Report by Kuziemski, M., Mergel, I., Ulrich, P. and Martinez, A.: “To support governments in the EU embracing GovTech, this report provides an overview of the diversity of GovTech programmes and shares lessons learnt for setting up government-run GovTech programmes. While the focus of this report is on national GovTech programmes, its findings and conclusions can be applied to others levels of government as well. The term GovTech refers to the use of emerging technologies and digital products and services by government from start-ups and SMEs – instead of relying on large system integrators. This report presents an overview of how the existing GovTech programmes are set up in different EU member states and introduces practical case studies. This is followed by a discussion of the rationale of governments’ investment in GovTech and the barriers countries have encountered when engaging with the GovTech ecosystem. The report then distils important lessons learned for setting up government-run GovTech programmes. This report is aimed at anyone wanting to understand how governments are already supporting GovTech, and especially public sector managers who are looking for a starting point for establishing or improving a GovTech programme. It is part of two twin reports on GovTech developed by the JRC with support from the ISA² programme…(More)”.
A little less conversation, a little more action
Blog by Mariana Mazzucato, Rainer Kattel and Rowan Conway: “The risk with any new economic movement is that it remains closed within the confines of high level academic and conceptual debates — which sadly then forms part of the “blah blah blah” rather than moving policy practice forward. At IIPP, we never wanted to advocate for policy from an Ivory tower. From the day we started, we got our hands dirty and worked with policymakers in practice to co-design new tools and frameworks for inclusive, healthy and sustainable growth. While bold economics research is crucial, the work ‘on the ground’ with public organisations is equally critical in order to change public policy practice and so we have been exploring practical ways to translate this new economic thinking into policy change at the place or institutional level.
This has included a wide range of deep dives that ultimately led to the Mission-Oriented Horizon 2020 programme and policy guidance for the EU. This guidance then unlocked funding for research and innovation across members states, the MOIIS commission that drove challenge-oriented innovation and industrial strategy into UK government, and our work with the Scottish Government that helped to develop and launch a new mission-oriented national bank (Scottish National Investment Bank). Since then, we have worked on more deep dives with our growing MOIN network and other policy-making bodies — at a city level in Camden in London and Biscay region of Spain, in national and regional governments in British Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden — as well as with key public institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the BBC where we developed an evaluation framework to measure dynamic public value.
Practice-based theorising in action
These deep dives are not simply standard academic or think tank round tables — they are what we call “practice-based theorising”. This means taking insights from pioneering research, enabling co-creation and setting a route to implementation when it comes to policy, and by using participatory research, engagement and design processes to bridge the gap between theory and practice. It is this collaborative work with policymakers that makes IIPP different. Through practice-based theorising our researchers bring new theories to policymakers, not just offering a theoretical stance but engaging, experimenting and evolving these concepts in practice. Through deep dives we have learned a great deal from practice and these lessons then feed back into the theory itself, and ultimately into what we teach through our Masters in Public Administration.
Practice-based theorising takes artful engagement of cross-disciplinary actors in multiple sectors and places. Using dynamic research methods, participatory co-design workshops and rapid prototyping, we learn from the places we work in and translate IIPP’s key economic theories into testable policy innovations. We also teach our MPA students many of the participatory design processes we deploy via our MPA module called “Transformation by Design” which acts as the connecting tissue between the taught course and the placement semester within our policymaking network organisations….(More)”
NIH issues a seismic mandate: share data publicly
Max Kozlov at Nature: “In January 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications — and to eventually make their data publicly available.
Researchers who spoke to Nature largely applaud the open-science principles underlying the policy — and the global example it sets. But some have concerns about the logistical challenges that researchers and their institutions will face in complying with it. Namely, they worry that the policy might exacerbate existing inequities in the science-funding landscape and could be a burden for early-career scientists, who do the lion’s share of data collection and are already stretched thin.
Because the vast majority of laboratories and institutions don’t have data managers who organize and curate data, the policy — although well-intentioned — will probably put a heavy burden on trainees and early-career principal investigators, says Lynda Coughlan, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who has been leading a research team for fewer than two years and is worried about what the policy will mean for her.
Jorgenson says that, although the policy might require researchers to spend extra time organizing their data, it’s an essential part of conducting research, and the potential long-term boost in public trust for science will justify the extra effort…(More)”.
Russian disinformation frenzy seeds groundwork for Ukraine invasion
Zachary Basu and Sara Fischer at Axios: “Russia is testing its agility at weaponizing state media to win backing at home, in occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and with sympathizers abroad for a war of aggression.
The big picture: State media has pivoted from accusing the West of hysterical warnings about a non-existent invasion to pumping out minute-by-minute coverage of the tensions.
Zoom in: NewsGuard, a misinformation tech firm, identified three of the most common false narratives being propagated by Russian state media like RT, Sputnik News, and TASS:
- The West staged a coup in 2014 to overthrow the Ukrainian government
- Ukrainian politics is dominated by Nazi ideology
- Ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s Donbas region have been subjected to genocide
Between the lines: Social media platforms have been on high alert for Russian disinformation that would violate their policies but have less control over private messaging, where some propaganda efforts have moved to avoid detection.
- A Twitter spokesperson notes: “As we do around major global events, our safety and integrity teams are monitoring for potential risks associated with conflicts to protect the health of the platform.”
- YouTube’s threat analysis group and trust and safety teams have also been closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine. The platform’s policies ban misleading titles, thumbnails or descriptions that trick users into believing the content is something it is not….(More)”.
Privacy and/or Trade
Paper by Anupam Chander and Paul M. Schwartz: “International privacy and trade law developed together, but now are engaged in significant conflict. Current efforts to reconcile the two are likely to fail, and the result for globalization favors the largest international companies able to navigate the regulatory thicket. In a landmark finding, this Article shows that more than sixty countries outside the European Union are now evaluating whether foreign countries have privacy laws that are adequate to receive personal data. This core test for deciding on the permissibility of global data exchanges is currently applied in a nonuniform fashion with ominous results for the data flows that power trade today.
The promise of a global internet, with access for all, including companies from the Global South, is increasingly remote. This Article uncovers the forgotten and fateful history of the international regulation of privacy and trade that led to our current crisis and evaluates possible solutions to the current conflict. It proposes a Global Agreement on Privacy enforced within the trade order, but with external data privacy experts developing the treaty’s substantive norms….(More)”.
Measuring Data Demand Within the Public Sector
Discussion Paper for data.europa.eu: “What are the needs of open data re-users from public sector institutions in Europe? This question is critical to facilitate the publication of open data and support to re-users from EU institutions and public authorities in Member States in line with their needs for policymaking, service provision and organisational management. To what extent is this question asked in open data policymaking across Europe? And how?
This discussion paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of existing approaches and indicators in the European open data landscape to assess public institutions’ needs as data re-users. This overview serves as a basis to drive a discussion with public sector stakeholders on suitable methods and indicators to measure public institutions’ data demand to foster demand-driven data publication and support on data.europa.eu, the official portal for European data.
The undertaken literature review and the analysis of international measurement frameworks show feeble evidence of existing approaches and indicators developed by EU institutions and Member States to assess public institutions’ open data demand. The results of this discussion paper raise the following questions to be discussed with stakeholders to further develop demand-driven data publication and support to public sector re-users.
- Why is it important to measure public institutions’ data demand?
- What are suitable engagement activities for public sector re-users?
- What is needed to evolve demand measurement from an occasional to a structural
activity? - How can automated metrics be leveraged to measure the data demand by public
institutions? - To what extent can existing international indicators be re-used and complemented to
measure public institutions’ data demand? - How can data providers in EU institutions and Member States be supported in adopting a
demand-driven approach towards the publication of open data for public sector purposes?…(More)”.
Collaborative Democracy
eBook by PublicInput: “…Democracy is an emergent phenomenon that evolves and changes over time. Amid the constant and ever-present circumstances of change, collaborative democracy is the next phase in the evolution of democracy itself. When we zoom out over the historical trend line from anarchy to democracy, this evolution looks like this:
Collaborative democracy, as the next phase in the evolution of democracy, will be enabled not through more conflict, but rather through technological innovation…(More)”.
Ukraine prepares to remove data from Russia’s reach
Article by Eric Geller: “Ukraine’s government is preparing to wipe its computer servers and transfer its sensitive data out of Kyiv if Russian troops move to seize the capital, a senior Ukrainian cyber officialsaid Tuesday.
The worst-case contingency planning addresses an unintended consequence of a security measure the government took in 2014, when it began centralizing its computer systems after Russia and pro-Moscow separatists seized control of Crimea and the Donbas region.
That measure made it harder for Russian hackers to penetrate computers that store critical data and provide services such as pension benefits, or to use formerly government-run networks in the occupied territories to launch cyberattacks on Kyiv. But it’s also created a tempting target in the capital for Russia’s military, which has begun moving into separatist-controlled territories of eastern Ukraine.
Seizing Ukraine’s computer networks intact would give Moscow not only troves of classified documents but also detailed information about the population under its control. So Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration says it isn’t taking any chances.
“We have plans and we have scenarios,” Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, said in an interview from Kyiv. “We can move to new locations, we can save data and we can delete data and prevent capturing all this data,” even if Russian forces take control of the government’s offices….(More)”
We need to build a deliberative democracy
Article by Neera Chandhoke: “There was a time when elections in India were described as ‘the carnival of democracy’. Today, they are a theatre of war. And war has no rules. In the Mahabharata, law-giver Krishna advises deceit: recollect the killing of Karna, the tragic hero who epitomised courage, valour, honour, generosity and loyalty. Analogously, in the current elections to five Assemblies, every rule protecting human dignity has been violated. Wild allegations are thrown around, history is distorted, people are divided, the hijab becomes a core issue, poverty and unemployment are non-issues and politicians strike Faustian bargains. Political languages are turned upside down, and we no longer know who stands for what, or whether they stand for anything at all.
The unnecessary hype over elections is odd. In parliamentary democracies, elections come and go, politicians appear and disappear, and life goes on. In India, elections are a matter of life and death. Television channels carry no other news. Ministers of the Central government focus their attention on state and even panchayat elections, and pay scant attention to what they should be doing: governing the country, providing jobs, ensuring wellbeing, moderating political excesses.
Considering that every year some or the other state goes into the election mode, we are fated to live amidst this hysteria and this name-calling, this empty symbolism and even emptier rhetoric…(More)”.
End the State Monopoly on Facts
Essay by Adam J. White: “…This Covid-era dynamic has accelerated broader trends toward the consolidation of informational power among a few centralized authorities. And it has further deformed the loose set of institutions and norms that Jonathan Rauch, in a 2018 National Affairs article, identified as Western civilization’s “constitution of knowledge.” This is an arrangement in science, journalism, and the courts in which “any hypothesis can be floated” but “can join reality only insofar as it persuades people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism.” The more that Americans delegate the hard work of developing and distributing information to a small number of regulatory institutions, the less capable we all will be of correcting the system’s mistakes — and the more likely the system will be to make mistakes in the first place.
In a 1999 law review article, Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein warned of availability cascades, a process in which activists promote factual assertions and narratives that in a self-reinforcing dynamic become more plausible the more widely available they are, and can eventually overwhelm the public’s perception. The Covid-19 era has been marked by the opposite problem: unavailability cascades, in which media institutions and social media platforms swiftly erase disfavored narratives and dissenting contentions from the marketplace of ideas, making them seem implausible by their near unavailability. Such cascades occur because legacy media and social media platforms have come to rely overwhelmingly, even exclusively, on federal regulatory agencies’ factual assertions and the pronouncements of a small handful of other favored institutions, such as the World Health Organization, as the gold standard of facts. But availability and unavailability cascades, even when intended in good faith to prevent the spread of disinformation among the public, risk misinforming the very people they purport to inform. A more diverse and vibrant ecosystem of informational institutions would disincentivize the platforms’ and media’s reflexive, cascading reactions to dissenting views.
This second problem — the concentration of informational power — exacerbates the first one: how to counterbalance the executive branch’s power after an emergency. In order for Congress, the courts, and other governing institutions to reassert their own constitutional roles after the initial weeks and months of crisis, they (and the public) need credible sources of information outside the administration itself. An informational ecosystem not overweighted so heavily toward administrative agencies, one that benefits more from the independent contributions of experts in universities, think tanks, journalism, and other public and private institutions, would improve the quality of information that it produces. It would also be less susceptible to the reflexively partisan skepticism that has become endemic in the polarization of modern president-centric government…(More)”.