Larry Dignan at ZDN: “IBM is hoping that mobile barometric sensors from individuals opting in, supercomputing ,and the Internet of Things can make weather forecasting more local globally.
Big Blue, which owns The Weather Company, will outline the IBM Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF). GRAF incorporates IoT data in its weather models via crowdsourcing.
While hyper local weather forecasts are available in the US, Japan, and some parts of Western Europe, many regions in the world lack an accurate picture of weather.
Mary Glackin, senior vice president of The Weather Company, said the company is “trying to fill in the blanks.” She added, “In a place like India, weather stations are kilometers away. We think this can be as significant as bringing satellite data into models.”
For instance, the developing world gets forecasts based on global data that are updated every 6 hours and resolutions at 10km to 15km. By using GRAF, IBM said it can offer forecasts for the day ahead that are updated hourly on average and have a 3km resolution….(More)”.
Report by Karen Yeung: “This study was commissioned by the Council of Europe’s Committee of experts on human rights dimensions of automated data processing and different forms of artificial intelligence (MSI-AUT). It was prompted by concerns about the potential adverse consequences of advanced digital technologies (including artificial intelligence (‘AI’)), particularly their impact on the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms. This draft report seeks to examine the implications of these technologies for the concept of responsibility, and this includes investigating where responsibility should lie for their adverse consequences. In so doing, it seeks to understand (a) how human rights and fundamental freedoms protected under the ECHR may be adversely affected by the development of AI technologies and (b) how responsibility for those risks and consequences should be allocated.
Its methodological approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on concepts and academic scholarship from the humanities, the social sciences and, to a more limited extent, from computer science. It concludes that, if we are to take human rights seriously in a hyperconnected digital age, we cannot allow the power of our advanced digital technologies and systems, and those who develop and implement them, to be accrued and exercised without responsibility. Nations committed to protecting human rights must therefore ensure that those who wield and derive benefits from developing and deploying these technologies are held responsible for their risks and consequences. This includes obligations to ensure that there are effective and legitimate mechanisms that will operate to prevent and forestall violations to human rights which these technologies may threaten, and to attend to the health of the larger collective and shared socio-technical environment in which human rights and the rule of law are anchored….(More)”.
Paper by F.M. Welle Donker and B. van Loenen: “Much research has emphasised the benefits of open government data, and especially high-value data. The G8 Open Data Charter defines high-value data as data that improve democracy and encourage the innovative reuse of the particular data. Thus, governments worldwide invest resources to identify potential high-value datasets and to publish these data as open data. However, while the benefits of open data are well researched, the costs of publishing data as open data are less researched. This research examines the relationship between the costs of making data suitable for publication as (linked) open data and the societal benefits thereof. A case study of five high-value datasets was carried out in the Netherlands to provide a societal cost-benefit analysis of open high-value data. Different options were investigated, ranging from not publishing the dataset at all to publishing the dataset as linked open data.
In general, it can be concluded that the societal benefits of (linked) open data are higher than the costs. The case studies show that there are differences between the datasets. In many cases, costs for open data are an integral part of general data management costs and hardly lead to additional costs. In certain cases, however, the costs to anonymize /aggregate the data are high compared to the potential value of an open data version of the dataset. Although, for these datasets, this leads to a less favourable relationship between costs and benefits, the societal benefits would still be higher than without an open data version….(More)”.
By Alexandra Shaw, Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on open data and was originally published in 2018.
Value that open data can help unlock in economic value annually across seven sectors in the United States:$3-5 trillion
Public Views on and Use of Open Government Data
Number of Americans who do not trust the federal government or social media sites to protect their data: Approximately 50%
Key findings from The Economist Intelligence Unit report on Open Government Data Demand:
Percentage of respondents who say the key reason why governments open up their data is to create greater trust between the government and citizens: 70%
Percentage of respondents who say OGD plays an important role in improving lives of citizens: 78%
Percentage of respondents who say OGD helps with daily decision making especially for transportation, education, environment: 53%
Percentage of respondents who cite lack of awareness about OGD and its potential use and benefits as the greatest barrier to usage: 50%
Percentage of respondents who say they lack access to usable and relevant data: 31%
Percentage of respondents who think they don’t have sufficient technical skills to use open government data: 25%
Percentage of respondents who feel the number of OGD apps available is insufficient, indicating an opportunity for app developers: 20%
Percentage of respondents who say OGD has the potential to generate economic value and new business opportunity: 61%
Percentage of respondents who say they don’t trust governments to keep data safe, protected, and anonymized: 19%
Efforts and Involvement
Time that’s passed since open government advocates convened to create a set of principles for open government data – the instance that started the open data government movement: 10 years
EU Policy Lab: “The Future of Government scenarios were developed through a bottom-up process on the basis of open dialogue workshops in Europe with about 130 citizens and 25 civil society and think tank representatives. The Joint Research Centre then reviewed these discussions and synthesised them into four scenarios. Together they highlight some of the key uncertainties about the relationships between citizens, governments and business and explore, through the eyes of European citizens, how government will look in the future. The four scenarios are:
EU Science Hub: “Citizen science is the non-professional involvement of volunteers in the scientific process, whether in the data collection phase or in other phases of the research.
It can be a powerful tool for environmental management that has the potential to inform an increasingly complex environmental policy landscape and to meet the growing demands from society for more participatory decision-making.
While there is growing interest from international bodies and national governments in citizen science, the evidence that it can successfully contribute to environmental policy development, implementation, evaluation or compliance remains scant.
Central to elucidating this question is a better understanding of the benefits delivered by citizen science, that is to determine to what extent these benefits can contribute to environmental policy, and to establish whether projects that provide policy support also co-benefit science and encourage meaningful citizen engagement.
EU-wide inventory
In order to get an evidence base of citizen science activities that can support environmental policies in the European Union (EU), the European Commission (DG ENV, with the support of DG JRC) contracted Bio Innovation Service (FR), in association with Fundacion Ibercivis (ES) and The Natural History Museum (UK), to perform a “Study on an inventory of citizen science activities for environmental policies”.
The first objective was to develop an inventory of citizen science projects relevant for environmental policy and assess how these projects contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.
To this end, a desk-research and an EU-wide survey were used to identify 503 citizen science projects of relevance to environmental policy.
The study demonstrates the breadth of citizen science that can be of relevance to environmental policy....Three salient features were found:
Government support, not only in the funding, but also through active participation in the design and implementation of the project appears to be a key factor for the successful uptake of citizen science in environmental policy.
When there is easy engagement process for the citizens, that is, with projects requiring limited efforts and a priori skills, this facilitates their policy uptake.
Scientific aspects on the other hand did not appear to affect the policy uptake of the analysed projects, but they were a strong determinant of how well the project could serve policy: projects with high scientific standards and endorsed by scientists served more phases of the environmental policy cycle.
In conclusion, this study demonstrates that citizen science has the potential to be a cost-effective way to contribute to policy and highlights the importance of fostering a diversity of citizen science activities and their innovativeness….(More)”.
Data-scores.org: “Data scores that combine data from a variety of both online and offline activities are becoming a way to categorize citizens, allocating services, and predicting future behavior. Yet little is still known about the implementation of data-driven systems and algorithmic processes in public services and how citizens are increasingly ‘scored’ based on the collection and combination of data.
As part of our project ‘Data Scores as Governance’ we have developed a tool to map and investigate the uses of data analytics and algorithms in public services in the UK. This tool is designed to facilitate further research and investigation into this topic and to advance public knowledge and understanding.
The tool is made up of a collection of documents from different sources that can be searched and mapped according to different categories. The database consists of more than 5300 unverified documents that have been scraped based on a number of search terms relating to data systems in government. This is an incomplete and on-going data-set. You can read more in our Methodology section….(More)”.
Working document by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG): “…Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most transformative forces of our time, and is bound to alter the fabric of society. It presents a great opportunity to increase prosperity and growth, which Europe must strive to achieve. Over the last decade, major advances were realised due to the availability of vast amounts of digital data, powerful computing architectures, and advances in AI techniques such as machine learning. Major AI-enabled developments in autonomous vehicles, healthcare, home/service robots, education or cybersecurity are improving the quality of our lives every day. Furthermore, AI is key for addressing many of the grand challenges facing the world, such as global health and wellbeing, climate change, reliable legal and democratic systems and others expressed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Having the capability to generate tremendous benefits for individuals and society, AI also gives rise to certain risks that should be properly managed. Given that, on the whole, AI’s benefits outweigh its risks, we must ensure to follow the road that maximises the benefits of AI while minimising its risks. To ensure that we stay on the right track, a human-centric approach to AI is needed, forcing us to keep in mind that the development and use of AI should not be seen as a means in itself, but as having the goal to increase human well-being. Trustworthy AI will be our north star, since human beings will only be able to confidently and fully reap the benefits of AI if they can trust the technology.
Trustworthy AI has two components: (1) it should respect fundamental rights, applicable regulation and core principles and values, ensuring an “ethical purpose” and (2) it should be technically robust and reliable since, even with good intentions, a lack of technological mastery can cause unintentional harm.
These Guidelines therefore set out a framework for Trustworthy AI:
Chapter I deals with ensuring AI’s ethical purpose, by setting out the fundamental rights, principles and values that it should comply with.
From those principles, Chapter II derives guidance on the realisation of Trustworthy AI, tackling both ethical purpose and technical robustness. This is done by listing the requirements for Trustworthy AI and offering an overview of technical and non-technical methods that can be used for its implementation.
Chapter III subsequently operationalises the requirements by providing a concrete but nonexhaustive assessment list for Trustworthy AI. This list is then adapted to specific use cases. …(More)”
Paula Forteza at OGP: “…The Yellow Vests movement in France is a complex social movement that points out social injustices from a political system that has excluded voices for decades. The movement shows the negative effects of the lack of participatory mechanisms in our institutional architecture. If the Yellow Vests are protesting in the streets today, it is certainly because an institutional dialogue was not possible, because their claims did not find an official channel of communication to reach the decision makers.
The inception of this movement is also symptomatic of the need to update our democracies. Organized through Facebook groups, the Yellow Vests is a leaderless movement that is challenging the hierarchical and vertical organization of the decision-making process. We need a more horizontal, agile and decentralized democracy to match the way civil society is getting organized on the internet. Social media platforms are not made for political mobilisation, as the rise of fake news, polarisation and foreign intervention have showed. Learning from these social media flaws, we can back an institutional change with the creation of dedicated platforms for political expression that are transparent, accountable and democratically governed.
Our reaction to this crisis needs to match the expectations. It is urgent to revitalise our democracies through a robust and impactful set of participatory initiatives. We have in our hands the future of the social contract and, in a way, the future of our democracy. Some initiatives have emerged in France: citizen questions to the government, legislative consultations, a collaborative space in the Parliament, more than 80 local participatory budgets and dozens of participatory experimentations. We need to scale up many local initiatives and include impactful and continuous participatory mechanisms into the institutional decision-making process. A constitutional reform is expected in France next January – let’s take this opportunity to institutionalize these mechanisms….(More)”.
“Polls suggest that governments across the world face high levels of citizen dissatisfaction, and low levels of citizen trust. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer found, for instance, that only 43% of those surveyed trust Canada’s government. Only 15% of those surveyed trust government in South Africa, and levels are low in other countries too—including Brazil (at 24%), South Korea (28%), the United Kingdom (36%), Australia, Japan, and Malaysia (37%), Germany (38%), Russia (45%), and the United States (47%). Similar surveys find trust in government averaging only 40-45% across member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and suggest that as few as 31% and 32% of Nigerians and Liberians trust government.
There are many reasons why trust in government is deficient in so many countries, and these reasons differ from place to place. One common factor across many contexts, however, is a lack of confidence that governments can or will address key policy challenges faced by citizens.
Studies show that this confidence deficiency stems from citizen observations or experiences with past public policy failures, which promote jaundiced views of their public officials’ capabilities to deliver. Put simply, citizens lose faith in government when they observe government failing to deliver on policy promises, or to ‘get things done’. Incidentally, studies show that public officials also often lose faith in their own capabilities (and those of their organizations) when they observe, experience or participate in repeated policy implementation failures. Put simply, again, these public officials lose confidence in themselves when they repeatedly fail to ‘get things done’.
I call the ‘public policy futility’ trap—where past public policy failure leads to a lack of confidence in the potential of future policy success, which feeds actual public policy failure, which generates more questions of confidence, in a vicious self fulfilling prophecy. I believe that many governments—and public policy practitioners working within governments—are caught in this trap, and just don’t believe that they can muster the kind of public policy responses needed by their citizens.
Along with my colleagues at the Building State Capability (BSC) program, I believe that many policy communities are caught in this trap, to some degree or another. Policymakers in these communities keep coming up with ideas, and political leaders keep making policy promises, but no one really believes the ideas will solve the problems that need solving or produce the outcomes and impacts that citizens need. Policy promises under such circumstances center on doing what policymakers are confident they can actually implement: like producing research and position papers and plans, or allocating inputs toward the problem (in a budget, for instance), or sponsoring visible activities (holding meetings or engaging high profile ‘experts’ for advice), or producing technical outputs (like new organizations, or laws). But they hold back from promising real solutions to real problems, as they know they cannot really implement them (given past political opposition, perhaps, or the experience of seemingly interactable coordination challenges, or cultural pushback, and more)….(More)”.
