and future efforts, we’ve identified five key opportunities to align academic publishing priorities with the public good:
- Transparency: Redesign and incentivize the peer review process to publish all peer reviews alongside primary research, reducing duplicate reviews and allowing readers and authors to understand and engage with the critiques.
- Accountability: The roles of various authors on any given manuscript should be clearly defined and presented for the readers. When datasets are used, one or more of the authors should have explicit responsibility for verifying the integrity of the data and should document that verification process within the paper’s methodology section.
- Urgency: Scientific research can be slow moving and time consuming. Publishing data does not have to be. Publishing houses should build networks of experts who are able to dedicate time to scrutinizing papers in a timely manner with the goal of rapid review with rigor.
- Digital-First Publishing: While science is a dynamic process of continued learning and exploration, much of scientific publishing conforms to outdated print models. Academic journals should explore opportunities to deploy AI-powered tools to identify peer-reviewers or preprint scholarship and digital publishing platforms to enable more visible communication and collaboration about research findings. Not only can reviews be closer to real-time, but authors can easily respond and modify their work for continuous quality improvement.
- Funding: Pioneering new solutions in academic publishing will require significant trial and error, at a time when traditional business models such as library subscriptions are in decline. Philanthropies should step forward to provide catalytic risk financing, testing new models and driving social good outcomes….(More)”.
Maryam Ahmed at BBC News: “Women with darker skin are more than twice as likely to be told their photos fail UK passport rules when they submit them online than lighter-skinned men, according to a BBC investigation.
One black student said she was wrongly told her mouth looked open each time she uploaded five different photos to the government website.
This shows how “systemic racism” can spread, Elaine Owusu said.
The Home Office said the tool helped users get their passports more quickly.
“The indicative check [helps] our customers to submit a photo that is right the first time,” said a spokeswoman.
“Over nine million people have used this service and our systems are improving.
“We will continue to develop and evaluate our systems with the objective of making applying for a passport as simple as possible for all.”
Skin colour
The passport application website uses an automated check to detect poor quality photos which do not meet Home Office rules. These include having a neutral expression, a closed mouth and looking straight at the camera.
BBC research found this check to be less accurate on darker-skinned people.
More than 1,000 photographs of politicians from across the world were fed into the online checker.
The results indicated:
- Dark-skinned women are told their photos are poor quality 22% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned women is 14%
- Dark-skinned men are told their photos are poor quality 15% of the time, while the figure for light-skinned men is 9%
Photos of women with the darkest skin were four times more likely to be graded poor quality, than women with the lightest skin….(More)”.
David Gerard at Foreign Policy: “The U.K.’s response to COVID-19 is widely regarded as scattershot and haphazard. So how did they get here?
Excel is a top-of-the-line spreadsheet tool. A spreadsheet is good for quickly modeling a problem—but too often, organizations cut corners and press the cardboard-and-string mock-up into production, instead of building a robust and unique system based on the Excel proof of concept.
Excel is almost universally misused for complex data processing, as in this case—because it’s already present on your work computer and you don’t have to spend months procuring new software. So almost every business has at least one critical process that relies on a years-old spreadsheet set up by past staff members that nobody left at the company understands.
That’s how the U.K. went wrong. An automated process at Public Health England (PHE) transformed the incoming private laboratory test data (which was in text-based CSV files) into Excel-format files, to pass to the Serco Test and Trace teams’ dashboards.
Unfortunately, the process produced XLS files—an outdated Excel format that went extinct in 2003—which had a limit of 65,536 rows, rather than the around 1 million-row limit in the more recent XLSX format. With several lines of data per patient, this meant a sheet could only hold 1,400 cases. Further cases just fell off the end.
Technicians at PHE monitoring the dashboards noticed on Oct. 2 that not all data that had been sent in was making it out the other end. The data was corrected the next day, and PHE announced the issue the day after.
It’s not clear if the software at PHE was an Excel spreadsheet or an in-house program using the XLS format for data interchange—the latter would explain why PHE stated that replacing it might take months—but the XLS format would have been used on the assumption that Excel was universal.
And even then, a system based on Excel-format files would have been an improvement over earlier systems—the system for keeping a count of COVID-19 cases in the U.K. was, as of May, still based on data handwritten on cards….
The process that went wrong was a workaround for a contract issue: The government’s contract with Deloitte to run the testing explicitly stipulated that the company did not have to report “Pillar 2” (general public testing) positive cases to PHE at all.
Since a test-and-trace system is not possible without this data, PHE set up feeds for the data anyway, as CSV text files directly from the testing labs. The data was then put into this system—the single system that serves as the bridge between testing and tracing, for all of England. PHE had to put in place technological duct tape to make a system of life-or-death importance work at all….
The Brookings Institution report Doomed: Challenges and solutions to government IT projects lists factors to consider when outsourcing government information technology. The outsourcing of tracking and tracing is an example where the government has assumed all of the risk, and the contractor assumes all of the profit. PHE did one thing that you should never do: It outsourced a core function. Running a call center or the office canteen? You can outsource it. Tracing a pandemic? You must run it in-house.
If you need outside expertise for a core function, use contractors working within a department. Competing with the private sector on pay can be an issue, but a meaningful project can be a powerful incentive….(More)”.
Article by Richard Mason: “The group of 100 broadly representative Scots have been meeting throughout the year to discuss some of the country’s major constitutional issues.
Members have been asked to consider three questions, the first of which is: “What kind of country are we seeking to build?”
The assembly will meet online to develop the vision, having examined issues such as finances and taxation, and discussed how decisions are taken for and about Scotland. A report of the meeting will be published on October 9
The other two parts of the Assembly’s remit – how to best overcome the challenges the country faces, including Brexit, and how to empower people to make “informed choices” about Scotland’s future – will be addressed in a final report by the end of the year.
Assembly convener Kate Wimpress said: “The meeting this weekend will see a group of people from all walks of life across Scotland come together to agree a shared vision of our country’s future.
“The Citizens’ Assembly’s vision for Scotland will help give a roadmap for the country at an uncertain and difficult time.
“Our members have worked hard together across the months, and it’s exciting to witness their efforts now coming to fruition.”
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the creation of the Citizens’ Assembly and outlined its remit, but she stressed it would be independent from Government following criticism it was set up to garner independence support.
Constitution Secretary Michael Russell said the Scottish Government is spending £1.37 million to fund six assembly meetings, which were held in person before moving online following the coronavirus lockdown….(More)”
Introduction by Neela Saldanha & Sakshi Ghai: “We are in the middle of a global pandemic, one that has infected more than 35 million people worldwide and killed over 1 million. Almost nine months after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a “public health emergency of international concern,” the primary strategies we have to prevent the spread of an invisible and often deadly virus are behavioral—keeping a distance, wearing masks, washing hands. No wonder behavioral science has been thrust into the spotlight. Behavioral scientists have been advising national and local governments, as well as health institutions around the world about the best ways to help people collectively adhere to new behaviors.
Although the pandemic rages globally, 7 of the 10 worst outbreaks in the world are in countries in the Global South. These countries have very different social, cultural, and economic contexts from those in the Global North. Mitigating the pandemic in these countries is not simply a matter of importing recommendations from the north. As Saugato Dutta pointed out, “advice that can seem grounded in universal human tendencies must be careful not to ignore the context in which it is applied.”
What are the elements of context that we need to attend to? What issues are behavioral scientists in Nairobi or New Delhi grappling with as they tackle the virus? What can we learn from the interventions deployed in Brazil or in the Philippines? And how can these lessons inspire the rest of the world?
We thought the best way to understand these questions was simply to ask behavioral scientists in those countries. And so, in this special collection, we have curated dispatches from behavioral scientists in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America to learn what’s different about tackling coronavirus.
Our goal is to learn from the work they have done, understand the unique challenges they face, and get their view on what behavioral science needs to focus on to benefit the 80 percent of the world population that lives in these countries. We also hope that this collection will spark ideas and seed collaborations among behavioral scientists in the Global South and North alike. The current situation demands it….(More)”.
Paper by Anna Kosovac, Kris Hartley, Michele Acuto, and Darcy Gunning: “The impact of global challenges such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic manifests most acutely in urban settings, rendering cities essential players on the global stage.
In the 2018 report Toward City Diplomacy, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs presented findings from a survey of 27 cities on the capacity of local governments around the world to network internationally—and the perceived barriers to that engagement. The report found that cities “need to invest in resources, expertise, and capacity to manage their relationships and responsibilities to conduct city diplomacy effectively.”
In our new survey of 47 cities, we find that advice to still ring true. City officials broadly recognize the importance of engaging internationally but lack the necessary formal diplomacy training and resources for conducting that engagement to maximum effect. Nevertheless, cities maintain a strong commitment to global agendas, and international frameworks are increasingly influential in municipal affairs. For example, more than half of survey respondents said they track their city’s performance against the metrics of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Furthermore, we found that cities and their leaders are confident in their capacity to tackle global challenges. For instance, the majority of survey respondents said that city governments have greater potential for impact on climate change mitigation than their national government counterparts do, especially when acting collaboratively through city networks and multilateral urban programs.
The individual stories of five cities whose officials participated in the study offer lessons for a variety of challenges and approaches to city diplomacy. Based on the survey results, we discuss the three primary obstacles cities must overcome in order to strengthen the role of city diplomacy globally: inadequate funding and resources for international engagement, insufficient training in city diplomacy, and the failure of national and multilateral bodies to fully recognize and formalize city engagement in diplomacy.
We conclude with a framework for ensuring that city-diplomacy efforts are systematic and institutionalized rather than reliant on the personalities and connections of powerful city leaders. This capacity-building strategy can help cities leverage international coordination, information sharing, and intersectoral collaboration to address the complex and interconnected problems that will characterize the 21st century….(More)”.
Paper by Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin: “In this essay, we provide a simple conceptual framework to elucidate the forces that lead to institutional persistence and change. Our framework is based on a dynamic game between different groups, who care both about current policies and institutions and future policies, which are themselves determined by current institutional choices, and clarifies the forces that lead to the most extreme form of institutional persistence (“institutional stasis”) and the potential drivers of institutional change. We further study the strategic stability of institutions, which arises when institutions persist because of fear of subsequent, less beneficial changes that would follow initial reforms. More importantly, we emphasize that, despite the popularity of ideas based on institutional stasis in the economics and political science literatures, most institutions are in a constant state of flux, but their trajectory may still be shaped by past institutional choices, thus exhibiting “path-dependent change”, so that initial conditions determine both the subsequent trajectories of institutions and how they respond to shocks. We conclude the essay by discussing how institutions can be designed to bolster stability, the relationship between social mobility and institutions, and the interplay between culture and institutions….(More)”
Book edited by Dorota Mokrosinska: This edited volume offers a critical discussion of the trade-offs between transparency and secrecy in the actual political practice of democratic states in Europe. As such, it answers to a growing need to systematically analyse the problem of secrecy in governance in this political and geographical context.
Focusing on topical cases and controversies in particular areas, the contributors reflect on the justification and limits of the use of secrecy in democratic governance, register the social, cultural, and historical factors that inform this process and explore the criteria used by European legislators and policy-makers, both at the national and supranational level, when balancing interests on the sides of transparency and secrecy, respectively.
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of security studies, political science, European politics/studies, law, history, political philosophy, public administration, intelligence studies, media and communication studies, and information technology sciences….(More)”.