UNESCO demonstrates global impact through new transparency portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Opendata.UNESCO.org  is intended to present comprehensive, quality and timely information about UNESCO’s projects, enabling users to find information by country/region, funding source, and sector and providing comprehensive project data, including budget, expenditure, completion status, implementing organization, project documents, and more. It publishes program and financial information that are in line with UN system-experience of the IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) standards and other relevant transparency initiatives. UNESCO is now part of more than 230 organizations that have published to the IATI Registry, which brings together donor and developing countries, civil society organizations and other experts in aid information who are committed to working together to increase the transparency of aid.

Since its creation 70 years ago, UNESCO has tirelessly championed the causes of education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information, globally. For instance – started in March 2010, the program for the Enhancement of Literacy in Afghanistan (ELA) benefited from a $19.5 million contribution by Japan. It aimed to improve the level of literacy, numeracy and vocational skills of the adult population in 70 districts of 15 provinces of Afghanistan. Over the next three years, until April 2013, the ELA programme helped some 360,000 adult learners in General Literacy compotency. An interactive map allows for an easy identification of UNESCO’s high-impact programs, and up-to-date information of current and future aid allocations within and across countries.

Public participation and interactivity are key to the success of any open data project. http://Opendata.UNESCO.org will evolve as Member States and partners will get involved, by displaying data on their own websites and sharing data among different networks, building and sharing applications, providing feedback, comments, and recommendations. …(More)”

The Ubiquitous Internet: User and Industry Perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Anja Bechmann, and Stine Lomborg: “This book presents state of the art theoretical and empirical research on the ubiquitous internet: its everyday users and its economic stakeholders. The book offers a 360-degree media analysis of the contemporary terrain of the internet by examining both user and industry perspectives and their relation to one another. Contributors consider user practices in terms of internet at your fingertips—the abundance, free flow, and interconnectivity of data. They then consider industry’s use of user data and standards in commodification and value-creation…. Introduction Part I: Users and Usage Patterns 1. Next Generation Users: Changing Access to the Internet Grant Blank and William H. Dutton 2. The Internet in My Pocket Stine Lomborg 3. Managing the Interoperable Self Anja Bechmann 4. The Dynamics of Real-Time Contentious Politics: How Ubiquitous Internet Shapes and Transforms Popular Protest in China Jun Liu Part II: Commercialization, Standards, and Politics 5. Histories of Ubiquitous Web Standardization Indrek Ibrus 6. Mobile Internet: The Politics of Code and Networks Lela Mosemghvdlishvili 7. Predictive Algorithms and Personalization Services on Social Network Sites: Implications for Users and Society Robert Bodle 8. The Digital Transformation of Physical Retailing: Sellers, Customers, and the Ubiquitous Internet Joseph Turow Conclusion…(More)

Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104  Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”

Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Journal of Democracy: “The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The transitions in Southern Europe and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over 110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores every year since then. The year 2014 has not been good for democracy, with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expectations that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degenerated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, similar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the United States and the European Union, which experienced massive economic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies, from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their performance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tunisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many democratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and existing democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for democratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions… (More)”

An Open Government Index: From Democracy to Efficiency to Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by Lindgren, Tony; Ekenberg, Love; Nouri, Jalal and Hansson, Karin: “Most research in research areas like E-government, E-participation and Open government assume a democratic norm. The concept of Open government, recently promoted by, e.g., The Obama administration and the European Commission is to a large extent based on a general liberal and deliberative ideology emphasizing transparency, participation and collaboration. The concept has also become of interest for states like China and Singapore. In this position paper we outline how to study the concept under different political discourses and suggest an Open government index that can be used to analyze the concept of open government under various settings. (More)”

Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization: Essays in Economic History and Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Avner Greif, Lynne Kiesling & John V. C. Nye: “This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr—arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation—these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre–Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr’s important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Data to Fight Air Pollution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Brick at PSFK: “Air pollution is among the most serious environmental problems of the modern age. Although pollution in developed nations like the USA and Germany has fallen since the 1980s, air quality in growing technological countries — especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group — grows worse with each year. In 2012, 3.7 million people died as a direct result of problems caused by chronic exposure to bad air, and tens of millions more were made ill.
There is no easy solution to such a complex and widespread problem, but Breathe offers a fix for one aspect and solves it in two ways.
The first way is the device itself: a portable plastic brick smaller than a bar of soap that monitors the presence and concentration of toxic gases and other harmful substances in the air, in real time throughout your day. It records the quality and, if it reaches unacceptably dangerous levels, warns you immediately with an emergency signal. Plug the device into your smart phone, and it keeps a record of air quality by time and location you can use to avoid the most polluted times of day and places in your area.
The second solution is the truly innovative aspect of this project. Via the Breathe app, any user who wants to can add her data to a central database that keeps statistics worldwide. Individuals can then use that data to plan vacations, time outdoor activities or schedule athletic events. Given enough time, Breathe could accumulate enough data to be used to affect policy by identifying the most polluted areas in a city, county or nation so the authorities can work on a more robust solution….(More)”

An Introduction to the Economic Analysis of Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Note by Soichiro Takagi: “Open data generally refers to a movement in which public organizations provide data in a machine-readable format to the public, so that anyone can reuse the data. Open data is becoming an important phenomenon in Japan. At this moment, utilization of open data in Japan is emerging with collaborative efforts among small units of production such as individuals. These collaborations have been also observed in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, but collaboration in open data is somewhat different in respect to small-scale, distributed collaboration. The aim of this research note is to share the phenomena of open data as an object of economic analysis with readers by describing the movement and providing a preliminary analysis. This note discusses how open data is associated with mass collaboration from the viewpoint of organizational economics. It also provides the results of empirical analysis on how the regional characteristics of municipalities affect the decision of local governments to conduct open data initiatives.”

Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nanette Byrnes at MIT Technology Review: “Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful examples of cities that have used their technology to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cities already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.
To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direction are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep government support.
The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air-conditioning and pneumatic waste disposal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpensive and flexible digital technologies….”

Research Handbook On Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Padideh Ala’i and Robert G. Vaughn: ‘”Transparency” has multiple, contested meanings. This broad-ranging volume accepts that complexity and thoughtfully contrasts alternative views through conceptual pieces, country cases, and assessments of policies–such as freedom of information laws, whistleblower protections, financial disclosure, and participatory policymaking procedures.’
– Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University Law School, US
In the last two decades transparency has become a ubiquitous and stubbornly ambiguous term. Typically understood to promote rule of law, democratic participation, anti-corruption initiatives, human rights, and economic efficiency, transparency can also legitimate bureaucratic power, advance undemocratic forms of governance, and aid in global centralization of power. This path-breaking volume, comprising original contributions on a range of countries and environments, exposes the many faces of transparency by allowing readers to see the uncertainties, inconsistencies and surprises contained within the current conceptions and applications of the term….
The expert contributors identify the goals, purposes and ramifications of transparency while presenting both its advantages and shortcomings. Through this framework, they explore transparency from a number of international and comparative perspectives. Some chapters emphasize cultural and national aspects of the issue, with country-specific examples from China, Mexico, the US and the UK, while others focus on transparency within global organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO. A number of relevant legal considerations are also discussed, including freedom of information laws, financial disclosure of public officials and whistleblower protection…”