Evidence Ecosystems and the Challenge of Humanising and Normalising Evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Geoff Mulgan: “It is reasonable to assume that the work of governments, businesses and civil society goes better if the people making decisions are well-informed, using reliable facts and strong evidence rather than only hunch and anecdote.  The term ‘evidence ecosystem’1  is a useful shorthand for the results of systematic attempts to make this easier, enabling decision makers, particularly in governments, to access the best available evidence, in easily digestible forms and when it’s needed.  

…This sounds simple.  But these ecosystems are as varied as ecosystems in nature.  How they work depends on many factors, including how political or technical the issues are; the presence or absence of confident, well-organised professions; the availability of good quality evidence; whether there is a political culture that values research; and much more.

In particular, the paper argues that the next generation of evidence ecosystems need a sharper understanding of how the supply of evidence meets demand, and the human dimension of evidence.  That means cultivating lasting relationships rather than relying too much on a linear flow of evidence from researchers to decision-makers; it means using conversation as much as prose reports to ensure evidence is understood and acted on; and it means making use of stories as well as dry analysis.  It depends, in other words, on recognising that the users of evidence are humans.

In terms of prescription the paper emphasises:

  • Sustainability/normalisation: the best approaches are embedded, part of the daily life of decision-making rather than depending on one-off projects and programmes.  This applies both to evidence and to data.  Yet embeddedness is the exception rather than the rule.
  • Multiplicity: multiple types of knowledge, and logics, are relevant to decisions, which is why people and institutions that understand these different logics are so vital.  
  • Credibility and relationships: the intermediaries who connect the supply and demand of knowledge need to be credible, with both depth of knowledge and an ability to interpret it for diverse audiences, and they need to be able to create and maintain relationships, which will usually be either place or topic based, and will take time to develop, with the communication of evidence often done best in conversation.
  • Stories: influencing decision-makers depends on indirect as well as direct communication, since the media in all their forms play a crucial role in validating evidence and evidence travels best with stories, vignettes and anecdotes.

In short, while evidence is founded on rigorous analysis, good data and robust methods, it also needs to be humanised – embedded in relationships, brought alive in conversations and vivid, human stories – and normalised, becoming part of everyday work…(More)”.

Mechanisms for Researcher Access to Online Platform Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Status Report by the EU/USA: “Academic and civil society research on prominent online platforms has become a crucial way to understand the information environment and its impact on our societies. Scholars across the globe have leveraged application programming interfaces (APIs) and web crawlers to collect public user-generated content and advertising content on online platforms to study societal issues ranging from technology-facilitated gender-based violence, to the impact of media on mental health for children and youth. Yet, a changing landscape of platforms’ data access mechanisms and policies has created uncertainty and difficulty for critical research projects.


The United States and the European Union have a shared commitment to advance data access for researchers, in line with the high-level principles on access to data from online platforms for researchers announced at the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) Ministerial Meeting in May 2023.1 Since the launch of the TTC, the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) has gone into effect, requiring providers of Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs) to provide increased transparency into their services. The DSA includes provisions on transparency reports, terms and conditions, and explanations for content moderation decisions. Among those, two provisions provide important access to publicly available content on platforms:


• DSA Article 40.12 requires providers of VLOPs/VLOSEs to provide academic and civil society researchers with data that is “publicly accessible in their online interface.”
• DSA Article 39 requires providers of VLOPs/VLOSEs to maintain a public repository of advertisements.

The announcements related to new researcher access mechanisms mark an important development and opportunity to better understand the information environment. This status report summarizes a subset of mechanisms that are available to European and/or United States researchers today, following, in part VLOPs and VLOSEs measures to comply with the DSA. The report aims at showcasing the existing access modalities and encouraging the use of these mechanisms to study the impact of online platform’s design and decisions on society. The list of mechanisms reviewed is included in the Appendix…(More)”

The Potential of Artificial Intelligence for the SDGs and Official Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Paris21: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on people’s lives is growing rapidly. AI is already leading to significant developments from healthcare to education, which can contribute to the efficient monitoring and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a call to action to address the world’s greatest challenges. AI is also raising concerns because, if not addressed carefully, its risks may outweigh its benefits. As a result, AI is garnering increasing attention from National Statistical Offices (NSOs) and the official statistics community as they are challenged to produce more, comprehensive, timely, and highquality data for decision-making with limited resources in a rapidly changing world of data and technologies and in light of complex and converging global issues from pandemics to climate change. This paper has been prepared as an input to the “Data and AI for Sustainable Development: Building a Smarter Future” Conference, organized in partnership with The Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Building on case studies that examine the use of AI by NSOs, the paper presents the benefits and risks of AI with a focus on NSO operations related to sustainable development. The objective is to spark discussions and to initiate a dialogue around how AI can be leveraged to inform decisions and take action to better monitor and achieve sustainable development, while mitigating its risks…(More)”.

Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Catherine D’Ignazio: “What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated. Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence.

Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world…(More)”.

Generative AI in Journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Nicholas Diakopoulos et al: “The introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022 captured the imagination of the public—and the news industry—with the potential of generative AI to upend how people create and consume media. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can create new content, such as text, images, audio, video, or other media, based on the data it has been trained on and according to written prompts provided by users. ChatGPT is the chat-based user interface that made the power and potential of generative AI salient to a wide audience, reaching 100 million users within two months of its launch.

Although similar technology had been around, by late 2022 it was suddenly working, spurring its integration into various products and presenting not only a host of opportunities for productivity and new experiences but also some serious concerns about accuracy, provenance and attribution of source information, and the increased potential for creating misinformation.

This report serves as a snapshot of how the news industry has grappled with the initial promises and challenges of generative AI towards the end of 2023. The sample of participants reflects how some of the more savvy and experienced members of the profession are reacting to the technology.

Based on participants’ responses, they found that generative AI is already changing work structure and organization, even as it triggers ethical concerns around use. Here are some key takeaways:

  • Applications in News Production. The most predominant current use cases for generative AI include various forms of textual content production, information gathering and sensemaking, multimedia content production, and business uses.
  • Changing Work Structure and Organization. There are a host of new roles emerging to grapple with the changes introduced by generative AI including for leadership, editorial, product, legal, and engineering positions.
  • Work Redesign. There is an unmet opportunity to design new interfaces to support journalistic work with generative AI, in particular to enable the human oversight needed for the efficient and confident checking and verification of outputs..(More)”

Methodological Pluralism in Practice: A systemic design approach for place-based sustainability transformations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Haley Fitzpatrick, Tobias Luthe, and Birger Sevaldson: “To leverage the fullest potential of systemic design research in real-world contexts, more diverse and reflexive approaches are necessary. Especially for addressing the place-based and unpredictable nature of sustainability transformations, scholars across disciplines caution that standard research strategies and methods often fall short. While systemic design promotes concepts such as holism, plurality, and emergence, more insight is necessary for translating these ideas into practices for engaging in complex, real-world applications. Reflexivity is crucial to understanding these implications, and systemic design practice will benefit from a deeper discourse on the relationships between researchers, contexts, and methods. In this study, we offer an illustrated example of applying a diverse and reflexive systems oriented design approach that engaged three mountain communities undergoing sustainability transformations. Based on a longitudinal, comparative research project, a combination of methods from systemic design, social science, education, and embodied practices was developed and prototyped across three mountain regions: Ostana, Italy; Hemsedal, Norway; and Mammoth Lakes, California. The selection of these regions was influenced by the researchers’ varying levels of previous engagement. Reflexivity was used to explore how place-based relationships influenced the researchers’ interactions with each community. Different modes of reflexivity were used to analyze the contextual, relational, and boundary-related factors that shaped how the framing, format, and communication of each method and practice adapted over time. We discuss these findings through visualizations and narrative examples to translate abstract concepts like emergence and plurality into actionable insights. This study contributes to systemic design research by showing how a reflexive approach of weaving across different places, methods, and worldviews supports the critical facilitation processes needed to apply and advance methodological plurality in practice…(More)”

How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Glyn Moody: “The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for almost no cost. That’s one of the driving forces behind the open access movement. But as Walled Culture has reported, resistance from the traditional publishing world has slowed the shift to open access, and undercut the benefits that could flow from it.

That in itself is bad news, but new research from Martin Paul Eve (available as open access) shows that the way the shift to digital has been managed by publishers brings with it a new problem. For all their flaws, analogue publications have the great virtue that they are durable: once a library has a copy, it is likely to be available for decades, if not centuries. Digital scholarly articles come with no such guarantee. The Internet is constantly in flux, with many publishers and sites closing down each year, often without notice. That’s a problem when sites holding archival copies of scholarly articles vanish, making it harder, perhaps impossible, to access important papers. Eve explored whether publishers were placing copies of the articles they published in key archives. Ideally, digital papers would be available in multiple archives to ensure resilience, but the reality is that very few publishers did this. Ars Technica has a good summary of Eve’s results:

When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all.

At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn’t appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.)..(More)”.

Digital Inclusion: International Policy and Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Simeon Yates and Elinor Carmi: “This collection presents policy and research that addresses digital inequalities, access, and skills, from multiple international perspectives.  With a special focus on the impact of the COVID-19, the collection is based on the 2021 Digital Inclusion, Policy and Research Conference, with chapters from both academia and civic organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed citizens’ relationship with digital technologies for the foreseeable future. Many people’s main channels of communication were transferred to digital services, platforms, and apps. Everything ‘went online’: our families, friends, partners, health, work, news, politics, culture, arts and protesting. Yet access to digital technologies remained highly unequal. This brought digital inclusion policy and research to the fore, highlighting to policymakers and the public the ‘hidden’ challenges and impacts of digital exclusion and inequalities.

The cutting-edge volume offers research findings and policycase studies that explore digital inclusion from the provision of basic access to digital, via education and digital literacy, and on to issues of gender and technology.  Case studies are drawn from varied sources including the UK, Australia, South America, and Eastern Europe, providing a valuable resource in the pursuit of social equity and justice…(More)”

Feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Paloma Caravantes and Emanuela Lombardo: “This article examines the potential of feminist democratic innovations in policy and institutional politics. It examines how feminist democratic innovations can be conceptualised and articulated in local institutions. Combining theories on democratic governance, feminist democracy, social movements, municipalism, decentralisation, gender equality policies and state feminism, it conceptualises feminist democratic innovations in policy and politics as innovations oriented at (a) transforming knowledge, (b) transforming policymaking and public funding, (c) transforming institutions, and (d) transforming actors’ coalitions. Through analysis of municipal plans and interviews with key actors, the article examines feminist democratic innovations in the policy and politics of Barcelona’s local government from 2015 to 2023. Emerging from the mobilisation of progressive social movements after the 2008 economic crisis, the findings uncover a laboratory of feminist municipal politics, following the election of a new government and self-proclaimed feminist mayor. Critical actors and an enabling political context play a pivotal role in the adoption of this feminist institutional politics. The article concludes by arguing that feminist institutional politics at the local level contribute to democratising policy and politics in innovative ways, in particular encouraging inclusive intersectionality and participatory discourses and practices…(More)”.and 

Regulatory experimentation: Moving ahead on the agile regulatory governance agenda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Policy Paper: “This policy paper aims to help governments develop regulatory experimentation constructively and appropriately as part of their implementation of the 2021 OECD Recommendation for Agile Regulatory Governance to Harness Innovation. Regulatory experimentation can help promote adaptive learning and innovative and better-informed regulatory policies and practices. This policy paper examines key concepts, definitions and constitutive elements of regulatory experimentation. It outlines the rationale for using regulatory experimentation, discusses enabling factors and governance requirements, and presents a set of forward-looking conclusions…(More)”.