Stefaan Verhulst

Guidance: “The Government Digital Service (GDS) and the Office for Artificial Intelligence (OAI) have published joint guidance on how to build and use artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector.

This guidance covers how:

• to assess if using AI will help you meet user needs
• the public sector can best use AI
• to implement AI ethically, fairly and safely…(More)”

Paper by Angela G. Winegar and Cass R. Sunstein: “Do consumers value data privacy? How much? In a survey of 2,416 Americans, we find that the median consumer is willing to pay just $5 per month to maintain data privacy (along specified dimensions), but would demand $80 to allow access to personal data. This is a “superendowment effect,” much higher than the 1:2 ratio often found between willingness to pay and willingness to accept. In addition, people demand significantly more money to allow access to personal data when primed that such data includes health-related data than when primed that such data includes demographic data. We analyze reasons for these disparities and offer some notations on their implications for theory and practice.

A general theme is that because of a lack of information and behavioral biases, both willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures are highly unreliable guides to the welfare effects of retaining or giving up data privacy. Gertrude Stein’s comment about Oakland, California may hold for consumer valuations of data privacy: “There is no there there.” For guidance, policymakers should give little or no attention to either of those conventional measures of economic value, at least when steps are not taken to overcome deficits in information and behavioral biases….(More)”.

Bvudzai Magadzire, Melissa West, Emily Lawrence, Julia Guerette & Barbara Jones-Singer at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: ” …At the core of our framework is the idea that solutions must exist within an “enabling context.” The enabling context comprises external conditions such as a country’s level of political stability, government independence, and economic prosperity. Each of these can have a major effect on whether a government entity succeeds in sustaining a solution after an NGO or private-sector partner exits. While these external factors are generally outside most organizations’ control, monitoring them can inform decisions about how to invest time and resources, with the aim of minimizing their negative impacts on a government’s ability to sustain projects.

We are using tools like the PESTLE framework to help identify external factors that could impact the success of programs, as well as reviewing resources from USAID, World Bank, World Health Organization, and other agencies to better understand the political, economic, and social context for transitioning solutions to our government partners. For instance, the government of Malawi has made high-level political commitments to support maternal, adolescent, and child health, but as a low-income country, it has limited funds to spend on health. Thus, reducing costs is critical. VillageReach initially developed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the telecommunications provider Airtel—one of two major mobile service providers in Malawi. Since signing the MOU in 2015, Airtel has covered all incoming call and promotional text costs of the hotline, allowing callers to call CCPF for free from any Airtel phone. The government is now managing the MOU with Airtel as part of the transition process.

As organizations assess a social solution’s readiness for transition to government, they should consider both the external environment and each of the solution elements. (Illustration by The Medium)

The second tier of our framework combines all the elements integral to a solution’s success that (unlike the enabling context) are within the control of an implementing organization. We call this the “integrated solution,” and it has six elements:

• Solution design: This includes standard operating procedures, guidelines, templates, and job and skill descriptions needed to manage and operate the solution. We are developing a toolkit specifically to support the government in managing CCPF.
• Resource availability: This includes the financial and human resources, as well as infrastructure like buildings and equipment, needed to transition, operate, and maintain the solution. For CCPF, we are supporting the development of a memorandum of understanding between the government and the telecommunications provider Airtel to ensure that the company continues to cover the costs of calls to the hotline.
• Financial management: This covers developing and managing budgets, estimating and managing costs, and disbursing funds in a timely fashion. This process has been important for understanding exactly which budgets need what amount of funds to ensure that operations continue.
• Government strategy: This includes sector (in our case, health-sector) and related government strategies that support the solution’s transition, operation, and maintenance. For CCPF, we needed to ensure that these aligned with Malawi’s broader strategic plan for the health sector.
• Policy and regulatory strategies: These are laws and regulations that affect the solution’s transition, operation, and maintenance. For CCPF, we needed to ensure that the cadre of hotline workers fit into government staffing protocols and that we could legally share certain types of health information with callers.
• Organizational structure: This includes managerial roles and responsibilities, management effectiveness, and governance. CCPF established a steering committee to help maintain alignment and accountability.

Organizations should evaluate and plan for the enabling context and integrated solution concurrently—ideally prior to or early on in the process of developing their solution, and periodically throughout its life….(More)”

Nick Paumgarten at the New Yorker: “…Parcak is a pioneer in the use of remote sensing, via satellite, to find and map potential locations that would otherwise be invisible to us. Variations in the chemical composition of the earth reveal the ghost shadows of ancient walls and citadels, watercourses and planting fields. The nifty kid-friendly name for all this is “archeology from space,” which also happens to be the title of Parcak’s new book. That’s a bit of a misnomer, because, technically, the satellites in question are in the mid-troposphere, and also the archeology still happens on, or under, the ground. In spite of the whiz-bang abracadabra of the multispectral imagery, Parcak is, at heart, a shovel bum…..Another estimate of Parcak’s, based on satellite data: there are roughly fifty million unmapped archeological sites around the world. Many, if not most, will be gone or corrupted by 2040, she says, the threats being not just looting but urban development, illegal construction, and climate change. In 2016, Parcak won the ted Prize, a grant of a million dollars; she used it to launch a project called GlobalXplorer, a crowdsourcing platform, by which citizen Indiana Joneses can scrutinize satellite maps and identify potential new sites, adding these to a database without publicly revealing the coördinates. The idea is to deploy more eyeballs (and, ultimately, more benevolent shovel bums) in the race against carbon and greed….(More)”.

Paper by Timo Minssen, Rajam N. and Marcel Bogers: “Recent EU initiatives and legislations have considerably increased public access to clinical trials data (CTD). These developments are generally much welcomed for the enhancement of science, trust, and open innovation. However, they also raise many questions and concerns, not least at the interface between CTD transparency and other areas of evolving EU law on the protection of trade secrets, intellectual property rights and privacy.

This paper focuses on privacy issues and on the interrelation between developments in transparency and the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR). More specifically, this paper examines: (1) the genesis of EU transparency regulations, including the incidents, developments and policy concerns that have shaped them; (2) the features and implications of the GDPR which are relevant in the context of clinical trials; and (3) the risk for tensions between the GDPR and the policy goals of CTD transparency, including their implications for data sharing and open innovation. Ultimately, we stress that these and other related factors must be carefully considered and addressed to reap the full benefits of CTD transparency….(More)”.

Paper by Bissera Zankova: “The purpose of the study is to analyze the role of social media to boost democratic citizenship and contribute to the creation of smart environment through the perspective of direct democracy in Bulgaria. The issue of “smart cities” will be tackled from a broader media and communication perspective. The term “smart city” does not denote the symbiosis between urban development and new information technologies only but it signifies a new vibrant social ecology rooted in the thorough use of the Internet for wider democratic participation. As a theoretical basis of my survey I shall use Dewey’s model of the inherent bond between communication and enlightened citizenry and Robert Putnam’s theory about the social capital facilitated by social networks generating trust and solidarity among community members. As a case study I shall dwell on local democracy and particularly on two recent referendums in Bulgaria (2017) – in the cities of Tran and Stara Zagora, their basic premises, claims, organization, social media use, outcomes and impact. Though not mandatory for the governing bodies the referendums’ results demonstrated the level of social activity in the country underpinned by networks. Democracy should be understood best through the Abraham Lincoln’s centuries-cherished metaphor as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. In the current research I build on a previous investigation done in 2013 on civic journalism, blogs and protests in Bulgaria and on my contribution to the book “Smart journalism” (Zankova, Skolkay, Franklin (2016), presenting findings from the New Media Literacy Project 2012 – 2014. This interdisciplinary paper will be useful for both academics and practitioners and specifically for media specialists who will get knowledge about the state of direct democracy in a new democratic country in SEE, new media non/ contribution to this state and what the necessary conditions are to make this democracy really workable at a community level to turn the cities into future-oriented democratic centres….(More)”

Chapter by Francisco Luis Benítez Martínez, María Visitación Hurtado Torres and Esteban Romero Frías: “Currently Distributed Ledger Technologies-DLTs, and especially the Blockchain technology, are an excellent opportunity for public institutions to transform the channels of citizen participation and reinvigorate democratic processes. These technologies permit the simplification of processes and make it possible to safely and securely manage the data stored in its records. This guarantees the transmission and public transparency of information, and thus leads to the development of a new citizen governance model by using technology such as a BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) platform. G-Cloud solutions would facilitate a faster deployment in the cities and provide scalability to foster the creation of Smart Citizens within the philosophy of Open Government. The development of an eParticipation model that can configure a tokenizable system of the actions and processes that citizens currently exercise in democratic environments is an opportunity to guarantee greater participation and thus manage more effective local democratic spaces. Therefore, a Blockchain solution in eDemocracy platforms is an exciting new opportunity to claim a new pattern of management amongst the agents that participate in the public sphere….(More)”.

Blog by Jim Nelson: “The idea is that web sites will verify you much as a bartender checks your ID before pouring a drink.  The bar doesn’t store a copy of your card and the bartender doesn’t look at your name or address; only your age is pertinent to receive service.  The next time you enter the bar the bartender once again asks for proof of age, which you may or may not relinquish. That’s the promise of self-sovereign identity.

At the Decentralized Web Summit, questions and solutions were bounced around in the hopes of solving this fundamental problem.  Developers spearheading the next web hashed out the criteria for decentralized identity, including:

• secure: to prevent fraud, maintain privacy, and ensure trust between all parties
• self-sovereign: individual ownership of private information
• consent: fine-tuned control over what information third-parties are privy to
• directed identity: manage multiple identities for different contexts (for example, your doctor can access certain aspects while your insurance company accesses others)
• and, of course, decentralized: no central authority or governing body holds private keys or generates identifiers

One problem with decentralized identity is that these problems often compete, pulling in polar directions.

For example, while security seems like a no-brainer, with self-sovereign identity the end-user is in control (and not Facebook, Google, or Twitter).  It’s incumbent on them to secure their information. This raises questions of key management, data storage practices, and so on. Facebook, Google, and Twitter pay full-time engineers to do this job; handing that responsibility to end-users shifts the burden to someone who may not be so technically savvy.  The inconvenience of key management and such also creates more hurdles for widespread adoption of the decentralized web.

The good news is, there are many working proposals today attempting to solve the above problems.  One of the more promising is DID (Decentralized Identifier).

A DID is simply a URI, a familiar piece of text to most people nowadays.  Each DID references a record stored in a blockchain. DIDs are not tied to any particular blockchain, and so they’re interoperable with existing and future technologies.  DIDs are cryptographically secure as well.

DIDs require no central authority to produce or validate.  If you want a DID, you can generate one yourself, or as many was you want.  In fact, you should generate lots of them.  Each unique DID gives the user fine-grained control over what personal information is revealed when interacting with a myriad of services and people.

If you’re interested to learn more, I recommend reading Michiel Mulders’ article on DIDs, “the Internet’s ‘missing identity layer’.”  The DID working technical specification is being developed by the W3C.  And those looking for code and community, check out the Decentralized Identity Foundation…(More)”.

Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times: “…Where the conflation of the expert and the policymaker did real damage was not to policy but to expertdom itself. It compromised the experts’ most prized asset — their independence.

When economics blogging started to become fashionable, I sat on a podium with an academic blogger who predicted that people like him would usurp the role of the economics newspaper columnist within a period of 10 years. That was a decade ago. His argument was that trained economists were just smarter. What he did not reckon with is that it is hard to speak truth to power when you have to beg that power to fund your think-tank or institute. E

ven less so once you are politically attached or appointed. Independence matters. A good example of a current issue where lack of independence gets in the way is the debate on cryptocurrencies. I agree that governments should not lightly concede the money monopoly of the state, which is at the heart of our economic system. But I sometimes wonder whether those who hyperventilate about crypto do so because they find the whole concept offensive. Cryptocurrencies embody a denial of economics. There are no monetary policy committees. Cryptocurrencies may, or may not, damage the economy. But they surely damage the economist.

Even the best arguments lose power when they get mixed up with personal interests. If you want to be treated as an independent authority, do not join a policy committee, or become a minister or central banker. As soon as you do, you have changed camps. You may think of yourself as an expert. The rest of the world does not. The minimum needed to maintain or regain credibility is to state conflicts of interests openly. The only option in such cases is to be transparent. This is also why financial journalists have to declare the shares they own. The experts I listen to are those who are independent, and who do not follow a political agenda. The ones I avoid are the zealots and those who wander off their reservation and make pronouncements without inhibition. An economist may have strong views on the benefits of vaccination, for example, but is still no expert on the subject. And I often cringe when I hear a doctor trying to prove a point by using statistics. The world will continue to need policymakers and the experts who advise them. But more than that, it needs them to be independent….(More)”.

Christopher Beam at MIT Technology Review: “In 2013, police in Grants Pass, Oregon, got a tip that a man named Curtis W. Croft had been illegally growing marijuana in his backyard. So they checked Google Earth. Indeed, the four-month-old satellite image showed neat rows of plants growing on Croft’s property. The cops raided his place and seized 94 plants.

In 2018, Brazilian police in the state of Amapá used real-time satellite imagery to detect a spot where trees had been ripped out of the ground. When they showed up, they discovered that the site was being used to illegally produce charcoal, and arrested eight people in connection with the scheme.

Chinese government officials have denied or downplayed the existence of Uighur reeducation camps in Xinjiang province, portraying them as “vocational schools.” But human rights activists have used satellite imagery to show that many of the “schools” are surrounded by watchtowers and razor wire.

Every year, commercially available satellite images are becoming sharper and taken more frequently. In 2008, there were 150 Earth observation satellites in orbit; by now there are 768. Satellite companies don’t offer 24-hour real-time surveillance, but if the hype is to be believed, they’re getting close. Privacy advocates warn that innovation in satellite imagery is outpacing the US government’s (to say nothing of the rest of the world’s) ability to regulate the technology. Unless we impose stricter limits now, they say, one day everyone from ad companies to suspicious spouses to terrorist organizations will have access to tools previously reserved for government spy agencies. Which would mean that at any given moment, anyone could be watching anyone else.

The images keep getting clearer

Commercial satellite imagery is currently in a sweet spot: powerful enough to see a car, but not enough to tell the make and model; collected frequently enough for a farmer to keep tabs on crops’ health, but not so often that people could track the comings and goings of a neighbor. This anonymity is deliberate. US federal regulations limit images taken by commercial satellites to a resolution of 25 centimeters, or about the length of a man’s shoe….(More)”.