The Theory of Deliberative Wisdom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Eric Racine: “Humanity faces a multitude of profound challenges at present: technological advances, environmental changes, rising inequality, and deep social and political pluralism. These transformations raise moral questions—questions about how we view ourselves and how we ought to engage with the world in the pursuit of human flourishing. In The Theory of Deliberative Wisdom, Eric Racine puts forward an original interdisciplinary ethics theory that offers both an explanation of the workings of human morality and a model for deliberation-based imaginative processes to tackle moral problems.

Drawing from a wide array of disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, neuroscience, and economics, this book offers an engaging account of situated moral agency and of ethical life as the pursuit of human flourishing. Moral experience, Racine explains, is accounted for in the form of situational units—morally problematic situations. These units are, in turn, theorized as actionable and participatory building blocks of moral existence mapping to mechanisms of episodic memory and to the construction of personal identity. Such explanations pave the way for an understanding of the social and psychological mechanisms of the awareness and neglect of morally problematic situations as well as of the imaginative ethical deliberation needed to respond to these situations. Deliberative wisdom is explained as an engaged and ongoing learning process about human flourishing…(More)”

The European Data Cooperative (EDC) 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Invest Europe: “The European Data Cooperative (EDC) is a joint initiative developed by Invest Europe and its national association partners to collect Europe-wide industry data on activity (fundraising, investments, & divestments), economic impact (Employment, Turnover, EBITDA, & CAPEX) and ESG.

The EDC platform is jointly owned and operated by the private equity and venture capital associations of Europe. It serves as a single data entry point for their members and other contributors across the continent. The EDC brings together:

  • 4,000 firms
  • 10,900 funds
  • 86,700 portfolio companies
  • 330,900 transactions

Using one platform with a standardised methodology allows us to have consistent, robust pan-European statistics that are comparable across the region…(More)”

Indiana Faces a Data Center Backlash

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matthew Zeitlin: “Indiana has power. Indiana has transmission. Indiana has a business-friendly Republican government. Indiana is close to Chicago but — crucially — not in Illinois. All of this has led to a huge surge of data center development in the “Crossroads of America.” It has also led to an upswell of local opposition.

There are almost 30 active data center proposals in Indiana, plus five that have already been rejected in the past year, according to data collected by the environmentalist group Citizens Action Coalition. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all announced projects in the state since the beginning of 2024.

Nipsco, one of the state’s utilities, has projected 2,600 megawatts worth of new load by the middle of the next decade as its base scenario, mostly attributable to “large economic development projects.” In a more aggressive scenario, it sees 3,200 megawatts of new load — that’s three large nuclear reactors’ worth — by 2028 and 8,600 megawatts by 2035. While short of, say, the almost 36,500 megawatts worth of load growth planned in Georgia for the next decade, it’s still a vast range of outcomes that requires some kind of advanced planning.

That new electricity consumption will likely be powered by fossil fuels. Projected load growth in the state has extended a lifeline to Indiana’s coal-fired power plants, with retirement dates for some of the fleet being pushed out to late in the 2030s. It’s also created a market for new natural gas-fired plants that utilities say are necessary to power the expected new load.

State and local political leaders have greeted these new data center projects with enthusiasm, Ben Inskeep, the program director at CAC, told me. “Economic development is king here,” he said. “That is what all the politicians and regulators say their number one concern is: attracting economic development.”..(More)”.

The Importance of Co-Designing Questions: 10 Lessons from Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hannah Chafetz and Stefaan Verhulst: “How can a question-based approach to philanthropy enable better learning and deeper evaluation across both sides of the partnership and help make progress towards long-term systemic change? That’s what Siegel Family Endowment (Siegel), a family foundation based in New York City, sought to answer by creating an Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach. 

While many philanthropies continue to follow traditional practices that focus on achieving a set of strategic objectives, Siegel employs an inquiry-driven approach, which focuses on answering questions that can accelerate insights and iteration across the systems they seek to change. By framing their goal as “learning” rather than an “outcome” or “metric,” they aim to generate knowledge that can be shared across the whole field and unlock impact beyond the work on individual grants. 

The Siegel approach centers on co-designing and iteratively refining questions with grantees to address evolving strategic priorities, using rapid iteration and stakeholder engagement to generate insights that inform both grantee efforts and the foundation’s decision-making.

Their approach was piloted in 2020, and refined and operationalized the years that followed. As of 2024, it was applied across the vast majority of their grantmaking portfolio. Laura Maher, Chief of Staff and Director of External Engagement at Siegel Family Endowment, notes: “Before our Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach we spent roughly 90% of our time on the grant writing process and 10% checking in with grantees, and now that’s balancing out more.”

Screenshot 2025 05 08 at 4.29.24 Pm

Image of the Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking Process from the Siegel Family Endowment

Earlier this year, the DATA4Philanthropy team conducted two in-depth discussions with Siegel’s Knowledge and Impact team to discuss their Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach and what they learned thus far from applying their new methodology. While the Siegel team notes that there is still much to be learned, there are several takeaways that can be applied to others looking to initiate a questions-led approach. 

Below we provide 10 emerging lessons from these discussions…(More)”.

The world at our fingertips, just out of reach: the algorithmic age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Soumi Banerjee: “Artificial intelligence (AI) has made global movements, testimonies, and critiques seem just a swipe away. The digital realm, powered by machine learning and algorithmic recommendation systems, offers an abundance of visual, textual, and auditory information. With a few swipes or keystrokes, the unbounded world lies open before us. Yet this ‘openness’ conceals a fundamental paradox: the distinction between availability and accessibility.

What is technically available is not always epistemically accessible. What appears global is often algorithmically curated. And what is served to users under the guise of choice frequently reflects the imperatives of engagement, profit, and emotional resonance over critical understanding or cognitive expansion.

The transformative potential of AI in democratising access to information comes with risks. Algorithmic enclosure and content curation can deepen epistemic inequality, particularly for the youth, whose digital fluency often masks a lack of epistemic literacy. What we need is algorithmic transparency, civic education in media literacy, and inclusive knowledge formats…(More)”.

Building Community-Centered AI Collaborations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Michelle Flores Vryn and Meena Das: “AI can only boost the under-resourced nonprofit world if we design it to serve the communities we care about. But as nonprofits consider how to incorporate AI into their work, many look to expertise from tech sector, expecting tools and implementation advice as well as ethical guidance. Yet when mission-driven entities—with a strong focus on people, communities, and equity—partner solely with tech companies, they may encounter a variety of obstacles, such as:

  1. Limited understanding of community needs: Sector-specific knowledge is essential for aligning AI with nonprofit missions, something many tech companies lack.
  2. Bias in AI models: Without diverse input, AI models may exacerbate biases or misrepresent the communities that nonprofits serve.
  3. Resource constraints: Tech solutions often presume budgets or capacity beyond what nonprofits can bring to bear, creating a reliance on tools that fit the nonprofit context.

We need creative, diverse collaborations across various fields to ensure that technology is deployed in ways that align with nonprofit values, build trust, and serve the greater good. Seeking partners outside of the tech world helps nonprofits develop AI solutions that are context-aware, equitable, and resource-sensitive. Most importantly, nonprofit practitioners must deeply consider our ideal future state: What does an AI-empowered nonprofit sector look like when it truly centers human well-being, community agency, and ethical technology?

Imagining this future means not just reacting to emerging technology but proactively shaping its trajectory. Instead of simply adapting to AI’s capabilities, nonprofits should ask:

  • What problems do we truly need AI to solve?
  • Whose voices must be centered in AI decision-making?
  • How do we ensure AI remains a tool for empowerment rather than control?..(More)”.

Policy Implications of DeepSeek AI’s Talent Base

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brief by Amy Zegart and Emerson Johnston: “Chinese startup DeepSeek’s highly capable R1 and V3 models challenged prevailing beliefs about the United States’ advantage in AI innovation, but public debate focused more on the company’s training data and computing power than human talent. We analyzed data on the 223 authors listed on DeepSeek’s five foundational technical research papers, including information on their research output, citations, and institutional affiliations, to identify notable talent patterns. Nearly all of DeepSeek’s researchers were educated or trained in China, and more than half never left China for schooling or work. Of the quarter or so that did gain some experience in the United States, most returned to China to work on AI development there. These findings challenge the core assumption that the United States holds a natural AI talent lead. Policymakers need to reinvest in competing to attract and retain the world’s best AI talent while bolstering STEM education to maintain competitiveness…(More)”.

How Bad Is China’s Economy? The Data Needed to Answer Is Vanishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rebecca Feng and Jason Douglas: “Not long ago, anyone could comb through a wide range of official data from China. Then it started to disappear. 

Land sales measures, foreign investment data and unemployment indicators have gone dark in recent years. Data on cremations and a business confidence index have been cut off. Even official soy sauce production reports are gone.

In all, Chinese officials have stopped publishing hundreds of data points once used by researchers and investors, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. 

In most cases, Chinese authorities haven’t given any reason for ending or withholding data. But the missing numbers have come as the world’s second biggest economy has stumbled under the weight of excessive debt, a crumbling real-estate market and other troubles—spurring heavy-handed efforts by authorities to control the narrative.China’s National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing some numbers related to unemployment in urban areas in recent years. After an anonymous user on the bureau’s website asked why one of those data points had disappeared, the bureau said only that the ministry that provided it stopped sharing the data.

The disappearing data have made it harder for people to know what’s going on in China at a pivotal time, with the trade war between Washington and Beijing expected to hit China hard and weaken global growth. Plunging trade with the U.S. has already led to production shutdowns and job cuts.

Getting a true read on China’s growth has always been tricky. Many economists have long questioned the reliability of China’s headline gross domestic product data, and concerns have intensified recently. Official figures put GDP growth at 5% last year and 5.2% in 2023, but some have estimated that Beijing overstated its numbers by as much as 2 to 3 percentage points. 

To get what they consider to be more realistic assessments of China’s growth, economists have turned to alternative sources such as movie box office revenues, satellite data on the intensity of nighttime lights, the operating rates of cement factories and electricity generation by major power companies. Some parse location data from mapping services run by private companies such as Chinese tech giant Baidu to gauge business activity. 

One economist said he has been assessing the health of China’s services sector by counting news stories about owners of gyms and beauty salons who abruptly close up and skip town with users’ membership fees…(More)”.

Glorious RAGs : A Safer Path to Using AI in the Social Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jim Fruchterman: “Social sector leaders ask me all the time for advice on using AI. As someone who started for-profit machine learning (AI) companies in the 1980s, but then pivoted to running nonprofit social enterprises, I’m often the first person from Silicon Valley that many nonprofit leaders have met. I joke that my role is often that of “anti-consultant,” talking leaders out of doing an app, a blockchain (smile) or firing half their staff because of AI. Recently, much of my role has been tamping down the excessive expectations being bandied about for the impact of AI on organizations. However, two years into the latest AI fad wave created by ChatGPT and its LLM (large language model) peers, more and more of the leaders are describing eminently sensible applications of LLMs to their programs. The most frequent of these approaches can be described as variations on “Retrieval-Augmented Generation,” also known as RAG. I am quite enthusiastic about using RAG for social impact, because it addresses a real need and supplies guardrails for using LLMs effectively…(More)”

The RRI Citizen Review Panel: a public engagement method for supporting responsible territorial policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Maya Vestergaard Bidstrup et al: “Responsible Territorial Policymaking incorporates the main principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) into the policymaking process, making it well-suited for guiding the development of sustainable and resilient territorial policies that prioritise societal needs. As a cornerstone in RRI, public engagement plays a central role in this process, underscoring the importance of involving all societal actors to align outcomes with the needs, expectations, and values of society. In the absence of existing methods to gather sufficiently and effectively the citizens’ review of multiple policies at a territorial level, the RRI Citizen Review Panel is a new public engagement method developed to facilitate citizens’ review and validation of territorial policies. By using RRI as an analytical framework, this paper examines whether the RRI Citizen Review Panel can support Responsible Territorial Policymaking, not only by incorporating citizens’ perspectives into territorial policymaking, but also by making policies more responsible. The paper demonstrates that in the review of territorial policies, citizens are adding elements of RRI to a wide range of policies within different policy areas, contributing to making policies more responsible. Consequently, the RRI Citizen Review Panel emerges as a valuable tool for policymakers, enabling them to gather citizen perspectives and imbue policies with a heightened sense of responsibility…(More)”.