Regulating the Regulators: Tracing the Emergence of the Political Transparency Laws in Chile

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference Paper by Bettina Schorr: “Due to high social inequalities and weak public institutions, political corruption and the influence of business elites on policy-makers are widespread in the Andean region. The consequences for the opportunities of sustainable development are serious: regulation limiting harmful business activities or (re-)distributive reforms are difficult to achieve and public resources often end up as private gains instead of serving development purposes.

Given international and domestic pressures, political corruption has reached the top of the political agendas in many countries. However, frequently transparency goals do not materialize into new binding policies or, when reforms are enacted, they suffer from severe implementation gaps.

The paper analyses transparency politics in Chile where a series of reforms regarding political transparency were implemented since 2014. Hence, Chile counts among the few successful cases in the region. By tracing the process that led to the emergence of new transparency policies in Chile, the paper elaborates an analytical framework for the explanation of institutional innovation in the case of political transparency. In particular, the study emphasizes the importance of civil society actors´ involvement in the whole policy cycle, particularly in the stages of formulation, implementation and evaluation….(More)”.

Reach is crowdsourcing street criminal incidents to reduce crime in Lima

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Krumholtz at LATAM Tech: “Unfortunately, in Latin America and many other places around the world, robberies are a part of urban life. Moisés Salazar of Lima has been a victim of petty crime in the streets, which is what led him to create Reach.

The application that markets itself as a kind of Waze for street crime alerts users through a map of incident reports or crimes that display visibly on your phone….

Salazar said that Reach helps users before, during and after incidents that could victimize them. That’s because the map allows users to avoid certain areas where a crime may have just happened or is being carried out.

In addition, there is a panic button that users can push if they find themselves in danger or in need of authorities. After the fact, that data then gets made public and can be analyzed by expert users or authorities wanting to see which incidents occur most commonly and where they occur.

Reach is very similar to the U.S. application Citizen, which is a crime avoidance tool used in major metropolitan areas in the U.S. like New York. That application alerts users to crime reports in their neighborhoods and gives them a forum to either record anything they witness or talk about it with other users….(More)”.

The Private Impact of Public Information: Landsat Satellite Maps and Gold Exploration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Abhishek Nagaraj: “The public sector provides many types of information, such as geographic and census maps, that firms use when making decisions. However, the economic implications of such information infrastructure remain unexamined.

This study estimates the impact of information from Landsat, a NASA satellite mapping program, on the discovery of new deposits by large and small firms in the gold exploration industry. Using a simple theoretical framework, I argue that public sector information guides firms on the viability of risky projects and increases the likelihood of project success.

This effect is especially relevant for smaller firms, who face higher project costs and are particularly deterred from engaging in risky projects. I test the predictions of this framework by exploiting idiosyncratic timing variation in Landsat coverage across regions. Landsat maps nearly doubled the rate of significant gold discoveries after a region was mapped and increased the market share of smaller, junior firms from about 10% to 25%.

Public information infrastructure, including mapping efforts, seem to be an important, yet overlooked, driver of private-sector productivity and small business performance…(More)”

Governing Open Data Platforms to Cultivate Innovation Ecosystems: The Case of the Government of Buenos Aires

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carla Bonina, Ben Eaton and Stefan Henningsson: “Open Government Data (OGD) is increasingly an object of research. Whilst referred to as a platform problem, few studies examine the phenomenon using platform concepts. One challenge governments face is to establish thriving OGD ecosystems through appropriate platform governance. The governance of innovating complements on the demand side of platforms, such as services using OGD datasets by entrepreneurs for citizen users, is well studied in platform literature. However, understanding of the supply side and how third parties can be governed to help innovate platform core architecture, such a ministries sourcing quality datasets for OGD platforms, is lacking. In our preliminary study of emergent OGD platforms in Latin America, we construct a model extending concepts of boundary resources from the demand side to the supply side to expand our understanding of platform governance. In addition to contributing to platform governance theories, we improve our understanding of OGD platform ecosystem cultivation….(More)”.

Creating Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, and Rob Kitchin: “In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While “smart city” advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack.

This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils.

Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These chapters discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity. This book will be of interest to urban policymakers, as well as researchers in Regional Studies and Urban Planning…(More)”.

Blockchain Technologies for Social Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Launch of New Platform and Field Report:

Screen Shot 2018-10-31 at 2.33.43 PM“Blockchain technologies are a new form of data disclosure technologies that have received extensive coverage and attention because of their potential to transform (or “disrupt”) industry sectors – ranging from financial services and publishing to supply chain management and real-estate. Additionally, blockchain is increasingly believed to be capable of positively empowering underserved populations in a myriad of ways – from improving service delivery for homeless people in New York City to bringing the “unbanked” into the global economy. As such, blockchain has been heralded as an avenue for creating positive social change, or “Blockchange.”

Yet for all the enthusiasm, we know very little about how blockchain can actually impact social change — what kinds of applications can serve what needs, what technological attributes matter most, what risks are involved, and under what conditions blockchain can have maximum social impact.

Exploring Three Application Areas

Today, the GovLab is launching the Blockchange platform: a hub for research and evidence into blockchain’s capacity to create social change. In particular, we are exploring the promise and practice of blockchain for creating societal benefits and addressing information asymmetries through three applications: improved identity management, smart contracting, and the ability to track and trace transactions. Blockchange features a repository of Curated Examples of projects that are actively seeking to leverage blockchain for social change across each of the these three areas, as well as efforts to create an ecosystem of blockchain use for societal benefit.

Focus on Identity

In addition, the platform provides access to our first Blockchange Field Report, which focuses on Blockchain’s potential and limitation for trusted identity management.

Of the three types of Blockchange applications, identity should be considered  foundational because it a) plays a prominent role in social change; b) underpins most other blockchange applications; and c) provides a necessary missing ID protocol layer of the Internet.

The field report, Blockchan.ge: Blockchain Technologies for Social Change – Field Report on the Emergent Use of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Identity Management, was developed through a yearlong exploration project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Our initial analysis centered on the current theory, practice and dominant narratives in the blockchain and identity spaces – and at the nexus of the two….(More)”.

Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by W. Kip Viscusi: “Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people’s lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial “cost of death” to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach–the value of a statistical life, or VSL—and persuasively shows how its more widespread use could create a safer and more equitable society for everyone.

In the 1980s, W. Kip Viscusi used the method to demonstrate that the benefits of requiring businesses to label hazardous chemicals immensely outweighed the costs. VSL is the risk-reward trade-off that people make about their health when considering risky job choices. With it, Viscusi calculated how much more money workers would demand to take on hazardous jobs, boosting calculated benefits by an order of magnitude. His current estimate of the value of a statistical life is $10 million. In this book, Viscusi provides a comprehensive look at all aspects of economic and policy efforts to price lives, including controversial topics such as whether older people’s lives are worth less and richer people’s lives are worth more. He explains why corporations need to abandon the misguided cost-of-death approach, how the courts can profit from increased application of VSL in assessing liability and setting damages, and how other countries consistently undervalue risks to life.

Pricing Lives proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world….(More)”.

Statistics Canada promises more detailed portrait of Canadians with fewer surveys

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bill Curry at The Globe and Mail: “Canadians are increasingly shunning phone surveys, but they could still be providing Statistics Canada with valuable data each time they flush the toilet or flash their debit card.

The national statistics agency laid out an ambitious plan Thursday to overhaul the way it collects and reports on issues ranging from cannabis and opioid use to market-moving information on unemployment and economic growth.

According to four senior Statscan officials, the agency is in the midst of a major transformation as it adapts to a world of big data collected by other government agencies as well as private sector actors such as banks, cellphone companies and digital-based companies like Uber.

At its core, the shift means the agency will become less reliant on traditional phone surveys or having businesses fill out forms to report their sales data. Instead, Statscan is reaching agreements with other government departments and private companies in order to gain access to their raw data, such as point-of-sale information. According to agency officials, such arrangements reduce the reporting paperwork faced by businesses while creating the potential for Statscan to produce faster and more reliable information.

Key releases such as labour statistics or reporting on economic growth could come out sooner, reducing the lag time between the end of a quarter and reporting on results. Officials said economic data that is released quarterly could shift to monthly reporting. The greater access to raw data sources will also allow for more localized reporting at the neighbourhood level….(More)”.

Houston’s $6 Billion Census Problem: Frightened Immigrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Natasha Rausch at Bloomberg: “At Houston’s City Hall last week, Mayor Sylvester Turner gathered with company CEOs, university professors, police officers, politicians and local judges to discuss a $6 billion problem they all have in common: the 2020 census.

City officials and business leaders are worried about people like 21-year-old Ana Espinoza, a U.S. citizen by birth who lives with undocumented relatives. Espinoza has no intention of answering the census because she worries it could expose her family and get them deported….

Getting an accurate count has broad economic implications across the city, said Laura Murillo, chief executive officer of the Hispanic Chamber. “For everyone, the census is important. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat, black or white or green.”…

For growing businesses, the census is crucial for understanding the population they’re serving in different regions. Enterprise Rent-A-Car used the 2010 census to help diversify the company’s employee base. The data prompted Enterprise to staff a new location in Houston with Spanish-speaking employees to better serve area customers, said the company’s human resources manager Phil Dyson.

“It’s been one of our top locations,” he said.

Doing the Math

Texas stands to lose at least $1,161 in federal funding for each person not counted, according to a March report by Andrew Reamer, a research professor at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. Multiplied by the estimated 506,000 unathorized immigrants who live in the nation’s fourth-largest city, that puts at stake about $6 billion for Houston over the 10 years the census applies.

That’s just for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The potential loss is even larger when grants are taken into account for items like highways and community development, he said…(More)”.

How Big Tech Is Working With Nonprofits and Governments to Turn Data Into Solutions During Disasters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kelsey Sutton at Adweek: “As Hurricane Michael approached the Florida Panhandle, the Florida Division of Emergency Management tapped a tech company for help.

Over the past year, Florida’s DEM has worked closely with GasBuddy, a Boston-based app that uses crowdsourced data to identify fuel prices and inform first responders and the public about fuel availability or power outages at gas stations during storms. Since Hurricane Irma in 2017, GasBuddy and DEM have worked together to survey affected areas, helping Florida first responders identify how best to respond to petroleum shortages. With help from the location intelligence company Cuebiq, GasBuddy also provides estimated wait times at gas stations during emergencies.

DEM first noticed GasBuddy’s potential in 2016, when the app was collecting and providing data about fuel availability following a pipeline leak.

“DEM staff recognized how useful such information would be to Florida during any potential future disasters, and reached out to GasBuddy staff to begin a relationship,” a spokesperson for the Florida State Emergency Operations Center explained….

Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and chief research and development officer at the Governance Laboratory at New York University, advocates for private corporations to partner with public institutions and NGOs. Private data collected by corporations is richer, more granular and more up-to-date than data collected through traditional social science methods, making that data useful for noncorporate purposes like research, Verhulst said. “Those characteristics are extremely valuable if you are trying to understand how society works,” Verhulst said….(More)”.