Paper by Devansh Saxena, et al: “Local and federal agencies are rapidly adopting AI systems to augment or automate critical decisions, efficiently use resources, and improve public service delivery. AI systems are being used to support tasks associated with urban planning, security, surveillance, energy and critical infrastructure, and support decisions that directly affect citizens and their ability to access essential services. Local governments act as the governance tier closest to citizens and must play a critical role in upholding democratic values and building community trust especially as it relates to smart city initiatives that seek to transform public services through the adoption of AI. Community-centered and participatory approaches have been central for ensuring the appropriate adoption of technology; however, AI innovation introduces new challenges in this context because participatory AI design methods require more robust formulation and face higher standards for implementation in the public sector compared to the private sector. This requires us to reassess traditional methods used in this space as well as develop new resources and methods. This workshop will explore emerging practices in participatory algorithm design – or the use of public participation and community engagement – in the scoping, design, adoption, and implementation of public sector algorithms…(More)”.
The Data Innovation Toolkit
Toolkit by Maria Claudia Bodino, Nathan da Silva Carvalho, Marcelo Cogo, Arianna Dafne Fini Storchi, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Despite the abundance of data, the excitement around AI, and the potential for transformative insights, many public administrations struggle to translate data into actionable strategies and innovations.
Public servants working with data-related initiatives, need practical, easy-to-use resources designed to enhance the management of data innovation initiatives.
In order to address these needs, the iLab of DG DIGIT from the European Commission is developing an initial set of practical tools designed to facilitate and enhance the implementation of data-driven initiatives. The main building blocks of the first version of the of the Digital Innovation Toolkit include:
- A Repository of educational materials and resources on the latest data innovation approaches from public sector, academia, NGOs and think tanks
- An initial set of practical resources, some examples:
- Workshop Templates to offer structured formats for conducting productive workshops that foster collaboration, ideation, and problem-solving.
- Checklists to ensure that all data journey aspects and steps are properly assessed.
- Interactive Exercises to engage team members in hands-on activities that build skills and facilitate understanding of key concepts and methodologies.
- Canvas Models to provide visual frameworks for planning and brainstorming….(More)”.
When forecasting and foresight meet data and innovation: toward a taxonomy of anticipatory methods for migration policy
Paper by Sara Marcucci, Stefaan Verhulst and María Esther Cervantes: “The various global refugee and migration events of the last few years underscore the need for advancing anticipatory strategies in migration policy. The struggle to manage large inflows (or outflows) highlights the demand for proactive measures based on a sense of the future. Anticipatory methods, ranging from predictive models to foresight techniques, emerge as valuable tools for policymakers. These methods, now bolstered by advancements in technology and leveraging nontraditional data sources, can offer a pathway to develop more precise, responsive, and forward-thinking policies.
This paper seeks to map out the rapidly evolving domain of anticipatory methods in the realm of migration policy, capturing the trend toward integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies and harnessing novel tools and data. It introduces a new taxonomy designed to organize these methods into three core categories: Experience-based, Exploration-based, and Expertise-based. This classification aims to guide policymakers in selecting the most suitable methods for specific contexts or questions, thereby enhancing migration policies…(More)”
Combine AI with citizen science to fight poverty
Nature Editorial: “Of the myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI), its use in humanitarian assistance is underappreciated. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Togo’s government used AI tools to identify tens of thousands of households that needed money to buy food, as Nature reports in a News Feature this week. Typically, potential recipients of such payments would be identified when they apply for welfare schemes, or through household surveys of income and expenditure. But such surveys were not possible during the pandemic, and the authorities needed to find alternative means to help those in need. Researchers used machine learning to comb through satellite imagery of low-income areas and combined that knowledge with data from mobile-phone networks to find eligible recipients, who then received a regular payment through their phones. Using AI tools in this way was a game-changer for the country.Can AI help beat poverty? Researchers test ways to aid the poorest people
Now, with the pandemic over, researchers and policymakers are continuing to see how AI methods can be used in poverty alleviation. This needs comprehensive and accurate data on the state of poverty in households. For example, to be able to help individual families, authorities need to know about the quality of their housing, their children’s diets, their education and whether families’ basic health and medical needs are being met. This information is typically obtained from in-person surveys. However, researchers have seen a fall in response rates when collecting these data.
Missing data
Gathering survey-based data can be especially challenging in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In-person surveys are costly to do and often miss some of the most vulnerable, such as refugees, people living in informal housing or those who earn a living in the cash economy. Some people are reluctant to participate out of fear that there could be harmful consequences — deportation in the case of undocumented migrants, for instance. But unless their needs are identified, it is difficult to help them.Leveraging the collaborative power of AI and citizen science for sustainable development
Could AI offer a solution? The short answer is, yes, although with caveats. The Togo example shows how AI-informed approaches helped communities by combining knowledge of geographical areas of need with more-individual data from mobile phones. It’s a good example of how AI tools work well with granular, household-level data. Researchers are now homing in on a relatively untapped source for such information: data collected by citizen scientists, also known as community scientists. This idea deserves more attention and more funding.
Thanks to technologies such as smartphones, Wi-Fi and 4G, there has been an explosion of people in cities, towns and villages collecting, storing and analysing their own social and environmental data. In Ghana, for example, volunteer researchers are collecting data on marine litter along the coastline and contributing this knowledge to their country’s official statistics…(More)”.
How tax data unlocks new insights for industrial policy
OECD article: “Value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax applied at each stage of the supply chain whenever value is added to goods or services. Businesses collect and remit VAT. The VAT data that are collected represent a breakthrough in studying production networks because they capture actual transactions between firms at an unprecedented level of detail. Unlike traditional business surveys or administrative data that might tell us about a firm’s size or industry, VAT records show us who does business with whom and for how much.
This data is particularly valuable because of its comprehensive coverage. In Estonia, for example, all VAT-registered businesses must report transactions above €1,000 per month, creating an almost complete picture of significant business relationships in the economy.
At least 15 countries now have such data available, including Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Estonia, and Italy. This growing availability creates opportunities for cross-country comparison and broader economic insights…(More)”.
On the Shoulders of Others: The Importance of Regulatory Learning in the Age of AI
Paper by Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger: “…International harmonization of regulation is the right strategy when the appropriate regulatory ends and means are sufficiently clear to reap efficiencies of scale and scope. When this is not the case, a push for efficiency through uniformity is premature and may lead to a suboptimal regulatory lock-in: the establishment of a rule framework that is either inefficient in the use of its means to reach the intended goal, or furthers the wrong goal, or both.
A century ago, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggested that companies have two distinct strategies to achieve success. The first is to employ economies of scale and scope to lower their cost. It’s essentially a push for improved efficiency. The other strategy is to invent a new product (or production process) that may not, at least initially, be hugely efficient, but is nevertheless advantageous because demand for the new product is price inelastic. For Schumpeter this was the essence of innovation. But, as Schumpeter also argued, innovation is not a simple, linear, and predictable process. Often, it happens in fits and starts, and can’t be easily commandeered or engineered.
As innovation is hard to foresee and plan, the best way to facilitate it is to enable a wide variety of different approaches and solutions. Public policies in many countries to foster startups and entrepreneurship stems from this view. Take, for instance, the policy of regulatory sandboxing, i.e. the idea that for a limited time certain sectors should not or only lightly be regulated…(More)”.
The Preventative Shift: How can we embed prevention and achieve long term missions
Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.
There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.
In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:
- Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
- This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.
Nonprofits, Stop Doing Needs Assessments.
Design for Social Impact: “Too many non-profits and funders still roll into communities with a clipboard and a mission to document everything “missing.”
Needs assessments have become a default tool for diagnosing deficits, reinforcing a saviour mentality where outsiders decide what’s broken and needs fixing.
I’ve sat in meetings where non-profits present lists of what communities lack:
- “Youth don’t have leadership skills”
- “Parents don’t value education”
- “Grassroots organisations don’t have capacity”
The subtext? “They need us.”
And because funding is tied to these narratives of scarcity, organisations learn to describe themselves in the language of need rather than strength—because that’s what gets funded…Now, I’m not saying that organisations or funders should never ask people what their needs are. The key issue is how needs assessments are framed and used. Too often, they use extractive “data” collection methodologies and reinforce top-down, deficit-based narratives, where communities are defined primarily by what they lack rather than what they bring.
Starting with what’s already working (asset mapping) and then identifying what’s needed to strengthen and expand those assets is different from leading with gaps, which can frame communities as passive recipients rather than active problem-solvers.
Arguably, a balanced synergy between assessing needs and asset mapping can be powerful—so long as the process centres on community agency, self-determination, and long-term sustainability rather than diagnosing problems for external intervention.
Also, asset-based mapping to me does not mean that you swoop in with the same clipboard and demand people document their strengths…(More)”.
The New Control Society
Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.
The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.
In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative
Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.
To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.
However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.
What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.
Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.