Mapping Africa’s Buildings with Satellite Imagery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google AI Blog: “An accurate record of building footprints is important for a range of applications, from population estimation and urban planning to humanitarian response and environmental science. After a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, authorities need to estimate how many households have been affected. Ideally there would be up-to-date census information for this, but in practice such records may be out of date or unavailable. Instead, data on the locations and density of buildings can be a valuable alternative source of information.

A good way to collect such data is through satellite imagery, which can map the distribution of buildings across the world, particularly in areas that are isolated or difficult to access. However, detecting buildings with computer vision methods in some environments can be a challenging task. Because satellite imaging involves photographing the earth from several hundred kilometres above the ground, even at high resolution (30–50 cm per pixel), a small building or tent shelter occupies only a few pixels. The task is even more difficult for informal settlements, or rural areas where buildings constructed with natural materials can visually blend into the surroundings. There are also many types of natural and artificial features that can be easily confused with buildings in overhead imagery.

In “Continental-Scale Building Detection from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery”, we address these challenges, using new methods for detecting buildings that work in rural and urban settings across different terrains, such as savannah, desert, and forest, as well as informal settlements and refugee facilities. We use this building detection model to create the Open Buildings dataset, a new open-access data resource containing the locations and footprints of 516 million buildings with coverage across most of the African continent. The dataset will support several practical, scientific and humanitarian applications, ranging from disaster response or population mapping to planning services such as new medical facilities or studying human impact on the natural environment….(More)”.

Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton: “Participatory Budgeting continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative democratic program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often adapt PB’s basic program design to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. This book develops six “PB types” to account for the wide variation in how PB programs function as well as the outcomes they produce. To illustrate the similar patterns across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs; chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America. By organizing the chapters regionally, it becomes clear that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions, but similar programs within each region. A key empirical finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being but, too often, researchers do not have any evidence tying PB to significant social or political change….(More)”.

The A, B and C of Democracy: Or Cats in the Sack

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Luca Belgiorno-Nettis and Kyle Redman: “This is a learner’s guide to a better democracy. Sounds ambitious? It is. The catalyst for publishing this book is obvious. There’s no need to regurgitate the public’s disaffection with politics. Mired in the tawdry mechanics of political campaigning, and incapable of climbing out of cyclical electioneering contests, representative democracies are stuck in a rut.

As Dawn Nakagawa, Vice President of the Berggruen Institute, writes, ‘Democratic reform is hard. We are very attached to our constitutions and institutions, even to the point of romanticising it all.’

This handbook is an introduction to minipublics – otherwise known as citizens’ juries or assemblies – interspersed with a few travel anecdotes to share the momentum behind the basic methodology of deliberative democracy.

As the world accelerates into its digital future, with new modes of working, connecting and living – our parliaments remain relics from a primordial, ideological and adversarial age. Meanwhile urgent challenges are stumbling to half-solutions in slow-motion. Collaboration amongst us humans in the Anthropocene is no longer just a nice-to-have….(More)”.

Shock to the System: Coups, Elections, and War on the Road to Democratization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Michael K. Miller: “How do democracies emerge? Shock to the System presents a novel theory of democratization that focuses on how events like coups, wars, and elections disrupt autocratic regimes and trigger democratic change. Employing the broadest qualitative and quantitative analyses of democratization to date, Michael Miller demonstrates that more than nine in ten transitions since 1800 occur in one of two ways: countries democratize following a major violent shock or an established ruling party democratizes through elections and regains power within democracy. This framework fundamentally reorients theories on democratization by showing that violent upheavals and the preservation of autocrats in power—events typically viewed as antithetical to democracy—are in fact central to its foundation.

Through in-depth examinations of 139 democratic transitions, Miller shows how democratization frequently follows both domestic shocks (coups, civil wars, and assassinations) and international shocks (defeat in war and withdrawal of an autocratic hegemon) due to autocratic insecurity and openings for opposition actors. He also shows how transitions guided by ruling parties spring from their electoral confidence in democracy. Both contexts limit the power autocrats sacrifice by accepting democratization, smoothing along the transition. Miller provides new insights into democratization’s predictors, the limited gains from events like the Arab Spring, the best routes to democratization for long-term stability, and the future of global democracy.

Disputing commonly held ideas about violent events and their effects on democracy, Shock to the System offers new perspectives on how regimes are transformed….(More)”.

Principled Data Access: Building Public-private Data Partnerships for Better Official Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Claudia Biancotti, Oscar Borgogno and Giovanni Veronese: “Official statistics serve as an important compass for policymakers due to their quality, impartiality, and transparency. In the current post-pandemic environment of great uncertainty and widespread disinformation, they need to serve this purpose more than ever. The wealth of data produced by the digital society (e.g. from user activity on online platforms or from Internet-of-Things devices) could help official statisticians improve the salience, timeliness and depth of their output. This data, however, tends to be locked away within the private sector. We argue that this should change and we propose a set of principles under which the public and the private sector can form partnerships to leverage the potential of new-generation data in the public interest. The principles, compatible with a variety of legal frameworks, aim at establishing trust between data collectors, data subjects, and statistical authorities, while also ensuring the technical usability of the data and the sustainability of partnerships over time. They are driven by a logic of incentive compatibility and burden sharing….(More)”

Safeguarding Public Values in Cooperation with Big Tech Companies: The Case of the Austrian Contact Tracing App Stopp Corona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Valerie Eveline: “In April 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Austrian Red Cross announced it was encouraging a cooperation with Google and Apple’s Exposure Notification Framework to develop the so-called Stop Corona app – a contact tracing app which would support health personnel in monitoring the spread of the virus to prevent new infections (European Commission, 2020a). The involvement of Google and Apple to support combating a public health emergency fueled controversy over addressing profit-driven private interests at the expense of public values. Concerns have been raised about the dominant position of US based big tech companies in political decision concerning public values. This research investigates how public values are safeguarded in cooperation with big tech companies in the Austrian contact tracing app Stop Corona. Contact tracing apps manifest a bigger trend in literature, signifying power dynamics of big tech companies, governments, and civil society in relation to public values. The theoretical foundation of this research form prevailing concepts from Media and Communication Studies (MCS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) about power dynamics such as the expansion of digital platforms and infrastructures, the political economy of big tech companies, dependencies, and digital platforms and infrastructure governance.

The cooperative responsibility framework guides the empirical investigation in four main steps. First steps identify key public values at stake and main stakeholders. After, public deliberations on advancing public values and the translation of public values based on the outcome of public deliberation are analyzed….(More)”.

Medical crowdfunding has become essential in India, but it’s leaving many behind

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Akanksha Singh: “In May, as India grappled with a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Mahan and Nishan Sekhon found themselves stretched thin. Their mother had contracted black fungus, a potentially lethal disease. The treatment, at a cost of $1,300 per day, had exhausted their insurance plan and burned through their savings. As a last resort, they turned to Ketto, a crowdfunding platform. 

They shared the campaign within their social networks in mid-June, and within a month the brothers had secured $59,000 of their $76,000 goal. “I even got a call from an [Indian man] in Belgium,” Mahan Sekhon told Rest of World. “His Spanish restaurant manager told him [about the fundraiser].”

This is how Ketto is supposed to work. In a country where out-of-pocket expenses account for nearly 63% of total health expenditures, crowdfunding fills a void in medical needs for thousands of Indians. During the Covid-19 crisis, in which more than 4 million people are estimated to have died and 10 million people have lost their jobs, Ketto saw a fourfold increase in registered fundraisers, hosting nearly 12,500 Covid-19 relief campaigns and raising $40 million, according to the company.

However, for many people in India, crowdfunding medical care is either impractical or impossible. To access the platforms, users need official documentation and formal bank accounts, which are far from universal. In 2018, the World Bank’s Identification for Development initiative estimated that 162 million Indians lack registration, including people from the trans community, homeless people, sex workers, indigenous peoples, and those from oppressed caste and class backgrounds. Even when they can get on the platforms, they are regularly targeted with hate speech and discrimination.

It means they are, effectively, cut off from services they need, or are forced to rely on the empathy of intermediaries. “People from marginalized communities in India often do not possess identity documents,” lawyer and activist Lara Jesani told Rest of World. “There are sections of people who systematically face the problem of documentation,” she said.

Ketto, an Indian online crowdfunding platform, says it has hosted over 200,000 medical fundraisers.https://www.ketto.org/

Ketto was founded in 2012 as an online marketplace that allows people to raise funds for everything from starting a business to helping nonprofits. The company began to focus on healthcare three years ago, Varun Sheth, the company’s co-founder, told Rest of World. “We realized that [medical fundraising] was where the platform was most effectively used,” he said. The company promotes campaigns through targeted advertising on Facebook and YouTube, helping them to reach a wide audience, including Indian citizens overseas. “We constantly got feedback that people outside India, especially, want to support more causes in India,” Sheth said.

Since its launch, Ketto said it has hosted over 200,000 medical fundraisers and raised over $148 million. The platform recently raised its largest ever medical appeal, $460,000 for Mithra, an infant with spinal muscular atrophy….(More)”.

How Does Participatory Action Research Generate Innovation? Findings from a Rapid Realist Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mieke Snijder and Marina Apgar: “A rapid realist review was undertaken to develop programme theories that explain how PAR generates innovation. The methodology included peer-reviewed and grey literature and moments of engagement with programme staff, such that their input supported the development and refinement of three resulting initial programme theories (IPTs) that we present in this report. Across all three IPTs, safe relational space, group facilitation, and the abilities of facilitators, are essential context and intervention components through which PAR can generate innovation. Implications from the three IPTs for evaluation design of the CLARISSA programme are identified and discussed. The report finishes with opportunities for the CLARISSA programme to start building an evidence base of how PAR works as an intervention modality, such as evidencing group-level conscientisation, the influence of intersecting inequalities, and influence of diverse perspectives coming together in a PAR process….(More)”.

A framework for assessing intergenerational fairness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Concerns about intergenerational fairness have steadily climbed up the priority ladder over the past decade. The 2020 OECD Report on Governance on Youth, Trust and Intergenerational Jusice outlines the intergenerational issues underlying many of today’s most urgent political debates, and we believe these questions will only intensify in coming years.

Ensuring effective long-term decision-making is hard. It requires leaders and decision-makers across public, private and civil society to be incentivised, and for all citizens to be empowered to have a say around the future. To do this will require change in our culture, behaviours, process and systems….

The School of International Futures and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation have created a methodology to assess whether a decision is fair to different generations, now and in the future.

It can be applied by national and local governments, independent institutions, international organisations, foundations, businesses and special interest groups to evaluate the impact of decisions on present and future generations.

The policy assessment methodology is freely available for use under the Creative Commons license for non-commercial use….

Our work on the Framework for Assessing Intergenerational Fairness and the Intergenerational Fairness Observatory are practical first steps to creating this change….(More)“.

Stewardship of global collective behavior

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al: “Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems….(More)”.