Data Stewardship: The Way Forward in the New Digital Data Landscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Courtney Cameron: “…It is absolutely critical that Statistics Canada, as a national statistical office (NSO) and public service organization, along with other government agencies and services, adapt to the new data ecosystem and digital landscape. Canada is falling behind in adjusting to rapid digitalization, exploding data volumes, the ever-increasing digital market monopolization by private companies, foreign data harvesting, and in managing the risks associated with data sharing or reuse. If Statistics Canada and the federal public service are to keep up with private companies or foreign powers in this digital data context, and to continue to provide useful insights and services for Canadians, concerns of data digitalization, data interoperability and data security must be addressed through effective data stewardship.

However, it is not sufficient to have data stewards responsible for data: as data governance expert David Plotkin argues in Data Stewardship: An Actionable Guide to Effective Data Management and Data Governance, government departments must also consult these stewards on decisions about the data that they steward, if they are to ensure that decisions are made in the best interests of those who get value from the information. Frameworks, policies and procedures are needed to ensure this, as is having a steward involved in the processes as they occur. Plotkin also writes that data stewardship involvement needs to be integrated into enterprise processes, such as in project management and systems development methodologies. Data stewardship and data governance principles must be accepted as a part of the corporate culture, and stewardship leaders need to advise, drive and support this shift.

Finally, stewardship goes beyond sound data management and standards: it is important to be mindful of the role of an NSO. Public acceptability and trust are of vital importance. Social licence, or acceptability, and public engagement are necessary for NSOs to be able to perform their duties. These are achieved through practising data stewardship and adhering to the principles of open data, as well as by ensuring transparent processes, confidentiality and security, and by communicating the value of citizens’ sharing their data…With the rapidly accelerating proliferation of data and the increasing demand for, and potential of, data sharing and collaboration, NSOs and public governance organizations alike need to reimagine data stewardship as a function and role encompassing a wider range of purposes and responsibilities…(More)”. See also: Data Stewards — Drafting the Job Specs for A Re-imagined Data Stewardship Role

Groups want N.Y. to disaggregate data of Middle Eastern, North African individuals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Luke Parsnow: “A group of organizations are pushing for New York lawmakers to pass a bill that would disaggregate data of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) individuals, according to a letter sent Monday.

The bill (S6584-B/A6219-A) would direct every state agency, board, department and commission that collects demographic data to use separate categories to collect data for the “White” and “Middle Eastern or North African” groups.

“Our organizations have seen firsthand the impact of the systemic exclusion of Middle Eastern and North African communities from data collection,” the letter reads. “Our communities do not perceive themselves to be white and are not perceived to be white. We also experience various disparities compared to non-Hispanic whites that go unseen because of the lack of data.”

The group says those communities categorized as “White” hinders those communities in education, employment, housing, health care and political representation.

“Miscategorizing a New Yorker’s race is not only offensive, but has real-world impacts on services and resources my particular communities receive,” Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris said in a statement. “It should be obvious that people from the Middle East or North Africa are not white, yet that is how our laws define them.”

Gianaris said the legislation would give many New Yorkers better representation and a more powerful voice.

“The lack of a MENA category has hindered our understanding of the needs of MENA communities and our ability to consider those needs in decision-making and resource allocation,” according to the letter…(More)”.

Design for a “Mess”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Anirudh Dhebar: “The world is a mess,” reads the opening sentence of the blurb for Don Norman’s latest book, Design for a Better World. Compelled by that phrase, I was left wondering: Does Norman, an influential voice on user-centered design, perhaps best known for his seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, have workable solutions to offer so we can design our way out of the mess?

Thirty years ago, I read Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, which was originally published in a hardcover version as The Psychology of Everyday Things and retitled for the paperback edition. In his preface to that new edition, the author suggested the title change was a “lesson in design.” I could not agree more—many readers may find a book on design less intimidating than a book on psychology. By changing the title, Norman was practicing what he was preaching: making its design more user centric.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman preached effectively. He offered a distinctive perspective on something commonplace (everyday things), with an approachable style and a persuasive pitch to casual readers who otherwise may not have given much thought to the good, bad, and the ugly of the designs of the many things they interact with in their daily lives. His message helped bring user centricity to the front and center of product design and was part of a widespread shift toward more intentional design.

In his new book, Norman shifts the focus to something much more ambitious: the role of design in transforming the world from its present “mess” into something “better”—more sustainable, meaningful, and centered on humanity. While I applaud the author’s ambition, a shift from a relatively narrow focus on the design of tangible everyday objects to something as vast as a moral reform of the economy and its relationship to the environment is a tall order and requires more than a call-for-action-on-multiple-fronts message…(More)”.

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Salman Khan: “…explores how artificial intelligence and GPT technology will transform learning, and offers a road map for teachers, parents, and students to navigate this exciting (and sometimes intimidating) new world.

A pioneer in the field of education technology, Khan examines the ins and outs of these cutting-edge tools and how they will revolutionize the way we learn and teach. For parents concerned about their children’s success, Khan illustrates how AI can personalize learning by adapting to each student’s individual pace and style, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and offering tailored support and feedback to complement traditional classroom instruction. Khan emphasizes that embracing AI in education is not about replacing human interaction but enhancing it with customized and accessible learning tools that encourage creative problem-solving skills and prepare students for an increasingly digital world.

But Brave New Words is not just about technology—it’s about what this technology means for our society, and the practical implications for administrators, guidance counselors, and hiring managers who can harness the power of AI in education and the workplace. Khan also delves into the ethical and social implications of AI and large language models, offering thoughtful insights into how we can use these tools to build a more accessible education system for students around the world…(More)”.

US Senate AI Working Group Releases Policy Roadmap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gabby Miller: “On Wednesday, May 15, 2024, a bipartisan US Senate working group led by Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) released a report titled “Driving U.S. Innovation in Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States Senate.” The 31-page report follows a series of off-the-record “educational briefings,” including “the first ever all-senators classified briefing focused solely on AI,” and nine “AI Insight Forums” hosted in the fall of 2023 that drew on the participation of more than 150 experts from industry, academia, and civil society.

The report makes a number of recommendations on funding priorities, the development of new legislation, and areas that require further exploration. It also encourages the executive branch to share information “in a timely fashion and on an ongoing basis” about its AI priorities and “any AI-related Memorandums of Understanding with other countries and the results from any AI-related studies in order to better inform the legislative process.”…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and the Skill Premium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David E. Bloom et al: “How will the emergence of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the skill premium? To address this question, we propose a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function that distinguishes among three types of capital: traditional physical capital (machines, assembly lines), industrial robots, and AI. Following the literature, we assume that industrial robots predominantly substitute for low-skill workers, whereas AI mainly helps to perform the tasks of high-skill workers. We show that AI reduces the skill premium as long as it is more substitutable for high-skill workers than low-skill workers are for high-skill workers…(More)”

Participatory mapping as a social digital tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by María de los Ángeles Briones: “…we will use 14 different examples from different continents and contexts to explore the goals and methods used for participatory mapping as a social digital tool. Despite looking very different and coming from a range of cultural backgrounds, there are a number of similarities in these different case studies.

Although the examples have different goals, we have identified four main focus areas: activism, conviviality, networking and urban planning. More localised mapping projects often had a focus on activism. We also see from that maps are not isolated tools, they are complementary to work with other communication tools and platforms.

The internet has transformed communications and networks across the globe – allowing for interconnectivity and scalability of information among and between different groups of society. This allows voices, regardless of their location, to be amplified and listened to by many other voices achieving collective goals. This has great potential in a global world where it is evident that top-down initiatives are not enough to handle many of the social needs that local people experience. However, though the internet makes sharing and collaborating between people easier, offline maps are still valuable, as shown in some of our examples.

The similarity between the different maps that we explored is that they are social digital tools. They are social because they are related to projects that are seeking to solve social needs; and they are digital because they are based on digital platforms that permit them to be alive, spread, shared and used. These characteristics also refer to their function and design.

A tool can be defined as a device or implement, especially one held in the hand, used to carry out a particular function. So when we speak of a tool there are four things involved: an actor, an object, a function and a purpose. Just as a hammer is a tool that a carpenter (actor) use to hammer nails (function) and thus build something (purpose) we understand that social tools are used by one or more people for taking actions where the final objective is to meet a social need…(More)”.

Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nora Kenworthy: “Over the past decade, charitable crowdfunding has exploded in popularity across the globe. Sites such as GoFundMe, which now boasts a “global community of over 100 million” users, have transformed the ways we seek and offer help. When faced with crises—especially medical ones—Americans are turning to online platforms that promise to connect them to the charity of the crowd. What does this new phenomenon reveal about the changing ways we seek and provide healthcare? In Crowded Out, Nora Kenworthy examines how charitable crowdfunding so quickly overtook public life, where it is taking us, and who gets left behind by this new platformed economy.

Although crowdfunding has become ubiquitous in our lives, it is often misunderstood: rather than a friendly free market “powered by the kindness” of strangers, crowdfunding is powerfully reinforcing inequalities and changing the way Americans think about and access healthcare. Drawing on extensive research and rich storytelling, Crowded Out demonstrates how crowdfunding for health is fueled by—and further reinforces—financial and moral “toxicities” in market-based healthcare systems. It offers a unique and distressing look beneath the surface of some of the most popular charitable platforms and helps to foster thoughtful discussions of how we can better respond to healthcare crises both small and large…(More)”.

QuantGov

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “QuantGov is an open-source policy analytics platform designed to help create greater understanding and analysis of the breadth of government actions through quantifying policy text. By using the platform, researchers can quickly and effectively retrieve unique data that lies embedded in large bodies of text – data on text complexity, part of speech metrics, topic modeling, etc. …

QuantGov is a tool designed to make policy text more accessible. Think about it in terms of a hyper-powerful Google search that not only finds (1) specified content within massive quantities of text, but (2) also finds patterns and groupings and can even make predictions about what is in a document. Some recent use cases include the following:

  • Analyzing state regulatory codes and predicting which parts of those codes are related to occupational licensing….And predicting which occupation the regulation is talking about….And determining the cost to receive the license.
  • Analyzing Canadian province regulatory code while grouping individual regulations by industry-topic….And determining which Ministers are responsible for those regulations….And determining the complexity of the text for those regulation.
  • Quantifying the number of tariff exclusions that exists due to the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and recent tariff polices….And determining which products those exclusions target.
  • Comparing the regulatory codes and content of 46 US states, 11 Canadian provinces, and 7 Australian states….While using consistent metrics that can lead to insights that provide legitimate policy improvements…(More)”.

AI and Epistemic Risk for Democracy: A Coming Crisis of Public Knowledge?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Wihbey: “As advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are developed and deployed, core zones of information and knowledge that support democratic life will be mediated more comprehensively by machines. Chatbots and AI agents may structure most internet, media, and public informational domains. What humans believe to be true and worthy of attention – what becomes public knowledge – may increasingly be influenced by the judgments of advanced AI systems. This pattern will present profound challenges to democracy. A pattern of what we might consider “epistemic risk” will threaten the possibility of AI ethical alignment with human values. AI technologies are trained on data from the human past, but democratic life often depends on the surfacing of human tacit knowledge and previously unrevealed preferences. Accordingly, as AI technologies structure the creation of public knowledge, the substance may be increasingly a recursive byproduct of AI itself – built on what we might call “epistemic anachronism.” This paper argues that epistemic capture or lock-in and a corresponding loss of autonomy are pronounced risks, and it analyzes three example domains – journalism, content moderation, and polling – to explore these dynamics. The pathway forward for achieving any vision of ethical and responsible AI in the context of democracy means an insistence on epistemic modesty within AI models, as well as norms that emphasize the incompleteness of AI’s judgments with respect to human knowledge and values…(More)” – See also: Steering Responsible AI: A Case for Algorithmic Pluralism