Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in the Conversation: “The irony of internet freedom was on full display shortly after midnight July 16 in Turkey when President Erdogan used FaceTime and independent TV news to call for public resistance against the military coup that aimed to depose him.

In response, thousands of citizens took to the streets and aided the government in beating back the coup. The military plotters had taken over state TV. In this digital age they apparently didn’t realize television was no longer sufficient to ensure control over the message.

This story may appear like a triumphant example of the internet promoting democracy over authoritarianism.

Not so fast….This duality of the internet, as a tool to promote democracy or authoritarianism, or simultaneously both, is a complex puzzle.

The U.S. has made increasing internet access around the world a foreign policy priority. This policy was supported by both Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. State Department has allocated tens of millions of dollars to promote internet freedom, primarily in the area of censorship circumvention. And just this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution declaring internet freedom a fundamental human right. The resolution condemns internet shutdowns by national governments, an act that has become increasingly common in variety of countries across the globe, including Turkey, Brazil, India and Uganda.

On the surface, this policy makes sense. The internet is an intuitive boon for democracy. It provides citizens around the world with greater freedom of expression, opportunities for civil society, education and political participation. And previous research, including our own, has been optimistic about the internet’s democratic potential.

However, this optimism is based on the assumption that citizens who gain internet access use it to expose themselves to new information, engage in political discussions, join social media groups that advocate for worthy causes and read news stories that change their outlook on the world.

And some do.

But others watch Netflix. They use the internet to post selfies to an intimate group of friends. They gain access to an infinite stream of music, movies and television shows. They spend hours playing video games.

However, our recent research shows that tuning out from politics and immersing oneself in online spectacle has political consequences for the health of democracy….Political use of the internet ranks very low globally, compared to other uses. Research has found that just 9 percent of internet users posted links to political news and only 10 percent posted their own thoughts about political or social issues. In contrast, almost three-quarters (72 percent) say they post about movies and music, and over half (54 percent) also say they post about sports online.

This inspired our study, which sought to show how the internet does not necessarily serve as democracy’s magical solution. Instead, its democratic potential is highly dependent on how citizens choose to use it….

Ensuring citizens have access to the internet is not sufficient to ensure democracy and human rights. In fact, internet access may negatively impact democracy if exploited for authoritarian gain.

The U.S. government, NGOs and other democracy advocates have invested a great deal of time and resources toward promoting internet access, fighting overt online censorship and creating circumvention technologies. Yet their success, at best, has been limited.

The reason is twofold. First, authoritarian governments have adapted their own strategies in response. Second, the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy underlying a great deal of internet freedom promotion doesn’t take into account basic human psychology in which entertainment choices are preferred over news and attitudes toward the internet determine its use, not the technology itself.

Allies in the internet freedom fight should realize that the locus of the fight has shifted. Greater efforts must be put toward tearing down “psychological firewalls,” building demand for internet freedom and influencing citizens to employ the internet’s democratic potential.

Doing so ensures that the democratic online toolkit is a match for the authoritarian one….(More)”

The Future of Economics Uses the Science of Real-Life Social Networks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul Ormerod at Evonomics: “….The recognition of the fundamental importance of networks for outcomes in the modern social and economic worlds does not mean that governments are powerless. Instead it calls for smarter government rather than no government. It almost certainly means fewer state bureaucrats, working in an outdated intellectual framework, searching for the elusive silver bullet which is guaranteed to solve a problem.

The silver bullet of this approach is that there are no silver bullets. Instead, we need to rely much more on the processes of experimentation and discovery. A key influence on behaviour in many social and economic contexts is the prevailing social norm in the relevant network, which emerges from the interactions of the individuals who comprise the network. But there are no levers, no magic buttons to press, which will guarantee that social norms can be altered in ways which the policymaker desires. We can only discover what works by experiment.

This does not mean that we are operating in the dark, that the success or otherwise of a policy is merely a matter of chance. The more knowledge we have of how people are connected on the relevant network, of who might influence whom and when, the more chance a policy has of succeeding. Much of this knowledge is held at decentralised levels in tacit form, a form which is hard or even impossible to codify. But it is crucial to how most social and economic systems work in practice.

Our current political institutions are to a large extent based on the vision of society and the economy operating like machines, populated by economically rational agents. This view of the world leads to centralised bureaucracies and centralised decision-making. We live in a society where decisions are made through several layers of bureaucracy, in both the public and private sectors. On the whole, this leads to decisions that are insensitive to local (micro) conditions, and which are insensitive to society as it changes.

A lack of both resilience and robustness is a characteristic feature of such approaches to social and economic management. Structures, rules, regulations, incentives are put in place in the belief that a desired outcome can be achieved, that a potential crisis can be predicted and forestalled by such policies. As the recent financial crisis illustrates only too well, this view of the world is ill-suited to creating systems which are resilient when unexpected shocks occur, and which exhibit robustness in their ability to recover from the shock. The focus of policy needs to shift away from prediction and control. We can never predict the unpredictable. Instead, we need systems which exhibit resilience and robustness together with the ability to adapt and respond well to unpredictable future events….(More) Adapted from Complex New World: Translating new economic thinking into public policy, published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

Human Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Concilio, Grazia and  Rizzo, Francesca: “Within the most recent discussion on smart cities and the way this vision is affecting urban changes and dynamics, this book explores the interplay between planning and design both at the level of the design and planning domains’ theories and practices.
Urban transformation is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon, rich in uncertainty. It is the unpredictable consequence of complex interplay between urban forces (both top-down or bottom-up), urban resources (spatial, social, economic and infrastructural as well as political or cognitive) and transformation opportunities (endogenous or exogenous).

The recent attention to Urban Living Lab and Smart City initiatives is disclosing a promising bridge between the micro-scale environments, with the dynamics of such forces and resources, and the urban governance mechanisms. This bridge is represented by those urban collaborative environments, where processes of smart service co-design take place through dialogic interaction with and among citizens within a situated and cultural-specific frame….(More)”

Inside Government: The role of policy actors in shaping e-democracy in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Mary Houston: “The thesis focuses on the emergence of e-democracy in the UK between 1999 and 2013. It examines the part that policy actors have played in shaping the agenda. Emphasis is placed on how e-democracy is understood by those charged with developing initiatives and implementing government policy on e-democracy. Previous research on e-democracy has focused largely on the impact of Web technologies on political systems and/or on how, why and to what degree, citizens participate. Less attention is paid to what happens inside government, in how policy actors’ conceive public engagement in the policy process. Their perceptions and shared understandings are crucial to the commissioning, implementation, or deflection of participatory opportunities. This thesis is concerned with exploring how policy actors experience, interpret and negotiate e-democracy policy and practices and their perceptions of citizen involvement in the policy process. Competing discourses shape institutional expectations of e-democracy in the UK. The research examines how policy actors draw upon wider discourses such as the modernisation of government and the emphasis on transparency. It analyses understandings of technologies in government and the effects of relational interactions and linkages in policy and practice….(More)”

Big health data: the need to earn public trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tjeerd-Pieter van Staa et al in the BMJ: “Better use of large scale health data has the potential to benefit patient care, public health, and research. The handling of such data, however, raises concerns about patient privacy, even when the risks of disclosure are extremely small.

The problems are illustrated by recent English initiatives trying to aggregate and improve the accessibility of routinely collected healthcare and related records, sometimes loosely referred to as “big data.” One such initiative, care.data, was set to link and provide access to health and social care information from different settings, including primary care, to facilitate the planning and provision of healthcare and to advance health science.1 Data were to be extracted from all primary care practices in England. A related initiative, the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), evolved from the General Practice Research Database (GPRD). CPRD was intended to build on GPRD by linking patients’ primary care records to hospital data, around 50 disease registries and clinical audits, genetic information from UK Biobank, and even the loyalty cards of a large supermarket chain, creating an integrated data repository and linked services for all of England that could be sold to universities, drug companies, and non-healthcare industries. Care.data has now been abandoned and CPRD has stalled. The flawed implementation of care.data plus earlier examples of data mismanagement have made privacy issues a mainstream public concern. We look at what went wrong and how future initiatives might gain public support….(More)”

US start-up aims to steer through flood of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Waters in the Financial Times: “The “open data” movement has produced a deluge of publicly available information this decade, as governments like those in the UK and US have released large volumes of data for general use.

But the flood has left researchers and data scientists with a problem: how do they find the best data sets, ensure these are accurate and up to date, and combine them with other sources of information?

The most ambitious in a spate of start-ups trying to tackle this problem is set to be unveiled on Monday, when data.world opens for limited release. A combination of online repository and social network, the site is designed to be a central platform to support the burgeoning activity around freely available data.

The aim closely mirrors Github, which has been credited with spurring the open source software movement by becoming both a place to store and find free programs as well as a crowdsourcing tool for identifying the most useful.

“We are at an inflection point,” said Jeff Meisel, chief marketing officer for the US Census Bureau. A “massive amount of data” has been released under open data provisions, he said, but “what hasn’t been there are the tools, the communities, the infrastructure to make that data easier to mash up”….

Data.world plans to seed its site with about a thousand data sets and attract academics as its first users, said Mr Hurt. By letting users create personal profiles on the site, follow others and collaborate around the information they are working on, the site hopes to create the kind of social dynamic that makes it more useful the more it is used.

An attraction of the service is the ability to upload data in any format and then use common web standards to link different data sets and create mash-ups with the information, said Dean Allemang, an expert in online data….(More)”

Can mobile usage predict illiteracy in a developing country?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pål Sundsøy at arXiv: “The present study provides the first evidence that illiteracy can be reliably predicted from standard mobile phone logs. By deriving a broad set of mobile phone indicators reflecting users financial, social and mobility patterns we show how supervised machine learning can be used to predict individual illiteracy in an Asian developing country, externally validated against a large-scale survey. On average the model performs 10 times better than random guessing with a 70% accuracy. Further we show how individual illiteracy can be aggregated and mapped geographically at cell tower resolution. Geographical mapping of illiteracy is crucial to know where the illiterate people are, and where to put in resources. In underdeveloped countries such mappings are often based on out-dated household surveys with low spatial and temporal resolution. One in five people worldwide struggle with illiteracy, and it is estimated that illiteracy costs the global economy more than 1 trillion dollars each year. These results potentially enable cost-effective, questionnaire-free investigation of illiteracy-related questions on an unprecedented scale…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing biomedical research: leveraging communities as innovation engines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julio Saez-Rodriguez et al in Nature: “The generation of large-scale biomedical data is creating unprecedented opportunities for basic and translational science. Typically, the data producers perform initial analyses, but it is very likely that the most informative methods may reside with other groups. Crowdsourcing the analysis of complex and massive data has emerged as a framework to find robust methodologies. When the crowdsourcing is done in the form of collaborative scientific competitions, known as Challenges, the validation of the methods is inherently addressed. Challenges also encourage open innovation, create collaborative communities to solve diverse and important biomedical problems, and foster the creation and dissemination of well-curated data repositories….(More)”

Enablers for Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Laurent Hérault, and Hideyuki Tokuda: “Smart cities are a new vision for urban development.  They integrate information and communication technology infrastructures – in the domains of artificial intelligence, distributed and cloud computing, and sensor networks – into a city, to facilitate quality of life for its citizens and sustainable growth.  This book explores various concepts for the development of these new technologies (including agent-oriented programming, broadband infrastructures, wireless sensor networks, Internet-based networked applications, open data and open platforms), and how they can provide smart services and enablers in a range of public domains.

The most significant research, both established and emerging, is brought together to enable academics and practitioners to investigate the possibilities of smart cities, and to generate the knowledge and solutions required to develop and maintain them…(More)”

MapSwipe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pete Masters at MissingMaps: “Downloading MapSwipe means that in a matter of minutes you can contribute to the work being done around the world by MSF, the Red Cross and others, and all from the comfort of your own phone!

In a humanitarian crisis, the location of the most vulnerable people is fundamental information for delivering food, shelter, medical care and other services where they are most needed. And, although it may be hard to believe, millions people around the world are not represented on any accessible map.

Part of the Missing Maps project, MapSwipe enables anyone with a smartphone to contribute to the mapping of these vulnerable communities.Download the app, choose a mission, read the instructions and get started! One tap identifies features, a second tap indicates possible features (if you’re not sure) and a third flags cloudy or bad quality imagery areas. If there is nothing to identify, just swipe to the next image! You can download imagery for offline MapSwiping on an underground train or plane, so say goodbye to your wasted commuter hours on Candy Crush or Angry Birds!

Screenshots from MapSwipe

Screenshots from MapSwipe

Developed by Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders (MSF), MapSwipe serves a direct purpose for NGOs. For example, when MSF responds to major disease outbreaks with mass vaccination campaigns, hundreds of teams have to cover enormous areas (as in the measles outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo last year). Now, with MapSwipe, we can give vaccination campaign coordinators a super-fast snapshot of where the population clusters are, helping them to send their teams to the locations where they are most needed to achieve maximum vaccination coverage.

The Missing Maps project is a collaborative project in which a large and committed community of NGOs, academic institutes, companies and most of all individual mappers map vulnerable areas in OpenStreetMap. By using MapSwipe to identify where communities are located, you also give these mappers the ability to use their talents to map the towns and villages in these areas without having to search through miles of jungle and bush to find them, saving time and helping to put valuable data into the hands of field teams even faster….(More)”