Book by Joshua A. T. Fairfield: “In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology – a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate….(More)”.
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
Yoshi Sodeoka in The Atlantic: “…With the wholesale transfer of so much entertainment, social interaction, education, commerce, and politics from the real world to the virtual world—a process recently accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic—many Americans have come to live in a nightmarish inversion of the Tocquevillian dream, a new sort of wilderness. Many modern Americans now seek camaraderie online, in a world defined not by friendship but by anomie and alienation. Instead of participating in civic organizations that give them a sense of community as well as practical experience in tolerance and consensus-building, Americans join internet mobs, in which they are submerged in the logic of the crowd, clicking Like or Share and then moving on. Instead of entering a real-life public square, they drift anonymously into digital spaces where they rarely meet opponents; when they do, it is only to vilify them.
Conversation in this new American public sphere is governed not by established customs and traditions in service of democracy but by rules set by a few for-profit companies in service of their needs and revenues. Instead of the procedural regulations that guide a real-life town meeting, conversation is ruled by algorithms that are designed to capture attention, harvest data, and sell advertising. The voices of the angriest, most emotional, most divisive—and often the most duplicitous—participants are amplified. Reasonable, rational, and nuanced voices are much harder to hear; radicalization spreads quickly. Americans feel powerless because they are.
In this new wilderness, democracy is becoming impossible. If one half of the country can’t hear the other, then Americans can no longer have shared institutions, apolitical courts, a professional civil service, or a bipartisan foreign policy. We can’t compromise. We can’t make collective decisions—we can’t even agree on what we’re deciding. No wonder millions of Americans refuse to accept the results of the most recent presidential election, despite the verdicts of state electoral committees, elected Republican officials, courts, and Congress. We no longer are the America Tocqueville admired, but have become the enfeebled democracy he feared, a place where each person,…(More)”.
Measuring Commuting and Economic Activity Inside Cities with Cell Phone Records
Paper by Gabriel Kreindler and Yuhei Miyauchi: “We show how to use commuting flows to infer the spatial distribution of income within a city. A simple workplace choice model predicts a gravity equation for commuting flows whose destination fixed effects correspond to wages. We implement this method with cell phone transaction data from Dhaka and Colombo. Model-predicted income predicts separate income data, at the workplace and residential level, and by skill group. Unlike machine learning approaches, our method does not require training data, yet achieves comparable predictive power. We show that hartals (transportation strikes) in Dhaka reduce commuting more for high model-predicted wage and high-skill commuters….(More)”.
Smart weather app helps Kenya’s herders brace for drought
Thomson Reuters Foundation: “Sitting under a low tree to escape the blazing Kenyan sun, Kaltuma Milkalkona and two young men hunch intently over the older woman’s smartphone – but they are not transfixed by the latest sports scores or a trending internet meme.
The men instead are looking at a weather alert for their village in the country’s north, sent through an app that uses weather station data to help pastoralists prepare for drought.
The myAnga app on Milkalkona’s phone showed that Merille would continue facing dry weather and that “pasture conditions (were) expected to be very poor with no grass and browse availability.”
One of the young men said he would warn his older brother, who had taken the family’s livestock to another area where there was water and pasture, not to come home yet.
Milkalkona, 42, who lives and sells clothing in the neighbouring town of Laisamis, said she often shared data from her phone with others who did not have smartphones.
“When I get the weather alerts, I usually show the people who are close to me,” she said, as well as calling others in more distant villages.
Extreme and erratic weather linked to a warming climate can be devastating for Kenya’s pastoralists, with prolonged droughts making it difficult to find enough pasture for their animals.
But armed with up-to-date weather information and advice, herders can plan ahead to ensure their livestock make it through the region’s frequent dry spells, said Frankline Agolla, co-founder of Amfratech, a Nairobi-based social enterprise that developed the myAnga app.
The app – its name means “my weather” – goes further than the weather reports anyone can get from the meteorological department by interpreting them and making recommendations to herders on the best way to protect their livelihoods.
“If there is an imminent drought, we advise them to sell their livestock early to reduce their losses,” said Agolla in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation….
The app is part of Amfratech’s Climate Livestock and Markets (CLIMARK) project, which the company aims to roll out to more than 300,000 pastoralists in Kenya over the next five years, with funding and other help from partners including the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation and the Kenya Livestock Marketing Council.
The app sends out weekly weather information in English, Swahili and other languages used in northern Kenya, and users can see forecasts for areas as small as a single village, Agolla said….(More)”.
Improving Governance by Asking Questions that Matter
Fiona Cece, Nicola Nixon and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Government Partnership:
“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions” – Naguib Mahfouz
Data is at the heart of every dimension of the COVID-19 challenge. It’s been vital in the monitoring of daily rates, track and trace technologies, doctors appointments, and the vaccine roll-out. Yet our daily diet of brightly-coloured graphed global trends masks the maelstrom of inaccuracies, gaps and guesswork that underlies the ramshackle numbers on which they are so often based. Governments are unable to address their citizens’ needs in an informed way when the data itself is partial, incomplete or simply biased. And citizens’ in turn are unable to contribute to collective decision-making that impacts their lives when the channels for doing so in meaningful ways are largely non-existent.
There is an irony here. We live in an era in which there are an unprecedented number of methods for collecting data. Even in the poorest countries with weak or largely non-existent government systems, anyone with a mobile phone or who accesses the internet is using and producing data. Yet a chasm exists between the potential of data to contribute to better governance and what it is actually collected and used for.
Even where data accuracy can be relied upon, the practice of effective, efficient and equitable data governance requires much more than its collection and dissemination.
And although governments will play a vital role, combatting the pandemic and its associated socio-economic challenges will require the combined efforts of non-government organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations (CSOs), citizens’ associations, healthcare companies and providers, universities, think tanks and so many others. Collaboration is key.
There is a need to collectively move beyond solution-driven thinking. One initiative working toward this end is The 100 Questions Initiative by The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In partnership with the The Asia Foundation, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Indonesia, and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development, the Initiative is launching a Governance domain. Collectively we will draw on the expertise of over 100 “bilinguals”– experts in both data science and governance — to identify the 10 most-pressing questions on a variety of issues that can be addressed using data and data science. The cohort for this domain is multi-sectoral and geographically varied, and will provide diverse input on these governance challenges.
Once the questions have been identified and prioritized, and we have engaged with a broader public through a voting campaign, the ultimate goal is to establish one or more data collaboratives that can generate answers to the questions at hand. Data collaboratives are an emerging structure that allow pooling of data and expertise across sectors, often resulting in new insights and public sector innovations. Data collaboratives are fundamentally about sharing and cross-sectoral engagement. They have been deployed across countries and sectoral contexts, and their relative success shows that in the twenty-first century no single actor can solve vexing public problems. The route to success lies through broad-based collaboration.
Multi-sectoral and geographically diverse insight is needed to address the governance challenges we are living through, especially during the time of COVIDd-19. The pandemic has exposed weak governance practices globally, and collectively we need to craft a better response. As an open governance and data-for-development community, we have not yet leveraged the best insight available to inform an effective, evidence-based response to the pandemic. It is time we leverage more data and technology to enable citizen-centrism in our service delivery and decision-making processes, to contribute to overcoming the pandemic and to building our governance systems, institutions and structures back better. Together with over 130 ‘Bilinguals’ – experts in both governance and data – we have set about identifying the priority questions that data can answer to improve governance. Join us on this journey. Stay tuned for our public voting campaign in a couple of months’ time when we will crowdsource your views on which of the questions they pose really matter….(More)”.
How governments use evidence to make transport policy
Report by Alistair Baldwin, and Kelly Shuttleworth: “The government’s ambitious transport plans will falter unless policy makers – ministers, civil servants and other public officials – improve the way they identify and use evidence to inform their decisions.
This report compares the use of evidence in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and New Zealand, and finds that England is an outlier in not having a coordinated transport strategy. This damages both scrutiny and coordination of transport policy.
The government has plans to reform bus services, support cycling, review rail franchising, and invest more than £60 billion in transport projects over the next five years. But these plans are not integrated. The Department for Transport should develop a new strategy integrating different modes of transport, rather than mode by mode, to improve political understanding of trade-offs and scrutiny of policy decisions.
The DfT is a well-resourced department, with significant expertise, responsibilities and a wide array of analysts. But its reliance on economic evidence means other forms of evidence can appear neglected in transport decision making – including social research, evaluation or engineering. Decision makers are often too attached to the importance of the Benefit-Cost Ratio at the expense of other forms of evidence.
The government needs to improve its attitude to evaluation of past projects. There are successes – like the evaluation of the Cycle City Ambition Fund – but they are outnumbered by failures – like the evaluation of projects in the Local Growth Fund. For example, good practice from Highways England should be common across the transport sector, helped by providing dedicated funding to local authorities to properly evaluate projects….(More)”.
Theories of Choice: The Social Science and the Law of Decision Making
Book by Stefan Grundmann and Philipp Hacker: “Choice is a key concept of our time. It is a foundational mechanism for every legal order in societies that are, politically, constituted as democracies and, economically, built on the market mechanism. Thus, choice can be understood as an atomic structure that grounds core societal processes. In recent years, however, the debate over the right way to theorise choice—for example, as a rational or a behavioural type of decision making—has intensified. This collection therefore provides an in-depth discussion of the promises and perils of specific types of theories of choice. It shows how the selection of a specific theory of choice can make a difference for concrete legal questions, in particularly in the regulation of the digital economy or in choosing between market, firm, or network.
In its first part, the volume provides an accessible overview of the current debates about rational versus behavioural approaches to theories of choice. The remainder of the book structures the vast landscape of theories of choice along three main types: individual, collective, and organisational decision making. As theories of choice proliferate and become ever more sophisticated, however, the process of choosing an adequate theory of choice becomes increasingly intricate, too. This volume addresses this selection problem for the various legal arenas in which individual, organisational, and collective decisions matter. By drawing on economic, technological, political, and legal points of view, the volume shows which theories of choice are at the disposal of the legally relevant decision maker, and how they can be implemented for the solution of concrete legal problems….(More)“
“Civic tech” and “digital democracy” to “open up” democracy?
Clément Mabi in Réseaux: “This paper posits that digital participatory democracy can be seen as a new anchor of participatory governmentality. Conveniently called “digital democracy”, its implementation contributes to the spread of a particular conception of government through participation, influenced by digital literacy and its principles of self-organization and interactivity. By studying the deployment and trajectory of the so-called “civic tech” movement in France, the aim is to show that the project of democratic openness embodied by the movement has gradually narrowed down to a logic of services, for the purposes of institutions. The “great national debate” triggered a shift in this trajectory. While part of the community complied with the government’s request to facilitate participation, the debate also gave unprecedented visibility to critics who contributed to the emergence of a different view of the role of digital technologies in democracy….(More)“.
Resilience in the Digital Age
Book edited by Fred S. Roberts and Igor A. Sheremet: “The growth of a global digital economy has enabled rapid communication, instantaneous movement of funds, and availability of vast amounts of information. With this come challenges such as the vulnerability of digitalized sociotechnological systems (STSs) to destructive events (earthquakes, disease events, terrorist attacks). Similar issues arise for disruptions to complex linked natural and social systems (from changing climates, evolving urban environments, etc.). This book explores new approaches to the resilience of sociotechnological and natural-social systems in a digital world of big data, extraordinary computing capacity, and rapidly developing methods of Artificial Intelligence….
The world-wide COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the vulnerability of our healthcare systems, supply chains, and social infrastructure, and confronts our notions of what makes a system resilient. We have found that use of AI tools can lead to problems when unexpected events occur. On the other hand, the vast amounts of data available from sensors, satellite images, social media, etc. can also be used to make modern systems more resilient.
Papers in the book explore disruptions of complex networks and algorithms that minimize departure from a previous state after a disruption; introduce a multigrammatical framework for the technological and resource bases of today’s large-scale industrial systems and the transformations resulting from disruptive events; and explain how robotics can enhance pre-emptive measures or post-disaster responses to increase resiliency. Other papers explore current directions in data processing and handling and principles of FAIRness in data; how the availability of large amounts of data can aid in the development of resilient STSs and challenges to overcome in doing so. The book also addresses interactions between humans and built environments, focusing on how AI can inform today’s smart and connected buildings and make them resilient, and how AI tools can increase resilience to misinformation and its dissemination….(More)”.
New approach to data is a great opportunity for the UK post-Brexit
Oliver Dowden at the Financial Times: “As you read this, thousands of people are receiving a message that will change their lives: a simple email or text, inviting them to book their Covid jab. But what has powered the UK’s remarkable vaccine rollout isn’t just our NHS, but the data that sits underneath it — from the genetic data used to develop the vaccine right through to the personal health data enabling that “ping” on their smartphone.
After years of seeing data solely through the lens of risk, Covid-19 has taught us just how much we have to lose when we don’t use it.
As I launch the competition to find the next Information Commissioner, I want to set a bold new approach that capitalises on all we’ve learnt during the pandemic, which forced us to share data quickly, efficiently and responsibly for the public good. It is one that no longer sees data as a threat, but as the great opportunity of our time.
Until now, the conversation about data has revolved around privacy — and with good reason. A person’s digital footprint can tell you not just vital statistics like age and gender, but their personal habits.
Our first priority is securing this valuable personal information. The UK has a long and proud tradition of defending privacy, and a commitment to maintaining world-class data protection standards now that we’re outside the EU. That was recognised last week in the bloc’s draft decisions on the ‘adequacy’ of our data protection rules — the agreement that data can keep flowing freely between the EU and UK.
We fully intend to maintain those world-class standards. But to do so, we do not need to copy and paste the EU’s rule book, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), word-for-word. Countries as diverse as Israel and Uruguay have successfully secured adequacy with Brussels despite having their own data regimes. Not all of those were identical to GDPR, but equal doesn’t have to mean the same. The EU doesn’t hold the monopoly on data protection.
So, having come a long way in learning how to manage data’s risks, the UK is going to start making more of its opportunities….(More)”.