The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud


Essay by Steven Gonzalez Monserrate: “While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive. Like a puffy cumulus drifting across a clear blue sky, refusing to maintain a solid shape or form, the Cloud of the digital is elusive, its inner workings largely mysterious to the wider public, an example of what MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner once called a “black box.” But just as the clouds above us, however formless or ethereal they may appear to be, are in fact made of matter, the Cloud of the digital is also relentlessly material.

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat….

To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage….(More)”.

Scientific Foundations of Digital Governance and Transformation


Book by Yannis Charalabidis, Leif Skiftenes, Flak Gabriela, and Viale Pereira: “This book provides the latest research advancements and findings for the scientific systematization of knowledge regarding digital governance and transformation, such as core concepts, foundational principles, theories, methodologies, architectures, assessment frameworks and future directions. It brings forward the ingredients of this new domain, proposing its needed formal and systematic tools, exploring its relation with neighbouring scientific domains and finally prescribing the next steps for laying the foundations of a new science.The book is structured into three main areas. The first section focuses on contributions towards the purpose, ingredients and structure of the scientific foundations of digital transformation in the public sector. The second looks at the identification and description of domain’s scientific problems with a view to stabilizing research products, assessment methods and tools in a reusable, extendable and sustainable manner. The third envisions a pathway for future research to tackle broader governance problems via the applications of information and communication technologies in combination with innovative approaches from neighbouring scientific domains.

Contributing to the analysis of the scientific perspectives of digital governance and digital transformation, this book will be an indispensable tool for students, researchers and practitioners interested in digital governance, digital transformation, information systems, as well as ICT industry experts and policymakers charged with the design, deployment and implementation of public sector information systems….(More)”.

The effects of AI on the working lives of women


Report by Clementine Collett, Gina Neff and Livia Gouvea: “Globally, studies show that women in the labor force are paid less, hold fewer senior positions and participate less in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. A 2019 UNESCO report found that women represent only 29% of science R&D positions globally and are already 25% less likely than men to know how to leverage digital technology for basic uses.

As the use and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to mature, its time to ask: What will tomorrows labor market look like for women? Are we effectively harnessing the power of AI to narrow gender equality gaps, or are we letting these gaps perpetuate, or even worse, widen?

This collaboration between UNESCO, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) examines the effects of the use of AI on the working lives of women. By closely following the major stages of the workforce lifecycle from job requirements, to hiring to career progression and upskilling within the workplace – this joint report is a thorough introduction to issues related gender and AI and hopes to foster important conversations about womens equality in the future of work…(More)”

Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn’t Forget Russia’s War on Ukraine


Karl Bode at VICE: “As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine’s online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict.

The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack—as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion—the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.

Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they’ve dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began.

All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet.

Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens…(More)”.

Can Ukraine’s Experiments in Local Democracy Survive the Invasion?


Joe Mathews at Zocolo: “As I write this, Russian troops reportedly are moving north through the Odesa oblast, or region, toward the river Kodyma, along which sits a town called Balta.

This is not new territory for Balta, which like much of Ukraine has been contested over centuries of wars. But in recent years, Balta has actually broken a lot of new ground, at least when it comes to the practice of citizen-centered democracy. In 2016, Balta adopted participatory budgeting, an innovative process—originated in Brazil—in which citizens rather than officials determine their local budget. Balta also gave its young people their own governing council and a decision-making process to influence local policies.

Democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Such self-government happens most often at the local level, which is why countries tend to get more democratic when they decentralize.

Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth….

In a politically divided Ukraine, this devolution of local power had support across the spectrum, for a couple reasons.

The first was positive and driven by economics. Putting more money and power in localities was seen as the best bet for addressing poverty and inequality, and developing Ukraine in a balanced way that would make it a better fit with the rest of Europe, which has strong local governments. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth.

The second reason, however, was defensive: the threat of separatism. In a country the size of Texas, greater local control was seen as the best way to placate localities and regions that might think of leaving—especially Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking Ukrainian oblasts where Russia would make incursions (and which Putin would declare “independent” as a pretext for his new invasion).

“The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor,” said Andriy Parubiy, a former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, in 2017. “The process of the formation of capable communities was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.”

Many of these newly empowered Ukrainian local governments have seized the opportunity, and not just for economic development. Municipalities have embraced political reforms—adopting ethics codes, making their records and decision-making transparent, establishing citizen-directed processes like participatory budgeting, and adding new guarantees for representation and participation of women, men, and underrepresented groups in local politics.

Just this past December, two Ukrainian cities, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia, finished first and third, respectively, in a global contest for innovation in government transparency. Mariupol, a city in the southeast reportedly under siege by the Russian military, has won international praise for its model of sharing governance power with local organizations….(More)”.

How climate data scarcity costs lives


Paula Dupraz-Dobias at New Humanitarian: “Localised data can help governments project climate forecasts, prepare for disasters as early as possible, and create long-term policies for adapting to climate change.

Wealthier countries tend to have better access to new technology that allows for more accurate predictions, such as networks of temperature, wind, and atmospheric pressure sensors.

But roughly half the world’s countries do not have multi-hazard early warning systems, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization. Some 60 percent lack basic water information services designed to gather and analyse data on surface, ground, and atmospheric water, which could help reduce flooding and better manage water. Some 43 percent do not communicate or interact adequately with other countries to share potentially life-saving information.

The black holes in weather data around the globe

Availability of surface land observations (Map)WMO/ECMWFUS reports weather observations every three hours, as opposed to the every hour required by World Meteorological Organization regulations. It says it will comply with these from 2023.

See WIGOS’s full interactive map

“Right now, we can analyse weather; in other words, what happens today, tomorrow, and the day after,” said Ena Jaimes Espinoza, a weather expert at CENEPRED, Peru’s national centre for disaster monitoring, prevention, and risk reduction. “For climate data, where you need years of data, there is still a dearth [of information].”

Without this information, she said, it’s difficult to establish accurate trends in different areas of the country – trends that could help forecasters better predict conditions in Tarucani, for example, or help policymakers to plan responses.

Inadequate funding, poor data-sharing between countries, and conflict, at least in some parts of the world, contribute to the data shortfalls. Climate experts warn that some of the world’s most disaster-vulnerable countries risk being left behind as this information gap widens…(More)”.

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending


Paper by Matias Giaccobasso, Brad C. Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Alejandro Zentner: “Do perceptions about how the government spends tax dollars affect the willingness to pay taxes? We designed a field experiment to test this hypothesis in a natural, high-stakes context and via revealed preferences. We measure perceptions about the share of property tax revenues that fund public schools and the share of property taxes that are redistributed to disadvantaged districts. We find that even though information on where tax dollars go is publicly available and easily accessible, taxpayers still have significant misperceptions. We use an information-provision experiment to induce exogenous shocks to these perceptions. Using administrative data on tax appeals, we measure the causal effect of perceived government spending on the willingness to pay taxes. We find that some perceptions about government spending have a significant effect on the probability of filing a tax appeal and in a manner that is consistent with the classical theory of benefit-based taxation. We discuss implications for researchers and policy makers…(More)”.

GovTech Practices in the EU


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, CanadaSouth 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)”.