Collection

Data Stewards: Data Leadership to Address the Challenges of the 21st Century

Curated on May 16, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to announce the launch of its Data Stewards website — a new portal for connecting organizations across sectors that seek to promote responsible data leadership that can address the challenges of the 21st century — developed with generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Increasingly, the private sector is collaborating with the public sector and researchers on ways to use private-sector data and analytical expertise for public good. With these new practices of data collaborations come the need to reimagine roles and responsibilities to steer the process of using this data, and the insights it can generate, to address society’s biggest questions and challenges: Data Stewards.

Today, establishing and sustaining these new collaborative and accountable approaches requires significant and time-consuming effort and investment of resources for both data holders on the supply side, and institutions that represent the demand. By establishing Data Stewardship as a function — recognized within the private sector as a valued responsibility — the practice of Data Collaboratives can become more predictable, scaleable, sustainable and de-risked.

Together with BrightFront Group and Adapt, we are:

Exploring the needs and priorities of current private sector Data Stewards who act as change agents within their firms. Responsible for determining what, when, how and with whom to share private data for public good, these individuals are critical catalysts for ensuring insights are turned into action.

Identifying and connecting existing Data Stewards across sectors and regions to create an online and in-person community for exchanging knowledge and best practices.

Developing methodologies, tools and frameworks to use data more responsibly, systematically and efficiently to decrease the transaction cost, time and energy currently needed to establish Data Collaboratives.

To learn more about the Data Stewards Initiative, including new insights, ideas, tools and information about the Data Steward of the Year Award program, visit datastewards.net.

If you are a Data Steward, or would like to join a community of practice to learn from your peers, please contact [email protected] to join the Network of Data Stewards.

For more information about The GovLab, visit thegovlab.org.

Using Blockchain Technology to Create Positive Social Impact

Curated on May 16, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

Randall Minas in Healthcare Informatics: “…Healthcare is yet another area where blockchain can make a substantial impact. Blockchain technology could be used to enable the WHO and CDC to better monitor disease outbreaks over time by creating distributed “ledgers” that are both secure and updated hundreds of times per day. Issued in near real-time, these updates would alert healthcare professionals to spikes in local cases almost immediately. Additionally, using blockchain would allow accurate diagnosis and streamline the isolation of clusters of cases as quickly as possible. Providing blocks of real-time disease information—especially in urban areas—would be invaluable.

In the United States, disease updates are provided in a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the CDC. This weekly report provides tables of current disease trends for hospitals and public health officials. Another disease reporting mechanism is the National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS), launched in 2009. NORS’ web-based tool provides outbreak data through 2016 and is accessible to the general public. There are two current weaknesses in the NORS reporting system and both can be addressed by blockchain technology.

The first issue lies in the number of steps required to accurately report each outbreak. A health department reports an outbreak to the NORS system, the CDC checks it for accuracy, analyzes the data, then provides a summary via the MMRW. Instantiating blockchain as the technology through which the NORS data is reported, every health department in the country could have preliminary data on disease trends at their fingertips without having to wait for the next MMRW publication.

The second issue is the inherent cybersecurity vulnerabilities using a web-based platform to monitor disease reporting. As we have seen with cyberattacks both domestic and abroad, cybersecurity vulnerabilities underlie most of our modern-day computing infrastructure. Blockchain was designed to be secure because it is decentralized across many computer networks and, since it was designed as a digital ledger, the previous data (or “blocks”) in the blockchain are difficult to alter.

While the NORS platform could be hacked with malware to gain access to our electricity and water infrastructure, instituting blockchain technology would limit the potential damage of the malware based on the inherent security of the technology. If this does not sound important, imagine the damage and ensuing panic that could be caused by a compromised NORS reporting a widespread Ebola outbreak.

The use of blockchain in monitoring epidemic outbreaks might not only apply to fast-spreading outbreaks like the flu, but also to epidemics that have lasted for decades. Since blockchain allows an unchangeable snapshot of data over time and can be anonymous, partner organizations could provide HIV test results to an individual’s “digital ledger” with a date of the test and the results.

Individuals could then exchange their HIV status securely, in an application, before engaging in high-risk behaviors. Since many municipalities provide free or low-cost, anonymous HIV testing, the use of blockchain would allow disease monitoring and exchange of status in a secure and trusted manner. The LGBTQ community and other high-risk communities could use an application to securely exchange HIV status with potential partners. With widespread adoption of this status-exchange system, an individual’s high-risk exposure could be limited, further reducing the spread of the epidemic.

While much of the creative application around blockchain has focused on supply chain-like models, including distribution of renewable energy and local sourcing of goods, it is important also to think innovatively about how blockchain can be used outside of supply chain and accounting.

In healthcare, blockchain has been discussed frequently in relation to electronic health records (EHRs), yet even that could be underappreciating the technology’s potential. Leaders in the blockchain arena should invest in application development for epidemic monitoring and disease control using blockchain technology. …(More)”.

Playing Games While Building Savings

Curated on May 16, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

Corporate Insights: “Nearly half of all Americans play video games, yet only a third have more than a thousand dollars saved for an emergency. A new fintech startup called Blast hopes to combine the increasingly popular pastime with saving for the future. Unlike other attempts to gamify savings that create entirely new experiences, Blast works alongside existing games with three ways for users to increase their balances when they play: automated micro-deposits, mission rewards and weekly prizes. By linking to games that people already enjoy, Blast avoids the difficult task of creating a hit game to reach a wide audience.

Much like Acorns—co-founded by Blast’s creator, Walter Cruttenden—and other micro-savings apps that make small automatic deposits to users’ savings, Blast automatically moves small amounts into savings whenever users accomplish in-game tasks. These “triggers” are user-controlled and available for popular online games like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. For example, users can choose to deposit $1.00 every time they win a match or $0.10 every time they defeat an enemy player. The linked savings account provided by Wells Fargo earns 1.00% APY, and Blast can withdraw funds from a linked checking or PayPal account.

Blast partners with game publishers to reward users for playing their games, doling out set amounts to users who engage (or re-engage) with games made by its partners…(More)”.

Open government – Open for business?

Curated on May 15, 2018May 29, 2019 by admin

Dieter Zinnbauer at OGP: “Many activities related to opening government have a demonstrated, empirical potential to create business value, foster broader economic opportunities, and promote a business climate for growth and dynamism. What’s more, opening government plays a highly relevant, if not essential, role for economic stewardship and for putting economies on sustainable, inclusive trajectories of good growth. These are the central insights from this scan of the empirical literature on the economic and business dimension of open government. More specifically, opening government is found to have created sizeable business opportunities, innovation impetus, and to a somewhat lesser extent, new jobs—particularly in the area of open data. A growing body of empirical evidence also suggests that opening government has helped countries attract investments and capital, boost trade, reduce red tape, and remove barriers to market entry, all pointing towards an enhanced business and investment climate. At least equally important, there is compelling evidence that opening government supports good growth by enabling the containment of some of the major negative side effects of economic growth, by improving the targeting and efficacy of inclusive economic policies and benefits schemes, and by making it easier for businesses to live up to some of their fundamental societal responsibilities. Overall, the research landscape on opening government and business and economy nexus is still rather fragmented, and there are many promising, feasible, and much-needed avenues for future investigations in this fast-moving area….(More)”.

Why Policymakers Should Care About “Big Data” in Healthcare

Curated on May 15, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

David W.Bates et al at Health Policy and Technology: “The term “big data” has gotten increasing popular attention, and there is growing focus on how such data can be used to measure and improve health and healthcare. Analytic techniques for extracting information from these data have grown vastly more powerful, and they are now broadly available. But for these approaches to be most useful, large amounts of data must be available, and barriers to use should be low. We discuss how “smart cities” are beginning to invest in this area to improve the health of their populations; provide examples around model approaches for making large quantities of data available to researchers and clinicians among other stakeholders; discuss the current state of big data approaches to improve clinical care including specific examples, and then discuss some of the policy issues around and examples of successful regulatory approaches, including deidentification and privacy protection….(More)”.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together

Curated on May 15, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

Book by Thomas W. Malone: “If you’re like most people, you probably believe that humans are the most intelligent animals on our planet. But there’s another kind of entity that can be far smarter: groups of people. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Malone, the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, shows how groups of people working together in superminds — like hierarchies, markets, democracies, and communities — have been responsible for almost all human achievements in business, government, science, and beyond. And these collectively intelligent human groups are about to get much smarter.

Using dozens of striking examples and case studies, Malone shows how computers can help create more intelligent superminds not just with artificial intelligence, but perhaps even more importantly with hyperconnectivity: connecting humans to one another at massive scales and in rich new ways. Together, these changes will have far-reaching implications for everything from the way we buy groceries and plan business strategies to how we respond to climate change, and even for democracy itself. By understanding how these collectively intelligent groups work, we can learn how to harness their genius to achieve our human goals….(More)”.

Gender is personal – not computational

Curated on May 15, 2018May 29, 2019 by admin

Foad Hamidi, Morgan Scheuerman and Stacy Branham in the Conversation: “Efforts at automatic gender recognition – using algorithms to guess a person’s gender based on images, video or audio – raise significant social and ethical concerns that are not yet fully explored. Most current research on automatic gender recognition technologies focuses instead on technological details.

Our recent research found that people with diverse gender identities, including those identifying as transgender or gender nonbinary, are particularly concerned that these systems could miscategorize them. People who express their gender differently from stereotypical male and female norms already experience discrimination and harm as a result of being miscategorized or misunderstood. Ideally, technology designers should develop systems to make these problems less common, not more so.

As digital technologies become more powerful and sophisticated, their designers are trying to use them to identify and categorize complex human characteristics, such as sexual orientation, gender and ethnicity. The idea is that with enough training on abundant user data, algorithms can learn to analyze people’s appearance and behavior – and perhaps one day characterize people as well as, or even better than, other humans do.

Gender is a hard topic for people to handle. It’s a complex concept with important roles both as a cultural construct and a core aspect of an individual’s identity. Researchers, scholars and activists are increasingly revealing the diverse, fluid and multifaceted aspects of gender. In the process, they find that ignoring this diversity can lead to both harmful experiences and social injustice. For example, according to the 2016 National Transgender Survey, 47 percent of transgender participants stated that they had experienced some form of discrimination at their workplace due to their gender identity. More than half of transgender people who were harassed, assaulted or expelled because of their gender identity had attempted suicide….(More)”.

Introducing Sourcelist: Promoting diversity in technology policy

Curated on May 15, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

Susan Hennessey at Brookings: “…delighted to announce the launch of Sourcelist, a database of experts in technology policy from diverse backgrounds.

Here at Brookings, we built Sourcelist on the principle that technology policymaking stands to benefit from the inclusion of the voices of a broader diversity of people. It aims to help journalists, conference planners, and others to identify and connect with experts outside of their usual sources and panelists. Sourcelist’s purpose is to facilitate more diverse representation by leveraging technology to create a user-friendly resource for people whose decisions can make a difference. We hope that Sourcelist will take away the excuse that diverse experts couldn’t be found to comment on a story or participate on a panel.

Our first database is devoted to Women +. Countless organizations now recognize the institutional barriers that women and underrepresented gender identities face in tech policy. Sourcelist is a resource for those hoping to put recognition into practice.

I want to take the opportunity to personally thank the incredible team at Objectively that took an idea and turned it into the remarkable resource we’re launching today….(More)”.

International Data Flows and Privacy: The Conflict and its Resolution

Curated on May 14, 2018November 15, 2018 by admin

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper by Aaditya Mattoo and Joshua P Meltzer: “The free flow of data across borders underpins today’s globalized economy. But the flow of personal dataoutside the jurisdiction of national regulators also raises concerns about the protection of privacy. Addressing these legitimate concerns without undermining international integration is a challenge. This paper describes and assesses three types of responses to this challenge: unilateral development of national or regional regulation, such as the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation; international negotiation of trade disciplines, most recently in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); and international cooperation involving regulators, most significantly in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Agreement.

The paper argues that unilateral restrictions on data flows are costly and can hurt exports, especially of data-processing and other data-based services; international trade rules that limit only the importers’ freedom to regulate cannot address the challenge posed by privacy; and regulatory cooperation that aims at harmonization and mutual recognition is not likely to succeed, given the desirable divergence in national privacy regulation. The way forward is to design trade rules (as the CPTPP seeks to do) that reflect the bargain central to successful international cooperation (as in the EU-US Privacy Shield): regulators in data destination countries would assume legal obligations to protect the privacy of foreign citizens in return for obligations on data source countries not to restrict the flow of data. Existing multilateral rules can help ensure that any such arrangements do not discriminate against and are open to participation by other countries….(More)”.