The 2021 Good Tech Awards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Roose at the New York Times: “…Especially at a time when many of tech’s leaders seem more interested in building new, virtual worlds than improving the world we live in, it’s worth praising the technologists who are stepping up to solve some of our biggest problems.

So here, without further ado, are this year’s Good Tech Awards…

One of the year’s most exciting A.I. breakthroughs came in July when DeepMind — a Google-owned artificial intelligence company — published data and open-source code from its groundbreaking AlphaFold project.

The project, which used A.I. to predict the structures of proteins, solved a problem that had vexed scientists for decades, and was hailed by experts as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. And by publishing its data freely, AlphaFold set off a frenzy among researchers, some of whom are already using it to develop new drugs and better understand the proteins involved in viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

Google’s overall A.I. efforts have been fraught with controversy and missteps, but AlphaFold seems like an unequivocally good use of the company’s vast expertise and resources…

Prisons aren’t known as hotbeds of innovation. But two tech projects this year tried to make our criminal justice system more humane.

Recidiviz is a nonprofit tech start-up that builds open-source data tools for criminal justice reform. It was started by Clementine Jacoby, a former Google employee who saw an opportunity to corral data about the prison system and make it available to prison officials, lawmakers, activists and researchers to inform their decisions. Its tools are in use in seven states, including North Dakota, where the data tools helped prison officials assess the risk of Covid-19 outbreaks and identify incarcerated people who were eligible for early release….(More)”.

Biases in human mobility data impact epidemic modeling

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Frank Schlosser, Vedran Sekara, Dirk Brockmann, and Manuel Garcia-Herranz: “Large-scale human mobility data is a key resource in data-driven policy making and across many scientific fields. Most recently, mobility data was extensively used during the COVID-19 pandemic to study the effects of governmental policies and to inform epidemic models. Large-scale mobility is often measured using digital tools such as mobile phones. However, it remains an open question how truthfully these digital proxies represent the actual travel behavior of the general population. Here, we examine mobility datasets from multiple countries and identify two fundamentally different types of bias caused by unequal access to, and unequal usage of mobile phones. We introduce the concept of data generation bias, a previously overlooked type of bias, which is present when the amount of data that an individual produces influences their representation in the dataset. We find evidence for data generation bias in all examined datasets in that high-wealth individuals are overrepresented, with the richest 20% contributing over 50% of all recorded trips, substantially skewing the datasets. This inequality is consequential, as we find mobility patterns of different wealth groups to be structurally different, where the mobility networks of high-wealth users are denser and contain more long-range connections. To mitigate the skew, we present a framework to debias data and show how simple techniques can be used to increase representativeness. Using our approach we show how biases can severely impact outcomes of dynamic processes such as epidemic simulations, where biased data incorrectly estimates the severity and speed of disease transmission. Overall, we show that a failure to account for biases can have detrimental effects on the results of studies and urge researchers and practitioners to account for data-fairness in all future studies of human mobility…(More)”.

Expecting the Unexpected: Effects of Data Collection Design Choices on the Quality of Crowdsourced User-Generated Content

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Roman Lukyanenko: “As crowdsourced user-generated content becomes an important source of data for organizations, a pressing question is how to ensure that data contributed by ordinary people outside of traditional organizational boundaries is of suitable quality to be useful for both known and unanticipated purposes. This research examines the impact of different information quality management strategies, and corresponding data collection design choices, on key dimensions of information quality in crowdsourced user-generated content. We conceptualize a contributor-centric information quality management approach focusing on instance-based data collection. We contrast it with the traditional consumer-centric fitness-for-use conceptualization of information quality that emphasizes class-based data collection. We present laboratory and field experiments conducted in a citizen science domain that demonstrate trade-offs between the quality dimensions of accuracy, completeness (including discoveries), and precision between the two information management approaches and their corresponding data collection designs. Specifically, we show that instance-based data collection results in higher accuracy, dataset completeness and number of discoveries, but this comes at the expense of lower precision. We further validate the practical value of the instance-based approach by conducting an applicability check with potential data consumers (scientists, in our context of citizen science). In a follow-up study, we show, using human experts and supervised machine learning techniques, that substantial precision gains on instance-based data can be achieved with post-processing. We conclude by discussing the benefits and limitations of different information quality and data collection design choice for information quality in crowdsourced user-generated content…(More)”.

Research Anthology on Citizen Engagement and Activism for Social Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA): “Activism and the role everyday people play in making a change in society are increasingly popular topics in the world right now, especially as younger generations begin to speak out. From traditional protests to activities on college campuses, to the use of social media, more individuals are finding accessible platforms with which to share their views and become more actively involved in politics and social welfare. With the emergence of new technologies and a spotlight on important social issues, people are able to become more involved in society than ever before as they fight for what they believe. It is essential to consider the recent trends, technologies, and movements in order to understand where society is headed in the future.

The Research Anthology on Citizen Engagement and Activism for Social Change examines a plethora of innovative research surrounding social change and the various ways citizens are involved in shaping society. Covering topics such as accountability, social media, voter turnout, and leadership, it is an ideal work for activists, sociologists, social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, social media analysts, government administrators, academicians, researchers, practitioners, and students….(More)”.

Whistleblowing for Change: Exposing Systems of Power and Injustice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access book edited by Tatiana Bazzichelli: “The courageous acts of whistleblowing that inspired the world over the past few years have changed our perception of surveillance and control in today’s information society. But what are the wider effects of whistleblowing as an act of dissent on politics, society, and the arts? How does it contribute to new courses of action, digital tools, and contents? This urgent intervention based on the work of Berlin’s Disruption Network Lab examines this growing phenomenon, offering interdisciplinary pathways to empower the public by investigating whistleblowing as a developing political practice that has the ability to provoke change from within…(More)”.

GDP’s Days Are Numbered

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Diane Coyle: “How should we measure economic success? Criticisms of conventional indicators, particularly gross domestic product, have abounded for years, if not decades. Environmentalists have long pointed out that GDP omits the depletion of natural assets, as well as negative externalities such as global warming. And its failure to capture unpaid but undoubtedly valuable work in the home is another glaring omission. But better alternatives may soon be at hand.

In 2009, a commission led by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi spurred efforts to find alternative ways to gauge economic progress by recommending a “dashboard” of indicators. Since then, economists and statisticians, working alongside natural scientists, have put considerable effort into developing rigorous wealth-based prosperity metrics, particularly concerning natural assets. The core idea is to create a comprehensive national balance sheet to demonstrate that economic progress today is illusory when it comes at the expense of future living standards.

In an important milestone in March of this year, the United Nations approved a statistical standard relating to the services that nature provides to the economy. That followed the UK Treasury’s publication of a review by the University of Cambridge’s Partha Dasgupta setting out how to integrate nature in general, and biodiversity in particular, into economic analysis. With the consequences of climate change starting to become all too apparent, any meaningful concept of economic success in the future will surely include sustainability.

The next steps in this statistical endeavor will be to incorporate measures of social capital, reflecting the ability of communities or countries to act collectively, and to extend measurement of the household sector. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how crucial this unpaid work is to a country’s economic health. For example, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics intends to develop a more comprehensive concept of living standards that includes the value of such activity….(More)”.

Data for Common Purpose: Leveraging Consent to Build Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the World Economic Forum: “Over the past few decades, the digital world has been a breeding ground for bad actors, data breaches, and dark patterns of data collection and use. Shifting individuals’ perceptions away from skepticism to a position of trust is no easy task with no easy answers. This report provides a pragmatic approach to strengthen the engagement of individuals and positively affect the experiences of those who contribute data for the common good…(More)”.

For Queer Communities, Being Counted Has Downsides

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kevin Guyan: “Next March, for the first time, Scotland’s census will ask all residents 16 and over to share information about their sexual orientation and whether they identify as trans. These new questions, whose addition follows similar developments in other parts of the United Kingdom and Malta, invite people to “come out” on their census return. Proposals to add more questions about gender, sex, and sexuality to national censuses are at various stages of discussion in countries outside of Europe, including New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the United States.

The idea of being counted in a census feels good. Perhaps it’s my passion for data, but I feel recognized when I tick the response option “gay” in a survey that previously pretended I did not exist or was not important enough to count. If you identify with descriptors less commonly listed in drop-down boxes, seeing yourself reflected in a survey can change how you relate to wider communities that go beyond individual experiences. It therefore makes sense that many bottom-up queer rights groups and top-down government agencies frame the counting of queer communities in a positive light and position expanded data collection as a step toward greater inclusion.

There is great historical significance in increased visibility for many queer communities. But an over-focus on the benefits of being counted distracts from the potential harms for queer communities that come with participation in data collection activities….

The limits of inclusion became apparent to me as I observed the design process for Scotland’s 2022 census. While researching my book Queer Data, I sat through committee meetings at the Scottish Parliament, digested lengthy reports, submitted evidence, and participated in stakeholder engagement sessions. As many months of disagreement over how to count and who to count progressed, it grew more and more obvious that the design of a census is never exclusively about the collection of accurate data.

I grew ambivalent about what “being counted” actually meant for queer communities and concerned that the expansion of the census to include some queer people further erased those who did not match the government’s narrow understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality. Most notably, Scotland’s 2022 census does not count nonbinary people, who are required to identify their sex as either male or female. In another example, trans-exclusionary campaign groups requested that the census remove the “other” write-in box and limit response options for sexual orientation to “gay or lesbian,” “bisexual,” and “straight/heterosexual.” Reproducing the idea that sexual orientation is based on a fixed, binary notion of sex and restricting the question to just three options would effectively delete those who identify as queer, pansexual, asexual, and other sexualities from the count. Although the final version of the sexual orientation question includes an “other” write-in box for sexuality, collecting data about the lives of some queer people can push those who fall outside these expectations further into the shadows…(More)”.

Eight ways to institutionalise deliberative democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “This guide for public officials and policy makers outlines eight models for institutionalising representative public deliberation to improve collective decision making and strengthen democracy.

Increasingly, public authorities are reinforcing democracy by making use of deliberative processes in a structural way, beyond one-off initiatives that are often dependent on political will. The guide provides examples of how to create structures that allow representative public deliberation to become an integral part of how certain types of public decisions are taken.


Eight models to consider for implementation:

1. Combining a permanent citizens’ assembly with one-off citizens’ panels

2. Connecting representative public deliberation to parliamentary committees

3. Combining deliberative and direct democracy

4. Standing citizens’ advisory panels

5. Sequenced representative deliberative processes throughout the policy cycle

6. Giving people the right to demand a representative deliberative process

7. Requiring representative public deliberation before certain types of public decisions

8. Embedding representative deliberative processes in local strategic planning…(More)”.

Data Portals and Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Series of blogs by Tim Davies: “Portals have been an integral part of the open data movement. They provided a space for publishing and curation of data for governments (usually), and a space to discover and access data for users (often individuals, civil society organisations or sometimes private sector organisations building services or deriving insights from this data). 

While many data portals are still maintained, and while some of them enable access to a sizeable amount of data, portals face some big questions in the decade ahead:

  1. Are open data portals still fit for purpose (and if so, which purpose)?
  2. Do open data portals still “make sense” in this decade, or are they a public sector anomaly in a context when data lakes, data meshes, data platforms are adopted across industry? Is there a minimum viable spec for a future-proof open data “portal”?
  3. What roles and activities have emerged around data platforms and portals that deserve to be codified and supported by the future type of platforms?
  4. Could re-imagined open data “platforms” create change in the role of the public service organisation with regards to data (from publisher to… steward?)?
  5. How can a new generation of portals or data platforms better support citizen engagement and civic participation?
  6. What differences are there between the private and public approaches, and why? Does any difference introduce any significant dynamics in private / public open data ecosystems?…(More)”.