Governance Level: national

Four steps to precision public health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Scott F. Dowell, David Blazes & Susan Desmond-Hellmann at Nature: “When domestic transmission of Zika virus was confirmed in the United States in July 2016, the entire country was not declared at risk — nor even the entire state of Florida. Instead, precise surveillance defined two at-risk areas of Miami-Dade County, neighbourhoods measuring just 2.6 and 3.9 square kilometres. Travel advisories and mosquito control focused on those regions. Six weeks later, ongoing surveillance convinced officials to lift restrictions in one area and expand the other.

By contrast, a campaign against yellow fever launched this year in sub-Saharan Africa defines risk at the level of entire nations, often hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. More granular assessments have been deemed too complex.

The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information1.

The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. In Guinea, it took months to assemble enough data to clearly identify the start of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. This should take days. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world; it is also where we know the least about causes of death…..

The value of precise disease tracking was baked into epidemiology from the start. In 1854, John Snow famously located cholera cases in London. His mapping of the spread of infection through contaminated water dealt a blow to the idea that the disease was caused by bad air. These days, people and pathogens move across the globe swiftly and in great numbers. In 2009, the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ influenza virus took just 35 days to spread from Mexico and the United States to China, South Korea and 12 other countries…

The public-health community is sharing more data faster; expectations are higher than ever that data will be available from clinical trials and from disease surveillance. In the past two years, the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Gates Foundation have all instituted open data policies for their grant recipients, and leading journals have declared that sharing data during disease emergencies will not impede later publication.

Meanwhile, improved analysis, data visualization and machine learning have expanded our ability to use disparate data sources to decide what to do. A study published last year4 used precise geospatial modelling to infer that insecticide-treated bed nets were the single most influential intervention in the rapid decline of malaria.

However, in many parts of the developing world, there are still hurdles to the collection, analysis and use of more precise public-health data. Work towards malaria elimination in South Africa, for example, has depended largely on paper reporting forms, which are collected and entered manually each week by dozens of subdistricts, and eventually analysed at the province level. This process would be much faster if field workers filed reports from mobile phones.

Sources: Ref. 8/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

…Frontline workers should not find themselves frustrated by global programmes that fail to take into account data on local circumstances. Wherever they live — in a village, city or country, in the global south or north — people have the right to public-health decisions that are based on the best data and science possible, that minimize risk and cost, and maximize health in their communities…(More)”

neveragain.tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

neveragain.tech: “We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable…..

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

We commit to the following actions:

  • We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
  • We will advocate within our organizations:
    • to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.
    • to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
    • to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.
    • to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.
    • to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.
  • If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:
    • We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.
    • If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.
    • If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.
    • If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.
  • We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry….(More)“

Towards a transparency ontology in the context of open government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rui Pedro Lourenço, Susana Jorge and Helena Rolas at Electronic Government: “Several open government initiatives have been launched to make available online data enhancing accountability of public officials towards ordinary citizens. However, these initiatives raise several questions, namely: Which data should be disclosed? How to bring together dispersed (fragmented) data? How to improve its understandability by ordinary citizens? Literature shows that, in general, the data selection process does not take into account ordinary citizens’ expectations and information needs. This paper presents the development process of a transparency ontology, which aims to provide an answer to the above questions, in what concerns public sector entities’ use of resources. The process started by creating a list of relevant expressions/terms discussed in national and local newspapers, considering the role of journalists as ‘information brokers’ acting on behalf of ordinary citizens. This list was externally validated for relevance, comprehensiveness and improvements by interviewing journalists, and the resulting transparency ontology was formalised using OWL and Protégé….(More)”.

Social Movements and World-System Transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jackie Smith, Michael Goodhart, Patrick Manning, and John Markoff: “At a particularly urgent world-historical moment, this volume brings together some of the leading researchers of social movements and global social change and other emerging scholars and practitioners to advance new thinking about social movements and global transformation. Social movements around the world today are responding to crisis by defying both political and epistemological borders, offering alternatives to the global capitalist order that are imperceptible through the modernist lens. Informed by a world-historical perspective, contributors explain today’s struggles as building upon the experiences of the past while also coming together globally in ways that are inspiring innovation and consolidating new thinking about what a fundamentally different, more equitable, just, and sustainable world order might look like.

This collection offers new insights into contemporary movements for global justice, challenging readers to appreciate how modernist thinking both colors our own observations and complicates the work of activists seeking to resolve inequities and contradictions that are deeply embedded in Western cultural traditions and institutions. Contributors consider today’s movements in the longue durée—that is, they ask how Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and other contemporary struggles for liberation reflect, build upon, or diverge from anti-colonial and other emancipatory struggles of the past. Critical to this volume is its exploration of how divisions over gender equity and diversity of national cultures and class have impacted what are increasingly intersectional global movements. The contributions of feminist and indigenous movements come to the fore in this collective exploration of what the movements of yesterday and today can contribute to our ongoing effort to understand the dynamics of global transformation in order to help advance a more equitable, just, and ecologically sustainable world….(More)”.

Uber supports Brazilian health awareness campaign

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Being a parent is a busy job and anything that can make the life of a parent easier, cheaper or simpler is likely to be met by an eager — if slightly bleary eyed — audience. We recently wrote about a lift sharing service parents can order for their kids, and now Uber have decided to reach out to the same demographic, offering a discount to parents who are vaccinating their children.

In September, Uber offered a discount to parents in Brazil taking their children to get vaccinated. The promotion was linked to ‘Multivaccination 2016’: a national campaign aiming to raise awareness about the importance of vaccinations and encouraging parents to update their child’s vaccination card regularly. The initiative was launched by Brazil’s Minister of Health and for one Saturday only parents travelling with their children in certain cities could enter the promotional code “UberGotinha”. In return they received BRL 20 (USD 6) in credit to cover journeys to and from participating health centers….(More)”

From policing to news, how algorithms are changing our lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carl Miller at The National: “First, write out the numbers one to 100 in 10 rows. Cross out the one. Then circle the two, and cross out all of the multiples of two. Circle the three, and do likewise. Follow those instructions, and you’ve just completed the first three steps of an algorithm, and an incredibly ancient one. Twenty-three centuries ago, Eratosthenes was sat in the great library of Alexandria, using this process (it is called Eratosthenes’ Sieve) to find and separate prime numbers. Algorithms are nothing new, indeed even the word itself is old. Fifteen centuries after Eratosthenes, Algoritmi de numero Indorum appeared on the bookshelves of European monks, and with it, the word to describe something very simple in essence: follow a series of fixed steps, in order, to achieve a given answer to a given problem. That’s it, that’s an algorithm. Simple.

 Apart from, of course, the story of algorithms is not so simple, nor so humble. In the shocked wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the United States presidential election, a culprit needed to be found to explain what had happened. What had, against the odds, and in the face of thousands of polls, caused this tectonic shift in US political opinion? Soon the finger was pointed. On social media, and especially on Facebook, it was alleged that pro-Trump stories, based on inaccurate information, had spread like wildfire, often eclipsing real news and honestly-checked facts.
But no human editor was thrust into the spotlight. What took centre stage was an algorithm; Facebook’s news algorithm. It was this, critics said, that was responsible for allowing the “fake news” to circulate. This algorithm wasn’t humbly finding prime numbers; it was responsible for the news that you saw (and of course didn’t see) on the largest source of news in the world. This algorithm had somehow risen to become more powerful than any newspaper editor in the world, powerful enough to possibly throw an election.
So why all the fuss? Something is now happening in society that is throwing algorithms into the spotlight. They have taken on a new significance, even an allure and mystique. Algorithms are simply tools but a web of new technologies are vastly increasing the power that these tools have over our lives. The startling leaps forward in artificial intelligence have meant that algorithms have learned how to learn, and to become capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they were never been able to achieve before. Their learning is fuelled with more data than ever before, collected, stored and connected with the constellations of sensors, data farms and services that have ushered in the age of big data.

Algorithms are also doing more things; whether welding, driving or cooking, thanks to robotics. Wherever there is some kind of exciting innovation happening, algorithms are rarely far away. They are being used in more fields, for more things, than ever before and are incomparably, incomprehensibly more capable than the algorithms recognisable to Eratosthenes….(More)”

Making the Case for Evidence-Based Decision-Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jennifer Brooks in Stanford Social Innovation Review: “After 15 years of building linkages between evidence, policy, and practice in social programs for children and families, I have one thing to say about our efforts to promote evidence-based decision-making: We have failed to capture the hearts and minds of the majority of decision-makers in the United States.

I’ve worked with state and federal leadership, as well as program administrators in the public and nonprofit spheres. Most of them just aren’t with us. They aren’t convinced that the payoffs of evidence-based practice (the method that uses rigorous tests to assess the efficacy of a given intervention) are worth the extra difficulty or expense of implementing those practices.

Why haven’t we gotten more traction for evidence-based decision-making? Three key reasons: 1) we have wasted time debating whether randomized control trials are the optimal approach, rather than building demand for more data-based decision-making; 2) we oversold the availability of evidence-based practices and underestimated what it takes to scale them; and 3) we did all this without ever asking what problems decision-makers are trying to solve.

If we want to gain momentum for evidence-based practice, we need to focus more on figuring out how to implement such approaches on a larger scale, in a way that uses data to improve programs on an ongoing basis….

We must start by understanding and analyzing the problem the decision-maker wants to solve. We need to offer more than lists of evidence-based strategies or interventions. What outcomes do the decision-makers want to achieve? And what do data tell us about why we aren’t getting those outcomes with current methods?…

None of the following ideas is rocket science, nor am I the first person to say them, but they do suggest ways that we can move beyond our current approaches in promoting evidence-based practice.

1. We need better data.

As Michele Jolin pointed out recently, few federal programs have sufficient resources to build or use evidence. There are limited resources for evaluation and other evidence-building activities, which too often are seen as “extras.” Moreover, many programs at the local, state, and national level have minimal information to use for program management and even fewer staff with the skills required to use it effectively…

 

2. We should attend equally to practices and to the systems in which they sit.

Systems improvements without changes in practice won’t get outcomes, but without systems reforms, evidence-based practices will have difficulty scaling up. …

3. You get what you pay for.

One fear I have is that we don’t actually know whether we can get better outcomes in our public systems without spending more money. And yet cost-savings seem to be what we promise when we sell the idea of evidence-based practice to legislatures and budget directors….

4. We need to hold people accountable for program results and promote ongoing improvement.

There is an inherent tension between using data for accountability and using it for program improvement….(More)”

Using open government for climate action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Moses at Eco-Business: “Countries made many national climate commitments as part of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which entered into force earlier this month. Now comes the hard part of implementing those commitments. The public can serve an invaluable watchdog role, holding governments accountable for following through on their targets and making sure climate action happens in a way that’s fair and inclusive.

But first, the climate and open government communities will need to join forces….

Here are four areas where these communities can lean in together to ensure governments follow through on effective climate action:

1) Expand access to climate data and information.

Open government and climate NGOs and local communities can expand the use of traditional transparency tools and processes such as Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, transparent budgeting, open data policies and public procurement to enhance open information on climate mitigation, adaptation and finance.

For example, Transparencia Mexicana used Mexico’s Freedom of Information Law to collect data to map climate finance actors and the flow of finance in the country. This allows them to make specific recommendations on how to safeguard climate funds against corruption and ensure the money translates into real action on the ground….

2) Promote inclusive and participatory climate policy development.

Civil society and community groups already play a crucial role in advocating for climate action and improving climate governance at the national and local levels, especially when it comes to safeguarding poor and vulnerable people, who often lack political voice….

3) Take legal action for stronger accountability.

Accountability at a national level can only be achieved if grievance mechanisms are in place to address a lack of transparency or public participation, or address the impact of projects and policies on individuals and communities.

Civil society groups and individuals can use legal actions like climate litigation, petitions, administrative policy challenges and court cases at the national, regional or international levels to hold governments and businesses accountable for failing to effectively act on climate change….

4) Create new spaces for advocacy.

Bringing the climate and open government movements together allows civil society to tap new forums for securing momentum around climate policy implementation. For example, many civil society NGOs are highlighting the important connections between a strong Governance Goal 16 under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and strong water quality and climate change policies….(More)”

The “Open Government Reform” Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Suzanne J. Piotrowski on “The Case of the Open Government Partnership and U.S. Transparency Policies”: “Open government initiatives, which include not only transparency but also participation and collaboration policies, have become a major administrative reform. As such, these initiatives are gaining cohesiveness in literature. President Obama supported open government through a range of policies including the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multinational initiative. The OGP requires member organizations to develop open government national action plans, which are used as the basis for my analysis. To frame this paper, I use and expand upon David Heald’s directions and varieties of transparency framework. A content analysis of the 62 commitments in the US Second Open Government National Action Plan was conducted. The analysis provides two findings of note: First, the traditional view of transparency was indeed the most prevalent in the policies proposed. In that respect, not much has changed, even with the OGP’s emphasis on a range moof approaches. Second, openness among and between agencies played a larger than expected role. While the OGP pushed an array of administrative reforms, the initiative had limited impact on the type of policies that were proposed and enacted. In sum, the OGP is an administrative reform that was launched with great fanfare, but limited influence in the US context. More research needs to be conducted to determine is the “open government reform” movement as a whole suffers from such problems in implementation….(More)”

New Data Portal to analyze governance in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The Mo Ibrahim Foundation launched today the new IIAG Data Portal, which provides unprecedented access to 15 years of data, crucial to assessing the quality of governance in African countries. The Data Portal is freely available online. It will serve as an interactive platform for in-depth analysis and review of governance performance across Africa….

The IIAG Data Portal contains a number of innovative features, including:

  • enabling users to undertake bespoke analysis of governance ranks, scores and trends over the fifteen-year period since 2000, for each of Africa’s 54 countries
  • making possible, for the first time, to examine data at the indicator-level for all 95 IIAG indicators
  • allowing users to generate visualisations and graphics from the data that are shareable online
  • providing a user-friendly interface that facilitates navigation for anyone, from expert statisticians to the public.

….Mo Ibrahim, Chair of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, said:

Strengthening the African national statistical offices and the robustness and availability of data is crucial to unlocking the continent’s potential. It is a matter of ownership, of identity and of sovereignty. Without sound national data, there is no way you can define adequate public policies nor measure their outcomes.Giving free access to data is about empowering people. It is less eye-catching than building a hospital or a school but it is a smart way to ensure that more hospitals and schools are delivered more effectively and efficiently. I’m delighted that the Foundation can play its part in taking forward Africa’s data revolution, and I hope that our new Data Portal will support efforts to improve governance on the continent.

The IIAG data portal can be accessed online via desktop and mobile at iiag.online.”

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