Stefaan Verhulst

Elena Souris and Hollie Russon Gilman at Vox: “…While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement.

The two may initially seem completely separate, but democracy itself depends on information and communication, and a balance of privacy (secret ballot) and transparency. As communication moves almost entirely to networked online technology platforms, the governance questions surrounding data and privacy have far-reaching civic and political implications for how people interact with all aspects of their lives, from commerce and government services to their friends, families, and communities. That is why we need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights…

What could a golden mean in the US look like? Is it possible to take principles of the GDPR and apply a more community based, citizen-centric approach across states and localities in the United States? Could a US version of the GDPR be designed in a way that included public participation? Perhaps there could be an ongoing participatory role? Most of all, the questions underpinning data regulation need to serve as an impetus for an honest conversation about equity across digital access, digital literacy, and now digital privacy.

Across the country, we’re already seeing successful experiments with a more citizen-inclusive democracy, with localities and cities rising as engines of American re-innovationand laboratories of participatory democracy. Thanks to our federalist system, states are already paving the way for greater electoral reform, from public financing of campaigns to experiments with structures such as ranked-choice voting.

In these local federalist experiments, civic participation is slowly becoming a crucial tool. Innovations from participatory budgeting to interactive policy co-production sessions are giving people in communities a direct say in public policies. For example, the Rural Climate Dialogues in Minnesota empower rural residents to impact policy on long-term climate mitigation. Bowling Green, Kentucky, recently used the online deliberation platform Polisto identify common policy areas for consensus building. Scholars have been writing about various potential participatory models for our digital lives as well, including civic trusts.

Can we take these principles and begin a serious conversation for how to translate the best privacy practices, tools, and methods to ensure that people’s valuable online and offline resources — including their trust, attention span, and vital information — are also protected and honored? Since the people are a primary stakeholder in the conversation about civic data and data privacy, they should have a seat at the table.

Including citizens and residents in these conversations could have a big policy impact. First, working toward a participatory governance framework for civic data would enable people to understand the value of their data in the open market. Second, it would provide greater transparency to the value of networks — an individual’s social graph, a valuable asset, which, until now, people are generating in aggregate without anything in return. Third, it could amplify concerns of more vulnerable data users, including elderly or tech-illiterate citizens — and even refugees and international migrants, as Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst recently argued in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

There are already templates and road maps for responsible data, but talking to those users themselves with a participatory governance approach could make them even more effective. Finally, citizens can help answer tough questions about what we value and when and how we need to make ethical choices with data.

Because data-collecting organizations will have to comply abroad soon, the GDPR is a good opportunity for the American social sector to consider data rights as civic rights and incorporate a participatory process to meet this challenge. Instead of simply assuming regulatory agencies will pave the way, a more participatory data framework could foster an ongoing process of civic empowerment and make the outcome more effective. It’s too soon to know the precise forms or mechanisms new data regulation should take. Instead of a rigid, predetermined format, the process needs to be community-driven by design — ensuring traditionally marginalized communities are front and center in this conversation, not only the elites who already hold the microphone.

It won’t be easy. Building a participatory governance structure for civic data will require empathy, compromise, and potentially challenging the preconceived relationship between people, institutions, and their information. The interplay between our online and offline selves is a continuous process of learning error. But if we simply replicate the top-down structures of the past, we can’t evolve toward a truly empowered digital democratic future. Instead, let’s use the GDPR as an opening in the United States for advancing the principles of a more transparent and participatory democracy….(More)”.

The new or interesting story isn’t just that Valerie, Betsy, and Steve’s friends had different social and academic impacts, but that they had various types of friendship networks. My research points to the importance of network structure—that is, the relationships among their friends—for college students’ success. Different network structures result from students’ experiences—such as race- and class-based marginalization on this predominantly White campus—and shape students’ experiences by helping or hindering them academically and socially.

I used social network techniques to analyze the friendship networks of 67 MU students and found they clumped into three distinctive types—tight-knitters, compartmentalizers, and samplers. Tight-knitters have one densely woven friendship group in which nearly all their friends are friends with one another. Compartmentalizers’ friends form two to four clusters, where friends know each other within clusters but rarely across them. And samplers make a friend or two from a variety of places, but the friends remain unconnected to each other. As shown in the figures, tight-knitters’ networks resemble a ball of yarn, compartmentalizers’ a bow-tie, and samplers’ a daisy. In these network maps, the person I interviewed is at the center and every other dot represents a friend, with lines representing connections among friends (that is, whether the person I interviewed believed that the two people knew each other). During the interviews, participants defined what friendship meant to them and listed as many friends as they liked (ranging from three to 45).

The students’ friendship network types influenced how friends matter for their academic and social successes and failures. Like Valerie, most Black and Latina/o students were tight-knitters. Their dense friendship networks provided a sense of home as a minority on a predominantly White campus. Tight-knit networks could provide academic support and motivation (as they did for Valerie) or pull students down academically if their friends lacked academic skills and motivation. Most White students were compartmentalizers like Betsy, and they succeeded with moderate levels of social support from friends and with social support and academic support from different clusters. Samplers came from a range of class and race backgrounds. Like Steve, samplers typically succeeded academically without relying on their friends. Friends were fun people who neither help nor hurt them academically. Socially, however, samplers reported feeling lonely and lacking social support….(More)”.

Dario Taraborelli at BoingBoing: “When researchers write, we don’t just describe new findings — we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know.

Back in the 1950s, reference works like Shepard’s Citations provided lawyers with tools to reconstruct which relevant cases to cite in the context of a court trial. No such a tool existed at the time for identifying citations in scientific publications. Eugene Garfield — the pioneer of modern citation analysis and citation indexing — described the idea of extending this approach to science and engineering as his Eureka moment. Garfield’s first experimental Genetics Citation Index, compiled by the newly-formed Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1961, offered a glimpse into what a full citation index could mean for science at large. It was distributed, for free, to 1,000 libraries and scientists in the United States.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century. the Web of Science citation index — maintained by Thomson Reuters, who acquired ISI in 1992 — has become the canonical source for scientists, librarians, and funders to search scholarly citations, and for the field of scientometrics, to study the structure and evolution of scientific knowledge. ISI could have turned into a publicly funded initiative, but it started instead as a for-profit effort. In 2016, Thomson Reuters sold its Intellectual Property & Science business to a private-equity fund for $3.55 billion. Its citation index is now owned by Clarivate Analytics.

Raw citation data being non-copyrightable, it’s ironic that the vision of building a comprehensive index of scientific literature has turned into a billion-dollar business, with academic institutions paying cripplingly expensive annual subscriptions for access and the public locked out.

Enter the Initiative for Open Citations.

In 2016, a small group founded the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) as a voluntary effort to work with scholarly publishers — who routinely publish this data — to persuade them to release it in the open and promote its unrestricted availability. Before the launch of the I4OC, only 1% of indexed scholarly publications with references were making citation data available in the public domain. When the I4OC was officially announced in 2017, we were able to report that this number had shifted from 1% to 40%. In the main, this was thanks to the swift action of a small number of large academic publishers.

In April 2018, we are celebrating the first anniversary of the initiative. Since the launch, the fraction of indexed scientific articles with open citation data (as measured by Crossref) has surpassed 50% and the number of participating publishers has risen to 490. Over half a billion references are now openly available to the public without any copyright restriction. Of the top-20 biggest publishers with citation data, all but 5 — Elsevier, IEEE, Wolters Kluwer Health, IOP Publishing, ACS — now make this data open via Crossref and its APIs. Over 50 organisations — including science funders, platforms and technology organizations, libraries, research and advocacy institutions — have joined us in this journey to help advocate and promote the reuse of open citations….(More)”.

Article by Cameron Bishop: “…The US General services Administration built the first federal procurement blockchain proof of concept about six months ago. The procurement blockchain was built to demonstrate how the distributed ledger technology can modernize federal procurement. The pilot project made them realize that blockchain, when combined with artificial intelligence and robotics, provides the foundational architecture for widespread automation.

The proof of concept, which was built in seven weeks, automated the procurement process. More importantly, it reduced the average contract award time from 100 days to less than 10 days. Complex tasks such as financial review was automated through the use of blockchain. It also eliminated human error, bias and subjectivity from the process. A smart contract deployed in the blockchain automatically calculated the financial health score from the offerors’ balance sheets and income statements. The entire process was standardized using commercial and government practices.

Furthermore, the use of blockchain ledger ensured that vendors were kept abreast of the developments. Vendors received alerts on a real-time basis as the offers progress through the workflow. This made the process transparent, while preserving the privacy of each transaction. The success of this pilot project is expected to bring a drastic change in the federal procurement process.

While a blockchain can be public, permissioned, and private, federal agencies may opt for a private blockchain to facilitate procurement transactions among pre-screened vendors with digital identity certificates.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) provides guidelines to ensure integrity, openness and fairness in federal procurement. The blockchain technology will enforce those policies through a system of procedural trust embedded into the platform.

By using blockchain technology, the federal procurement process can be more transparent, efficient, faster, and less vulnerable to fraud and abuse. More importantly, by design, a blockchain preserves the integrity of the assets and transactions between multiple parties within the value chain. Additionally, blockchain will avoid unnecessary litigations, while promoting competition in a healthy manner. It will also provide an organization with unique insights into the procurement value chain unavailable previously….(More)”.

David Sasaki: “Is there any there there? That’s what we wanted to uncover beneath the hype and skepticism surrounding participatory budgeting, an innovation in democracy that began in Brazil in 1989 and has quickly spread to nearly every corner of the world like a viral hashtag….We ended up selecting two groups of consultants for two phases of work. The first phase was led by three academic researchers — Brian Wampler, Mike Touchton and Stephanie McNulty — to synthesize what we know broadly about PB’s impact and where there are gaps in the evidence. mySociety led the second phase, which originally intended to identify the opportunities and challenges faced by civil society organizations and public officials that implement participatory budgeting. However, a number of unforeseen circumstances, including contested elections in Kenya and a major earthquake in Mexico, shifted mySociety’s focus to take a global, field-wide perspective.

In the end, we were left with two reports that were similar in scope and differed in perspective. Together they make for compelling reading. And while they come from different perspectives, they settle on similar recommendations. I’ll focus on just three: 1) the need for better research, 2) the lack of global coordination, and 3) the emerging opportunity to link natural resource governance with participatory budgeting….

As we consider some preliminary opportunities to advance participatory budgeting, we are clear-eyed about the risks and challenges. In the face of democratic backsliding and the concern that liberal democracy may not survive the 21st century, are these efforts to deepen local democracy merely a distraction from a larger threat, or is this a way to build active citizenship? Also, implementing PB is expensive — both in terms of money and time; is it worth the investment? Is PB just the latest checkbox for governments that want a reputation for supporting citizen participation without investing in the values and process it entails? Just like the proliferation of fake “consultation meetings,” fake PB could merely exacerbate our disappointment with democracy. What should we make of the rise of participatory budgeting in quasi-authoritarian contexts like China and Russia? Is PB a tool for undemocratic central governments to keep local governments in check while giving citizens a simulacrum of democratic participation? Crucially, without intentional efforts to be inclusive like we’ve seen in Boston, PB could merely direct public resources to those neighborhoods with the most outspoken and powerful residents.

On the other hand, we don’t want to dismiss the significant opportunities that come with PB’s rapid global expansion. For example, what happens when social movements lose their momentum between election cycles? Participatory budgeting could create a civic space for social movements to pursue concrete outcomes while engaging with neighbors and public officials. (In China, it has even helped address the urban-rural divide on perspectives toward development policy.) Meanwhile, social media have exacerbated our human tendency to complain, but participatory budgeting requires us to shift our perspective from complaints to engaging with others on solutions. It could even serve as a gateway to deeper forms of democratic participation and increased trust between governments, civil society organizations, and citizens. Perhaps participatory budgeting is the first step we need to rebuild our civic infrastructure and make space for more diverse voices to steer our complex public institutions.

Until we have more research and evidence, however, these possibilities remain speculative….(More)”.

Russ Juskalian at MIT Tech Review: “…Though Bassam may not know it, his visit to the supermarket involves one of the first uses of blockchain for humanitarian aid. By letting a machine scan his iris, he confirmed his identity on a traditional United Nations database, queried a family account kept on a variant of the Ethereum blockchain by the World Food Programme (WFP), and settled his bill without opening his wallet.

Started in early 2017, Building Blocks, as the program is known, helps the WFP distribute cash-for-food aid to over 100,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan. By the end of this year, the program will cover all 500,000 refugees in the country. If the project succeeds, it could eventually speed the adoption of blockchain technologies at sister UN agencies and beyond.

Building Blocks was born of a need to save money. The WFP  helps feed 80 million people around the globe, but since 2009 the organization has shifted from delivering food to transferring money to people who need food. This approach could feed more people, improve local economies, and increase transparency. But it also introduces a notable point of inefficiency: working with local or regional banks. For the WFP, which transferred over $1.3 billion in such benefits in 2017 (about 30 percent of its total aid), transaction and other fees are money that could have gone to millions of meals. Early results of the blockchain program touted a 98 percent reduction in such fees.

And if the man behind the project, WFP executive Houman Haddad, has his way, the blockchain-based program will do far more than save money. It will tackle a central problem in any humanitarian crisis: how do you get people without government identity documents or a bank account into a financial and legal system where those things are prerequisites to getting a job and living a secure life?

Haddad imagines Bassam one day walking out of Zaatari with a so-called digital wallet, filled with his camp transaction history, his government ID, and access to financial accounts, all linked through a blockchain-based identity system. With such a wallet, when Bassam left the camp he could much more easily enter the world economy. He would have a place for an employer to deposit his pay, for a mainstream bank to see his credit history, and for a border or immigration agent to check his identity, which would be attested to by the UN, the Jordanian government, and possibly even his neighbors….

But because Building Blocks runs on a small, permissioned blockchain, the project’s scope and impact are narrow. So narrow that some critics say it’s a gimmick and the WFP could just as easily use a traditional database. Haddad acknowledges that—“Of course we could do all of what we’re doing today without using blockchain,” he says. But, he adds, “my personal view is that the eventual end goal is digital ID, and beneficiaries must own and control their data.”

Other critics say blockchains are too new for humanitarian use. Plus, it’s ethically risky to experiment with vulnerable populations, says Zara Rahman, a researcher based in Berlin at the Engine Room, a nonprofit group that supports social-change organizations in using technology and data. After all, the bulk collection of identifying information and biometrics has historically been a disaster for people on the run….(More)”.

Carla Fried at UCLA Anderson Review: “Behavioral science does not suffer from a lack of academic focus. A Google Scholar search for the term delivers more than three million results.

While there is an abundance of research into how human nature can muck up our decision making process and the potential for well-placed nudges to help guide us to better outcomes, the field has kept rather mum on a basic question: Are behavioral nudges cost-effective?

That’s an ever more salient question as the art of the nudge is increasingly being woven into public policy initiatives. In 2009, the Obama administration set up a nudge unit within the White House Office of Information and Technology, and a year later the U.K. government launched its own unit. Harvard’s Cass Sunstein, co-author of the book Nudge, headed the U.S. effort. His co-author, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler — who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics — helped develop the U.K.’s Behavioral Insights office. Nudge units are now humming away in other countries, including Germany and Singapore, as well as at the World Bank, various United Nations agencies and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Given the interest in the potential for behavioral science to improve public policy outcomes, a team of nine experts, including UCLA Anderson’s Shlomo Benartzi, Sunstein and Thaler, set out to explore the cost-effectiveness of behavioral nudges relative to more traditional forms of government interventions.

In addition to conducting their own experiments, the researchers looked at published research that addressed four areas where public policy initiatives aim to move the needle to improve individuals’ choices: saving for retirement, applying to college, energy conservation and flu vaccinations.

For each topic, they culled studies that focused on both nudge approaches and more traditional mandates such as tax breaks, education and financial incentives, and calculated cost-benefit estimates for both types of studies. Research used in this study was published between 2000 and 2015. All cost estimates were inflation-adjusted…

The study itself should serve as a nudge for governments to consider adding nudging to their policy toolkits, as this approach consistently delivered a high return on investment, relative to traditional mandates and policies….(More)”.

Alice Meadows at the Scholarly Kitchen: “In this interview, Joris van Rossum (Director of Special Projects, Digital Science) and author of Blockchain for Research, and Martijn Roelandse (Head of Publishing Innovation, Springer Nature), discuss blockchain in scholarly communications, including the recently launched Peer Review Blockchain initiative….

How would you describe blockchain in one sentence?

Joris: Blockchain is a technology for decentralized, self-regulating data which can be managed and organized in a revolutionary new way: open, permanent, verified and shared, without the need of a central authority.

How does it work (in layman’s language!)?

Joris: In a regular database you need a gatekeeper to ensure that whatever is stored in a database (financial transactions, but this could be anything) is valid. However with blockchain, trust is not created by means of a curator, but through consensus mechanisms and cryptographic techniques. Consensus mechanisms clearly define what new information is allowed to be added to the datastore. With the help of a technology called hashing, it is not possible to change any existing data without this being detected by others. And through cryptography, the database can be shared without real identities being revealed. So the blockchain technology removes the need for a middle-man.

How is this relevant to scholarly communication?

Joris: It’s very relevant. We’ve explored the possibilities and initiatives in a report published by Digital Science. The blockchain could be applied on several levels, which is reflected in a number of initiatives announced recently. For example, a cryptocurrency for science could be developed. This ‘bitcoin for science’ could introduce a monetary reward scheme to researchers, such as for peer review. Another relevant area, specifically for publishers, is digital rights management. The potential for this was picked up by this blog at a very early stage. Blockchain also allows publishers to easily integrate micropayments, thereby creating a potentially interesting business model alongside open access and subscriptions.

Moreover, blockchain as a datastore with no central owner where information can be stored pseudonymously could support the creation of a shared and authoritative database of scientific events. Here traditional activities such as publications and citations could be stored, along with currently opaque and unrecognized activities, such as peer review. A data store incorporating all scientific events would make science more transparent and reproducible, and allow for more comprehensive and reliable metrics….

How do you see developments in the industry regarding blockchain?

Joris: In the last couple of months we’ve seen the launch of many interesting initiatives. For example scienceroot.com. Pluto.network, and orvium.io. These are all ambitious projects incorporating many of the potential applications of blockchain in the industry, and to an extent aim to disrupt the current ecosystem. Recently artifacts.ai was announced, an interesting initiative that aims to allow researchers to permanently document every stage of the research process. However, we believe that traditional players, and not least publishers, should also look at how services to researchers can be improved using blockchain technology. There are challenges (e.g. around reproducibility and peer review) but that does not necessarily mean the entire ecosystem needs to be overhauled. In fact, in academic publishing we have a good track record of incorporating new technologies and using them to improve our role in scholarly communication. In other words, we should fix the system, not break it!

What is the Peer Review Blockchain initiative, and why did you join?

Martijn: The problems of research reproducibility, recognition of reviewers, and the rising burden of the review process, as research volumes increase each year, have led to a challenging landscape for scholarly communications. There is an urgent need for change to tackle the problems which is why we joined this initiative, to be able to take a step forward towards a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for peer review. The initiative aims to look at practical solutions that leverage the distributed registry and smart contract elements of blockchain technologies. Each of the parties can deposit peer review activity in the blockchain — depending on peer review type, either partially or fully encrypted — and subsequent activity is also deposited in the reviewer’s ORCID profile. These business transactions — depositing peer review activity against person x — will be verifiable and auditable, thereby increasing transparency and reducing the risk of manipulation. Through the shared processes we will setup with other publishers, and recordkeeping, trust will increase.

A separate trend we see is the broadening scope of research evaluation which triggered researchers to also get (more) recognition for their peer review work, beyond citations and altmetrics. At a later stage new applications could be built on top of the peer review blockchain….(More)”.

Springwise: “We have already seen how technology can be harnessed to help facilitate charitable and environmental efforts. For example, the recycling organization which helps businesses rehome unwanted goods, donating money to charity in addition to helping businesses be more economical. Another example in which technology has been used to raise awareness is through the charity chatbot, which teaches users about women’s daily journey to find water in Ethiopia.

JoodLife is a start-up which aims to make the most of technology and take advantage of it in order to help voluntary efforts in Jordan.

The application works as a social platform to connect volunteers and donors in order to facilitate charity work. Donors can register their donations via the app, and then all the available grants are displayed. The grants can be searched for on the app, and users can specify the area they wish to search. The donor and the volunteer can then agree a mechanism by which they wish to transfer the grant. At which point the available grant will no longer be shown on the app search. The app aims to serve as a link between donors and volunteers to save both parties time and effort. This makes it much easier to make monetary and material donations. The social aspect of the app also increases solidarity between charity workers and makes it much simpler to distribute roles in the most efficient way….(More)”.