Governance Level: national

Global Standards in National Contexts: The Role of Transnational Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives in Public Sector Governance Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brandon Brockmyer: “Multi-stakeholder initiatives (i.e., partnerships between governments, civil society, and the private sector) are an increasingly prevalent strategy promoted by multilateral, bilateral, and nongovernmental development organizations for addressing weaknesses in public sector governance. Global public sector governance MSIs seek to make national governments more transparent and accountable by setting shared standards for information disclosure and multi- stakeholder collaboration. However, research on similar interventions implemented at the national or subnational level suggests that the effectiveness of these initiatives is likely to be mediated by a variety of socio-political factors.

This dissertation examines the transnational evidence base for three global public sector governance MSIs — the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative, and the Open Government Partnership — and investigates their implementation within and across three shared national contexts — Guatemala, the Philippines, and Tanzania — in order to determine whether and how these initiatives lead to improvements in proactive transparency (i.e., discretionary release of government data), demand-driven transparency (i.e., reforms that increase access to government information upon request), and accountability (i.e., the extent to which government officials are compelled to publicly explain their actions and/or face penalties or sanction for them), as well as the extent to which they provide participating governments with an opportunity to project a public image of transparency and accountability, while maintaining questionable practices in these areas (i.e., openwashing).

The evidence suggests that global public sector governance MSIs often facilitate gains in proactive transparency by national governments, but that improvements in demand-driven transparency and accountability remain relatively rare. Qualitative comparative analysis reveals that a combination of multi-stakeholder power sharing and civil society capacity is sufficient to drive improvements in proactive transparency, while the absence of visible, high-level political support is sufficient to impede such reforms. The lack of demand-driven transparency or accountability gains suggests that national-level coalitions forged by global MSIs are often too narrow to successfully advocate for broader improvements to public sector governance. Moreover, evidence for openwashing was found in one-third of cases, suggesting that national governments sometimes use global MSIs to deliberately mislead international observers and domestic stakeholders about their commitment to reform….(More)”

Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ariel Procaccia in Wired: “…Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one….. Maine recently became the first US state to adopt instant-runoff voting; the approach will be used for choosing the governor and members of Congress and the state legislature….

So why aren’t we already using cutting-edge voting systems in national elections? Perhaps because changing election systems usually itself requires an election, where short-term political considerations may trump long-term, scientifically grounded reasoning….Despite these difficulties, in the last few years state-of-the-art voting systems have made the transition from theory to practice, through not-for-profit online platforms that focus on facilitating elections in cities and organizations, or even just on helping a group of friends decide where to go to dinner. For example, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team has created an online tool whereby residents of a city can vote on how to allocate the city’s budget for public projects such as parks and roads. This tool has been used by New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle to allocate millions of dollars. Building on this success, the Stanford team is experimenting with groundbreaking methods, inspired by computational thinking, to elicit and aggregate the preferences of residents.

The Princeton-based project All Our Ideas asks voters to compare pairs of ideas, and then aggregates these comparisons via statistical methods, ultimately providing a ranking of all the ideas. To date, roughly 14 million votes have been cast using this system, and it has been employed by major cities and organizations. Among its more whimsical use cases is the Washington Post’s 2010 holiday gift guide, where the question was “what gift would you like to receive this holiday season”; the disappointingly uncreative top idea, based on tens of thousands of votes, was “money”.

Finally, the recently launched website RoboVote (which I created with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard) offers AI-driven voting methods to help groups of people make smart collective decisions. Applications range from selecting a spot for a family vacation or a class president, to potentially high-stakes choices such as which product prototype to develop or which movie script to produce.

These examples show that centuries of research on voting can, at long last, make a societal impact in the internet age. They demonstrate what science can do for democracy, albeit on a relatively small scale, for now….(More)’

Artificial Intelligence Could Help Colleges Better Plan What Courses They Should Offer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey R. Young at EdSsurge: Big data could help community colleges better predict how industries are changing so they can tailor their IT courses and other programs. After all, if Amazon can forecast what consumers will buy and prestock items in their warehouses to meet the expected demand, why can’t colleges do the same thing when planning their curricula, using predictive analytics to make sure new degree or certificates programs are started just in time for expanding job opportunities?

That’s the argument made by Gordon Freedman, president of the nonprofit National Laboratory for Education Transformation. He’s part of a new center that will do just that, by building a data warehouse that brings together up-to-date information on what skills employers need and what colleges currently offer—and then applying artificial intelligence to attempt to predict when sectors or certain employment needs might be expanding.

He calls the approach “opportunity engineering,” and the center boasts some heavy-hitting players to assist in the efforts, including the University of Chicago, the San Diego Supercomputing Center and Argonne National Laboratory. It’s called the National Center for Opportunity Engineering & Analysis.

Ian Roark, vice president of workforce development at Pima Community College in Arizona, is among those eager for this kind of “opportunity engineering” to emerge.

He explains when colleges want to start new programs, they face a long haul—it takes time to develop a new curriculum, put it through an internal review, and then send it through an accreditor….

Other players are already trying to translate the job market into a giant data set to spot trends. LinkedIn sits on one of the biggest troves of data, with hundreds of millions of job profiles, and ambitions to create what it calls the “economic graph” of the economy. But not everyone is on LinkedIn, which attracts mainly those in white-collar jobs. And companies such as Burning Glass Technologies have scanned hundreds of thousands of job listings and attempt to provide real-time intelligence on what employers say they’re looking for. Those still don’t paint the full picture, Freedman argues, such as what jobs are forming at companies.

“We need better information from the employer, better information from the job seeker and better information from the college, and that’s what we’re going after,” Freedman says…(More)”.

‘Slacktivism’ that works: ‘Small changes’ matter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Conversation: “In 2013, an online petition persuaded a national organization representing high school coaches to develop materials to educate coaches about sexual assault and how they could help reduce assaults by their athletes. Online petitions have changed decisions by major corporations (ask Bank of America about its debit card fees) and affected decisions on policies as diverse as those related to survivors of sexual assault and local photography permitting requirements. Organizing and participating in these campaigns has also been personally meaningful to many.

But, a nostalgia for 1960s activism leads many to assume that “real” protest only happens on the street. Critics assume that classic social movement tactics such as rallies and demonstrations represent the only effective model for collectively pressing for change. Putting your body on the line and doing that collectively for decades is viewed as the only way “people power” works. Engaging online in “slacktivism” is a waste, making what cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell has called “small change.”

This amounts to a debate over the “right way” to protest. And it’s bound to heat up: The election of Donald Trump is pushing many people who have not previously engaged in activism to look for ways to get involved; others are redoubling their efforts. People have a range of possible responses, including doing nothing, using online connections to mobilize and publicize support and protesting in the streets – or some combination of tactics.

As a social movement scholar and someone who believes we should leverage all assets in a challenge, I know that much social good can come from mass involvement – and research shows that includes online activism. The key to understanding the promise of what I prefer to call “flash activism” is considering the bigger picture, which includes all those people who care but are at risk of doing nothing….(More)”

Introducing the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA Version

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “GODAN, Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, Open Data Charter, and the Open Data Institute are pleased to announce the release of the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA version. …The Agriculture Open Data Package (http://AgPack.info) has been designed to help governments get to impact with open data in the agriculture sector. This practical resource provides key policy areas, key data categories, examples datasets, relevant interoperability initiatives, and use cases that policymakers and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector or open data should focus on, in order to address food security challenges.

The Package is meant as a source of inspiration and an invitation to start a national open data for agriculture initiative.

In the Package we identify fourteen key categories of data and discuss the effort it will take for a government to make this data available in a meaningful way. …

The Package also highlights more than ten use cases (the number is growing) demonstrating how open data is being harnessed to address sustainable agriculture and food security around the world. Examples include:

  • mapping water points to optimise scarce resource allocation in Burkina Faso

  • surfacing daily price information on multiple food commodities across India

  • benchmarking agricultural productivity in the Netherlands

Where relevant we also highlight applicable interoperability initiatives, such as open contracting, international aid transparency initiative (IATI), and global product classification (GPC) standards.

We recognise that the agriculture sector is diverse, with many contextual differences affecting scope of activities, priorities and capacities. In the full version of the Agricultural Open Data Package we discuss important implementation considerations such as inter-agency coordination and resourcing to develop an appropriate data infrastructure and a healthy data ‘ecosystem’ for agriculture….(More)”

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)”

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