Paper by Huaxiong Jiang, Stan Geertman & Patrick Witte: “This paper argues for a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance that we call “smart urban governance,” which represents a move away from the technocratic way of governing cities often found in smart cities. A framework on smart urban governance is proposed on the basis of three intertwined key components, namely spatial, institutional, and technological components. To test the applicability of the framework, we conducted an international questionnaire survey on smart city projects. We then identified and discursively analyzed two smart city projects—Smart Nation Singapore and Helsinki Smart City—to illustrate how this framework works in practice. The questionnaire survey revealed that smart urban governance varies remarkably: As urban issues differ in different contexts, the governance modes and relevant ICT functionalities applied also differ considerably. Moreover, the case analysis indicates that a focus on substantive urban challenges helps to define appropriate modes of governance and develop dedicated technologies that can contribute to solving specific smart city challenges. The analyses of both cases highlight the importance of context (cultural, political, economic, etc.) in analyzing interactions between the components. In this, smart urban governance promotes a sociotechnical way of governing cities in the “smart” era by starting with the urban issue at stake, promoting demand-driven governance modes, and shaping technological intelligence more socially, given the specific context….(More)”.
Digital Democracy’s Road Ahead
Richard Hughes Gibson at the Hedgehog Review: “In the last decade of the twentieth century, as we’ve seen, Howard Rheingold and William J. Mitchell imagined the Web as an “electronic agora” where netizens would roam freely, mixing business, pleasure, and politics. Al Gore envisioned it as an “information superhighway” system for which any computer could offer an onramp. Our current condition, by contrast, has been likened to shuffling between “walled gardens,” each platform—be it Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Google—being its own tightly controlled ecosystem. Yet even this metaphor is perhaps too benign. As the cultural critic Alan Jacobs has observed, “they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell.”
Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff has dubbed the business model underlying these factories “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism works by collecting information about you (your Internet activity, call history, app usage, your voice, your location, even your fitness level), which creates profiles of what you like, where you go, who you know, and who you are. That shadowy portrait makes a powerful tool for predicting what kinds of products and services you might like to purchase, and other companies are happy to pay for such finely-tuned targeted advertising. (Facebook alone generated $69 billion in ad revenue last year.)
The information-gathering can’t ever stop, however; the business model depends on a steady supply of new user data to inform the next round of predictions. This “extraction imperative,” as Zuboff calls it, is inherently monopolistic, rival companies being both a threat that must be eliminated and a potential gold mine from which more user data can be extracted (see Facebook’s acquisitions of competitors Whatsapp and Instagram). Equally worryingly, the big tech companies have begun moving into other sectors of the economy, as seen, for example, in Google’s quiet entry last year into the medical records business (unbeknownst to the patients and physicians whose data was mined).
There is growing consensus among legal scholars and social scientists that these practices are hazardous to democracy. Commentators worry over the consequences of putting so much wealth in so few hands so quickly (Zuboff calls it a “new Gilded Age”). They note the number of tech executives who’ve gone on to high-ranking government posts and vice versa. They point to the fact that—contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 declaration that privacy is no longer a “social norm”—users are indeed worried about privacy. Scholars note, furthermore, that these platforms are not a genuine reflection of public opinion, though they are often treated as such. Social media can operate as echo chambers, only showing you what people like you read, think, do. Paradoxically, they can also become pressure cookers. As is now widely documented, many algorithms reward—and thereby amplify—the most divisive and thus most attention-grabbing content. Keeping us dialed in—whether for the next round of affirmation or outrage—is essential to their success….(More)”.
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
Article by Clive Thompson: “…When the open source concept emerged in the ’90s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership.
Now, it’s true that open source has, overall, been a wild success. Every startup, when creating its own software services or products, relies on open source software from folks like Thornton: open source web-server code, open source neural-net code. But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn’t particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people.
Recently, Nadia Eghbal—the head of writer experience at the email newsletter platform Substack—published Working in Public, a fascinating book for which she spoke to hundreds of open source coders. She pinpointed the change I’m describing here. No matter how hard the programmers worked, most “still felt underwater in some shape or form,” Eghbal told me.
Why didn’t the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it’s partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis—which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people.
Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases—but without the huge, ad-based remuneration.
Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn’t regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms—and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency….(More)”.
Data could hold the key to stopping Alzheimer’s
Blog post by Bill Gates: “My family loves to do jigsaw puzzles. It’s one of our favorite activities to do together, especially when we’re on vacation. There is something so satisfying about everyone working as a team to put down piece after piece until finally the whole thing is done.
In a lot of ways, the fight against Alzheimer’s disease reminds me of doing a puzzle. Your goal is to see the whole picture, so that you can understand the disease well enough to better diagnose and treat it. But in order to see the complete picture, you need to figure out how all of the pieces fit together.
Right now, all over the world, researchers are collecting data about Alzheimer’s disease. Some of these scientists are working on drug trials aimed at finding a way to stop the disease’s progression. Others are studying how our brain works, or how it changes as we age. In each case, they’re learning new things about the disease.
But until recently, Alzheimer’s researchers often had to jump through a lot of hoops to share their data—to see if and how the puzzle pieces fit together. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, there is a lot of confusion about what information you can and can’t share because of patient privacy. Often there weren’t easily available tools and technologies to facilitate broad data-sharing and access. In addition, pharmaceutical companies invest a lot of money into clinical trials, and often they aren’t eager for their competitors to benefit from that investment, especially when the programs are still ongoing.
Unfortunately, this siloed approach to research data hasn’t yielded great results. We have only made incremental progress in therapeutics since the late 1990s. There’s a lot that we still don’t know about Alzheimer’s, including what part of the brain breaks down first and how or when you should intervene. But I’m hopeful that will change soon thanks in part to the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, or ADDI….(More)“.
The responsible use of data for and about children: treading carefully and ethically
Q&A with Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young …” working in collaboration with UNICEF on an initiative called Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C) . Its focus is on data – the risks it poses to children, as well as the opportunities it offers.
You have been working with UNICEF on the Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C). What is this and why do we need to be talking more about ‘responsible data’?
To date, the relationship between the datafication of everyday life and child welfare has been under-explored, both by researchers in data ethics and those who work to advance the rights of children. This neglect is a lost opportunity, and also poses a risk to children.
Today’s children are the first generation to grow up amid the rapid datafication of virtually every aspect of social, cultural, political and economic life. This alone calls for greater scrutiny of the role played by data. An entire generation is being datafied, often starting before birth. Every year the average child will have more data collected about them in their lifetime than would a similar child born any year prior. Ironically, humanitarian and development organizations working with children are themselves among the key actors contributing to the increased collection of data. These organizations rely on a wide range of technologies, including biometrics, digital identity systems, remote-sensing technologies, mobile and social media messaging apps, and administrative data systems. The data generated by these tools and platforms inevitably includes potentially sensitive PII data (personally identifiable information) and DII data (demographically identifiable information). All of this begs much closer scrutiny, and a more systematic framework to guide how child-related data is collected, stored, and used.
Towards this aim, we have also been working with the Data for Children Collaborative, based in Edinburgh in establishing innovative and ethical practices around the use of data to improve the lives of children worldwide….(More)”.
E-participation: a quick overview of recent qualitative trends
Paper by David Le Blanc: “This paper briefly takes stock of two decades of e-participation initiatives based on a limited review of the academic literature. The purpose of the paper is to complement the results of the e-government Survey 2020/ As such, the emphasis is on aspects that the e-government survey (based on analysis of e-government portals and on quantitative indicators) does not capture directly. Among those are the challenges faced by e-participation initiatives and key areas of attention for governments.
The paper maps the field of e-participation and related activities, as well as its relationships with other governance concepts. Areas of recent development in terms of e-participation applications are briefly reviewed. The paper selectively highlights conclusions from the literature on different participation tools, as well as a list of key problematic areas for policy makers. The paper concludes that while e-participation platforms using new technologies have spread rapidly in developed countries in the first decade of the 2000s and in developing countries during the last 10 years, it is not clear that their multiplication has translated into broader or deeper citizen participation. Beyond reasons related to technology access and digital skills, factors such as lack of understanding of citizens’ motivations to participate and the reluctance of public institutions to genuinely share agenda-setting and decision-making power seem to play an important role in the observed limited progress….(More)’
Platform Power to the People
Essay by Sanjay Pinto & Beth Gutelius: “When stay-at-home orders swept across the United States in response to the coronavirus outbreak this past spring, workers’ rights advocates accustomed to in-person meetings had to adjust quickly—and many did. In April, thousands of supporters joined a digital workers’ town hall to learn about the issues facing Nashville’s low-wage workers amid COVID-19, compounded by a series of tornadoes that had recently hit the Tennessee capitol’s region. In May, Taco Bell workers in Michigan created an online petition with support from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a group formed in the early months of the pandemic. That effort won them hazard pay and increased paid sick leave, among other benefits.
In response to the pandemic, workers both employed and unemployed have used digital platforms and tools to magnify their voices and meet their needs. They have launched online petition campaigns to demand safer workplaces. Worker centers, unions, and other economic justice groups are broadcasting Facebook and Instagram live events to share information about programs that support workers, offering online training to navigate state unemployment insurance systems, and sending out text blasts asking workers to take direct action.
Digital platforms have also helped workers share information about the problems they’re confronting, mobilize different forms of support and mutual aid, and make demands of employers and policy makers. Such engagement occurs not only within the channels created by established worker justice organizations, including unions and worker centers, but also among informal networks of workers who have common concerns. In some cases, digital tools are mediating relationships between workers and employers to address needs that have intensified during the pandemic. Online platforms are connecting people to steadier work, for example, and enabling employers to pay in to benefits funds for workers who have been shut out of government-sponsored and regulated systems.
These uses of digital tools are not new. Mainstream social media platforms, despite serious drawbacks discussed below, have played an important role in a variety of social movements. For example, activists used Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests during the Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s. In the worker justice arena, online engagement using social media platforms that mobilize and organize workers, like Facebook and customized platforms like Coworker, has contributed to impressive actions and campaigns, including teacher strikes in the United States, strikes of Ryanair workers in Europe, and successful efforts to challenge unfair workplace policies in nonunion settings around the world. In many ways, COVID-19 has amplified and accelerated the digital efforts that have already been in motion. In a time of social distancing, people have increasingly relied upon digital tools to support collective action across different sectors, just as they have for a broad spectrum of other social interactions.
However, digital engagement will never replace analog or in-person forms of connection, as we have seen in the recent protests drawing attention to the epidemic of police violence against Black Americans. Nor will tools designed to directly address specific challenges confronting low-wage workers single-handedly transform the broader set of conditions that have produced rising inequality; ongoing expansion of the low-wage economy; and entrenched marginalization based on identity markers like race, gender, and citizenship status. Just as we need to challenge the idea that technological change will inevitably lead to mass unemployment, we also need to resist seeing new technology as supplying a set of easy fixes that secure a just and equitable future of work.
In this article, we examine how worker-centered digital tools and approaches to digital engagement might fit within a larger set of strategies for shifting power in the economy and ensuring that all people have access to “decent work” that provides fair income, social protections, and the freedom to organize, among other measures. How can online organizing foster connection and collective action—even direct action—for workers separated by geography and working across different sectors? For those lacking information about their labor rights and the behavior of unscrupulous and abusive employers, how can digital channels offer a lifeline? How can digital tools help pave the way for “high-road” forms of employment that pay fairly and invest in workers, particularly in areas where prevailing policies and norms translate into chronic precarity?…(More)”.
Transparency in Local Governments: Patterns and Practices of Twenty-first Century
Paper by Redeemer Dornudo Yao Krah and Gerard Mertens: “The study is a systematic literature review that assembles scientific knowledge in local government transparency in the twenty-first Century. The study finds a remarkable growth in research on local government transparency in the first nineteen years, particularly in Europe and North America. Social, economic, political, and institutional factors are found to account for this trend. In vogue among local governments is the use of information technology to enhance transparency. The pressure to become transparent largely comes from the passage of Freedom of Information Laws and open data initiatives of governments….(More)”.
COVID-19 Data and Data Sharing Agreements: The Potential of Sunset Clauses and Sunset Provisions
A report by SDSN TReNDS and DataReady Limited on behalf of Contracts4DataCollaboration: “Building upon issues discussed in the C4DC report, “Laying the Foundation for Effective Partnerships: An Examination of Data Sharing Agreements,” this brief examines the potential of sunset clauses or sunset provisions to be a legally binding, enforceable, and accountable way of ensuring COVID-19 related data sharing agreements are wound down responsibly at the end of the pandemic. The brief is divided into four substantive parts: Part I introduces sunset clauses as legislative tools, highlighting a number of examples of how they have been used in both COVID-19 related and other contexts; Part II discusses sunset provisions in the context of data sharing agreements and attempts to explain the complex interrelationship between data ownership, intellectual property, and sunset provisions; Part III identifies some key issues policymakers should consider when assessing the utility and viability of sunset provisions within their data sharing agreements and arrangements; and Part IV highlights the value of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) as a viable vehicle for sunset provisions in contexts where data sharing agreements are either non-existent or not regularly used….(More)“.(Contracts 4 Data Collaboration Framework).
The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
Paper by Stephanie Russo Carroll et al: “Concerns about secondary use of data and limited opportunities for benefit-sharing have focused attention on the tension that Indigenous communities feel between (1) protecting Indigenous rights and interests in Indigenous data (including traditional knowledges) and (2) supporting open data, machine learning, broad data sharing, and big data initiatives. The International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group (within the Research Data Alliance) is a network of nation-state based Indigenous data sovereignty networks and individuals that developed the ‘CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance’ (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) in consultation with Indigenous Peoples, scholars, non-profit organizations, and governments. The CARE Principles are people– and purpose-oriented, reflecting the crucial role of data in advancing innovation, governance, and self-determination among Indigenous Peoples. The Principles complement the existing data-centric approach represented in the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’ (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). The CARE Principles build upon earlier work by the Te Mana Raraunga Maori Data Sovereignty Network, US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, Maiam nayri Wingara Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective, and numerous Indigenous Peoples, nations, and communities. The goal is that stewards and other users of Indigenous data will ‘Be FAIR and CARE.’ In this first formal publication of the CARE Principles, we articulate their rationale, describe their relation to the FAIR Principles, and present examples of their application….(More)” See also Selected Readings on Indigenous Data Sovereignty.