Artificial Intelligence: Risks to Privacy and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karl Manheim and Lyric Kaplan at Yale Journal of Law and Technology: “A “Democracy Index” is published annually by the Economist. For 2017, it reported that half of the world’s countries scored lower than the previous year. This included the United States, which was demoted from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy.” The principal factor was “erosion of confidence in government and public institutions.” Interference by Russia and voter manipulation by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 presidential election played a large part in that public disaffection.

Threats of these kinds will continue, fueled by growing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to manipulate the preconditions and levers of democracy. Equally destructive is AI’s threat to decisional andinforma-tional privacy. AI is the engine behind Big Data Analytics and the Internet of Things. While conferring some consumer benefit, their principal function at present is to capture personal information, create detailed behavioral profiles and sell us goods and agendas. Privacy, anonymity and autonomy are the main casualties of AI’s ability to manipulate choices in economic and political decisions.

The way forward requires greater attention to these risks at the nation-al level, and attendant regulation. In its absence, technology giants, all of whom are heavily investing in and profiting from AI, will dominate not only the public discourse, but also the future of our core values and democratic institutions….(More)”.

The ‘Gateway Drug to Democracy’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Video by Jay Arthur Sterrenberg at The Atlantic: “The fastest way to reveal a nation’s priorities is to take a look at its budget. Where money is allocated, improvements and expansions are made; where costs are cut, institutions and policies wither. In America and other similar democracies, political candidates campaign on budget promises, but it can be difficult to maintain transparency—and enforce accountability—once elected into office.

“Budgets are the essence of what government does,” says a woman at a community meeting in Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s short documentary, Public Money. “We’re cutting out the rhetoric about budgeting and allowing community members to make direct decisions about money in our community.”

She’s talking about participatory budgeting, an innovative democratic process that has been under way in New York City since 2011. Once a year, citizens in participating council districts across the city propose and vote on how to spend $1 million in their neighborhood.

“It results in better budget decisions,” the New York city council’s website reads, “because who better knows the needs of our community than the people who live there?”

Participatory budgeting was first introduced on a large scale in Porto Alegre, Brazil. “For over 25 years, there have been all kinds of massive improvements in city infrastructure, and especially improved conditions in poorer neighborhoods,” Sterrenberg told The Atlantic. Today, there are more than 1,500 participatory budgets around the world.

Public Money, from Meerkat Media Collective, follows one cycle of the participatory-budget process in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Residents are tasked with proposing project ideas, such as building a community center in the local library, installing security cameras in the park, and fixing potholes in the streets. Committees workshop, debate, and ultimately vote for their favorite projects, which—once deemed viable by the city government—go to the ballot. A public vote is held, and winning projects are funded.

The film takes an observational approach to what Sterrenberg describes as a “hard-to-explain process that has such potential to overhaul our politics.”…(More)”

Getting Serious About Evidence-Based Public Management

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Philip Joyce at Governing: “In a column in this space in 2015, the late Paul L. Posner, who was one of the most thoughtful observers of public management and intergovernmental relations of the last half-century, decried the disappearance of report cards of government management. In particular, he issued an appeal for someone to move into the space that had been occupied by the Government Performance Project, the decade-long effort funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to assess the management of states and large local governments.

If anything, what Posner advocated is needed even more today. In an era in which the call for evidence-based decision-making is ubiquitous in government, we have been lacking any real analysis, or even description, of what states and local governments are doing. A couple of recent notable efforts, however, have moved to partially fill this void at the state level.

First, a 2017 report by Pew and the MacArthur Foundation looked across the states at ways in which evidence-based policymaking was used in human services. The study looked at six types of actions that could be undertaken by states and identified states that were engaging, in some way, across four specific policy areas (behavioral health, child welfare, criminal justice and juvenile justice): defining levels of evidence (40 states); inventorying existing programs (50); comparing costs and benefits at a program level (17); reporting outcomes in the budget (42); targeting funds to evidence-based programs (50); and requiring action through state law (34)….

The second notable effort is an ongoing study of the use of data and evidence in the states that was launched recently by the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO). Previously, no one had attempted to summarize and categorize all of the initiatives – including those with their impetus in both laws and executive orders — underway across the 50 states. NASBO’s inventory of “Statewide Initiatives to Advance the Use of Data & Evidence for Decision-Making” is part of a set of resources aimed at providing state officials and other interested parties with a summary demonstrating the breadth of these initiatives.

The resulting “living” inventory, which is updated as additional practices are discovered, categorizes these state efforts into five types, listing a total of 90 as of this writing: data analytics (13 initiatives in 9 states), evidence-based policymaking (12 initiatives in 10 states), performance budgeting (18 initiatives in 16 states), performance management (27 initiatives in 24 states) and process improvement (20 initiatives in 19 states).

NASBO acknowledges that it is difficult to draw a bright line between these categories and classifies the initiatives according to the one that appears to be the most dominant. Nevertheless, this inventory provides a very useful catalogue of what states report they are doing, with links to further resources that make it a valuable resource for those considering launching similar initiatives….(More)”.

Declaration of Cities Coalition for Digital Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New York City, Barcelona and Amsterdam: “We, the undersigned cities, formally come together to form the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, to protect and uphold human rights on the internet at the local and global level.

The internet has become inseparable from our daily lives. Yet, every day, there are new cases of digital rights abuse, misuse and misinformation and concentration of power around the world: freedom of expression being censored; personal information, including our movements and communications, monitored, being shared and sold without consent; ‘black box’ algorithms being used to make unaccountable decisions; social media being used as a tool of harassment and hate speech; and democratic processes and public opinion being undermined.

As cities, the closest democratic institutions to the people, we are committed to eliminating impediments to harnessing technological opportunities that improve the lives of our constituents, and to providing trustworthy and secure digital services and infrastructures that support our communities. We strongly believe that human rights principles such as privacy, freedom of expression, and democracy must be incorporated by design into digital platforms starting with locally-controlled digital infrastructures and services.

As a coalition, and with the support of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), we will share best practices, learn from each other’s challenges and successes, and coordinate common initiatives and actions. Inspired by the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition (IRPC), the work of 300 international stakeholders over the past ten years, we are committed to the following five evolving principles:

01.Universal and equal access to the internet, and digital literacy

02.Privacy, data protection and security

03.Transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination of data, content and algorithms

04.Participatory Democracy, diversity and inclusion

05.Open and ethical digital service standards”

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)”.