Chapter by Catherine E. Weaver in Good Governance and Modern International Financial Institutions: “Development scholars and practitioners today see progressive access to information and transparency policies as necessary preconditions for improved effectiveness of international development aid and the legitimacy of modern international financial institutions. This chapter examines the evolution of access to information and broader open data policies in international development institutions. Drawing from the case of the World Bank as a “first mover,” this chapter examines the complex internal processes and factors that shape the adoption and implementation of access to information policy reforms. While challenges to achieving robust information disclosure and open data policies across all multilateral and bilateral aid agencies persist, transparency is now a benchmark for good governance in global development finance and the proverbial genie that cannot be put back in the bottle….(More)”.
Open Parliaments Around the World. Open Parliaments’ Tools in Comparative Perspective
Book by Rafael Rubio and Ricardo Vela: “…over the past few years Parliaments across the world have started to explore new forms of developing their traditional functions, assuming what some consider new functions, to try and respond to these demands. In this regard information and communication technologies have show their capacity to support and modernize institutional activity. In the past few years there are very few countries who have not experienced technological advances in the parliamentary realm. It is possible to discover new ideas, new tools, new practices and an increasing number of parliaments use technology to carry out their representative tasks with greater efficiency, drawing them closer to citizens. It still remains to be seen as to whether they have created a real change in parliamentary practice….
Born to be mirrors of public opinion, Parliaments are places in which national sovereignty resides and as such, communication is a key aspect of its DNA. It is thus not surprising that new technologies have special weight in the configuration of Open Parliament. However, the model for Open Parliament is not only about increasing the technology used by and in the Parliament, nor just about its implementation. When they are implanted in a passive way, new technologies often end up being used to replace representation, which constitutes one of the most frequent errors in the initial process of adapting to technologies: putting reality at the service of the tool and not the other way round. Not everything that is possible to carry out is interesting or appropriate, even if it is new and innovative. It makes no sense to start developing functions that adapt to what technology is capable of doing, and losing sight of the needs that technology serves….(More)”.
What If There Were More Policy Futures Studios?
Essay by Lucy Kimbell: “Unexpected election results are intersecting in new and often disturbing ways with enduring issues such as economic and social inequalities; climate change; global movements of people fleeing war, poverty and environmental change; and the social and cultural consequences of long-term cuts in public funding. These developments are punctuated by dramatic events such as war, terrorist attacks and disasters such as floods, fires and other effects of changes in rainfall and temperature. Many of the available public policy visions of the future fail to connect with people’s day-to-day realities and challenges they face. Where could alternative visions and more effective public policy solutions come from? And what roles can design and futures practices play in constituting these?
For people using design-based and arts-based approaches in relation to social and public policy issues, the practices, structures and processes associated with institutions making public policy present a paradox. On
the one hand, creative methods can enable people to participate in assessing how things are, in ways that are meaningful to them, and imagining how things could be different, and to do so in collaboration with people they might not ordinarily engage with. Workshops and spaces for exploring futures such as design jams, hackathons, digital platforms, exhibitions and co-working hubs can open up a distributed creative capacity for negotiating potentialities in relation to current actualities. The strong emphasis in design on how people experience issues – understanding things on their terms, informed by the principles of ethnography – can open up participation, critique and creativity. Such practices can surface and open up difficult questions about institutions and how they work….(More)”.
The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing
Paper by Sam Grabus and Jane Greenberg: “Over the last twenty years, a wide variety of resources have been developed to address the rights and licensing problems inherent with contemporary data sharing practices. The landscape of developments is this area is increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate, due to the complexity of intellectual property and ethics issues associated with sharing sensitive data. This paper seeks to address this challenge, examining the landscape and presenting a Version 1.0 directory of resources. A multi-method study was pursued, with an environmental scan examining 20 resources, resulting in three high-level categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives; and a content analysis revealing the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies. A timeline confirms a shift in licensing standardization priorities from open data to more nuanced and technologically robust solutions, over time, to accommodate for more sensitive data types. This paper reports on the research undertaking, and comments on the potential for using license-specific metadata supplements and developing data-centric rights and licensing ontologies….(More)”.
Co-Creation Of Public Services: Why And How
Paper by David Osimo and Francesco Mureddu: “Co-creation” and “design thinking” are trendy themes – the topic of innumerable conferences and a growing number of academic papers. But how do we turn co-creation into a reality for Europe’s 508 million citizens? In Co-Creation of Public Services: Why and How, Co-VAL’s new Policy Brief, co-authors Francesco Mureddu and David Osimo propose a ten-step roadmap for delivering genuinely user-centric digital government. The authors argue that it is time to put co-creation at the core of government functioning.
According to the authors, “today, co-creation is a mature subject. There is an extended theoretical and applied research effort underway, led in many places by members of the Co-VAL consortium, whose research informed the new policy brief. And there is a solid professional community, ready to deliver, and staffed by people with clearly identified job profiles, such as “user researcher” and “service designer.” There are even success stories of entire countries that scaled up design thinking at national level, such as Italy’s Government Commissioner and Digital Transformation Team and the United Kingdom’s legendary Government Digital Services.”…(More)”.
From market multilateralism to governance by goal setting: SDGs and the changing role of partnerships in a new global order
Paper by Benedicte Bull and Desmond McNeill: “Business has been involved in cooperation with multilateral organizations through public-private partnerships (PPPs) since the late 1990s. With their adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), multilateral institutions increasingly consider partnerships as a means to achieve their goals given their own limited implementation capacity. However, the global economic order has changed significantly since the first expansion of PPPs, particularly due to growing participation by non-western states and companies. This article asks how this shift has changed the eagerness to form partnerships, as well as their qualitative content. It analyzes the 3964 partnerships in the SDG partnership registry, focusing on the subset of them that includes business partners. We divide these into five groups: local implementation, resource mobilization, advocacy, policy, and operational partnerships.
We study PPPs involving companies from different varieties of capitalism—private, market based forms, and state-led forms of capitalism. We find that PPPs are still dominated by companies and other actors from Western countries. Moreover, business participate more in U.S.- and Canadianled partnerships than others. We also find strong differences regarding what category of PPPs that companies from different backgrounds engage in, and discuss the linkages between varieties of capitalism and PPP participation…(More)”.
The Lives and After Lives of Data
Paper by Christine L. Borgman: “The most elusive term in data science is ‘data.’ While often treated as objects to be computed upon, data is a theory-laden concept with a long history. Data exist within knowledge infrastructures that govern how they are created, managed, and interpreted. By comparing models of data life cycles, implicit assumptions about data become apparent. In linear models, data pass through stages from beginning to end of life, which suggest that data can be recreated as needed. Cyclical models, in which data flow in a virtuous circle of uses and reuses, are better suited for irreplaceable observational data that may retain value indefinitely. In astronomy, for example, observations from one generation of telescopes may become calibration and modeling data for the next generation, whether digital sky surveys or glass plates. The value and reusability of data can be enhanced through investments in knowledge infrastructures, especially digital curation and preservation. Determining what data to keep, why, how, and for how long, is the challenge of our day…(More)”.
Urbanism Under Google: Lessons from Sidewalk Toronto
Paper by Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles: “Cities around the world are rapidly adopting digital technologies, data analytics, and the trappings of “smart” infrastructure. No company is more ambitious about exploring data flows and seeking to dominate networks of information than Google. In October 2017, Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs embarked on its first prototype smart city in Toronto, Canada, planning a new kind of data-driven urban environment: “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up.” Although the vision is for an urban district foregrounding progressive ideals of inclusivity, for the crucial first 18 months of the venture, many of the most consequential features of the project were hidden from view and unavailable for serious scrutiny. The players defied public accountability on questions about data collection and surveillance, governance, privacy, competition, and procurement. Even more basic questions about the use of public space went unanswered: privatized services, land ownership, infrastructure deployment and, in all cases, the question of who is in control. What was hidden in this first stage, and what was revealed, suggest that the imagined smart city may be incompatible with democratic processes, sustained public governance, and the public interest.
This article analyzes the Sidewalk project in Toronto as it took shape in its first phase, prior to the release of the Master Innovation and Development Plan, exploring three major governance challenges posed by the imagined “city of the future”: privatization, platformization, and domination. The significance of this case study applies well beyond Toronto. Google and related companies are modeling future business growth embedded in cities and using projects like the one in Toronto as test beds. What happens in Toronto is designed to be replicated. We conclude with some lessons, highlighting the precarity of civic stewardship and public accountability when cities are confronted with tantalizing visions of privatized urban innovation…(More)”.
AI & the sustainable development goals: The state of play
Report by 2030Vision: “…While the world is making progress in some areas, we are falling behind in delivering the SDGs overall. We need all actors – businesses, governments, academia, multilateral institutions, NGOs, and others – to accelerate and scale their efforts to deliver the SDGs, using every tool at their disposal, including artificial intelligence (AI).
In December 2017, 2030Vision published its first report, Uniting to Deliver Technology for the Global Goals, which addressed the role of digital technology – big data, robotics, internet of things, AI, and other technologies – in achieving the SDGs.
In this paper, we focus on AI for the SDGs. AI extends and amplifies the capacity of human beings to understand and solve complex, dynamic, and interconnected systems challenges like the SDGs. Our main objective was to survey the landscape of research and initiatives on AI and the SDGs to identify key themes and questions in need of further exploration. We also reviewed the state of AI and the SDGs in two sectors – food and agriculture and healthcare – to understand if and how AI is being deployed to address the SDGs and the challenges and opportunities in doing so….(More)”.
Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy
Article by John B. Morris Jr. and Cameron F. Kerry: “It’s my data.” It’s an idea often expressed about information privacy.
Indeed, in congressional hearings last year, Mark Zuckerberg said multiple times that “people own all of their own content” on Facebook. A survey by Insights Network earlier this year found that 79% of consumers said they want compensation when their data is shared. Musician and tech entrepreneur will.i.am took to the website of The Economist to argue that payment for data is a way to “redress the balance” between individuals and “data monarchs.”
Some policymakers are taking such thinking to heart. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) introduced a three-page bill, the “Own Your Own Data Act of 2019,” which declares that “each individual owns and has an exclusive property right in the data that individual generates on the internet” and requires that social media companies obtain licenses to use this data. Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) are filing legislation to require Facebook, Google, and other large collectors of data to disclose the value of personal data they collect, although the bill would not require payments. In California, Governor Gavin Newsome wants to pursue a “data dividend” designed to “share in the wealth that is created from [people’s] data.”
Treating our data as our property has understandable appeal. It touches what the foundational privacy thinker Alan Westin identified as an essential aspect of privacy, a right “to control, edit, manage, and delete information about [individuals] and decide when, how, and to what extent information is communicated to others.” It expresses the unfairness people feel about an asymmetrical marketplace in which we know little about the data we share but the companies that receive the data can profit by extracting marketable information.
The trouble is, it’s not your data; it’s not their data either. Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal information even if they choose to “sell” it. Data is not a commodity. It is information. Any system of information rights—whether patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property, or privacy rights—presents some tension with strong interest in the free flow of information that is reflected by the First Amendment. Our personal information is in demand precisely because it has value to others and to society across a myriad of uses.
Treating personal information as property to be licensed or sold may induce people to trade away their privacy rights for very little value while injecting enormous friction into free flow of information. The better way to strengthen privacy is to ensure that individual privacy interests are respected as personal information flows to desirable uses, not to reduce personal data to a commodity….(More)”.