Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We have previously written about innovations that promote inclusion and equal rights such as edible pie charts that highlight gender inequality. Another example is a predictive text app that finds alternative words for gendered language. Now, NINA, created in Brazil, is an app for empowering women to report violence that occurs in public spaces. The project was shared to Red Bull Amaphiko, a platform for social entrepreneurs to share their work and stories.

A 2016 survey released by ActionAid and conducted by YouGov found that 86 percent of Brazilian women were victims of harassment in public spaces. Responding to these statistics, Simony César created project NINA two years ago to help tackle gender-based violence. The app collects data in real time, mapping locations in which cases of harassment have taken place. The launch and testing of the app took place on public transport. It saw 76 thousand users per day at 17 bus lines at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).

César states “The premise of NINA aims to empower women through an application that denounces the types of violence they suffer within public spaces”. It combats violence against women by making cases of harassment in the city locatable on a map. NINA can then use this data to find out which bus lines have the highest rate of harassment. It can also record the most common times that cases occur and store photographic records and short videos of harassers.

Another survey by ActionAid in March 2018 revealed that 64 percent of Brazilian women surveyed were victims of sexual harassment. These results demonstrate that the need for empowerment tools, such as NINA, is still necessary. The exposure of women to violence in public city spaces is a global issue and as a result, accessibility within cities is unequal based on gender….(More)”.

Handbook by Evan Selinger, Jules Polonetsky, and Omer Tene: “Businesses are rushing to collect personal data to fuel surging demand. Data enthusiasts claim personal information that’s obtained from the commercial internet, including mobile platforms, social networks, cloud computing, and connected devices, will unlock path-breaking innovation, including advanced data security. By contrast, regulators and activists contend that corporate data practices too often disempower consumers by creating privacy harms and related problems. As the Internet of Things matures and facial recognition, predictive analytics, big data, and wearable tracking grow in power, scale, and scope, a controversial ecosystem will exacerbate the acrimony over commercial data capture and analysis. The only productive way forward is to get a grip on the key problems right now and change the conversation….(More)”.

Michael David Thomas in Public Choice: “New justifications for government intervention based on behavioral psychology rely on a behavioral asymmetry between expert policymakers and market participants. Public choice theory applied the behavioral symmetry assumption to policy making in order to illustrate how special interests corrupt the suppositions of benevolence on the part of policy makers. Cognitive problems associated with market choices have been used to argue for even more intervention.

If behavioral symmetry is applied to the experts and not just to market participants, problems with this approach to public policy formation become clear. Manipulation, cognitive capture, and expert bias are among the problems associated with a behavioral theory of market failure. The application of behavioral symmetry to the expanding role of choice architecture will help to limit the bias in behavioral policy. Since experts are also subject to cognitive failures, policy must include an evaluation of expert error. Like the rent-seeking literature before it, a theory of cognitive capture points out the systematic problems with a theory of asymmetry between policy experts and citizens when it comes to policy making….(More)”.

Tafari Mbadiwe at The Atlantis: “For generations, the Maasai people of eastern Africa have passed down the story of a tireless old man. He lived alone and his life was not easy. He spent every day in the fields — tilling the land, tending the animals, and gathering water. The work was as necessary as it was exhausting. But the old man considered himself fortunate. He had a good life, and never really gave much thought to what was missing.

One morning the old man was greeted with a pleasant surprise. Standing in his kitchen was a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years old. The old man had never seen him before. The boy smiled but said nothing. The old man looked around. His morning breakfast had already been prepared, just as he liked it. He asked the boy’s name. “Kileken,” the boy replied. After some prodding, the boy explained that, before preparing breakfast, he had completed all of the old man’s work for the day. Incredulous, the old man stepped outside. Indeed, the fields had been tilled, the animals tended, and the water gathered. Astonishment written all over his face, the old man staggered back into the kitchen. “How did this happen? And how can I repay you?” The boy smiled again, this time dismissively. “I will accept no payment. All I ask is that you let me stay with you.” The old man knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Kileken and the old man soon became inseparable, and the farm grew lush and bountiful as it never had before. The old man could hardly remember what life was like before the arrival of his young comrade. There could be no doubt: With Kileken’s mysterious assistance, the old man was prospering. But he never quite understood why, or how, it had happened.

To an extent we have failed to fully acknowledge, decision-making algorithms have become our society’s collective Kileken. They show up unannounced and where we least expect them, promise and often deliver great things, and quickly come to be seen as indispensable. Their reach can’t be overestimated. They tell traders what stocks to buy and sell, determine how much our car insurance costs, influence which products Amazon shows us and how much we get charged for them, and interpret our Google searches and rank their results….(More)”.

Report by the Centre for Public Impact: “…embarked upon a worldwide project to find out how governments can strengthen their legitimacy. Amidst the turbulence and unpredictability of recent years, there are many contemporary accounts of people feeling angry, cynical or ambivalent about government.

While much has been said about the personalities of leaders and the rise of populist parties, what’s less clear is what governments could really do to strengthen legitimacy, a concept most agree remains integral to worldwide stability and peace. To find out what legitimacy means to people today and how it could be strengthened, we decided to break out of the usual circles of influence and ensure our project heard directly from citizens from around the world. People were open and honest about the struggle for someone in government to understand and to listen. Some shed tears while others felt angry about how their voices and identities seemed undervalued. Everyone, however, wanted to show how it was still very possible to build a stronger relationship and understanding between governments and people, even if the day-to-day actions of government were not always popular.

The aim of this paper is not to provide the definitive model for legitimacy. Instead, we have sought to be open about what we heard, stay true to people’s views and shine a light on the common themes that could help governments have better conversations about building legitimacy into all their systems and with the support of their citizens.

We gathered case studies to show how this was already happening and found positive examples in places we didn’t expect. The importance of governments showing their human side – even in our age of AI and robotics – emerged as such a key priority, and is why we called this paper Finding a more human government.

This is a conversation that has only just begun. …. To see what others are saying, do take a look at our website www.findinglegitimacy.centreforpublicimpact.org”

Joe Leahy at ZY See Beyond: “When Argentine entrepreneur Federico Vega two years ago launched a startup offering Uberlike services for Brazil’s freight industry, the sector was on the cusp of a wave of cargo theft.

Across Brazil, but especially in Rio de Janeiro, crime has soared, with armed gangs robbing one truck every 50 minutes in Rio last year.

Darrell West at the Hill: “Imagine it is 2030 and you are a U.S. government employee working from home. With the assistance of the latest technology, you participate in video calls with clients and colleagues, augment your job activities through artificial intelligence and a personal digital assistant, work through collaboration software, and regularly get rated on a one-to-five scale by clients regarding your helpfulness, follow-through, and task completion.

How did you — and the government — get here? The sharing economy that unfolded in 2018 has revolutionized the public-sector workforce. The days when federal employees were subject to a centrally directed Office of Personnel and Management that oversaw permanent, full-time workers sitting in downtown office buildings are long gone. In their place is a remote workforce staffed by a mix of short- and long-term employees. This has dramatically improved worker productivity and satisfaction.

In the new digital world that has emerged, the goal is to use technology to make employees accountable. Gone are 20- or 30-year careers in the federal bureaucracy. Political leaders have always preached the virtue of running government like a business, and the success of Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork has persuaded them to focus on accountability and performance.

Companies such as Facebook demonstrated they could run large and complex organizations with less than 20,000 employees, and the federal government followed suit in the late 2020s. Now, workers deploy the latest tools of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, data analytics, robots, driverless cars, and digital assistants to improve the government. Unlike the widespread mistrust and cynicism that had poisoned attitudes in the decades before, the general public now sees government as a force for achieving positive results.

Many parts of the federal government are decentralized and mid-level employees are given greater authority to make decisions — but are subject to digital ratings that keep them accountable for their performance. The U.S. government borrowed this technique from China, where airport authorities in 2018 installed digital devices that allowed visitors to rate the performance of individual passport officers after every encounter. The reams of data have enabled Chinese authorities to fire poor performers and make sure foreign visitors see a friendly and competent face at the Beijing International Airport.

Alexa-like devices are given to all federal employees. The devices are used to keep track of leave time, file reimbursement requests, request time off, and complete a range of routine tasks that used to take employees hours. Through voice-activated commands, they navigate these mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. No one can believe the mountains of paperwork required just a decade ago….(More)”.

Victor Tangermann in Futurism: “…astronomers from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands… are developing a simple smartphone attachment that makes it ridiculously, comically easy to measure the quality of water by pointing the tool at it, nothing more.

The tool’s primary purpose isn’t just so that you can whet your whistle in any lake, river, or creek you deem tasty-looking — quick and precise measurements of water pollution can be hugely beneficial for science. This kind of data can steer environmental policies on a national level. Citizens can tell if their drinking water is contaminated. Fishermen are able to determine the quality of their catch, and how pollution could affect local fish populations. Polluted water can even determine human migration patterns by forcing fishermen to move or give up their trade altogether….

There’s a precedent that have researchers hopeful. In 2013, the same team of astronomers and toxicologists developed the iSPEX (Spectropolarimeter for Planetary EXploration) — a smartphone attachment that can measure air pollution. Dutch citizens, along with people in cities from Athens to London, took thousands of measurements of the particulates in the air. The result: a detailed map of dust particles over the Netherlands and beyond.

The technology behind the smartphone attachment actually is a spin-off of sophisticated astronomy technology that can tell if oxygen is present on planets around other stars. This also foregoes the need to take local samples and send them back to the lab — a relatively expensive process that can take a lot longer….(More)”.

Book by Yascha Mounk: “The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, Yascha Mounk shows, democracy itself may now be at risk.

Two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”

The consequence, Mounk shows in The People vs. Democracy, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fears of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

The People vs. Democracy is the first book to go beyond a mere description of the rise of populism. In plain language, it describes both how we got here and where we need to go. For those unwilling to give up on either individual rights or the popular will, Mounk shows, there is little time to waste: this may be our last chance to save democracy….(More)”