Radhika Garg in First Monday: “Information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the way people interact with each other. Today, every physical device can have the capability to connect to the Internet (digital presence) to send and receive data. Internet connected cameras, home automation systems, connected cars are all examples of interconnected Internet of Things (IoT). IoT can bring benefits to users in terms of monitoring and intelligent capabilities, however, these devices collect, transmit, store, and have a potential to share vast amount of personal and individual data that encroach private spaces and can be vulnerable to security breaches. The ecosystem of IoT comprises not only of users, various sensors, and devices but also other stakeholders of IoT such as data collectors, processors, regulators, and policy-makers. Even though the number of commercially available IoT devices is on steep rise, the uptake of these devices has been slow, and abandonment rapid. This paper explains how stakeholders (including users) and technologies form an assemblage in which these stakeholders are cumulatively responsible for making IoT an essential element of day-to-day living and connectivity. To this end, this paper examines open issues in data privacy and security policies (from perspectives of the European Union and North America), and its effects on stakeholders in the ecosystem. This paper concludes by explaining how these open issues, if unresolved, can lead to another wave of digital division and discrimination in the use of IoT….(More)”.
If, When and How Blockchain Technologies Can Provide Civic Change
By Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young
The hype surrounding the potential of blockchain technologies– the distributed ledger technology (DLT) undergirding cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin – to transform the way industries and sectors operate and exchange records is reaching a fever pitch.
Source: Top Trends in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017
Governments and civil society have now also joined the quest and are actively exploring the potential of DLTs to create transformative social change. Experiments are underway to leverage blockchain technologies to address major societal challenges – from homelessness in New York City to the Rohyingya crisis in Myanmar to government corruption around the world. At the same time, a growing backlash to the newest ‘shiny object’ in the technology for good space is gaining ground.
At this year’s The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC), organized by mySociety in Lisbon, the GovLab’s Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young joined the Engine Room’s Nicole Anand, the Natural Resource Governance Institute’s Anders Pedersen, and ITS-Rio’s Marco Konopacki to consider whether or not Blockchain can truly deliver on its promise for creating civic change.
For the GovLab’s contribution to the panel, we shared early findings from our Blockchange: Blockchain for Social Change initiative. Blockchange, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the promise and practice of DLTs tin addressing public problems – with a particular focus on the lack, the role and the establishment of trusted identities – through a set of detailed case-studies. Such insights may help us develop operational guidelines on when blockchain technology may be appropriate and what design principles should guide the future use of DLTs for good.
Our presentation covered four key areas (Full presentation here):
- The evolving package of attributes present in Blockchain technologies: on-going experimentation, development and investment has lead to the realization that there is no one blockchain technology. Rather there are several variations of attributes that provide for different technological scenarios. Some of these attributes remain foundational -– such as immutability, (guaranteed) integrity, and distributed resilience – while others have evolved as optional including disintermediation, transparency, and accessibility. By focusing on the attributes we can transcend the noise that is emerging from having too many well funded start-ups that seek to pitch their package of attributes as the solution;
- The three varieties of Blockchain for social change use cases: Most of the pilots and use cases where DLTs are being used to improve society and people’s lives can be categorized along three varieties of applications:
- Track and Trace applications. For instance:
- Versiart creates verifiable, digital certificates for art and collectibles which helps buyers ensure each piece’s provenance.
- Grassroots Cooperative along with Heifer USA created a blockchain-powered app that allows every package of chicken marketed and sold by Grassroots to be traced on the Ethereum blockchain.
- Everledger works with stakeholders across the diamond supply chain to track diamonds from mine to store.
- Ripe is working with Sweetgreen to use blockchain and IoT sensors to track crop growth, yielding higher-quality produce and providing better information for farmers, food distributors, restaurants, and consumers.
- Smart Contracting applications. For instance:
- In Indonesia, Carbon Conservation and Dappbase have created smart contracts that will distribute rewards to villages that can prove the successful reduction of incidences of forest fires.
- Alice has built Ethereum-based smart contracts for a donation project that supports 15 homeless people in London. The smart contracts ensure donations are released only when pre-determined project goals are met.
- Bext360 utilizes smart contracts to pay coffee farmers fairly and immediately based on a price determined through weighing and analyzing beans by the Bext360 machine at the source.
- Identity applications. For instance:
- The State of Illinois is working with Evernym to digitize birth certificates, thus giving individuals a digital identity from birth.
- BanQu creates an economic passport for previously unbanked populations by using blockchain to record economic and financial transactions, purchase goods, and prove their existence in global supply chains.
- In 2015, AID:Tech piloted a project working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon to distribute over 500 donor aid cards that were tied to non-forgeable identities.
- uPort provides digital identities for residents of Zug, Switzerland to use for governmental services.
- The promise of trusted Identity: the potential to establish a trusted identity turns out to be foundational for using blockchain technologies for social change. At the same time identity emerges from a process (involving, for instance, provisioning, authentication, administration, authorization and auditing) and it is key to assess at what stage of the ID lifecycle DLTs provide an advantage vis-a-vis other ID technologies; and how the maturity of the blockchain technology toward addressing the ID challenge.
- Finally, we seek to translate current findings into
- Operational conditions that can enable the public and civic sector at-large to determine when “to blockchain” including:
- The need for a clear problem definition (as opposed to certain situations where DLT solutions are in search of a problem);
- The presence of information asymmetries and high transaction costs incentivize change. (“The Market of Lemons” problem);
- The availability of (high quality) digital records;
- The lack of availability of credible and alternative disclosure technologies;
- Deficiency (or efficiency) of (trusted) intermediaries in the space.
- Design principles that can increase the likelihood of societal benefit when using Blockchain for identity projects (see picture) .
In the coming months, we will continue to share our findings from the Blockchange project in a number of forms – including a series of case studies, additional presentations and infographics, and an operational field guide for designing and implementing Blockchain projects to address challenges across the identity lifecycle.
The GovLab, in collaboration with the National Resource Governance Institute, is also delighted to announce a new initiative aimed at taking stock of the promise, practice and challenge of the use of Blockchain in the extractives sector. The project is focused in particular on DLTs as they relate to beneficial ownership, licensing and contracting transparency, and commodity trading transparency. This fall, we will share a collection of Blockchain for extractives case studies, as well as a report summarizing if, when, and how Blockchain can provide value across the extractives decision chain.
If you are interested in collaborating on our work to increase our understanding of Blockchain’s real potential for social change, or if you have any feedback on this presentation of early findings, please contact [email protected].
Everyone can now patrol this city’s streets for crime. ACLU says that’s a bad idea
NJ.com: “All eyes are on the city of Newark, literally. The city recently revealed its new “Citizen Virtual Patrol” program, which places 60 cameras around the city’s intersections, putting the city’s streets, and those who venture out on them, on display seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
That isn’t startling, as cameras have been up in the city for the past dozen years, says Anthony Ambrose, the city’s public safety director.
What is new, and not found in other cities, is that police officers won’t be the only ones trolling for criminals. Now, anyone who’s willing to submit their email address and upload an app onto their home computer or phone, can watch those cameras.
Citizens can then alert police when they see suspicious activity and remain anonymous. “Right now, in this era of society, it’s impossible to be outside without being recorded,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. “We need to be able to use that technology to allow the police to do their job more efficiently and more cost effective.”
Those extra eyes, however, come at a cost. The cameras could also provide stalkers with their victim’s whereabouts, show intimate scenes and even when residents leave their homes vacant as they head out on vacation.
The American Civil Liberties Association of New Jersey is asking Newark to end the program, saying it’s a violation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.
“Newark is crowdsourcing it’s responsibility to the public instead of engaging in policing,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.
“There’s a fundamental difference between a civilian using their phone to record a certain area than government having cameras where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Sinha said….
The city also plans to launch a campaign informing residents about the cameras.
“It’s about transparency,” Ambrose said. “We’re not saying we put cameras out there and you don’t know where they are at, we’re telling you.” …(More)”.
A Framework for Strengthening Data Ecosystems to Serve Humanitarian Purposes
Paper by Marc van den Homberg et al: “The incidence of natural disasters worldwide is increasing. As a result, a growing number of people is in need of humanitarian support, for which limited resources are available. This requires an effective and efficient prioritization of the most vulnerable people in the preparedness phase, and the most affected people in the response phase of humanitarian action. Data-driven models have the potential to support this prioritization process. However, the applications of these models in a country requires a certain level of data preparedness.
To achieve this level of data preparedness on a large scale we need to know how to facilitate, stimulate and coordinate data-sharing between humanitarian actors. We use a data ecosystem perspective to develop success criteria for establishing a “humanitarian data ecosystem”. We first present the development of a general framework with data ecosystem governance success criteria based on a systematic literature review. Subsequently, the applicability of this framework in the humanitarian sector is assessed through a case study on the “Community Risk Assessment and Prioritization toolbox” developed by the Netherlands Red Cross. The empirical evidence led to the adaption the framework to the specific criteria that need to be addressed when aiming to establish a successful humanitarian data ecosystem….(More)”.
Optimal Scope for Free Flow of Non-Personal Data in Europe
Paper by Simon Forge for the European Parliament Think Tank: “Data is not static in a personal/non-personal classification – with modern analytic methods, certain non-personal data can help to generate personal data – so the distinction may become blurred. Thus, de-anonymisation techniques with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and manipulation of large datasets will become a major issue. In some new applications, such as smart cities and connected cars, the enormous volumes of data gathered may be used for personal information as well as for non-personal functions, so such data may cross over from the technical and non-personal into the personal domain. A debate is taking place on whether current EU restrictions on confidentiality of personal private information should be relaxed so as to include personal information in free and open data flows. However, it is unlikely that a loosening of such rules will be positive for the growth of open data. Public distrust of open data flows may be exacerbated because of fears of potential commercial misuse of such data, as well of leakages, cyberattacks, and so on. The proposed recommendations are: to promote the use of open data licences to build trust and openness, promote sharing of private enterprises’ data within vertical sectors and across sectors to increase the volume of open data through incentive programmes, support testing for contamination of open data mixed with personal data to ensure open data is scrubbed clean – and so reinforce public confidence, ensure anti-competitive behaviour does not compromise the open data initiative….(More)”.
Digital Skills Toolkit
Report by the International Telecommunications Union: “This toolkit provides stakeholders with guidance on developing a digital skills strategy. It is intended for policymakers, along with partners in the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Its overarching aim is to facilitate the development of a comprehensive digital skills strategy at country level. It is also possible to use this guide to focus on selected priorities that require a fresh approach.
Why do countries need a digital skills strategy?
Digital skills underpin nearly every aspect of work and life. From filling in a government form to communicating for work, it is difficult to find a job or life-task that does not require a basic level of digital functioning. And with new technologies emerging every day, we need lifelong opportunities to learn new skills that will allow us to succeed in an era of ongoing digital transformation. Digital skills are essential in opening the door to a wide range of opportunities in the 21st century. Countries that implement comprehensive digital skills strategies ensure their populations have the skills they need to be more employable, productive, creative, and successful while ensuring they remain safe, secure and healthy online. Critically, digital skills strategies need to be updated regularly to respond to the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the digital economy and digital society. The digital economy has created a huge shortage of people with the necessary digital skills. ITU research shows that there will be tens of millions of jobs for people with advanced digital skills in the coming years. In Europe, for example, estimates suggest there will be 500,000 unfilled positions for ICT professionals by 2020. Every region faces similar challenges. In addition to existing skills gaps, experts forecast that advances in areas like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and other technologies will usher in a new era that will radically alter patterns of consumption, production, and employment. Many countries view digital skills as one of the core foundations of the digital transformation….(More)”
How Do You Control 1.4 Billion People?
Robert Foyle Hunwick at The New Republic: China’s “social credit system”, which becomes mandatory in 2020, aims to funnel all behavior into a credit score….The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.”
Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing to help injured strangers for fear of being held responsible—have become a national embarrassment. Even the most enthusiastic middle-class supporters of the ruling Communist Party (CCP) feel perpetually insecure. “Fraud has become ever more common,” Lian Weiliang, vice chairman of the CCP’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently admitted. “Swindlers must pay a price.”
The solution, apparently, lies in a data-driven system that automatically separates the good, the bad, and the ugly…
once compulsory state “social credit” goes national in 2020, these shadowy algorithms will become even more opaque. Social credit will align with Communist Party policy to become another form of law enforcement. Since Beijing relaxed its One Child Policy to cope with an aging population (400 million seniors by 2035), the government has increasingly indulged in a form of nationalist natalism to encourage more two-child families. Will women be penalized for staying single, and rewarded for swapping their careers for childbirth? In April, one of the country’s largest social-media companies banned homosexual content from its Weibo platform in order to “create a bright and harmonious community environment” (the decision was later rescinded in favor of cracking down on all sexual content). Will people once again be forced to hide non-normative sexual orientations in order to maintain their rights? An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also warns that social credit policies would be used to discourage protest.
State media has defended social credit against Orwellian charges, arguing that China’s maturing economy requires a “well-functioning” apparatus like the U.S.’s FICO credit score system. But, counters Lubman, “the U.S. systems, maintained by three companies, collect only financially related information.” In the UK, citizens are entitled to an Equifax report itemizing their credit status. In China, only the security services have access to an individual’s dang’an, the personal file containing every scrap of information the state keeps on them, from exam results to their religious and political views….(More)”.
Examining Civil Society Legitimacy
Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Civil society is under stress globally as dozens of governments across multiple regions are reducing space for independent civil society organizations, restricting or prohibiting international support for civic groups, and propagating government-controlled nongovernmental organizations. Although civic activists in most places are no strangers to repression, this wave of anti–civil society actions and attitudes is the widest and deepest in decades. It is an integral part of two broader global shifts that raise concerns about the overall health of the international liberal order: the stagnation of democracy worldwide and the rekindling of nationalistic sovereignty, often with authoritarian features.
Attacks on civil society take myriad forms, from legal and regulatory measures to physical harassment, and usually include efforts to delegitimize civil society. Governments engaged in closing civil society spaces not only target specific civic groups but also spread doubt about the legitimacy of the very idea of an autonomous civic sphere that can activate and channel citizens’ interests and demands. These legitimacy attacks typically revolve around four arguments or accusations:
- That civil society organizations are self-appointed rather than elected, and thus do not represent the popular will. For example, the Hungarian government justified new restrictions on foreign-funded civil society organizations by arguing that “society is represented by the elected governments and elected politicians, and no one voted for a single civil organization.”
- That civil society organizations receiving foreign funding are accountable to external rather than domestic constituencies, and advance foreign rather than local agendas. In India, for example, the Modi government has denounced foreign-funded environmental NGOs as “anti-national,” echoing similar accusations in Egypt, Macedonia, Romania, Turkey, and elsewhere.
- That civil society groups are partisan political actors disguised as nonpartisan civic actors: political wolves in citizen sheep’s clothing. Governments denounce both the goals and methods of civic groups as being illegitimately political, and hold up any contacts between civic groups and opposition parties as proof of the accusation.
- That civil society groups are elite actors who are not representative of the people they claim to represent. Critics point to the foreign education backgrounds, high salaries, and frequent foreign travel of civic activists to portray them as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary citizens and only working to perpetuate their own privileged lifestyle.
Attacks on civil society legitimacy are particularly appealing for populist leaders who draw on their nationalist, majoritarian, and anti-elite positioning to deride civil society groups as foreign, unrepresentative, and elitist. Other leaders borrow from the populist toolbox to boost their negative campaigns against civil society support. The overall aim is clear: to close civil society space, governments seek to exploit and widen existing cleavages between civil society and potential supporters in the population. Rather than engaging with the substantive issues and critiques raised by civil society groups, they draw public attention to the real and alleged shortcomings of civil society actors as channels for citizen grievances and demands.
The widening attacks on the legitimacy of civil society oblige civil society organizations and their supporters to revisit various fundamental questions: What are the sources of legitimacy of civil society? How can civil society organizations strengthen their legitimacy to help them weather government attacks and build strong coalitions to advance their causes? And how can international actors ensure that their support reinforces rather than undermines the legitimacy of local civic activism?
To help us find answers to these questions, we asked civil society activists working in ten countries around the world—from Guatemala to Tunisia and from Kenya to Thailand—to write about their experiences with and responses to legitimacy challenges. Their essays follow here. We conclude with a final section in which we extract and discuss the key themes that emerge from their contributions as well as our own research…
- Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Landscape
- César Rodríguez-Garavito, Objectivity Without Neutrality: Reflections From Colombia
- Walter Flores, Legitimacy From Below: Supporting Indigenous Rights in Guatemala
- Arthur Larok, Pushing Back: Lessons From Civic Activism in Uganda
- Kimani Njogu, Confronting Partisanship and Divisions in Kenya
- Youssef Cherif, Delegitimizing Civil Society in Tunisia
- Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, The Legitimacy Deficit of Thailand’s Civil Society
- Özge Zihnioğlu, Navigating Politics and Polarization in Turkey
- Stefánia Kapronczay, Beyond Apathy and Mistrust: Defending Civic Activism in Hungary
- Zohra Moosa, On Our Own Behalf: The Legitimacy of Feminist Movements
- Nilda Bullain and Douglas Rutzen, All for One, One for All: Protecting Sectoral Legitimacy
- Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers, The Legitimacy Menu….(More)”.
200,000 Volunteers Have Become the Fact Checkers of the Internet
Hanna Kozlowska and Heather TimmonsNextGov: “Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is on the verge of adulthood. It’s the world’s fifth-most popular website, with 46 million articles in 300 languages, while having less than 300 full-time employees. What makes it successful is the 200,000 volunteers who create it, said Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent-organization for Wikipedia and its sister sites.
Unlike other tech companies, Wikipedia has avoided accusations of major meddling from malicious actors to subvert elections around the world. Part of this is because of the site’s model, where the creation process is largely transparent, but it’s also thanks to its community of diligent editors who monitor the content…
Somewhat unwittingly, Wikipedia has become the internet’s fact-checker. Recently, both YouTube and Facebook started using the platform to show more context about videos or posts in order to curb the spread of disinformation—even though Wikipedia is crowd-sourced, and can be manipulated as well….
While no evidence of organized, widespread election-related manipulation on the platform has emerged so far, Wikipedia is not free of malicious actors, or people trying to grab control of the narrative. In Croatia, for instance, the local-language Wikipedia was completely taken over by right-wing ideologues several years ago.
The platform has also been battling the problem of “black-hat editing”— done surreptitiously by people who are trying to push a certain view—on the platform for years….
About 200,000 editors contribute to Wikimedia projects every month, and together with AI-powered bots they made a total of 39 million edits in February of 2018. In the chart below, group-bots are bots approved by the community, which do routine maintenance on the site, looking for examples of vandalism, for example. Name-bots are users who have “bot” in their name.
Like every other tech platform, Wikimedia is looking into how AI could help improve the site. “We are very interested in how AI can help us do things like evaluate the quality of articles, how deep and effective the citations are for a particular article, the relative neutrality of an article, the relative quality of an article,” said Maher. The organization would also like to use it to catch gaps in its content….(More)”.
Using Linked Open Statistical Data to enhance executive decision making in Greek Public Administration
OpenGovIntelligence: “Imagine an executive Government Department that needs to manage resources and make decisions on a daily basis without possessing any data to support them. This is the case in the supervising department of Government Vehicles, which is part of the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reconstruction. This department is in charge of the supervision and management of the whole fleet of Greek Government Vehicles….In an attempt to solve this problem, the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reconstruction joined the OpenGovernmentIntelligence project as a pilot partner to exploit statistical data for this purpose. Preliminary findings of the project team were very encouraging, to the surprise of Greek Ministry executives. There was a plethora of Government Vehicle data owned by other governmental and non-governmental bodies. Interestingly, the Ministry of Transport even had record level data of all vehicles, including governmental ones. Other data providers included the Hellenic Statistical Authority and the Hellenic Association of Motor Vehicle Importers-Representatives that provided fuel consumption and gas emissions data. Even more impressively, before the end of the first year of the project, a new web-based platform was built by means of the OGI toolkit. Its goal was to provide visualisations and statistical metrics to enhance executive decision making. For the first time, decision makers could acquire knowledge on metrics such as the average age, cubic capacity or daily fuel consumptions of a Government Agency fleet.
However, a lot still needs to be done. The primary concern of the Greek Pilot team members is now data quality, as the Ministry of Administrative Reconstruction does not own any of these data. Next steps include data validation and cleansing, as well as collaboration with other agencies serving as intermediates for government fleet management regarding service co-production. Executives in the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reconstruction are now pleased to have access to data that will enhance their ability to make rational decisions regarding Government Vehicles. This is a small, but at the same time essential, step for a country struggling with economic recession….(More)”.