Twiplomacy Study 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “Social media has become diplomacy’s significant other. It has gone from being an afterthought to being the very first thought of world leaders and governments across the globe, as audiences flock to their newsfeeds for the latest news. This recent worldwide embrace of online channels has brought with it a wave of openness and transparency that has never been experienced before. Social media provides a platform for unconditional communication, and has become a communicator’s most powerful tool. Twitter in particular, has even become a diplomatic ‘barometer, a tool used to analyze and forecast international relations.

There is a vast array of social networks for government communicators to choose from. While some governments and foreign ministries still ponder the pros and cons of any social media engagement, others have gone beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to reach their target audiences, even embracing emerging platforms such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Telegram where communications are under the radar and almost impossible to track.

Burson-Marsteller’s 2016 Twiplomacy study has been expanded to include other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as more niche digital diplomacy platforms such as Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google+,Periscope and Vine.

There is a growing digital divide between governments that are active on social media with dedicated teams and those that see digital engagement as an afterthought and so devote few resources to it. There is still a small number of government leaders who refuse to embrace the new digital world and, for these few, their community managers struggle to bring their organizations into the digital century.

Over the past year, the most popular world leaders on social media have continued to increase their audiences, while new leaders have emerged in the Twittersphere. Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama have all made a significant impact on Twitter and Facebook over the past year.

Obama’s social media communication has become even more personal through his @POTUS Twitter account and Facebook page, and the first “president of the social media age” will leave the White House in January 2017 with an incredible 137 million fans, followers and subscribers. Beyond merely Twitter and Facebook, world leaders such as the Argentinian President have also become active on new channels like Snapchat to reach a younger audience and potential future voters. Similarly, a number of governments, mainly in Latin America, have started to use Periscope, a cost-effective medium to live-stream their press conferences.

We have witnessed occasional public interactions between leaders, namely the friendly fighting talk between the Obamas, the Queen of England and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Foreign ministries continue to expand their diplomatic and digital networks by following each other and creating coalitions on specific topics, in particular the fight against ISIS….

A number of world leaders, including the President of Colombia and Australia’s Julie Bishop, also use emojis to brighten up their tweets, creating what can be described as a new diplomatic sign language. The Foreign Ministry in Finland has even produced its own set of 49 emoticons depicting summer and winter in the Nordic country.

We asked a number of digital leaders of some of the best connected foreign ministries and governments to share their thoughts on their preferred social media channel and examples of their best campaigns on our blog. You will learn:

Here is our list of the #Twiplomacy Top Twenty Twitterati in 2016….(More)”

#OpenZika project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Community Grid: “In February 2016, the World Health Organization declared the Zika virus to be a global public health emergency due to its rapid spread and new concerns about its link to a rise in neurological conditions.

The virus is rapidly spreading in new geographic areas such as the Americas, where people have not been previously exposed to the disease and therefore have little immunity to it. In April 2016, the Centers for Disease Control announced that a rise in severe neurological disorders, especially in children, has been linked to the Zika virus. Some pregnant women who have contracted the Zika virus have given birth to infants with a condition called microcephaly, which results in brain development issues typically leading to severe mental deficiencies. In other cases, paralysis and other neurological problems can occur, even in adults.

Problem

Currently, there is no vaccine to provide immunity to the disease and no antiviral drug for curing Zika, although various efforts are underway. Even though the virus was first identified in 1947, there has been little research since then, because the symptoms of the infection are usually mild. However, new data on links between Zika and microcephaly or other neurological issues have revealed that the disease may not be so benign, prompting the need for intensified research efforts.

Proposed Solution

The OpenZika project on World Community Grid aims to identify drug candidates to treat the Zika virus in someone who has been infected. The project will target proteins that the Zika virus likely uses to survive and spread in the body, based on what is known from similar diseases, such as dengue virus and yellow fever. In order to develop an anti-Zika drug, researchers need to identify which of millions of chemical compounds might be effective at interfering with these key proteins. The effectiveness of each compound will be tested in virtual experiments, called “docking calculations,” performed on World Community Grid volunteers’ computers and Android devices. These calculations would help researchers focus on the most likely compounds that may eventually lead to an antiviral medicine….(More)”

Improving patient care by bridging the divide between doctors and data scientists

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 at the Conversation: “While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, doctors struggle daily with using information and techniques available right now while carefully adopting new concepts and treatments. As a practicing doctor, I deal with uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions all the time….At the moment, a report from the National Academy of Medicine tells us, most doctors base most of their everyday decisions on guidelines from (sometimes biased) expert opinions or small clinical trials. It would be better if they were from multicenter, large, randomized controlled studies, with tightly controlled conditions ensuring the results are as reliable as possible. However, those are expensive and difficult to perform, and even then often exclude a number of important patient groups on the basis of age, disease and sociological factors.

Part of the problem is that health records are traditionally kept on paper, making them hard to analyze en masse. As a result, most of what medical professionals might have learned from experiences was lost – or at least was inaccessible to another doctor meeting with a similar patient.

A digital system would collect and store as much clinical data as possible from as many patients as possible. It could then use information from the past – such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, heart rate and other measurements of patients’ body functions – to guide future doctors to the best diagnosis and treatment of similar patients.

Industrial giants such as Google, IBM, SAP and Hewlett-Packard have also recognized the potential for this kind of approach, and are now working on how to leverage population data for the precise medical care of individuals.

Collaborating on data and medicine

At the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have begun to collect large amounts of detailed patient data in the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care (MIMIC). It is a database containing information from 60,000 patient admissions to the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The data in MIMIC has been meticulously scoured so individual patients cannot be recognized, and is freely shared online with the research community.

But the database itself is not enough. We bring together front-line clinicians (such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors) to identify questions they want to investigate, and data scientists to conduct the appropriate analyses of the MIMIC records. This gives caregivers and patients the best individualized treatment options in the absence of a randomized controlled trial.

Bringing data analysis to the world

At the same time we are working to bring these data-enabled systems to assist with medical decisions to countries with limited health care resources, where research is considered an expensive luxury. Often these countries have few or no medical records – even on paper – to analyze. We can help them collect health data digitally, creating the potential to significantly improve medical care for their populations.

This task is the focus of Sana, a collection of technical, medical and community experts from across the globe that is also based in our group at MIT. Sana has designed a digital health information system specifically for use by health providers and patients in rural and underserved areas.

At its core is an open-source system that uses cellphones – common even in poor and rural nations – to collect, transmit and store all sorts of medical data. It can handle not only basic patient data such as height and weight, but also photos and X-rays, ultrasound videos, and electrical signals from a patient’s brain (EEG) and heart (ECG).

Partnering with universities and health organizations, Sana organizes training sessions (which we call “bootcamps”) and collaborative workshops (called “hackathons”) to connect nurses, doctors and community health workers at the front lines of care with technology experts in or near their communities. In 2015, we held bootcamps and hackathons in Colombia, Uganda, Greece and Mexico. The bootcamps teach students in technical fields like computer science and engineering how to design and develop health apps that can run on cellphones. Immediately following the bootcamp, the medical providers join the group and the hackathon begins…At the end of the day, though, the purpose is not the apps….(More)

An App to Save Syria’s Lost Generation? What Technology Can and Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Latonero in Foreign Affairs: ” In January this year, when the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe had hit its peak—more than a million had crossed into Europe over the course of 2015—the U.S. State Department and Google hosted a forum of over 100 technology experts. The goal was to “bridge the education gap for Syrian refugee children.” Speaking to the group assembled at Stanford University, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $1.7 million prize “to develop a smartphone app that can help Syrian children learn how to read and improve their wellbeing.” The competition, known as EduApp4Syria, is being run by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and is supported by the Australian government and the French mobile company Orange.

Less than a month later, a group called Techfugees brought together over 100 technologists for a daylong brainstorm in New York City focused exclusively on education solutions. “We are facing the largest refugee crisis since World War II,” said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to open the conference. “It is a twenty-first-century crisis and we need a twenty-first-century solution.” Among the more promising, according to Power, were apps that enable “refugees to access critical services,” new “web platforms connecting refugees with one another,” and “education programs that teach refugees how to code.”

For example, the nonprofit PeaceGeeks created the Services Advisor app for the UN Refugee Agency, which maps the location of shelters, food distribution centers, and financial services in Jordan….(More)”

How to implement “open innovation” in city government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Victor Mulas at the Worldbank: “City officials are facing increasingly complex challenges. As urbanization rates grow, cities face higher demand for services from a larger and more densely distributed population. On the other hand, rapid changes in the global economy are affecting cities that struggle to adapt to these changes, often resulting in economic depression and population drain.

“Open innovation” is the latest buzz word circulating in forums on how to address the increased volume and complexity of challenges for cities and governments in general.

But, what is open innovation?

Traditionally, public services were designed and implemented by a group of public officials. Open innovation allows us to design these services with multiple actors, including those who stand to benefit from the services, resulting in more targeted and better tailored services, often implemented through partnership with these stakeholders. Open innovation allows cities to be more productive in providing services while addressing increased demand and higher complexity of services to be delivered.

New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam and many other cities have been experimenting with this concept, introducing challenges for entrepreneurs to address common problems or inviting stakeholders to co-create new services.   Open innovation has gone from being a “buzzword” to another tool in the city officials’ toolbox.

However, even cities that embrace open innovation are still struggling to implement it beyond a few specific areas.  This is understandable, as introducing open innovation practically requires a new way of doing things for city governments, which tend to be complex and bureaucratic organizations.

Counting with an engaged mayor is not enough to bring this kind of transformation. Changing the behavior of city officials requires their buy-in, it can’t be done top down

We have been introducing open innovation to cities and governments for the last three years in Chile, Colombia, Egypt and Mozambique. We have addressed specific challenges and iteratively designed and tested a systematic methodology to introduce open innovation in government through both a top-down and a bottom-up approaches. We have tested this methodology in Colombia (Cali, Barranquilla and Manizales) and Chile (metropolitan area of Gran Concepción).   We have identified “internal champions” (i.e., government officials who advocate the new methodology), and external stakeholders organized in an “innovation hub” that provides long-term sustainability and scalability of interventions. We believe that this methodology is easily applicable beyond cities to other government entities at the regional and national levels. …To understand how the methodology practically works, we describe in this report the process and its results in its application in the city area of Gran Concepción, in Chile. For this activity, the urban transport sector was selected and the target of intervention were the regional and municipal government departments in charge or urban transport in the area of Gran Concepción. The activity in Chile resulted in a threefold impact:

  1. It catalyzed the adoption of the bottom-up smart city model following this new methodology throughout Chile; and
  2. It expanded the implementation and mainstreaming of the methodologies developed and tested through this activity in other World Bank projects.

More information about this activity in Chile can be found in the Smart City Gran Concepcion webpage…(More)”

Open data + increased disclosure = better public-private partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bloomgarden and Georg Neumann at Fomin Blog: “The benefits of open and participatory public procurement are increasingly being recognized by international bodies such as the Group of 20 major economies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and multilateral development banks. Value for money, more competition, and better goods and services for citizens all result from increased disclosure of contract data. Greater openness is also an effective tool to fight fraud and corruption.

However, because public-private partnerships (PPPs) are planned during a long timeframe and involve a large number of groups, therefore, implementing greater levels of openness in disclosure is complicated. This complexity can be a challenge to good design. Finding a structured and transparent approach to managing PPP contract data is fundamental for a project to be accepted and used by its local community….

In open contracting, all data is disclosed during the public procurement process—from the planning stage, to the bidding and awarding of the contract, to the monitoring of the implementation. A global open source data standard is used to publish that data, which is already being implemented in countries as diverse as Canada, Paraguay, and the Ukraine. Using open data throughout the contracting process provides opportunities to innovate in managing bids, fixing problems, and integrating feedback as needed. Open contracting contributes to the overall social and environmental sustainability of infrastructure investments.

In the case of Mexico’s airport, the project publishes details of awarded contracts, including visualizing the flow of funds and detailing the full amounts of awarded contracts and renewable agreements. Standardized, timely, and open data that follow global standards such as the Open Contracting Data Standard will make this information useful for analysis of value for money, cost-benefit, sustainability, and monitoring performance. Crucially, open contracting will shift the focus from the inputs into a PPP, to the outputs: the goods and services being delivered.

Benefits of open data for PPPs

We think that better and open data will lead to better PPPs. Here’s how:

1. Using user feedback to fix problems

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has been a leader in transparent PPP contracts with full proactive disclosure of the contract terms, as well as of other relevant project information—a practice that puts a government under more scrutiny but makes for better projects in the long run.

According to Marcos Siqueira, former head of the PPP Unit in Minas Gerais, “An adequate transparency policy can provide enough information to users so they can become contract watchdogs themselves.”

For example, a public-private contract was signed in 2014 to build a $300 million waste treatment plant for 2.5 million people in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. As the team members conducted appraisals, they disclosed them on the Internet. In addition, the team held around 20 public meetings and identified all the stakeholders in the project. One notable result of the sharing and discussion of this information was the relocation of the facility to a less-populated area. When the project went to the bidding phase, it was much closer to the expectations of its various stakeholders.

2. Making better decisions on contracts and performance

Chile has been a leader in developing PPPs (which it refers to as concessions) for several decades, in a range of sectors: urban and inter-urban roads, seaports, airports, hospitals, and prisons. The country tops the list for the best enabling environment for PPPs in Latin America and the Caribbean, as measured by Infrascope, an index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the IDB Group.

Chile’s distinction is that it discloses information on performance of PPPs that are underway. The government’s Concessions Unit regularly publishes summaries of the projects during their different phases, including construction and operation. The reports are non-technical, yet include all the necessary information to understand the scope of the project…(More)”

Teenage scientists enlisted to fight Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ShareAmerica: “A mosquito’s a mosquito, right? Not when it comes to Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Only two of the estimated 3,000 species of mosquitoes are capable of carrying the Zika virus in the United States, but estimates of their precise range remain hazy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists could start getting better information about these pesky, but important, insects with the help of plastic cups, brown paper towels and teenage biology students.

As part of the Invasive Mosquito Project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, secondary-school students nationwide are learning about mosquito populations and helping fill the knowledge gaps.

Simple experiment, complex problem

The experiment works like this: First, students line the cups with paper, then fill two-thirds of the cups with water. Students place the plastic cups outside, and after a week, the paper is dotted with what looks like specks of dirt. These dirt particles are actually mosquito eggs, which the students can identify and classify.

Students then upload their findings to a national crowdsourced database. Crowdsourcing uses the collective intelligence of online communities to “distribute” problem solving across a massive network.

Entomologist Lee Cohnstaedt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinates the program, and he’s already thinking about expansion. He said he hopes to have one-fifth of U.S. schools participate in the mosquito species census. He also plans to adapt lesson plans for middle schools, Scouting troops and gardening clubs.

Already, crowdsourcing has “collected better data than we could have working alone,” he told the Associated Press….

In addition to mosquito tracking, crowdsourcing has been used to develop innovative responses to a number of complex challenges, from climate change to archaeologyto protein modeling….(More)”

Case Studies of Government Use of Big Data in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Roberto da Mota Ueti, Daniela Fernandez Espinosa, Laura Rafferty, Patrick C. K. Hung in Big Data Applications and Use Cases: “Big Data is changing our world with masses of information stored in huge servers spread across the planet. This new technology is changing not only companies but governments as well. Mexico and Brazil, two of the most influential countries in Latin America, are entering a new era and as a result, facing challenges in all aspects of public policy. Using Big Data, the Brazilian Government is trying to decrease spending and use public money better by grouping public information with stored information on citizens in public services. With new reforms in education, finances and telecommunications, the Mexican Government is taking on a bigger role in efforts to channel the country’s economic policy into an improvement of the quality of life of their habitants. It is known that technology is an important part for sub-developed countries, who are trying to make a difference in certain contexts such as reducing inequality or regulating the good usage of economic resources. The good use of Big Data, a new technology that is in charge of managing a big quantity of information, can be crucial for the Mexican Government to reach the goals that have been set in the past under Peña Nieto’s administration. This article focuses on how the Brazilian and Mexican Governments are managing the emerging technologies of Big Data and how it includes them in social and industrial projects to enhance the growth of their economies. The article also discusses the benefits of these uses of Big Data and the possible problems that occur related to security and privacy of information….(More)’

Big data: big power shifts?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Internet Policy Review: “Facing general conceptions of the power effects of big data, this thematic edition is interested in studies that scrutinise big data and power in concrete fields of application. It brings together scholars from different disciplines who analyse the fields agriculture, education, border control and consumer policy. As will be made explicit in the following, each of the articles tells us something about firstly, what big data is and how it relates to power. They secondly also shed light on how we should shape “the big data society” and what research questions need to be answered to be able to do so….

The ethics of big data in big agriculture
Isabelle M. Carbonell, University of California, Santa Cruz

Regulating “big data education” in Europe: lessons learned from the US
Yoni Har Carmel, University of Haifa

The borders, they are a-changin’! The emergence of socio-digital borders in the EU
Magdalena König, Maastricht University

Beyond consent: improving data protection through consumer protection law
Michiel Rhoen, Leiden University…

(More)”

Moneyballing Criminal Justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Milgram in the Atlantic: “…One area in which the potential of data analysis is still not adequately realized,however, is criminal justice. This is somewhat surprising given the success of CompStat, a law enforcement management tool that uses data to figure out how police resources can be used to reduce crime and hold law enforcement officials accountable for results. CompStat is widely credited with contributing to New York City’s dramatic reduction in serious crime over the past two decades. Yet data-driven decision-making has not expanded to the whole of the criminal justice system.

But it could. And, in this respect, the front end of the system — the part of the process that runs from arrest through sentencing — is particularly important. Atthis stage, police, prosecutors, defenders, and courts make key choices about how to deal with offenders — choices that, taken together, have an enormous impact on crime. Yet most jurisdictions do not collect or analyze the data necessary to know whether these decisions are being made in a way that accomplishes the most important goals of the criminal justice system: increased public safety,decreased recidivism, reduced cost, and the fair, efficient administration of justice.

Even in jurisdictions where good data exists, a lack of technology is often an obstacle to using it effectively. Police, jails, courts, district attorneys, and public defenders each keep separate information systems, the data from which is almost never pulled together and analyzed in a way that could answer the questions that matter most: Who is in our criminal justice system? What crimes have been charged? What risks do individual offenders pose? And which option would best protect the public and make the best use of our limited resources?

While debates about prison over-crowding, three strikes laws, and mandatory minimum sentences have captured public attention, the importance of what happens between arrest and sentencing has gone largely unnoticed. Even though I ran the criminal justice system in New Jersey, one of the largest states in the country, I had not realized the magnitude of the pretrial issues until I was tasked by theLaura and John Arnold Foundation with figuring out which aspects of criminal justice had the most need and presented the greatest opportunity for reform….

Technology could help us leverage data to identify offenders who will pose unacceptable risks to society if they are not behind bars and distinguish them from those defendants who will have lower recidivism rates if they are supervised in the community or given alternatives to incarceration before trial. Likewise, it could help us figure out which terms of imprisonment, alternatives to incarceration, and other interventions work best–and for whom. And the list does not end there.

The truth is our criminal justice system already makes these decisions every day.But it makes them without knowing whether they’re the right ones. That needs to change. If data is powerful enough to transform baseball, health care, and education, it can do the same for criminal justice….(More)”

…(More).