Collection

Hashtag Standards For Emergencies

Curated on November 12, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Key Findings of New Report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:”

The public is using Twitter for real-time information exchange and for expressing emotional support during a variety of crises, such as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, political protests, mass shootings, and communicable-disease tracking.31 By encouraging proactive standardization of hashtags, emergency responders may be able to reduce a big-data challenge and better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response.
Twitter is the primary social media platform discussed in this Think Brief. However, the use of hashtags has spread to other social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora. As a result, the ideas behind hashtag standardization may have a much larger sphere of influence than just this one platform.
Three hashtag standards are encouraged and discussed: early standardization of the disaster name (e.g., #Fay), how to report non-emergency needs (e.g., #PublicRep) and requesting emergency assistance (e.g., #911US).
As well as standardizing hashtags, emergency response agencies should encourage the public to enable Global Positioning System (GPS) when tweeting during an emergency. This will provide highly detailed information to facilitate response.
Non-governmental groups, national agencies and international organizations should discuss the potential added value of monitoring social media during emergencies. These groups need to agree who is establishing the standards for a given country or event, which agency disseminates these prescriptive messages, and who is collecting and validating the incoming crowdsourced reports.
Additional efforts should be pursued regarding how to best link crowdsourced information into emergency response operations and logistics. If this information will be collected, the teams should be ready to act on it in a timely manner.”

Transparency for Trust in Government: How Effective is Formal Transparency?

Curated on November 10, 2014November 27, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Maria Cucciniello & Greta Nasi in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Many countries refer to transparency not only as the right to access information, but also as a tool for enhancing government efficiency and accountability. However, the practice of transparency is still linked to the need to comply with legal obligations, not necessarily meeting citizens’ needs. The purpose of this article is twofold: it measures the levels of transparency of governments and the needs of citizens for government information and consequently assesses whether there is a gap, offering recommendations for reducing it. This should contribute to reaching higher levels of useful rather than formal transparency and may help in facilitating government-constituent relations.”

Why the World Needs Anonymous

Curated on November 10, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gabriella Coleman at MIT Technology Review: “Anonymity is under attack, and yet the actions of a ragtag band of hackers, activists, and rabble-rousers reveal how important it remains.
“It’s time to end anonymous comments sections,” implored Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi in the Washington Post this August. In the U.K., a parliamentary committee has even argued for a “cultural shift” against treating pseudonymous comments as trustworthy. This assault is matched by pervasive practices of monitoring and surveillance, channeled through a stunning variety of mechanisms—from CCTV cameras to the constant harvesting of digital data.
But just as anonymity’s value has sunk to a new low in the eyes of some, a protest movement in favor of concealment has appeared. The hacker collective Anonymous is most famous for its controversial crusades against the likes of dictators, corporations, and pseudo-religions like Scientology. But the group is also the embodiment of this new spirit.
Anonymous may strike a reader as unique, but its efforts represent just the latest in experimentation with anonymous speech as a conduit for political expression. Anonymous expression has been foundational to our political culture, characterizing monumental declarations like the Federalist Papers, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly granted anonymous speech First Amendment protection.
The actions of this group are also important because anonymity remains important to us all. Universally enforcing disclosure of real identities online would limit the possibilities for whistle-blowing and voicing unpopular beliefs—processes essential to any vibrant democracy. And just as anonymity can engender disruptive and antisocial behavior such as trolling, it can provide a means of pushing back against increased surveillance.
By performing a role increasingly unavailable to most Internet users as they participate in social networks and other gated communities requiring real names, Anonymous dramatizes the existence of other possibilities. Its members symbolically incarnate struggles against the constant, blanket government surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden and many before him.
As an anthropologist who has spent half a dozen years studying Anonymous, I’ve have had the unique opportunity to witness and experience just how these activists conceive of and enact obfuscation. It is far from being implemented mindlessly. Indeed, there are important ethical lessons that we can draw from their successes and failures.
Often Anonymous activists, or “Anons,” interact online under the cover of pseudo-anonymity. Typically, this takes the form of a persistent nickname, otherwise known as a handle, around which a reputation necessarily accrues. Among the small fraction of law-breaking Anons, pseudo-anonymity is but one among a roster of tactics for achieving operational security. These include both technical solutions, such as encryption and anonymizing software, and cultivation of the restraint necessary to prevent the disclosure of personal information.
The great majority of Anonymous participants are neither hackers nor lawbreakers but must nonetheless remain circumspect in what they reveal about themselves and others. Sometimes, ignorance is the easiest way to ensure protection. A participant who helped build up one of the larger Anonymous accounts erected a self-imposed fortress between herself and the often-private Internet Relay Chat channels where law-breaking Anons cavorted and planned actions. It was a “wall,” as she put it, which she sought never to breach.
During the course of my research, I eschewed anonymity and mitigated risk by erecting the same wall, making sure not to climb over it. But some organizers were more intrepid. Since they associated with lawbreakers or even witnessed planning of illegal activity on IRC, they chose to cloak themselves for self-protection.
Regardless of the reasons for maintaining anonymity, it shaped many of the ethical norms and mores of the group. The source of this ethic is partly indebted to 4chan, a hugely popular, and deeply subversive, image board that enforced the name “Anonymous” for all users, thus hatching the idea’s potential (see “Radical Opacity”)….
See also: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.

Politics, Policy and Privatisation in the Everyday Experience of Big Data in the NHS

Curated on November 10, 2014July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Andrew Goffey ; Lynne Pettinger and Ewen Speed in Martin Hand , Sam Hillyard (ed.) Big Data? Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Volume 13) : “This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and technology Studies (STS) researchers were used to inform the research questions, data gathering and analysis. The chapter focuses on the aftermath of legislation to change the organisation of the NHS.

Findings

The chapter shows the benefits of qualitative research into specific manifestations information technology. It explains how apparently ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ quantitative data gathering and analysis is mediated by complex software practices. It considers the political power of claims that data is neutral.

Originality/value

The chapter provides insight into a specific case of healthcare data and. It makes explicit the role of politics and the State in digitisation and shows how STS approaches can be used to understand political and technological practice.”

Open Elections

Curated on November 10, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Welcome to OpenElections Our goal is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election data for the United States, including federal and statewide offices. No freely available comprehensive source of official election results exists. The current options for election data can be difficult to find and use or financially out-of-reach for most journalists and civic hackers. We want the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a CSV file for stories and data analysis or JSON usable for web applications and interactive graphics. OpenElections is generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge.”

Gov.uk quietly disrupts the problem of online identity login

Curated on November 10, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “A new “verified identity” scheme for gov.uk is making it simpler to apply for a new driving licence, passport or to file a tax return online, allowing users to register securely using one log in that connects and securely stores their personal data.
After nearly a year of closed testing with a few thousand Britons, the “Gov.UK Verify” scheme quietly opened to general users on 14 October, expanding across more services. It could have as many as half a million users with a year.
The most popular services are expected to be one for tax credit renewals, and CAP farm information – both expected to have around 100,000 users by April next year, and on their own making up nearly half of the total use.
The team behind the system claim this is a world first. Those countries that have developed advanced government services online, such as Estonia, rely on state identity cards – which the UK has rejected.
“This is a federated model of identity, not a centralised one,” said Janet Hughes, head of policy and engagement at the Government Digital Service’s identity assurance program, which developed and tested the system.
How it works
The Verify system has taken three years to develop, and involves checking a user’s identity against details from a range of sources, including credit reference agencies, utility bills, driving licences and mobile provider bills.
But it does not retain those pieces of information, and the credit checking companies do not know what service is being used. Only a mobile or landline number is kept in order to send verification codes for subsequent logins.
When people subsequently log in, they would have to provide a user ID and password, and verify their identity by entering a code sent to related stored phone number.
To enrol in the system, users have to be over 19, living in the UK, and been resident for over 12 months. A faked passport would not be sufficient: “they would need a very full false ID, and have to not appear on any list of fraudulent identities,” one source at the GDS told the Guardian.
Banks now following gov.uk’s lead
Government developers are confident that it presents a higher barrier to authentication than any other digital service – so that fraudulent transactions will be minimised. That has interested banks, which are understood to be expressing interest in using the same service to verify customer identities through an arms-length verification system.
The government system would not pass on people’s data, but would instead verify that someone is who they claim to be, much like Twitter and Facebook verify users’ identity to log in to third party sites, yet don’t share their users’ data.
The US, Canada and New Zealand have also expressed interest in following up the UK’s lead in the system, which requires separate pieces of verified information about themselves from different sources.
The system then cross-references that verified information with credit reference agencies and other sources, which can include a mobile phone provider, passport, bank account, utility bill or driving licence.
The level of confidence in an individual’s identity is split into four levels. The lowest is for the creation of simple accounts to receive reports or updates: “we don’t need to know who it is, only that it’s the same person returning,” said Hughes.
Level 2 requires that “on the balance of probability” someone is who they say they are – which is the level to which Verify will be able to identify people. Hughes says that this will cover the majority of services.
Level 3 requires identity “beyond reasonable doubt” – perhaps including the first application for a passport – and Level 4 would require biometric information to confirm individual identity.

Seattle Launches Sweeping, Ethics-Based Privacy Overhaul

Curated on November 10, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Angelique Carson for the Privacy Advisor: “The City of Seattle this week launched a citywide privacy initiative aimed at providing greater transparency into the city’s data collection and use practices.
To that end, the city has convened a group of stakeholders, the Privacy Advisory Committee, comprising various government departments, to look at the ways the city is using data collected from practices as common as utility bill payments and renewing pet licenses or during the administration of emergency services like police and fire. By this summer, the committee will deliver the City Council suggested principles and a “privacy statement” to provide direction on privacy practices citywide.
In addition, the city has partnered with the University of Washington, where Jan Whittington, assistant professor of urban design and planning and associate director at the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, has been given a $50,000 grant to look at open data, privacy and digital equity and how municipal data collection could harm consumers.
Responsible for all things privacy in this progressive city is Michael Mattmiller, who was hired to the position of chief technology officer (CTO) for the City of Seattle in June. Before his current gig, he worked as a senior strategist in enterprise cloud privacy for Microsoft. He said it’s an exciting time to be at the helm of the office because there’s momentum, there’s talent and there’s intention.
“We’re at this really interesting time where we have a City Council that strongly cares about privacy … We have a new police chief who wants to be very good on privacy … We also have a mayor who is focused on the city being an innovative leader in the way we interact with the public,” he said.
In fact, some City Council members have taken it upon themselves to meet with various groups and coalitions. “We have a really good, solid environment we think we can leverage to do something meaningful,” Mattmiller said….
Armbruster said the end goal is to create policies that will hold weight over time.
“I think when looking at privacy principles, from an ethical foundation, the idea is to create something that will last while technology dances around us,” she said, adding the principles should answer the question, “What do we stand for as a city and how do we want to move forward? So any technology that falls into our laps, we can evaluate and tailor or perhaps take a pass on as it falls under our ethical framework.”
The bottom line, Mattmiller said, is making a decision that says something about Seattle and where it stands.
“How do we craft a privacy policy that establishes who we want to be as a city and how we want to operate?” Mattmiller asked.”

Logged On: Smart Government Solutions from South Asia

Curated on November 8, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Zubair K. Bhatti, Jody Zall Kusek and Tony Verheijen: “Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelation that mobile technology is helping to fight corruption in Pakistan, improve health delivery in Bangladesh, provide access to government by the ordinary citizen in India, and help monitor elections in Afghanistan. If this Is possible in some place in poor South Asian countries considered the most poor in the world, then how can these examples be spread to further in these counties or in other countries? Logged on Government provides a look back on conventional solutions that have mostly not worked and why mobile solutions are taking hold. The book offers a model called Smart Proactive Government based on a Feedback model being used in Punjab, Pakistan. The book also offers five solutions that are present in every successful mobile and smart phone example that the authors reviewed. (Book PDF (20.18 MB) | View Chapters).”

A World That Counts: Mobilising a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

Curated on November 7, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary of the Report by the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG): “Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.
New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are bigger, faster and more detailed than ever before. This is the data revolution.
Some are already living in this new world. But too many people, organisations and governments are excluded because of lack of resources, knowledge, capacity or opportunity. There are huge and growing inequalities in access to data and information and in the ability to use it.
Data needs improving. Despite considerable progress in recent years, whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured. For people, this can lead to the denial of basic rights, and for the planet, to continued environmental degradation. Too often, existing data remain unused because they are released too late or not at all, not well-documented and harmonized, or not available at the level of detail needed for decision-making.
As the world embarks on an ambitious project to meet new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is an urgent need to mobilise the data revolution for all people and the whole planet in order to monitor progress, hold governments accountable and foster sustainable development. More diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can lead to better decision-making and real-time citizen feedback. This in turn enables individuals, public and private institutions, and companies to make choices that are good for them and for the world they live in.
This report sets out the main opportunities and risks presented by the data revolution for sustain-able development. Seizing these opportunities and mitigating these risks requires active choices, especially by governments and international institutions. Without immediate action, gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people, and between the private and public sectors will widen, and risks of harm and abuses of human rights will grow.

An urgent call for action: Key recommendations

The strong leadership of the United Nations (UN) is vital for the success of this process. The Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG), established in August 2014, offers the UN Secretary-General several key recommendations for actions to be taken in the near future, summarised below:

Develop a global consensus on principles and standards: The disparate worlds of public, private and civil society data and statistics providers need to be urgently brought together to build trust and confidence among data users. We propose that the UN establish a process whereby key stakeholders create a “Global Consensus on Data”, to adopt principles concerning legal, technical, privacy, geospatial and statistical standards which, among other things, will facilitate openness and information exchange and promote and protect human rights.
Share technology and innovations for the common good: To create mechanisms through which technology and innovation can be shared and used for the common good, we propose
to create a global “Network of Data Innovation Networks”, to bring together the organisations and experts in the field. This would: contribute to the adoption of best practices for improving the monitoring of SDGs, identify areas where common data-related infrastructures could address capacity problems and improve efficiency, encourage collaborations, identify critical research gaps and create incentives to innovate.
New resources for capacity development: Improving data is a development agenda in
its own right, and can improve the targeting of existing resources and spur new economic opportunities. Existing gaps can only be overcome through new investments and the strengthening of capacities. A new funding stream to support the data revolution for sustainable development should be endorsed at the “Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, in Addis Ababa in July 2015. An assessment will be needed of the scale of investments, capacity development and technology transfer that is required, especially for low income countries; and proposals developed for mechanisms to leverage the creativity and resources of the private sector. Funding will also be needed to implement an education program aimed at improving people’s, infomediaries’ and public servants’ capacity and data literacy to break down barriers between people and data.
Leadership for coordination and mobilisation: A UN-led “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” is proposed, tomobiliseandcoordinate the actions and institutions required to make the data revolution serve sustainable development, promoting several initiatives, such as:
- A “World Forum on Sustainable Development Data” to bring together the whole data ecosystem to share ideas and experiences for data improvements, innovation, advocacy and technology transfer. The first Forum should take place at the end of 2015, once the SDGs are agreed;
- A “Global Users Forum for Data for SDGs”, to ensure feedback loops between data producers and users, help the international community to set priorities and assess results;
- Brokering key global public-private partnerships for data sharing.
Exploit some quick wins on SDG data: Establishing a “SDGs data lab” to support the development of a first wave of SDG indicators, developing an SDG analysis and visualisation platform using the most advanced tools and features for exploring data, and building a dashboard from diverse data sources on ”the state of the world”.