Stefaan Verhulst

 Audrey Tang in the New York Times: “Democracy improves as more people participate. And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation — as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating consensus, not division.

These are lessons Taiwan has taken to heart in recent years, with the government and the tech community partnering to create online platforms and other digital initiatives that allow everyday citizens to propose and express their opinion on policy reforms. Today, Taiwan is crowdsourcing democracy to create a more responsive government.

Fittingly, this movement, which today aims to increase government transparency, was born in a moment of national outrage over a lack of openness and accountability in politics.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party.

Catalyzing what came to be known as the Sunflower Movement, the protesters demanded that the pact be scrapped and that the government institute a more transparent ratification process.

The occupation, which drew widespread public support, ended a little more than three weeks later, after the government promised greater legislative oversight of the trade pact. (To this day, the pact has yet to be approved by Taiwan’s legislature.) A poll released after the occupation, however, showed that 76 percent of the nation remained dissatisfied with the Kuomintang government, illustrating the crisis of trust caused by the trade deal dispute.

To heal this rift and communicate better with everyday citizens, the administration reached out to a group of civic-minded hackers and coders, known as g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”), who had been seeking to improve government transparency through the creation of open-source tools. The organization had come to the attention of the government during the Sunflower occupation, when g0v hackers had worked closely with the protesters.

In December 2014, Jaclyn Tsai, a government minister focused on digital technology, attended a g0v-sponsored hackathon and proposed the establishment of a neutral platform where various online communities could exchange policy ideas.

Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. VTaiwan (which stands for “virtual Taiwan”) brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders. Though the government is not obligated to follow vTaiwan’s recommendations (a policy that may soon change), the group’s work often leads to concrete action….(More)”.

Book edited by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb: “Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the potential of this technology to affect productivity, growth, inequality, market power, innovation, and employment. This volume seeks to set the agenda for economic research on the impact of AI.

It covers four broad themes: AI as a general purpose technology; the relationships between AI, growth, jobs, and inequality; regulatory responses to changes brought on by AI; and the effects of AI on the way economic research is conducted. It explores the economic influence of machine learning, the branch of computational statistics that has driven much of the recent excitement around AI, as well as the economic impact of robotics and automation and the potential economic consequences of a still-hypothetical artificial general intelligence. The volume provides frameworks for understanding the economic impact of AI and identifies a number of open research questions…. (More)”

Sara Jerving at Devex: “Data gaps across the African continent threaten to hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s first governance report released on Tuesday.

The report, “Agendas 2063 & 2030: Is Africa On Track?“ based on an analysis of the foundation’s Ibrahim index of African governance, found that since the adoption of both of these agendas, the availability of public data in Africa has declined. With data focused on social outcomes, there has been a notable decline in education, population and vital statistics, such as birth and death records, which allow citizens to access public services.

The index, on which the report is based, is the most comprehensive dataset on African governance, drawing on ten years of data of all 54 African nations. An updated index is released every two years….

The main challenge in the production of quality, timely data, according to the report, is a lack of funding and lack of independence of the national statistical offices.

Only one country, Mauritius, had a perfect score in terms of independence of its national statistics office – meaning that its office can collect the data it chooses, publish without approval from other arms of the government, and is sufficiently funded. Fifteen African nations scored zero in terms of the independence of their offices….(More)”.

Edge Interview with Patricia S. Churchland: “Although we have made tremendous progress in understanding many details of the brain, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. What’s relevant to me, as somebody who’s interested in the nature of moral behavior, is how little we understand about the nature of reasoning, or if I may use a different expression, problem solving. I don’t know what reasoning is. For a long time, people seemed to think it was completely separate from emotion, but we know that can’t be true.

The nature of problem solving is something that is still very much in the pioneering stages in neuroscience. It’s a place where neuroscience and psychology can cooperate to get interesting experimental paradigms so that we can attack the question: How is it that, out of all these constraints and factors, a reasonable decision can be made? That’s a tough one. It will require us to find good experimental paradigms and new techniques….(More)”.

Paper by Gabriela V. Angeles et al: “Road traffic accidents are among the principal causes of traffic congestion, causing human losses, damages to health and the environment, economic losses and material damages. Studies about traditional road traffic accidents in urban zones represents very high inversion of time and money, additionally, the result are not current.

However, nowadays in many countries, the crowdsourced GPS based traffic and navigation apps have emerged as an important source of information to low cost to studies of road traffic accidents and urban congestion caused by them. In this article we identified the zones, roads and specific time in the CDMX in which the largest number of road traffic accidents are concentrated during 2016. We built a database compiling information obtained from the social network known as Waze.

The methodology employed was Discovery of knowledge in the database (KDD) for the discovery of patterns in the accidents reports. Furthermore, using data mining techniques with the help of Weka. The selected algorithms was the Maximization of Expectations (EM) to obtain the number ideal of clusters for the data and k-means as a grouping method. Finally, the results were visualized with the Geographic Information System QGIS….(More)”.

Paper by Michael Haman: “The objective of this article is to analyze the results of the anti-corruption referendum in Colombia in 2018. Colombia is a country with a significant corruption problem. More than 99% of the voters who came to the polls voted in favor of the proposals. However, the anti-corruption referendum nonetheless failed because not enough citizens were mobilized to participate. The article addresses the reasons why turnout was very low…

Conclusions: I find that the more transparent a municipality, the higher the percentage of the municipal electorate that voted for proposals in the anti-corruption referendum. Moreover, I find that in municipalities where support for Sergio Fajardo in the presidential election was higher and support for Iván Duque was lower, support for the referendum proposals was higher. Also, turnout was lower in municipalities with higher poverty rates and higher homicide rates…(More)”.

Introduction to the Data Power Special Issue of Online Information Review by Ysabel Gerrard and Jo Bates : “…The Data Power Conference 2017, and by extension the seven papers in this Special Issue, addressed three questions:

1. How can we reclaim some form of data-based power and autonomy, and advance data-based technological citizenship, while living in regimes of data power?
2. Is it possible to regain agency and mobilise data for the common good? To do so, which theories help to interrogate and make sense of the operations of data power?
3. What kind of design frameworks are needed to build and deploy data-based technologies with values and ethics that are equitable and fair? How can big data be mobilised to improve how we live, beyond notions of efficiency and innovation?

These questions broadly emphasise the reclamation of power, retention of agency and ethics of data-based technologies, and they reflect a broader moment in recent data studies scholarship. While early critical research on “big data” – a term that captures the technologies, analytics and mythologies of increasingly large data sets (Boyd and Crawford, 2012) – could only hypothesise the inequalities and deepened forms discrimination that might emerge as data sets grew in volume, many of those predictions have now become real. The articles in this Special Issue ask pressing questions about data power at a time when we have learned that data are too frequently handled in a way that deepens social inequalities and injustices (amongst others, Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018).

The papers in this Special Issue approach discussions of inequality and injustice through three broad lenses: the tactics people use to confront unequal distributions of (data) power; the access to data that are most relevant and essential for particular social groups, coupled with the changing and uncertain legalities of data access; and the shaping of social relations by and through data, whether through the demands placed on app users to disclose more personal information, the use of data to construct cultures of compliance or through the very methodologies commonly used to organise and label information. While these three themes do not exhaustively capture the range of topics addressed in this Special Issue, at the Data Power Conferences, or within the field at large, they represent an emphasis within data studies scholarship on shedding light on the most pressing issues confronting our increasingly datafied world…(More)”.

Paper by Kevin E. Davis and Florencia Marotta-Wurgler: “Is contracting for the collection, use, and transfer of data like contracting for the sale of a horse or a car or licensing a piece of software? Many are concerned that conventional principles of contract law are inadequate when some consumers may not know or misperceive the full consequences of their transactions. Such concerns have led to proposals for reform that deviate significantly from general rules of contract law. However, the merits of these proposals rest in part on testable empirical claims.

We explore some of these claims using a hand-collected data set of privacy policies that dictate the terms of the collection, use, transfer, and security of personal data. We explore the extent to which those terms differ across markets before and after the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We find that compliance with the GDPR varies across markets in intuitive ways, indicating that firms take advantage of the flexibility offered by a contractual approach even when they must also comply with mandatory rules. We also compare terms offered to more and less sophisticated subjects to see whether firms may exploit information barriers by offering less favorable terms to more vulnerable subjects….(More)”.

Blog by Erin Barnes: “As an employer, I’m always looking for structural ways to support my team in their health and wellbeing. We know that individual health is so often tied to community health: strong communities mean, among other things, better health outcomes, reduced crime, and better education for our children, so making space for my team to be able to be active participants in their neighborhoods gives them and their families better health outcomes. So, from my perspective, allowing time to give back to the community is just as important as providing sick days.

When my cofounder Brandon Whitney and I started ioby — a nonprofit focused on building civic leadership in our neighborhoods — we wanted our internal organizational values to reflect our mission. For example, we’ve always given Election Day off, and Brandon created ioby’s Whole Person Policy inspired by the work of Parker Palmer. And a few years ago, after a series of high-profile killings of people of color by police made it difficult for many of our staff to feel fully present at work while also showing up for those in their community who were struggling with pain and grief, we decided to add an additional 5 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) for civic duty.

At ioby, a Civic Duty Day is not the same as jury duty. Civic Duty Days are designed to give ioby staff the time to do what we need to do to be active participants involved in everyday democracy. Activities can include neighborhood volunteering, get-out-the-vote volunteering, fundraising, self-care and community-care to respond to local and national emergencies, writing letters, meeting with local elected officials, making calls, going to a healing workshop, and personal health to recover from civic duty activities that fall on weekends.

A couple weeks ago, at a retreat with other nonprofit leaders, we were discussing structural ways to increase civic participation in the United States. Given that nearly 15% of Americans cite lack of time as their reason for not voting, and 75% of Americans cite it as their reason for not volunteering, employers can make a big difference in how Americans show up in public life.

I asked my team what sorts of things they’ve used Civic Duty Days for. In addition to the typical answers about park cleanups, phone banking, door knocking and canvassing, postcard writing, attending demonstrations like the Women’s March and the Climate Strike, I heard some interesting stories.

• One ioby staff person used her Civic Duty Days to attend Reverse Ride Alongs where she acts as a guide with cadets for the entire day. This program allows cadets to see the community they will be serving and for the community to have a voice in how they see policing and what ways best to be approached by new police officers.
• An ioby staff person used Civic Duty Days to attend trial for an activist who was arrested for protesting; this would have been impossible to attend otherwise since trials are often during the day.
• Another ioby staff person used his days to stay home with his kids while his wife attended demonstrations….(More)”

Paper by Greig Charnock, Hug March, Ramon Ribera-Fumaz: “This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after May 2015, by the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comú. We pay particular attention to the new council’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure technological sovereignty and digital rights for its citizens. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any urban revolution….(More)”.