What Germany’s Lack of Race Data Means During a Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Edna Bonhomme: “What do you think the rate of Covid-19 is for us?” This is the question that many Black people living in Berlin asked me at the beginning of March 2020. The answer: We don’t know. Unlike other countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, the German government does not record racial identity information in official documents and statistics. Due to the country’s history with the Holocaust, calling Rasse (race) by its name has long been contested.

To some, data that focuses on race without considering intersecting factors such as class, neighborhood, environment, or genetics rings with furtive deception, because it might fail to encapsulate the multitude of elements that impact well-being. Similarly, some information makes it difficult to categorize a person into one identity: A multiracial person may not wish to choose one racial group, one of many conundrums that complicate the denotation of demographics. There is also the element of trust. If there are reliable statistics that document racial data and health in Germany, what will be done about it, and what does it mean for the government to potentially access, collect, or use this information? As with the history of artificial intelligence, figures often poorly capture the experiences of Black people, or are often misused. Would people have confidence in the German government to prioritize the interests of ethnic or racial minorities and other marginalized groups, specifically with respect to health and medicine?

Nevertheless, the absence of data collection around racial identity may conceal how certain groups might be disproportionately impacted by a malady. Racial self-identities can be a marker for data scientists and public health officials to understand the rates or trends of diseases, whether it’s breast cancer or Covid-19. Race data has been helpful for understanding inequities in many contexts. In the US, statistics on maternal mortality and race have been a portent for exposing how African Americans are disproportionately affected, and have since been a persuasive foundation for shifting behavior, resources, and policy on birthing practices.

In 2020, the educational association Each One Teach One, in partnership with Citizens for Europe, launched The Afrozensus, the first large-scale sociological study on Black people living in Germany, inquiring about employment, housing, and health—part of deepening insight into the ethnic makeup of this group and the institutional discrimination that they might face. Of the 5,000 people that took part in the survey, a little over 70 percent were born in Germany, with the other top four being the United States, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. Germany’s Afro-German population is heterogenous, a reflection of an African diaspora that hails from various migrations, whether it be Fulani people from Senegal or the descendants of slaves from the Americas. “Black,” as an identity, does not and cannot grasp the cultural and linguistic richness that exists among the people who fit into this category, but it may be part of a tableau for gathering shared experiences or systematic inequities.“I think that the Afrozensus didn’t reveal anything that Black people didn’t already know,” said Jeff Kwasi Klein, Project Manager of Each One Teach. “Yes, there is discrimination in all walks of life.” The results from this first attempt at race-based data collection show that ignoring Rasse has not allowed racial minorities to elide prejudice in Germany….(More)”.

Digital Wallets and Migration Policy: A Critical Intersection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the German Marshall Fund: “A range of international bodies have recently begun experimenting with digital wallets. Digital wallets take many forms but are typically mobile phone-based systems that enable people to make electronic transactions and/or share identity credentials. In cross-border and migration contexts, digital wallets promise to have wide ranging implications for global governance, especially in identity management and finance. Aid organizations, governments, technology companies, and other interested parties are testing digital wallet projects that either target, or incidentally affect, migrants and refugees along with mainstream citizens.

A pertinent example is Ukraine’s Diia wallet. Precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the reliance on digital systems for governance, the Ukrainian government launched the Diia wallet in 2020. Diia provides Ukrainians with a centralized, digital platform for storing, managing, and sharing official credentials such as vaccination records, insurance documents, passports, ID cards, and licenses.  Through the Diia mobile application, Ukrainian people can engage with the government to update residence or driving license information, pay taxes, or access benefits, among other uses.

In early 2022, Russia’s war on Ukraine prompted the mass displacement of Ukrainian refugees. Key government infrastructures have been and continue to be targeted, compromised, and/or destroyed by Russian forces. Some Ukrainians have lost access to their devices, network connections, and digital ID documents in the Diia wallet (see Figure 1). However, others are using the wallet to access vital assistance. Internally displaced people are receiving monthly aid to cover living expenses; refugees are using Diia to donate to the army, report on enemy troops, and access TV and radio. The Diia wallet is a key example of a mainstream digital wallet system being stress tested in circumstances of political conflict and displacement. It illustrates the urgent need to investigate the implications of national digital wallet systems for governments and people in crisis:

  • Does the digital wallet infrastructure support the secure continuation of government services and assistance?
  • Do digital wallets boost the resilience of internally displaced people and refugees rebuilding their lives across borders, including marginalized groups?
  • What are the risks of a digital wallet system, and how are they playing out in conditions of mass displacement?…(More)”.

Education data reality: A continued conversation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Report by the Digital Futures Commission (UK): “explores how EdTech is currently used within schools, and identifies four problems that constrain children’s best interests when it comes to EdTech and the use of education data:

  1. Disproportional risks vs benefits: The actual benefits of EdTech and the data processed from children in schools are currently not discernible or in children’s best interests. Nor are they proportionate to the scope, scale and sensitivity of data currently processed from children in schools. The teachers and school staff reported modest added value of EdTech or the insights that could be extracted from the data processed by the EdTech in use without appropriate analytics skills required from teachers or school staff.
  2. Limited control over data: Schools have limited control or oversight over data processed from children through their uses of EdTech. This limited control over data results from the design of the specific EdTech, EdTech providers’ business models, the broader ecosystem of public and commercial stakeholders with interests in data processed from children in educational contexts and convoluted terms of service and privacy policies. Effectively, the power imbalance between EdTech providers and schools, as service users, is structured in the terms of use they signed up to and exacerbated by external pressure to use some EdTech services.
  3. Insufficient guidance: Currently, there is a distinct lack of comprehensive guidance for schools on how to manage EdTech providers’ data practices. Nor is there a minimum standard for acceptable features, data practices and evidence-based benefits for schools to navigate the currently fragmented EdTech market and select appropriate EdTech that offers educational benefits proportionate to the data it processes.
  4. Resource limitation: Patchy access to and security of digital devices at school and home due to cost and resource barriers means that access to digital technologies to deliver and receive education remains inequitable…(More)”.

The Truth in Fake News: How Disinformation Laws Are Reframing the Concepts of Truth and Accuracy on Digital Platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Paolo Cavaliere: “The European Union’s (EU) strategy to address the spread of disinformation, and most notably the Code of Practice on Disinformation and the forthcoming Digital Services Act, tasks digital platforms with a range of actions to minimise the distribution of issue-based and political adverts that are verifiably false or misleading. This article discusses the implications of the EU’s approach with a focus on its categorical approach, specifically what it means to conceptualise disinformation as a form of advertisement and by what standards digital platforms are expected to assess the truthful or misleading nature of the content they distribute because of this categorisation. The analysis will show how the emerging EU anti-disinformation framework marks a departure from the European Court of Human Rights’ consolidated standards of review for public interest and commercial speech and the tests utilised to assess their accuracy….(More)”.

Expert Group to Eurostat releases its report on the re-use of privately-held data for Official Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “…To inform its efforts, Eurostat set up an expert group in 2021 on ‘Facilitating the use of new data sources for official statistics’ to reflect on opportunities offered by the data revolution to enhance the reuse of private sector data for official statistics”.

Data reuse is a particularly important area for exploration, both because of the potential it offers and because it is not sufficiently covered by current policies. Data reuse occurs when data collected for one purpose is shared and reused for another, often with resulting social benefit. Currently, this process is limited by a fragmented or outdated policy and regulatory framework, and often quite legitimate concerns over ethical challenges represented by sharing (e.g., threats to individual privacy).

Nonetheless, despite such hurdles, a wide variety of evidence supports the idea that responsible data reuse can strengthen and supplement official statistics, and potentially lead to lasting and positive social impact.

Having reviewed and deliberated about these issues over several months, the expert group issued its report this week entitled “Empowering society by reusing privately held data for official statistics”. It seeks to develop recommendations and a framework for sustainable data reuse in the production of official statistics. It highlights regulatory gaps, fragmentation of practices, and a lack of clarity regarding businesses’ rights and obligations, and it draws attention to the ways in which current efforts to reuse data have often led to ad-hoc, one-off projects rather than systematic transformation.

The report considers a wide variety of evidence, including historical, policy, and academic research, as well as the theoretical literature… (More)”.

Read the Eurostat report at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/read-final-report_en

The modern malaise of innovation: overwhelm, complexity, and herding cats

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Lucy Mason: “But the modern world is too complicated to innovate alone. Coming up with the idea is the easy bit: developing and implementing it inevitably involves navigating complex and choppy waters: multiple people, funding routes, personal agendas, legal complexity, and strategic fuzziness. All too often, great ideas fail to become reality not because the idea wouldn’t work, but because everything in the ecosystem seems (accidentally) designed to prevent it from working.

Given that innovation is a key Government priority, and so many organisations and people are dedicated to make it happen (such as Innovate UK), this lack of success seems odd. The problem does not lie with the R&D base: despite relative underinvestment by the UK Government the UK punches well above its weight in world-leading R&D. Being an entrepreneur is of course, hard work, high risk and prone to failure even for the most dedicated individuals. But are there particular features which inhibit how innovation is developed, scaled, implemented, and adopted in the UK? I would argue there are three key factors at play: overwhelm (too much), complexity (too vague), and ‘herding cats’ (too hard)…(More)”.

The digitalisation of social protection before and since the onset of Covid-19: opportunities, challenges and lessons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Overseas Development Institute: “…discusses the main opportunities and challenges associated with digital social protection, drawing on trends pre-Covid and since the onset of the pandemic. It offers eight lessons to help social protection actors capitalise on technology’s potential in a risk-sensitive manner.

  • The response to Covid-19 accelerated the trend of increasing digitalisation of social protection delivery.
  • Studies from before and during the pandemic suggest that well-used technology holds potential to enhance provision for some service users, and played a notable role in rapid social protection expansion during Covid-19. It may also help reduce leakage or inclusion errors, lower costs and support improvements in programme design.
  • However, unless designed and implemented with careful mitigating measures, digitalisation may in some cases do more harm than good. Key concerns relate to potential risks and challenges of exclusion, protection and privacy violations, ‘technosolutionism’ and obscured transparency and accountability.
  • Ultimately, technology is a tool, and its outcomes depend on the needs it is expected to meet, the goals it is deployed to pursue, and the specific ways in which it is designed and implemented…(More)”.

“Co-construction” in deliberative democracy: lessons from the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Louis-Gaëtan Giraudet et al: “Launched in 2019, the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate (CCC) tasked 150 randomly chosen citizens with proposing fair and effective measures to fight climate change. This was to be fulfilled through an “innovative co-construction procedure”, involving some unspecified external input alongside that from the citizens. Did inputs from the steering bodies undermine the citizens’ accountability for the output? Did co-construction help the output resonate with the general public, as is expected from a citizens’ assembly? To answer these questions, we build on our unique experience in observing the CCC proceedings and documenting them with qualitative and quantitative data. We find that the steering bodies’ input, albeit significant, did not impair the citizens’ agency, creativity, and freedom of choice. While succeeding in creating consensus among the citizens who were involved, this co-constructive approach, however, failed to generate significant support among the broader public. These results call for a strengthening of the commitment structure that determines how follow-up on the proposals from a citizens’ assembly should be conducted…(More)”.

Societal Readiness Thinking Tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “…The thinking tool offers practical guidance for researchers who wish to mature the societal readiness of their work. The primary goal is to help researchers align their project activities with societal needs and expectations. The thinking tool asks reflective questions to stimulate thinking about how to integrate ideas about responsible research and innovation  into research practice, at different stages in the project life. We have designed the tool so that it is useful for researchers engaged in new as well as ongoing projects. Some of the reflective questions used in the tool are adapted from other RRI projects. References for these projects and a detailed account of the tool’s underlying methodology is available  here.   If your project involves several researchers, we recommend that the full team is involved in using the Societal Readiness Thinking Tool together, and that you reserve sufficient time for discussions along the way. Ideally, the team would use the tool from the from the earliest phases of the project and return at later stages thougout the project life. You can learn more about the tool’s RRI terminology  here…(More)”.

Regulatory Governance: Policy Making, Legislative Drafting and Law Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edward Donelan: “This book describes how governments formulate policies, draft legislation, and manage stocks of legislation and how approaches to these tasks are converging. That convergence has developed over 30 years through the work by the OECD in its studies on regulatory reform and the work of other international organizations to improve regulatory management.

The Institutions of the European Union and its member states, OECD member countries and a growing number of developing and transitional countries have developed a policy best described as ‘Better Regulation.’ That policy is characterized using regulatory impact assessment, improving public consultation, and reducing administrative burdens. The policy has brought improvements in legislative drafting and managing stocks of legislation.

The book concludes with a description of the impact of information technology on governments and how the challenges posed by the Internet, globalization and pandemics are being met by new approaches to regulating to ensure its benefits exceed its costs….(More)”.