Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ilan Manor: “This book addresses how digitalization has influenced the institutions, practitioners and audiences of diplomacy. Throughout, the author argues that terms such as ‘digitalized public diplomacy’ or ‘digital public diplomacy’ are misleading, as they suggest that Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) are either digital or non-digital, when in fact digitalization should be conceptualized as a long-term process in which the values, norms, working procedures and goals of public diplomacy are challenged and re-defined. Subsequently, through case study examination, this book also argues that different MFAs are at different stages of the digitalization process. By adopting the term ‘the digitalization of public diplomacy’, this book will offer a new conceptual framework for investigating the impact of digitalization on the practice of public diplomacy….(More)”.

Conference Paper by Fariha Tasmin Jaigirdar, Carsten Rudolph, and Chris Bain: “With the increasing advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled systems, smart medical devices open numerous opportunities for the healthcare sector. The success of using such devices in the healthcare industry depends strongly on secured and reliable medical data transmission. Physicians diagnose that data and prescribe medicines and/or give guidelines/instructions/treatment plans for the patients. Therefore, a physician is always concerned about the medical data trustworthiness, because if it is not guaranteed, a savior can become an involuntary foe! This paper analyses two different scenarios to understand the real-life consequences in IoT-based healthcare (IoT-Health) application. Appropriate sequence diagrams for both scenarios show data movement as a basis for determining necessary security requirements in each layer of IoT-Health.

We analyse the individual entities of the overall system and develop a system-wide view of trust in IoT-Health. The security analysis pinpoints the research gap in end-to-end trust and indicates the necessity to treat the whole IoT-Health system as an integrated entity. This study highlights the importance of integrated cross-layer security solutions that can deal with the heterogeneous security architectures of IoT healthcare system and finally identifies a possible solution for the open question raised in the security analysis with appropriate future research directions….(More)”.

Book by Daniel T. O’Brien: “The future of smart cities has arrived, courtesy of citizens and their phones. To prove it, Daniel T. O’Brien explains the transformative insights gleaned from years researching Boston’s 311 reporting system, a sophisticated city management tool that has revolutionized how ordinary Bostonians use and maintain public spaces. Through its phone service, mobile app, website, and Twitter account, 311 catalogues complaints about potholes, broken street lights, graffiti, litter, vandalism, and other issues that are no one citizen’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life. The Urban Commons offers a pioneering model of what modern digital data and technology can do for cities like Boston that seek both prosperous growth and sustainability.

Analyzing a rich trove of data, O’Brien discovers why certain neighborhoods embrace the idea of custodianship and willingly invest their time to monitor the city’s common environments and infrastructure. On the government’s side of the equation, he identifies best practices for implementing civic technologies that engage citizens, for deploying public services in collaborative ways, and for utilizing the data generated by these efforts.

Boston’s 311 system has narrowed the gap between residents and their communities, and between constituents and local leaders. The result, O’Brien shows, has been the creation of more effective policy and practices that reinvigorate the way citizens and city governments approach their mutual interests. By unpacking when, why, and how the 311 system has worked for Boston, The Urban Commons reveals the power and potential of this innovative system, and the lessons learned that other cities can adapt…(More)”.

Paper by Siva Parvathi and Yjn Lakshmi: “Sentiment analysis or Opinion mining is one of the quickest developing fields with its call for and potential advantages growing every day. With the onset of the internet and modern technology, there has been a vigorous growth in the quantity of statistics. Each character is capable of specific his/her personal ideas freely on social media. All of this facts may be analyzed and used that allows you to draw benefits and high-quality statistics.

One such idea is sentiment analysis, here, the sentiment of the problem is taken into consideration and important facts is drawn out whether it be a product evaluation or his/her opinion on whatever materialistic. A few of such packages of sentiment evaluation and the method in which they’re carried out are defined. Moreover,the possibility of every of those works to impact any destiny work is considered and explained along with the analysis as to how the previous troubles in the equal area have been overcome….(More)”.

NBER Working Paper by Joseph Abadi and Markus Brunnermeier: “When is record-keeping better arranged through a blockchain than through a traditional centralized intermediary? The ideal qualities of any record-keeping system are (i) correctness, (ii) decentralization, and (iii) cost efficiency. We point out a blockchain trilemma: no ledger can satisfy all three properties simultaneously.

A centralized record-keeper extracts rents due to its monopoly on the ledger. Its franchise value dynamically incentivizes correct reporting. Blockchains drive down rents by allowing for free entry of record-keepers and portability of information to competing “forks.” Blockchains must, therefore, provide static incentives for correctness through computationally expensive proof-of-work algorithms and permit record-keepers to roll back history in order to undo fraudulent reports. While blockchains can keep track of ownership transfers, enforcement of possession rights is often better complemented by centralized record-keeping….(More)”

Press Release: “The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).

Divided by Trust

There is a 16-point gap between the more trusting informed public and the far-more-skeptical mass population, marking a return to record highs of trust inequality. The phenomenon fueling this divide was a pronounced rise in trust among the informed public. Markets such as the U.S., UK, Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong saw trust gains of 12 points or more among the informed public. In 18 markets, there is now a double-digit trust gap between the informed public and the mass population.

An Urgent Desire for Change

Despite the divergence in trust between the informed public and mass population the world is united on one front—all share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.

In conjunction with pessimism and worry, there is a growing move toward engagement and action. In 2019, engagement with the news surged by 22 points; 40 percent not only consume news once a week or more, but they also routinely amplify it. But people are encountering roadblocks in their quest for facts, with 73 percent worried about fake news being used as a weapon.

The New Employer-Employee Contract

Despite a high lack of faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer.” Fifty-eight percent of general population employees say they look to their employer to be a trustworthy source of information about contentious societal issues.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual.” Employees’ expectation that prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues (67 percent) is nearly as high as their expectations of personal empowerment (74 percent) and job opportunity (80 percent)….(More)”.

Heather Savory at the Office for National Statistics (UK): “Official Statistics are for the benefit of society and the economy and help Britain to make better decisions. They allow the formulation of better public policy and the effective measurement of those policies. They inform the direction of economic and commercial activities. They provide valuable information for analysts, researchers, public and voluntary bodies. They enable the public to hold organisations that spend public money to account, thus informing democratic debate.

The ability to harness the power of data is critical in enabling official statistics to support the most important decisions facing the country.

Under the new powers in the Digital Economy Act , ONS can now gain access to new and different sources of data including ‘administrative’ data from government departments and commercial data. Alongside the availability of these new data sources ONS is experiencing a strong demand for ad hoc insights alongside our traditional statistics.

We need to deliver more, faster, finer-grained insights into the economy and society. We need to deliver high quality, trustworthy information, on a faster timescale, to help decision-making. We will increasingly develop innovative data analysis methods, for example using images to gain insight from the work we’ve recently announced on Urban Forests….

I should explain here that our data is not held in one big linked database; we’re architecting our Data Access Platform so that data can be linked in different ways for different purposes. This is designed to preserve data confidentiality, so only the necessary subset of data is accessible by authorised people, for a certain purpose. To avoid compromising their effectiveness, we do not make public the specific details of the security measures we have in place, but our recently tightened security regime, which is independently assured by trusted external bodies, includes:

• physical measures to restrict who can access places where data is stored;
• protective measures for all data-related IT services;
• measures to restrict who can access systems and data held by ONS;
• controls to guard against staff or contractors misusing their legitimate access to data; including vetting to an appropriate level for the sensitivity of data to which they might have access.

One of the things I love about working in the public sector is that our work can be shared openly.

We live in a rapidly changing and developing digital world and we will continue to monitor and assess the data standards and security measures in place to ensure they remain strong and effective. So, as well as sharing this work openly to reassure all our data suppliers that we’re taking good care of their data, we’re also seeking feedback on our revised data policies.

The same data can provide different insights when viewed through different lenses or in different combinations. The more data is shared – with the appropriate safeguards of course – the more it has to give.

If you work with data, you’ll know that collaborating with others in this space is key and that we need to be able to share data more easily when it makes sense to do so. So, the second reason for sharing this work openly is that, if you’re in the technical space, we’d value your feedback on our approach and if you’re in the data space and would like to adopt the same approach, we’d love to support you with that – so that we can all share data more easily in the future….(More)

ONS’s revised policies on the use, management and security of data can befound here.

Book edited by Bill Johnston, Sheila MacNeill and Keith Smyth: “Despite the increasing ubiquity of the term, the concept of the digital university remains diffuse and indeterminate. This book examines what the term ‘digital university’ should encapsulate and the resulting challenges, possibilities and implications that digital technology and practice brings to higher education. Critiquing the current state of definition of the digital university construct, the authors propose a more holistic, integrated account that acknowledges the inherent diffuseness of the concept. The authors also question the extent to which digital technologies and practices can allow us to re-think the location of universities and curricula; and how they can extend higher education as a public good within the current wider political context. Framed inside a critical pedagogy perspective, this volume debates the role of the university in fostering the learning environments, skills and capabilities needed for critical engagement, active open participation and reflection in the digital age. This pioneering volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of digital education, as well as policy makers and practitioners….(More)”

Jen Gold at What Works Blog: “There’s a small but growing band of government teams around the world dedicated to making experiments happen. The Cabinet Office’s What Works Team, set up in 2013, was the first of its kind. But you’ll now find them in Canada, the US, Finland, Australia, Colombia, and the UAE.

All of these teams work across government to champion the testing and evaluation of new approaches to public service delivery. This blog takes a look at the many ways in which we’re striving to make experimentation the norm in our governments.

Unsurprisingly we’re all operating in very different contexts. Some teams were set up in response to central requirements for greater experimentation. Take Canada, for instance. In 2016 the Treasury Board directed departments and agencies to devote a fixed proportion of programme funds to “experimenting with new approaches” (building on Prime Minister Trudeau’s earlier instruction to Ministers). An Innovation and Experimentation Team was then set up in the Treasury Board to provide some central support.

Finland’s Experimentation Office, based in the Prime Minister’s Office, is in a similar position. The team supports the delivery of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s 2016 national action plan that calls for “a culture of experimentation” in public services and a series of flagship policy experiments.

Others, like the US Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), grew out of political interest in using behavioural science experiments in public policy. But these teams now run experiments in a much broader set of areas.

What unites us is a focus on helping public servants generate and use new evidence in policy decisions and service delivery….(More)”.

Larry Kramer at the Hewlett Foundation: “Among the most corrosive developments of recent years—one that predates the election of Donald Trump—has been a breakdown in our ability to debate and reason with others with whom we disagree. The term du jour, “tribalism,” replaced the earlier “polarization” precisely to capture the added ingredient of animosity that has made even conversation across partisan divides difficult. Mistrust and hostility have been grafted onto disagreement about ideas.

Political scientists differ about how widespread the phenomenon is—some seeing it shared broadly across American society, while others believe it confined to activist elites. I lean toward the latter view, though the disease seems to be spreading awfully fast. The difference hardly matters, because activists drive and shape public debates. And, either way, the resulting take-no-prisoners politics threatens the future of democratic government, which presupposes disagreement and depends on willingness to work through and across differences from a sense of shared community....

Learning to listen with empathy matters for a number of reasons. An advocate needs to see an opponent’s argument in its strongest light, not only to counter the position effectively, but also to fully understand his or her own position—its weaknesses as well as its strengths—and so be properly prepared to defend it. Nor is this the only reason, because adversarial advocacy is only part of what lawyers do. Most legal work involves bargaining among conflicting interests and finding ways to settle disputes. Good lawyers know how to negotiate and cooperate; they know (in the phrase made famous by Roger Fisher and William Ury) how to “get to yes”—something made vastly easier if one fully and fairly comprehends both sides of an issue. There is a reason lawyers have historically constituted such a disproportionate share of our legislators and executives, and it’s not because they know how to argue. It is because they know how to find common ground.

Not that compromising is always the right thing to do. Without doubt, there are matters of principle too important to relinquish, and instances in which an adversary is too inflexible or too extreme to accommodate. In today’s public discourse, moreover, outright fabrication has become, if not quite acceptable, increasingly common. But one cannot know if or when these are the case unless and until one has examined the other side’s position honestly and confronted the weaknesses in one’s own position fearlessly…

Three techniques in particular pervade the practice of paying heed to an opposing argument without condescending to meet it:

• First, there is the “straw man” method—a tried and true practice that involves taking the weakest or most extreme or least plausible argument in favor of a position and acting as if it were the only argument for that position; a variation of this method takes the most extreme and unattractive advocates for a position and treats them as typical.
• Second is the practice of attributing bad motives to one’s opponents. Those employing this approach assume that people who take a contrary position know in their hearts that they are wrong and make the arguments they do for some inappropriate reason, such as racism or self-interest, that makes it easy to ignore what they have to say.
• Third, a relatively new entrant, is what might be called the identity excuse: “We don’t need to listen to them because they are [blank].” Then fill in the blank with whatever identity you think warrants dismissal: a white male, a Black Lives Matter supporter, a Trump voter, a Democrat, the oil industry, a union, someone who received money for their work, and so on….(More)”.