Digital contact tracing and surveillance during COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report on General and Child-specific Ethical Issues by Gabrielle Berman, Karen Carter, Manuel García-Herranz and Vedran Sekara: “The last few years have seen a proliferation of means and approaches being used to collect sensitive or identifiable data on children. Technologies such as facial recognition and other biometrics, increased processing capacity for ‘big data’ analysis and data linkage, and the roll-out of mobile and internet services and access have substantially changed the nature of data collection, analysis, and use.

Real-time data are essential to support decision-makers in government, development and humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF to better understand the issues facing children, plan appropriate action, monitor progress and ensure that no one is left behind. But the collation and use of personally identifiable data may also pose significant risks to children’s rights.

UNICEF has undertaken substantial work to provide a foundation to understand and balance the potential benefits and risks to children of data collection. This work includes the Industry Toolkit on Children’s Online Privacy and Freedom of Expression and a partnership with GovLab on Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) – which promotes good practice principles and has developed practical tools to assist field offices, partners and governments to make responsible data management decisions.

Balancing the need to collect data to support good decision-making versus the need to protect children from harm created through the collection of the data has never been more challenging than in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The response to the pandemic has seen an unprecedented rapid scaling up of technologies to support digital contact tracing and surveillance. The initial approach has included:

  • tracking using mobile phones and other digital devices (tablet computers, the Internet of Things, etc.)
  • surveillance to support movement restrictions, including through the use of location monitoring and facial recognition
  • a shift from in-person service provision and routine data collection to the use of remote or online platforms (including new processes for identity verification)
  • an increased focus on big data analysis and predictive modelling to fill data gaps…(More)”.

How data analysis helped Mozambique stem a cholera outbreak

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Jack at the Financial Times: “When Mozambique was hit by two cyclones in rapid succession last year — causing death and destruction from a natural disaster on a scale not seen in Africa for a generation — government officials added an unusual recruit to their relief efforts. Apart from the usual humanitarian and health agencies, the National Health Institute also turned to Zenysis, a Silicon Valley start-up.

As the UN and non-governmental organisations helped to rebuild lives and tackle outbreaks of disease including cholera, Zenysis began gathering and analysing large volumes of disparate data. “When we arrived, there were 400 new cases of cholera a day and they were doubling every 24 hours,” says Jonathan Stambolis, the company’s chief executive. “None of the data was shared [between agencies]. Our software harmonised and integrated fragmented sources to produce a coherent picture of the outbreak, the health system’s ability to respond and the resources available.

“Three and a half weeks later, they were able to get infections down to zero in most affected provinces,” he adds. The government attributed that achievement to the availability of high-quality data to brief the public and international partners.

“They co-ordinated the response in a way that drove infections down,” he says. Zenysis formed part of a “virtual control room”, integrating information to help decision makers understand what was happening in the worst hit areas, identify sources of water contamination and where to prioritise cholera vaccinations.

It supported an “mAlert system”, which integrated health surveillance data into a single platform for analysis. The output was daily reports distilled from data issued by health facilities and accommodation centres in affected areas, disease monitoring and surveillance from laboratory testing….(More)”.

The Food Systems Dashboard

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About: “The Food Systems Dashboard combines data from multiple sources to give users a complete view of food systems. Users can compare components of food systems across countries and regions. They can also identify and prioritize ways to sustainably improve diets and nutrition in their food systems.

Dashboards are useful tools that help users visualize and understand key information for complex systems. Users can track progress to see if policies or other interventions are working at a country or regional level

In recent years, the public health and nutrition communities have used dashboards to track the progress of health goals and interventions, including the Sustainable Development Goals. To our knowledge, this is the first dashboard that collects country-level data across all components of the food system.

The Dashboard contains over 150 indicators that measure components, drivers, and outcomes of food systems at the country level. As new indicators and data become available, the Dashboard will be updated. Most data used for the Dashboard is open source and available to download directly from the website. Data is pooled from FAO, Euromonitor International, World Bank, and other global and regional data sources….(More)”.

Policy Priority Inference

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Turing Institute: “…Policy Priority Inference builds on a behavioural computational model, taking into account the learning process of public officials, coordination problems, incomplete information, and imperfect governmental monitoring mechanisms. The approach is a unique mix of economic theory, behavioural economics, network science and agent-based modelling. The data that feeds the model for a specific country (or a sub-national unit, such as a state) includes measures of the country’s DIs and how they have moved over the years, specified government policy goals in relation to DIs, the quality of government monitoring of expenditure, and the quality of the country’s rule of law.

From these data alone – and, crucially, with no specific information on government expenditure, which is rarely made available – the model can infer the transformative resources a country has historically allocated to transform its SDGs, and assess the importance of SDG interlinkages between DIs. Importantly, it can also reveal where previously hidden inefficiencies lie.

How does it work? The researchers modelled the socioeconomic mechanisms of the policy-making process using agent-computing simulation. They created a simulator featuring an agent called “Government”, which makes decisions about how to allocate public expenditure, and agents called “Bureaucrats”, each of which is essentially a policy-maker linked to a single DI. If a Bureaucrat is allocated some resource, they will use a portion of it to improve their DI, with the rest lost to some degree of inefficiency (in reality, inefficiencies range from simple corruption to poor quality policies and inefficient government departments).

How much resource a Bureaucrat puts towards moving their DI depends on that agent’s experience: if becoming inefficient pays off, they’ll keep doing it. During the process, Government monitors the Bureaucrats, occasionally punishing inefficient ones, who may then improve their behaviour. In the model, a Bureaucrat’s chances of getting caught is linked to the quality of a government’s real-world monitoring of expenditure, and the extent to which they are punished is reflected in the strength of that country’s rule of law.

Diagram of the Policy Priority Inference model
Using data on a country or state’s development indicators and its governance, Policy Priority Inference techniques can model how a government and its policy-makers allocate “transformational resources” to reach their sustainable development goals.

When the historical movements of a country’s DIs are reproduced through the internal workings of the model, the researchers have a powerful proxy for the real-world relationships between government activity, the movement of DIs, and the effects of the interlinkages between DIs, all of which are unique to that country. “Once we can match outcomes, we can discern something that’s going on in reality. But the fact that the method is matching the dynamics of real-world development indicators is just one of multiple ways that we validate our results,” Guerrero notes. This proxy can then be used to project which policy areas should be prioritised in future to best achieve the government’s specified development goals, including predictions of likely timescales.

What’s more, in combination with techniques from evolutionary computation, the model can identify DIs that are linked to large positive spillover effects. These DIs are dubbed “accelerators”. Targeting government resources at such development accelerators fosters not only more rapid results, but also more generalised development…(More)”.

Permanent joint committees in Belgium: involving citizens in parliamentary debate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elisa Minsart and Vincent Jacquet: “Amidst wide public disillusionment with the institutions of representative democracy, political scientists, campaigners and politicians have intensified efforts to find an effective mechanism to narrow the gap between citizens and those who govern them. One of the most popular remedies in recent years – and one frequently touted as a way to break the Brexit impasse encountered by the UK political class in 2016-19 – is that of citizens’ assemblies. These deliberative forums gather diversified samples of the population, recruited through a process of random selection. Citizens who participate meet experts, deliberate on a specific public issue and make a range of recommendations for policy-making. Citizens’ assemblies are flourishing in many representative democracies – not least in the UK, with the current Climate Assembly UK and Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland. They show that citizens are able to deliberate on complex political issues and to deliver original proposals. 

For several years now, some public leaders, scholars and politicians have sought to integrate these democratic innovations into more traditional political structures. Belgium recently made a step in this direction. Each of Belgium’s three regions has its own parliament, with full legislative powers: on 13 November 2019, a proposition was approved to modify how the Parliament of the Brussels Region operates. The reform mandates the establishment of joint deliberative committees, on which members of the public will serve alongside elected representatives. This will enable ordinary people to deliberate with MPs on preselected themes and to formulate recommendations. The details of the process are currently still being drafted and the first commission is expected to launch at the end of 2020. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, drafting and negotiations with other parties have not been interrupted thanks to an online platform and a videoconference facility.

This experience has been inspired by other initiatives organised in Belgium. In 2011, the G1000 initiative brought together more than 700 randomly selected citizens to debate on different topics. This grassroots experiment attracted lots of public attention. In its aftermath, the different parliaments of the country launched their own citizens’ assemblies, designed to tackle specific local issues. Some international experiences also inspired the Brussels Region, in particular the first Irish Constitutional Convention (2012–2014). This assembly was composed of both elected representatives and randomly selected citizens, and led directly to a referendum that approved the legalisation of same-sex marriage. However, the present joint committees go well beyond these initiatives. Whereas both of these predecessors were ad hoc initiatives designed to resolve particular problems, the Brussels committees will be permanent and hosted at the heart of the parliament. Both of these aspects make the new committees a major innovation and entirely different from the predecessors that helped inspire them…(More)”.

More ethical, more innovative? The effects of ethical culture and ethical leadership on realized innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeger van der Wal and Mehmet Demircioglu in the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA): “Are ethical public organisations more likely to realize innovation? The public administration literature is ambiguous about this relationship, with evidence being largely anecdotal and focused mainly on the ethical implications of business‐like behaviour and positive deviance, rather than how ethical behaviour and culture may contribute to innovation.

In this paper we examine the effects of ethical culture and ethical leadership on reported realized innovation, using 2017 survey data from the Australia Public Service Commission (n  = 80,316). Our findings show that both ethical culture at the working group‐level and agency‐level as well as ethical leadership have significant positive associations with realized innovation in working groups. The findings are robust across agency, work location, job level, tenure, education, and gender and across different samples. We conclude our paper with theoretical and practical implications of our research findings…(More)”.

UK parliamentary select committees: crowdsourcing for evidence-based policy or grandstanding?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the The LSE GV314 Group: “In the United Kingdom, the influence of parliamentary select committees on policy depends substantially on the ‘seriousness’ with which they approach the task of gathering and evaluating a wide range of evidence and producing reports and recommendations based on it. However, select committees are often charged with being concerned with ‘political theatre’ and ‘grandstanding’ rather than producing evidence-based policy recommendations. This study, based on a survey of 919 ‘discretionary’ witnesses, including those submitting written and oral evidence, examines the case for arguing that there is political bias and grandstanding in the way select committees go about selecting witnesses, interrogating them and using their evidence to put reports together. While the research finds some evidence of such ‘grandstanding’ it does not appear to be strong enough to suggest that the role of select committees is compromised as a crowdsourcer of evidence….(More)”.

Google searches are no substitute for systematic reviews when it comes to policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Peter Bragge: “With all public attention on the COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to forget that Australia suffered traumatic bushfires last summer, and that a royal commission is investigating the fires and will report in August. According to its Terms of Reference, the commission will examine how Australia’s national and state governments can improve the ‘preparedness for, response to, resilience to and recovery from, natural disasters.’

Many would assume that the commission will identify and use all best-available research knowledge from around the world. But this is highly unlikely because royal commissions are not designed in a way that is fit-for-purpose in the 21st century. Specifically, their terms of reference do not mandate the inclusion of knowledge from world-leading research, even though such research has never been more accessible. This design failure provides critical lessons not only for future royal commissions and public inquiries but for public servants developing policy, including for the COVID-19 crisis, and for academics, journalists, and all researchers who want to keep up with the best global thinking in their field.

The risk of not employing research knowledge that could shape policy and practice could be significantly reduced if the royal commission drew upon what are known as systematic reviews. These are a type of literature review that identify, evaluate and summarise the findings and quality of all known research studies on a particular topic. Systematic reviews provide an overall picture of an entire body of research, rather than one that is skewed by accessing only one or two studies in an area. They are the most thorough form of inquiry, because they control for the ‘outlier’ effect of one or two studies that do not align with the weight of the identified research.

Systematic reviews are known as the ‘peak of peaks’ of research knowledge

They became mainstream in the 1990s through the Cochrane Collaboration – an independent organisation originating in Britain but now worldwide — which has published thousands of systematic reviews across all areas of medicine. These and other medical systematic reviews have been critical in driving best practice healthcare around the world. The approach has expanded to business and management, the law, international development, education, environmental conservation, health service delivery and how to tackle the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

There are now tens of thousands of systematic reviews spanning all these areas. Researchers who use them can spend much less time navigating the vastly larger volume of up to 80 million individual research studies published since 1665.

Sadly, they are not. Few policymakers, decision-makers and media are using systematic reviews to respond to complex challenges. Instead, they are searching Google, and hoping that something useful will turn up amongst an estimated 6.19 billion web pages.

The vastness of the open web is an understandable temptation for the time poor, and a great way to find a good local eatery. But it’s a terrible way to try and access relevant, credible knowledge, and an enormous risk for those seeking to address hugely difficult problems, such as responding to Australia’s bushfires.

The deep expertise of specialist professionals and academics is critical to solving complex societal challenges. Yet the standard royal commission approach of using a few experts as a proxy for the world’s knowledge is selling short both their expertise and the commission process. If experts called before the bushfire royal commission could be asked to contribute not just their own expertise, but a response to the applicability of systematic review research to Australia, the commission’s thinking could benefit hugely from harnessing the knowledge both of the reviews and of the experts…(More)”.

Digital Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tim Markham: “Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded?

In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at stake amid the constant distractions of our media-saturated world, the way we present ourselves to that world through social media, and the relentless march of data into every aspect of our lives.

A provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, Digital Life offers timely insights into distraction and compassion fatigue, privacy and surveillance, identity and solidarity. It is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of media and communication…(More)”.

An introduction to human rights for the mobile sector

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Report by the GSMA: “Human rights risks are present throughout mobile operators’ value chains. These range from the treatment and conditions of people working in the supply chain to how operators’ own employees are treated and how the human rights of customers are respected online.

This summary provides a high-level introduction to the most salient human rights issues for mobile operators. The aim is to explain why the issues are relevant for operators and share initial practical guidance for companies beginning to focus and respond to human rights issues….(More)”.