Data Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Data Africa is an open data platform designed to provide information on key themes for research and development such as: agriculture, climate, poverty and child health across Sub-Saharan Africa at the sub-national level. The main goal of the online tool is to present the themes to a wide, even non-technical audience through easily accessible visual narratives.

In its first stage, the platform is focused on national and sub-national level data for 13 countries:

  • Burkina Faso
  • Ethiopia
  • Ghana
  • Kenya
  • Malawi
  • Mali
  • Mozambique
  • Nigeria
  • Rwanda
  • Senegal
  • Tanzania
  • Uganda
  • Zambia

Over time, we anticipate expanding the coverage of the platform with additional countries and increasing the amount of data available through the platform….

The data contained in the online tool draws from a variety of sources, including:

Crowd Research: Open and Scalable University Laboratories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rajan Vaish et al: “Research experiences today are limited to a privileged few at select universities. Providing open access to research experiences would enable global upward mobility and increased diversity in the scientific workforce. How can we coordinate a crowd of diverse volunteers on open-ended research? How could a PI have enough visibility into each person’s contributions to recommend them for further study? We present Crowd Research, a crowdsourcing technique that coordinates open-ended research through an iterative cycle of open contribution, synchronous collaboration, and peer assessment. To aid upward mobility and recognize contributions in publications, we introduce a decentralized credit system: participants allocate credits to each other, which a graph centrality algorithm translates into a collectively-created author order. Over 1,500 people from 62 countries have participated, 74% from institutions with low access to research. Over two years and three projects, this crowd has produced articles at top-tier Computer Science venues, and participants have gone on to leading graduate programs….(More)”.

The Implementation of Open Data in Indonesia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dani Gunawan and Amalia Amalia: “Nowadays, public demands easy access to nonconfidential government data, such as public digital information on health, industry, and culture that can be accessed on the Internet. This will lead departments within government to be efficient and more transparent. As the results, rapid development of applications will solve citizens’ problems in many sectors. One Data Initiatives is the prove that the Government of Indonesia supports data transparency. This research investigates the implementation of open data in Indonesia based on Tim BernersLee five-star rating and open stage model by Kalampokis. The result shows that mostly data in Indonesia is freely available in the Internet, but most of them are not machine-readable and do not support non-proprietary format. The drawback of Indonesia’s open data is lack of ability to link the existing data with other data sources. Therefore, Indonesia is still making initial steps with data inventories and beginning to publish key datasets of public interest…(More)”

Nudges in a post-truth world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Levy at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events….(More)”.

Waste Is Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Dietmar Offenhuber: “Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, São Paulo, and Boston.

Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility—the idea that the city can be read like a text—to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders’ interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills. Through these case studies, Offenhuber outlines an emerging paradigm of infrastructure governance based on a complex negotiation among users, technology, and the city….(More)”.

Rage against the machines: is AI-powered government worth it?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Maëlle Gavet at the WEF: “…the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of proprietary software in sentencing in many US courts … almost by stealth and with remarkably little outcry, technology is transforming the way we are policed, categorized as citizens and, perhaps one day soon, governed. We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation — intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws — but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state….

Some may herald this as democracy rebooted. In my view it represents nothing less than a threat to democracy itself — and deep scepticism should prevail. There are five major problems with bringing algorithms into the policy arena:

  1. Self-reinforcing bias…
  2. Vulnerability to attack…
  3. Who’s calling the shots?…
  4. Are governments up to it?…
  5. Algorithms don’t do nuance….

All the problems notwithstanding, there’s little doubt that AI-powered government of some kind will happen. So, how can we avoid it becoming the stuff of bad science fiction? To begin with, we should leverage AI to explore positive alternatives instead of just applying it to support traditional solutions to society’s perceived problems. Rather than simply finding and sending criminals to jail faster in order to protect the public, how about using AI to figure out the effectiveness of other potential solutions? Offering young adult literacy, numeracy and other skills might well represent a far superior and more cost-effective solution to crime than more aggressive law enforcement. Moreover, AI should always be used at a population level, rather than at the individual level, in order to avoid stigmatizing people on the basis of their history, their genes and where they live. The same goes for the more subtle, yet even more pervasive data-driven targeting by prospective employers, health insurers, credit card companies and mortgage providers. While the commercial imperative for AI-powered categorization is clear, when it targets individuals it amounts to profiling with the inevitable consequence that entire sections of society are locked out of opportunity….(More)”.

Contests as innovation policy instruments: Lessons from the US federal agencies’ experience

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 

Isabelle Liotard and Valérie Revest in Technological Forecasting and Social Change: “An increase of the innovation contests and their associated prizes have been observed since the 90s especially in the US through the sponsorship of the American Federal Agencies. The purpose of this article is to shed light on some of the direct and indirect effects of US federal agency contests not only on economic dynamics but also on social dynamics. Based on recent case studies, this paper describes the various positive impacts that federal agency contests may have: i) contests may display a strong incentive effect ex-ante and during the contest; ii) they may produce favourable spillovers after the contests, at innovation and economic levels in specified economic/industry sectors and iii) they may also play a beneficial social role, contributing to citizens’ education and awareness. Nevertheless, as a contest remains a sophisticated device, public decision makers must comply with certain requirements if they wish to benefit from this particular policy tool in order to spur innovation….(More)”

 

Citizen sensing, air pollution and fracking: From ‘caring about your air’ to speculative practices of evidencing harm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jennifer Gabrys at the Sociological Review: “Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an emerging and growing industry that is having considerable effects on environments and health. Yet fracking often lacks environmental regulations that might be understood as governmental forms of care. In some locations in the US, citizens have taken up environmental monitoring as a way to address this perceived absence of care, and to evidence harm in order to argue for new infrastructures of care. This article documents the practices of residents engaged in monitoring air pollution near fracking sites in the US, as well as the participatory and practice-based research undertaken by the Citizen Sense research project to develop monitoring kits for residents to use and test over a period of seven months. Citizen sensing practices for monitoring air pollution can constitute ways of expressing care about environments, communities and individual and public health. Yet practices for documenting and evidencing harm through the ongoing collection of air pollution data are also speculative attempts to make relevant these unrecognised and overlooked considerations of the need for care. Working with the concept of speculation, this article advances alternative notions of evidence, care and policy that attend to citizens’ experiences of living in the gas fields. How do citizen sensing practices work towards alternative ways of evidencing harm? In what ways does monitoring with environmental sensors facilitate this process? And what new speculative practices emerge to challenge the uses of environmental sensors, as well as to expand the types of data gathered, along with their political impact?…(More)”.

Government innovations and the hype cycle

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Danny Buerkli at the Centre for Public Impact: “The Gartner hype cycle tracks how technologies develop from initial conception to productive use. There is much excitement around different methodologies and technologies in the “government innovation” space, but which of these is hyped and which of these is truly productive?

Last year we made some educated guesses and placed ten government innovations along the hype cycle. This year, however, we went for something bigger and better. We created an entirely non-scientific poll and asked respondents to tell us where they thought these same ten government innovations sat on the hype cycle.

The innovations we included were artificial intelligence, blockchain, design thinking, policy labs, behavioural insights, open data, e-government, agile, lean and New Public Management.

Here is what we learned.

  1. For the most part, we’re still in the early days

On average, our respondents don’t think that any of the methods have made it into truly productive use. In fact, for seven out of the ten innovations, the majority of respondents believed that these were indeed still in the “technology trigger” phase.

Assuming that these innovations will steadily make their way along the hype cycle, we should expect a lot more hype (as they enter the “peak of inflated expectations”) and a lot more disappointment (as they descend into the “trough of disillusionment)” going forward. Government innovation advocates should take heed.

  1. Policy Labs are believed to be in “peak of inflated expectations”

This innovation attracted the highest level of disagreement from respondents. While almost two out of five people believe that policy labs are in the “technology trigger” phase, one out of five see them as having already reached the “slope of enlightenment”. On average, however, respondents believe policy labs to be in the “peak of inflated expectations”….

  1. Blockchain is seen as the most nascent government innovation

Our survey respondents rather unanimously believe that blockchain is at the very early stage of the “technology trigger” phase. Given that blockchain is often characterized as a solution in search of a problem, this view may not be surprising. The survey results also indicates that blockchain will have a long way to go before it will be used productively in government, but there are several ways this can be done.

  1. Artificial intelligence inspires a lot of confidence (in some)…
  1. New Public Management is – still – overhyped?… (More).

‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings….(More)”