Stefaan Verhulst
Olivier Alais at the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: “The concept of “open data” is not new, but its definition is quite recent. Since computers began communicating through networks, engineers have been developing standards to share data. The open data philosophy holds that some data should be freely available for use, reuse, distribute and publish without copyright and patent controls. Several mechanisms can also limit access to data like restricted database access, use of proprietary technologies or encryption. Ultimately, open data buttresses government initiatives to boost innovation, support transparency, empower citizens, encourage accountability, and fight corruption.
West Africa is primed for open data. The region experienced a 6% growth in 2014, according to the Africa Development Bank. Its Internet user network is also growing: 17% of the sub-Saharan population owned a unique smartphone in 2013, a number projected to grow to 37% by 2020 according to the GSMA. To improve the quality of governance and services in the digital age, the region must develop new infrastructures, revise digital strategies, simplify procurement procedures, adapt legal frameworks, and allow access to public data. Open data can enhance local economies and the standard of living.
This paper speaks towards the impact of open data in West Africa. First it assesses open data as a positive tool for governance and civil society. Then, it analyzes the current situation of open data across the region. Finally, it highlights specific best practices for enhancing impact in the future….(More)”
Book edited by Oriol Nel-lo and Renata Mele: “Cities in the 21st Century provides an overview of contemporary urban development. Written by more than thirty major academic specialists from different countries, it provides information on and analysis of the global network of cities, changes in urban form, environmental problems, the role of technologies and knowledge, socioeconomic developments, and finally, the challenge of urban governance.
In the mid-20th century, architect and planner Josep Lluís Sert wondered if cities could survive; in the early 21st century, we see that cities have not only survived but have grown as never before. Cities today are engines of production and trade, forges of scientific and technological innovation, and crucibles of social change. Urbanization is a major driver of change in contemporary societies; it is a process that involves acute social inequalities and serious environmental problems, but also offers opportunities to move towards a future of greater prosperity, environmental sustainability, and social justice.
With case studies on thirty cities in five continents and a selection of infographics illustrating these dynamic cities, this edited volume is an essential resource for planners and students of urbanization and urban change….(More)”
David Brooks in The New York Times: “We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force. Our founding fathers chose politics.
Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.
The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.
But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.
As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”
Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.
Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
This antipolitics tendency has had a wretched effect on our democracy. It has led to a series of overlapping downward spirals:
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience. That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.
The antipolitics people don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations. When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and, disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitics.
The antipolitics people refuse compromise and so block the legislative process. The absence of accomplishment destroys public trust. The decline in trust makes deal-making harder….
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. The answer to Trump is politics. It’s acknowledging other people exist. It’s taking pleasure in that difference and hammering out workable arrangements. As Harold Laski put it, “We shall make the basis of our state consent to disagreement. Therein shall we ensure its deepest harmony.”…(More)”
Crowdsourcing Campaign by Strong Towns: “Nearly every urban neighborhood in this country — whether small town or big city — has properties that could use a little love. This week at Strong Towns we’re talking about the federal rules that have made that love difficult to find, tilting the playing field so that capital and expertise flow away from walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Over eighty years of this distortion has created a lot of opportunity for Americans to make good, high-returning investments in our core cities and neighborhoods.
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SHOW JUST HOW MUCH POTENTIAL IS OUT THERE.
We all know that empty lot, that underutilized building, that is just waiting for the right person to come along and knit it back into the fabric of the neighborhood. Imagine that right person could actually get the financing — that the rules weren’t rigged against them — and all they needed was your encouragement. This week, let’s provide that encouragement.
Let’s shine a huge spotlight on these spaces. They don’t need expensive utilities, a new road or a tax subsidy. They just need a fair shake.
HOW CAN I PARTICIPATE?
- Get outside and take pictures of the vacant or underutilized properties in your town.
- Upload your photos to Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #BuildHereNow
- Bonus points if you include the location and a suggestion of what you would like to see built there. (Note that turning on location services will also greatly aid us in mapping out these posts all over the country.)…(More)”
HIFLD: “This site provides National foundation-level geospatial data within the open public domain that can be useful to support community preparedness, resiliency, research, and more. The data is available for download as CSV, KML, Shapefile, and accessible via web services to support application development and data visualization.”
Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now require that programs and policies be “evidence-based.” It makes sense to demand that policies be based on evidence and that such evidence be as good as possible, within reasonable time and budgetary limits. But the way this approach is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do.
The current so-called “gold standard” of what constitutes good evidence is the randomized control trial, or RCT, an idea that started in medicine two centuries ago, moved to agriculture, and became the rage in economics during the past two decades. Its popularity is based on the fact that it addresses key problems in statistical inference.
For example, rich people wear fancy clothes. Would distributing fancy clothes to poor people make them rich? This is a case where correlation (between clothes and wealth) does not imply causation.
Harvard graduates get great jobs. Is Harvard good at teaching – or just at selecting smart people who would have done well in life anyway? This is the problem of selection bias.
RCTs address these problems by randomly assigning those participating in the trial to receive either a “treatment” or a “placebo” (thereby creating a “control” group). By observing how the two groups differ after the intervention, the effectiveness of the treatment can be assessed. RCTs have been conducted on drugs, micro-loans, training programs, educational tools, and myriad other interventions….
In economics, RCTs have been all the rage, especially in the field of international development, despite critiques by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, who have attacked the inflated claims of RCT’s proponents. One serious shortcoming is external validity. Lessons travel poorly: If an RCT finds out that giving micronutrients to children in Guatemala improves their learning, should you give micronutrients to Norwegian children?
My main problem with RCTs is that they make us think about interventions, policies, and organizations in the wrong way. As opposed to the two or three designs that get tested slowly by RCTs (like putting tablets or flipcharts in schools), most social interventions have millions of design possibilities and outcomes depend on complex combinations between them. This leads to what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls a “rugged fitness landscape.”
Getting the right combination of parameters is critical. This requires that organizations implement evolutionary strategies that are based on trying things out and learning quickly about performance through rapid feedback loops, as suggested by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock at Harvard’s Center for International Development.
RCTs may be appropriate for clinical drug trials. But for a remarkably broad array of policy areas, the RCT movement has had an impact equivalent to putting auditors in charge of the R&D department. That is the wrong way to design things that work. Only by creating organizations that learn how to learn, as so-called lean manufacturing has done for industry, can we accelerate progress….(More)”
Andrew Young at The GovLab: “Last month, the GovLab and Omidyar Network launched Open Data’s Impact (odimpact.org), a custom-built repository offering a range of in-depth case studies on global open data projects. The initial launch of theproject featured the release of 13 open data impact case studies – ten undertaken by the GovLab, as well asthree case studies from Becky Hogge (@barefoot_techie), an independent researcher collaborating withOmidyar Network. Today, we are releasing a second batch of 12 case studies – nine case studies from theGovLab and three from Hogge…
The batch of case studies being revealed today examines two additional dimensions of impact. They find that:
- Open data is creating new opportunities for citizens and organizations, by fostering innovation and promoting economic growth and job creation.
- Open data is playing a role in solving public problems, primarily by allowing citizens and policymakers access to new forms of data-driven assessment of the problems at hand. It also enables data-driven engagement, producing more targeted interventions and enhanced collaboration.
The specific impacts revealed by today’s release of case studies are wide-ranging, and include both positive and negative transformations. We have found that open data has enabled:
- The creation of new industries built on open weather data released by the United States NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
- The generation of billions of dollars of economic activity as a result of the Global Positioning System(GPS) being opened to the global public in the 1980s, and the United Kingdom’s Ordnance Survey geospatial offerings.
- A more level playing field for small businesses in New York City seeking market research data.
- The coordinated sharing of data among government and international actors during the response to theEbola outbreak in Sierra Leone.
- The identification of discriminatory water access decisions in the case Kennedy v the City of Zanesville, resulting in a $10.9 million settlement for the African-American plaintiffs.
- Increased awareness among Singaporeans about the location of hotspots for dengue fever transmission.
- Improved, data-driven emergency response following earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.
- Troubling privacy violations on Eightmaps related to Californians’ political donation activity….(More)”
All case studies available at odimpact.org.
Virginia Eubanks at Slate: “Algorithms don’t just power search results and news feeds, shaping our experience of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, and Tinder.Algorithms are widely—and largely invisibly—integrated into American political life, policymaking, and program administration.
Algorithms can terminate your Medicaid benefits, exclude you from air travel, purge you from voter rolls, or predict if you are likely to commit a crime in the future. They make decisions about who has access to public services, who undergoes extrascrutiny, and where we target scarce resources.
But are all algorithms created equal? Does the kind of algorithm used by government agencies have anything to do with who it is aimed at?
Bias can enter algorithmic processes through many doors. Discriminatory datacollection can mean extra scrutiny for whole communities, creating a feedback cycleof “garbage in, garbage out.” For example, much of the initial data that populated CalGang, an intelligence database used to target and track suspected gang members, was collected by the notorious Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums unitsof the LAPD, including in the scandal-ridden Rampart division. Algorithms can alsomirror and reinforce entrenched cultural assumptions. For example, as Wendy HuiKyong Chun has written, Googling “Asian + woman” a decade ago turned up moreporn sites in the first 10 hits than a search for “pornography.”
But can automated policy decisions be class-biased? Let’s look at four algorithmic systems dedicated to one purpose—identifying and decreasing fraud, waste, and abuse in federal programs—each aimed at a different economic class. We ‘ll investigate the algorithms in terms of their effectiveness at protecting key American political values—efficacy, transparency, fairness, and accountability—and see which ones make the grade.
Below, I’ve scored each of the four policy algorithms on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being very low and 5 being high…
Of course this ad hoc survey is merely suggestive, not conclusive. But it indicates areality that those of us who talk about data-driven policy rarely address: All algorithmsare not created equal. Policymakers and programmers make inferences about theirtargets that get baked into the code of both legislation and high-tech administrativetools—that SNAP recipients are sneakier than other people and deserve less due process protection, for example….(More)
Joshua A.T. Fairfield & Christoph Engel in Duke Law Journal: “Privacy is commonly studied as a private good: my personal data is mine to protect and control, and yours is yours. This conception of privacy misses an important component of the policy problem. An individual who is careless with data exposes not only extensive information about herself, but about others as well. The negative externalities imposed on nonconsenting outsiders by such carelessness can be productively studied in terms of welfare economics. If all relevant individuals maximize private benefit, and expect all other relevant individuals to do the same, neoclassical economic theory predicts that society will achieve a suboptimal level of privacy. This prediction holds even if all individuals cherish privacy with the same intensity. As the theoretical literature would have it, the struggle for privacy is destined to become a tragedy.
But according to the experimental public-goods literature, there is hope. Like in real life, people in experiments cooperate in groups at rates well above those predicted by neoclassical theory. Groups can be aided in their struggle to produce public goods by institutions, such as communication, framing, or sanction. With these institutions, communities can manage public goods without heavy-handed government intervention. Legal scholarship has not fully engaged this problem in these terms. In this Article, we explain why privacy has aspects of a public good, and we draw lessons from both the theoretical and the empirical literature on public goods to inform the policy discourse on privacy…(More)”
See also:
Privacy, Public Goods, and the Tragedy of the Trust Commons: A Response to Professors Fairfield and Engel, Dennis D. Hirsch
Response to Privacy as a Public Good, Priscilla M. Regan
The Partnership for Public Service: “Government can change lives through great customer service. For example, millions of individuals attend college each year thanks to federal financial aid services, and many more rebuild their lives after natural disasters with government assistance. In order to change lives, agencies must put citizen needs at the center of everything they do. But how well are they accomplishing that goal?
The Partnership for Public Service, with support from Accenture Federal Services, identified the steps agencies can take to become more customer-centered, based on extensive interviews with agency leaders… (More). Download full report (602k)”