WeDialogue

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WeDialogue: “… is a global experiment to test new solutions for commenting on news online. The objective of weDialogue is to promote humility in public discourse and prevent digital harassment and trolling.

What am I expected to do?

The task is simple. You are asked to fill out a survey, then wait until the experiment begins. You will then be given a login for your platform. There you will be able to read and comment on news as if it was a normal online newspaper or blog. We would like people to comment as much as possible, but you are free to contribute as much as you want. At the end of the experiment we would be very grateful if you could fill in a final survey and provide us with feedback on the overall experience.

Why is important to test new platforms for news comments?

We know the problems of harassment and trolling (see our video), but the solution is not obvious. Developers have proposed new platforms, but these have not been tested rigorously. weDialogue is a participatory action research project that aims to combine academic expertise and citizens’ knowledge and experience to test potential solutions.

What are you going to do with the research?

All our research and data will be publicly available so that others can build upon it. Both the Deliberatorium and Pol.is are free software that can be reused. The data we will create and the resulting publications will be released in an open access environment.

Who is weDialogue?

weDialogue is an action research project led by a team of academics at the University of Westminster (UK) and the University of Connecticut (USA).  For more information about the academic project see our academic project website.…(More)”.

Open Data Politics: A Case Study on Estonia and Kazakhstan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Maxat Kassen: “… offers a cross-national comparison of open data policies in Estonia and Kazakhstan. By analyzing a broad range of open data-driven projects and startups in both countries, it reveals the potential that open data phenomena hold with regard to promoting public sector innovations. The book addresses various political and socioeconomic contexts in these two transitional societies, and reviews the strategies and tactics adopted by policymakers and stakeholders to identify drivers of and obstacles to the implementation of open data innovations. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars, policymakers, e-government practitioners and open data entrepreneurs interested in implementing and evaluating open data-driven public sector projects….(More)”

Facebook could be forced to share data on effects to the young

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicola Davis at The Guardian: “Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter could be required by law to share data with researchers to help examine potential harms to young people’s health and identify who may be at risk.

Surveys and studies have previously suggested a link between the use of devices and networking sites and an increase in problems among teenagers and younger children ranging from poor sleep to bullying, mental health issues and grooming.

However, high quality research in the area is scarce: among the conundrums that need to be looked at are matters of cause and effect, the size of any impacts, and the importance of the content of material accessed online.

According to a report by the Commons science and technology committee on the effects of social media and screen time among young people, companies should be compelled to protect users and legislation was needed to enable access to data for high quality studies to be carried out.

The committee noted that the government had failed to commission such research and had instead relied on requesting reviews of existing studies. This was despite a 2017 green paper that set out a consultation process on aUK internet safety strategy.

“We understand [social media companies’] eagerness to protect the privacy of users but sharing data with bona fide researchers is the only way society can truly start to understand the impact, both positive and negative, that social media is having on the modern world,” said Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the committee. “During our inquiry, we heard that social media companies had openly refused to share data with researchers who are keen to examine patterns of use and their effects. This is not good enough.”

Prof Andrew Przybylski, the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the issue of good quality research was vital, adding that many people’s perception of the effect of social media is largely rooted in hype.

“Social media companies must participate in open, robust, and transparent science with independent scientists,” he said. “Their data, which we give them, is both their most valuable resource and it is the only means by which we can effectively study how these platforms affect users.”…(More)”

Evidence vs Democracy: what are we doing to bridge the divide?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Breckon, and Anna Hopkins at the Alliance for Useful Evidence: “People are hacked off with politicians. Whether it’s hurling abuse at MPs outside the House of Commons, or the burning barricades of Gilets Jaunes in Toulouse, discontent is in the air.

The evidence movement must respond to the ‘politics of distrust’. We cannot carry on regardless. For evidence advocates like us, reaching over the heads of the public to get research into the hands of elite policy-makers is not enough. Let’s be honest and accept that a lot of our work goes on behind closed doors. The UK’s nine What Works Centres only rarely engage with the public – more often with professionals, budget holders or civil servants. The evidence movement needs to democratise.

However, the difficulty is that evidence is hard work. It needs slow-thinking, and at least a passing knowledge of statistics, economics, or science.  How on earth can you do all that on Twitter or Facebook?

In a report published today we look at ‘mini-publics’ – an alternative democratic platform to connect citizens with research. Citizens’ Juries, Deliberative Polls, Consensus Conferences and other mini-publics are forums that bring people and evidence together, for constructive, considered debate. Ideally, people work in small groups, that are randomly chosen, and have the chance to interrogate experts in the field in question.

This is not a new idea. The idea of a ‘minipopulus’ was set out by the American political theorist Robert Dahl in the 1970s. Indeed, there is an even older heritage. Athenian classical democracy did for a time select small groups of officials by lot.

It’s also not a utopian idea from the past, as we have found many promising recent examples. For example in the UK, a Citizens’ Assembly on adult social care gave recommendations to two parliamentary Select Committees last year. There are also examples of citizens contributing to our public institutions and agendas by deliberating – through NICE’s Citizens Council or the James Lind Alliance.

We shouldn’t ignore this resistance to the mood of disaffection. Initiatives like the RSA’s Campaign for Deliberative Democracy are making the case for a step-change. To break the political deadlock on Brexit, there has been a call to create a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Stella Creasy MP and others. And there are many hopeful visions of a democratic future from abroad – like the experiments in Canada and Australia. Our report explores many of these international examples.

Citizens can make informed decisions – if we allow them to be citizens. They can understand, debate and interrogate research in platforms like mini-publics. And they can use evidence to help make the case for their priorities and concerns….(More)”.

The Think-Tank Dilemma

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Yoichi Funabashi: “Without the high-quality research that independent think tanks provide, there can be no effective policymaking, nor even a credible basis for debating major issues. Insofar as funding challenges, foreign influence-peddling, and populist attacks on truth pose a threat to such institutions tanks, they threaten democracy itself….

The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC – perhaps the world’s top think tank – is under scrutiny for receiving six-figure donations from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which many consider to be a security threat. And since the barbaric murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October, many other Washington-based think tanks have come under pressure to stop accepting donations from Saudi Arabia.

These recent controversies have given rise to a narrative that Washington-based think tanks are facing a funding crisis. In fact, traditional think tanks are confronting three major challenges that have put them in a uniquely difficult situation. Not only are they facing increased competition from for-profit think tanks such as the McKinsey Global Institute and the Eurasia Group; they also must negotiate rising geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China.And complicating matters further, many citizens, goaded by populist harangues, have become dismissive of “experts” and the fact-based analyses that think tanks produce (or at least should produce).

With respect to the first challenge, Daniel Drezner of Tufts University argues in The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas that for-profit think tanks have engaged in thought leadership by operating as platforms for provocative thinkers who push big ideas. Whereas many non-profit think tanks – as well as universities and non-governmental organizations – remain “old-fashioned” in their approach to data, their for-profit counterparts thrive by finding the one statistic that captures public attention in the digital age. Given their access to both public and proprietary information, for-profit think tanks are also able to maximize the potential of big data in ways that traditional think tanks cannot.

Moreover, with the space for balanced foreign-policy arguments narrowing, think tanks are at risk of becoming tools of geopolitical statecraft. This is especially true now that US-China relations are deteriorating and becoming more ideologically tinged.

Over time, foreign governments of all stripes have cleverly sought to influence policymaking not only in Washington, but also in London, Brussels, Berlin, and elsewhere, by becoming significant donors to think tanks. Governments realize that the well-connected think tanks that act as “power brokers” vis-à-vis the political establishment have been facing fundraising challenges since the 2008 financial crisis. In some cases, locally based think tanks have even been accused of becoming fronts for foreign authoritarian governments….(More)”.


“Giving something back”: A systematic review and ethical enquiry into public views on the use of patient data for research in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jessica Stockdale, Jackie Cassell and Elizabeth Ford: “The use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK, and technological innovation in analytical methods for new discoveries using these data resources is developing quickly. Data scientists have developed, and are improving, many ways to extract and process information in medical records. This continues to lead to an exciting range of health related discoveries, improving population health and saving lives. Nevertheless, as the development of analytic technologies accelerates, the decision-making and governance environment as well as public views and understanding about this work, has been lagging behind1.

Public opinion and data use

A range of small studies canvassing patient views, mainly in the USA, have found an overall positive orientation to the use of patient data for societal benefit2–7. However, recent case studies, like NHS England’s ill-fated Care.data scheme, indicate that certain schemes for secondary data use can prove unpopular in the UK. Launched in 2013, Care.data aimed to extract and upload the whole population’s general practice patient records to a central database for prevalence studies and service planning8. Despite the stated intention of Care.data to “make major advances in quality and patient safety”8, this programme was met with a widely reported public outcry leading to its suspension and eventual closure in 2016. Several factors may have been involved in this failure, from the poor public communication about the project, lack of social licence9, or as pressure group MedConfidential suggests, dislike of selling data to profit-making companies10. However, beyond these specific explanations for the project’s failure, what ignited public controversy was a concern with the impact that its aim to collect and share data on a large scale might have on patient privacy. The case of Care.data indicates a reluctance on behalf of the public to share their patient data, and it is still not wholly clear whether the public are willing to accept future attempts at extracting and linking large datasets of medical information. The picture of mixed opinion makes taking an evidence-based position, drawing on social consensus, difficult for legislators, regulators, and data custodians who may respond to personal or media generated perceptions of public views. However, despite differing results of studies canvassing public views, we hypothesise that there may be underlying ethical principles that could be extracted from the literature on public views, which may provide guidance to policy-makers for future data-sharing….(More)”.

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust has changed profoundly in the past year—people have shifted their trust to the relationships within their control, most notably their employers. Globally, 75 percent of people trust “my employer” to do what is right, significantly more than NGOs (57 percent), business (56 percent) and media (47 percent).

Divided by Trust

There is a 16-point gap between the more trusting informed public and the far-more-skeptical mass population, marking a return to record highs of trust inequality. The phenomenon fueling this divide was a pronounced rise in trust among the informed public. Markets such as the U.S., UK, Canada, South Korea and Hong Kong saw trust gains of 12 points or more among the informed public. In 18 markets, there is now a double-digit trust gap between the informed public and the mass population.

2019 Edelman Trust Barometer - Trust Inequality

An Urgent Desire for Change

Despite the divergence in trust between the informed public and mass population the world is united on one front—all share an urgent desire for change. Only one in five feels that the system is working for them, with nearly half of the mass population believing that the system is failing them.

In conjunction with pessimism and worry, there is a growing move toward engagement and action. In 2019, engagement with the news surged by 22 points; 40 percent not only consume news once a week or more, but they also routinely amplify it. But people are encountering roadblocks in their quest for facts, with 73 percent worried about fake news being used as a weapon.

Trust Barometer - News Engagement

The New Employer-Employee Contract

Despite a high lack of faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer.” Fifty-eight percent of general population employees say they look to their employer to be a trustworthy source of information about contentious societal issues.

Employees are ready and willing to trust their employers, but the trust must be earned through more than “business as usual.” Employees’ expectation that prospective employers will join them in taking action on societal issues (67 percent) is nearly as high as their expectations of personal empowerment (74 percent) and job opportunity (80 percent)….(More)”.

Looking after and using data for public benefit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Heather Savory at the Office for National Statistics (UK): “Official Statistics are for the benefit of society and the economy and help Britain to make better decisions. They allow the formulation of better public policy and the effective measurement of those policies. They inform the direction of economic and commercial activities. They provide valuable information for analysts, researchers, public and voluntary bodies. They enable the public to hold organisations that spend public money to account, thus informing democratic debate.

The ability to harness the power of data is critical in enabling official statistics to support the most important decisions facing the country.

Under the new powers in the Digital Economy Act , ONS can now gain access to new and different sources of data including ‘administrative’ data from government departments and commercial data. Alongside the availability of these new data sources ONS is experiencing a strong demand for ad hoc insights alongside our traditional statistics.

We need to deliver more, faster, finer-grained insights into the economy and society. We need to deliver high quality, trustworthy information, on a faster timescale, to help decision-making. We will increasingly develop innovative data analysis methods, for example using images to gain insight from the work we’ve recently announced on Urban Forests….

I should explain here that our data is not held in one big linked database; we’re architecting our Data Access Platform so that data can be linked in different ways for different purposes. This is designed to preserve data confidentiality, so only the necessary subset of data is accessible by authorised people, for a certain purpose. To avoid compromising their effectiveness, we do not make public the specific details of the security measures we have in place, but our recently tightened security regime, which is independently assured by trusted external bodies, includes:

  • physical measures to restrict who can access places where data is stored;
  • protective measures for all data-related IT services;
  • measures to restrict who can access systems and data held by ONS;
  • controls to guard against staff or contractors misusing their legitimate access to data; including vetting to an appropriate level for the sensitivity of data to which they might have access.

One of the things I love about working in the public sector is that our work can be shared openly.

We live in a rapidly changing and developing digital world and we will continue to monitor and assess the data standards and security measures in place to ensure they remain strong and effective. So, as well as sharing this work openly to reassure all our data suppliers that we’re taking good care of their data, we’re also seeking feedback on our revised data policies.

The same data can provide different insights when viewed through different lenses or in different combinations. The more data is shared – with the appropriate safeguards of course – the more it has to give.

If you work with data, you’ll know that collaborating with others in this space is key and that we need to be able to share data more easily when it makes sense to do so. So, the second reason for sharing this work openly is that, if you’re in the technical space, we’d value your feedback on our approach and if you’re in the data space and would like to adopt the same approach, we’d love to support you with that – so that we can all share data more easily in the future….(More)

ONS’s revised policies on the use, management and security of data can befound here.

Inside the world’s ‘what works’ teams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jen Gold at What Works Blog: “There’s a small but growing band of government teams around the world dedicated to making experiments happen. The Cabinet Office’s What Works Team, set up in 2013, was the first of its kind. But you’ll now find them in Canada, the US, Finland, Australia, Colombia, and the UAE.

All of these teams work across government to champion the testing and evaluation of new approaches to public service delivery. This blog takes a look at the many ways in which we’re striving to make experimentation the norm in our governments.

Unsurprisingly we’re all operating in very different contexts. Some teams were set up in response to central requirements for greater experimentation. Take Canada, for instance. In 2016 the Treasury Board directed departments and agencies to devote a fixed proportion of programme funds to “experimenting with new approaches” (building on Prime Minister Trudeau’s earlier instruction to Ministers). An Innovation and Experimentation Team was then set up in the Treasury Board to provide some central support.

Finland’s Experimentation Office, based in the Prime Minister’s Office, is in a similar position. The team supports the delivery of Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s 2016 national action plan that calls for “a culture of experimentation” in public services and a series of flagship policy experiments.

Others, like the US Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA), grew out of political interest in using behavioural science experiments in public policy. But these teams now run experiments in a much broader set of areas.

What unites us is a focus on helping public servants generate and use new evidence in policy decisions and service delivery….(More)”.

Digital rights as a security objective: New gateways for attacks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yannic Blaschke at EDRI: “Violations of human rights online, most notably the right to data protection, can pose a real threat to electoral security and societal polarisation. In this series of blogposts, we’ll explain how and why digital rights must be treated as a security objective instead. The second part of the series explains how encroaching on digital rights could create new gateways for attacks against our security.

In the first part of this series, we analysed the failure of the Council of the European Union to connect the obvious dots between ePrivacy and disinformation online, leaving open a security vulnerability through a lack of protection of citizens. However, a failure to act is not the only front on which the EU is potentially weakening our security on- and offline: on the contrary, some of the EU’s more actively pursued digital policies could have unintended, yet serious consequences in the future. Nowhere is this trend more visible than in the recent trust in filtering algorithms, which seem to be the new “censorship machine” that is proposed as a solution for almost everything, from copyright infringements to terrorist content online.

Article 13 of the Copyright Directive proposal and the Terrorist Content Regulation proposal are two examples of the attempt to regulate the online world via algorithms. While having different motivations, both share the logic of outsourcing accountability and enforcement of public rules to private entities who will be the ones deciding about the availability of speech online. They, explicitly or implicitly, advocate for the introduction of technologies that detect and remove certain types of content: upload filters. They empower internet companies to decide which content will stay online, based on their terms of service (and not law). In a nutshell, public institutions are encouraging Google, Facebook and other platform giants to become the judge and the police of the internet. In turn, they undermine the presumption that it should be democratically legitimise states, not private entities, who are tasked with the heavy burden of balancing the right to freedom of expression.

Even more chilling is the outlook of upload filters creating new entry points for forces that seek to influence societal debates in their favour. If algorithms will be the judges of what can or cannot be published, they could become the target of the next wave of election interference campaigns, with attackers instigating them to take down critical or liberal voices to influence debates on the internet. Despite continuous warnings about the misuse of personal data on Facebook, it only took us a few years to arrive at the point of Cambridge Analytica. How long will it take us to arrive at a similar point of election interference through upload filters in online platforms?

If we let this pre-emptive and extra-judicial censorship happen, it would likely result in severe detriments to the freedom of speech and right to information of European citizens, and the free flow of information would, in consequence, be stifled. The societal effects of this could be further aggravated by the introduction of a press publishers right (Article 11 of the Copyright Directive) that is vividly opposed by the academic world, as it will concentrate the power over what appears in the news in ever fewer hands. Especially in Member States where media plurality and independence of bigger outlets from state authorities are no longer guaranteed, a decline in societal resilience to authoritarian tendencies is unfortunately easy to imagine.

We have to be very clear about what machines are good at and what they are bad at: Algorithms are incredibly well suited to detect patterns and trends, but cannot and will not be able perform the delicate act of balancing our rights and freedoms in accordance with the law any time soon….(More)”