Stefaan Verhulst
Article by Alonzo Plough and Joel Gurin: “Data-driven, reality-based health science saves lives. Without it, we could not protect people from disease, cure them when they’re sick, or ensure that the places where they live promote good health. In America today, however, an anti-facts movement is eroding the data needed to protect lives.
Already, the Trump administration has dramatically changed how health data is gathered and reported, removed federal websites and datasets, cut staff and funding for health agencies and health research, and diminished our ability to track traditional health outcomes and social determinants of health. The public health community has lost critical data for tracking flu, COVID, sexually transmitted diseases, women’s and children’s health, and more. Thousands of staff at the Department of Health and Human Services have been let go.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has made protecting America’s essential health data a priority. To that end, the foundation supported an expert roundtable in July hosted by the nonprofit Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) and the National Conference on Citizenship. CODE has synthesized the results of that roundtable and extensive additional research in a new report, Ensuring the Future of Essential Health Data for All Americans. The report is a timely and comprehensive summary of the sweeping shifts endangering both the health of Americans and the capacity to measure how everyday conditions — like access to food, safe neighborhoods, and jobs — shape health outcomes. It presents five recommendations and several tactics to protect and improve critical health data…(More)”.
Series by UNECE: “The purpose of the Policy Briefs series is to highlight the opportunities and the challenges that AI poses to PPPs and infrastructure throughout the lifecycle of projects. Lower transaction costs for governments and an expedited PPP process would represent a transformational leap in the efficiency and effectiveness of PPPs in support of the SDGs. But such efficiencies need to be measured against the risks associated with the implementation of AI in PPPs and infrastructure projects.
The Policy Briefs are drafted by leading experts under the auspices of the UNECE secretariat and are supplemented by regular webinars or podcasts organised by the UNECE secretariat, engaging various experts from governments, private sector, academia, civil society, and international organisations.
The Policy Briefs series will address both the pros and the cons in implementing AI in PPPs and infrastructure projects, including how AI is already utilised in projects and its potential to predict infrastructure needs, generate reports and analyses data…(More)”.
Report by By Kathrin Frauscher and Kaye Sklar: “Public sector organizations are accelerating their investments in AI technology, and spending big: In the UK, government contracts for AI projects hit £573 million by August 2025, exceeding all of 2024. In the United States, federal agencies committed $5.6 billion to AI between 2022 and 2024. But it’s not just what they buy, it’s how they buy it that will have a huge impact on outcomes.
1. Off-the-shelf AI is winning over custom builds.
Organizations aren’t rushing to buy complex, custom-built AI systems. Instead, right now they are purchasing off-the-shelf licenses for lower-risk efficiency-driven use cases, such as AI-powered writing assistants, data analysis tools, or automated document management systems. Public sector organizations can often use these tools through their existing cloud or productivity platforms.
2. Centralized buying is on the rise.
We see a clear shift toward enterprise-wide AI procurement. Central IT or digital transformation agencies now negotiate contracts for all government departments. The United States, among others, has moved to this model. While central purchasing can promote efficiency and interoperability, this also means that decision-making power is concentrated in fewer hands.
3. AI is sneaking in through side doors.
Not all AI used by the public sector goes through procurement. Government agencies often access AI through free pilots, grants, features built into existing tools, or academic partnerships. This “shadow AI” can help teams move fast, but it means less opportunity for accountability and oversight.
Together, these trends create a growing gap between AI procurement and AI adoption…(More)”.
Book by Kevin Hartnett: “The inside story of Lean, a computer program that answers the age-old question: How do you know if something is true?
It began as an obscure bug-checking program at Microsoft Research developed by a lone computer engineer named Leo de Moura. Then an unlikely crew of mathematical misfits caught wind of it and began to adopt it with messianic zeal. Their goal was to create a truth machine that could provide the rarest of all commodities in life: a complete, 100 percent guarantee that something is true. Its name: Lean.
As the movement grew and strengthened the program’s capabilities, it drew in two of the world’s most prominent mathematicians: Peter Scholze and Terence Tao. Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and other tech firms started using the program to supercharge computer reasoning. Now it’s remaking the multi-thousand-year history of how mathematicians work, collaborate, and assess truth, while charting a new path in the march toward machine intelligence.
In The Proof in the Code, Kevin Hartnett tells the definitive story of the birth and rise of Lean, and how a growing movement is transforming the enterprise of mathematics and ushering in a new era of human–computer collaboration. An engrossing, character driven narrative filled with insights about the future of math, computers, and AI, this brilliant work of journalism from one of the world’s leading math writers offers a profound answer to the question: Can computers reveal universal truths?…(More)”.
Article by Vincent Barry: “It’s mid-2016 in Adelaide. It’s been raining for days. Wind relentlessly buffets the city. 52 random people are picking their way around a swarm of raincoated protestors and into a room brimming with journalists. Cameras and boom mics are thrust in their faces. There’s Stanley, a 35-year-old software engineer from Torrensville. There’s Jenny, a 56-year-old screen printer from Port Augusta and Khatija, 38-year-old business owner from Adelaide. The list goes on. They’re all here for one thing: to discuss the prospect of establishing an international nuclear waste storage facility in South Australia. They’re here for a citizens’ jury.
A strange, confused tension reigns. Nuclear things are a touchy topic in South Australia. Rural parts of the State, Maralinga and Emu Field, were used for nuclear weapons testing in the ’50s and ’60s, and the land there—home to multiple First Nations peoples—remains contaminated and uninhabitable today. South Australia has the world’s largest known single deposit of uranium which supports an industry for mining, milling and exporting it. Over the years, a political forever-war has raged between those wanting to exploit this natural resource and those wary of the stakes and costs. Indeed, as the citizens’ jury on nuclear waste deliberated, a once-in-50-years storm caused widespread blackouts, for which many blamed an overreliance on renewable energy and pointed towards nuclear power as an alternative. It’s a complex, generational issue that has increasingly polarised the people of South Australia. Partisan positions are set. Consensus seems impossible.
So, you can understand why, as 52 random citizens arrive to report on the opportunities and risks of the nuclear fuel cycle, onlookers aren’t quite sure what to make of the scene. What good could this do? What could Shane, a retiree from Brompton, know about the nuances of storing, managing and disposing of high-level nuclear waste? The process is championed by people touting mini-publics and deliberative innovations that will put the ‘people’ back in ‘people power’. But can lay people really command such a vexed issue?..(More)”.
Press Release: “The Commission has presented today the European Democracy Shield, setting out a series of concrete measures to empower, protect, and promote strong and resilient democracies across the EU. An open civic space is at the core of our democracies, and this is why the Commission has also put forward an EU Strategy for Civil Society, for stronger engagement, protection and support to civil society organisations who play essential roles in our societies. Both initiatives had been outlined in the political guidelines and this year’s State of the Union address by President von der Leyen.
The European Democracy Shield and the EU Strategy for Civil Society present measures to protect the key pillars of our democratic systems: free people, free and fair elections, free and independent media, a vibrant civil society and strong democratic institutions…
The actions under the European Democracy Shield will further boost our collective capacity to counter information manipulation and disinformation and strengthen our resilience through a whole-of-society approach. The European Democracy Shield will present actions across three main pillars: 1) safeguarding the integrity of the information space; 2) strengthening our institutions, fair and free elections, and free and independent media; and 3) boosting societal resilience and citizens’ engagement.
An important deliverable from the European Democracy Shield will be a new European Centre for Democratic Resilience to bring together EU and Member States’ expertise and resources to increase our collective capacity to anticipate, detect and respond to threats and build democratic resilience. With Member States at its core, the Centre will act as a framework to facilitate information sharing and support capacity building to withstand evolving common threats, in particular foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) and disinformation...(More)”.
Article by Daniela Blei: “Alex Dildine used to run the digital organizing program for the nonpartisan group Organizing for Action (OFA), an offshoot of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. During her tenure at OFA, Dildine managed the former president’s digital assets, using email lists and social media to organize communities that had become civically engaged by joining the campaign. In her work helping create leaders remotely, Dildine encountered an array of problems: decades of declining social capital, volunteers in far-flung locations struggling to find meaning online, and low response rates on digital platforms.
Dildine is now a doctoral candidate in political science at Johns Hopkins University, and her dissertation research asks how organizers can build a sense of community in ways that sustain long-term engagement.
“When Trump was elected in 2016, I watched as volunteer participation rates skyrocketed,” Dildine says. “But I knew that without the organizational infrastructure and an intentional effort to create a sense of community, virtual or otherwise, people were not going to know how to continue their engagement.”
What tools, Dildine wondered, could help practitioners turn online enthusiasm into offline action? Was there a way to assess the depth and quality of engagement online, and whether people found meaning, community, and purpose in organizing?
To answer these questions, Dildine’s dissertation delves into historical cases; draws on interviews with organizational strategists; and mines organizational databases, training materials, and annual reports to chart the patterns of volunteers over time, spanning an earlier era of optimism about the internet to the more pessimistic present, thanks to years of accelerated data gathering and online surveillance. Microtargeting campaigns have offered one easy way to find supporters to back a particular cause, for example. But moving those individuals targeted by campaigns to fight or even take risks for a political cause remains an unsolved challenge. Most organizations lack proven online strategies and must compete with a barrage of emails and notifications to capture people’s attention…(More)”
Paper by Gerid Hager et al: “…Citizen science has grown dramatically in recent years, with cities emerging as key hubs of participation and data creation. One well-known example is OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is considered human’s greatest collective, open source and volunteer-led initiative to map the Earth’s surface and one of the most successful, collectively maintained and regularly updated open datasets in history. Just in the last 60 minutes of writing this piece, 900 contributors made 184,688 map edits in 113 countries.1 It was started in an urban area – Regent’s Park in London – in 2004 (another decade before Townsend’s article). By 2009, Map Kibera,2 which is based on OSM, was the first ever-created map of Kibera in Nairobi, considered then one of the largest informal settlements in Africa. This community-driven effort literally put people on the map, acknowledging their existence in the city. As a result, city officials, who could no longer ignore this large community of city dwellers, started to consider Kibera in urban planning processes. Map Kibera is still ongoing today and has become a thriving ‘interactive community information project’, which has expanded to other informal settlement areas (Mathare and Mukuru), all backed by the Map Kibera Trust whose mission is to ‘increase influence and representation of marginalized communities through the creative use of digital tools for action’.
Though notable exceptions exist, the citizen science activities, which rely on human observation on the ground, are largely geared toward urban areas and human settlements, addressing topics around pollution, heat, greenspaces, odour and noise, traffic and flooding, to name just a few examples. These and many other citizen science initiatives are shaping policy by providing credible local data and mobilising civic action. Data from Sensor.Community3 are now integrated into the Netherlands’ official ‘Measure Together’ platform, where the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment calibrates volunteer measurements to support local decision making (Crowd4SDG, 2022). The Making Sense project translated community sensing into municipal action in Barcelona, where residents’ noise data prompted revised street-cleaning schedules (Coulson et al., 2017), while the Curious Noses project influenced Flemish election debates and strengthened the case for Low Emission Zones (Van Brussel and Huyse, 2019). Additionally, the D-NOSES project advanced odour governance by developing a municipal model to guide odour regulation, highlighting the utility and potential of citizen science and odour pollution for the EU Action Plan ‘Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil’.4
The urban bias in citizen science data is evident, even, where the subject matter is not primarily considered an urban-first topic…(More)”.
Book edited by Giorgia Lupi and Phillip Cox: “Through inspiring illustrations and a fresh, accessible approach, Speak Data invites us to see data differently—not just as numbers on a screen or tick marks in a chart, but as a language to help us better understand each other and the world around us. Seventeen thought-provoking conversations with leaders in business, tech, medicine, psychology, health, art, and more explore the human side of data, unpacking its powerful ability to divulge patterns, tell stories, stir emotion, and illuminate complexity. While often stereotyped as abstract or intimidating, here data is revealed as something far different: personal, nuanced, and above all, human made.
Featuring:
- Tech pioneer John Maeda on the value of data visualization during global emergencies
- Marketing legend Seth Godin on how to use data to get people to really care about climate change
- Museum curator Paola Antonelli on whether data is art
- Author James Clear on the ways data can (and can’t) describe human identity
- AI data artist Refik Anadol on how big datasets can dream
- And many more…(More)”.
Handbook edited by Michael Howlett and Ishani Mukherjee: “…examines the background, organization and evolution of policy advice and expertise in contemporary government. Chapters in the book set out and critically re-evaluate conventional assumptions about the role of policy advisors and advice in policy-making in an era when increasing new technologies, political polarization and contestation have mounted challenges to traditional sources of policy ideas and influence.
In 50 chapters on different topics and country experiences, leading international experts explore how issues and developments such as social media and AI have impacted the content, quality and organization of policy advice for modern governments. They discuss how the nature and deployment of policy expertise is changing amidst the fragmentation of existing information ecosystems and growing distrust in traditional actors and institutions. The Handbook analyses the features and problems of existing studies and practices such as evidence-based policy-making and addresses the future of policy advising, illustrating the impact and implications of ongoing shifts towards more pluralistic and social-media-driven sources of policy knowledge.
Students and scholars of public policy, public administration and management, and regulation and governance will greatly benefit from the consolidation of existing knowledge and the novel perspectives on policy advice found in this Handbook. It is also an essential resource for practitioners in public policy and administration…(More)”.