Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Richard M. Re and Alicia Solow-Niederman: “Artificial intelligence, or AI, promises to assist, modify, and replace human decision-making, including in court. AI already supports many aspects of how judges decide cases, and the prospect of “robot judges” suddenly seems plausible—even imminent. This Article argues that AI adjudication will profoundly affect the adjudicatory values held by legal actors as well as the public at large. The impact is likely to be greatest in areas, including criminal justice and appellate decision-making, where “equitable justice,” or discretionary moral judgment, is frequently considered paramount. By offering efficiency and at least an appearance of impartiality, AI adjudication will both foster and benefit from a turn toward “codified justice,” an adjudicatory paradigm that favors standardization above discretion. Further, AI adjudication will generate a range of concerns relating to its tendency to make the legal system more incomprehensible, data-based, alienating, and disillusioning. And potential responses, such as crafting a division of labor between human and AI adjudicators, each pose their own challenges. The single most promising response is for the government to play a greater role in structuring the emerging market for AI justice, but auspicious reform proposals would borrow several interrelated approaches. Similar dynamics will likely extend to other aspects of government, such that choices about how to incorporate AI in the judiciary will inform the future path of AI development more broadly….(More)”.

Beth Noveck at apolitical: “So how do we develop these better ways of working in government? How do we create a more effective public service?

Governments, universities and philanthropies are beginning to invest in training those inside and outside of government in new kinds of public entrepreneurial skills. They are also innovating in how they teach.

Canada has created a new Digital Academy to teach digital literacy to all 250,000 public servants. Among other approaches, they have created a 15 minute podcast series called bus rides to enable public servants to learn on their commute.

The better programs, like Canada’s, combine online and face-to-face methods. This is what Israel does in its Digital Leaders program. This nine-month program alternates between web- and live meetings as well as connecting learners to a global, online network of digital innovators.

Many countries have started to teach human-centred design to public servants, instructing officials in how to design services with, not simply for the public, as WeGov does in Brazil. in Chile, the UAI University has just begun teaching quantitative skills, offering three day intensives in data science for public servants.

The GovLab also offers a nifty, free online program called Solving Public Problems with Data.

The Public sector learning

To ensure that learning translates into practice, Australia’s BizLab Academy, turns students into teachers by using alumni of their human-centred design training as mentors for new students.

The Cities of Orlando and Sao Paulo go beyond training public servants. Orlando includes members of the public in its training program for city officials. Because they are learning to redesign services with citizens, the public participates in the training.

The Sao Paulo Abierta program uses citizens as trainers for the city’s public servants. Over 23,000 of them have studied with these lay trainers, who possess the innovation skills that are in short supply in government. In fact, public officials are prohibited from teaching in the program altogether.

Image from the ten recommendations for training public entrepreneurs. Read all the recommendations here. 

Recognising that it is not enough to train only a lone innovator or data scientist in a unit, governments are scaling their programs across the public sector.

Argentina’s LabGob has already trained 30,000 people since 2016 in its Design Academy for Public Policy with plans to expand. For every class taken, a public servant earns points, which are a prerequisite for promotions and pay raises in the Argentinian civil service.

Rather than going broad, some training programs are going deep by teaching sector-specific innovation skills. The NHS Digital Academy done in collaboration with Imperial College is a series of six online and four live sessions designed to produce leaders in health innovation.

Innovating in a bureaucracy

In my own work at the GovLab at New York University, we are helping public entrepreneurs take their public interest projects from idea to implementation using coaching, rather than training.

Training classes may be wonderful but leave people feeling abandoned when they return to their desks to face the challenge of innovating within a bureaucracy.

With hands-on mentoring from global leaders and peer-to-peer support, the GovLab Academycoaching programs try to ensure that public servants are getting the help they need to advance innovative projects.

Knowing what innovation skills to teach and how to teach them, however, should depend on asking people what they want. That’s why the Australia New Zealand School of Government is administering a survey asking these questions for public servants there….(More)”.

About: “Whether we work within schools or as part of the broader ecosystem of parent-teacher associations, and philanthropic, nonprofit, and volunteer organizations, we need data to guide decisions about investing our time and resources.

This data is typically expensive to gather, often unvalidated (e.g. self-reported), and commonly available only to those who collect or report it. It can even be hard to ask for data when it’s not clear what’s available. At the same time, information – in the form of discrete research, report-card style PDFs, or static websites – is everywhere. The result is that many already resource-thin organizations that could be collaborating around strategies to help kids advance, spend a lot of time in isolation collecting and searching for data.

In the past decade, we’ve seen solid progress in addressing part of the problem: the emergence of connected longitudinal data systems (LDS). These warehouses and  linked databases contain data that can help us understand how students progress over time. No personally identifiable information (or PII) is shared, yet the data can reveal where interventions are most needed. Because these systems are typically designed for researchers and policy professionals, they are rarely accessible to the educators, parents, and partners – arts, sports, academic enrichment (e.g. STEM), mentoring, and family support programs – that play such important roles in helping young people learn and succeed…

“We need open tools for the ecosystem – parents, volunteers, non-profit organizations and the foundations and agencies that support them. These partners can realize significant benefit from the same kind of data policy makers and education leaders hold in their LDS.

That’s why we’re launching the Education Data Collaborative. Working together, we can build tools that help us use data to improve the design, efficacy, and impact of programs and interventions and find new  way to work with public education systems to achieve great things for kids. …Data collaboratives, data trusts, and other kinds of multi-sector data partnerships are among the most important civic innovations to emerge in the past decade….(More)”

Jennifer Harris in Democracy. A Journal of Ideas: “…Today’s new ideas are just beginnings. Hence the need for philanthropic investment. One challenge is to get academics to work differently. In Hayek and Friedman’s day, creating beachheads at places like the University of Chicago and George Mason was necessary in part because the academy was fairly hostile to their ideas. Today’s situation is more one of distraction and benign neglect than outright hostility; the question is whether the most promising academics can reject pressures of over-specialization in favor of asking bigger questions, and can come to see themselves as part of a common project spanning relevant disciplines. Against this task, the role for philanthropy is less straightforward than financing a critical mass of endowed chairs at a couple of well-chosen universities.

Developing new ideas is only one front in this movement. If developing ideas is difficult, moving them in the world is more so, partly because it means contending with the power structures underpinning neoliberalism. Historians like Angus Burgin and Quinn Slobodian explain how neoliberalism’s rise was ultimately a marriage between libertarian intellectuals, big business, and white evangelicals. The amalgam that resulted was generous enough for each faction to take what suited their purposes and largely ignore the rest.

Upsetting this coalition will involve creating immediate stakes for what can often feel like abstract ideas. This is where social movement and grassroots organizing groups come in. Yet these groups are the first to admit, returning to Michael Shuman, that “Too little is being invested today in answering a fundamental question: What exactly are we organizing for? Many of our pat ‘answers’ are obsolete…. One unanswered question looming large, for example, is how to provide decent work to everyone without destroying our ecological base. Can anyone say, with confidence, what our economic program is?”

It’s not difficult to make out what these groups are against—consider the array of campaigns targeting the predatory behaviors of Wall Street or specific corporations. To the extent that campaigns do have affirmative aims, they tend to be for better minimums—the Fight for $15, for example, or paid sick days. To be sure, this is critical work and should continue. But these fights do not add up to, nor derive from, any coherent answer to neoliberalism.

Such is partly the nature of campaigning; outrage mobilizes. But at least part of the blame also falls on philanthropy—the foundations that tend to invest most heavily in economic and social justice work tend to support specific campaigns. There is too little focus on building power, and too little focus on ideas.

Arguably the lack of focus on ideas also partly stems from the fact that it has traditionally not been seen as the competency of these groups to be the idea generators. But that seems increasingly less true: The current push for reparations probably would not be mainstream if not for the Movement for Black Lives, just as teachers strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and elsewhere are breathing new life into the labor movement.

There is much to learn from the wisdom of angry crowds in America today, it seems. And philanthropy is well situated to help bring about a new set of relationships linking organizers and activists and academics. Through thoughtful funding of post-graduate career paths, it might even be possible to generate a new mold of organizer, who is some blend of the two. Take Ady Barkan, called the “most powerful activist in America.” Barkan studied social movements in college and law school, and went on to found Fed Up, a campaign premised on three insights: one, the Federal Reserve wields far more power over the economic well-being of the country than does any other single institution, including Congress; two, partly for that reason, monetary policy should be a topic of political discourse; three, the rules of the economy have sufficiently changed that it is possible to allow for much more expansionary monetary policy than most economists have advocated, without nearly the same risk of inflation. Affirmative, structural campaigns of this sort—ones that target key institutions of power and rewrite the rules over how the economy is managed—are possible.

But they are not easy. It is safe to assume they would be easier with less uniform opposition from the business community. There are rumblings of a new willingness to depart from the highly partisan, staunchly conservative activism business has adopted over the past four decades. The ultimate test of whether these rumblings amount to anything will likely center on business itself—specifically, on whether business is willing to dispense with one of neoliberalism’s most insidious ideas: shareholder primacy. There is an emerging policy agenda importantly grounded in the notion that “Corporations are creatures of public permission,” as economist Lenore Palladino has put it. And “The privileges granted to large corporations are just that—privileges—not rights, and they are granted by the government so that corporations can accomplish public purposes that otherwise would be hard to meet.”

Not least, any worthy successor to neoliberalism must involve a moral dimension. The most important periods of social and political struggle have always fought not just over who should have power, but over which ideas about morality should dominate. In the late twentieth century, as market logic pervaded more and more spheres of human life and became fused to moral arguments about freedom, markets assumed a moral force of their own. As this happened, other ideas about morality not tethered to markets receded. A course-correction may be brewing, though. “We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules,” one prominent observer wrote recently. “We made the market its own priest and confessor.” Another put it this way: “The first thing we must recognize, is that economic justice is a moral issue. And economics can’t be separated from moral questions. It was never intended that way.”

The first quote belongs to conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, and the second to Rev. William Barber II, leader of the Poor People’s Campaign—lending weight to the notion that some of the best arguments against market fundamentalism today are moral ones, and they are found on both the right and the left.

All of this adds up to a pretty different picture of philanthropy. We need foundations willing to try something different than issue-specific programs. We need to invest in institutions and individuals—academics, think tanks, movement actors, business leaders, moral and religious figures—willing to prioritize ideas over policy, and willing to see themselves as part of a common project….(More)”

Polly Curtis in the Financial Times: “…We once believed in utopian dreams about how a digital world would challenge power structures, democratise information and put power into the hands of the audience. Twenty years ago, I even wrote a university dissertation on how the internet was going to re-democratise society.

Two decades on, power structures have certainly been disrupted, but that utopianism has now crashed into a different reality: a growing and largely unrecognised crisis of the “unnewsed” population. The idea of the unnewsed stems from the concept of the “unbanked”, people who are dispossessed of the structures of society that depend on having a bank account.

Not having news does the same for you in a democratic system. It is a global problem. In parts of the developing world the digital divide is defined by the cost of data, often splitting between rural and urban, and in some places male control of mobile phones exacerbates the disenfranchisement of women. Even in the affluent west, where data is cheap and there are more sim cards than people, that digital divide exists. In the US the concept of “news deserts”, communities with no daily local news outlet, is well established.

Last week, the Reuters Digital News Report, an annual survey of the digital news habits of 75,000 people in 38 countries, reported that 32 per cent now actively avoid the news — avoidance is up 6 percentage points overall and 11 points in the UK. When I dug into other data on news consumption, from the UK communications regulator Ofcom, I found that those who claim not to follow any news are younger, less educated, have lower incomes and are less likely to be in work than those who do. We don’t like to talk about it, but news habits are closely aligned to something that looks very like class. How people get their news explains some of this — and demonstrates the class divide in access to information.

Research by Oxford university’s Reuters Institute last year found that there is greater social inequality in news consumption online than offline. Whereas on average we all use the same number of news sources offline, those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale use significantly fewer sources online. Even the popular tabloids, with their tradition of campaigning news for mass audiences, now have higher social class readers online than in print. Instead of democratising information, there is a risk that the digital revolution is exacerbating gaps in news habits….(More)”.

Paper by Katharina Hölscher et al: “The narrative of urban sustainability transformations epitomises the hope that urban governance can create the conditions to plan and govern cities in a way that they contribute to local and global sustainability and resilience. So far, urban governance is not delivering: novel governance approaches are emerging in cities worldwide, yet are unable to transform conventional policymaking and planning to allow for innovative, co-beneficial and long-term solutions and actions to emerge and institutionalise. We present a capacities framework for urban transformations governance, starting from the need to fulfil distinct output functions (‘what needs to happen’) for mobilising and influencing urban transformation dynamics. The framework helps to diagnose and inform urban governance for responding to disturbances (stewarding capacity), phasing-out drivers of path-dependency (unlocking capacity), creating and embedding novelties (transformative capacity) and coordinating multi-actor processes (orchestrating capacity). Our case study of climate governance in New York City exemplifies the framework’s applicability and explanatory power to identify conditions and activities facilitating transformation (governance), and to reveal gaps and barriers of these vis-à-vis the existing governance regime. Our framework thereby functions as a tool to explore what new forms of urban transformation governance are emerging, how effective these are, and how to strengthen capacities….(More)”.

Laura Bacon at Luminate:: “Our global philanthropic organisation – previously the Government & Citizen Engagement (GCE) initiative at Omidyar Network, now Luminate – has been active in the open data space for over decade. In that time, we have invested more than $50m in organisations and platforms that are working to advance open data’s potential, including Open Data Institute, IMCO, Open Knowledge, ITS Rio, Sunlight, GovLab, Web Foundation, Open Data Charter, and Open Government Partnership.

Ahead of our transition from GCE to Luminate last year, we wanted to take a step back and assess the field in order to cultivate a richer understanding of the evolution of open data—including its critical developments, drivers of change, and influential actors[1]. This research would help inform our own strategy and provide valuable insight that we can share with the broader open data ecosystem. 

First, what is open data? Open data is data that can be freely used, shared, and built-upon by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. At its best, open government data can empower citizens, improve governments, create opportunities, and help solve public problems. Have you used a transport app to find out when the next bus will arrive? Or a weather app to look up a forecast? When using a real estate website to buy or rent a home, have you also reviewed its proximity to health, education, and recreational facilities or checked out neighborhood crime rates? If so, your life has been impacted by open data. 

The Open Data Retrospective

We commissioned Dalberg, a global strategic advisory firm, to conduct an Open Data Retrospective to explore: ‘how and why did the open data field evolve globally over the past decade?’ as well as ‘where is the field today?’ With the concurrent release of the report “The State of Open Data” – led by IDRC and Open Data for Development initiative – we thought this would be a great time to make public the report we’d commissioned. 

You can see Dalberg’s open data report here, and its affiliated data here. Please note, this presentation is a modification of the report. Several sections and slides have been removed for brevity and/or confidentiality. Therefore, some details about particular organisations and strategies are not included in this deck.

Evolution and impact

Dalberg’s report covers the trajectory of the open data field and characterised it as: inception (pre-2008), systematisation (2009-2010), expansion (2011-2015), and reevaluation (2016-2018).This characterisation varies by region and sector, but generally captures the evolution of the open data movement….(More)”.

Paper by Richard Heeks et al: “The role of data within international development is rapidly expanding. However, the recency of this phenomenon means analysis has been lagging; particularly, analysis of broader impacts of real-world initiatives. Addressing this gap through a focus on data’s increasing presence in urban development, this paper makes two contributions. First – drawing from the emerging literature on ‘data justice’ – it presents an explicit, systematic and comprehensive new framework that can be used for analysis of datafication. Second, it applies the framework to four mapping initiatives in cities of the global South. These initiatives capture and visualise new data about marginalised communities: residents living in slums and other informal settlements about whom data has traditionally been lacking. Analysing across procedural, rights, instrumental and structural dimensions, it finds these initiatives deliver real incremental gains for their target communities. But it is external actors and wealthier communities that gain more; thus, increasing relative inequality….(More)”.

Book edited by Jonathan Mendilow and Éric Phélippeau: “This book argues that the mainstream definitions of corruption, and the key expectations they embed concerning the relationship between corruption, democracy, and the process of democratization, require reexamination. Even critics who did not consider stable institutions and legal clarity of veteran democracies as a cure-all, assumed that the process of widening the influence on government decision making and implementation allows non-elites to defend their interests, define the acceptable sources and uses of wealth, and demand government accountability. This had proved correct, especially insofar as ‘petty corruption’ is involved. But the assumption that corruption necessarily involves the evasion of democratic principles and a ‘market approach’ in which the corrupt seek to maximize profit does not exhaust the possible incentives for corruption, the types of behaviors involved (for obvious reasons, the tendency in the literature is to focus on bribery), or the range of situations that ‘permit’ corruption in democracies. In the effort to identify some of the problems that require recognition, and to offer a more exhaustive alternative, the chapters in this book focus on corruption in democratic settings (including NGOs and the United Nations which were largely so far ignored), while focusing mainly on behaviors other than bribery….(More)”.

Report of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation: “The immense power and value of data in the modern economy can and must be harnessed to meet the SDGs, but this will require new models of collaboration. The Panel discussed potential pooling of data in areas such as health, agriculture and the environment to enable scientists and thought leaders to use data and artificial intelligence to better understand issues and find new ways to make progress on the SDGs. Such data commons would require criteria for establishing relevance to the SDGs, standards for interoperability, rules on access and safeguards to ensure privacy and security.

Anonymised data – information that is rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is not or no longer identifiable – about progress toward the SDGs is generally less sensitive and controversial than the use of personal data of the kind companies such as Facebook, Twitter or Google may collect to drive their business models, or facial and gait data that could be used for surveillance. However, personal data can also serve development goals, if handled with proper oversight to ensure its security and privacy.

For example, individual health data is extremely sensitive – but many people’s health data, taken together, can allow researchers to map disease outbreaks, compare the effectiveness of treatments and improve understanding of conditions. Aggregated data from individual patient cases was crucial to containing the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Private and public sector healthcare providers around the world are now using various forms of electronic medical records. These help individual patients by making it easier to personalise health services, but the public health benefits require these records to be interoperable.

There is scope to launch collaborative projects to test the interoperability of data, standards and safeguards across the globe. The World Health Assembly’s consideration of a global strategy for digital health in 2020 presents an opportunity to launch such projects, which could initially be aimed at global health challenges such as Alzheimer’s and hypertension.

Improved digital cooperation on a data-driven approach to public health has the potential to lower costs, build new partnerships among hospitals, technology companies, insurance providers and research institutes and support the shift from treating diseases to improving wellness. Appropriate safeguards are needed to ensure the focus remains on improving health care outcomes. With testing, experience and necessary protective measures as well as guidelines for the responsible use of data, similar cooperation could emerge in many other fields related to the SDGs, from education to urban planning to agriculture…(More)”.