Collection

Data-Driven Innovation: Big Data for Growth and Well-Being

Curated on October 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“A new OECD report on data-driven innovation finds that countries could be getting much more out of data analytics in terms of economic and social gains if governments did more to encourage investment in “Big Data” and promote data sharing and reuse.

The migration of economic and social activities to the Internet and the advent of The Internet of Things – along with dramatically lower costs of data collection, storage and processing and rising computing power – means that data-analytics is increasingly driving innovation and is potentially an important new source of growth.

The report suggest countries act to seize these benefits, by training more and better data scientists, reducing barriers to cross-border data flows, and encouraging investment in business processes to incorporate data analytics.

Few companies outside of the ICT sector are changing internal procedures to take advantage of data. For example, data gathered by companies’ marketing departments is not always used by other departments to drive decisions and innovation. And in particular, small and medium-sized companies face barriers to the adoption of data-related technologies such as cloud computing, partly because they have difficulty implementing organisational change due to limited resources, including the shortage of skilled personnel.

At the same time, governments will need to anticipate and address the disruptive effects of big data on the economy and overall well-being, as issues as broad as privacy, jobs, intellectual property rights, competition and taxation will be impacted. Read the Policy Brief…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Preface	Read
Foreword	Read
Executive summary	Read
The phenomenon of data-driven innovation	Read
Mapping the global data ecosystem and its points of control	Read
How data now drive innovation	Read
Drawing value from data as an infrastructure	Read
Building trust for data-driven innovation	Read
Skills and employment in a data-driven economy	Read
Promoting data-driven scientific research	Read
The evolution of health care in a data-rich environment	Read
Cities as hubs for data-driven innovation	Read
Governments leading by example with public sector data	Read

Anxieties of Democracy

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Debate at the Boston Review opened by Ira Katznelson: “…..Across the range of established democracies, we see skepticism bordering on cynicism about whether parliamentary governments can successfully address pressing domestic and global challenges. These doubts about representative democracy speak to both its fairness and its ability to make good policy.

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability….(More)

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Health Data Governance: Privacy, Monitoring and Research

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD publishing: “All countries are investing in health data, however; there are significant cross-country differences in data availability and use. Some countries stand out for their innovative practices enabling privacy-protective respectful data use; while others are falling behind with insufficient data and restrictions that limit access to and use of data, even by government itself. Countries that develop a data governance framework that enables privacy-protective data use will not only have the information needed to promote quality, efficiency and performance in their health systems, they will become a more attractive centre for medical research. After examining the current situation in OECD countries, a multi-disciplinary advisory panel of experts identified eight key data governance mechanisms to maximise benefits to patients and to societies from the collection, linkage and analysis of health data and to, at the same time, minimise risks to the privacy of patients and to the security of health data. These mechanisms include coordinated developming of high-value, privacy-protective health information systems; legislation that permits privacy-protective data use; open and transparent public communication ; accreditation or certification of health data processors; transparent and fair project approval processes; data de-identification and data security practices that meet legal requirements and public expectations without compromising data utility; and a process to continually assess and renew the data governance framework as new data and new risks emerge…”

.(<a href="http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/social-issues-migration-health/health-data-governance_9789264244566-en#page1">More</a>)” </p> <p>

Big Data Privacy Scenarios

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

E. Bruce, K. Sollins, M. Vernon, and D. Weitzner at D-Space@MIT: “This paper is the first in a series on privacy in Big Data. As an outgrowth of a series of workshops on the topic, the Big Data Privacy Working Group undertook a study of a series of use scenarios to highlight the challenges to privacy that arise in the Big Data arena. This is a report on those scenarios. The deeper question explored by this exercise is what is distinctive about privacy in the context of Big Data. In addition, we discuss an initial list of issues for privacy that derive specifically from the nature of Big Data. These derive from observations across the real world scenarios and use cases explored in this project as well as wider reading and discussions:

* Scale: The sheer size of the datasets leads to challenges in creating, managing and applying privacy policies.

* Diversity: The increased likelihood of more and more diverse participants in Big Data collection, management, and use, leads to differing agendas and objectives. By nature, this is likely to lead to contradictory agendas and objectives.

* Integration: With increased data management technologies (e.g. cloud services, data lakes, and so forth), integration across datasets, with new and often surprising opportunities for cross-product inferences, will also come new information about individuals and their behaviors.

* Impact on secondary participants: Because many pieces of information are reflective of not only the targeted subject, but secondary, often unattended, participants, the inferences and resulting information will increasingly be reflective of other people, not originally considered as the subject of privacy concerns and approaches.

* Need for emergent policies for emergent information: As inferences over merged data sets occur, emergent information or understanding will occur.

Although each unique data set may have existing privacy policies and enforcement mechanisms, it is not clear that it is possible to develop the requisite and appropriate emerged privacy policies and appropriate enforcement of them automatically…(More)”

The multiple meanings of open government data: Understanding different stakeholders and their perspectives

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Felipe Gonzalez-Zapata, and Richard Heeks in Government Information Quarterly: “As a field of practice and research that is fast-growing and a locus for much attention and activity, open government data (OGD) has attracted stakeholders from a variety of origins. They bring with them a variety of meanings for OGD. The purpose of this paper is to show how the different stakeholders and their different perspectives on OGD can be analyzed in a given context. Taking Chile as an OGD exemplar, stakeholder analysis is used to identify and categorize stakeholder groups in terms of their relative power and interest as either primary (in this case, politicians, public officials, public sector practitioners, international organizations) or secondary (civil society activists, funding donors, ICT providers, academics). Stakeholder groups sometimes associated with OGD but absent from significant involvement in Chile – such as private sector- and citizen-users – are also identified.

Four different perspectives on open government data – bureaucratic, political, technological, and economic – are identified from a literature review. Template analysis is used to analyze text – OGD-related reports, conference presentations, and interviews in Chile – in terms of those perspectives. This shows bureaucratic and political perspectives to be more dominant than the other two, and also some presence for a politico-economic perspective not identified from the original literature review. The information value chain is used to identify a “missing middle” in current Chilean OGD perspectives: a lack of connection between a reality of data provision and an aspiration of developmental results. This pattern of perspectives can be explained by the capacities and interests of key stakeholders, with those in turn being shaped by Chile’s history, politics, and institutions….(More)”

A matter of public trust: measuring how government performs

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gai Brodtmann at the Sydney Morning Herald:”…Getting trust is hard. Losing it is easy. And the work of maintaining trust in our democracy, and the public institutions it rests on, is constant, quiet and careful.

That trust is built on accountability and transparency. It relies on an assurance that government programs are well managed and delivered efficiently and effectively to give the best results for Australians.

And it demands impartial adjudicators to provide that assurance.

The first is getting the metrics, the key performance indicators, right. The indicators should be a fundamental way of judging whether a program is being implemented effectively and achieving its aims. If significant variations from expected performance are observed, it’s a sure sign that closer examination of the program is needed.

A lot of effort has gone into indicators in recent years. Progress has been made, but everyone recognises the issue is complex. Establishing meaningful indicators, which are aligned across and up and down agencies, and become business as usual, is not easy. And it cannot be done independently of other public sector reform.

Cultural change is inevitably at the heart of all these discussions and two aspects of that strike me. The first is risk-aversion. The second is the silo problem.

A crucial challenge in overcoming a too-timid approach to doing business is that we do not, on the whole, have incentives in the system that encourage taking risks. In fact, many of the incentives do the opposite….

But a more balanced risk-management culture will only germinate if both the government and the Parliament – including its committees – change their ways to recognise that innovative policy design and complex program implementation needs to embrace risk to be successful.

The second aspect of cultural change is the problem of too many silos. Perhaps, in some simpler past, public service agencies could generally operate with exclusive rights and functions within their own well-defined boundaries. But as social and economic challenges become more complex, this isn’t feasible.

Modern government in Australia is still coming to grips with this new imperative. Programs often involve multi-agency collaboration across jurisdictions, where the boundaries are well and truly crossed both within jurisdictions and across them. Unsurprisingly, ensuring a consistent approach and assessing outcomes has been difficult to achieve.

Collaboration between different entities is not strange to the private sector. One lesson we can draw is that, in collaborations, it is important to have a clear line of authority and control….(More)”

New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

Curated on October 5, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon, Madeleine Gabriel: “Interest in social innovation continues to rise, from governments setting up social innovation ‘labs’ to large corporations developing social innovation strategies. Yet theory lags behind practice, and this hampers our ability to understand social innovation and make the most of its potential. This collection brings together work by leading social innovation researchers globally, exploring the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical chapters and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations. It takes a critical perspective, analyzing potential downsides of social innovation that often remain unexplored or are glossed over, yet concludes with a powerful vision of the potential for social innovation to transform society. It aims to be a valuable resource for students and researchers, as well as policymakers and others supporting and leading social innovation….(More)”

Would you use Yelp if you couldn’t see other people’s comments?

Curated on October 5, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Renee Ho at Feedback Labs: “Earlier this year, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a leading humanitarian organization, launched a feedback tool IRC Service Info for the over 1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon. According to IRC, “Service Info is designed to be used by service providers to coordinate and increase responsiveness, and by service users to find and provide feedback on the services relevant to them.”

At first glance, it looked as though IRC Service Info would function a lot like Yelp, a commercial website that allows users to comment and leave feedback on small businesses—restaurants, hair salons, cafes— and now, even on US federal government agencies.

People can use IRC Service Info using a computer or mobile device. The website is in English, French, and Arabic. For individuals without online access or who prefer using a phone, they can also call to provide feedback to particular services.

This could be an exciting platform to increase the role of constituent feedback in humanitarian aid.

After spending some time on the website (toggling between the different languages), I noticed something that made it very different from Yelp. I didn’t see any user reviews despite this being an explicit goal of the project….(More)”

Uber wants you to change the world without leaving home

Curated on October 5, 2015October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney at the Financial Times: “Another day, another petition. The latest pinging into my email is from Uber, the minicab app…..To their supporters, online petitions are like Uber itself, harnessing the disruptive power of technology to shake up public life. In 2011, the campaign group 38 Degrees (motto: “People, Power, Change”) helped derail UK government plans to sell off national forests with a petition of over 500,000 names. In 2013, a 36,000-strong call to get portraits of women on to British banknotes resulted in Jane Austen’s ascendancy to a forthcoming £10 note.

But e-petitions have become victims of their own success. The numbers they generate are so large that they have created a kind of arms race of popularity…..Despite their high-tech trappings, e-petitions are an essentially feudal mechanism for raising popular grievances. They are an act of supplication, an entreaty made to a higher authority. In a modern democracy, the true megaphone for expressing the popular will is the vote. Yet the way votes are cast in the UK is locked in a bizarre time warp.

Although we spend increasing amounts of our lives online, the idea of emailing or texting our votes is mired in specious fears of electoral fraud. Meanwhile, one-third of eligible voters do not take part in general elections and almost two-thirds ignore local elections….(More)”

Digital Research Confidential

Curated on October 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig: “The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidentialoffers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers’ mistakes—and their successes.

The book—a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai’s widely read Research Confidential—presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field….(More)”