Launching the Data Culture Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New project by MIT Center for Civic Media and the Engagement Lab@Emerson College: “Learning to work with data is like learning a new language — immersing yourself in the culture is the best way to do it. For some individuals, this means jumping into tools like Excel, Tableau, programming, or R Studio. But what does this mean for a group of people that work together? We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data?

About a year ago we (Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D’Ignazio) found that more and more users of our DataBasic.io suite of tools and activities were asking this question — online and in workshops. In response, with support from the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, we’ve worked together with 25 organizations to create the Data Culture Project. We’re happy to launch it publicly today! Visit datacultureproject.org to learn more.

The Data Culture Project is a hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other — from IT to marketing to programs to evaluation. These are not boring spreadsheet trainings! Try running our fun activities — one per month works as a brown bag lunch to focus people on a common learning goal. For example, “Sketch a Story” brings people together around basic concepts of quantitative text analysis and visual storytelling. “Asking Good Questions” introduces principles of exploratory data analysis in a fun environment. What’s more, you can use the sample data that we provide, or you can integrate your organization’s data as the topic of conversation and learning….(More)”.

Building Democratic Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman, K. Sabeel Rahman, & Elena Souris in Stanford Social Innovation Review: “How can civic engagement be effective in fostering an accountable, inclusive, and responsive American democracy? This question has gained new relevance under the Trump administration, where a sense of escalating democratic crises risks obscuring any nascent grassroots activism. Since the 2016 election, the twin problems of authoritarianism and insufficient political accountability have attracted much attention, as has the need to mobilize for near-future elections. These things are critical for the long-term health of American democracy, but at the same time, it’s not enough to focus solely on Washington or to rely on electoral campaigns to salvage our democracy.

Conventional civic-engagement activities such as canvassing, registering voters, signing petitions, and voting are largely transient experiences, offering little opportunity for civic participation once the election is over. And such tactics often do little to address the background conditions that make participation more difficult for marginalized communities.

To address these issues, civil society organization and local governments should build more long-term and durable democratic infrastructure, with the aim of empowering constituencies to participate in meaningful and concrete ways, overcoming division within our societies, and addressing a general distrust of government by enhancing accountability.

In our work with groups like the Center for Rural Strategies in Appalachia and the Chicago-based Inner-City Muslim Action Network, as well as with local government officials in Eau Claire, Wis. and Boston, Mass., we identify two areas where can help build a broader democratic infrastructure for the long haul. First, we need to support and radically expand efforts by local-level government officials to innovate more participatory and accountable forms of policymaking. And then we need to continue developing new methods of diverse, cross-constituency organizing that can help build more inclusive identities and narratives. Achieving this more-robust form of democracy will require that many different communities—including organizers and advocacy groups, policymakers and public officials, technologists, and funders—combine their efforts….(More)”.

Trustworthy data will transform the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill at the Financial Times: “The internet’s original sin was identified as early as 1993 in a New Yorker cartoon. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” the caption ran beneath an illustration of a pooch at a keyboard. That anonymity has brought some benefits. But it has also created myriad problems, injecting distrust into the digital world. If you do not know the provenance and integrity of information and data, how can you trust their veracity?

That has led to many of the scourges of our times, such as cyber crime, identity theft and fake news. In his Alan Turing Institute lecture in London last week, the American computer scientist Sandy Pentland outlined the massive gains that could result from trusted data.

The MIT professor argued that the explosion of such information would give us the capability to understand our world in far more detail than ever before. Most of what we know in the fields of sociology, psychology, political science and medicine is derived from tiny experiments in controlled environments. But the data revolution enables us to observe behaviour as it happens at mass scale in the real world. That feedback could provide invaluable evidence about which theories are most valid and which policies and products work best.

The promise is that we make soft social science harder and more predictive. That, in turn, could lead to better organisations, fairer government, and more effective monitoring of our progress towards achieving collective ambitions, such as the UN’s sustainable development goals. To take one small example, Mr Pentland illustrated the strong correlation between connectivity and wealth. By studying the telephone records of 100,000 users in south-east Asia, researchers have plotted social connectivity against income. The conclusion: “The more diverse your connections, the more money you have.” This is not necessarily a causal relationship but it does have a strong causal element, he suggested.

Similar studies of European cities have shown an almost total segregation between groups of different socio-economic status. That lack of connectivity has to be addressed if our politics is not to descend further into a meaningless dialogue.

Data give us a new way to measure progress.

For years, the Open Data movement has been working to create public data sets that can better inform decision making. This worldwide movement is prising open anonymised public data sets, such as transport records, so that they can be used by academics, entrepreneurs and civil society groups. However, much of the most valuable data is held by private entities, notably the consumer tech companies, telecoms operators, retailers and banks. “The big win would be to include private data as a public good,” Mr Pentland said….(More)”.

Digitalization, Collective Intelligence, and Entrepreneurship in the Care Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Erik Lakomaa in Managing Digital Transformation edited by Per Andersson, Staffan Movin, Magnus Mähring, Robin Teigland, and Karl Wennberg: “Parallel to the formal private or public (health) care organisations in Europe, a number of community-driven care projects have emerged. They may supplement the formal organisations by reducing costs or provide care to groups that, for some reason, do not have access to the formal sector. Drawing upon the Ostromian theory of commons and on previous theory and research on open software development (which share some of the characteristics of “open care”), I use historical cases of community-driven care to examine the prospects for such projects to help remedy the cost crisis in the care sector. I explore under which institutional settings “open care” is likely to emerge and when open care projects have potential to scale. It is found that open care is more likely to emerge and prosper when it builds upon existing organisational structures: where the participants do not need to create new hierarchies or governance structures, and where they share common values…(More)”.

Public Scrutiny of Automated Decisions: Early Lessons and Emerging Methods

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Report by Omidyar Network: “Automated decisions are increasingly part of everyday life, but how can the public scrutinize, understand, and govern them? To begin to explore this, Omidyar Network has, in partnership with Upturn, published Public Scrutiny of Automated Decisions: Early Lessons and Emerging Methods.

The report is based on an extensive review of computer and social science literature, a broad array of real-world attempts to study automated systems, and dozens of conversations with global digital rights advocates, regulators, technologists, and industry representatives. It maps out the landscape of public scrutiny of automated decision-making, both in terms of what civil society was or was not doing in this nascent sector and what laws and regulations were or were not in place to help regulate it.

Our aim in exploring this is three-fold:

1) We hope it will help civil society actors consider how much they have to gain in empowering the public to effectively scrutinize, understand, and help govern automated decisions;

2) We think it can start laying a policy framework for this governance, adding to the growing literature on the social and economic impact of such decisions; and

3) We’re optimistic that the report’s findings and analysis will inform other funders’ decisions in this important and growing field. (Read the full report here.)”

A primer on political bots: Part one

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stuart W. Shulman et al at Data Driven Journalism: “The rise of political bots brings into sharp focus the role of automated social media accounts in today’s democratic civil society. Events during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election revealed the scale of this issue for the first time to the majority of citizens and policy-makers. At the same time, the deployment of Russian-linked bots designed to promote pro-gun laws in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting demonstrates the state-sponsored, real-time readiness to shape, through information warfare, the dominant narratives on platforms such as Twitter. The regular news reports on these issues lead us to conclude that the foundations of democracy have become threatened by the presence of aggressive and socially disruptive bots, which aim to manipulate online political discourse.

While there is clarity on the various functions that bot accounts can be scripted to perform, as described below, the task of accurately defining this phenomenon and identifying bot accounts remains a challenge. At Texifter, we have endeavoured to bring nuance to this issue through a research project which explores the presence of automated accounts on Twitter. Initially, this project concerned itself with an attempt to identify bots which participated in online conversations around the prevailing cryptocurrency phenomenon. This article is the first in a series of three blog posts produced by the researchers at Texifter that outlines the contemporary phenomenon of Twitter bots….

Bots in their current iteration have a relatively short, albeit rapidly evolving history. Initially constructed with non-malicious intentions, it wasn’t until the late 1990s with the advent of Web 2.0 when bots began to develop a more negative reputation. Although bots have been used maliciously in denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, spam emails, and mass identity theft, their purpose is not explicitly to incite mayhem.

Before the most recent political events, bots existed in chat rooms, operated as automated customer service agents on websites, and were a mainstay on dating websites. This familiar form of the bot is known to the majority of the general population as a “chatbot” – for instance, CleverBot was and still is a popular platform to talk to an “AI”. Another prominent example was Microsoft’s failed Twitter Chatbot Tay which made headlines in 2016 when “her” vocabulary and conversation functions were manipulated by Twitter users until “she” espoused neo-nazi views when “she” was subsequently deleted.

Image: XKCD Comic #632.

A Twitter bot is an account controlled by an algorithm or script, which is typically hosted on a cloud platform such as Heroku. They are typically, though not exclusively, scripted to conduct repetitive tasks.  For example, there are bots that retweet content containing particular keywords, reply to new followers, and direct messages to new followers; although they can be used for more complex tasks such as participating in online conversations. Bot accounts make up between 9 and 15% of all active accounts on Twitter; however, it is predicted that they account for a much greater percentage of total Twitter traffic. Twitter bots are generally not created with malicious intent; they are frequently used for online chatting or for raising the professional profile of a corporation – but their ability to pervade our online experience and shape political discourse warrants heightened scrutiny….(More)”.

Do Academic Journals Favor Researchers from Their Own Institutions?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yaniv Reingewertz and Carmela Lutmar at Harvard Business Review: “Are academic journals impartial? While many would suggest that academic journals work for the advancement of knowledge and science, we show this is not always the case. In a recent study, we find that two international relations (IR) journals favor articles written by authors who share the journal’s institutional affiliation. We term this phenomenon “academic in-group bias.”

In-group bias is a well-known phenomenon that is widely documented in the psychological literature. People tend to favor their group, whether it is their close family, their hometown, their ethnic group, or any other group affiliation. Before our study, the evidence regarding academic in-group bias was scarce, with only one studyfinding academic in-group bias in law journals. Studies from economics found mixedresults. Our paper provides evidence of academic in-group bias in IR journals, showing that this phenomenon is not specific to law. We also provide tentative evidence which could potentially resolve the conflict in economics, suggesting that these journals might also exhibit in-group bias. In short, we show that academic in-group bias is general in nature, even if not necessarily large in scope….(More)”.

How Blockchain can benefit migration programmes and migrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Solon Ardittis at the Migration Data Portal: “According to a recent report published by CB Insights, there are today at least 36 major industries that are likely to benefit from the use of Blockchain technology, ranging from voting procedures, critical infrastructure security, education and healthcare, to car leasing, forecasting, real estate, energy management, government and public records, wills and inheritance, corporate governance and crowdfunding.

In the international aid sector, a number of experiments are currently being conducted to distribute aid funding through the use of Blockchain and thus to improve the tracing of the ways in which aid is disbursed. Among several other examples, the Start Network, which consists of 42 aid agencies across five continents, ranging from large international organizations to national NGOs, has launched a Blockchain-based project that enables the organization both to speed up the distribution of aid funding and to facilitate the tracing of every single payment, from the original donor to each individual assisted.

As Katherine Purvis of The Guardian noted, “Blockchain enthusiasts are hopeful it could be the next big development disruptor. In providing a transparent, instantaneous and indisputable record of transactions, its potential to remove corruption and provide transparency and accountability is one area of intrigue.”

In the field of international migration and refugee affairs, however, Blockchain technology is still in its infancy.

One of the few notable examples is the launch by the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in May 2017 of a project in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan which, through the use of Blockchain technology, enables the creation of virtual accounts for refugees and the uploading of monthly entitlements that can be spent in the camp’s supermarket through the use of an authorization code. Reportedly, the programme has contributed to a reduction by 98% of the bank costs entailed by the use of a financial service provider.

This is a noteworthy achievement considering that organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs and that an estimated 30% of all development funds do not reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement.

At least six other UN agencies including the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Women, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Group (UNDG), are now considering Blockchain applications that could help support international assistance, particularly supply chain management tools, self-auditing of payments, identity management and data storage.

The potential of Blockchain technology in the field of migration and asylum affairs should therefore be fully explored.

At the European Union (EU) level, while a Blockchain task force has been established by the European Parliament to assess the ways in which the technology could be used to provide digital identities to refugees, and while the European Commission has recently launched a call for project proposals to examine the potential of Blockchain in a range of sectors, little focus has been placed so far on EU assistance in the field of migration and asylum, both within the EU and in third countries with which the EU has negotiated migration partnership agreements.

This is despite the fact that the use of Blockchain in a number of major programme interventions in the field of migration and asylum could help improve not only their cost-efficiency but also, at least as importantly, their degree of transparency and accountability. This at a time when media and civil society organizations exercise increased scrutiny over the quality and ethical standards of such interventions.

In Europe, for example, Blockchain could help administer the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), both in terms of transferring funds from the European Commission to the eligible NGOs in the Member States and in terms of project managers then reporting on spending. This would help alleviate many of the recurrent challenges faced by NGOs in managing funds in line with stringent EU regulations.

As crucially, Blockchain would have the potential to increase transparency and accountability in the channeling and spending of EU funds in third countries, particularly under the Partnership Framework and other recent schemes to prevent irregular migration to Europe.

A case in point is the administration of EU aid in response to the refugee emergency in Greece where, reportedly, there continues to be insufficient oversight of the full range of commitments and outcomes of large EU-funded investments, particularly in the housing sector. Another example is the set of recent programme interventions in Libya, where a growing number of incidents of human rights abuses and financial mismanagement are being brought to light….(More)”.

Data Collaboratives can transform the way civil society organisations find solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst at Disrupt & Innovate: “The need for innovation is clear: The twenty-first century is shaping up to be one of the most challenging in recent history. From climate change to income inequality to geopolitical upheaval and terrorism: the difficulties confronting International Civil Society Organisations (ICSOs) are unprecedented not only in their variety but also in their complexity. At the same time, today’s practices and tools used by ICSOs seem stale and outdated. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but new methods for arriving at solutions.

Data will likely become more central to meeting these challenges. We live in a quantified era. It is estimated that 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the last two years. We know that this data can help us understand the world in new ways and help us meet the challenges mentioned above. However, we need new data collaboration methods to help us extract the insights from that data.

UNTAPPED DATA POTENTIAL

For all of data’s potential to address public challenges, the truth remains that most data generated today is in fact collected by the private sector – including ICSOs who are often collecting a vast amount of data – such as, for instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which generates various (often sensitive) data related to humanitarian activities. This data, typically ensconced in tightly held databases toward maintaining competitive advantage or protecting from harmful intrusion, contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for innovation in how we solve public problems. But because of access restrictions and often limited data science capacity, its vast potential often goes untapped.

DATA COLLABORATIVES AS A SOLUTION

Data Collaboratives offer a way around this limitation. They represent an emerging public-private partnership model, in which participants from different areas — including the private sector, government, and civil society — come together to exchange data and pool analytical expertise.

While still an emerging practice, examples of such partnerships now exist around the world, across sectors and public policy domains. Importantly several ICSOs have started to collaborate with others around their own data and that of the private and public sector. For example:

  • Several civil society organisations, academics, and donor agencies are partnering in the Health Data Collaborative to improve the global data infrastructure necessary to make smarter global and local health decisions and to track progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • Additionally, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) built Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a platform for sharing humanitarian from and for ICSOs – including Caritas, InterAction and others – donor agencies, national and international bodies, and other humanitarian organisations.

These are a few examples of Data Collaboratives that ICSOs are participating in. Yet, the potential for collaboration goes beyond these examples. Likewise, so do the concerns regarding data protection and privacy….(More)”.

Spanning Today’s Chasms: Seven Steps to Building Trusted Data Intermediaries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Shulman at the Mellon Foundation: “In 2001, when hundreds of individual colleges and universities were scrambling to scan their slide libraries, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation created a new organization, Artstor, to assemble a massive library of digital images from disparate sources to support teaching and research in the arts and humanities.

Rather than encouraging—or paying for—each school to scan its own slide of the Mona Lisa, the Mellon Foundation created an intermediary organization that would balance the interests of those who created, photographed and cared for art works, such as artists and museums, and those who wanted to use such images for the admirable calling of teaching and studying history and culture.  This organization would reach across the gap that separated these two communities and would respect and balance the interests of both sides, while helping each accomplish their missions.  At the same time that Napster was using technology to facilitate the un-balanced transfer of digital content from creators to users, the Mellon Foundation set up a new institution aimed at respecting the interests of one side of the market and supporting the socially desirable work of the other.

As the internet has enabled the sharing of data across the world, new intermediaries have emerged as entire platforms. A networked world needs such bridges—think Etsy or Ebay sitting between sellers and buyers, or Facebook sitting between advertisers and users. While intermediaries that match sellers and buyers of things provide a marketplace to bridge from one side or the other, aggregators of data work in admittedly more shadowy territories.

In the many realms that market forces won’t support, however, a great deal of public good can be done by aggregating and managing access to datasets that might otherwise continue to live in isolation. Whether due to institutional sociology that favors local solutions, the technical challenges associated with merging heterogeneous databases built with different data models, intellectual property limitations, or privacy concerns, datasets are built and maintained by independent groups that—if networked—could be used to further each other’s work.

Think of those studying coral reefs, or those studying labor practices in developing markets, or child welfare offices seeking to call upon court records in different states, or medical researchers working in different sub-disciplines but on essentially the same disease.  What intermediary invests in joining these datasets?  Many people assume that computers can simply “talk” to each other and share data intuitively, but without targeted investment in connecting them, they can’t.  Unlike modern databases that are now often designed with the cloud in mind, decades of locally created databases churn away in isolation, at great opportunity cost to us all.

Art history research is an unusually vivid example. Most people can understand that if you want to study Caravaggio, you don’t want to hunt and peck across hundreds of museums, books, photo archives, libraries, churches, and private collections.  You want all that content in one place—exactly what Mellon sought to achieve by creating Artstor.

What did we learn in creating Artstor that might be distilled as lessons for others taking on an aggregation project to serve the public good?….(More)”.