Report by Samantha Custer and Tanya Sethi: “Government, development partner, and civil society leaders make decisions every day about how to allocate, monitor and evaluate development assistance. Policymakers and practitioners can theoretically draw from more data sources in a variety of formats than ever before to inform these decisions,but will they choose to do so? Those who collect data and produce evidence are often far removed from those who ultimately influence and make decisions. Technocratic ideals of evidence-informed policymaking and data-driven decision-making are easily undercut by individual prerogatives, organizational imperatives, and ecosystem-wide blind spots. In 2016, researchers from the... (More >)
Can social media, loud and inclusive, fix world politics
Rania Fakhoury at the Conversation: “Privacy is no longer a social norm, said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, as social media took a leap to bring more private information into the public domain. But what does it mean for governments, citizens and the exercise of democracy? Donald Trump is clearly not the first leader to use his Twitter account as a way to both proclaim his policies and influence the political climate. Social media presents novel challenges to strategic policy, and has become a managerial issues for many governments. But it also offers a free platform for public... (More >)
From disaster planning to conservation: mobile phones as a new tracking tool
Rob Harcourt, Carlos Duarte, and Mark Meekan in The Conversation: “We can learn a lot about things by studying how they move through the world and interact with the environment. In the past, for example, it was possible to study the mobility of people within the United States by monitoring things such as the movement of banknotes. Today we can use something that is much more global and widely available than US cash. Mobile phones have almost totally infiltrated human society, with the number estimated at more than 7 billion in 2014. Ownership of mobile phones continues to grow,... (More >)
Bit By Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age
Open Review of Book by Matthew J. Salganik: “In the summer of 2009, mobile phones were ringing all across Rwanda. In addition to the millions of calls between family, friends, and business associates, about 1,000 Rwandans received a call from Joshua Blumenstock and his colleagues. The researchers were studying wealth and poverty by conducting a survey of people who had been randomly sampled from a database of 1.5 million customers from Rwanda’s largest mobile phone provider. Blumenstock and colleagues asked the participants if they wanted to participate in a survey, explained the nature of the research to them, and... (More >)
Open Government Data in Africa: A preference elicitation analysis of media practitioners
Eric Afful-Dadzie and Anthony Afful-Dadzie in Government Information Quarterly: “Open Government Data (OGD) continues to receive considerable traction around the world. In particular, there have been a growing number of OGD establishments in the developed world, sparking expectations of similar trends in growing democracies. To understand the readiness of OGD stakeholders in Africa especially the media, this paper (1) reviews current infrastructure at OGD web portals in Africa and (2) conducts a preference elicitation analysis among media practitioners in 5 out of the 7 OGD country centers in Africa regarding desired structure of OGD in developing countries. The analysis... (More >)
Innovation in Education Through Crowdsourcing
Meghna Tare in TriplePundit: “….UNESCO tapped into online crowdsourcing to help achieve Education for All. The project on crowdsourcing girls’ education in Ethiopia and Tanzania launched in July 2011 took a community-based approach to lowering drop-out rates in secondary schools in those countries. Funded by the Packard Foundation, within the framework of UNESCO’s global partnership for girls’ and women’s education, it encouraged girls and their communities to propose solutions to obstacles preventing girls from completing secondary education. The process introduced a fresh approach to designing education policies One of the groups that benefits tremendously from crowdsourcing in education is... (More >)
What is the Spectrum of Public Participation?
Post by Graeme Stuart: “The Spectrum of Public Participation was developed by the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) to help clarify the role of the public (or community) in planning and decision-making, and how much influence the community has over planning or decision-making processes. It identifies five levels of public participation (or community engagement). The further to the right on the Spectrum, the more influence the community has over decisions, and each level can be appropriate depending on the context. It is important to recognise they are levels; not steps. For each level it each articulates the public... (More >)
Fighting Illegal Fishing With Big Data
Emily Matchar in Smithsonian: “In many ways, the ocean is the Wild West. The distances are vast, the law enforcement agents few and far between, and the legal jurisdiction often unclear. In this environment, illegal activity flourishes. Illegal fishing is so common that experts estimate as much as a third of fish sold in the U.S. was fished illegally. This illegal fishing decimates the ocean’s already dwindling fish populations and gives rise to modern slavery, where fishermen are tricked onto vessels and forced to work, sometimes for years. A new use of data technology aims to help curb these... (More >)
From Nairobi to Manila, mobile phones are changing the lives of bus riders
Shomik Mehnidrata at Transport for Development Blog: “Every day around the world, millions of people rely on buses to get around. In many cities, these services carry the bulk of urban trips, especially in Africa and Latin America. They are known by many different names—matatus, dalalas, minibus taxis, colectivos, diablos rojos, micros, etc.—but all have one thing in common: they are either hardly regulated… or not regulated at all. Although buses play a critical role in the daily life of many urban dwellers, there are a variety of complaints that have spurred calls for improvement and reform. However, we... (More >)
Connecting the dots: Building the case for open data to fight corruption
Web Foundation: “This research, published with Transparency International, measures the progress made by 5 key countries in implementing the G20 Anti-Corruption Open Data Principles. These principles, adopted by G20 countries in 2015, committed countries to increasing and improving the publication of public information, driving forward open data as a tool in anti-corruption efforts. However, this research – looking at Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa – finds a disappointing lack of progress. No country studied has released all the datasets identified as being key to anti-corruption and much of the information is hard to find and hard use.... (More >)
