Stefaan Verhulst

Want to Invest in Your City? Try the New Kickstarter for Municipal Bonds

Curated on July 7, 2015October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kyle Chayka’ in Pacific Standard Magazine:“… The San Francisco-based Neighborly launched in 2013 as a kind of community-based Kickstarter, helping users fund projects close to home. But the site recently pivoted toward presenting a better interface for municipal bonds, highlighting investment opportunities with a slick, Silicon Valley-style interface that makes supporting a local infrastructure project as cool as backing a new model of wrist-wearable computer. It’s bringing innovation to a dusty, though increasingly popular, sector. “You’d be shocked to find how much of the [municipal bonds] process is still being done by email and phone calls,” says Rodrigo Davies, Neighborly’s chief product officer. “This market is really not as modern as you would think.”….Neighborly enters into a gray space between crowdfunding and crowd-investing. The former is what we associate with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which lump together many small donations into totals that can reach into the millions. In crowdfunding, donations are often made for no guaranteed return. Contrary to what it might suggest, Kickstarter isn’t selling any products; it’s just giving users the opportunity to freely give away money for a legally non-binding promise of a reward, often in the form of a theoretical product. …

Crowd-investing, in contrast, exchanges money for equity in a company, or in Neighborly’s case, a city. Shares of stock or debt purchased through crowd-investing ideally result in profit for the holder, though they can hold as much risk as any vaporware crowdfunding project. But crowd-investing remains largely illegal, despite President Obama’s passing of the JOBS Act in early 2012 that was supposed to clear its path to legitimacy.

The obstacle is that the government’s job is to mitigate the financial risks its citizens can take. That’s why Quire, a start-up that allows fans of popular tech businesses to invest in them themselves, is still only open to “accredited investors,” defined by the government as someone “with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years” or who has an individual net worth of over $1 million. Legally, a large investment is categorized as too much risk for anyone under that threshold.

That’s exactly the demographic Neighborly is targeting for municipal bonds, which start in minimum denominations of $5,000. “Bond brokers wouldn’t even look at you unless you have $50-100,000 to invest,” Davies says. The new platform, however, doesn’t discriminate. “We’re looking at people who live in the cities where the projects are happening … in their mid-20s to early 40s, who have some money that they want to invest for the future,” he says. “They put it in a bank savings account or invest it in some funds that they don’t necessarily understand. They should be investing to earn better returns, but they’re not necessarily experienced with financial markets. Those people could benefit a ton from investing in their cities.”…(More)

Why Protecting Data Privacy Matters, and When

Curated on July 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Russell at Data Science Central: “It’s official. Public concerns over the privacy of data used in digital approaches have reached an apex. Worried about the safety of digital networks, consumers want to gain control over what they increasingly sense as a loss of power over how their data is used. It’s not hard to wonder why. Look at the extent of coverage on the U.S. Government data breach last month and the sheer growth in the number of attacks against government and others overall. Then there is the increasing coverage on the inherent security flaws built into the internet, through which most of our data flows. The costs of data breaches to individuals, industries, and government are adding up. And users are taking note…..
If you’re not sure whether the data fueling your approach will raise privacy and security flags, consider the following. When it comes to data privacy and security, not all data is going to be of equal concern. Much depends on the level of detail in data content, data type, data structure, volume, and velocity, and indeed how the data itself will be used and released.

First there is the data where security and privacy has always mattered and for which there is already an existing and well galvanized body of law in place. Foremost among these is classified or national security data where data usage is highly regulated and enforced. Other data for which there exists a considerable body of international and national law regulating usage includes:

Proprietary Data – specifically the data that makes up the intellectual capital of individual businesses and gives them their competitive economic advantage over others, including data protected under copyright, patent, or trade secret laws and the sensitive, protected data that companies collect on behalf of its customers;

Infrastructure Data – data from the physical facilities and systems – such as roads, electrical systems, communications services, etc. – that enable local, regional, national, and international economic activity; and

Controlled Technical Data – technical, biological, chemical, and military-related data and research that could be considered of national interest and be under foreign export restrictions….

The second group of data that raises privacy and security concerns is personal data. Commonly referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), it is any data that distinguishes individuals from each other. It is also the data that an increasing number of digital approaches rely on, and the data whose use tends to raise the most public ire. …

A third category of data needing privacy consideration is the data related to good people working in difficult or dangerous places. Activists, journalists, politicians, whistle-blowers, business owners, and others working in contentious areas and conflict zones need secure means to communicate and share data without fear of retribution and personal harm. That there are parts of the world where individuals can be in mortal danger for speaking out is one of the reason that TOR (The Onion Router) has received substantial funding from multiple government and philanthropic groups, even at the high risk of enabling anonymized criminal behavior. Indeed, in the absence of alternate secure networks on which to pass data, many would be in grave danger, including those such as the organizers of the Arab Spring in 2010 as well as dissidents in Syria and elsewhere….(More)”

From Mechanism to Virtue: Evaluating Nudge-Theory

Curated on July 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by van der Heijden, Jeroen and Kosters, Mark: “Ever since Thaler and Sunstein published their influential Nudge, the book and the theory it presents have received great praise and opposition. Nudge-theory, and more particularly, nudging may be considered an additional strategy providing some novel instruments to the already rich governance toolbox. But what is its value? The current debates on Nudge-theory are often highly normative or ideologically driven and pay limited attention to more practical aspects of the theory: Whether and how is nudging evaluable as a theory and a practice? Whether there is solid evidence available of nudge success over other governance interventions? What is to be considered a nudge success at all? What data and evaluative techniques may assist in evaluating nudging beyond individual cases? The current article seeks to explore these questions… (More)”

The regulator of tomorrow

Curated on July 6, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shrupti Shah, Rachel Brody, & Nick Olson at Deloitte: “…Disruptive trends are making it difficult for regulators to achieve their missions. But what if this changing business landscape presented opportunities to help regulators overcome the challenges they face? In the balance of this report, we explore the potential for regulators to embrace the opportunities presented by technical and business model innovation, the increasingly digital nature of their constituents, and industries’ and consumers’ changing attitudes and behaviors to help them meet key challenges across their two main functions: rulemaking (part one) and oversight and enforcement (part two).

PART ONE: RULEMAKING

Regulators are often the agencies responsible for implementing policy mandates. These mandates can vary from being highly prescriptive to giving regulators great freedom to determine how to implement a policy. In some cases, regulatory agencies have been granted authority by Congress to monitor entire industries, with discretion as to determining how to protect citizens and fair markets.

The business of rulemaking is governed by its own laws and regulations, from the Administrative Procedures Act to approvals of proposed rules by the Office of Management and Budget. All of these processes are designed as a safeguard to protect our citizens while not unduly burdening the regulated businesses or entities.

The process of formal and informal rulemaking is well defined,¹¹incorporates input from citizens and industry, and can take time. Given the challenges previously described, it becomes essential for regulators to think creatively about their rulemaking activities to meet their policy objectives. In this section, we explore several rulemaking opportunities for the regulator of tomorrow:

Rethinking outreach
Sensing
Guidelines and statements versus regulations
Tomorrow’s talent
Consultation 2.0…

PART TWO: OVERSIGHT AND ENFORCEMENT

In addition to rulemaking, regulators oversee compliance with the published rules, taking enforcement action when violations occur. Today’s regulators have access to significant amounts of data. Larger data sets combined with increasingly sophisticated analytical tools and the power of the crowd can help regulators better utilize limited resources and reduce the burden of compliance on citizens and business.

This section will explore several oversight and enforcement opportunities for the regulator of tomorrow:

Correlate to predict
Citizen as regulator
Open data
Collaborative regulating
Retrospective review…(More)”

Understanding the smart city Domain: A Literature Review

Curated on July 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos: “Smart Cities appeared in literature in late ‘90s and various approaches have been developed so far. Until today, smart city does not describe a city with particular attributes but it is used to describe different cases in urban spaces: web portals that virtualize cities or city guides; knowledge bases that address local needs; agglomerations with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure that attract business relocation; metropolitan-wide ICT infrastructures that deliver e-services to the citizens; ubiquitous environments; and recently ICT infrastructure for ecological use. Researchers, practicians, businessmen and policy makers consider smart city from different perspectives and most of them agree on a model that measures urban economy, mobility, environment, living, people and governance. On the other hand, ICT and construction industries stress to capitalize smart city and a new market seems to be generated in this domain. This chapter aims to perform a literature review, discover and classify the particular schools of thought, universities and research centres as well as companies that deal with smart city domain and discover alternative approaches, models, architecture and frameworks with this regard….(More)

How does collaborative governance scale?

Curated on July 5, 2015December 11, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ansell, Chris; and Torfing, Jacob in Policy & Politics: “Scale is an overlooked issue in the literature on interactive governance. This special issue investigates the challenges posed by the scale and scaling of network and collaborative forms of governance. Our original motivation arose from a concern about whether collaborative governance can scale up. As we learned more, our inquiry expanded to include the tensions inherent in collaboration across scales or at multiple scales and the issue of dynamically scaling collaboration to adapt to changing problems and demands. The diverse cases in this special issue explore these challenges in a range of concrete empirical domains than span the globe…(More)”

The Data Revolution

Curated on July 5, 2015December 11, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Review of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & their Consequences by David Moats in Theory, Culture and Society: “…As an industry, academia is not immune to cycles of hype and fashion. Terms like ‘postmodernism’, ‘globalisation’, and ‘new media’ have each had their turn filling the top line of funding proposals. Although they are each grounded in tangible shifts, these terms become stretched and fudged to the point of becoming almost meaningless. Yet, they elicit strong, polarised reactions. For at least the past few years, ‘big data’ seems to be the buzzword, which elicits funding, as well as the ire of many in the social sciences and humanities.

Rob Kitchin’s book The Data Revolution is one of the first systematic attempts to strip back the hype surrounding our current data deluge and take stock of what is really going on. This is crucial because this hype is underpinned by very real societal change, threats to personal privacy and shifts in store for research methods. The book acts as a helpful wayfinding device in an unfamiliar terrain, which is still being reshaped, and is admirably written in a language relevant to social scientists, comprehensible to policy makers and accessible even to the less tech savvy among us.

The Data Revolution seems to present itself as the definitive account of this phenomena but in filling this role ends up adopting a somewhat diplomatic posture. Kitchin takes all the correct and reasonable stances on the matter and advocates all the right courses of action but he is not able to, in the context of this book, pursue these propositions fully. This review will attempt to tease out some of these latent potentials and how they might be pushed in future work, in particular the implications of the ‘performative’ character of both big data narratives and data infrastructures for social science research.

Kitchin’s book starts with the observation that ‘data’ is a misnomer – etymologically data should refer to phenomena in the world which can be abstracted, measured etc. as opposed to the representations and measurements themselves, which should by all rights be called ‘capta’. This is ironic because the worst offenders in what Kitchin calls “data boosterism” seem to conflate data with ‘reality’, unmooring data from its conditions of production and making relationship between the two given or natural.

As Kitchin notes, following Bowker (2005), ‘raw data’ is an oxymoron: data are not so much mined as produced and are necessarily framed technically, ethically, temporally, spatially and philosophically. This is the central thesis of the book, that data and data infrastructures are not neutral and technical but also social and political phenomena. For those at the critical end of research with data, this is a starting assumption, but one which not enough practitioners heed. Most of the book is thus an attempt to flesh out these rapidly expanding data infrastructures and their politics….

Kitchin is at his best when revealing the gap between the narratives and the reality of data analysis such as the fallacy of empiricism – the assertion that, given the granularity and completeness of big data sets and the availability of machine learning algorithms which identify patterns within data (with or without the supervision of human coders), data can “speak for themselves”. Kitchin reminds us that no data set is complete and even these out-of-the-box algorithms are underpinned by theories and assumptions in their creation, and require context specific knowledge to unpack their findings. Kitchin also rightly raises concerns about the limits of big data, that access and interoperability of data is not given and that these gaps and silences are also patterned (Twitter is biased as a sample towards middle class, white, tech savy people). Yet, this language of veracity and reliability seems to suggest that big data is being conceptualised in relation to traditional surveys, or that our population is still the nation state, when big data could helpfully force us to reimagine our analytic objects and truth conditions and more pressingly, our ethics (Rieder, 2013).

However, performativity may again complicate things. As Kitchin observes, supermarket loyalty cards do not just create data about shopping, they encourage particular sorts of shopping; when research subjects change their behaviour to cater to the metrics and surveillance apparatuses built into platforms like Facebook (Bucher, 2012), then these are no longer just data points representing the social, but partially constitutive of new forms of sociality (this is also true of other types of data as discussed by Savage (2010), but in perhaps less obvious ways). This might have implications for how we interpret data, the distribution between quantitative and qualitative approaches (Latour et al., 2012) or even more radical experiments (Wilkie et al., 2014). Kitchin is relatively cautious about proposing these sorts of possibilities, which is not the remit of the book, though it clearly leaves the door open…(More)”

The science prize that’s making waves

Curated on July 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “The Ocean Health XPrize reveals a new fashion among philanthropists’…There is another reason why the Ocean Health XPrize fascinates me: what it reveals about the new fashion among philanthropists for handing out big scientific prizes. The idea is not a new one: wealthy people and governments have been giving prizes for centuries. In 1714, for example, the British government passed the Longitude Act, establishing a board to offer reward money for innovation in navigation — the most money was won by John Harrison, a clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer.

But a fascinating shift has taken place in the prize-giving game. In previous decades, governments or philanthropists usually bestowed money to recognise past achievements, often in relation to the arts. In 2012, McKinsey, the management consultants, estimated that before 1991, 97 per cent of prize money was a “recognition” award — for example, the Nobel Prizes. Today, however, four-fifths of all prize money is “incentive” or “inducement” awards. This is because many philanthropists and government agencies have started staging competitions to spur innovation in different fields, particularly science.

The best known of these is the XPrize Foundation, initiated two decades ago by Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur. The original award, the Ansari XPrize, offered $10m to the first privately financed team to put a vehicle into space. Since then, the XPrize has spread its wings into numerous different fields, including education and life sciences. Indeed, having given $30m in prize money so far, it has another $70m of competitions running, including the Google Lunar XPrize, which is offering $30m to land a privately funded robot on the moon.

McKinsey estimates that if you look across the field of prize-giving around the world, “total funds available from large prizes have more than tripled over the last decade to reach $350m”, while the “total prize sector could already be worth as much as $1bn to $2bn”. The Ocean Health XPrize, in other words, is barely a drop in the prize-giving ocean.

Is this a good thing? Not always, it might seem. As the prizes proliferate, they can sometimes overlap. The money being awarded tends — inevitably — to reflect the pet obsessions of philanthropists, rather than what scientists themselves would like to explore. And even the people running the prizes admit that these only work when there is a clear problem to be solved….(More)”

Who knew contracts could be so interesting?

Curated on July 5, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Goodrich at Transparency International UK: “…Despite the UK Government’s lack of progress, it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable to ask “who actually publishes these things, anyway?” Well, back in 2011, when the UK Government committed to publish all new contracts and tenders over £10,000 in value, the Slovakian Government decided to publish more or less everything. Faced by mass protests over corruption in the public sector, their government committed to publishing almost all public sector contracts online (there are some exemptions). You can now browse through the details of a significant amount of government business via the country’s online portal (so long as you can read Slovak, of course).

Who actually reads these things?

According to research by Transparency International Slovakia, at least 11% of the Slovakian adult population have looked at a government contract since they were first published back in 2011. That’s around 480,000 people. Although some of these spent more time than others browsing through the documents in-depth, this is undeniably an astounding amount of people taking a vague interest in government procurement.

Why does this matter?

Before Slovakia opened-up its contracts there was widespread mistrust in public institutions and officials. According to Transparency International’s global Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures impressions of public sector corruption, Slovakia was ranked 66^th out of 183 countries in 2011. By 2014 it had jumped 12 places – a record achievement – to 54^th, which must in some part be due to the Government’s commitment to opening-up public contracts to greater scrutiny.

Since the contracts were published, there also seems to have been a spike in media reports on government tenders. This suggests there is greater scrutiny of public spending, which should hopefully translate into less wasted expenditure.

Elsewhere, proponents of open contracting have espoused other benefits, such as greater commitment by both parties to following the agreement and protecting against malign private interests. Similar projects inGeorgia have also turned clunky bureaucracies into efficient, data-savvy administrations. In short, there are quite a few reasons why more openness in public sector procurement is a good thing.

Despite these benefits, opponents cite a number of downsides, including the administrative costs of publishing contracts online and issues surrounding commercially sensitive information. However, TI Slovakia’s research suggests the former is minimal – and presumably preferable to rooting around through paper mountains every time a Freedom of Information (FOI) request is received about a contract – whilst the latter already has to be disclosed under the FOI Act except in particular circumstances…(More)”