Stefaan Verhulst

Johan Farkas and Christina Neumayer in First Monday: “This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation….(More)”.

Chapter byYair Cohen in Maximizing Social Science Research Through Publicly Accessible Data Sets, book edited by S. Marshall Perry: “The United States federal government agencies as well as states agencies are liberating their data through web portals. Web portals like data.gov, census.gov, healthdata.gov, ed.gov and many others on the state level provide great opportunity for researchers of all fields. This chapter shows the challenges and the opportunities that lie by merging data from different pubic sources. The researcher collected and merged data from the following datasets: NYSED school report card, NYSED Fiscal Profile Reporting System, Civil Rights Data Collection, and Census 2010 School District Demographics System. The challenges include data validation, data cleaning, flatting data for easy reporting, and merging datasets based on text fields….(More)”.

Akemi TakeokaChatfield and Christopher G.Reddick at Government Information Quarterly: “While citizens previously took a back seat to government, citizen coproduction of disaster risk communications through social media networks is emerging. We draw on information-processing, citizen coproduction, and networked governance theories to examine the governance and impact of networked interactions in the following question: When government’s capacity in information-processing and communication is overwhelmed by unfolding disasters, how do government and citizens coproduce disaster risk communications? During the Hurricane Sandy, we collected 132,922 #sandy tweets to analyze the structure and networked interactions using social network analysis. We then conducted case study of the government’s social media policy governance networks. Networked citizen interactions – their agility in voluntarily retweeting the government’s #sandy tweets and tweeting their own messages – magnified the agility and reach of the government’s #sandy disaster communications. Our case study indicates the criticality of social media policy governance networks in empowering the lead agencies and citizens to coproduce disaster communication public services….(More)”.

SAS Insights “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, accounting for one-fifth of deaths of people under the age of 25 in 2011. The Canadian Mental Health Association states that among 15 – 24 year olds the number is an even more frightening at 24 percent – the third highest in the industrialized world. Yet despite these disturbing statistics, the signals that an individual plans on self-injury or suicide are hard to isolate….

Team members …collected 2.3 million tweets and used text mining software to identify 1.1 million of them as likely to have been authored by 13 to 17 year olds in Canada by building a machine learning model to predict age, based on the open source PAN author profiling dataset. Their analysis made use of natural language processing, predictive modelling, text mining, and data visualization….

However, there were challenges. Ages are not revealed on Twitter, so the team had to figure out how to tease out the data for 13 – 17 year olds in Canada. “We had a text data set, and we created a model to identify if people were in that age group based on how they talked in their tweets,” Soehl said. “From there, we picked some specific buzzwords and created topics around them, and our software mined those tweets to collect the people.”

Another issue was the restrictions Twitter places on pulling data, though Soehl believes that once this analysis becomes an established solution, Twitter may work with researchers to expedite the process. “Now that we’ve shown it’s possible, there are a lot of places we can go with it,” said Soehl. “Once you know your path and figure out what’s going to be valuable, things come together quickly.”

The team looked at the percentage of people in the group who were talking about depression or suicide, and what they were talking about. Horne said that when SAS’ work went in front of a Canadian audience working in health care, they said that it definitely filled a gap in their data — and that was the validation he’d been looking for. The team also won $10,000 for creating the best answer to this question (the team donated the award money to two mental health charities: Mind Your Mind and Rise Asset Development)

What’s next?

That doesn’t mean the work is done, said Jos Polfliet. “We’re just scraping the surface of what can be done with the information.” Another way to use the results is to look at patterns and trends….(More)”

Paper by Jordan M. Blanke: “Technology has dramatically altered virtually every aspect of our life in recent years. While technology has always driven change, it seems that these changes are occurring more rapidly and more extensively than ever before. Society and its laws will evolve; but it is not always an easy process. Privacy has changed dramatically in our data-driven world – and continues to change daily. It has always been difficult to define exactly what privacy is, and therefore, it is even more difficult to propose what it should become. As the meaning of privacy often varies from person to person, it is difficult to establish a one-size-fits-all concept. This paper explores some of the historical, legal and ethical development of privacy, discusses how some of the normative values of privacy may survive or change, and examines how outrage has been – and will continue to be – a driver of such change….(More)”.

Policy brief by Franz Gatzweiler: “Many problems of urban health and wellbeing, such as pollution, obesity, ageing, mental health, cardiovascular diseases, infectious diseases, inequality and poverty (WHO 2016), are highly complex and beyond the reach of individual problem solving capabilities. Biodiversity loss, climate change, and urban health problems emerge at aggregate scales and are unpredictable. They are the consequence of complex interactions between many individual agents and their environments across urban sectors and scales. Another challenge of complex urban health problems is the knowledge approach we apply to understand and solve them. We are challenged to create a new, innovative knowledge approach to understand and solve the problems of urban health. The positivist approach of separating cause from effect, or observer from observed, is insufficient when human agents are both part of the problemand the solution.

Problems emerging from complexity can only be solved collectively by applying rules which govern complexity. For example, the law of requisite variety (Ashby 1960) tells us that we need as much variety in our problemsolving toolbox as there are different types of problemsto be solved, and we need to address these problems at the respective scale. No individual, hasthe intelligence to solve emergent problems of urban health alone….

• Complex problems of urban health and wellbeing cause millions of premature deaths annually and are beyond the reach of individual problem-solving capabilities.
• Collective and artificial intelligence (CI+AI) working together can address the complex challenges of urban health
• The systems approach (SA) is an adaptive, intelligent and intelligence-creating, “data-metabolic” mechanism for solving such complex challenges
• Design principles have been identified to successfully create CI and AI. Data metabolic costs are the limiting factor.
• A call for collaborative action to build an “urban brain” by means of next generation systems approaches is required to save lives in the face of failure to tackle complex urban health challenges….(More)”.

Book edited by Saqib Saeed, Zaigham Mahmood and T. Ramayah: “This book provides user studies and theories related to user-centered technology design processes for e-government projects. The book mainly discusses inherent issues of technology design implications, user experiences, and guidelines for technology appropriation. Ethnographic studies focusing on real life examples will enable readers to understand the problems in an effective way. Furthermore, the theories and results will help researchers and practitioners to handle these challenges in an efficient way.

E-Government is about harnessing the information revolution to improve the efficiency of government processes and the lives of citizens. It aims at a citizen centered approach to governance through effective use of the Internet and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). E-Government promotes transparency and effectiveness of a government’s processes as well as citizens’ participation (e-participation) in the affairs of the government. Whereas E-government projects are huge undertakings for government departments, a user-centric approach requires citizens’ participation in the design and delivery  of e government services. In both these respects, there are huge challenges and governments require long term commitment as well as correct planning and availability of financial resources to address them.

System design for e-governmental applications is inherently a complex process. In successful e-government projects, appropriately designed technology infrastructure plays a pivotal rule. The technology appropriation process requires that e-government technologies should be in line with the work practices of end users, so that successful usage of these technologies can be realized. E-governmental systems which fail to take into account such human factors result in failure and wasting huge amounts of public money as well as a loss of confidence of the public in such technological infrastructures. It is highly important that citizens are enabled to have access to the appropriate information technology, have knowledge and skills to use the available technology, and have the positive commitment to affect the governments’ strategies. So, enabling citizens to effectively participate is much more difficult.  This book addresses these inherent challenges and available opportunities with respect to user-centric e-government….(More)”.

Amy Liu and Allison Plyer at Brookings: “To recover from a disaster on the scale of Harvey and Irma requires a massive coordinated effort. Federal, state and local governments must lead. Philanthropy, nonprofits and the private sector will be key partners. Residents will voice their views, through community planning meetings and other venues, on how best to spend disaster-recovery dollars. With so many stakeholders and rebuilding needs, the process of restoring neighborhoods and economic activity will become emotionally and politically charged. As Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has already warned in Texas: “This is going to be a frustrating and painful process.”

For public officials to effectively steer a recovery process and for citizens to trust in the effort, reliable, transparent information will be essential. Leaders and the public need a shared understanding of the scale and extent of the damage and which households, businesses and neighborhoods have been affected. This is not a one-time effort. Data must be collected and issued regularly over months and years to match the duration of the rebuilding effort.

Without this information, it will be nearly impossible to estimate the nature of aid required, determine how best to deploy resources, prioritize spending and monitor progress. Rebuilding processes are chaotic, with emotions high over multiple, competing priorities. Credible public information organized in one place can help to neutralize misconceptions, put every need in context and depoliticize decision-making. Most importantly, data on recovery needs also can enable citizen involvement and allow residents to hold public leaders accountable for progress.

We know this first-hand from our experience in New Orleans, where the Brookings Institution and the New Orleans Data Center teamed up to produce what became the New Orleans Index following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We set out to help the public and decision-makers understand the level of outstanding damage in New Orleans and the region and to monitor the extent to which the city was bouncing back….(More)”.

UK Policy Lab: “…Over the summer in the Policy Lab we have started mapping different policy options, showing the variety of ways policy-makers might use their power to influence people’s actions and behaviours. We have grouped these into seven categories from low level to large scale interventions.

Carrots or sticks

These styles of intervention include traditional law-making powers (sticks) or applying softer influencing powers (carrots)  such as system stewardship.   In reality policy-making is much more complex than most people imagine.  From this starting point we’ve created a grid of 28 different ways policy-makers operate at different stages of maturity. This is still work in progress so we would very much welcome your thoughts. We are currently building examples for each of the styles from across government.  The design choices for policy-makers early in policy development shape how a policy is delivered and the kind of results that can be achieved. We have played around a lot with the language, and will continue to test this in the Lab.  However, it should be clear from the array of possibilities that determining which course of action, which levers will deliver the outcomes needed, in any particular circumstance requires great skill and judgement…(More)”.

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “…Yesterday, the National Digital Policy Network of the World Economic Forum, of which I am a member,  released a White Paper aimed at facilitating this process. The paper, entitled “Digital Policy Playbook 2017: Approaches to National Digital Governance,”  examines a number of case studies from around the world to develop a “playbook” that can help leaders in designing digital policies that maximize the forthcoming opportunities and effectively meet the challenges. It is the result of a series of extensive discussions and consultations held around the world, over , and attended by leading experts from various sectors and geographies…..

How can such insights be translated into a practical and pragmatic approach to policymaking? In order to find implementable solutions, we sought to develop a “Digital Policy Model Canvas” that would guide policy makers to derive specific policies and regulatory mechanisms in an agile and iterative manner – integrating both design thinking and evidence based policy making. This notion of a canvas is borrowed from the business world. For example, in Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur introduce the idea of a “Business Model Canvas” to generate new, innovative business models that can help companies–and others–go beyond legacy systems and approaches.

Applying this approach to the world of digital policymaking and innovation, we arrive at the “Digital Policy Model Canvas” represented in the accompanying figure.

The design and implementation of such a canvas can be applied to a specific problem and/or geographic context, and would include the following steps…(More)”.