Colm Gorey at SiliconRepublic: “…not all blockchain technologies need to be about making money. A recent report issued by the European Commission discussed the possible ways it could change people’s lives….
While many democratic nations still prefer a traditional paper ballot system to an electronic voting system over fears that digital votes could be tampered with, new technologies are starting to change that opinion.
One suggestion is blockchain enabled e-voting (BEV), which would take control from a central authority and put it back in the hands of the voter.
As a person’s vote would be timestamped with details of their last vote thanks to the encrypted algorithm, an illegitimate one would be spotted more easily by a digital system, or even those within digital-savvy communities.
Despite still being a fledgling technology, BEV has already begun working on the local scale of politics within Europe, such as the internal elections of political parties in Denmark.
But perhaps at this early stage, its actual use in governmental elections at a national level will remain limited, depending on “the extent to which it can reflect the values and structure of society, politics and democracy”, according to the EU….blockchain has also been offered as an answer to sustaining the public service, particularly with transparency of where people’s taxes are going.
One governmental concept could allow blockchain to form the basis for a secure method of distributing social welfare or other state payments, without the need for divisions running expensive and time-consuming fraud investigations.
Irish start-up Aid:Tech is one noticeable example that is working with Serbia to do just that, along with its efforts to use blockchain to create a transparent system for aid to be evenly distributed in countries such as Syria.
Bank of Ireland’s innovation manager, Stephen Moran, is certainly of the opinion that blockchain in the area of identity offers greater revolutionary change than BEV.
“By identity, that can cover everything from educational records, but can also cover the idea of a national identity card,” he said in conversation with Siliconrepublic.com….
But perhaps the wildest idea within blockchain – and one that is somewhat connected to governance – is that, through an amalgamation of smart contracts, it could effectively run itself as an artificially intelligent being.
Known as decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), these are, in effect, entities that can run a business or any operation autonomously, allocating tasks or distributing micropayments instantly to users….
An example similar to the DAO already exists, in a crowdsourced blockchain online organisation run entirely on the open source platform Ethereum.
Last year, through the sheer will of its users, it was able to crowdfund the largest sum ever – $100m – through smart contracts alone.
If it appears confusing and unyielding, then you are not alone.
However, as was simply summed up by writer Leda Glyptis, blockchain is a force to be reckoned with, but it will be so subtle that you won’t even notice….(More)”.
Scientists crowdsource autism data to learn where resource gaps exist
SCOPE: “How common is autism? Since 2000, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revised its estimate several times, with the numbers ticking steadily upward. But the most recent figure of 1 in 68 kids affected is based on data from only 11 states. It gives no indication of where people with autism live around the country nor whether their communities have the resources to treat them.
That’s a knowledge gap Stanford biomedical data scientist Dennis Wall, PhD, wants to fill — not just in the United States but also around the world. A new paper, published online in JMIR Public Health & Surveillance, explains how Wall and his team created GapMap, an interactive website designed to crowdsource the missing autism data. They’re now inviting people and families affected by autism to contribute to the database….
The pilot phase of the research, which is described in the new paper, estimated that the average distance from an individual in the U.S. to the nearest autism diagnostic center is 50 miles, while those with an autism diagnosis live an average of 20 miles from the nearest diagnostic center. The researchers think this may reflect lower rates of diagnosis among people in rural areas….Data submitted to GapMap will be stored in a secure, HIPAA-compliant database. In addition to showing where more autism treatment resources are needed, the researchers hope the project will help build communities of families affected by autism and will inform them of treatment options nearby. Families will also have the option of participating in future autism research, and the scientists plan to add more features, including the locations of environmental factors such as local pollution, to understand if they contribute to autism…(More)”
What data do we want? Understanding demands for open data among civil society organisations in South Africa
Report by Kaliati, Andrew; Kachieng’a, Paskaliah and de Lanerolle, Indra: “Many governments, international agencies and civil society organisations (CSOs) support and promote open data. Most open government data initiatives have focused on supply – creating portals and publishing information. But much less attention has been given to demand – understanding data needs and nurturing engagement. This research examines the demand for open data in South Africa, and asks under what conditions meeting this demand might influence accountability. Recognising that not all open data projects are developed for accountability reasons, it also examines barriers to using government data for accountability processes. The research team identified and tested ‘use stories’ and ‘use cases’. How did a range of civil society groups with an established interest in holding local government accountable use – or feel that they could use – data in their work? The report identifies and highlights ten broad types of open data use, which they divided into two streams: ‘strategy and planning’ – in which CSOs used government data internally to guide their own actions; and ‘monitoring, mobilising and advocacy’ – in which CSOs undertake outward-facing activities….(More)”
SeeClickFix Empowers Citizens by Connecting Them to Their Local Governments
Paper by Ben Berkowitz and Jean-Paul Gagnon in Democratic Theory: “SeeClickFix began in 2009 when founder and present CEO Ben Berkowitz spotted a piece of graffiti in his New Haven, Connecticut, neighborhood. After calling numerous departments at city hall in a bid to have the graffiti removed, Berkowitz felt no closer to fixing the problem. Confused and frustrated, his emotions resonated with what many citizens in real- existing democracies feel today (Manning 2015): we see problems in public and want to fix them but can’t. This all too habitual inability for “common people” to fix problems they have to live with on a day-to-day basis is a prelude to the irascible citizen (White 2012), which, according to certain scholars (e.g., Dean 1960; Lee 2009), is itself a prelude to political apathy and a citizen’s alienation from specific political institutions….(More)”
Open data and the war on hunger – a challenge to be met
Diginomica: “Although the private sector is seen as the villain of the piece in some quarters, it actually has a substantial role to play in helping solve the problem of world hunger.
This is the view of Andre Laperriere, executive director of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (Godan) initiative, …
Laperriere himself heads up Godan’s small secretariat of five full-time equivalent employees who are based in Oxfordshire in the UK. The goal of the organisation, which currently has 511 members, is to encourage governmental, non-governmental (NGO) and private sector organisations to share open data about agriculture and nutrition. The idea is to make such information more available, accessible and usable in order to help tackle world food security in the face of mounting threats such as climate change.
But to do so, it is necessary to bring the three key actors originally identified by James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, into play, believes Laperriere. He explains:
You have states, which generate and possess much of the data. There are citizens with lots of specific needs for which the data can be used, and there’s the private sector in between. It’s in the best position to exploit the data and use it to develop products that help meet the needs of the population. So the private sector is the motor of development and has a big role to play.
This is not least because NGOs, cooperatives and civil societies of all kinds often simply do not have the resources or technical knowledge to either find or deal with the massive quantities of open data that is released. Laperriere explains:
It’s a moral dilemma for a lot of research organisations. If, for example, they release 8,000 data sets about every kind of cattle disease, they’re doing so for the benefit of small farmers. But the only ones that can often do anything with it are the big companies as they have the appropriate skills. So the goal is the little guy rather than the big companies, but the alternative is not to release anything at all.
But for private sector businesses to truly get the most out of this open data as it is made available, Laperriere advocates getting together to create so-called pre-competition spaces. These spaces involve competitors collaborating in the early stages of commercial product development to solve common problems. To illustrate how such activity works, Laperriere cites his own past experience when working for a lighting company:
We were pushing fluorescent rather than incandescent lighting, but it contains mercury which pollutes, although it has a lower carbon footprint. It was also a lot more expensive. But we sat down together with the other manufacturers and shared our data to fix the problem together, which meant that everyone benefited by reducing the cost, the mercury pollution and the amount of energy consumed.
Next revolution
While Laperriere understands the fear of many organisations in potentially making themselves vulnerable to competition by disclosing their data, in reality, he attests, “it not the case”. Instead he points out:
If you release data in the right way to stimulate collaboration, it is positive economically and benefits both consumers and companies too as it helps reduce their costs and minimise other problems.
Due to growing amounts of government legislation and policies that require processed food manufacturers around the world to disclose product ingredients, he is, in fact, seeing rising interest in the approach not only among the manufacturers themselves but also among packaging and food preservation companies. The fact that agriculture and nutrition is a vast, complex area does mean there is still a long way to go, however….(More)”
Artificial intelligence prevails at predicting Supreme Court decisions
Matthew Hutson at Science: “See you in the Supreme Court!” President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers can do a better job than legal scholars at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information.
Several other studies have guessed at justices’ behavior with algorithms. A 2011 project, for example, used the votes of any eight justices from 1953 to 2004 to predict the vote of the ninth in those same cases, with 83% accuracy. A 2004 paper tried seeing into the future, by using decisions from the nine justices who’d been on the court since 1994 to predict the outcomes of cases in the 2002 term. That method had an accuracy of 75%.
The new study draws on a much richer set of data to predict the behavior of any set of justices at any time. Researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information on cases dating back to 1791, to build a general algorithm for predicting any justice’s vote at any time. They drew on 16 features of each vote, including the justice, the term, the issue, and the court of origin. Researchers also added other factors, such as whether oral arguments were heard….
From 1816 until 2015, the algorithm correctly predicted 70.2% of the court’s 28,000 decisions and 71.9% of the justices’ 240,000 votes, the authors report in PLOS ONE. That bests the popular betting strategy of “always guess reverse,” which has been the case in 63% of Supreme Court cases over the last 35 terms. It’s also better than another strategy that uses rulings from the previous 10 years to automatically go with a “reverse” or an “affirm” prediction. Even knowledgeable legal experts are only about 66% accurate at predicting cases, the 2004 study found. “Every time we’ve kept score, it hasn’t been a terribly pretty picture for humans,” says the study’s lead author, Daniel Katz, a law professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago…..Outside the lab, bankers and lawyers might put the new algorithm to practical use. Investors could bet on companies that might benefit from a likely ruling. And appellants could decide whether to take a case to the Supreme Court based on their chances of winning. “The lawyers who typically argue these cases are not exactly bargain basement priced,” Katz says….(More)”.
Minecraft in urban planning: how digital natives are shaking up governments
Rebecca Hill in The Guardian: “When we think of governments and technology, the image that springs to mind is more likely to be clunky computers and red tape than it is nimble innovators.
But things are changing. The geeks in jeans are making their way into government and starting to shake things up.
New ideas are changing the way governments use technology – whether that’s the UK’s intelligence organisation GCHQ finding a secure way to use the instant messenger Slack or senior mandarins trumpeting the possibilities of big data.
Governments are also waking up to the idea that the public are not only users, but also a powerful resource – and that engaging them online is easier than ever before. “People get very excited about using technology to make a real impact in the world,” says Chris Lintott, the co-founder of Zooniverse, a platform that organisations can use to develop their own citizen science projects for everything from analysing planets to spotting penguins.
For one of these projects, Old Weather, Zooniverse is working with the UK Met Office to gather historic weather data from ancient ships’ logs. At the same time, people helping to discover the human stories of life at sea. “Volunteers noticed that one admiral kept turning up on ship after ship after ship,” says Lintott. “It turned out he was the guy responsible for awarding medals!”
The National Archives in the US has similarly been harnessing the power of people’s curiosity by asking them to transcribe and digitise, handwritten documents through its Citizen Archivist project….
The idea for the Järviwiki, which asks citizens to log observations about Finland’s tens of thousands of lakes via a wiki service, came to Lindholm one morning on the way into work….
The increase in the number of digital natives in governments not only brings in different skills, it also enthuses the rest of the workforce, and opens their eyes to more unusual ideas.
Take Block by Block, which uses the game Minecraft to help young people show city planners how urban spaces could work better for them.
A decade ago it would have been hard to imagine a UN agency encouraging local governments to use a game to re-design their cities. Now UN-Habitat, which works with governments to promote more sustainable urban environments, is doing just that….
In Singapore, meanwhile – a country with densely populated cities and high volumes of traffic – the government is using tech to do more than manage information. It has created an app, MyResponder, that alerts a network of more than 10,000 medically trained volunteers to anyone who has a heart attack nearby, sometimes getting someone to the scene faster than the ambulance can get through the traffic.
The government is now piloting an expansion of the project by kitting out taxis with defibrillators and giving drivers first aid training, then linking them up to the app.
It’s examples like these, where governments use technology to bring communities together, that demonstrates the benefit of embracing innovation. The people making it happen are not only improving services for citizens – their quirky ideas are breathing new life into archaic systems…(More)“
NYC’s New Tech to Track Every Homeless Person in the City
Wired: “New York is facing a crisis. The city that never sleeps has become the city with the most people who have no home to sleep in. As rising rents outpace income growth across the five boroughs, some 62,000 people, nearly 40 percent of them children, live in homeless shelters—rates the city hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.
As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio faces reelection in November, his reputation and electoral prospects depend in part on his ability to reverse this troubling trend. In the mayor’s estimation, combatting homelessness effectively will require opening 90 new shelters across the city and expanding the number of outreach workers who canvass the streets every day offering aid and housing. The effort will also require having the technology in place to ensure that work happens as efficiently as possible. To that end, the city is rolling out a new tool, StreetSmart, aims to give city agencies and non-profit groups a comprehensive view of all of the data being collected on New York’s homeless on a daily basis.
Think of StreetSmart as a customer relationship management system for the homeless. Every day in New York, some 400 outreach workers walk the streets checking in on homeless people and collecting information about their health, income, demographics, and history in the shelter system, among other data points. The workers get to know this vulnerable population and build trust in the hope of one day placing them in some type of housing.
Traditionally, outreach workers have entered information about every encounter into a database, keeping running case files. But those databases never talked to each other. One outreach worker in the Bronx might never know she was talking to the same person who’d checked into a Brooklyn shelter a week prior. More importantly, the worker might never know why that person left. What’s more, systems used by city agencies and non-profits seldom overlapped, complicating efforts to keep track of individuals….
The big promise of StreetSmart extends beyond its ability to help outreach workers in the moment. The aggregation of all this information could also help the city proactively design fixes to problems it wouldn’t have otherwise seen. The tool has a map feature that shows where encampments are popping up and where outreach workers are having the most interactions. It can also be used to assess how effective different housing facilities are at keeping people off the streets….(More)”.
The Nudge Wars: A Glimpse into the Modern Socialist Calculation Debate
Paper by Abigail Devereaux: “Nudge theory, the preferences-neutral subset of modern behavioral economic policy, is premised on irrational decision-making at the level of the individual agent. We demonstrate how Hayek’s epistemological argument, developed primarily during the socialist calculation debate in response to claims made by fellow economists in favor of central planning, can be extended to show how nudge theory requires social architects to have access to fundamentally unascertainable implicit and local knowledge. We draw parallels between the socialist calculation debate and nudge theoretical arguments throughout, particularly the “libertarian socialism” of H. D. Dickinson and the “libertarian paternalism” of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We discuss the theory of creative and computable economics in order to demonstrate how nudges are provably not preferences-neutral, as even in a state of theoretically perfect information about current preferences, policy-makers cannot access information about how preferences may change in the future. We conclude by noting that making it cheaper to engage in some methods of decision-making is analogous to subsidizing some goods. Therefore, the practical consequences of implementing nudge theory could erode the ability of individuals to make good decisions by destroying the kinds of knowledge-encoding institutions that endogenously emerge to assist agent decision-making….(More)”
Beyond Networks – Interlocutory Coalitions, the European and Global Legal Orders
Book by Gianluca Sgueo: “….explores the activism promoted by organised networks of civil society actors in opening up possibilities for more democratic supranational governance. It examines the positive and negative impact that such networks of civil society actors – named “interlocutory coalitions” – may have on the convergence of principles of administrative governance across the European legal system and other supranational legal systems.
The book takes two main controversial aspects into account: the first relates to the convergence between administrative rules pertaining to different supranational regulatory systems. Traditionally, the spread of methods of administrative governance has been depicted primarily against the background of the interactions between the domestic and the supranational arena, both from a top-down and bottom-up perspective. However, the exploration of interactions occurring at the supranational level between legal regimes is still not grounded on adequate empirical evidence. The second controversial aspect considered in this book consists of the role of civil society actors operating at the supranational level. In its discussion of the first aspect, the book focuses on the relations between the European administrative law and the administrative principles of law pertaining to other supranational regulatory regimes and regulators, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Asian Development Bank, and the Council of Europe. The examination of the second aspect involves the exploration of the still little examined, but crucial, role of civil society organised networks in shaping global administrative law. These “interlocutory coalitions” include NGOs, think tanks, foundations, universities, and occasionally activists with no formal connections to civil society organisations. The book describes such interlocutory coalitions as drivers of harmonized principles of participatory democracy at the European and global levels. However, interlocutory coalitions show a number of tensions (e.g. the governability of coalitions, the competition among them) that may hamper the impact they have on the reconfiguration of individuals’ rights, entitlements and responsibilities in the global arena….(More)’