Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer and Fenja De Silva-Schmidt: “Data-driven journalism can be considered as journalism’s response to the datafication of society. To better understand the key components and development of this still young and fast evolving genre, we investigate what the field itself defines as its ‘gold-standard’: projects that were nominated for the Data Journalism Awards from 2013 to 2016 (n = 225). Using a content analysis, we examine, among other aspects, the data sources and types, visualisations, interactive features, topics and producers. Our results demonstrate, for instance, only a few consistent developments over the years and a predominance of political pieces, of projects by newspapers and by investigative journalism organisations, of public data from official institutions as well as a glut of simple visualisations, which in sum echoes a range of general tendencies in data journalism. On the basis of our findings, we evaluate data-driven journalism’s potential for improvement with regard to journalism’s societal functions….(More)”.

Summary from an independent review, carried out by Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti: “Increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring major social and economic benefits to the UK. With AI, computers can analyse and learn from information at higher accuracy and speed than humans can. AI offers massive gains in efficiency and performance to most or all industry sectors, from drug discovery to logistics. AI is software that can be integrated into existing processes, improving them, scaling them, and reducing their costs, by making or suggesting more accurate decisions through better use of information.

It has been estimated that AI could add an additional USD $814 billion (£630bn) to the UK economy by 2035, increasing the annual growth rate of GVA from 2.5 to 3.9%.

Our vision is for the UK to become the best place in the world for businesses developing and deploying AI to start, grow and thrive, to realise all the benefits the technology offers….

Key factors have combined to increase the capability of AI in recent years, in particular:

• New and larger volumes of data
• Supply of experts with the specific high level skills
• Availability of increasingly powerful computing capacity. The barriers to achieving performance have fallen significantly, and continue to fall.

To continue developing and applying AI, the UK will need to increase ease of access to data in a wider range of sectors. This Review recommends:

• Development of data trusts, to improve trust and ease around sharing data
• Making more research data machine readable
• Supporting text and data mining as a standard and essential tool for research.

Skilled experts are needed to develop AI, and they are in short supply. To develop more AI, the UK will need a larger workforce with deep AI expertise, and more development of lower level skills to work with AI. …

Increasing uptake of AI means increasing demand as well as supply through a better understanding of what AI can do and where it could be applied. This review recommends:

• An AI Council to promote growth and coordination in the sector
• Guidance on how to explain decisions and processes enabled by AI
• Support for export and inward investment
• Guidance on successfully applying AI to drive improvements in industry
• A programme to support public sector use of AI
• Funded challenges around data held by public organisations.

Our work has indicated that action in these areas could deliver a step-change improvement in growth of UK AI. This report makes the 18 recommendations listed in full below, which describe how Government, industry and academia should work together to keep the UK among the world leaders in AI…(More)”

About Colony: “We believe that the most successful organizations of the future will be open.

Openness is not about open plan offices or ‘20% time’. It’s about how decisions get made, how labor is divided, and who controls the purse strings.

In an open organization, you’re empowered to do the work you care about, not just what you’re told to do. Decisions are made openly and transparently. Influence is earned by consistently demonstrating just how damn good you are. It means everyone’s incentives are aligned, because ownership is open to all.

And that means opportunity is open to all, and a new world of possibility opens up.

Colony is infrastructure for the future of work: self-organizing companies that run via software, not paperwork….

Pew Global: “A deepening anxiety about the future of democracy around the world has spread over the past few years. Emboldened autocrats and rising populists have shaken assumptions about the future trajectory of liberal democracy, both in nations where it has yet to flourish and countries where it seemed strongly entrenched. Scholars have documented a global “democratic recession,” and some now warn that even long-established “consolidated” democracies could lose their commitment to freedom and slip toward more authoritarian politics.

A 38-nation Pew Research Center survey finds there are reasons for calm as well as concern when it comes to democracy’s future. More than half in each of the nations polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. Yet, in all countries, pro-democracy attitudes coexist, to varying degrees, with openness to nondemocratic forms of governance, including rule by experts, a strong leader or the military.

A number of factors affect the depth of the public’s commitment to representative democracy over nondemocratic options. People in wealthier nations and in those that have more fully democratic systems tend to be more committed to representative democracy. And in many nations, people with less education, those who are on the ideological right and those who are dissatisfied with the way democracy is currently working in their country are more willing to consider nondemocratic alternatives.

At the same time, majorities in nearly all nations also embrace another form of democracy that places less emphasis on elected representatives. A global median of 66% say direct democracy – in which citizens, rather than elected officials, vote on major issues – would be a good way to govern. This idea is especially popular among Western European populists….(More)”

James Kynge in the Financial Times: “…Over the period of “reform and opening” since the late 1970s, China has generally sought to “bide its time and hide its strength”. But no longer. At the congress, Xi Jinping, the president, presented “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a “a new choice” for developing nations to follow. But what lends heft to this globalist intent are technological advances that are already invigorating the Chinese economy and may also help to address some of the historic failings of the country’s polity.

The data revolution is fusing with China’s party-state to create a potential “techno-tatorship”; a hybrid strain in which rigid political control can coexist with ample free-market flexibility….

First of all, he said, the big ecommerce companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com, are obliged to share their data with central authorities such as the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the central bank. Then the PBoC shares the data with about 50 state-owned banks, creating a database that covers about 400m people, detailing their payment history, creditworthiness and even networks of social contacts, the official said.

“We have already seen that the number of bad debts being built up by households has come down sharply since we launched this system,” said the official. “People really care about their credit scores because those with bad scores have reduced access to financial services.”…
To be sure, data-centric approaches to governance can have shortcomings. The data can be ignored or manipulated by humans, or privileged institutions can lobby for special treatment using old fashioned political leverage. But some Chinese see a big opportunity. Economists Wang Binbin and Li Xiaoyan argue in a paper that the marriage of big data and central planning creates a potent new hybrid….(More)”.

Eunyoung Ha and Nicholas L.Cain in The Social Science Journal: “This paper examines the effects of regime type, government ideology and economic globalization on poverty in low- and middle-income countries around the world. We use panel regression to estimate the effect of these explanatory variables on two different response variables: national poverty gap (104 countries from 1981 to 2005) and child mortality rate (132 countries from 1976 to 2005). We find consistent and significant results for the interactive effect of democracy and government ideology: strong leftist power under a democratic regime is associated with a reduction in both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate. Democracy, on its own, is associated with a lower child mortality rate, but has no effect on the poverty gap. Leftist power under a non-democratic regime is associated with an increase in both poverty measures. Trade reduces both measures of poverty. Foreign direct investment has a weak and positive effect on the poverty gap. From examining factors that influence the welfare of poor people in less developed countries, we conclude that who governs is as important as how they govern….

• Our paper uses a unique dataset to study the impact of regime type, ideology and globalization on two measures of poverty.
• We find that higher levels of democracy are associated with lower child mortality rates, but do not impact poverty gap.
• The interaction of regime type and ideology has a strong effect: leftist power in a democracy reduces poverty and child mortality.
• We find that trade significantly reduces both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate.
• Overall, we find strong evidence that who governs is as important as how they govern…(More)”

Ali Farazmand in Public Organization Review: “This paper addresses governance reforms of the last three and a half decades and looks into the future. This is done in three parts. The first part presents a birds-eye view of the massive literature on governance and governance reforms with a focus on the good, the bad, and ugly sides, then in part two argues for an alternative concept or theory of “sound governance” with characteristics and dimensions that overcome the deficiencies of other models of governance. As a consequence of reforms, the third part examines the past and explores the future of public organizations via “going home” as a conclusion with possible scenarios, challenges, and opportunities….(More)”

Report by UNDP and Futurgov: “Effective and inspirational labs exist in many highly developed countries. In Western Europe, MindLab (Denmark) and The Behavioural Insights Team (UK) push their governments to re-imagine public services. In Asia, the Innovation Bureau in Seoul, South Korea, co-designs better services with citizens.

However, this guide is aimed towards those working in the development context. The authors believe their collective experience of running labs in Eurasia, Asia and the Middle East is directly transferrable to other regions who face similar challenges, for example, moving from poverty to inequality, or from a recent history of democratisation towards more open government.

This report does not offer a “how-to” of innovation techniques — there are plenty of guides out there. Instead, we give the real story of how government innovation labs develop in regions like ours: organic and people-driven, often operating under the radar until safe to emerge. We share a truthful  examination of the twists and turns of seeding, starting up and scaling labs, covering the challenges we faced and our failures, as much as our successes. …(More)”.

Anna Sienicka in the Financial Times: “I often imagine how different the world would look if citizens and social activists were able to fully understand and use data, and new technologies. Unfortunately, the entry point to this world is often inaccessible for most civil society groups…

The concept of open data has revolutionised thinking about citizens’ participation in civic life. Since the fall of communism, citizens across central and eastern Europe have been fighting for more transparent and responsive governments, and to improve collaboration between civil society and the public sector. When an institution makes its data public, it is a sign that it is committed to being transparent and accountable. A few cities have opened up data about budget spending, for example, but these remain the exception rather than the rule. Open data provides citizens with a tool to directly engage in civic life. For example, they can analyse public expenses to check how their taxes are used, track their MP’s votes or monitor the legislative process….

One of the successful projects in Ukraine is the Open School app, which provides reviews and ratings of secondary schools based on indicators such as the number of pupils who go on to university, school subject specialisations and accessibility. It allows students and parents to make informed decisions about their educational path… Another example comes from the Serbian city of Pancevo, where a maths teacher and a tax inspector have worked together to help people navigate the tax system. The idea is simple: the more people know about taxes, the less likely they are to unconsciously violate the law. Open Taxes is a free, web-based, interactive guide to key national and local taxes…(More)”

Medium Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “We live in an increasingly quantified world, one where data is driving key business decisions. Data is claimed to be the new competitive advantage. Yet, paradoxically, even as our reliance on data increases and the call for agile, data-driven policy making becomes more pronounced, many Statistical Offices are confronted with shrinking budgets and an increased demand to adjust their practices to a data age. If Statistical Offices fail to find new ways to deliver “evidence of tomorrow”, by leveraging new data sources, this could mean that public policy may be formed without access to the full range of available and relevant intelligence — as most business leaders have. At worst, a thinning evidence base and lack of rigorous data foundation could lead to errors and more “fake news,” with possibly harmful public policy implications.

While my talk was focused on the key ways data can inform and ultimately transform the full policy cycle (see full presentation here), a key premise I examined was the need to access, utilize and find insight in the vast reams of data and data expertise that exist in private hands through the creation of new kinds of public and private partnerships or “data collaboratives” to establish more agile and data-driven policy making.

Applied to statistics, such approaches have already shown promise in a number of settings and countries. Eurostat itself has, for instance, experimented together with Statistics Belgium, with leveraging call detail records provided by Proximus to document population density. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) recently launched a Center for Big Data Statistics (CBDS)in partnership with companies like Dell-EMC and Microsoft. Other National Statistics Offices (NSOs) are considering using scanner data for monitoring consumer prices (Austria); leveraging smart meter data (Canada); or using telecom data for complementing transportation statistics (Belgium). We are now living undeniably in an era of data. Much of this data is held by private corporations. The key task is thus to find a way of utilizing this data for the greater public good.

Value Proposition — and Challenges

There are several reasons to believe that public policy making and official statistics could indeed benefit from access to privately collected and held data. Among the value propositions:

• Using private data can increase the scope and breadth and thus insights offered by available evidence for policymakers;
• Using private data can increase the quality and credibility of existing data sets (for instance, by complementing or validating them);
• Private data can increase the timeliness and thus relevance of often-outdated information held by statistical agencies (social media streams, for example, can provide real-time insights into public behavior); and
• Private data can lower costs and increase other efficiencies (for example, through more sophisticated analytical methods) for statistical organizations….(More)”.