Reimagining Data Governance for AI: Operationalizing Social Licensing for Data Reuse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Stefaan Verhulst, Adam Zable, Andrew J. Zahuranec, and Peter Addo: “…introduces a practical, community-centered framework for governing data reuse in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). As AI increasingly relies on data from LMICs, affected communities are often excluded from decision-making and see little benefit from how their data is used. This report,…reframes data governance through social licensing—a participatory model that empowers communities to collectively define, document, and enforce conditions for how their data is reused. It offers a step-by-step methodology and actionable tools, including a Social Licensing Questionnaire and adaptable contract clauses, alongisde real-world scenarios and recommendations for enforcement, policy integration, and future research. This report recasts data governance as a collective, continuous process – shifting the focus from individual consent to community decision-making…(More)”.

Humanitarian aid depends on good data: what’s wrong with the way it’s collected

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Vicki Squire: The defunding of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), along with reductions in aid from the UK and elsewhere, raises questions about the continued collection of data that helps inform humanitarian efforts.

Humanitarian response plans rely on accurate, accessible and up-to-date data. Aid organisations use this to review needs, monitor health and famine risks, and ensure security and access for humanitarian operations.

The reliance on data – and in particular large-scale digitalised data – has intensified in the humanitarian sector over the past few decades. Major donors all proclaim a commitment to evidence-based decision making. The International Organization for Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix and the REACH impact initiative are two examples designed to improve operational and strategic awareness of key needs and risks.

Humanitarian data streams have already been affected by USAID cuts. For example, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network was abruptly closed, while the Demographic and Health Surveys programme was “paused”. The latter informed global health policies in areas ranging from maternal health and domestic violence to anaemia and HIV prevalence.

The loss of reliable, accessible and up-to-date data threatens monitoring capacity and early warning systems, while reducing humanitarian access and rendering security failures more likely…(More)”.

The Technopolar Paradox

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ian Bremmer: “In February 2022, as Russian forces advanced on Kyiv, Ukraine’s government faced a critical vulnerability: with its Internet and communication networks under attack, its troops and leaders would soon be in the dark. Elon Musk—the de facto head of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink—stepped in. Within days, SpaceX had deployed thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine and activated satellite Internet service at no cost. Having kept the country online, Musk was hailed as a hero.

But the centibillionaire’s personal intervention—and Kyiv’s reliance on it—came with risks. Months later, Ukraine asked SpaceX to extend Starlink’s coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea, to enable a submarine drone strike that Kyiv wanted to carry out against Russian naval assets. Musk refused—worried, he said, that this would cause a major escalation in the war. Even the Pentagon’s entreaties on behalf of Ukraine failed to convince him. An unelected, unaccountable private citizen had unilaterally thwarted a military operation in an active war zone while exposing the fact that governments had remarkably little control over crucial decisions affecting their citizens and national security.

This was “technopolarity” in action: a technology leader not only driving stock market returns but also controlling aspects of civil society, politics, and international affairs that have been traditionally the exclusive preserve of nation-states. Over the past decade, the rise of such individuals and the firms they control has transformed the global order, which had been defined by states since the Peace of Westphalia enshrined them as the building blocks of geopolitics nearly 400 years ago. For most of this time, the structure of that order could be described as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, depending on how power was distributed among countries. The world, however, has since entered a “technopolar moment,” a term I used in Foreign Affairs in 2021 to describe an emerging order in which “a handful of large technology companies rival [states] for geopolitical influence.” Major tech firms have become powerful geopolitical actors, exercising a form of sovereignty over digital space and, increasingly, the physical world that potentially rivals that of states…(More)”.

Global Citizens’ Assemblies: Pathways for the UN – Principles, Design, and Implementation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Democracy International & Democracy Without Borders: “This report encourages the use of GCAs by different actors and in different settings without making recommendations or expressing preferences on how this should be done. We envision that ultimately there will be a dynamic ecosystem making use of this deliberative format. However, the report particularly discusses the potential for GCAs to be set up by and benefit the UN. As a tool to be used by the UN, this paper recommends that the UN General Assembly (UNGA) applies Article 22 of the UN Charter to establish a dedicated permanent framework to codify procedures and operations, increase efficiency and create synergies. The report recommends that this UN framework should enable UN bodies and entities to set up and operate different ad hoc GCAs as needed.

GCAs are positioned as complementary to other initiatives in the field, such as creating a UN Parliamentary Assembly or a UN World Citizens’ Initiative. They offer a specific pathway for global public deliberation and participation and bridging the gap between citizens and global decision-makers.

While GCAs face practical limitations due to the world’s diversity and scale, they offer a valuable opportunity to foster trust in multilateral institutions and empower citizens to have a voice in global policy-making. By enhancing inclusive deliberation and putting forward actionable outcomes, GCAs have the potential to improve the democratic character of global governance and promote more responsive, citizen-centered approaches to solving planetary challenges…(More)”.

Bus Stops Here: Shanghai Lets Riders Design Their Own Routes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chen Yiru: From early-morning school drop-offs to seniors booking rides to the hospital, from suburban commuters seeking a faster link to the metro to families visiting ancestral graves, Shanghai is rolling out a new kind of public bus — one that’s designed by commuters, and launched only when enough riders request it.

Branded “DZ” for dingzhi, or “customized,” the system invites residents to submit proposed routes through a city-run platform. Others with similar travel needs can opt in or vote, and if demand meets the threshold — typically 15 to 20 passengers per trip — the route goes live.

More than 220 DZ routes have already launched across all 16 city districts. Through an online platform opened May 8, users enter start and end points, preferred times, and trip frequency. If approved, routes can begin running in as little as three days…(More)”.

The New Control Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette.

And it isn’t just paintings that are converging, Murrell argues. Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.

Murrell focuses on design, but the same trend holds elsewhere: Kirk Goldsberry, a basketball statistician, has shown that the top two hundred shot locations in the NBA today, which twenty years ago formed a wide array of the court, now form a narrow ring at the three-point line, with a dense cluster near the hoop. The less said about the sameness of pop melodies or Hollywood movies, the better.

As we approach the moment when all information everywhere from all time is available to everyone at once, what we find is not new artistic energy, not explosive diversity, but stifling sameness. Everything is converging — and it’s happening even as the power of the old monopolies and centralized tastemakers is broken up.

Are the powerful platforms now in charge? Or are the forces at work today something even bigger?..(More)”.

The Meanings of Voting for Citizens: A Scientific Challenge, a Portrait, and Implications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Carolina Plescia: “On election day, citizens typically place a mark beside a party or candidate on a ballot paper. The right to cast this mark has been a historic conquest and today, voting is among the most frequent political acts citizens perform. But what does that mark mean to them? This book explores the diverse conceptualizations of voting among citizens in 13 countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. This book presents empirical evidence based on nearly a million words about voting from over 25,000 people through an open-ended survey and both qualitative and quantitative methods. The book’s innovative approach includes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical advancements and provides a comprehensive understanding of what voting means to citizens and how these meanings influence political engagement. This book challenges assumptions about universal views on democracy and reveals how meanings of voting vary among individuals and across both liberal democracies and electoral autocracies. The book also examines the implications of these meanings for political behaviour and election reforms. The Meanings of Voting for Citizens is a critical reference for scholars of public opinion, behaviour, and democratization, as well as a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative political behaviour, empirical methods, and survey research. Practitioners working on election reforms will find it particularly relevant via its insights into how citizens’ meanings of voting impact the effectiveness of electoral reforms…(More)”.

Leading, not lagging: Africa’s gen AI opportunity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mayowa Kuyoro, Umar Bagus: “The rapid rise of gen AI has captured the world’s imagination and accelerated the integration of AI into the global economy and the lives of people across the world. Gen AI heralds a step change in productivity. As institutions apply AI in novel ways, beyond the advanced analytics and machine learning (ML) applications of the past ten years, the global economy could increase significantly, improving the lives and livelihoods of millions.1

Nowhere is this truer than in Africa, a continent that has already demonstrated its ability to use technology to leapfrog traditional development pathways; for example, mobile technology overcoming the fixed-line internet gap, mobile payments in Kenya, and numerous African institutions making the leap to cloud faster than their peers in developed markets.2 Africa has been quick on the uptake with gen AI, too, with many unique and ingenious applications and deployments well underway…(More)”.

Across McKinsey’s client service work in Africa, many institutions have tested and deployed AI solutions. Our research has found that more than 40 percent of institutions have either started to experiment with gen AI or have already implemented significant solutions (see sidebar “About the research inputs”). However, the continent has so far only scratched the surface of what is possible, with both AI and gen AI. If institutions can address barriers and focus on building for scale, our analysis suggests African economies could unlock up to $100 billion in annual economic value across multiple sectors from gen AI alone. That is in addition to the still-untapped potential from traditional AI and ML in many sectors today—the combined traditional AI and gen AI total is more than double what gen AI can unlock on its own, with traditional AI making up at least 60 percent of the value…(More)”

Crowded Out: The Competitive Landscape of Contemporary International NGOs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sarah Sunn Bush and Jennifer Hadden: “…delves into the complex landscape of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Bush and Hadden trace INGOs’ rise to prominence at the end of the twentieth century and three significant but overlooked recent trends: a decrease in new INGO foundings, despite persistent global need; a shift towards specialization, despite the complexity of global problems; and a dispersal of INGO activities globally, despite potential gains from concentrating on areas of acute need. Assembling a wealth of new data on INGO foundings, missions, and locations, Bush and Hadden show how INGOs are being crowded out of dense organizational environments. They conduct case studies of INGOs across issue areas, relying on dozens of interviews and a large-scale survey to bring practitioners’ voices to the study of INGOs. To effectively address today’s global challenges, organizations must innovate in a crowded world. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core…(More)”.

Activating citizens: the contribution of the Capability Approach to critical citizenship studies and to understanding the enablers of engaged citizenship

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anna Colom and Agnes Czajka: “The paper argues that the Capability Approach can make a significant contribution to understanding the enablers of engaged citizenship. Using insights from critical citizenship studies and original empirical research on young people’s civic and political involvement in western Kenya, we argue that it is useful to think of the process of engaged citizenship as comprised of two distinct yet interrelated parts: activation and performance. We suggest that the Capability Approach (CA) can help us understand what resources and processes are needed for people to not only become activated but to also effectively perform their citizenship. Although the CA is rarely brought into conversation with critical citizenship studies literatures, we argue that it can be useful in both operationalising the insights of critical citizenship studies on citizenship engagement and illustrating how activation and performance can be effectively supported or catalysed….(More)”