Europe’s Digital Decade: Commission sets the course towards a digitally empowered Europe by 2030

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “…The Commission proposes a Digital Compass to translate the EUʼs digital ambitions for 2030 into concrete terms. They evolve around four cardinal points:

1) Digitally skilled citizens and highly skilled digital professionals; By 2030, at least 80% of all adults should have basic digital skills, and there should be 20 million employed ICT specialists in the EU – while more women should take up such jobs;

2) Secure, performant and sustainable digital infrastructures; By 2030, all EU households should have gigabit connectivity and all populated areas should be covered by 5G; the production of cutting-edge and sustainable semiconductors in Europe should be 20% of world production; 10,000 climate neutral highly secure edge nodes should be deployed in the EU; and Europe should have its first quantum computer;

3) Digital transformation of businesses; By 2030, three out of four companies should use cloud computing services, big data and Artificial Intelligence; more than 90% SMEs should reach at least basic level of digital intensity; and the number of EU unicorns should double;

4) Digitalisation of public services; By 2030, all key public services should be available online; all citizens will have access to their e-medical records; and 80% citizens should use an eID solution.

The Compass sets out a robust joint governance structure with Member States based on a monitoring system with annual reporting in the form of traffic lights. The targets will be enshrined in a Policy Programme to be agreed with the European Parliament and the Council….(More)“.

How Big Data is Transforming the Way We Plan Our Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rawad Choubassi and Lamia Abdelfattah: “The availability of ubiquitous location-based data in cities has had far-reaching implications on analytical powers in various disciplines. This article focuses on some of the accrued benefits to urban transport planners and the urban planning field at large. It contends that the gains of Big Data and real-time information has not only improved analytical strength, but has also created ripple effects in the systemic approaches of city planning, integrating ex-post studies within the design cycle and redefining the planning process as a microscopic, iterative and self-correcting process. Case studies from the field are used to further highlight these newfound abilities to process fine-grained analyses and propose more customized location-based solutions, offered by Big Data. A detailed description of the Torrance Living Lab experience maps out some of the potentials of using movement data from Big Data sources to design an alternative mobility plan for a low-density urban area. Finally, the paper reflects on Big Data’s limited capacity at present to replace traditional forecast modelling tools, despite demonstrated advantages over traditional methods in gaining insight from past and present travel trends….(More)”.

How governments use evidence to make transport policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Alistair Baldwin, and Kelly Shuttleworth: “The government’s ambitious transport plans will falter unless policy makers – ministers, civil servants and other public officials – improve the way they identify and use evidence to inform their decisions.

This report compares the use of evidence in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and New Zealand, and finds that England is an outlier in not having a coordinated transport strategy. This damages both scrutiny and coordination of transport policy.

The government has plans to reform bus services, support cycling, review rail franchising, and invest more than £60 billion in transport projects over the next five years. But these plans are not integrated. The Department for Transport should develop a new strategy integrating different modes of transport, rather than mode by mode, to improve political understanding of trade-offs and scrutiny of policy decisions.

The DfT is a well-resourced department, with significant expertise, responsibilities and a wide array of analysts. But its reliance on economic evidence means other forms of evidence can appear neglected in transport decision making – including social research, evaluation or engineering. Decision makers are often too attached to the importance of the Benefit-Cost Ratio at the expense of other forms of evidence.

The government needs to improve its attitude to evaluation of past projects. There are successes – like the evaluation of the Cycle City Ambition Fund – but they are outnumbered by failures – like the evaluation of projects in the Local Growth Fund.  For example, good practice from Highways England should be common across the transport sector, helped by providing dedicated funding to local authorities to properly evaluate projects….(More)”.

“Civic tech” and “digital democracy” to “open up” democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Clément Mabi in Réseaux: “This paper posits that digital participatory democracy can be seen as a new anchor of participatory governmentality. Conveniently called “digital democracy”, its implementation contributes to the spread of a particular conception of government through participation, influenced by digital literacy and its principles of self-organization and interactivity. By studying the deployment and trajectory of the so-called “civic tech” movement in France, the aim is to show that the project of democratic openness embodied by the movement has gradually narrowed down to a logic of services, for the purposes of institutions. The “great national debate” triggered a shift in this trajectory. While part of the community complied with the government’s request to facilitate participation, the debate also gave unprecedented visibility to critics who contributed to the emergence of a different view of the role of digital technologies in democracy….(More)“.

Liability of online platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Parliament Think Tank: “Given the central role that online platforms (OPs) play in the digital economy, questions arise about their responsibility in relation to illegal/harmful content or products hosted in the frame of their operation. Against this background, this study reviews the main legal/regulatory challenges associated with OP operations and analyses the incentives for OPs, their users and third parties to detect and remove illegal/harmful and dangerous material, content and/or products. To create a functional classification which can be used for regulatory purposes, it discusses the notion of OPs and attempts to categorise them under multiple criteria. The study then maps and critically assesses the whole range of OP liabilities, taking hard and soft law, self-regulation and national legislation into consideration, whenever relevant. Finally, the study puts forward policy options for an efficient EU liability regime: (i) maintaining the status quo; (ii) awareness-raising and media literacy; (iii)promoting self-regulation; (iv) establishing co-regulation mechanisms and tools; (v) adoptingstatutory legislation; (vi) modifying OPs’ secondaryliability by employing two different models – (a) byclarifying the conditions for liability exemptionsprovided by the e-Commerce Directive or (b) byestablishing a harmonised regime of liability….(More)”.

Dialogues about Data: Building trust and unlocking the value of citizens’ health and care data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nesta Report by Sinead Mac Manus and Alice Clay: “The last decade has seen exponential growth in the amount of data generated, collected and analysed to provide insights across all aspects of industry. Healthcare is no exception. We are increasingly seeing the value of using health and care data to prevent ill health, improve health outcomes for people and provide new insights into disease and treatments.

Bringing together common themes across the existing research, this report sets out two interlinked challenges to building a data-driven health and care system. This is interspersed with best practice examples of the potential of data to improve health and care, as well as cautionary tales of what can happen when this is done badly.

The first challenge we explore is how to increase citizens’ trust and transparency in data sharing. The second challenge is how to unlock the value of health and care data.

We are excited about the role for participatory futures – a set of techniques that systematically engage people to imagine and create more sustainable, inclusive futures – in helping governments and other organisations work with citizens to engage them in debate about their health and care data to build a data-driven health and care system for the benefit of all….(More)”.

New approach to data is a great opportunity for the UK post-Brexit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Oliver Dowden at the Financial Times: “As you read this, thousands of people are receiving a message that will change their lives: a simple email or text, inviting them to book their Covid jab. But what has powered the UK’s remarkable vaccine rollout isn’t just our NHS, but the data that sits underneath it — from the genetic data used to develop the vaccine right through to the personal health data enabling that “ping” on their smartphone.

After years of seeing data solely through the lens of risk, Covid-19 has taught us just how much we have to lose when we don’t use it.

As I launch the competition to find the next Information Commissioner, I want to set a bold new approach that capitalises on all we’ve learnt during the pandemic, which forced us to share data quickly, efficiently and responsibly for the public good. It is one that no longer sees data as a threat, but as the great opportunity of our time.

Until now, the conversation about data has revolved around privacy — and with good reason. A person’s digital footprint can tell you not just vital statistics like age and gender, but their personal habits.

Our first priority is securing this valuable personal information. The UK has a long and proud tradition of defending privacy, and a commitment to maintaining world-class data protection standards now that we’re outside the EU. That was recognised last week in the bloc’s draft decisions on the ‘adequacy’ of our data protection rules — the agreement that data can keep flowing freely between the EU and UK.

We fully intend to maintain those world-class standards. But to do so, we do not need to copy and paste the EU’s rule book, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), word-for-word. Countries as diverse as Israel and Uruguay have successfully secured adequacy with Brussels despite having their own data regimes. Not all of those were identical to GDPR, but equal doesn’t have to mean the same. The EU doesn’t hold the monopoly on data protection.

So, having come a long way in learning how to manage data’s risks, the UK is going to start making more of its opportunities….(More)”.

My Data, My Choice? – German Patient Organizations’ Attitudes towards Big Data-Driven Approaches in Personalized Medicine. An Empirical-Ethical Study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carolin Martina Rauter, Sabine Wöhlke & Silke Schicktanz: “Personalized medicine (PM) operates with biological data to optimize therapy or prevention and to achieve cost reduction. Associated data may consist of large variations of informational subtypes e.g. genetic characteristics and their epigenetic modifications, biomarkers or even individual lifestyle factors. Present innovations in the field of information technology have already enabled the procession of increasingly large amounts of such data (‘volume’) from various sources (‘variety’) and varying quality in terms of data accuracy (‘veracity’) to facilitate the generation and analyzation of messy data sets within a short and highly efficient time period (‘velocity’) to provide insights into previously unknown connections and correlations between different items (‘value’). As such developments are characteristics of Big Data approaches, Big Data itself has become an important catchphrase that is closely linked to the emerging foundations and approaches of PM. However, as ethical concerns have been pointed out by experts in the debate already, moral concerns by stakeholders such as patient organizations (POs) need to be reflected in this context as well. We used an empirical-ethical approach including a website-analysis and 27 telephone-interviews for gaining in-depth insight into German POs’ perspectives on PM and Big Data. Our results show that not all POs are stakeholders in the same way. Comparing the perspectives and political engagement of the minority of POs that is currently actively involved in research around PM and Big Data-driven research led to four stakeholder sub-classifications: ‘mediators’ support research projects through facilitating researcher’s access to the patient community while simultaneously selecting projects they preferably support while ‘cooperators’ tend to contribute more directly to research projects by providing and implemeting patient perspectives. ‘Financers’ provide financial resources. ‘Independents’ keep control over their collected samples and associated patient-related information with a strong interest in making autonomous decisions about its scientific use. A more detailed terminology for the involvement of POs as stakeholders facilitates the adressing of their aims and goals. Based on our results, the ‘independents’ subgroup is a promising candidate for future collaborations in scientific research. Additionally, we identified gaps in PO’s knowledge about PM and Big Data. Based on these findings, approaches can be developed to increase data and statistical literacy. This way, the full potential of stakeholder involvement of POs can be made accessible in discourses around PM and Big Data….(More)”.

Copenhagen Manual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The Copenhagen Manual is a helping hand for those who are in a position to further data-informed strategies for public sector development or have been given the responsibility for preparing, analysing or communicating a survey on public sector innovation.

Like other instruction manuals, the Copenhagen Manual offers examples of use, handy tips and general warnings. The manual discusses setting strategic goals, communication, reaching respondents, adapting the questionnaire and defining public sector innovation.

Internationally comparable data

The manual offers an opportunity to mirror public sector innovation capacity by way of internationally comparable data. The Copenhagen Manual, with emphasis on the ‘open’ in Copenhagen is:

  • the result of an open co-creation process that welcomed the participation of all interested parties
  • based on the open sharing of a multitude of experiences, good and bad
  • open to interpretation, making it usable in different national contexts and open to continuous discussion of added practical experience as actors from more countries conduct surveys on public sector innovation…(More)”.

Designing Data Trusts. Why We Need to Test Consumer Data Trusts Now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Brief by Aline Blankertz: “Data about individuals, about their preferences and behaviors, has become an increasingly important resource for companies, public agencies, and research institutions. Consumers carry the burden of having to decide which data about them is shared for which purpose. They want to make sure that data about them is not used to infer intimate details of their private life or to pursue other undesirable purposes. At the same time, they want to benefit from personalized products and innovation driven by the same data. The complexity of how data is collected and used overwhelms consumers, many of whom wearily accept privacy policies and lose trust that those who gain effective control over the data will use it for the consumers’ benefit.

At the same time, a few large companies accumulate and lock in vast amounts of data that enable them to use insights across markets and across consumers. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has given data rights to consumers to assert their interests vis-a-vis those companies, but it gives consumers neither enough information nor enough power to make themselves heard. Other organizations, especially small businesses or start-ups, do not have access to the data (unless individual consumers laboriously exercise their right to portability), which often inhibits competition and innovation. Governments across Europe would like to tackle the challenge of reconciling productive data use with privacy. In recent months, data trusts have emerged as a promising solution to enable data-sharing for the benefit of consumers.

The concept has been endorsed by a broad range of stakeholders, including privacy advocates, companies and expert commissions. In Germany, for example, the data ethics commission and the commission competition law 4.0 have recommended further exploring data trusts, and the government is incorporating the concept into its data strategy.

There is no common understanding yet what consumer data trusts are and what they do. In order for them to address the problems mentioned, it is helpful to use as a working definition: consumer data trusts are intermediaries that aggregate consumers’ interests and represent them vis-à-vis data-using organizations. Data trusts use more technical and legal expertise, as well as greater bargaining power, to negotiate with organizations on the conditions of data use to achieve better outcomes than those that individual consumers can achieve. To achieve their consumer-oriented mission, data trusts should be able to assign access rights, audit data practices, and support enforcement. They may or may not need to hold data…(More)”.