Will data improve governance? It depends on the questions we ask

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Uma Kalkar, Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst in the Quaterly Inquiry of the Development Intelligence Lab: “…What are the key takeaways from our process and how does it relate to the Summit for Democracy? First, good questions serve as the bedrock for effective and data-driven decision-making across the governance ecosystem. Second, sourcing multidisciplinary and global experts allow us to paint a fuller picture of the hot-button issues and encourage a more nuanced understanding of priorities. Lastly, including the public as active participants in the process of designing questions can help to increase the legitimacy of and obtain a social impact for data efforts, as well as tap into the collective intelligence that exists across society….

A key focus for world leaders, civil society members, academics, and private sector representatives at the Summit for Democracy should not only be on how to promote open governance by democratising data and data science. It must also consider how we can democratise and improve the way we formulate and prioritise questions facing society. To paraphrase Albert Einstein’s famous quote: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes”….(More)”.

Citizen Empowerment through Digital Transformation in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Neeta Verma: “Technological innovations across the globe are bringing profound change to our society. Governments around the world are experiencing and embracing this technology-led shift. New platforms, emerging technologies, customizable products, and changing citizen demand and outlook towards government services are reshaping the whole journey. When it comes to the application of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in any sector, the Government of India has emerged as an early adopter of these technologies and has also focused on last-mile delivery of citizen-centric services.

Citizen Empowerment through Digital Transformation in Government takes us through the four-decade long transformational journey of various key sectors in India where ICT has played a major role in reimagining government services to citizens across the country. It touches upon the emergence of the National Informatics Centre as a premier technology institution of the Government of India and its collaborative efforts with the Central, State Governments, as well as the District level administration, to deliver best-in-class solutions.

Inspiring and informative, the book is filled with real-life transformation stories that have helped to lead the people and the Government of India to realize their vision of a digitally empowered nation….(More)”

Do Awards Incentivize Non-Winners to Work Harder on CSR?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jiangyan Li, Juelin Yin, Wei Shi, And Xiwei Yi: “As corporate lists and awards that rank and recognize firms for superior social reputation have proliferated in recent years, the field of CSR is also replete with various types of awards given out to firms or CEOs, such as Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” rankings and “Best 100 Companies to Work For” lists. Such awards serve to both reward and incentivize firms to become more dedicated to CSR. Prior research has primarily focused on the effects of awards on award-winning firms; however, the effectiveness and implications of such awards as incentives to non-winning firms remain understudied. Therefore, in the article of “Keeping up with the Joneses: Role of CSR Awards in Incentivizing Non-Winners’ CSR” published by Business & Society, we are curious about whether such CSR awards could successfully incentivize non-winning firms to catch up with their winning competitors.

Drawing on the awareness-motivation-capability (AMC) framework developed in the competitive dynamics literature, we use a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2015 to investigate how competitors’ CSR award winning can influence focal firms’ CSR. The empirical results show that non-winning firms indeed improve their CSR after their competitors have won CSR awards. However, non-winning firms’ improvement in CSR may vary in different scenarios. For instance, media exposure can play an important informational role in reducing information asymmetries and inducing competitive actions among competitors, therefore, non-winning firms’ improvement in CSR is more salient when award-winning firms are more visible in the media. Meanwhile, when CSR award winners perform better financially, non-winners will be more motivated to respond to their competitors’ wins. Further, firms with a higher level of prior CSR are more capable of improving their CSR and therefore are more likely to respond to their competitors’ wins…(More)”.

Patching Development: Information Politics and Social Change in India

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Rajesh Veeraraghavan: “How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient due to resistance from entrenched local power systems. In Patching Development, Rajesh Veeraraghavan presents an ethnography of one of the largest development programs in the world, the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and examines NREGA’s implementation in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He finds that the local system of power is extremely difficult to transform, not because of inertia, but because of coercive counter strategy from actors at the last mile and their ability to exploit information asymmetries. Upper-level NREGA bureaucrats in Andhra Pradesh do not possess the capacity to change the power axis through direct confrontation with local elites, but instead have relied on a continuous series of responses that react to local implementation and information, a process of patching development. “Patching development” is a top-down, fine-grained, iterative socio-technical process that makes local information about implementation visible through technology and enlists participation from marginalized citizens through social audits. These processes are neither neat nor orderly and have led to a contentious sphere where the exercise of power over documents, institutions and technology is intricate, fluid and highly situated. A highly original account with global significance, this book casts new light on the challenges and benefits of using information and technology in novel ways to implement development programs….(More)”.

A crowdsourced spreadsheet is the latest tool in Chinese tech worker organizing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by JS: “This week, thousands of Chinese tech workers are sharing information about their working schedules in an online spreadsheet. Their goal is to inform each other and new employees about overtime practices at different companies. 

This initiative for work-schedule transparency, titled Working Time, has gone viral. As of Friday—just three days after the project launched—the spreadsheet has already had millions of views and over 6000 entries. The creators also set up group chats on the Tencent-owned messaging platform, QQ, to invite discussion about the project—over 10000 people have joined as participants.

This initiative comes after the explosive 996.ICU campaign which took place in 2019 where hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the country participated in an online effort to demand the end of the 72-hour work week—9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

This year, multiple tech companies—with encouragement from the government—have ended overtime work practices that forced employees to work on Saturdays (or in some cases, alternating Saturdays). This has effectively ended 996, which was illegal to begin with. While an improvement, the data collected from this online spreadsheet shows that most tech workers still work long hours, either “1095” or “11105” (10am to 9pm or 11am to 10pm, 5 days a week). The spreadsheet also shows a non-negligible number of workers still working 6 days week.

Like the 996.ICU campaign, the creators of this spreadsheet are using GitHub to circulate and share info about the project. The first commit was made on Tuesday, October 12th. Only a few days later, the repo has been starred over 9500 times….(More)”.

Unpacking China’s game-changing data law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Shen Lu: “China’s National Congress passed the highly anticipated Personal Information Protection Law on Friday, a significant piece of legislation that will provide Chinese citizens significant privacy protections while also bolstering Beijing’s ambitions to set international norms in data protection.

China’s PIPL is not only key to Beijing’s vision for a next-generation digital economy; it is also likely to influence other countries currently adopting their own data protection laws.

The new law clearly draws inspiration from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and like its precursor is an effort to respond to genuine grassroots demand for greater right to consumer privacy. But what distinguishes China’s PIPL from the GDPR and other laws on the books is China’s emphasis on national security, which is a broadly defined trump card that triggers data localization requirements and cross-border data flow restrictions….

The PIPL reinforces Beijing’s ambition to defend its digital sovereignty. If foreign entities “engage in personal information handling activities that violate the personal information rights and interests of citizens of the People’s Republic of China, or harm the national security or public interest of the People’s Republic of China,” China’s enforcement agencies may blacklist them, “limiting or prohibiting the provision of personal information to them.” And China may reciprocate against countries or regions that adopt “discriminatory prohibitions, limitations or other similar measures against the People’s Republic of China in the area of personal information protection.”…

Many Asian governments are in the process of writing or rewriting data protection laws. Vietnam, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all inserted localization provisions in their respective data protection laws. “[The PIPL framework] can provide encouragement to countries that would be tempted to use the data protection law that includes data transfer provisions to add this national security component,” Girot said.

This new breed of data protection law could lead to a fragmented global privacy landscape. Localization requirements can be a headache for transnational tech companies, particularly cloud service providers. And the CAC, one of the data regulators in charge of implementing and enforcing the PIPL, is also tasked with implementing a national security policy, which could present a challenge to international cooperation….(More)“

Afghan people face an impossible choice over their digital footprint

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nighat Dad at New Scientist: “The swift progress of the Taliban in Afghanistan has been truly shocking…Though the Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told the press conference that it wouldn’t be seeking “revenge” against people who had opposed them, many Afghan people are understandably still worried. On top of this, they — including those who worked with Western forces and international NGOs, as well as foreign journalists — have been unable to leave the country, as flight capacity has been taken over by Western countries evacuating their citizens.

As such, people have been attempting to move quickly to erase their digital footprints, built up during the 20 years of the previous US-backed governments. Some Afghan activists have been reaching out to me directly to help them put in place robust mobile security and asking how to trigger a mass deletion of their data.

The last time the Taliban was in power, social media barely existed and smartphones had yet to take off. Now, around 4 million people in Afghanistan regularly use social media. Yet, despite the huge rise of digital technologies, a comparative rise in digital security hasn’t happened.

There are few digital security resources that are suitable for people in Afghanistan to use. The leading guide on how to properly delete your digital history by Human Rights First is a brilliant place to start. But unfortunately it is only available in English and unofficially in Farsi. There are also some other guides available in Farsi thanks to the thriving community of tech enthusiasts who have been working for human rights activists living in Iran for years.

However, many of these guides will still be unintelligible for those in Afghanistan who speak Dari or Pashto, for example…

People in Afghanistan who worked with Western forces also face an impossible choice as countries where they might seek asylum often require digital proof of their collaboration. Keep this evidence and they risk persecution from the Taliban, delete it and they may find their only way out no longer available.

Millions of people’s lives will now be vastly different due to the regime change. Digital security feels like one thing that could have been sorted out in advance. We are yet to see exactly how Taliban 2.0 will be different to that which went before. And while the so-called War on Terror appears to be over, I fear a digital terror offensive may just be beginning…(More).

“We do not feel safe”: A Kabul-based crisis alert app struggles to protect its own employees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Q and A with Sara Wahedi by Hajira Maryam: “Ehtesab, a Kabul-based startup, emerged out of a personal security-related incident that Sara Wahedi, a former Afghan government employee, experienced in May 2018. After witnessing a suicide bomb attack firsthand, Wahedi rushed home, where she could see militants roaming the streets from her balcony. The city was put on lockdown for 12 hours and left without electricity. No one, Wahedi said, knew when the electricity would be restored or when roads would be cleared. The authorities were of little help. 

“Since that moment, I kept pondering about the idea of accountability and information provision. I jotted down a few words in different languages for accountability, namely Dari and Pashto. That was the moment the term Ehtesab came to my mind.” 

Ehtesab means “accountability” in Dari and Pashto, and the app, formally launched in March 2020, offers streamlined security-related information, including general security updates in Kabul to its users. With real-time, crowdsourced alerts, users across the city can track bomb blasts, roadblocks, electricity outages, or other problems in locations close to them. The app, which generates push notifications about nearby security risks, is supported by 20 employees working out of the company’s Kabul office, according to Wahedi. 

Despite the company’s single-minded focus on security, the Ehtesab team was caught off-guard by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government over the weekend. “It was inevitable that there would be a significant shift in governance … but we weren’t expecting the Taliban to come in within the first eight hours of the day,” Wahedi said….(More)”.

Developing a Responsible and Well-designed Governance Structure for Data Marketplaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WEF Briefing Paper: “… extracts insights from the discussions with thought leaders and experts to serve as a point of departure for governments and other members of the global community to discuss governance structures and regulatory frameworks for Data Marketplace Service Providers (DMSPs), the primary operators and managers of data exchanges as trusted third parties, in data marketplaces and exchanges in a wide range of jurisdictions. As decision-makers globally develop data marketplace solutions specific to their unique cultural nuances and needs, this paper provides insights into key governance issues to get right and do so with global interoperability and adaptability in mind….(More)”.

Exploring city digital twins as policy tools: A task-based approach to generating synthetic data on urban mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gleb Papyshev and Masaru Yarime: “This article discusses the technology of city digital twins (CDTs) and its potential applications in the policymaking context. The article analyzes the history of the development of the concept of digital twins and how it is now being adopted on a city-scale. One of the most advanced projects in the field—Virtual Singapore—is discussed in detail to determine the scope of its potential domains of application and highlight challenges associated with it. Concerns related to data privacy, availability, and its applicability for predictive simulations are analyzed, and potential usage of synthetic data is proposed as a way to address these challenges. The authors argue that despite the abundance of urban data, the historical data are not always applicable for predictions about the events for which there does not exist any data, as well as discuss the potential privacy challenges of the usage of micro-level individual mobility data in CDTs. A task-based approach to urban mobility data generation is proposed in the last section of the article. This approach suggests that city authorities can establish services responsible for asking people to conduct certain activities in an urban environment in order to create data for possible policy interventions for which there does not exist useful historical data. This approach can help in addressing the challenges associated with the availability of data without raising privacy concerns, as the data generated through this approach will not represent any real individual in society….(More)”.