Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa A. Cameron et al: “Billions of dollars have been spent on participatory development programs in the developing world. These programs give community members an active decision-making role. Given the emphasis on community involvement, one might expect that the effectiveness of this approach would depend on communities’ pre-existing social capital stocks. Using data from a large randomised field experiment of Community-Led Total Sanitation in Indonesia, we find that villages with high initial social capital built toilets and reduced open defecation, resulting in substantial health benefits. In villages with low initial stocks of social capital, the approach was counterproductive – fewer toilets were built than in control communities and social capital suffered….(More)”

Press Release: “A new report from the Federal Trade Commission outlines a number of questions for businesses to consider to help ensure that their use of big data analytics, while producing many benefits for consumers, avoids outcomes that may be exclusionary or discriminatory.

“Big data’s role is growing in nearly every area of business, affecting millions of consumers in concrete ways,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “The potential benefits to consumers are significant, but businesses must ensure that their big data use does not lead to harmful exclusion or discrimination.”

The report, Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion? Understanding the Issues, looks specifically at big data at the end of its lifecycle – how it is used after being collected and analyzed, and draws on information from the FTC’s 2014 workshop, “Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion?,” as well as the Commission’s seminar on Alternative Scoring Products. The Commission also considered extensive public comments and additional public research in compiling the report.

The report highlights a number of innovative uses of big data that are providing benefits to underserved populations, including increased educational attainment, access to credit through non-traditional methods, specialized health care for underserved communities, and better access to employment.

In addition, the report looks at possible risks that could result from biases or inaccuracies about certain groups, including more individuals mistakenly denied opportunities based on the actions of others, exposing sensitive information, creating or reinforcing existing disparities, assisting in the targeting of vulnerable consumers for fraud, creating higher prices for goods and services in lower-income communities and weakening the effectiveness of consumer choice.

The report outlines some of the various laws that apply to the use of big data, especially in regards to possible issues of discrimination or exclusion, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act, FTC Act and equal opportunity laws. It also provides a range of questions for businesses to consider when they examine whether their big data programs comply with these laws.

The report also proposes four key policy questions that are drawn from research into the ways big data can both present and prevent harms. The policy questions are designed to help companies determine how best to maximize the benefit of their use of big data while limiting possible harms, by examining both practical questions of accuracy and built-in bias as well as whether the company’s use of big data raises ethical or fairness concerns….(More)”

Clare Birchall in the International Journal of Communication: “As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental, and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets bad and openness good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a “right to opacity”—the right to not be transparent, legible, seen—might open up an experience of subjectivity and responsibility beyond the circumscribed demands of the current politicotechnological management of visibilities….(More)”

The Guardian: “In 2015 the EU launched the world’s first international data portal, the Chinese government pledged to make state data public, and the UK lost its open data crown to Taiwan. Troves of data were unlocked by governments around the world last year, but the usefulness of much of that data is still to be determined by the civic groups, businesses and governments who use it. So what’s in the pipeline? And how will the open data ecosystem grow in 2016? We asked the experts.

1. Data will be seen as infrastructure (Heather Savory, director general for data capability, Office for National Statistics)….

2. Journalists, charities and civil society bodies will embrace open data (Hetan Shah, executive director, the Royal Statistical Society)…3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data

3. Activists will take it upon themselves to create data (Pavel Richter, chief executive, Open Knowledge International)….

4. Data illiteracy will come at a heavy price (Sir Nigel Shadbolt, principal, Jesus College, Oxford, professorial research fellow in computer science, University of Oxford and chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute…)

5. We’ll create better tools to build a web of data (Dr Elena Simperl, associate professor, electronics and computer science, University of Southampton) …(More)”

CREATe Working Paper by Lilian Edwards: “Smart cities” are a buzzword of the moment. Although legal interest is growing, most academic responses at least in the EU, are still from the technological, urban studies, environmental and sociological rather than legal, sectors2 and have primarily laid emphasis on the social, urban, policing and environmental benefits of smart cities, rather than their challenges, in often a rather uncritical fashion3 . However a growing backlash from the privacy and surveillance sectors warns of the potential threat to personal privacy posed by smart cities . A key issue is the lack of opportunity in an ambient or smart city environment for the giving of meaningful consent to processing of personal data; other crucial issues include the degree to which smart cities collect private data from inevitable public interactions, the “privatisation” of ownership of both infrastructure and data, the repurposing of “big data” drawn from IoT in smart cities and the storage of that data in the Cloud.

This paper, drawing on author engagement with smart city development in Glasgow as well as the results of an international conference in the area curated by the author, argues that smart cities combine the three greatest current threats to personal privacy, with which regulation has so far failed to deal effectively; the Internet of Things(IoT) or “ubiquitous computing”; “Big Data” ; and the Cloud. While these three phenomena have been examined extensively in much privacy literature (particularly the last two), both in the US and EU, the combination is under-explored. Furthermore, US legal literature and solutions (if any) are not simply transferable to the EU because of the US’s lack of an omnibus data protection (DP) law. I will discuss how and if EU DP law controls possible threats to personal privacy from smart cities and suggest further research on two possible solutions: one, a mandatory holistic privacy impact assessment (PIA) exercise for smart cities: two, code solutions for flagging the need for, and consequences of, giving consent to collection of data in ambient environments….(More)

Paper by Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason: “Transparency is increasingly evoked within public and private climate governance arrangements as a key means to enhance accountability and improve environmental outcomes. We review assumed links between transparency, accountability and environmental sustainability here, by identifying four rationales underpinning uptake of transparency in governance. We label these democratization, technocratization, marketization and privatization, and assess how they shape the scope and practices of climate disclosure, and to what effect. We find that all four are discernible in climate governance, yet the technocratic and privatization rationales tend to overtake the originally intended (more inclusive, and more public-good oriented) democratization and marketization rationales for transparency, particularly during institutionalization of disclosure systems. This reduces transparency’s potential to enhance accountability or trigger more environmentally sustainable outcomes….(More)”

Paper by Yannis Charalabidis, Charalampos Alexopoulos & Euripidis Loukis in  the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce: “The opening of government data, in order to have both social and economic value generated from them, has attracted the attention and interest of both researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, such as information systems, management sciences, political and social sciences, and law. Despite the rapid growth of this multidisciplinary research domain, which has led to the emergence and continuous evolution of technologies and management approaches for open government data (OGD), a detailed analysis of the specific areas and topics of this research is still missing. In this paper, a detailed taxonomy of research areas and corresponding research topics of the OGD domain is presented: it includes four main research areas (ODG management & policies, infrastructures, interoperability and usage & value), which are further analysed into 35 research topics. An important advantage of this taxonomy, beyond its high level of detail, is that it has been developed through extraction and combination of relevant knowledge from three different kinds of sources: important relevant government policy documents, research literature, and experts. For each of the 35 research topics we have identified, its research literature is summarized and main research objectives and directions are highlighted. Based on the above taxonomy, an extension of the extant OGD lifecycle is advanced; also, under-researched topics that require further research are identified….(More)”

Book edited by Surya Nepal, Cécile Paris and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos: “This book highlights state-of-the-art research, development and implementation efforts concerning social media in government services, bringing together researchers and practitioners in a number of case studies. It elucidates a number of significant challenges associated with social media specific to government services, such as:  benefits and methods of assessing; usability and suitability of tools, technologies and platforms; governance policies and frameworks; opportunities for new services; integrating social media with organisational business processes; and specific case studies. The book also highlights the range of uses and applications of social media in the government domain, at both local and federal levels. As such, it offers a valuable resource for a broad readership including academic researchers, practitioners in the IT industry, developers, and government policy- and decision-makers….(More)“

Introduction by Pieter Ballon , Dimitri Schuurman: “This special issue on “Living labs: concepts, tools and cases” comes 10 years after the first scientific publications that defined the notion of living labs, but more than 15 years after the appearance of the first living lab projects (Ballon et al., 2005; Eriksson et al., 2005). This five-year gap demonstrates the extent to which living labs have been a practice-driven phenomenon. Right up to this day, they represent a pragmatic approach to innovation (of information and communication technologies [ICTs] and other artefacts), characterised by a.o. experimentation in real life and active involvement of users.

While there is now a certain body of literature that attempts to clarify and analyse the concept (Følstad, 2008; Almirall et al., 2012; Leminen et al., 2012), living lab practices are still under-researched, and a theoretical and methodological gap continues to exist in terms of the restricted amount and visibility of living lab literature vis-à-vis the rather large community of practice (Schuurman, 2015). The present special issue aims to assist in filling that gap.

This does not mean that the development of living labs has not been informed by scholarly literature previously (Ballon, 2015). Cornerstones include von Hippel’s (1988) work on user-driven innovation because of its emphasis on the ability of so-called lead users, rather than manufacturers, to create (mainly ICT) innovations. Another cornerstone is Silverstone’s (1993) theory on the domestication of ICTs that frames technology adoption as an ongoing struggle between users and technology where the user attempts to take control of the technological artefact and the technology comes to be fitted to users’ daily routines. It has been said that, in living labs, von Hippel’s concept of user-driven design and Silverstone’s insights into the appropriation of technologies are coupled dynamically through experimentation (Frissen and Van Lieshout, 2006).

The concept of stigmergy, which refers to addressing complex problems by collective, yet uncoordinated, actions and interactions of communities of individuals, has gradually become the third foundational element, as social media have provided online platforms for stigmergic behaviour, which has subsequently been linked to the “spontaneous” emergence of innovations (Pallot et al., 2010; Kiemen and Ballon, 2012). A fourth cornerstone is the literature on open and business model innovation, which argues that today’s fast-paced innovation landscape requires collaboration between multiple business and institutional stakeholders, and that the business should use these joint innovation endeavours to find the right “business architecture” (Chesbrough, 2003; Mitchell and Coles, 2003).….(More)

Lawrence Susskind and Ella Kim in The Conversation: “…We have been testing the use of role-playing games to promote collaborative decision-making by nations, states and communities. Unlike online computer games, players in role-playing games interact face-to-face in small groups of six to eight. The games place them in a hypothetical setting that simulates a real-life problem-solving situation. People are often assigned roles that are very different from their real-life roles. This helps them appreciate how their political adversaries view the problem.

Players receive briefing materials to read ahead of time so they can perform their assigned roles realistically. The idea is to reenact the tensions that actual stakeholders will feel when they are making real-life decisions. In the game itself, participants are asked to reach agreement in their roles in 60-90 minutes. (Other games, like the Mercury Game or the Chlorine Game, take longer to play.) If multiple small groups play the game at the same time, the entire room – which may include 100 tables of game players or more – can discuss the results together. In these debriefings, the most potent learning often occurs when players hear about creative moves that others have used to reach agreement.

It can take up to several months to design a game. Designers start by interviewing real-life decision makers to understand how they view the problem. Game designers must also synthesize a great deal of scientific and technical information to present it in the game in a form that anyone can understand. After the design phase, games have to be tested and refined before they are ready for play.

Research shows that this immersive approach to learning is particularly effective for adults. Our own research shows that elected and appointed officials, citizen advocates and corporate leaders can absorb a surprising amount of new scientific information when it is embedded in a carefully crafted role-playing game. In one study of more than 500 people in four New England coastal communities, we found that a significant portion of game players (1) changed their minds about how urgent a threat climate change is; (2) became more optimistic about their local government’s ability to reduce climate change risks; and (3) became more confident that conflicting groups would be able to reach agreement on how to proceed with climate adaptation….

Our conclusion is that “serious games” can prepare citizens and officialsto participate successfully in science-based problem-solving. In related research in Ghana and Vietnam, we found that role-playing games had similarly valuable effects. While the agreements reached in games do not necessarily indicate what actual agreements may be reached, they can help officials and stakeholder representatives get a much clearer sense of what might be possible.

We believe that role-playing games can be used in a wide range of situations. We have designed games that have been used in different parts of the world to help all kinds of interest groups work together to draft new environmental regulations. We have brought together adversaries in energy facility siting and waste cleanup disputes to play a game prior to facing off against each other in real life. This approach has also facilitated decisions in regional economic development disputes, water allocation disputes in an international river basin and disputes among aboriginal communities, national governments and private industry….(More)”