Proliferation of Open Government Initiatives and Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ayse Kok: “As is true in most aspects of daily life, the expansion of government in the modern era has included a move to a technologically-based system. A method of evaluation for such online governing systems is necessary for effective political management worldwide.

Proliferation of Open Government Initiatives and Systems is an essential scholarly publication that analyzes open government data initiatives to evaluate the impact and value of such structures. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics including collaborative governance, civic responsibility, and public financial management, this publication is geared toward academicians and researchers seeking current, relevant research on the evaluation of open government data initiatives….(More)”.

Civic Technology: Open Data and Citizen Volunteers as a Resource for North Carolina Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by John B. Stephens: “Civic technology is an emergent area of practice where IT experts and citizens without specialized IT skills volunteer their time using government-provided open data to improve government services or otherwise create public benefit. Civic tech, as it is often referred to, draws on longer-standing practices, particularly e-government and civic engagement. It is also a new form of citizen–government co-production, building on the trend of greater government transparency.

This report is designed to help North Carolina local government leaders:

  • Define civic technology practices and describing North Carolina civic tech resources
  • Highlight accomplishments and ongoing projects in civic tech (in North Carolina and beyond)
  • Identify opportunities and challenges for North Carolina local governments in civic tech
  • Provide a set of resources for education and involvement in civic tech….(More)”.

Some new nonprofits take off, others flop – and nobody knows why

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in the Conversation: “Although entrepreneurially minded donors would benefit from expert guidance on how to spot the outfits most likely to succeed, there’s been virtually no research on this question. As a scholar focusing on how new nonprofits are founded and develop, I believe two shortcomings in how research regarding nonprofit startups gets done create this gap. And I believe that this problem stands in the way of figuring out why some new nonprofits thrive while others do not.

An obsession with success

Plenty of people like the notion of nonprofit entrepreneurship. This is not surprising, as much of what is said and written about this subjectcelebrates and spotlights success stories, and it’s human nature to revere achievement.

Success stories can certainly boost interest and excitement among nonprofit donors and other stakeholders. But what leads some nonprofit entrepreneurs to succeed and others to fail or just muddle along?

This is what academics call “selection bias” – paying attention to only one of many subsets rather than taking stock of them all. The Swedish entrepreneurship researcher Per Davidsson has eloquently illustrated why selection bias is a big deal with this paraphrased example:

Imagine that researchers want to investigate and isolate the factors that make gamblers successful. If they study only the gamblers who win all the time, they would reach the obviously false conclusion that gambling is always profitable…

Snapshot studies

A second shortcoming is the inclination to rely on research methods that investigate new nonprofits and the donors who fund them at a single point in time. One way that happens is that researchers rely on surveys that capture a nonprofit’s activities and accomplishments at a single juncture rather than over the course of months, years or decades.

But new nonprofits don’t just emerge out of nowhere. Creating and developing a thriving new nonprofit is a process, as I have explained in Nonprofit Management & Leadership, an academic journal.

Thus, distilling what makes new ventures prosper requires studying how they – and other nonprofits – evolve. Inevitably by their very nature, snapshot studies fail to explain how and why such changes take place.

Further, nonprofit studies seldom capture the earliest phases of new nonprofit activity, even though entrepreneurship and organizationalresearchers have argued what happens during these nascent stages shape organizations and have a long-lasting influence on them.

Consequently, those few scholars who actually try to look into startup dynamics rely on fleeting snapshots resort to asking founders or other key staff, board members and additional stakeholders about earlier events and actions long after they took place. But that approach is prone to another kind of error, memory distortion….(More)”.

Research reveals de-identified patient data can be re-identified

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Teague, Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein in PhysOrg: “In August 2016, Australia’s federal Department of Health published medical billing records of about 2.9 million Australians online. These records came from the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) containing 1 billion lines of historical health data from the records of around 10 per cent of the population.

These longitudinal records were de-identified, a process intended to prevent a person’s identity from being connected with information, and were made public on the government’s open data website as part of its policy on accessible public …

We found that patients can be re-identified, without decryption, through a process of linking the unencrypted parts of the  with known information about the individual.

Our findings replicate those of similar studies of other de-identified datasets:

  • A few mundane facts taken together often suffice to isolate an individual.
  • Some patients can be identified by name from publicly available information.
  • Decreasing the precision of the data, or perturbing it statistically, makes re-identification gradually harder at a substantial cost to utility.

The first step is examining a patient’s uniqueness according to medical procedures such as childbirth. Some individuals are unique given public information, and many patients are unique given a few basic facts, such as year of birth or the date a baby was delivered….

The second step is examining uniqueness according to the characteristics of commercial datasets we know of but cannot access directly. There are high uniqueness rates that would allow linking with a commercial pharmaceutical dataset, and with the billing data available to a bank. This means that ordinary people, not just the prominent ones, may be easily re-identifiable by their bank or insurance company…

These de-identification methods were bound to fail, because they were trying to achieve two inconsistent aims: the protection of individual privacy and publication of detailed individual records. De-identification is very unlikely to work for other rich datasets in the government’s care, like census data, tax records, mental health records, penal information and Centrelink data.

While the ambition of making more data more easily available to facilitate research, innovation and sound public policy is a good one, there is an important technical and procedural problem to solve: there is no good solution for publishing sensitive complex individual records that protects privacy without substantially degrading the usefulness of the data.

Some data can be safely published online, such as information about government, aggregations of large collections of material, or data that is differentially private. For sensitive, complex data about individuals, a much more controlled release in a secure research environment is a better solution. The Productivity Commission recommends a “trusted user” model, and techniques like dynamic consent also give patients greater control and visibility over their personal information….(More).

The Annual Review of Social Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open access) book edited by May Seitanidi and Verena Bitzer: “…written for and by cross-sector social partnership (CSSP) academics and practitioners focusing on nonprofit, business, and public sectors, who view collaboration as key to solving social problems such as climate change, economic inequality, poverty, or biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. Published by an independent group of academics and practitioners since 2006, the ARSP bridges academic theory and practice with ideas about promoting the social good, covering a wide range of subjects and geographies surrounding the interactions between nonprofit, business, and public sectors. Its aim is to inform, to share, to inspire, to educate, and to train. Building a global community of experts on CSSPs, be they from academic or practice, is the inherent motivation of the ARSP. The ARSP offers new directions for research, presents funded research projects, and provides published papers in a compilation, allowing researchers to familiarize themselves with the latest work in this field. The ARSP also captures and presents insights on partnerships from practitioners, enabling its readership to learn from the hands-on experiences and observations of those who work with and for partnerships….(More)”. Issues of the ARSP can be downloaded here.

Migration Data Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New portal managed and developed by IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC)“…aims to serve as a unique access point to timely, comprehensive migration statistics and reliable information about migration data globally. The site is designed to help policy makers, national statistics officers, journalists and the general public interested in the field of migration to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of international migration data, currently scattered across different organisations and agencies.

Especially in critical times, such as those faced today, it is essential to ensure that responses to migration are based on sound facts and accurate analysis. By making the evidence about migration issues accessible and easy to understand, the Portal aims to contribute to a more informed public debate….

The five main sections of the Portal are designed to help you quickly and easily find the data and information you need.

  • DATA – Our interactive world map visualizes international, publicly-available and internationally comparable migration data.
  • THEMES – Thematic overviews explain how various aspects of migration are measured, what are the data sources, their strengths and weaknesses and provide context and analysis of key migration data.
  • TOOLS – Migration data tools are regularly added to help you find the right tools, guidelines and manuals on how to collect, interpret and disseminate migration data.
  • Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) – Migration Data, the SDGs and the new Global Compact on Migration (GCM) – Reviews the migration-related targets in the SDGs, how they are defined and measured, and provides information on the new GCM and the migration data needs to support its implementation.
  • BLOG – Our blog and the Talking Migration Data video series provide a place for the migration data community to share their opinion on new developments and policy, new data or methods….(More)”.

From Territorial to Functional Sovereignty: The Case of Amazon

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Frank Pasquale: “…Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city, or establish special judicial procedures for Foxconn? Some vanguardists of functional sovereignty believe online rating systems could replace state occupational licensure—so rather than having government boards credential workers, a platform like LinkedIn could collect star ratings on them.

In this and later posts, I want to explain how this shift from territorial to functional sovereignty is creating a new digital political economy. Amazon’s rise is instructive. As Lina Khan explains, “the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it.” The “everything store” may seem like just another service in the economy—a virtual mall. But when a firm combines tens of millions of customers with a “marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house…a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space,” as Khan observes, it’s not just another shopping option.

Digital political economy helps us understand how platforms accumulate power. With online platforms, it’s not a simple narrative of “best service wins.” Network effects have been on the cyberlaw (and digital economics) agenda for over twenty years. Amazon’s dominance has exhibited how network effects can be self-reinforcing. The more merchants there are selling on (or to) Amazon, the better shoppers can be assured that they are searching all possible vendors. The more shoppers there are, the more vendors consider Amazon a “must-have” venue. As crowds build on either side of the platform, the middleman becomes ever more indispensable. Oh, sure, a new platform can enter the market—but until it gets access to the 480 million items Amazon sells (often at deep discounts), why should the median consumer defect to it? If I want garbage bags, do I really want to go over to Target.com to re-enter all my credit card details, create a new log-in, read the small print about shipping, and hope that this retailer can negotiate a better deal with Glad? Or do I, ala Sunstein, want a predictive shopping purveyor that intimately knows my past purchase habits, with satisfaction just a click away?
As artificial intelligence improves, the tracking of shopping into the Amazon groove will tend to become ever more rational for both buyers and sellers. Like a path through a forest trod ever clearer of debris, it becomes the natural default. To examine just one of many centripetal forces sucking money, data, and commerce into online behemoths, play out game theoretically how the possibility of online conflict redounds in Amazon’s favor. If you have a problem with a merchant online, do you want to pursue it as a one-off buyer? Or as someone whose reputation has been established over dozens or hundreds of transactions—and someone who can credibly threaten to deny Amazon hundreds or thousands of dollars of revenue each year? The same goes for merchants: The more tribute they can pay to Amazon, the more likely they are to achieve visibility in search results and attention (and perhaps even favor) when disputes come up. What Bruce Schneier said about security is increasingly true of commerce online: You want to be in the good graces of one of the neo-feudal giants who bring order to a lawless realm. Yet few hesitate to think about exactly how the digital lords might use their data advantages against those they ostensibly protect.

Forward-thinking legal thinkers are helping us grasp these dynamics. For example, Rory van Loo has described the status of the “corporation as courthouse”—that is, when platforms like Amazon run dispute resolution schemes to settle conflicts between buyers and sellers. Van Loo describes both the efficiency gains that an Amazon settlement process might have over small claims court, and the potential pitfalls for consumers (such as opaque standards for deciding cases). I believe that, on top of such economic considerations, we may want to consider the political economic origins of e-commerce feudalism. For example, as consumer rights shrivel, it’s rational for buyers to turn to Amazon (rather than overwhelmed small claims courts) to press their case. The evisceration of class actions, the rise of arbitration, boilerplate contracts—all these make the judicial system an increasingly vestigial organ in consumer disputes. Individuals rationally turn to online giants for powers to impose order that libertarian legal doctrine stripped from the state. And in so doing, they reinforce the very dynamics that led to the state’s etiolation in the first place….(More)”.

The Participatory Democracy Turn

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Laurence Bherer, Pascale Dufour, and Francoise Montambeault:”Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decision making processes in a variety of sectors around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Over the years, this participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups, as well as by governments. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation are participatory budgeting, citizen councils, public consultations, etc. However, these experiences are sometimes far from the original 1960s’ radical conception of participatory democracy, which had a transformative dimension and aimed to overcome unequal relationships between the state and society and emancipate and empower citizens in their daily lives.

This book addresses four sets of questions: what do participatory practices mean today?; what does it mean to participate for participants, from the perspective of citizenship building?; how the processes created by the participatory turn have affected the way political representation functions?; and does the participatory turn also mean changing relationships and dynamics among civil servants, political representatives, and citizens?

Overall, the contributions in this book illustrate and grasp the complexity of the so-called participatory turn. It shows that the participatory turn now includes several participatory democracy projects, which have different effects on the overall system depending on the principles that they advocate. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Civil Society….(More)”

The whys of social exclusion : insights from behavioral economics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Karla Hoff and James Sonam Walsh: “All over the world, people are prevented from participating fully in society through mechanisms that go beyond the structural and institutional barriers identified by rational choice theory (poverty, exclusion by law or force, taste-based and statistical discrimination, and externalities from social networks).

This essay discusses four additional mechanisms that bounded rationality can explain: (i) implicit discrimination, (ii) self-stereotyping and self-censorship, (iii) “fast thinking” adapted to underclass neighborhoods, and (iv)”adaptive preferences” in which an oppressed group views its oppression as natural or even preferred.

Stable institutions have cognitive foundations — concepts, categories, social identities, and worldviews — that function like lenses through which individuals see themselves and the world. Abolishing or reforming a discriminatory institution may have little effect on these lenses. Groups previously discriminated against by law or policy may remain excluded through habits of the mind. Behavioral economics recognizes forces of social exclusion left out of rational choice theory, and identifies ways to overcome them. Some interventions have had very consequential impact….(More)”.

Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Well-being with Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (A/IS)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethical guidelines from The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems: “As the use and impact of autonomous and intelligent systems (A/IS) become pervasive, we need to establish societal and policy guidelines in order for such systems to remain human-centric, serving humanity’s values and ethical principles. These systems have to behave in a way that is beneficial to people beyond reaching functional goals and addressing technical problems. This will allow for an elevated level of trust between people and technology that is needed for its fruitful, pervasive use in our daily lives.

To be able to contribute in a positive, non-dogmatic way, we, the techno-scientific communities, need to enhance our self-reflection, we need to have an open and honest debate around our imaginary, our sets of explicit or implicit values, our institutions, symbols and representations.

Eudaimonia, as elucidated by Aristotle, is a practice that defines human well-being as the highest virtue for a society. Translated roughly as “flourishing,” the benefits of eudaimonia begin by conscious contemplation, where ethical considerations help us define how we wish to live.

Whether our ethical practices are Western (Aristotelian, Kantian), Eastern (Shinto, Confucian), African (Ubuntu), or from a different tradition, by creating autonomous and intelligent systems that explicitly honor inalienable human rights and the beneficial values of their users, we can prioritize the increase of human well-being as our metric for progress in the algorithmic age. Measuring and honoring the potential of holistic economic prosperity should become more important than pursuing one-dimensional goals like productivity increase or GDP growth….(More)”.