Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Niels Keijzer and Stephan Klingebiel for Paris21: “An ever-deepening data revolution is shaping everyday lives in many parts of the world. As just one of many mindboggling statistics on Big Data, it has been estimated that by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. The benefits of the data revolution extend to different groups of people, social movements, institutions and businesses. Yet many people and countries do not have access to these positive benefits and in richer countries potentially positive changes raise suspicion amongst citizens as well as concerns related to privacy and confidentiality. The availability of potential advantages is, to a large extent, guided by levels of development and income. Despite the rapid spread of mobile phone technology that allows regions otherwise disconnected from the grid to ‘leapfrog’ in terms of using and producing data and statistics, poor people are still less likely to benefit from the dramatic changes in the field of data.

Against the background of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the main challenge for statistics is to manage the data revolution in support of sustainable development. The main priorities are the broadening and deepening of production, dissemination and use of data and statistics, and achieving them requires identifying those population groups which are most vulnerable and making governments more accountable to their citizens. In parallel, the risks accompanying the data revolution need to be mitigated and reduced, including the use of data for purposes of repression or otherwise infringing on the privacy of citizens. In addition to representing a universal agenda that breaks away from the dichotomy of developed and developing countries, the new agenda calls for tailor-made approaches in each country or region concerned, supported by global actions. The 2030 Agenda further states the international community’s realisation of the need to move away from ‘business as usual’ in international support for data and statistics.

The most important driving forces shaping the data revolution are domestic (legal) frameworks and public policies across the globe. This applies not only to wealthier countries but also developing countries2 , and external support cannot compensate for absent domestic leadership and investment. Technical, legal and political factors all affect whether countries are willing and able to succeed in benefiting from the data revolution. However, in both low income countries and lower-middle income countries, and to some extent in upper-middle income countries, we can observe two constraining factors in this regard, capacities and funding. These factors are, to some degree, interrelated: if funding is not sufficiently available it might be difficult to increase the capacities required, and if capacities are insufficient funding issues might be more challenging….(More)”

Interview by David Bornstein at the New York Times: “Last year, the RAND Survey Research Group asked 3,037 Americans about their political preferences and found that the factor that best predicted support for Donald Trump wasn’t age, race, gender, income, educational attainment or attitudes toward Muslims or undocumented immigrants. It was whether respondents agreed with the statement “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”

A feeling of disenfranchisement, or powerlessness, runs deep in the country — and it’s understandable. For most Americans, wages have been flat for 40 years, while incomes have soared for the superrich. Researchers have found, unsurprisingly, that the preferences of wealthy people have a much bigger influence on policy than those of poor or middle-income people.

“I don’t think people are wrong to feel that the game has been rigged,” says Eric Liu, the author of “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” an engaging and extremely timely book published last week. “But we’re in a period where across the political spectrum — from the libertarian Tea Party right to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter left — people are pushing back and recognizing that the only remedy is to convert this feeling of ‘not having a say’ into ‘demanding a say.’ ”

Liu, who founded Citizen University, a nonprofit citizen participation organization in Seattle, teaches citizens to do just that. He has also traveled the country, searching across the partisan divide for places where citizens are making democracy work better. In his new book, he has assembled stories of citizen action and distilled them into powerful insights and strategies….

Can you explain the three “core laws of power” you outline in the book?

L. No. 1: Power compounds, as does powerlessness. The rich get richer, and people with clout get more clout.

No. 2: Power justifies itself. In a hundred different ways — propaganda, conventional wisdom, just-so stories — people at the top of the hierarchy tell narratives about why it should be so.

If the world stopped with laws No. 1 and 2, we would be stuck in this doom loop that would tip us toward monopoly and tyranny.

What saves us is law No. 3: Power is infinite. I don’t mean we are all equally powerful. I mean simply and quite literally that we can generate power out of thin air. We do that by organizing….(More)”

Isabell Stamm and Lina Eklund at LSE Impact Blog: “Social scientists are expanding the landscape of academic knowledge production by adopting online crowdsourcing techniques used by businesses to design, innovate, and produce. Researchers employ crowdsourcing for a number of tasks, such as taking pictures, writing text, recording stories, or digesting web-based data (tweets, posts, links, etc.). In an increasingly competitive academic climate, crowdsourcing offers researchers a cutting-edge tool for engaging with the public. Yet this socio-technical practice emerged as a business procedure rather than a research method and thus contains many hidden assumptions about the world which concretely affect the knowledge produced. With this comes a problematic reduction of research participants into a single, faceless crowd. This requires a critical assessment of crowdsourcing’s methodological assumptions….(More)”

Book edited by Norichika Kanie and Frank Biermann: “In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals built on and broadened the earlier Millennium Development Goals, but they also signaled a larger shift in governance strategies. The seventeen goals add detailed content to the concept of sustainable development, identify specific targets for each goal, and help frame a broader, more coherent, and transformative 2030 agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to build a universal, integrated framework for action that reflects the economic, social, and planetary complexities of the twenty-first century.

This book examines in detail the core characteristics of goal setting, asking when it is an appropriate governance strategy and how it differs from other approaches; analyzes the conditions under which a goal-oriented agenda can enable progress toward desired ends; and considers the practical challenges in implementation….(More)”

Salesforce Research: “To understand how Americans today engage with local and federal government agencies, Salesforce released its “2017 Connected Citizen Report.” The survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Salesforce, Dec. 9-13, 2016, among 2,057 adults, ages 18 and older, in the United States. The report found that some Americans said their local governments do not provide many general services — such as being able to report a road issue or apply for/submit a business permit — via modern digital channels. In addition, more than half of Americans would be open to their taxpayer money going to research forward-looking technologies for their cities, assuming it is for services they would find helpful. Finally, while most Americans agree they have better experiences communicating with private enterprises than government agencies, many that did engage with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Health and Human Services (HHS) or the Veterans Affairs (VA) in the past 12 months reported positive interactions overall….(More)”

“OpenAerialMap (OAM) is a set of tools for searching, sharing, and using openly licensed satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery.

Built on top of the Open Imagery Network (OIN), OAM is an open service that provides search and access to this imagery…

Use the map to pan and zoom to search available imagery. Imagery can be previewed by selecting a tile and browsing the sidebar. Read the User Guide for more information.

All imagery is publicly licensed and made available through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Open Imagery Network (OIN) Node. All imagery contained in OIN is licensed CC-BY 4.0, with attribution as contributors of Open Imagery Network. All imagery is available to be traced in OpenStreetMap.

OAM is available for sharing and distributing aerial imagery. There are plenty of ways to get involved in OpenAerialMap.

Check out the GitHub repository to learn more about the design and how to get involved in the project….(More)”

Helen Margetts in Nature: “Social networks are not a new phenomenon — people have always associated with like-minded others — but the advent of social media has led to a vast increase in the amount of social information that we see. We need data and experiments to understand how this information shapes our political landscape…(More)”

Innar Liiv in The Conversation: “Big Brother does “just want to help” – in Estonia, at least. In this small nation of 1.3 million people, citizens have overcome fears of an Orwellian dystopia with ubiquitous surveillance to become a highly digital society.

The government took nearly all its services online in 2003 with the e-Estonia State Portal. The country’s innovative digital governance was not the result of a carefully crafted master plan, it was a pragmatic and cost-efficient response to budget limitations.

It helped that citizens trusted their politicians after Estonia regained independence in 1991. And, in turn, politicians trusted the country’s engineers, who had no commitment to legacy hardware or software systems, to build something new.

This proved to be a winning formula that can now benefit all the European countries.

The once-only principle

With its digital governance, Estonia introduced the “once-only” principle, mandating that the state is not allowed to ask citizens for the same information twice.

In other words, if you give your address or a family member’s name to the census bureau, the health insurance provider will not later ask you for it again. No department of any government agency can make citizens repeat information already stored in their database or that of some other agency….The once-only principle has been such a big success that, based on Estonia’s common-sense innovation, the EU enacted a digital Once Only Principle and Initiative early this year. It ensures that “citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once, because public administration offices take action to internally share this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.”…

‘Twice-mandatory’ principle

Governments should always be brainstorming, asking themselves, for example, if one government agency needs this information, who else might benefit from it? And beyond need, what insights could we glean from this data?

Financier Vernon Hill introduced an interesting “One to Say YES, Two to Say NO” rule when founding Metro Bank UK: “It takes only one person to make a yes decision, but it requires two people to say no. If you’re going to turn away business, you need a second check for that.”

Imagine how simple and powerful a policy it would be if governments learnt this lesson. What if every bit of information collected from citizens or businesses had to be used for two purposes (at least!) or by two agencies in order to merit requesting it?

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board is, perhaps unexpectedly given the reputation of tax offices, an example of the potential for such a paradigm shift. In 2014, it launched a new strategy to address tax fraud, requiring every business transaction of over €1,000 to be declared monthly by the entities involved.

To minimise the administrative burden of this, the government introduced an application-programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company’s accounting software and the state’s tax system.

Though there was some negative push back in the media at the beginning by companies and former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves even vetoed the initial version of the act, the system was a spectacular success. Estonia surpassed its original estimate of €30 million in reduced tax fraud by more than twice.

Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and several others have taken a similar path for controlling and detecting tax fraud. But analysing this data beyond fraud is where the real potential is hidden….(More).”

Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward in First Monday: “Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in the usage of the term open, arguably stemming from the advent of networked technologies — including the Internet and mobile technologies. ‘Openness’ seems to be everywhere, and takes many forms: from open knowledge, open education, open data and open science, to open Internet, open medical records systems and open innovation. These applications of openness are having a profound, and sometimes transformative, effect on social, political and economic life.

This explosion of the use of the term has led to multiple interpretations, ambiguities, and even misunderstandings, not to mention countless debates and disagreements over precise definitions. The paper “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis. More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.

We argue that conceptualizing openness as social praxis offers several benefits. First, it provides a way out of a variety of problems that result from ambiguities and misunderstandings that emerge from the current multitude of uses of openness. Second, it provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness that allows space for the many different ways openness is experienced — often very different from the way that more formal definitions conceptualize it. Third, it points us towards an approach to developing practice-specific theory that we believe helps us build generalizable knowledge on what works (or not), for whom, and in what contexts….(More)”.