Enhancing Government Effectiveness and Transparency: The Fight Against Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
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Report by The World Bank: “… has undertaken a fresh assessment of challenges governments face in tackling corruption, what instruments tend to work and why, and how incremental progress is being achieved in specific country contexts. This flagship report shows positive examples of how countries are progressing in their fight against corruption. It is part of a series of initiatives being led by the Equitable Growth, Finance & Institutions (EFI) Vice Presidency to reaffirm the Bank’s commitment to anticorruption. The report follows the Anticorruption Initiatives completed last December. It also informs our pending work on the Bank’s Anticorruption Action Plan – on how we will be implementing anticorruption work going forward.

The report draws on the collective experts of staff across the World Bank to develop ways for enhancing the effectiveness of anti-corruption strategies in selected sectors and through targeted policy instruments. It covers issues, challenges and trends in five key thematic areas: Public Procurement; Public Infrastructure; State Owned Enterprises; Customs Administration; and Delivery of Services in selected sectors. The report also focuses on cross-cutting themes such as transparency, citizen engagement and Gov-tech; selected tools to build integrity; and the role and effectiveness of anticorruption agencies, tax and audit administrations, and justice systems. It features a country case study on Malaysia that traces the history of a country’s anti-corruption efforts over the last few decades…(More)”.

“European Digital Sovereignty”: Successfully Navigating Between the “Brussels Effect” and Europe’s Quest for Strategic Autonomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Theodore Christakis: “This Study discusses extensively the concept of “European Digital Sovereignty”. It presents the opportunities opened by the concept but also the risks and pitfalls. It provides a panorama of the major debates and developments related to digital/cyber issues in Europe. Here is the Executive Summary of the Study:

“The Times They Are A-Changin”. When Jean-Claude Juncker, then President of the European Commission, proclaimed in 2018 that “The Hour of European Sovereignty” had come, half of Europe criticized him, recalls Paul Timmers. Today hardly a day goes by in Europe, without a politician talking about “digital sovereignty”.

From a purely normative point of view, the concept makes little sense. It can only further accentuate the classic confusion surrounding the use of the term “sovereignty”, which is one of the most equivocal terms in legal theory and which has been criticized by a famous scholar for often being nothing more than “a catchword, a substitute for thinking and precision”. Still, from a political point of view, “European digital sovereignty” is an extremely powerful concept, broad and ambiguous enough to encompass very different things and to become a “projection surface for a wide variety of political demands”.

This study analyses in a detailed way the two understandings of the term: sovereignty as regulatory power; and, sovereignty as strategic autonomy and the ability to act in the digital sphere without being restricted to an undesired extent by external dependencies. While doing so, this study presents a panorama of the most recent le-gislative proposals (such as the Data Governance Act) and the most important debates on digital issues currently taking place at the European level: 5G deployment and cybersecurity concerns; international data transfers and foreign governments’ access to data after SchremsII; cloud computing; the digital services tax; competition law; content moderation; artificial intelligence regulation; and so many others….(More)”.

What we think we know and what we want to know: perspectives on trust in news in a changing world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: “…Trust in news has eroded worldwide. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, fewer than four in ten people (38%) across 40 markets say they typically trust most news (Newman et al. 2020). While trust has fallen by double digit margins in recent years in many places, including Brazil and the United Kingdom (Fletcher 2020), in other countries more stable overall trends conceal stark and growing partisan divides (see, for example, Jurkowitz et al. 2020).

Why is trust eroding, how does it play out across different contexts and different groups, what are the implications, and what might be done about it? These are the organising questions behind the Trust in News Project. This report is the first of many we will publish from the project over the next three years. Because trust is a relationship between trustors and trustees, we anticipate focusing primarily on audiences and the way they think about trust, but we begin the project by taking stock of how those who study journalism and those who practice it think about the subject. We want to be informed by their experiences and for our research to engage with how professional journalists and the news media approach trust so that it can be more useful in their work. Combining an extensive review of existing research on trust in news (including nearly 200 interdisciplinary publications) and original interviews on the subject (including 82 with journalists and other practitioners across several countries), we summarise some of what is known and unknown about trust, what is contributing to these trends, and how media organisations are seeking to address them in increasingly competitive digital environments.

Trust is not an abstract concern but part of the social foundations of journalism as a profession, news as an institution, and the media as a business. It is both important and dangerous, both for the public and for the news media – important for the public because being able to trust news helps people navigate and engage with the world, but dangerous because not everything is equally trustworthy; and important for the news media because the profession relies on it, but dangerous because it can be elusive and hard to regain when lost.

So if ‘trust is the new currency for success’, as the World Association of News Media has stated (Tjaardstra 2017), then how is it earned and what can this currency buy? For those who want to regain or retain it, it is not enough to do things that merely look good or feel good. Those things actually have to work or they risk making no difference, or worse, being counter-productive. Even when they do work, many of the choices involved in seeking to increase trust in accurate and reliable news may come with trade-offs. Our aim in the project is to gather actionable evidence to help journalists and news media make informed decisions about how best to address concerns around eroding trust….(More)”.

Data for Good: New Tools to Help Small Businesses and Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blogpost by Laura McGorman and Alex Pompe at Facebook: “Small businesses and people around the world are suffering devastating financial losses due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and public institutions need real time information to help. Today Facebook is launching new datasets and insights to help support economic recovery through our Data for Good program. 

Researchers estimate that over the next five years, the global economy could suffer over $80 trillion in losses due to COVID-19. Small businesses in particular are being hit hard — our Global State of Small Business Report found that over one in four had closed their doors in 2020. Governments around the world are looking to effectively distribute financial aid as well as accurately forecast when and how economies will recover. These four datasets — Business Activity Trends, Commuting Zones, Economic Insights from the Symptom Survey and the latest Future of Business Survey results — will help researchers, nonprofits and local officials identify which areas and businesses may need the most support.

Business Activity Trends

Many factors influence the pandemic’s impact on local economies around the world. However, real time information on business activity is scarce, leaving institutions seeking to provide economic aid with limited information on how to distribute it. To address these information gaps, we partnered with the University of Bristol to aggregate information from Facebook Business Pages to estimate the change in activity among local businesses around the world and how they respond and recover from crises over time.

UK graph showing average business activity
The above graph shows the drop in Business Page posting on Facebook across cities in the UK the day after the Prime Minister announced lockdown measures. Business Activity Trends can be used to determine how businesses and customers are reacting to local COVID-19 containment policies.

“Determining whether small and medium businesses are open is very important to assess the recovery after events like mandatory stay-at-home orders,” said Dr. Flavia De Luca, Senior Lecturer in Structural and Earthquake Engineering at the University of Bristol. “The traditional way of collecting this information, such as surveys and interviews, are usually costly, time consuming, and do not scale. By using real time information from Facebook, we hope to make it easier for public institutions to better respond to these events.”…(More)”.

Getting Everyone Vaccinated, With ‘Nudges’ and Charity Auctions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Thaler at the New York Times: “The good news is that safe and effective vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer appear to be on the way soon and that more are likely to follow.

The bad news is an usual combination: There won’t be enough vaccine on hand to meet initial demand, yet there is also a need to urge everyone to get shots.

I have some suggestions: An unusual type of charity auction, a bit of technology and a few nudges can help….

Economic theory offers a standard method for dealing with shortages. It is, basically: Let markets work. This would mean that those willing to pay the most would get the vaccine first.

Wisely, policymakers are not following this course. Nurses, other frontline workers and most nursing home residents could not win a bidding battle with billionaires. And, to be clear, they should not have to!

Yet there is a small but useful role that prices might play in determining who gets priority in the second round of vaccines, after the first 20 million people have gotten their shots.

At that point, perhaps sometime early this winter, suppose a small proportion of doses are sold in what would amount to a charity auction.

Who might be the winning bidders? Very wealthy individuals and high-tech companies are likely to account for some of the demand, along with businesses that employ high-profile talent like professional athletes and entertainers.

Just imagine how much the National Basketball Association, whose season will start around Christmas, would be willing to pay to ensure that none of its players or staff would be infected! The same goes for Hollywood studios and television production companies that are eager to go back to work.

The prospect of selling off precious vaccine to celebrity athletes and entertainers, hedge fund magnates and high-tech billionaires may strike you as utterly immoral, exacerbating the inequality this disease has already inflicted. But before you dismiss this idea as outrageous, let me make three points.

First, the very purpose of the charity auction would be to redistribute money from the rich to the poor….(More)”.

Feasibility study on the possible introduction of a mechanism for certifying artificial intelligence tools & services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by the Council of Europe: “The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) has adopted a feasibility study on the possible establishment of a certification mechanism for artificial intelligence tools and services. The study is based on the CEPEJ Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems and their environment, adopted in December 2018. The Council of Europe, if it decides to create such a mechanism, could be a pioneer in this field. After consultation with all member and observer states, this feasibility study will be followed by an action plan that the CEPEJ will prepare and send to the Committee of Ministers for examination in 2021….(Study)”.

Optimizing Digital Data Sharing in Agriculture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mercy Corps: “In our digital age, data is increasingly recognized as a powerful tool across all sectors, including agriculture. Historically, data on rural farmers was extremely limited and unreliable; the advent of new digital technologies has allowed more reliable data sources to emerge, from satellites to telecom to the Internet of Things. Private companies—including fintech and agricultural technology innovators—are increasingly utilizing these new data sources to learn more about farmers and to structure new services to meet their needs.

In order to make efficient use of this emerging data, many actors are exploring data-sharing partnerships that combine the power of multiple datasets to create greater impact for smallholder farmers. In a new Learning Brief looking at AgriFin engagements with 14 partners across four different countries, we found that 25% of engagements featured a strong data-sharing component. These engagements spanned various use cases, including credit scoring, targeted training, and open access to information.

Drawing on this broad experience, our research looks at what we’ve learned about data sharing to enhance service delivery for smallholder farmers. We have distilled these lessons into common barriers faced by data-sharing arrangements in order to provide practical guidance and tools for overcoming these barriers to the broader ecosystem of actors involved in optimizing data sharing for agriculture….(More) (Access the full length learning brief)”.

A Matter of Trust: Building Integrity into Data, Statistics and Records to Support the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Anne Thurston: ” The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiative has the potential to set the direction for a future world that works for everyone. Approved by 193 United Nations member countries in September 2016 to help guide global and national development policies through the year 2030, the seventeen goals build on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals, but also include new priority areas, such as climate change, economic inequality, innovation, sustainable consumption, peace, and justice. Assessed against commonly agreed targets and indicators, the goals should facilitate inter-governmental cooperation and the development of regional and even global development strategies. This book explores, through a series of case studies, the substantial challenges for assembling reliable data and statistics to address pressing development challenges, particularly in Africa. By highlighting the enormous potential value of creating and using high quality data, statistics, and records as an interconnected resource and describing how this can be achieved, the book will contribute to defining meaningful and realistic global and national development policies in the critical period to 2030….(More)”.

Wikipedia @ 20

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stories of an Incomplete Revolution edited by Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner (Open Access): “We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal.

The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it….(More)”

The Global Assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “A global citizens’ assembly to accelerate action to address the climate and ecological emergency and influence COP26 in ways that citizens see fit.

The global assembly will involve both:

  • a core group of people broken down by gender, race, age, economic background (and other criteria if appropriate) chosen by lottery, to be a true representation of the world population (1,000 people); and
  • distributed events that mirror the core group, and will be run by anyone anywhere e.g. communities, schools, organisations (100,000+ people).

The GA has three primary objectives:

  • Support a group of globally representative citizens make recommendations to COP26 and get an official response from the UN’s COP26 process (i.e. the core assembly)
  • Support a global conversation to amplify the core assembly process (i.e. distributed events)
  • Support large numbers of people and organisations globally to take action on the climate emergency.

Culminating in a ‘Moment for Change’ when the eyes of the world are on the citizens’ plans and a wave of enthusiasm is generated which makes those plans happen….(More)”.