Public Sector Entrepreneurship and the Integration of Innovative Business Models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Mateusz Lewandowski and Barbara Kożuch: “While private, for-profit businesses have typically been the most experienced with entrepreneurship, the study of public sector business models is coming to the forefront of entrepreneurial discussions. This shift has allowed researchers and practitioners to expand on their knowledge of positive business choices and paved the way for more profitable business empires.

Public Sector Entrepreneurship and the Integration of Innovative Business Models is a comprehensive source of academic research that discusses the latest entrepreneurial strategies, achievements, and challenges in public sector contexts. Highlighting relevant topics such as public management, crowdsourcing, municipal cooperation, and public sector marketing, this is an ideal resource for managers, practitioners, researchers, and professionals interested in learning more about public sector business ideals, and how these models are shaping positive entrepreneurial communities around the world….(More)”

Towards a sociology of institutional transparency: openness, deception, and the problem of public trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

S. Moore in Sociology: “Transparency has become the watchword of twenty-first century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of ‘opening up’ the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel’s (1906) work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point, the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of ‘instrumental politics’, reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a ‘domain of plain public facts’ (Ezrahi, 2004: 106). The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies….(More)”.

Data capitalism is cashing in on our privacy . . . for now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill in the Financial Times: “The buzz at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was all about connectivity and machine learning. …The primary effect of these consumer tech products seems limited — but we will need to pay increasing attention to the secondary consequences of these connected devices. They are just the most visible manifestation of a fundamental transformation that is likely to shape our societies far more than Brexit, Donald Trump or squabbles over the South China Sea. It concerns who collects, owns and uses data. The subject of data is so antiseptic that it seldom generates excitement. To make it sound sexy, some have described data as the “new oil”, fuelling our digital economies. In reality, it is likely to prove far more significant than that. Data are increasingly determining economic value, reshaping the practice of power and intruding into the innermost areas of our lives. Some commentators have suggested that this transformation is so profound that we are moving from an era of financial capitalism into one of data capitalism. The Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari even argues that Dataism, as he calls it, can be compared with the birth of a religion, given the claims of its most fervent disciples to provide universal solutions. …

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute, argues in a recent FT TechTonic podcast that it is too early to give up on privacy…The next impending revolution, he argues, will be about giving consumers control over their data. Considering the increasing processing power and memory capacity of smartphones, he believes new models of data collection and more localised use may soon gain traction. One example is the Blue Button service used by US veterans, which allows individuals to maintain and update their medical records. “That has turned out to be a really revolutionary step,” he says. “I think we are going to see a lot more of that kind of re-empowering.” According to this view, we can use data to create a far smarter world without sacrificing precious rights. If we truly believe in such a benign future, we had better hurry up and invent it….(More)”

Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A science fiction and tech-vision anthology “about the coming era of transparency in the information age” edited by David Brin & Stephen W. Potts: “Young people log their lives with hourly True Confessions. Cops wear lapel-cams and spy agencies peer at us — and face defections and whistle blowers. Bank records leak and “uncrackable” firewalls topple. As we debate internet privacy, revenge porn, the NSA, and Edward Snowden, cameras get smaller, faster, and more numerous.

Has Orwell’s Big Brother finally come to pass? Or have we become a global society of thousands of Little Brothers — watching, judging, and reporting on one another?

Partnering with the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, and inspired by Brin’s nonfiction book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, noted author and futurist David Brin and scholar Stephen W. Potts have compiled essays and short stories from writers such as Robert J. Sawyer, James Morrow, William Gibson, Damon Knight, Jack McDevitt, and many others to examine the benefits and pitfalls of technological transparency in all its permutations.

Among the many questions…

  • Do we answer surveillance with sousveillance, shining accountability upward?
  • Will we spiral into busybody judgmentalism? Or might people choose to leave each other alone?
  • Will empathy increase or decrease in a more transparent world?
  • What if we could own our information, and buy and sell it in a web bazaar?…(More)”

From Servants to Stewards: Design-led Innovation in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Hasler: “For years, and very acutely the last few months, citizens of the United States and in many other parts of the world have been pitched into an often uncomfortable morass of debate and discussion about the direction of their country. Problems exist, and persist, which government at all levels has tried to address or currently addresses, and government’s efficacy at addressing problems affects all of us in some way. At such an historical moment like the one in which we live, in which a competing visions of government excite or frighten so many, we remember how much government matters to us.

A very powerful anecdote told to a crowd of listeners at Harvard recently recounted how, during a United States Digital Service project, the prototype for a project delivered to a decision maker and her team didn’t include a feature that was very clearly dictated to them in the requirements. The head of the United States Digital Service team that facilitated the project received an angry call summoning her to the director’s office. There, the policy maker who had added the requirement asked for an explanation why the prototype didn’t meet requirements. “We described to her that we actually took this prototype to a school, and had people use it. It wasn’t a feature they wanted or used, so it didn’t make sense to build it.” The simple common sense of the logic of design-thinking immediately resonated with the policy maker. “Yeah, we shouldn’t build it if they don’t need it.” She stopped for a moment, and continued, “Oh my gosh, this is great, we should do everything like this, we should make policy like this!”

“Yeah, we shouldn’t build it if they don’t need it.” She stopped for a moment, and continued, “Oh my gosh, this is great! We should do everything like this! We should make policy like this!”

This story demonstrates how a growing movement within governments around the world has begun improve the public sector through design-led innovation. This article, presented in four parts, explores various aspects of that movement. To get right to it, the “design” in design-led innovation refers in this work specifically to design thinking, or the idea that design is a process, rather than a domain of outputs. You’ll see that I advocate strongly for a particular design process known as human-centered design, commonly referred to as HCD. HCD is a process made up of alternating divergence and convergence by which an individual or team starts by empathetically understanding a problem through close interaction with the people that experience it. The team then extends that co-creation to the solution phase, and experiments with ideas originating from both the team the humans who have the problem. It relies heavily on prototyping and small-scale releases of potential solutions to facilitate multiple iterations and get as close as possible to a solution whose effectiveness the team measures relative to its ability to solve the original problem. This may represent a bit of a switch to some: rather than become enamored of and advocate for a favored genius idea, many of today’s best designers fall in love with the problem, and don’t rest until a solution, originating from anywhere, gets it closer to solved.

I define innovation here as the process of developing and cultivating new ideas, often from individuals throughout an organization and even outside of it, thereby maximizing the potential of all of the resources at an organization’s disposal and often breaking down organizational silos. The marriage of innovation and design thinking suggests a strategy in which innovation encourages new ideas and helps an organization adapt to ever-changing conditions, and a transparent process that helps to develop a deep understanding of a problem, decreases cost and mitigates the risk of releasing something that doesn’t solve the problem, and provides a mechanism for questioning the system itself.

This work culminates an introductory research project for me. At the heart of the work is the question, “How can design thinking and innovation improve public sector effectiveness, provide more opportunities for rewarding political participation, and facilitate the pursuit of ambitious, shared goals that move us into the future?…(More)”

Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel J. Solove at Technology, Academics, Policy: “Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2016….

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy

From my blurb: “Chris Hoofnagle has written the definitive book about the FTC’s involvement in privacy and security. This is a deep, thorough, erudite, clear, and insightful work – one of the very best books on privacy and security.”

My interview with Hoofnagle about his book: The 5 Things Every Privacy Lawyer Needs to Know about the FTC: An Interview with Chris Hoofnagle

My further thoughts on the book in my interview post above: “This is a book that all privacy and cybersecurity lawyers should have on their shelves. The book is the most comprehensive scholarly discussion of the FTC’s activities in these areas, and it also delves deep in the FTC’s history and activities in other areas to provide much-needed context to understand how it functions and reasons in privacy and security cases. There is simply no better resource on the FTC and privacy. This is a great book and a must-read. It is filled with countless fascinating things that will surprise you about the FTC, which has quite a rich and storied history. And it is an accessible and lively read too – Chris really makes the issues come alive.”

Gary T. Marx, Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

From Peter Grabosky: “The first word that came to mind while reading this book was cornucopia. After decades of research on surveillance, Gary Marx has delivered an abundant harvest indeed. The book is much more than a straightforward treatise. It borders on the encyclopedic, and is literally overflowing with ideas, observations, and analyses. Windows into the Soul commands the attention of anyone interested in surveillance, past, present, and future. The book’s website contains a rich abundance of complementary material. An additional chapter consists of an intellectual autobiography discussing the author’s interest in, and personal experience with, surveillance over the course of his career. Because of its extraordinary breadth, the book should appeal to a wide readership…. it will be of interest to scholars of deviance and social control, cultural studies, criminal justice and criminology. But the book should be read well beyond the towers of academe. The security industry, broadly defined to include private security and intelligence companies as well as state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, would benefit from the book’s insights. So too should it be read by those in the information technology industries, including the manufacturers of the devices and applications which are central to contemporary surveillance, and which are shaping our future.”

Susan C. Lawrence, Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics

From the book blurb: “When the new HIPAA privacy rules regarding the release of health information took effect, medical historians suddenly faced a raft of new ethical and legal challenges—even in cases where their subjects had died years, or even a century, earlier. In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of these new privacy rules, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work.”

Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone

From Mark Tushnet: “Professor Krotoszynski provides a valuable overview of how several constitutional systems accommodate competing interests in privacy, speech, and democracy. He shows how scholarship in comparative law can help one think about one’s own legal system while remaining sensitive to the different cultural and institutional settings of each nation’s law. A very useful contribution.”

Laura K. Donohue, The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age…

Gordon Corera, Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage…

J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film…(More; See also Nonfiction Privacy + Security Books).

Cancer Research Orgs Release Big Data for Precision Medicine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at HealthITAnalytics: “The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is releasing more than 19,000 de-identified genomic records to further the international research community’s explorations into precision medicine.

The big data dump, which includes information on 59 major types of cancer, including breast, colorectal, and lung cancer, is a result of the AACR Project Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange (GENIE) initiative, and includes both genomic and some clinical data on consenting patients….

“These data were generated as part of routine patient care and without AACR Project GENIE they would likely never have been shared with the global cancer research community.”

Eight cancer research institutions, including five based in the United States, have contributed to the first phase of the GENIE project.  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston are among the collaborators.

Alongside institutions in Paris, the Netherlands, Toronto, Nashville, and Baltimore, these organizations aim to expand the research community’s knowledge of cancer and its potential treatments by continuing to make the exchange of high-grade clinical data a top priority.

“We are committed to sharing not only the real-world data within the AACR Project GENIE registry but also our best practices, from tips about assembling an international consortium to the best variant analysis pipeline, because only by working together will information flow freely and patients benefit rapidly,” Sawyers added…

Large-scale initiatives like the AACR Project GENIE, alongside separate data collection efforts like the VA’s Million Veterans Project, the CancerLinQ platform, Geisinger Health System’s MyCode databank, and the nascent PMI Cohort, will continue to make critical genomic and clinical data available to investigators across the country and around the world…(More)”.

Technoscience and Citizenship: Ethics and Governance in the Digital Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Ann Delgado that “… provides insights on how emerging technosciences come together with new forms of governance and ethical questioning. Combining science and technologies and ethics approaches, it looks at the emergence of three key technoscientific domains – body enhancement technologies, biometrics and technologies for the production of space -exploring how human bodies and minds, the movement of citizens and space become matters of technoscientific governance. The emergence of new and digital technologies pose new challenges for representative democracy and existing forms of citizenship. As citizens encounter and have to adapt to technological change in their everyday life, new forms of conviviality and contestation emerge. This book is a key reference for scholars interested in the governance of emerging technosciences in the fields of science and technology studies and ethics….(More)”

Beyond IRBs: Designing Ethical Review Processes for Big Data Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference Proceedings by Future of Privacy Forum: “The ethical framework applying to human subject research in the biomedical and behavioral research fields dates back to the Belmont Report.Drafted in 1976 and adopted by the United States government in 1991 as the Common Rule, the Belmont principles were geared towards a paradigmatic controlled scientific experiment with a limited population of human subjects interacting directly with researchers and manifesting their informed consent. These days, researchers in academic institutions as well as private sector businesses not subject to the Common Rule, conduct analysis of a wide array of data sources, from massive commercial or government databases to individual tweets or Facebook postings publicly available online, with little or no opportunity to directly engage human subjects to obtain their consent or even inform them of research activities.

Data analysis is now used in multiple contexts, such as combatting fraud in the payment card industry, reducing the time commuters spend on the road, detecting harmful drug interactions, improving marketing mechanisms, personalizing the delivery of education in K-12 schools, encouraging exercise and weight loss, and much more. And companies deploy data research not only to maximize economic gain but also to test new products and services to ensure they are safe and effective. These data uses promise tremendous societal benefits but at the same time create new risks to privacy, fairness, due process and other civil liberties.

Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to navigate unsettled social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or even lawyers. The ethical dilemmas arising from data analysis transcend privacy and trigger concerns about stigmatization, discrimination, human subject research, algorithmic decision making and filter bubbles.

The challenge of fitting the round peg of data-focused research into the square hole of existing ethical and legal frameworks will determine whether society can reap the tremendous opportunities hidden in the data exhaust of governments and cities, health care institutions and schools, social networks and search engines, while at the same time protecting privacy, fairness, equality and the integrity of the scientific process. One commentator called this “the biggest civil rights issue of our time.”…(More)”

Uber debuts Movement, a new website offering access to its traffic data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechCrunch: “Uber is opening up in an area where it might make sense competitively for it to stay more closed off: The ride-hailing company’s new Movement website will offer up access to its data around traffic flow in scores where it operates, intended for use by city planners and researchers looking into ways to improve urban mobility.

The basic idea is that Uber has a lot of insight into how traffic works within a city, and it can anonymize this data so that it isn’t tied to specific individuals in most cases. So where that’s possible, Uber is going to begin sharing said data, first to specific organizations who apply for early access, and then eventually to the general public.

Uber says it was looking at all the data it gathered and began to realize that it could be used for public benefit, and assembled a product team to make this happen. The result of this effort was Movement, which aims to address problems city officials and urban planners encounter when they’re forced to make key, transformational infrastructure decisions without access to all of, or the proper information about actual conditions and causes.

Essentially, according to Uber, it’s hoping to make it easier for those with influence over a city’s transportation picture to make the right decision, and to be able to explain why, where and when the changes are happening with accurate data backing them up. It also wants to do this in a way that makes it easy for organizations to work with, so it’s releasing the data organized around traffic analysis zones within cities, which are agreed-upon geographic demarcations that help with existing urban planning and traffic management.
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Users of the website can adjust things like time of day, day of week and zones to call up Uber’s data for that specific point or range, and can download the data, both with existing time series charts and in raw format for inputting into their own models. Uber says it’s looking at also releasing access to the data as an API, but is “trying to figure out how to do it in a performant way” at this stage….(More)”