Collection

Singapore’s ‘Uber of lifesaving’ app is a simple way to stop people from dying on the street

Curated on July 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ariel Schwartz for Business Insider: “If you have a heart attack on a plane, chances are decently good that a doctor or nurse onboard can provide emergency services while you wait to land. But if you collapse on a crowded city street, you might have to wait awhile for an ambulance to arrive.

Singapore’s solution: bring the plane treatment model to the streets by crowdsourcing medical help from whoever happens to be nearby.

The city-state’s population is rapidly aging, and that’s led to an uptick in the number of calls for emergency services. Getting ambulances through clogged city streets to people in need of care within 10 minutes – the approximate amount of time someone in cardiac arrest has before their prospects of survival dim -is a struggle.

A few years ago, Singapore’s Civil Defense Force (which run the public ambulance system) started testing a solution called myResponder. It’s essentially the app version of a flight attendant saying, “Is there a doctor onboard?”

When someone calls 995 (the equivalent of 911), their call is geolocated and a notification is sent out to anyone nearby who has downloaded the app. Once someone gets a notification, they can choose whether or not to accept the call for help. The app also shows the location of any nearby defibrillator machines.

The app launched in 2015. Since then, more than 15,000 medical professionals have downloaded it….(More)”

Using Collaboration to Harness Big Data for Social Good

Curated on June 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jake Porway at SSIR: “These days, it’s hard to get away from the hype around “big data.” We read articles about how Silicon Valley is using data to drive everything from website traffic to autonomous cars. We hear speakers at social sector conferences talk about how nonprofits can maximize their impact by leveraging new sources of digital information like social media data, open data, and satellite imagery.

Braving this world can be challenging, we know. Creating a data-driven organization can require big changes in culture and process. Some nonprofits, like Crisis Text Line and Watsi, started off boldly by building their own data science teams. But for the many other organizations wondering how to best use data to advance their mission, we’ve found that one ingredient works better than all the software and tech that you can throw at a problem: collaboration.

As a nonprofit dedicated to applying data science for social good, DataKind has run more than 200 projects in collaboration with other nonprofits worldwide by connecting them to teams of volunteer data scientists. What do the most successful ones have in common? Strong collaborations on three levels: with data science experts, within the organization itself, and across the nonprofit sector as a whole.

1. Collaborate with data science experts to define your project. As we often say, finding problems can be harder than finding solutions. ….

2. Collaborate across your organization to “build with, not for.” Our projects follow the principles of human-centered design and the philosophy pioneered in the civic tech world of “design with, not for.” ….

3. Collaborate across your sector to move the needle. Many organizations think about building data science solutions for unique challenges they face, such as predicting the best location for their next field office. However, most of us are fighting common causes shared by many other groups….

By focusing on building strong collaborations on these three levels—with data experts, across your organization, and across your sector—you’ll go from merely talking about big data to making big impact….(More).

A distributed model for internet governance

Curated on June 29, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Global Partners Digital: “Across the world, increased internet adoption has radically altered people’s lives – creating the need for new methods of internet governance that are more effective, flexible, inclusive, and legitimate. Conversations about reforming the internet governance ecosystem are already taking place at the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation, and within the wider IGF community.

A new paper by GovLab co-founder and GPD Advisory Board member Stefaan Verhulst – A distributed model for internet governance – seeks to contribute to this evolving debate by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework for internet governance – one which accommodates existing and emerging decision-making approaches, while also enabling broader participation by a wider range of institutions and actors….(More)”

The State of Mobile Data for Social Good

Curated on June 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

UN Global Pulse: “This report outlines the value of harnessing mobile data for social good and provides an analysis of the gaps. Its aim is to survey the landscape today, assess the current barriers to scale, and make recommendations for a way forward.

The report reviews the challenges the field is currently facing and discusses a range of issues preventing mobile data from being used for social good. These challenges come from both the demand and supply side of mobile data and from the lack of coordination among stakeholders. It continues by providing a set of recommendations intended to move beyond short-term and ad hoc projects to more systematic and institutionalized implementations that are scalable, replicable, sustainable and focused on impact.

Finally, the report proposes a roadmap for 2018 calling all stakeholders to work on developing a scalable and impactful demonstration project that will help to establish the value of mobile data for social good. The report includes examples of innovation projects and ways in which mobile data is already being used to inform development and humanitarian work. It is intended to inspire social impact organizations and mobile network operators (MNOs) to collaborate in the exploration and application of new data sources, methods and technologies….(More)”

The Politics of Listening: Possibilities and Challenges for Democratic Life

Curated on June 28, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Leah Bassel: “…explores listening as a social and political practice, in contrast to the more common focus on voice and speaking. The author draws on cases from Canada, France and the United Kingdom, exploring: minority women and debates over culture and religion; riots and young men in France and England; citizen journalism and the creative use of different media; and solidarity between migrant justice and indigenous activists. Analysis across these diverse settings considers whether and how a politics of listening, which demands that the roles of speakers and listeners change, can be undertaken in adversarial and tense political moments. The Politics of Listening argues that such a practice has the potential to create new ways of being and acting together, as political equals who are heard on their own terms….(More)”

The Right of Access to Public Information

Curated on June 28, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Hermann-Josef Blanke and Ricardo Perlingeiro: “This book presents a comparative study on access to public information in the context of the main legal orders worldwide. The international team of authors analyzes the Transparency- and Freedom-to-Information legislation with regard to the scope of the right to access, limitations of this right inherent in the respective national laws, the procedure, the relationship with domestic legislation on administrative procedure, as well as judicial protection. It particularly focuses on the Brazilian law of access to information, which is interpreted as a benchmark for regulations in other Latin-American states….(More)”

Using Open Data to Combat Corruption

Curated on June 28, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Richard Rose: “Open data makes transparent whether public officials are conducting their activities in conformity with standards that can be bureaucratic, political or moral. Actions that violate these standards are colloquially lumped together under the heterogeneous heading of corruption. However, the payment of a large bribe for a multi-million contract differs in kind from a party saying one thing to win votes and doing another once in office or an individual public figure promoting high standards of personal morality while conducting himself in private very differently. This paper conceptually distinguishes different forms of corruption with concrete examples. It also shows how sanctions for different forms of corruption require different sanctions: punishment by the courts, by political leaders or the electorate, or by public morality and a sense of individual shame. Such sanctions are most effective when there is normative agreement that standards have been violated. There are partisan as well as normative disagreements about whether standards have been violated. The paper concludes by pointing out that differences in violating standards require different policy responses….(More)”

Reinvention in Middle America

Curated on June 28, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by sparks & honey: “Conventional wisdom suggests that to peer into the crystal ball of America’s future, one should go to Silicon Valley to check out the latest start-up unicorns, or to New York or Los Angeles to scout emerging trends in fashion and food.
Middle America, on the other hand, is often described as if it’s on the margins of culture and innovation — “flyover country” — provincial, unsophisticated and stuck in the past. But Middle America is diverse and although it is not stuck in the past —rhetoric about it is.

In this culture forecast report, we spotlight the region, looking at it not through the lens of politics, ideology or outdated clichés, but rather through innovation. Key cities from Cleveland to Nashville to Louisville are reinventing themselves by embracing innovation in manufacturing, city design, healthcare, sustainability efforts and clean energy, creatively solving problems that the entire country will eventually have to confront. And they’re imbuing this reinvention with characteristic Middle American values of community, collaboration, and concern for the social impact of their actions.

Yes, portions of Middle America may have a lot of cornfields — but drone-farming is happening there. Although Nashville is still the seat of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s also emerging as a major fashion and design hub. And in Appalachia, a coal museum is powered by solar energy and out-of-work coal miners are reinventing themselves as coders. It’s even predicted that in five years, the Midwest will have more startups than Silicon Valley.

Although it’s easy to politicize and divide America, innovation is not about moving right or left. Innovation is about moving forward…(More)”

AI and the Law: Setting the Stage

Curated on June 28, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Urs Gasser: “Lawmakers and regulators need to look at AI not as a homogenous technology, but a set of techniques and methods that will be deployed in specific and increasingly diversified applications. There is currently no generally agreed-upon definition of AI. What is important to understand from a technical perspective is that AI is not a single, homogenous technology, but a rich set of subdisciplines, methods, and tools that bring together areas such as speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, reasoning, attention and memory, robotics and control, etc. ….

Given the breadth and scope of application, AI-based technologies are expected to trigger a myriad of legal and regulatory issues not only at the intersections of data and algorithms, but also of infrastructures and humans. …

When considering (or anticipating) possible responses by the law vis-à-vis AI innovation, it might be helpful to differentiate between application-specific and cross-cutting legal and regulatory issues. …

Information asymmetries and high degrees of uncertainty pose particular difficulty to the design of appropriate legal and regulatory responses to AI innovations — and require learning systems. AI-based applications — which are typically perceived as “black boxes” — affect a significant number of people, yet there are nonetheless relatively few people who develop and understand AI-based technologies. ….Approaches such as regulation 2.0, which relies on dynamic, real-time, and data-driven accountability models, might provide interesting starting points.

The responses to a variety of legal and regulatory issues across different areas of distributed applications will likely result in a complex set of sector-specific norms, which are likely to vary across jurisdictions….

Law and regulation may constrain behavior yet also act as enablers and levelers — and are powerful tools as we aim for the development of AI for social good. …

Law is one important approach to the governance of AI-based technologies. But lawmakers and regulators have to consider the full potential of available instruments in the governance toolbox. ….

In a world of advanced AI technologies and new governance approaches towards them, the law, the rule of law, and human rights remain critical bodies of norms. …

As AI applies to the legal system itself, however, the rule of law might have to be re-imagined and the law re-coded in the longer run….(More).