Collection

Disrupting Democracy: Point. Click. Transform.

Curated on December 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Anthony T. Silberfeld: “In January 2017, the Bertelsmann Foundation embarked on a nine-month journey to explore how digital innovation impacts democracies and societies around the world. This voyage included more than 40,000 miles in the air, thousands of miles on the ground and hundreds of interviews.

From the rival capitals of Washington and Havana to the bustling streets of New Delhi; the dynamic tech startups in Tel Aviv to the efficient order of Berlin, this book focuses on key challenges that have emerged as a result of technological disruption and offers potential lessons to other nations situated at various points along the technological and democratic spectra.

Divided into six chapters, this book provides two perspectives on each of our five case studies (India, Cuba, the United States, Israel and Germany) followed by polling data collected on demographics, digital access and political engagement from four of these countries.

The global political environment is constantly evolving, and it is clear that technology is accelerating that process for better and, in some cases, for worse. Disrupting Democracy attempts to sort through these changes to give policymakers and citizens information that will help them navigate this increasingly volatile world….(More)”.

Analyzing the Role of the Internet-of-Things in Business and Technologically-Smart Cities

Curated on December 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by A. Shinn, K. Nakatani, and W. Rodriguez in the International Journal of Internet of Things: “This research analyzes and theorizes on the role that the Internet-of-Things will play in the expansion of business and technologically-smart cities. This study examines: a) the underlying technology, referred to as the Internet of Things that forms the foundation for smart cities; b) what businesses and government must do to successfully transition to a technologically-smart city; and c) how the proliferation of the Internet of Things through the emerging cities will affect local citizens. As machine-to-machine communication becomes increasingly common, new use cases are continually created, as is the case with the use of the Internet of Things in technologically-smart cities. Technology businesses are keeping a close pulse on end-users’ needs in order to identify and create technologies and systems to cater to new use cases. A number of the international smart city-specific use cases will be discussed in this paper along with the technology that aligns to those use cases….(More)”.

A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance

Curated on December 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman: “At a time when trust is dropping precipitously and American government at the national level has fallen into a state of long-term, partisan-based gridlock, local government can still be effective—indeed more effective and even more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Based on decades of direct experience and years studying successful models around the world, the authors of this intriguing book propose a new operating system (O/S) for cities. Former mayor and Harvard professor Stephen Goldsmith and New York University professor Neil Kleiman suggest building on the giant leaps that have been made in technology, social engagement, and big data.

Calling their approach “distributed governance,” Goldsmith and Kleiman offer a model that allows public officials to mobilize new resources, surface ideas from unconventional sources, and arm employees with the information they need to become pre-emptive problem solvers. This book highlights lessons from the many innovations taking place in today’s cities to show how a new O/S can create systemic transformation.

For students of government, A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governance presents a groundbreaking strategy for rethinking the governance of cities, marking an important evolution of the current bureaucratic authority-based model dating from the 1920s. More important, the book is designed for practitioners, starting with public-sector executives, managers, and frontline workers. By weaving real-life examples into a coherent model, the authors have created a step-by-step guide for all those who would put the needs of citizens front and center. Nothing will do more to restore trust in government than solutions that work. A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governanceputs those solutions within reach of those public officials responsible for their delivery….(More)”.

Transitioning Towards a Knowledge Society: Qatar as a Case Study

Curated on December 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Julia Gremm, Julia Barth, Kaja J. Fietkiewicz and Wolfgang G. Stock: “The book offers a critical evaluation of Qatar’s path from oil- and gas-based industries to a knowledge-based economy. This book gives basic information about the region and the country, including the geographic and demographic data, the culture, the politics and the economy, the health care conditions and the education system. It introduces the concepts of knowledge society and knowledge-based development and adds factual details about Qatar by interpreting indicators of the development status. Subsequently, the research methods that underlie the study are described, which offers information on the eGovernment study analyzing the government-citizen relationship, higher education institutions and systems, its students and the students’ way into the labor market. This book has an audience with economists, sociologists, political scientists, geographers, information scientists and other researchers on the knowledge society, but also all researchers and practitioners interested in the Arab Oil States and their future….(More)”.

Enhancing social impact through better monitoring, evaluation, and learning

Curated on December 11, 2017October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Deloitte: “Social sector organizations tackle some of the world’s most difficult and complex challenges on a daily basis. And, just as in other industries, getting the right data and information at the right time is essential to understanding what an organization needs to achieve, whether it is doing what it set out to do, and what impact its efforts are actually having. Yet, despite marked advances in the tools and methods for monitoring, evaluation, and learning in the social sector, as well as a growing number of bright spots in practice emerging in the field, there is broad dissatisfaction across the sector about how data is—or is not—used….

Based on our interviews, the research team identified three characteristics that participants within and outside the social sector believe should be defining pillars of a better future for monitoring, evaluation, and learning. These three characteristics are purpose, perspective, and alignment with other actors….(More)”

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The Engineers and the Political System

Curated on December 11, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Aaron Timms at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Engineers enjoy a prestige in China that connects them to political power far more directly than in the United States. ….America, by contrast, has historically been governed by lawyers. That remains true today: there are 218 lawyers in Congress and 208 former businesspeople, according to the Congressional Research Service, but only eight engineers. (Science is even more severely underrepresented, with just three members in the House.) It’s unlikely that that balance will tilt meaningfully in favor of STEM-ers in the near term. But in another sense, the growing cultural capital of the engineers will inevitably translate to political power, whatever its form.

The engineering profession today is broad, much broader than it was in 1921 when Thorstein Veblen published The Engineers and the Price System, his classic pamphlet on industrial sabotage and government by technocrats. Engineering has outgrown the four traditional branches (chemical, civil, electrical, mechanical) to include all the professions in which the laws of mathematics and science are applied to real-world problems…..In a way that was never the case for previous generations, engineering today is politics, and politics engineering. Power is coming for the engineers, but are the engineers ready for power?

…tech smarts do not port easily to politics. However violently Silicon Valley pushes the story that it’s here to fix things for all of us, building an algorithm and coming up with intelligent ways to improve society are not the same thing. The triumph of the engineers is that they’ve managed to convince so many people otherwise.

This victory is more than simply economic or mechanical; engineering has also come to permeate the language of politics itself. Zuckerberg’s doe-eyed both-sidesism is the latest expression of the idea, nourished through the Clinton years and the height of the evidence-based policy movement, that facts offer the surest solution to knotty political problems. This is, we already know, a temple built on sand, ignoring as it does the intractably political nature of politics; hence the failure of “figures” and “facts” and “evidence” to do anything to shift positions on gun reform or voter fraud. But it’s a temple with enduring bipartisan appeal, and the engineers have come along at the right moment to give it a fresh lick of paint. If thinking like an engineer is the new way to do business, engineerialism, in politics, is the new centrism — rule by experts remarketed for the innovation age. It might be generations before a Veblenian technocrat calls the White House home, but no presidency can match the power engineers already have — a power to define progress, a power without check….(More)”.

Blockchain: Unpacking the disruptive potential of blockchain technology for human development.

Curated on December 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

IDRC white paper: “In the scramble to harness new technologies to propel innovation around the world, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and blockchain technologies are being explored and deployed in a wide variety of contexts globally.

Although blockchain is one of the most hyped of these new technologies, it is also perhaps the least understood. Blockchain is the distributed ledger — a database that is shared across multiple sites or institutions to furnish a secure and transparent record of events occurring during the provision of a service or contract — that supports cryptocurrencies (digital assets designed to work as mediums of exchange).

Blockchain is now underpinning applications such as land registries and identity services, but as its popularity grows, its relevance in addressing socio-economic gaps and supporting development targets like the globally-recognized UN Sustainable Development Goals is critical to unpack. Moreover, for countries in the global South that want to be more than just end users or consumers, the complex infrastructure requirements and operating costs of blockchain could prove challenging. For the purposes of real development, we need to not only understand how blockchain is workable, but also who is able to harness it to foster social inclusion and promote democratic governance.

This white paper explores the potential of blockchain technology to support human development. It provides a non-technical overview, illustrates a range of applications, and offers a series of conclusions and recommendations for additional research and potential development programming….(More)”.

Decoding Data Use: What evidence do world leaders want to achieve their goals?

Curated on December 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Samantha Custer, Takaaki Masaki, and Carolyn Iwicki: “Information is “never the hero”, but it plays a supporting role in how leaders allocate scarce resources and accelerate development in their communities. Even in low- and middle-income countries, decision-makers have ample choices in sourcing evidence from a growing field of domestic and international data providers. However, more information is not necessarily better if it misses the mark for what leaders need to monitor their country’s progress. Claims that information is the “world’s most valuable resource” and calls for a “data revolution” will ring hollow if we can’t decode what leaders actually use — and why.

In a new report, Decoding Data Use: How leaders source data and use it to accelerate development, AidData reveals what 3500 leaders from 126 countries have to say about the types of data or analysis they use, from what sources, and for which purposes in the context of their work. We analyze responses to AidData’s 2017 Listening to Leaders (LTL) Survey to offer insights to help funders, producers, advocates, and infomediaries of development data understand how to position themselves for greater impact….(more)”.

Data for Development

Curated on December 5, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The 2017 volume of the Development Co-operation Report by the OECD focuses on Data for Development: “Big Data” and “the Internet of Things” are more than buzzwords: the data revolution is transforming the way that economies and societies are functioning across the planet. The Sustainable Development Goals along with the data revolution are opportunities that should not be missed: more and better data can help boost inclusive growth, fight inequalities and combat climate change. These data are also essential to measure and monitor progress against the Sustainable Development Goals.

The value of data in enabling development is uncontested. Yet, there continue to be worrying gaps in basic data about people and the planet and weak capacity in developing countries to produce the data that policy makers need to deliver reforms and policies that achieve real, visible and long-lasting development results. At the same time, investing in building statistical capacity – which represented about 0.30% of ODA in 2015 – is not a priority for most providers of development assistance.

There is a need for stronger political leadership, greater investment and more collective action to bridge the data divide for development. With the unfolding data revolution, developing countries and donors have a unique chance to act now to boost data production and use for the benefit of citizens. This report sets out priority actions and good practices that will help policy makers and providers of development assistance to bridge the global data divide, notably by strengthening statistical systems in developing countries to produce better data for better policies and better lives…(More)”.