Paper by Sylvia E. Peacock: “The goal is to map out some policy problems attached to using a club good approach instead of a public good approach to manage our internet protocols, specifically the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Behavioral and information economics theory are used to evaluate the standardization process of our current generation HTTP/2 (2.0). The HTTP update under scrutiny is a recently released HTTP/2 version based on Google’s SPDY, which introduces several company-specific and best practice applications, side by side. A content analysis of email discussions extracted from a publicly accessible IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) email server shows how the club good approach of the working group leads to an underperformance in the outcomes of the standardization process. An important conclusion is that in some areas of the IETF, standardization activities may need to include public consultations, crowdsourced volunteers, or an official call for public participation to increase public oversight and more democratically manage our intangible public goods….(More)”.
Examining the Intersection of Behavioral Science and Advocacy
Introduction to Special Collection of the Behavioral Scientist by Cintia Hinojosa and Evan Nesterak: “Over the past year, everyone’s lives have been touched by issues that intersect science and advocacy—the pandemic, climate change, police violence, voting, protests, the list goes on.
These issues compel us, as a society and individuals, toward understanding. We collect new data, design experiments, test our theories. They also inspire us to examine our personal beliefs and values, our roles and responsibilities as individuals within society.
Perhaps no one feels these forces more than social and behavioral scientists. As members of fields dedicated to the study of social and behavioral phenomena, they are in the unique position of understanding these issues from a scientific perspective, while also navigating their inevitable personal impact. This dynamic brings up questions about the role of scientists in a changing world. To what extent should they engage in advocacy or activism on social and political issues? Should they be impartial investigators, active advocates, something in between?
t also raises other questions, like does taking a public stance on an issue affect scientific integrity? How should scientists interact with those setting policies? What happens when the lines between an evidence-based stance and a political position become blurred? What should scientists do when science itself becomes a partisan issue?
To learn more about how social and behavioral scientists are navigating this terrain, we put out a call inviting them to share their ideas, observations, personal reflections, and the questions they’re grappling with. We gave them 100-250 words to share what was on their mind. Not easy for such a complex and consequential topic.
The responses, collected and curated below, revealed a number of themes, which we’ve organized into two parts….(More)”.
Sandwich Strategy
Article by the Accountability Research Center: “The “sandwich strategy” describes an interactive process in which reformers in government encourage citizen action from below, driving virtuous circles of mutual empowerment between pro-accountability actors in both state and society.
The sandwich strategy relies on mutually-reinforcing interaction between pro-reform actors in both state and society, not just initiatives from one or the other arena. The hypothesis is that when reformers in government tangibly reduce the risks/costs of collective action, that process can bolster state-society pro-reform coalitions that collaborate for change. While this process makes intuitive sense, it can follow diverse pathways and encounter many roadblocks. The dynamics, strengths and limitations of sandwich strategies have not been documented and analyzed systematically. The figure below shows a possible pathway of convergence and conflict between actors for and against change in both state and society….(More)”.
Citizens ‘on mute’ in digital public service delivery
Blog by Sarah Giest at Data and Policy: “Various countries are digitalizing their welfare system in the larger context of austerity considerations and fraud detection goals, but these changes are increasingly under scrutiny. In short, digitalization of the welfare system means that with the help of mathematical models, data and/or the combination of different administrative datasets, algorithms issue a decision on, for example, an application for social benefits (Dencik and Kaun 2020).
Several examples exist where such systems have led to unfair treatment of welfare recipients. In Europe, the Dutch SyRI system has been banned by court, due to human rights violations in the profiling of welfare recipients, and the UK has found errors in the automated processes leading to financial hardship among citizens. In the United States and Canada, automated systems led to false underpayment or denial of benefits. A recent UN report (2019) even warns that countries are ‘stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia’. Further, studies raise alarm that this process of digitalization is done in a way that it not only creates excessive information asymmetry among government and citizens, but also disadvantages certain groups more than others.
A closer look at the Dutch Childcare Allowance case highlights this. In this example, low-income parents were regarded as fraudsters by the Tax Authorities if they had incorrectly filled out any documents. An automated and algorithm-based procedure then also singled out dual-nationality families. The victims lost their allowance without having been given any reasons. Even worse, benefits already received were reclaimed. This led to individual hardship, where financial troubles and the categorization as a fraudster by government led for citizens to a chain of events from unpaid healthcare insurance and the inability to visit a doctor to job loss, potential home loss and mental health concerns (Volkskrant 2020)….(More)”.
Digitalization as a common good. Contribution to an inclusive recovery
Essay by Julia Pomares, Andrés Ortega & María Belén Abdala: “…The pandemic has accelerated the urgency of a new social contract for this era at national, regional, and global levels, and such a pact clearly requires a digital dimension. The Spanish government, for example, proposes that by 2025, 100 megabits per second should be achieved for 100% of the population. A company like Telefónica, for its part, proposes a “Digital Deal to build back better our societies and economies” to achieve a “fair and inclusive digital transition,” both for Spain and Latin America.
The pandemic and the way of coping with and overcoming it has also emphasized and aggravated the significance of different types of digital and connectivity gaps and divides, between countries and regions of the world, between rural and urban areas, between social groups, including income and gender-related gaps, and between companies (large and small), which need to be addressed and bridged in these new social digital contracts. For the combination of digital divides and the pandemic amplify social disparities and inequalities in various spheres of life. Digitalization can contribute to enlarge those divides, but also to overcome them.
Common good
In 2016, the UN, through its Human Rights Council and General Assembly, qualified access to the internet as a basic fundamental human right, from which all human rights can also be defended. In 2021, the Italian Presidency of the G20 has set universal access to the internet as a goal of the group.
We use the concept of common good, in a non-legal but economic sense, following Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom 6 who refers to the nature of use and not of ownership. In line with Ostrom, digitalization and connectivity as a common good respond to three characteristics:
- It is non-rivalrous: Its consumption by anyone does not reduce the amount available to others (which in digitalization and connectivity is true to a certain extent, since it also relies on huge but limited storage and processing centers, and also on network capacity, both in the access and backbone network. It is the definition of service, where a distinction has to be made between the content of what is transmitted, and the medium used.)
- It is non-excludable: It is almost impossible to prevent anyone from consuming it.
- It is available, more or less, all over the world….(More)”.
How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid
Article by Ben Ramalingam, Benjamin Kumpf, Rahul Malhotra and Merrick Schaefer: “Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit, innovators around the world have developed thousands of novel solutions and practical approaches to this unprecedented global health challenge. About one-fifth of those innovations have come from low- and middle-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, according to our analysis of WHO data, and they work to address the needs of poor, marginalized, or excluded communities at the so-called bottom of the pyramid.
Over the past year we’ve been able to learn from and support some of those inspiring innovators. Their approaches are diverse in scope and scale and cover a vast range of pandemic response needs — from infection prevention and control to community engagement, contract tracing, social protection, business continuity, and more.
Here we share seven lessons from those innovators that offer promising insights not only for the ongoing Covid response but also for how we think about, manage, and enable innovation.
1. Ensure that your solutions are sensitive to social and cultural dynamics.
Successful innovations are relevant to the lived realities of the people they’re intended to help. Socially and culturally sensitive design approaches see greater uptake and use. This is true in both resource-constrained and resource-rich environments.
Take contact tracing in Kenya. In a context where more than half of all residents use public transportation every day, the provider of a ticketing app for Nairobi’s bus fleets adapted its software to collect real-time passenger data. The app has been used across one of the world’s most mobile populations to trace Covid-19 cases, identify future clusters, trigger automated warnings to exposed passengers, and monitor the maximum number of people that could safely be allowed in each vehicle….(More)”.
Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion
Book by Allison Schnable: “Amateurs without Borders examines the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. These small aid organizations, now ten thousand strong, sidestep the world of professionalized development aid by launching projects built around personal relationships and the skills of volunteers. This book draws on fieldwork in the United States and Africa, web data, and IRS records to offer the first large-scale systematic study of these groups. Amateurs without Borders investigates the aspirations and limits of personal compassion on a global scale….(More)”.
Privacy and Data Protection in Academia
Report by IAPP: “Today, demand for qualified privacy professionals is surging. Soon, societal, business and government needs for practitioners with expertise in the legal, technical and business underpinnings of data protection could far outstrip supply. To fill this gap, universities around the world are adding privacy curricula in their law, business and computer science schools. The IAPP’s Westin Research Center has catalogued these programs with the aim of promoting, catalyzing and supporting academia’s growing efforts to build an on-ramp to the privacy profession.
The information presented in our inaugural issue of “Privacy and Data Protection in Academia, A Global Guide to Curricula” represents the results of our publicly available survey. The programs included voluntarily completed the survey. The IAPP then organized the information provided and the designated contact at each institution verified the accuracy of the information presented.
This is not a comprehensive list of colleges and universities offering privacy and data protection related curricula. We encourage higher education institutions interested in being included to complete the survey as the IAPP will periodically publish updates….(More)”.
Social-Tech Entrepreneurs: Building Blocks of a New Social Economy
Article by Mario Calderini, Veronica Chiodo, Francesco Gerli & Giulio Pasi: “Is it possible to create a sustainable, human-centric, resilient economy that achieves diverse objectives—including growth, inclusion, and equity? Could industry provide prosperity beyond jobs and economic growth, by adopting societal well-being as a compass to inform the production of goods and services?
The policy brief “Industry 5.0,” recently released by the European Commission, seems to reply positively. It makes the case for conceiving economic growth as a means to inclusive prosperity. It is also an invitation to rethink the role of industry in society, and reprioritize policy targets and tools
The following reflection, based on insights gathered from empirical research, is a first attempt to elaborate on how we might achieve this rethinking, and aims to contribute to the social economy debate in Europe and beyond.
A New Entrepreneurial Genre
A new entrepreneurial genre forged by the values of social entrepreneurship and fueled by technological opportunities is emerging, and it is well-poised to mend the economic and social wounds inflicted by both COVID-19 and the unexpected consequences of the early knowledge economy—an economy built around ideas and intellectual capital, and driven by diffused creativity, technology, and innovation.
We believe this genre, which we call social-tech entrepreneurship, is important to inaugurating a new generation of place-based, innovation-driven development policies inspired by a more inclusive idea of growth—though under the condition that industrial and innovation policies include it in their frame of reference.
This is partly because social innovation has undergone a complex transformation in recent years. It has seen a hybridization of social and commercial objectives and, as a direct consequence, new forms of management that support organizational missions that blend the two. Today, a more recent trend, reinforced by the pandemic, might push this transformation further: the idea that technologies—particularly those commoditized in the digital and software domains—offer a unique opportunity to solve societal challenges at scale.
Social-tech entrepreneurship differs from the work of high-tech companies in that, as researchers Geoffrey Desa and Suresh Kotha explain, it specifically aims to “develop and deploy technology-driven solutions to address social needs.” A social-tech entrepreneur also leverages technology not just to make parts of their operations more efficient, but to prompt a disruptive change in the way a specific social problem is addressed—and in a way that safeguards economic sustainability. In other words, they attempt to satisfy a social need through technological innovation in a financially sustainable manner. …(More)”.
Help us identify how data can make food healthier for us and the environment
The GovLab: “To make food production, distribution, and consumption healthier for people, animals, and the environment, we need to redesign today’s food systems. Data and data science can help us develop sustainable solutions — but only if we manage to define those questions that matter.
Globally, we are witnessing the damage that unsustainable farming practices have caused on the environment. At the same time, climate change is making our food systems more fragile, while the global population continues to rapidly increase. To feed everyone, we need to become more sustainable in our approach to producing, consuming, and disposing of food.
Policymakers and stakeholders need to work together to reimagine food systems and collectively make them more resilient, healthy, and inclusive.
Data will be integral to understanding where failures and vulnerabilities exist and what methods are needed to rectify them. Yet, the insights generated from data are only as good as the questions they seek to answer. To become smarter about current and future food systems using data, we need to ask the right questions first.
That’s where The 100 Questions Initiative comes in. It starts from the premise that to leverage data in a responsible and effective manner, data initiatives should be driven by demand, not supply. Working with a global cohort of experts, The 100 Questions seeks to map the most pressing and potentially impactful questions that data and data science can answer.
Today the Barilla Foundation, the Center for European Policy Studies, and The Governance Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, are announcing the launch of the Food Systems Sustainability domain of The 100 Questions. We seek to identify the 10 most important questions that need to be answered to make food systems more sustainable…(More)”.