Collection

The 8p banana that showed Bogotá needed more open public spending

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

María Victoria Angulo in The Guardian: “On a typical school day in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city, about a million pupils, from four to 18 years old, will sit down for a meal at one of our 384 public schools.

Balanced nutrition is crucial for children’s development. The food we provide may well be their main meal for the entire day. So when concerns were raised in 2016 over the quality, delivery, price, and even the origin of our meals, we took them very seriously.

Colombia had recently started publishing detailed public contracting records as open data for the first time. So our first port of call was to work with our national procurement agency, Colombia Compra Eficiente, to analyse the US$136m that we were spending on meals and other services. What we found shocked us: severe inefficiency, or worse.

Mayor Enrique Peñalosa and I set out radical reforms based on an open contracting approach. We established minimum and maximum prices for meals and we made the whole contracting process competitive and fully open. Sourcing, packing and distribution of food would no longer be a single contract, and the lowest bid price would not be the deciding factor when choosing a supplier. Instead, it would be about quality.

We began sharing all the information about how meals were procured, from their planning to their delivery, on a public online platform for anyone to see, in a way that was easy to understand.

We faced resistance from all directions. Some of the existing suppliers threatened to sue, with nine lawsuits attempting to halt the process, and tensions flared in our politically polarised city, with more than 10 debates in the city council over the process. On top of that, a media smear campaign attempted to discredit and sabotage the reforms by spreading misleading information about, for example, food arriving damaged because of the new system.

In December 2016, we opened up for bids to procure 74 products. By March 2017, suppliers had been found for all of them, except one: no company put in a bid to provide fresh fruit at the set cost.

This made us suspicious….(More)”.

Composite Ethical Frameworks for IOT and Other Emerging Technologies

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Max Senges, Patrick S. Ryan and Richard S. Whitt: “Modern engineering and technology has allowed us to connect with each other and even to take us to the moon. But technology has also polluted vast areas of the planet and it has empowered surveillance and authoritarian governments with dangerous tools. There are numerous cases where engineers and other stakeholders routinely ask what they are capable of inventing, and what they actually should invent. Nuclear weapons and biotechnology are two examples.

But when analyzing the transformations arising from less controversial modern socio-technological tools—like the internet, smartphones, and connected devices which augment and define our work and social practices—two very distinct areas of responsibility become apparent.

On the one hand, there are questions around the values and practices of the engineers who create the technologies. What values should guide their endeavours and how can society promote good conduct?

And on the other hand, there are questions regarding the effects when people use these technologies.

While engineering and design choices can either promote or hinder commendable social behavior and appropriate use, this chapter will focus on the first question….(More)”.

Tracking Metrics in Social 3.0

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Lim in AdWeek: “…Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, with incomparable reach and real value for marketers. However, as engagement on the channel increases, marketers are in a pickle. While they want to track and support valuable experiences on Facebook, they’re unsure if they can trust the channel’s metrics…..Marketers’ wavering trust in Facebook metrics warrants a look back at the evolution of social media itself.

At social’s advent (Social 1.0), metrics focused strictly on likes and comments. Content simply wasn’t as important as users learned to build social profiles and make the platform work for them.

Then, Social 2.0 invited brands to enter the fray. With them came the new role of content as a driver of top-line metrics.

Now, we’re in the midst of Social 3.0, where advancements in the technology have made it possible for social channels to result in real ad conversions.

When it comes to these conversions, it’s no longer all about the click. There’s been a marked shift away from social interactions of the past, which centered around intangible things like likes and engagement-based activities. Now, marketers are tasked with tracking more tangible metrics like conversions. Another way to look at this evolution is from social objectives (likes, shares, comments) to real business objectives (conversions, units sold, cost per sale)….

To thrive in Social 3.0, marketers must provide more direct channels for responses with lower barriers of entry, and do more of this work themselves.

They must also come to terms with the fact that while Facebook often feels like an owned channel, it’s first and foremost a platform designed for consumers. This means they cannot blindly put all their trust in Facebook’s metrics. Rather, marketers should be partnering with available third-party technologies to truly understand, trust and drive full value from Facebook insights.

Call tracking provides an avenue for this. Armed with call tracking software, marketers can determine which campaigns are causing Facebook users to pick up their phones. For instance, marketers can assign unique call numbers to separate Facebook campaigns to A/B test different copy and CTAs. Once they know what’s working best, they can incorporate that feedback into future campaigns.

Other analytics tools then provide a clearer picture. For example, marketers can leverage insights from Google Analytics, third-party data providers or other big analytics tools to learn more about the users that are engaging. Such a holistic perspective results in the creation of more personalized campaigns and, therefore, conversions….(More)”.

Can the Blockchain Tame Moscow’s Wild Politics?

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Holder at CityLab: “…In 2014, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin launched Active Citizen, an e-voting platform designed to allow citizens to directly weigh in on non-political city decisions—things like setting speed limits, plotting bus routes, and naming subway stations. Since then, 2,800 polls have been administered via the app and almost 2 million users across this city of 11 million residents have participated.

Active Citizen bears a family resemblance to other app-based citizen portals that cities are attempting to deploy, like the popular SeeClickFix, which originated in New Haven and is now used by many cities nationwide, and MyLA311, in L.A. They’re all aimed at boosting citizen engagement and government accountability, marketed as tools to connect residents to municipal services and help deliver swift and tangible results. But in Russia, where widespread corruption and a tendency toward authoritarianism have long been features of governance, the stakes of building that trust are higher.

That’s why this month, Moscow officials announced they would be piloting a move of Active Citizen onto “the blockchain.” A blockchain is an online database of sorts: a digitized, decentralized, and typically completely public ledger of transactions and interactions. Often used to track secure financial transactions (it underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, for example), the system is hosted by multiple “nodes,” all of which have a copy of the database and the information contained therein.

Lately, blockchain has also become a buzzword meant to convey accountability and security: Its workings are complex enough that the general public generally can’t fully wrap their heads around it, but sexy enough to inspire confidence. Moscow officials are using Active Citizen, with its new blockchain-assured transparency, as proof that the city is indeed heeding the will of the majority. “The city entrusts you to decide,” reads Active Citizen’s motto….(More)”.

Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Paul Fawcett, Matthew Flinders, Colin Hay, and Matthew Wood: “There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation.

This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas.

In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics….(More)”.

Humanitarian group uses blockchain tech to give Rohingya digital ID cards

Curated on January 2, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Techwire Asia: “A Non-Governmental Organization is using blockchain technology to provide stateless Rohingya refugees who fled Burma (Myanmar) with digital identity cards in a pilot project aimed at giving access to services like banking and education.

The first 1,000 people to benefit from the project in 2018 will be members of the diaspora in Malaysia, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, decades-old safe havens for the Rohingya, who are the world’s biggest stateless minority.

“They are disenfranchised,” Kyri Andreou, co-founder of The Rohingya Project, which is organising the initiative, said at its launch in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday.

“They are shut out. One of the key aspects is because of the lack of identification.”

More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims – who are denied citizenship in Buddhist-majority Burma – have fled to Bangladesh since August after attacks by insurgents triggered a response by Burma’s army and Buddhist vigilantes….

According to The Sun, Muhammad Noor said the project focuses on two aspects – identity and opportunity – in which the system will provide the first verified data on Rohingya census across the world.

Individual Rohingya, he said, shall have their ancestry authentically identified to link them directly to their original land of dispersion…(More)”.

Choice Architecture: A new approach to behavior, design, and wellness

Curated on January 2, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Avani Parikh and Prashant Parikh: “From Vitruvius in the 1^st century BCE on, there has been an attempt to understand how architecture works, especially in its poetic aspect but also in its basic functions. Design can encourage us to walk, to experience community, to imagine new ways of being, and can affect countless other choices we make that shape our health and happiness.

Using the ideas of rational choice theory and behavioral economics, Choice Architecture shows how behavior, design, and wellness are deeply interconnected. As active agents, we choose our responses to the architectural meanings we encounter based on our perception of our individual contexts. The book offers a way to approach the design of spaces for human flourishing and explains in rich detail how the potential of the built environment to influence our well-being can be realized….(More)”.

Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

Curated on January 2, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Stuart Jeffries of new book by Byung-Chul Han: “During a commercial break in the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple broadcast an ad directed by Ridley Scott. Glum, grey workers sat in a vast grey hall listening to Big Brother’s declamations on a huge screen. Then a maverick athlete-cum-Steve-Jobs-lackey hurled a sledgehammer at the screen, shattering it and bathing workers in healing light. “On January 24th,” the voiceover announced, “Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like [Orwell’s] Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

The ad’s idea, writes Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, was that the Apple Mac would liberate downtrodden masses from the totalitarian surveillance state. And indeed, the subsequent rise of Apple, the internet, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google Glass means that today we live in nothing like the nightmare Orwell imagined. After all, Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured that consumer goods were lacking to make sure subjects were in an artificial state of need.

The new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984, argues Han, works differently yet is more elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Jeremy Bentham. “Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” he writes. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist, it’s just that we in the neoliberal west have outsourced them (thanks, rendition flights) so that that obscenity called polite society can pretend they don’t exist.

Nonetheless, what capitalism realised in the neoliberal era, Han argues, is that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive. This is what he calls smartpolitics. Instead of saying no, it says yes: instead of denying us with commandments, discipline and shortages, it seems to allow us to buy what we want when we want, become what we want and realise our dream of freedom. “Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.”…(More)”.

Innovation Contests: How to Engage Citizens in Solving Urban Problems?

Curated on January 2, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sarah Hartmann, Agnes Mainka and Wolfgang G. Stock in Enhancing Knowledge Discovery and Innovation in the Digital Era: “Cities all over the world are challenged with problems evolving from increasing urbanity, population growth, and density. For example, one prominent issue that is addressed in many cities is mobility. To develop smart city solutions, governments are trying to introduce open innovation. They have started to open their governmental and city related data as well as awake the citizens’ awareness on urban problems through innovation contests.

Citizens are the users of the city and therefore, have a practical motivation to engage in innovation contests as for example in hackathons and app competitions. The collaboration and co-creation of civic services by means of innovation contests is a cultural development of how governments and citizens work together in an open governmental environment. A qualitative analysis of innovation contests in 24 world cities reveals this global trend. In particular, such events increase the awareness of citizens and local businesses for identifying and solving urban challenges and are helpful means to transfer the smart city idea into practicable solutions….(More)”.