Tackling Corruption with People-Powered Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sandra Prüfer at Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: “Informal fees plague India’s “free” maternal health services. In Nigeria, village households don’t receive the clean cookstoves their government paid for. Around the world, corruption – coupled with the inability to find and share information about it – stymies development in low-income communities.

Now, digital transparency platforms – supplemented with features illiterate and rural populations can use – make it possible for traditionally excluded groups to make their voices heard and access tools they need to grow.

Mapping Corruption Hot Spots in India

One of the problems surrounding access to information is the lack of reliable information in the first place: a popular method to create knowledge is crowdsourcing and enlisting the public to monitor and report on certain issues.

The Mera Swasthya Meri Aawaz platform, which means “Our Health, Our Voice”, is an interactive map in Uttar Pradesh launched by the Indian non-profit organization SAHAYOG. It enables women to anonymously report illicit fees charged for services at maternal health clinics using their mobile phones.

To reduce infant mortality and deaths in childbirth, the Indian government provides free prenatal care and cash incentives to use maternal health clinics, but many charge illegal fees anyway – cutting mothers off from lifesaving healthcare and inhibiting communities’ growth. An estimated 45,000 women in India died in 2015 from complications of pregnancy and childbirth – one of the highest rates of any country in the world; low-income women are disproportionately affected….“Documenting illegal payment demands in real time and aggregating the data online increased governmental willingness to listen,” Sandhya says. “Because the data is linked to technology, its authenticity is not questioned.”

Following the Money in Nigeria

In Nigeria, Connected Development (CODE) also champions open data to combat corruption in infrastructure building, health and education projects. Its mission is to improve access to information and empower local communities to share data that can expose financial irregularities. Since 2012, the Abuja-based watchdog group has investigated twelve capital projects, successfully pressuring the government to release funds including $5.3 million to treat 1,500 lead-poisoned children.

“People activate us: if they know about any project that is supposed to be in their community, but isn’t, they tell us they want us to follow the money – and we’ll take it from there,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi.

Users alert the watchdog group directly through its webpage, which publishes open-source data about development projects that are supposed to be happening, based on reports from freedom of information requests to Nigeria’s federal minister of environment, World Bank data and government press releases.

Last year, as part of their #WomenCookstoves reporting campaign, CODE revealed an apparent scam by tracking a $49.8 million government project that was supposed to purchase 750,000 clean cookstoves for rural women. Smoke inhalation diseases disproportionately affect women who spend time cooking over wood fires; according to the World Health Organization, almost 100,000 people die yearly in Nigeria from inhaling wood smoke, the country’s third biggest killer after malaria and AIDS.

“After three months, we found out that only 15 percent of the $48 million was given to the contractor – meaning there were only 45,000 cook stoves out of 750,000 in the county,” Babayemi says….(More)”

How to Succeed in the Networked World: A Grand Strategy for the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne-Marie Slaughter in Foreign Affairs: “Foreign policy experts have long been taught to see the world as a chessboard, analyzing the decisions of great powers and anticipating rival states’ reactions in a continual game of strategic advantage. Nineteenth-century British statesmen openly embraced this metaphor, calling their contest with Russia in Central Asia “the Great Game.” Today, the TV show Game of Thrones offers a particularly gory and irresistible version of geopolitics as a continual competition among contending kingdoms.

Think of a standard map of the world, showing the borders and capitals of the world’s 190-odd countries. That is the chessboard view.

Now think of a map of the world at night, with the lit-up bursts of cities and the dark swaths of wilderness. Those corridors of light mark roads, cars, houses, and offices; they mark the networks of human relationships, where families and workers and travelers come together. That is the web view. It is a map not of separation, marking off boundaries of sovereign power, but of connection.

To see the international system as a web is to see a world not of states but of networks. It is the world of terrorism; of drug, arms, and human trafficking; of climate change and declining biodiversity; of water wars and food insecurity; of corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion; of pandemic disease carried by air, sea, and land. In short, it is the world of many of the most pressing twenty-first-century global threats… (More)”.

Predicting judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: a Natural Language Processing perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al at Peer J. Computer Science: “Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions. This can be useful, for both lawyers and judges, as an assisting tool to rapidly identify cases and extract patterns which lead to certain decisions. This paper presents the first systematic study on predicting the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights based solely on textual content. We formulate a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights. Textual information is represented using contiguous word sequences, i.e., N-grams, and topics. Our models can predict the court’s decisions with a strong accuracy (79% on average). Our empirical analysis indicates that the formal facts of a case are the most important predictive factor. This is consistent with the theory of legal realism suggesting that judicial decision-making is significantly affected by the stimulus of the facts. We also observe that the topical content of a case is another important feature in this classification task and explore this relationship further by conducting a qualitative analysis….(More)”

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Design Thinking for Educators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDEO: “The Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit gives teachers the tools and methods they need to apply design thinking—discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution—in real-world scenarios….

Why design thinking? Hear firsthand stories about how design thinking can apply to education.

Included in the toolkit are the Designer’s Workbook, workshops and an ongoing free five-week virtual class to help hone skills and empower teachers to create desirable solutions.

The effort is helping teachers become agents of change within their schools, driving new small- and large-scale innovations. Visit the Design Thinking Toolkit for Educators site for stories, case studies, process outlines, engagement opportunities, and more….(More)”

Civic Crowd Analytics: Making sense of crowdsourced civic input with big data tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by  that: “… examines the impact of crowdsourcing on a policymaking process by using a novel data analytics tool called Civic CrowdAnalytics, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods such as concept extraction, word association and sentiment analysis. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we examine the influence of civic input on the city’s Comprehensive City Plan update. The findings show that the impact of citizens’ voices depends on the volume and the tone of their demands. A higher demand with a stronger tone results in more policy changes. We also found an interesting and unexpected result: the city government in Palo Alto mirrors more or less the online crowd’s voice while citizen representatives rather filter than mirror the crowd’s will. While NLP methods show promise in making the analysis of the crowdsourced input more efficient, there are several issues. The accuracy rates should be improved. Furthermore, there is still considerable amount of human work in training the algorithm….(More)”

Nudges for Privacy and Security: Understanding and Assisting Users’ Choices Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alessandro Acquisti et al: “Advancements in information technology often task users with complex and consequential privacy and security decisions. A growing body of research has investigated individuals’ choices in the presence of privacy and information security trade-offs, the decision-making hurdles affecting those choices, and ways to mitigate those hurdles. This article provides a multi-disciplinary assessment of the literature pertaining to privacy and security decision making. It focuses on research on assisting individuals’ privacy and security choices with soft paternalistic interventions that nudge users towards more beneficial choices. The article discusses potential benefits of those interventions, highlights their shortcomings, and identifies key ethical, design, and research challenges….(More)”

Essays on collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Yiftach Nagar: “This dissertation consists of three essays that advance our understanding of collective-intelligence: how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be augmented. I combine theoretical and empirical work, spanning qualitative inquiry, lab experiments, and design, exploring how novel ways of organizing, enabled by advancements in information technology, can help us work better, innovate, and solve complex problems.

The first essay offers a collective sensemaking model to explain structurational processes in online communities. I draw upon Weick’s model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into Wikipedia’s policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research.

In the second essay, we characterize a class of semi-structured prediction problems, where patterns are difficult to discern, data are difficult to quantify, and changes occur unexpectedly. Making correct predictions under these conditions can be extremely difficult, and is often associated with high stakes. We argue that in these settings, combining predictions from humans and models can outperform predictions made by groups of people, or computers. In laboratory experiments, we combined human and machine predictions, and find the combined predictions more accurate and more robust than predictions made by groups of only people or only machines.

The third essay addresses a critical bottleneck in open-innovation systems: reviewing and selecting the best submissions, in settings where submissions are complex intellectual artifacts whose evaluation require expertise. To aid expert reviewers, we offer a computational approach we developed and tested using data from the Climate CoLab – a large citizen science platform. Our models approximate expert decisions about the submissions with high accuracy, and their use can save review labor, and accelerate the review process….(More)”

Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jenna Wortham at The New York Times: “…“Fixing” problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way: It embodies the values and biases of the people who create it. Crime-predicting software, celebrated when it was introduced in police departments around the country, turned out to reinforce discriminatory policing. Facebook was recently accused of suppressing conservative news from its trending topics. (The company denied a bias, but announced plans to train employees to neutralize political, racial, gender and age biases that could influence what it shows its user base.) Several studies have found that Airbnb has worsened the housing crises in some cities where it operates. In January, a report from the World Bank declared that tech companies were widening income inequality and wealth disparities, not improving them….

None of this was mentioned at South by South Lawn. Instead, speakers heralded the power of the tech community. John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, gave a rousing talk that implored listeners to “get in trouble. Good trouble. Get in the way and make some noise.” Clay Dumas, chief of staff for the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House, told me in an email that the event could be considered part of a legacy to inspire social change and activism through technology. “In his final months in office,” he wrote, “President Obama wants to empower the generation of people that helped launch his candidacy and whose efforts carried him into office.”

…But a few days later, during a speech at Carnegie Mellon, Obama seemed to reckon with his feelings about the potential — and limits — of the tech world. The White House can’t be as freewheeling as a start-up, he said, because “by definition, democracy is messy. And part of government’s job is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” But he added that he didn’t want people to become “discouraged and say, ‘I’m just not going to deal with government.’ ” Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could. That lesson was apparent on the lawn. While I still don’t believe that technology is a panacea for society’s problems, I will always appreciate the first president who tried to bring what’s best about Silicon Valley to Washington, even if some of the bad came with it….(More)”

100 Stories: The Impact of Open Access

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Promita Chatterji: “It is time to reassess how we talk about the impact of open access. Early thought leaders in the field of scholarly communications sparked our collective imagination with a compelling vision for open access: improving global access to knowledge, advancing science, and providing greater access to education.1 But despite the fact that open access has gained a sizable foothold, discussions about the impact of open access are often still stuck at the level of aspirational or potential benefit. Shouldn’t we be able to gather real examples of positive outcomes to demonstrate the impact of open access? We need to get more concrete. Measurements like

Measurements like altmetrics and download counts provide useful data about usage, but remain largely indicators of early-level interest rather actual outcomes and benefits. There has been considerable research into how open access affects citation counts,2 but beyond that discussion there is still a gap between the hypothetical societal good of open access and the minutiae of usage and interest measurements. This report begins to bridge that gap by presenting a framework, drawn from 100 real stories that describe the impact of open access. Collected by bepress from across 500 institutions and 1400 journals using Digital Commons as their publishing and/or institutional repository platform, these stories present information about actual outcomes, benefits, and impacts.

This report brings to light the wide variety of scholarly and cultural activity that takes place on university campuses and the benefit resulting from greater visibility and access to these materials. We hope that administrators, authors, students, and others will be empowered to articulate and amplify the impact of their own work. We also created the framework to serve as a tool for stakeholders who are interested in advocating for open access on their campus yet lack the specific vocabulary and suitable examples. Whether it is a librarian hoping to make the case for open access with reluctant administrators or faculty, a faculty member who wants to educate students about changing modes of publishing, a funding agency looking for evidence in support of its open access requirement, or students advocating for educational affordability, the framework and stories themselves can be a catalyst for these endeavors. Put more simply, these are 100 stories to answer the question: “why does open access matter?”…(More)”

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