Taking Transparency to the Next Level


Blog by USAID: “In order for us all to work better together, foreign assistance data — how and where the U.S. government invests our foreign assistance dollars — must be easily, readily, and freely available to the public, media, and our international partners.

To uphold these core values of transparency and openness, USAID and the U.S. Department of State jointly re-launched ForeignAssistance.gov.

This one-stop-shop helps the American taxpayer and other stakeholders understand the depth and breadth of the U.S. Government’s work in international development and humanitarian assistance, so that how much we invest and where and when we invest it is easier to access, use, and understand.

The new ForeignAssistance.gov provides a wealth of global information (above) as well as specific details for countries (below).

The new, consolidated ForeignAssistance.gov is a visual, interactive website that advances transparency by publishing U.S. foreign assistance budget and financial data that is usable, accurate, and timely. The site empowers users to explore U.S. foreign assistance data through visualizations, while also providing the flexibility for users to create custom queries, download data, and conduct analyses by country, sector, or agency…(More)”.

Under Construction: Citizen Participation in the European Union


Paper by Dominik Hierlemann: “Four out of five European citizens want to have a bigger say in EU policymaking. Already now, they can participate in the European Union through elections, citizens’ initiatives, consultations, petitions, dialogues, and the Ombudsman. But how well do these participation instruments work? Do citizens know about them? What is their impact on EU policymaking? This study examines seven EU participation instruments in depth. It finds that the EU offers a patchwork of participation instruments that work well in some respects but remain largely unknown and create little impact. To strengthen the voice of European citizens, the EU should move from its participation patchwork to a coherent participation infrastructure. Voting every five years is not enough. A democratically accountable and legitimate EU depends on the ongoing and effective participation of citizens…(More)”.

European Health Union: A European Health Data Space for people and science


Press Release: “Today, the European Commission launched the European Health Data Space (EHDS), one of the central building blocks of a strong European Health Union. The EHDS will help the EU to achieve a quantum leap forward in the way healthcare is provided to people across Europe. It will empower people to control and utilise their health data in their home country or in other Member States. It fosters a genuine single market for digital health services and products. And it offers a consistent, trustworthy and efficient framework to use health data for research, innovation, policy-making and regulatory activities, while ensuring full compliance with the EU’s high data protection standards…

Putting people in control of their own health data, in their country and cross-border

  • Thanks to the EHDS, people will have immediate, and easy access to the data in electronic form, free of charge. They can easily share these data with other health professionals in and across Member States to improve health care delivery. Citizens will be in full control of their data and will be able to add information, rectify wrong data, restrict access to others and obtain information on how their data are used and for which purpose.
  • Member States will ensure that patient summaries, ePrescriptions, images and image reports, laboratory results, discharge reports are issued and accepted in a common European format.
  • Interoperability and security will become mandatory requirements. Manufacturers of electronic health record systems will need to certify compliance with these standards.
  • To ensure that citizens’ rights are safeguarded, all Member States have to appoint digital health authorities. These authorities will participate in the cross-border digital infrastructure (MyHealth@EU) that will support patients to share their data across borders.

Improving the use of health data for research, innovation and policymaking

  • The EHDS creates a strong legal framework for the use of health data for research, innovation, public health, policy-making and regulatory purposes. Under strict conditions, researchers, innovators, public institutions or industry will have access to large amounts of high-quality health data, crucial to develop life-saving treatments, vaccines or medical devices and ensuring better access to healthcare and more resilient health systems.  
  • The access to such data by researchers, companies or institutions will require a permit from a health data access body, to be set up in all Member States. Access will only be granted if the requested data is used for specific purposesin closed, secure environments and without revealing the identity of the individual. It is also strictly prohibited to use the data for decisions, which are detrimental to citizens such as designing harmful products or services or increasing an insurance premium.
  • The health data access bodies will be connected to the new decentralised EU-infrastructure for secondary use (HealthData@EU) which will be set up to support cross-border projects…(More)”

Data scientists are using the most annoying feature on your phones to save lives in Ukraine


Article by Bernhard Warner: “In late March, five weeks into Russia’s war on Ukraine, an international team of researchers, aid agency specialists, public health experts, and data nerds gathered on a Zoom call to discuss one of the tragic by-products of the war: the refugee crisis.

The numbers discussedweregrim. The United Nations had just declared Ukraine was facing the biggest humanitarian crisis to hit Europe since World War II as more than 4 million Ukrainians—roughly 10% of the population—had been forced to flee their homes to evade Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deadly and indiscriminate bombing campaign. That total has since swelled to 5.5 million, the UN estimates.

What the aid specialists on the call wanted to figure out was how many Ukrainian refugees still remained in the country (a population known as “internally displaced people”) and how many had crossed borders to seek asylum in the neighboring European Union countries of Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, or south into Moldova. 

Key to an effective humanitarian response of this magnitude is getting accurate and timely data on the flow of displaced people traveling from a Point A danger zone to a Point B safe space. And nobody on the call, which was organized by CrisisReady, an A-team of policy experts and humanitarian emergency responders, had anything close to precise numbers.

But they did have a kind of secret weapon: mobility data.

“The importance of mobility data is often overstated,” Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, a crisis specialist at Unicef, told her colleagues on the call. Such anonymized data—pulled from social media feeds, geolocation apps like Google Maps, cell phone towers and the like—may not give the precise picture of what’s happening on the ground in a moment of extreme crisis, “but it’s valuable” as it can fill in points on a map. ”It’s important,” she added, “to get a picture for where people are moving, especially in the first days.”

Ukraine, a nation of relatively tech-savvy social media devotees and mobile phone users, is rich in mobility data, and that’s profoundly shaped the way the world sees and interprets the deadly conflict. The CrisisReady group believes the data has an even higher calling—that it can save lives.

Since the first days of Putin’s bombing campaign, various international teams have been tapping publicly available mobility data to map the refugee crisis and coordinate an effective response. They believe the data can reveal where war-torn Ukrainians are now, and even where they’re heading. In the right hands, the data can provide local authorities the intel they need to get essential aid—medical care, food, and shelter—to the right place at the right time…(More)”

Data sharing between humanitarian organisations and donors


Report by Larissa Fast: “This report investigates issues related to data sharing between humanitarian actors and donors, with a focus on two key questions:

  • What formal or informal frameworks govern the collection and sharing of disaggregated humanitarian data between humanitarian actors and donors?
  • How are these frameworks and the related requirements understood or perceived by humanitarian actors and donors?

Drawing on interviews with donors and humanitarians about data sharing practices and examination of formal documents, the research finds that, overall and perhaps most importantly, references to ‘data’ in the context of humanitarian operations are usually generic and lack a consistent definition or even a shared terminology. Complex regulatory frameworks, variability among donor expectations, both among and within donor governments (e.g., at the country or field/headquarters levels), and among humanitarian experiences of data sharing all complicate the nature and handling of data sharing requests. Both the lack of data literacy and the differing perceptions of operational data management risks exacerbate many issues related to data sharing and create inconsistent practice (see full summary of findings in Table 3).

More specifically, while much formal documentation about data sharing between humanitarians and donors is available in the public domain, few contain explicit policies or clauses on data sharing, instead referring only to financial or compliance data and programme reporting requirements. Additionally, the justifications for sharing disaggregated humanitarian data are framed most often in terms of accountability, compliance, efficiency, and programme design. Most requests for data are linked to monitoring and compliance, as well as requests for data as ‘assurances’. Even so, donors indicated that although they request detailed/disaggregated data, they may not have the time, or human and/or technical capacity to deal with it properly. In general, donor interviewees insisted that no record level data is shared within their governments, but only aggregated or in low or no sensitivity formats….(More)”.

How does research data generate societal impact?


Blog by Eric Jensen and Mark Reed: “Managing data isn’t exciting and it can feel like a hassle to deposit data at the end of a project, when you want to focus on publishing your findings.

But if you want your research to have impact, paying attention to data could make a big difference, according to new research we published recently in the journal PLOS ONE.

We analysed case studies from the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise in 2014 to show how data analysis and curation can generate benefits for policy and practice, and sought to understand the pathways through which data typically leads to impact. In this series of blog posts we will unpack this research and show you how you can manage your data for impact.

We were commissioned by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to investigate how research data contributes to demonstrable non-academic benefits to society from research, drawing on existing impact case studies from the REF. We then analyzed case studies from the Australian Research Council (ARC) Engagement and Impact Assessment 2018, a similar exercise to the UK’s…

The most prevalent type of research data-driven impact was benefits for professional practice (45% UK; 44% Australia).

This category of impact includes changing the ways professionals operate and improving the quality of products or services through better methods, technologies, and responses to issues through better understanding. It also includes changing organisational culture and improving workplace productivity or outcomes.

Government impacts were the next most prevalent category identified in this research (21% UK; 20% Australia).

These impacts include the introduction of new policies and changes to existing policies, as well as

  • reducing the cost to deliver government services
  • enhancing the effectiveness or efficiency of government services and operations
  • more efficient government planning

Other relatively common types of research data-driven impacts were economic impact (13% UK; 14% Australia) and public health impacts (10% UK; 8% Australia)…(More)”.

Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty-First Century


Book by Hugo Slim: “War is at a tipping point: we’re passing from the age of industrial warfare to a new era of computerised warfare, and a renewed risk of great-power conflict. Humanitarian response is also evolving fast—‘big aid’ demands more and more money, while aid workers try to digitalise, preparing to meet ever-broader needs in the long, big wars and climate crisis of the future. 

This book draws on the founding moment of the modern Red Cross movement—the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a moment of great change in the nature of conflict—to track the big shifts already underway, and still to come, in the wars and war aid of our century. Hugo Slim first surveys the current landscape: the tech, politics, law and strategy of warfare, and the long-term transformations ahead as conflict goes digital. He then explains how civilians both suffer and survive in today’s wars, and how their world is changing. Finally, he critiques today’s humanitarian system, citing the challenges of the 2020s.   

Inspired by Henri Dunant’s seminal humanitarian text, Solferino 21 alerts policymakers to the coming shakeup of the military and aid professions, illuminating key priorities for the new century. Humanitarians, he warns, must adapt or fail….(More)”.

Accelerating ethics, empathy, and equity in geographic information science



Paper by T. A. Nelson, F. Goodchild and D. J. Wright: “Science has traditionally been driven by curiosity and followed one goal: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Recently, ethics, empathy, and equity, which we term “the 3Es,” are emerging as new drivers of research and disrupting established practices. Drawing on our own field of GIScience (geographic information science), our goal is to use the geographic approach to accelerate the response to the 3Es by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience. We also aim to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Organized around the 3Es we discuss ethical issues arising from locational privacy and cartographic integrity, how our ability to build knowledge that will lead to empathy can be curbed by data that lack representativeness and by inadvertent inferential error, and how GIScientists can lead toward equity by supporting social justice efforts and democratizing access to spatial science and its tools. We conclude with a call to action and invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different science that responds to the 3Es and mobilizes for change by engaging in humility, broadening measures of excellences and success, diversifying our networks, and creating pathways to inclusive education. Science united around the 3Es is the right response to this unique moment where society and the planet are facing a vast array of challenges that require knowledge, truth, and action…(More)”

Democratic Progress in the 21st Century


Blog by the “Democratic Progress” Task force: “There appears to be distrust between citizens and governing officials at all levels, from local municipalities to regional and even national governments. The rapid transformation brought about by digital technologies, from the way we work to where we work, is instilling anxiety and uncertainty in the minds of our population. The fact is that the “business models” and way of doing business has shifted for all, whether you are in government, corporate, and even academia.

Despite their best efforts to innovate and embrace this transformation, the operational systems and processes in place are inefficient and ineffective in doing so, resulting in the digital divide. This divide just increases fear and uncertainty, leading to governments relying on populist views to garner votes, further polarizing rather than uniting nations. 

New democratic forms and institutions, in general, can help liberal democracies overcome the challenges highlighted. We will need to build more collaborations, partnerships, and dialogues with a range of stakeholders (SDG17 SDG16 SDG8) so that we may consider more viewpoints on a number of levels and embrace this transition collectively.

This is where the potential of digital ecosystems (communities), which are primarily represented by coworking spaces, creative hubs, and youth centres, are critical platforms for enabling this shift becomes important. The creation of an enabling environment in which diverse stakeholders (government, corporate, academia, and civil society) can collaborate to accelerate social tech entrepreneurs and digital technologies while holding open and inclusive dialogues about social challenges, cultural, and democratic experiences would be a key focus for this.

The Conference on the Future of Europe has taken a significant step in this direction; now we must bring together and elevate the voices of our citizens and digital ecosystem players to ensure that we create an inclusive and enabling environment that embraces citizens’ needs in the digital transformation and closes the digital divide. The goal of these platforms is to facilitate true contact between citizens and decision-makers, which will aid in the resolution of social issues and the restoration of confidence in our society…(More)”

‘Agile governance’ could redesign policy on data protection. Here’s why that matters


Article by Nicholas Davis: “Although technology regulation is evolving rapidly in today’s world, such regulation remains greatly fragmented across national and regional divides. Agile governance can potentially solve this fragmentation by promoting nimbler, more fluid, and more adaptive approaches to regulation.

Whether it is privacy, cyber security, cyber warfare, national security, or prohibited content, every hot-button issue in technology governance today seems to be of global concern, yet resides in the hands of nationally-focused lawmakers relying on outdated policies that continue to reinforce the fragmentation of technology regulation.

Take data protection, for example. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was first proposed in 2012 and came into effect in 2018, is essentially an international privacy law for data protection. Any organization that processes any personal data from any EU citizen is covered.

Beyond its extraterritorial impact, it has inspired similar efforts to update and improve data protection in other jurisdictions, such as in JapanChileEgypt, and the state of California in the United States…(More)”.