Satellites can advance sustainable development by highlighting poverty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cordis: “Estimating poverty is crucial for improving policymaking and advancing the sustainability of a society. Traditional poverty estimation methods such as household surveys and census data incur huge costs however, creating a need for more efficient approaches.

With this in mind, the EU-funded USES project examined how satellite images could be used to estimate household-level poverty in rural regions of developing countries. “This promises to be a radically more cost-effective way of monitoring and evaluating the Sustainable Development Goals,” says Dr Gary Watmough, USES collaborator and Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Land Use and Socioecological Systems at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Land use and land cover reveal poverty clues

To achieve its aims, the project investigated how land use and land cover information from satellite data could be linked with household survey data. “We looked particularly at how households use the landscape in the local area for agriculture and other purposes such as collecting firewood and using open areas for grazing cattle,” explains Dr Watmough.

The work also involved examining satellite images to determine which types of land use were related to household wealth or poverty using statistical analysis. “By trying to predict household poverty using the land use data we could see which land use variables were most related to the household wealth in the area,” adds Dr Watmough.

Overall, the USES project found that satellite data could predict poverty particularly the poorest households in the area. Dr Watmough comments: “This is quite remarkable given that we are trying to predict complicated household-level poverty from a simple land use map derived from high-resolution satellite data.”

A study conducted by USES in Kenya found that the most important remotely sensed variable was building size within the homestead. Buildings less than 140 m2 were mostly associated with poorer households, whereas those over 140 m2 tended to be wealthier. The amount of bare ground in agricultural fields and within the homestead region was also important. “We also found that poorer households were associated with a shorter number of agricultural growing days,” says Dr Watmough….(More)”.

The economic value of data: discussion paper

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HM Treasury (UK): “Technological change has radically increased both the volume of data in the economy, and our ability to process it. This change presents an opportunity to transform our economy and society for the better.

Data-driven innovation holds the keys to addressing some of the most significant challenges confronting modern Britain, whether that is tackling congestion and improving air quality in our cities, developing ground-breaking diagnosis systems to support our NHS, or making our businesses more productive.

The UK’s strengths in cutting-edge research and the intangible economy make it well-placed to be a world leader, and estimates suggest that data-driven technologies will contribute over £60 billion per year to the UK economy by 2020.1 Recent events have raised public questions and concerns about the way that data, and particularly personal data, can be collected, processed, and shared with third party organisations.

These are concerns that this government takes seriously. The Data Protection Act 2018 updates the UK’s world-leading data protection framework to make it fit for the future, giving individuals strong new rights over how their data is used. Alongside maintaining a secure, trusted data environment, the government has an important role to play in laying the foundations for a flourishing data-driven economy.

This means pursuing policies that improve the flow of data through our economy, and ensure that those companies who want to innovate have appropriate access to high-quality and well-maintained data.

This discussion paper describes the economic opportunity presented by data-driven innovation, and highlights some of the key challenges that government will need to address, such as: providing clarity around ownership and control of data; maintaining a strong, trusted data protection framework; making effective use of public sector data; driving interoperability and standards; and enabling safe, legal and appropriate data sharing.

Over the last few years, the government has taken significant steps to strengthen the UK’s position as a world leader in data-driven innovation, including by agreeing the Artificial Intelligence Sector Deal, establishing the Geospatial Commission, and making substantial investments in digital skills. The government will build on those strong foundations over the coming months, including by commissioning an Expert Panel on Competition in Digital Markets. This Expert Panel will support the government’s wider review of competition law by considering how competition policy can better enable innovation and support consumers in the digital economy.

There are still big questions to be answered. This document marks the beginning of a wider set of conversations that government will be holding over the coming year, as we develop a new National Data Strategy….(More)”.

Our misguided love affair with techno-politics

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The Economist: “What might happen if technology, which smothers us with its bounty as consumers, made the same inroads into politics? Might data-driven recommendations suggest “policies we may like” just as Amazon recommends books? Would we swipe right to pick candidates in elections or answers in referendums? Could businesses expand into every cranny of political and social life, replete with ® and ™ at each turn? What would this mean for political discourse and individual freedom?

This dystopian yet all-too-imaginable world has been conjured up by Giuseppe Porcaro in his novel “Disco Sour”. The story takes place in the near future, after a terrible war and breakdown of nations, when the (fictional) illegitimate son of Roman Polanski creates an app called Plebiscitum that works like Tinder for politics.

Mr Porcaro—who comes armed with a doctorate in political geography—uses the plot to consider questions of politics in the networked age. The Economist’s Open Future initiative asked him to reply to five questions in around 100 words each. An excerpt from the book appears thereafter.

*     *     *

The Economist: In your novel, an entrepreneur attempts to replace elections with an app that asks people to vote on individual policies. Is that science fiction or prediction? And were you influenced by Italy’s Five Star Movement?

Giuseppe Porcaro: The idea of imagining a Tinder-style app replacing elections came up because I see connections between the evolution of dating habits and 21st-century politics. A new sort of “tinderpolitics” kicking in when instant gratification substitutes substantial participation. Think about tweet trolling, for example.

Italy’s Five Star Movement was certainly another inspiration as it is has been a pioneer in using an online platform to successfully create a sort of new political mass movement. Another one was an Australian political party called Flux. They aim to replace the world’s elected legislatures with a new system known as issue-based direct democracy.

The Economist: Is it too cynical to suggest that a more direct relationship between citizens and policymaking would lead to a more reactionary political landscape? Or does the ideal of liberal democracy depend on an ideal citizenry that simply doesn’t exist?  

Mr Porcaro: It would be cynical to put the blame on citizens for getting too close to influence decision-making. That would go against the very essence of the “liberal democracy ideal”. However, I am critical towards the pervasive idea that technology can provide quick fixes to bridge the gap between citizens and the government. By applying computational thinking to democracy, an extreme individualisation and instant participation, we forget democracy is not simply the result of an election or the mathematical sum of individual votes. Citizens risk entering a vicious circle where reactionary politics are easier to go through.

The Economist: Modern representative democracy was in some ways a response to the industrial revolution. If AI and automation radically alter the world we live in, will we have to update the way democracy works too—and if so, how? 

Mr Porcaro: Democracy has already morphed several times. 19th century’s liberal democracy was shaken by universal suffrage, and adapted to the Fordist mode of production with the mass party. May 1968 challenged that model. Today, the massive availability of data and the increasing power of decision-making algorithms will change both political institutions.

The policy “production” process might be utterly redesigned. Data collected by devices we use on a daily basis (such as vehicles, domestic appliances and wearable sensors) will provide evidence about the drivers of personal voting choices, or the accountability of government decisions. …(More)

Regulatory Technology – Replacing Law with Computer Code

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LSE Legal Studies Working Paper by Eva Micheler and Anna Whaley: “Recently both the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority have carried out experiments using new digital technology for regulatory purposes. The idea is to replace rules written in natural legal language with computer code and to use artificial intelligence for regulatory purposes.

This new way of designing public law is in line with the government’s vision for the UK to become a global leader in digital technology. It is also reflected in the FCA’s business plan.

The article reviews the technology and the advantages and disadvantages of combining the technology with regulatory law. It then informs the discussion from a broader public law perspective. It analyses regulatory technology through criteria developed in the mainstream regulatory discourse. It contributes to that discourse by anticipating problems that will arise as the technology evolves. In addition, the hope is to assist the government in avoiding mistakes that have occurred in the past and creating a better system from the start…(More)”.

Open Data Use Case: Using data to improve public health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Willsher at ODX: “Studies have shown that a large majority of Canadians spend too much time in sedentary activities. According to the Health Status of Canadians report in 2016, only 2 out of 10 Canadian adults met the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines. Increasing physical activity and healthy lifestyle behaviours can reduce the risk of chronic illnesses, which can decrease pressures on our health care system. And data can play a role in improving public health.

We are already seeing examples of a push to augment the role of data, with programs recently being launched at home and abroad. Canada and the US established an initiative in the spring of 2017 called the Healthy Behaviour Data Challenge. The goal of the initiative is to open up new methods for generating and using data to monitor health, specifically in the areas of physical activity, sleep, sedentary behaviour, or nutrition. The challenge recently wrapped up with winners being announced in late April 2018. Programs such as this provide incentive to the private sector to explore data’s role in measuring healthy lifestyles and raise awareness of the importance of finding new solutions.

In the UK, Sport England and the Open Data Institute (ODI) have collaborated to create the OpenActive initiative. It has set out to encourage both government and private sector entities to unlock data around physical activities so that others can utilize this information to ease the process of engaging in an active lifestyle. The goal is to “make it as easy to find and book a badminton court as it is to book a hotel room.” As of last fall, OpenActive counted more than 76,000 activities across 1,000 locations from their partner organizations. They have also developed a standard for activity data to ensure consistency among data sources, which eases the ability for developers to work with the data. Again, this initiative serves as a mechanism for open data to help address public health issues.

In Canada, we are seeing more open datasets that could be utilized to devise new solutions for generating higher rates of physical activity. A lot of useful information is available at the municipal level that can provide specifics around local infrastructure. Plus, there is data at the provincial and federal level that can provide higher-level insights useful to developing methods for promoting healthier lifestyles.

Information about cycling infrastructure seems to be relatively widespread among municipalities with a robust open data platform. As an example, the City of Toronto, publishes map data of bicycle routes around the city. This information could be utilized in a way to help citizens find the best bike route between two points. In addition, the city also publishes data on indoor, outdoor, and post and ring bicycle parking facilities that can identify where to securely lock your bike. Exploring data from proprietary sources, such as Strava, could further enhance an application by layering on popular cycling routes or allow users to integrate their personal information. And algorithms could allow for the inclusion of data on comparable driving times, projected health benefits, or savings on automotive maintenance.

The City of Calgary publishes data on park sports surfaces and recreation facilities that could potentially be incorporated into sports league applications. This would make it easier to display locations for upcoming games or to arrange pick-up games. Knowing where there are fields nearby that may be available for a last minute soccer game could be useful in encouraging use of the facilities and generating more physical activity. Again, other data sources, such as weather, could be integrated with this information to provide a planning tool for organizing these activities….(More)”.

Democracy Is a Habit: Practice It

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Melvin Rogers at the Boston Review: “After decades of triumph,” The Economist recently concluded, “democracy is losing ground.” But not, apparently, in the West, whose “mature democracies . . . are not yet in serious danger.” On this view, reports of the death of American democracy have been greatly exaggerated. “Donald Trump may scorn liberal norms,” the reasoning goes, “but America’s checks and balances are strong, and will outlast him.” The truly endangered societies are those where “institutions are weaker and democratic habits less ingrained.”

It has become a common refrain, even among those critical of Trump’s administration. “Our democracy is hard to kill,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky said in an interview about his new book with Daniel Zeblatt, How Democracies Die. “We do still have very strong democratic institutions. We’re not Turkey, we’re not Hungary, we’re not Venezuela. We can behave quite recklessly and irresponsibly and probably still muddle through that.”

Is democracy in the United States really so robust? At the outset of World War II, American philosopher John Dewey cautioned against so easy a conclusion—and the simplistic picture of democratic society that it presumes. In Freedom and Culture (1939), he worried that democracy might succumb to the illusion of stability and endurance in the face of threats to liberty and norms of decency. According to Dewey, we must not believe

that democratic conditions automatically maintain themselves, or that they can be identified with fulfillment of prescriptions laid down in a constitution. Beliefs of this sort merely divert attention from what is going on, just as the patter of the prestidigitator enables him to do things that are not noticed by those whom he is engaged in fooling. For what is actually going on may be the formation of conditions that are hostile to any kind of democratic liberties.

Dewey’s was a warning to be wary not just of bad governance but of a more fundamental deformation of society. “This would be too trite to repeat,” he admits, “were it not that so many persons in the high places of business talk as if they believed or could get others to believe that the observance of formulae that have become ritualistic are effective safeguards of our democratic heritage.”…

Dewey may seem like an odd resource to recall in our current political climate. For if we stand in what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times,” Dewey’s optimistic faith in democracy—his unflinching belief in the reflective capacity of human beings to secure the good and avert the bad, and in the progressive character of American democracy—may look ill-equipped to address our current crisis.

Yet this faith was always shaped by an important insight regarding democracy that many seem to have ignored. For Dewey, democracy’s survival depends on a set of habits and dispositions—in short, a culture—to sustain it. …

“The democratic road is the hard one to take,” Dewey concluded in Freedom and Culture. “It is the road which places the greatest burden of responsibility on the greatest number of human beings.” Precisely for this reason, Dewey believed the culture of democracy—the habits and sensibilities of the citizenry—in greater need of scrutiny than its constitution and procedures. For what are constitutions and procedures once you have deformed the ground upon which their proper functioning depends?…(More)”.

How to be a public entrepreneur

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rowan Conway at the RSA: “Political theorist Elinor Ostrom was the first to coin the phrase “public entrepreneur” in her 1965 UCLA PhD thesis where she proposed that government actors should be the makers of purpose-driven businesses. She later went on to surprise the world of economics by winning a Nobel prize.

To the economic establishment Ostrom was a social scientist and her theories of common goods and public purpose enterprise ran counter to the economic orthodoxy. 44 years later, at the same time that she was taking the stage as the first (and only) woman to win a Nobel prize for economics, another California-based thinker was positing his own vision for entrepreneurship… “Move fast and break things” was famously Mark Zuckerberg’s credo for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. “Unless you are breaking stuff,” he said in 2009, “you are not moving fast enough.” This phrase came to epitomise the “fail fast” start-up culture that has seeped into our consciousness and redefined modern life in the last decade.

Public vs Private entrepreneurs

So which of these two types of entrepreneurship should prevail? I’d say that they’re not playing on the same field and barely even playing the same game. While the Silicon Valley model glorifies the frat boys who dreamt up tech start-ups in their dorm rooms and took the “self-made” financial gains when big tech took off, public entrepreneurs are not cast from this mold. They are the government actors taking on the system to solve social and environmental problems and the idea of “breaking things” won’t appeal to them. “Moving fast”, however, speaks to their ambitions for an agile government that wants to make change in a digital world.

Public entrepreneurs are socially minded — but they differ from social entrepreneurs in that they carry out a public or state role. In a Centre for Public Impact briefing paper entitled “Enter the Public Entrepreneur” the difference is clear:

“While “social entrepreneurs” are people outside government, public entrepreneurs act within government and, at their heart, are a blend of two different roles: that of a public servant, and that of an entrepreneur. The underlying premise is that these roles are usually distinct but the skill sets they require need not be. Indeed, the future public servant will increasingly need to think and act like an entrepreneur — building new relationships, leveraging resources, working across sector lines and acting, and sometimes failing, fast.”

Today we publish a RSA Lab report entitled “Move Fast and Fix Things” in partnership with Innovate UK. The report examines the role of Public Entrepreneurs who want to find ways to move fast without leaving a trail of destruction. It builds on the literature that makes the case for public missionsand entrepreneurship in government and acts as a kind of “how to guide” for those in the public sector who want to think and act like entrepreneurs, but sometimes feel like they are pushing up against an immovable bureaucratic system.

Acting entrepreneurially with procurement

A useful distinction of types of government innovation by the European Commission describes “innovation in government” as transforming public administration, such as the shift to digital service provision and “innovation through government” as initiatives that “foster innovation elsewhere in society, such as the public procurement of innovation”. Our report looks at public procurement — specifically the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) — as a route for innovation through government.

Governments have catalytic spending power. The UK public sector alone spends over £251.5 billion annually procuring goods and services which accounts for 33% of public sector spend and 13.7% of GDP. A profound shift in practice is required if government is to proactively use this power to stimulate innovation in the way that Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Entrepreneurial State calls for. As Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose she advocates for “mission-oriented innovation” which can enable speed as it has “not only a rate, but also a direction” — purposefully using government’s purchasing power to stimulate innovation for good.

But getting procurement professionals to understand how to be entrepreneurial with public funds is no mean feat….(More)”.

Exploring New Labscapes: Converging and Diverging on Social Innovation Labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Marlieke Kieboom:”…The question ‘what is a (social innovation) lab?’ is as old as the lab community itself and seems to return at every (social innovation) lab gathering. It came up at the very first event of its kind (Kennisland’s Lab2: Lab for Labs, Amsterdam 2013) and has been debated at every consequent event ever since under hashtags like #socinnlabs, #sociallabs and #psilabs (see MaRs’s Labs for Systems Change — 2014, Nesta’s Labworks — 2015, EU Policy lab’s Lab Connections — 2016 and ESADE’s Labs for Social Innovation — 2017).

However, the concept has remained roughly the same since we saw the first wave of labs (Helsinki Design Lab, MindLab and Reos’ Change Labs) in the early 2010’s. Social innovation labs are permanent or short term structures/projects/events that use a variety of experimental methods to support collaboration between stakeholders to collectively address social challenges at a systemic level. Stakeholders range from citizens and community action groups to businesses, universities and public administrations. Their specific characteristics (e.g. developing experimental user-led research methods, building innovation capacity building, convening multi-disciplinary teams, working to reach scale) and shapes (public sector innovation labs, social innovations labs, digital service labs, policy labs) are well described in many publications (e.g. Lab Matters, 2014; Labs for Social Innovation, 2017).

As Nesta neatly shows innovation labs are part of a family, or a movement of connected experimental, innovative approaches like service design, behavioural insights, citizen engagement, and so on.

 
Spot the labs (Source: https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/landscape-of-innovation-approaches/)

So why does this question keep coming back? The roots of the confusion and debates may lie in the word ‘social’. The medical, technological, and business sectors know exactly what they aim for in their innovation labs. They are ‘controlled-for’ environments where experimentation leads to developing, testing and scaling futuristic (mostly for profit) products, like self-driving cars, cancer medicines, drug test strips and cultured meat. Some of these products contribute to a more just, equal, sustainable world, while others don’t.

For working on societal issues like climate change, immigration patterns or a drug overdose crisis, lab settings are and should be unmistakably more open and porous. Complex, systemic challenges are impossible to capture between four lab walls, nor should we even try as they arguably arose from isolated, closed, and disconnected socio-economic interactions. Value creation for these type of challenges therefore lies outside closed, competitive, measurable spaces: in forging new collaborations, open-sourcing methodologies, encouraging curious mindsets and diversifying social movements. Consequently social lab outcomes are less measurable and concrete, ranging from reframing existing (socio-cultural) paradigms, to designing new procurement procedures and policies, to delivering new (digital and non-digital) public services. Try to ‘randomize-control-trial’ that!…(More).

‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymised” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people.

Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

The government pulled the data from its website, but not before it had been downloaded 1,500 times.

This privacy nightmare is one of many examples of seemingly innocuous, “de-identified” pieces of information being reverse-engineered to expose people’s identities. And it’s only getting worse as people spend more of their lives online, sprinkling digital breadcrumbs that can be traced back to them to violate their privacy in ways they never expected.

Nameless New York taxi logs were compared with paparazzi shots at locations around the city to reveal that Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba were bad tippers. In 2017 German researchers were able to identify people based on their “anonymous” web browsing patterns. This week University College London researchers showed how they could identify an individual Twitter user based on the metadata associated with their tweets, while the fitness tracking app Polar revealed the homes and in some cases names of soldiers and spies.

“It’s convenient to pretend it’s hard to re-identify people, but it’s easy. The kinds of things we did are the kinds of things that any first-year data science student could do,” said Vanessa Teague, one of the University of Melbourne researchers to reveal the flaws in the open health data.

One of the earliest examples of this type of privacy violation occurred in 1996 when the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission released “anonymised” data showing the hospital visits of state employees. As with the Australian data, the state removed obvious identifiers like name, address and social security number. Then the governor, William Weld, assured the public that patients’ privacy was protected….(More)”.

Bad Governance and Corruption

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Textbook by Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer: “This book explains why the role of corruption varies greatly between public services, between people, between national systems of governance, and between measures of corruption.

More than 1.8 billion people pay the price of bad government each year, by sending a bribe to a public official.

In developing countries, corruption affects social services, such as health care and education, and law enforcement institutions, such as the police. When public officials do not act as bureaucrats delivering services by the book, people can try to get them by hook or by crook. The book’s analysis draws on unique evidence: a data base of sample surveys of 175,000 people in 125 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America. The authors avoid one-size-fits-all proposals for reform and instead provide measures that can be applied to particular public services to reduce or eliminate opportunities for corruption….(More)”.