Report by the OECD: This report provides an overview of the state of open data policies across OECD member and partner countries, based on data collected through the OECD Open Government Data survey (2013, 2014, 2016/17), country reviews and comparative analysis. The report analyses open data policies using an analytical framework that is in line with the OECD OUR data Index and the International Open Data Charter. It assesses governments’ efforts to enhance the availability, accessibility and re-use of open government data. It makes the case that beyond countries’ commitment to open up good quality government data, the creation of public value requires engaging user communities from the entire ecosystem, such as journalists, civil society organisations, entrepreneurs, major tech private companies and academia. The report also underlines how open data policies are elements of broader digital transformations, and how public sector data policies require interaction with other public sector agendas such as open government, innovation, employment, integrity, public budgeting, sustainable development, urban mobility and transport. It stresses the relevance of measuring open data impacts in order to support the business case for open government data….(More)”.
Craft metrics to value co-production
Liz Richardson and Beth Perry at Nature: “Advocates of co-production encourage collaboration between professional researchers and those affected by that research, to ensure that the resulting science is relevant and useful. Opening up science beyond scientists is essential, particularly where problems are complex, solutions are uncertain and values are salient. For example, patients should have input into research on their conditions, and first-hand experience of local residents should shape research on environmental-health issues.
But what constitutes success on these terms? Without a better understanding of this, it is harder to incentivize co-production in research. A key way to support co-production is reconfiguring that much-derided feature of academic careers: metrics.
Current indicators of research output (such as paper counts or the h-index) conceptualize the value of research narrowly. They are already roundly criticized as poor measures of quality or usefulness. Less appreciated is the fact that these metrics also leave out the societal relevance of research and omit diverse approaches to creating knowledge about social problems.
Peer review also has trouble assessing the value of research that sits at disciplinary boundaries or that addresses complex social challenges. It denies broader social accountability by giving scientists a monopoly on determining what is legitimate knowledge1. Relying on academic peer review as a means of valuing research can discourage broader engagement.
This privileges abstract and theoretical research over work that is localized and applied. For example, research on climate-change adaptation, conducted in the global south by researchers embedded in affected communities, can make real differences to people’s lives. Yet it is likely to be valued less highly by conventional evaluation than research that is generalized from afar and then published in a high-impact English-language journal….(More)”.
Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners
So goes the logic of “desire paths” – described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways”. The New Yorker offers other names: “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)”. JM Barrie described them as “Paths that have Made Themselves”….
Desire paths have been described as illustrating “the tension between the native and the built environment and our relationship to them”. Because they often form in areas where there are no pavements, they can be seen to “indicate [the] yearning” of those wishing to walk, a way for “city dwellers to ‘write back’ to city planners, giving feedback with their feet”.
But as well as revealing the path of least resistance, they can also reveal where people refuse to tread. If you’ve been walking the same route for years, an itchy-footed urge to go off-piste, even just a few metres, is probably something you’ll identify with. It’s this idea that led one academic journal to describe them as a record of “civil disobedience”.
Rather than dismiss or even chastise the naughty pedestrian by placing fences or railings to block off “illicit” wanderings, some planners work to incorporate them into urban environments. This chimes with the thinking of Jane Jacobs, an advocate of configuring cities around desire lines, who said: “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them … that we must fit our plans.”…(More)”.
Whither large International Non-Governmental Organisations?
Working Paper by Penny Lawrence: “Large international non-government organisations (INGOs) seem to be in an existential crisis in their role in the fight for social justice. Many, such as Save the Children or Oxfam, have become big well-known brands with compliance expectations similar to big businesses. Yet the public still imagine them to be run by volunteers. Their context is changing so fast, and so unpredictably, that they are struggling to keep up. It is a time of extraordinary disruptive change including the digital transformation, changing societal norms and engagement expectations and political upheaval and challenge. Fifteen years ago the political centre-ground in the UK seemed firm, with expanding space for civil society organisations to operate. Space for civil society voice now seems more threatened and challenged (Kenny 2015).
There has been a decline in trust in large charities in particular, partly as a result of their own complacency, acting as if the argument for aid has been won. Partly as a result of questioned practices e.g. the fundraising scandal of 2016/17 (where repeated mail drops to individuals requesting funds caused public backlash) and the safeguarding scandal of 2018 (where historic cases of sexual abuse by INGO staff, including Oxfam, were revisited by media in the wake of the #me too movement). This is also partly as a result of political challenge on INGOs’ advocacy and influencing role, their bias and their voice:
‘Some government ministers regard the charity sector with suspicion because it largely employs senior people with a left-wing perspective on life and because of other unfair criticisms of government it means there is regularly a tension between big charities and the conservative party’ Richard Wilson (Former Minister for Civil Society) 2018
On the other hand many feel that charities who have taken significant contracts to deliver services for the state have forfeited their independent voice and lost their way:
‘The voluntary sector risks declining over the next ten years into a mere instrument of a shrunken state, voiceless and toothless, unless it seizes the agenda and creates its own vision.’ Professor Nicholas Deakin 2014
It’s a tough context to be leading an INGO through, but INGOs have appeared ill prepared and slow to respond to the threats and opportunities, not realising how much they may need to change to respond to the fast evolving context and expectations. Large INGOs spend most of their energy exploiting present grant and contract business models, rather than exploring the opportunities to overcome poverty offered by such disruptive change. Their size and structures do not enable agility. They are too internally focused and self-referencing at a time when the world around them is changing so fast, and when political sands have shifted. Focussing on the internationalisation of structures and decision-making means large INGOs are ‘defeated by our own complexity’, as one INGO interviewee put it.
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate thinking amongst large INGOs at a time of such extraordinary disruptive change. The paper explores options for large INGOs, in terms of function and structure. After outlining large INGOs’ history, changing context, value and current thinking, it explores learning from others outside the development sector before suggesting the emerging options. It reflects on what’s encouraging and what’s stopping change and offers possible choices and pathways forwards….(More)”.
Renovating democracy from the bottom up
Nathan Gardels at the Washington Post: “The participatory power of social media is a game changer for governance. It levels the playing field among amateurs and experts, peers and authorities and even challenges the legitimacy of representative government. Its arrival coincides with and reinforces the widespread distrust of elites across the Western world, ripening the historical moment for direct democracy.
For the first time, an Internet-based movement has come to power in a major country, Italy, under the slogan “Participate, don’t delegate!” All of the Five Star Movement’s parliamentarians, who rule the country in a coalition with the far-right League party, were nominated and elected to stand for office online. And they have appointed the world’s first minister for direct democracy, Riccardo Fraccaro.
In Rome this week, he explained the participatory agenda of Italy’s ruling coalition government to The WorldPost at a meeting of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy. “Citizens must be granted the same possibility to actively intervene in the process of managing and administrating public goods as normally carried out by their elected representatives,” he enthused. “What we have witnessed in our democracy is a drift toward ‘partyocracy,’ in which a restricted circle of policymakers have been so fully empowered with decision-making capacity that they could virtually ignore and bypass the public will. The mere election of a representative every so many years is no longer sufficient to prevent this from happening. That is why our government will take the next step forward in order to innovate and enhance our democracy.”
Fraccaro went on: “Referenda, public petitions and the citizens’ ballot initiative are nothing other than the direct means available for the citizenry to submit laws that political parties are not willing to propose or to reject rules approved by political parties that are not welcome by the people. Our aim, therefore, is to establish the principles and practices of direct democracy alongside the system of representative government in order to give real, authentic sovereignty to the citizens.”
At the Rome forum, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi di Maio, a Five Star member, railed against the technocrats and banks he says are trying to frustrate the will of the people. He promised forthcoming changes in the Italian constitution to follow through on Fraccaro’s call for citizen-initiated propositions that will go to the public ballot if the legislature does not act on them.
The program that has so far emerged out of the government’s participatory agenda is a mixed bag. It includes everything from anti-immigrant and anti-vaccine policies to the expansion of digital networks and planting more trees. In a move that has unsettled the European Union authorities as well as Italy’s non-partisan, indirectly-elected president, the governing coalition last week proposed both a tax cut and the provision of a universal basic income — despite the fact that Italy’s long-term debt is already 130 percent of GDP.
The Italian experiment warrants close attention as a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. It reveals a paradox for governance in this digital age: the more participation there is, the greater the need for the counterbalance of impartial mediating practices and institutions that can process the cacophony of voices, sort out the deluge of contested information, dispense with magical thinking and negotiate fair trade-offs among the welter of conflicting interests….(More)”.
Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a City of the South
Book by Fiona Anciano and Laurence Piper: “Why is dissatisfaction with local democracy endemic, despite the spread of new participatory institutions? This book argues that a key reason is the limited power of elected local officials, especially to produce the City. City Hall lacks control over key aspects of city decision-making, especially under conditions of economic globalisation and rapid urbanisation in the urban South.
Demonstrated through case studies of daily politics in Hout Bay, Democracy Disconnected shows how Cape Town residents engage local rule. In the absence of democratic control, urban rule in the Global South becomes a complex and contingent framework of multiple and multilevel forms of urban governance (FUG) that involve City Hall, but are not directed by it. Bureaucratic governance coexists alongside market, developmental and informal forms of governance. This disconnect of democracy from urban governance segregates people spatially, socially, but also politically. Thus, while the residents of Hout Bay may live next to each other, they do not live with each other…(More)”.
What is machine learning?
Chris Meserole at Brookings: “In the summer of 1955, while planning a now famous workshop at Dartmouth College, John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence” to describe a new field of computer science. Rather than writing programs that tell a computer how to carry out a specific task, McCarthy pledged that he and his colleagues would instead pursue algorithms that could teach themselves how to do so. The goal was to create computers that could observe the world and then make decisions based on those observations—to demonstrate, that is, an innate intelligence.
The question was how to achieve that goal. Early efforts focused primarily on what’s known as symbolic AI, which tried to teach computers how to reason abstractly. But today the dominant approach by far is machine learning, which relies on statistics instead. Although the approach dates back to the 1950s—one of the attendees at Dartmouth, Arthur Samuels, was the first to describe his work as “machine learning”—it wasn’t until the past few decades that computers had enough storage and processing power for the approach to work well. The rise of cloud computing and customized chips has powered breakthrough after breakthrough, with research centers like OpenAI or DeepMind announcing stunning new advances seemingly every week.
The extraordinary success of machine learning has made it the default method of choice for AI researchers and experts. Indeed, machine learning is now so popular that it has effectively become synonymous with artificial intelligence itself. As a result, it’s not possible to tease out the implications of AI without understanding how machine learning works—as well as how it doesn’t….(More)”.
Why Is Behavioral Economics So Popular?
David Gal at the New York Times: “Behavioral economics seems to have captured the popular imagination. Authors like Michael Lewis write about it in best sellers like “The Undoing Project,” while pioneers of the field like Daniel Kahneman popularize it in books like “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Its lexicon of “nudging,” “framing bias” and “the endowment effect” has become part of the vernacular of business, finance and policymaking. Even “Crazy Rich Asians,” the summer’s blockbuster romantic comedy, features an explicit nod to “loss aversion,” a key concept in the field.
What is behavioral economics, and why has it become so popular? The field has been described by Richard Thaler, one of its founders, as “economics done with strong injections of good psychology.” Proponents view it as a way to make economics more accurate by incorporating more realistic assumptions about how humans behave.
In practice, much of behavioral economics consists in using psychological insights to influence behavior. These interventions tend to be small, often involving subtle changes in how choices are presented: for example, whether you have to “opt in” to a 401(k) savings plan versus having to “opt out.” In this respect, behavioral economics can be thought of as endorsing the outsize benefits of psychological “tricks,” rather than as calling for more fundamental behavioral or policy change.
The popularity of such low-cost psychological interventions, or “nudges,” under the label of behavioral economics is in part a triumph of marketing. It reflects the widespread perception that behavioral economics combines the cleverness and fun of pop psychology with the rigor and relevance of economics.
Yet this triumph has come at a cost. In order to appeal to other economists, behavioral economists are too often concerned with describing how human behavior deviates from the assumptions of standard economic models, rather than with understanding why people behave the way they do.
Consider loss aversion. This is the notion that losses have a bigger psychological impact than gains do — that losing $5, for example, feels worse than gaining $5 feels good. Behavioral economists point to loss aversion as a psychological glitch that explains a lot of puzzling human conduct. But in an article published this year, the psychologist Derek D. Rucker and I contend that the behaviors most commonly attributed to loss aversion are a result of other causes….
There is nothing wrong with achieving small victories with minor interventions. The worry, however, is that the perceived simplicity and efficacy of such tactics will distract decision makers from more substantive efforts — for example, reducing electricity consumption by taxing it more heavily or investing in renewable energy resources.
It is great that behavioral economics is receiving its due; the field has contributed significantly to our understanding of ourselves. But in all the excitement, it’s important to keep an eye on its limits….(More)”.
The law and ethics of big data analytics: A new role for international human rights in the search for global standards
David Nersessian at Business Horizons: “The Economist recently declared that digital information has overtaken oil as the world’s most valuable commodity. Big data technology is inherently global and borderless, yet little international consensus exists over what standards should govern its use. One source of global standards benefitting from considerable international consensus might be used to fill the gap: international human rights law.
This article considers the extent to which international human rights law operates as a legal or ethical constraint on global commercial use of big data technologies. By providing clear baseline standards that apply worldwide, human rights can help shape cultural norms—implemented as ethical practices and global policies and procedures—about what businesses should do with their information technologies. In this way, human rights could play a broad and important role in shaping business thinking about the proper handling of this increasingly valuable commodity in the modern global society…(More)”.
Nervous States
Book by William Davies: “Why do we no longer trust experts, facts and statistics? Why has politics become so fractious and warlike? What caused the populist political upheavals of recent years?How can the history of ideas help us understand our present?
In this bold and far-reaching exploration of our new political landscape, William Davies reveals how feelings have come to reshape our world. Drawing deep on history, philosophy, psychology and economics, he shows how some of the fundamental assumptions that defined the modern world have dissolved. With advances in science and medicine, the division between mind and body is no longer so clear-cut. The spread of digital and military technology has left us not quite at war nor exactly at peace. In the murky new space between mind and body, between war and peace, lie nervous states: with all of us relying increasingly on feeling rather than fact.
In a book of profound insight and astonishing breadth, William Davies reveals the origins of this new political reality. Nervous States is a compelling and essential guide to the turbulent times we are living through….(More)”.