Lessons learned from telco data informing COVID-19 responses: toward an early warning system for future pandemics?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a special issue of Data and Policy (Open Access) by Richard Benjamins, Jeanine Vos, and Stefaan Verhulst: “More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the damage is still unfolding. While some countries have recently managed to gain an element of control through aggressive vaccine campaigns, much of the developing world — South and Southeast Asia in particular — remain in a state of crisis. Given what we now know about the global nature of this disease and the potential for mutant versions to develop and spread, a crisis anywhere is cause for concern everywhere. The world remains very much in the grip of this public health crisis.

From the beginning, there has been hope that data and technology could offer solutions to help inform the government’s response strategy and decision-making. Many of the expectations have been focused on mobile data analytics in particular, whereby mobile network operators create mobility insights and decision-support tools generated from anonymized and aggregated telco data. This stems both from a growing group of mobile network operators having significantly invested in systems and capabilities to develop such products and services for public and private sector customers. As well as their value having been demonstrated in addressing different global challenges, ranging from models to better understand the spread of Zika in Brazil to interactive dashboards to aid emergency services during earthquakes and floods in Japan. Yet despite these experiences, many governments across the world still have limited awareness, capabilities and resources to leverage these tools, in their efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 using non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), both from a medical and economic point of view.

Today, we release the first batch of papers of a special collection of Data & Policy that examines both the potential of mobile data, as well as the challenges faced in delivering these tools to inform government decision-making. Consisting of 5 papers from 33 researchers and experts from academia, industry and government, the articles cover a wide range of geographies, including Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Gambia, Germany, Ghana, Austria, Belgium, and Spain. Responding to our call for case studies to illustrate the opportunities (and challenges) offered by mobile big data in the fight against COVID-19, the authors of these papers describe a number of examples of how mobile and mobile-related data have been used to address the medical, economic, socio-cultural and political aspects of the pandemic….(More)”.

Solving Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Beth Simone Noveck (The GovLab): “The challenges societies face today, from inequality to climate change to systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving Public Problems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data, and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerful solutions to contemporary problems.  
 
Offering a radical rethinking of the role of the public servant and the skills of the public workforce, this book is about the vast gap between failing public institutions and the huge number of public entrepreneurs doing extraordinary things—and how to close that gap.  
 
Drawing on lessons learned from decades of advising global leaders and from original interviews and surveys of thousands of public problem solvers, Beth Simone Noveck provides a practical guide for public servants, community leaders, students, and activists to become more effective, equitable, and inclusive leaders and repair our troubled, twenty-first-century world….(More)”

Take the free online course presented by The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

Using big data for insights into the gender digital divide for girls: A discussion paper

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Using big data for insights into the gender digital divide for girls: A discussion paper

UNICEF paper: “This discussion paper describes the findings of a study that used big data as an alternative data source to understand the gender digital divide for under-18s. It describes 6 key insights gained from analysing big data from Facebook and Instagram platforms, and discusses how big data can be further used to contribute to the body of evidence for the gender digital divide for adolescent girls….(More)”

Citizen participation in budgeting and beyond: Deliberative Practices and their Impact in Contemporary Cases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access book by Joanna Podgórska-Rykała and Jacek Sroka: “…The basic questions which the theory and practice of public policy try to answer is the question about desires in democratic conditions and at the same time an effective formula for balancing centralization and decentralization in decision-making processes. […]

Participatory budgeting, as one of possible variants of deliberation, is one of those phenomena of public life, the quality of which depends on the relations of the parties involved. The shape of these relationships only to a limited extent depends on the ways of their current practice, because these methods are causally conditioned, and the causes lie in cultural constructions. That is why these relations are not easy to study; it is difficult to reach that deep, because it is difficult to both model the conceptualization of the problem and the methodological approach to such research. These are one of the most difficult and, at the same time, the most promising research areas of public policy. We hope that this book will contribute to their partial exploration…(More)”.

The Social Sector Needs a Meta Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Laura Deaton: “Imagine a world where the social sector exercises the full measure of its power and influence, fueled by its more than 12 million employees and 64 million volunteers. Imagine people who are fighting for living wages, women’s rights, early childhood education, racial justice, and climate action locking arms and pushing for broad social and environmental progress. Imagine a movement of movements with a bold, integrated policy agenda that drives real progress toward a more healthy, sustainable, resilient, and equitable world—not in some utopian future, but in the next decade.

If we click the heels of our ruby slippers together, we can go to that place.

OK, it’s not quite that easy. But we already have what we need to make it happen: the people, organizational models, and money. All of us—nonprofits, activists, funders, capacity builders, and knowledge providers—need to summon the vision and willingness to reach beyond our current bounds. And then we need to just do it.

Right now, we’re living in a social sector version of the tragedy of the commons, with organizations and coalitions pursuing their goals in silos and advocating only for their own narrow band of policy prescriptions. This problem is deep and wide—it’s happening both within and across movements—and it draws down the power of the sector as a whole. It’s time—actually well past time—to apply tried-and-true templates for grassroots movement building to the entire social sector and create demand for public policy changes that will move the needle toward long-term shared prosperity.

This involves a shift in mindset—from seeing our organizations as doing one thing (“We advocate for people experiencing homelessness”) to seeing them as part of a bigger thing (“We’re engaged in a movement that advocates for social and environmental justice”). Much as layers of identities make up our whole selves, this shift stands to weave all the strands of activism and service into our sector’s self-conception. From there, we can build an advocacy network that connects currently disparate movements and aligns agendas in pursuit of common goals. This requires action in the following areas: ramping up support for grassroots initiatives; coalescing behind a common goals framework; and designing a network support system that has regional, statewide, national, and potentially global scale….(More)”.

A Literature Review of E-government Services with Gamification Elements

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruth S. Contreras-Espinosa and Alejandro Blanco-M: “Many democracies face breaches of communication between citizens and political representatives, resulting in low engagement in political decision-making and public consultations. Gamification strategies can be implemented to generate constructive relationships and increase citizens’ motivation and participation by including positive experiences like achievements. This document contains a literature review of the gamification topic, providing a conceptual background, and presenting a selection and analysis of the applications to e-government services. The study characterises gamification element usage and highlights the need for a standardised methodology during element selection. Three research gaps were identified, with a potential impact on future studies and e-government applications….(More)”.

Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ramon van der Does and Vincent Jacquet: “Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research…(More)”.

Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The WHO guidance…”on Ethics & Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health is the product of eighteen months of deliberation amongst leading experts in ethics, digital technology, law, human rights, as well as experts from Ministries of Health.  While new technologies that use artificial intelligence hold great promise to improve diagnosis, treatment, health research and drug development and to support governments carrying out public health functions, including surveillance and outbreak response, such technologies, according to the report, must put ethics and human rights at the heart of its design, deployment, and use.

The report identifies the ethical challenges and risks with the use of artificial intelligence of health, six consensus principles to ensure AI works to the public benefit of all countries. It also contains a set of recommendations that can ensure the governance of artificial intelligence for health maximizes the promise of the technology and holds all stakeholders – in the public and private sector – accountable and responsive to the healthcare workers who will rely on these technologies and the communities and individuals whose health will be affected by its use…(More)”

Pooling society’s collective intelligence helped fight COVID – it must help fight future crises too

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aleks Berditchevskaia and Kathy Peach at The Conversation: “A Global Pandemic Radar is to be created to detect new COVID variants and other emerging diseases. Led by the WHO, the project aims to build an international network of surveillance hubs, set up to share data that’ll help us monitor vaccine resistance, track diseases and identify new ones as they emerge.

This is undeniably a good thing. Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, the COVID pandemic has brought home the importance of pooling society’s collective intelligence and finding new ways to share that combined knowledge as quickly as possible.

At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity that’s created when diverse groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and knowledge to solve a problem. Digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years – connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data.

So what have we learned over the last 18 months of collective intelligence pooling that can inform the Global Pandemic Radar? Building from the COVID crisis, what lessons will help us perfect disease surveillance and respond better to future crises?…(More)”

Linux Foundation unveils new permissive license for open data collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

VentureBeat: “The Linux Foundation has announced a new permissive license designed to help foster collaboration around open data for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) projects.

Data may be the new oil, but for AI and ML projects, having access to expansive and diverse datasets is key to reducing bias and building powerful models capable of all manner of intelligent tasks. For machines, data is a little like “experience” is for humans — the more of it you have, the better decisions you are likely to make.

With CDLA-Permissive-2.0, the Linux Foundation is building on its previous efforts to encourage data-sharing through licensing arrangements that clearly define how the data — and any derivative datasets — can and can’t be used.

The Linux Foundation introduced the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) in 2017 to entice organizations to open up their vast pools of (underused) data to third parties. There were two original licenses, a sharing license with a “copyleft” reciprocal commitment borrowed from the open source software sphere, stipulating that any derivative datasets built from the original dataset must be shared under a similar license, and a permissive license (1.0) without any such obligations in place (much as “true” open source software might be defined).

Licenses are basically legal documents that outline how a piece of work (in this case datasets) can be used or modified, but specific phrases, ambiguities, or exceptions can often be enough to spook companies if they think releasing content under a specific license could cause them problems down the line. This is where the CDLA-Permissive-2.0 license comes into play — it’s essentially a rewrite of version 1.0 but shorter and simpler to follow. Going further, it has removed certain provisions that were deemed unnecessary or burdensome and may have hindered broader use of the license.

For example, version 1.0 of the license included obligations that data recipients preserve attribution notices in the datasets. For context, attribution notices or statements are standard in the software sphere, where a company that releases software built on open source components has to credit the creators of these components in its own software license. But the Linux Foundation said feedback it received from the community and lawyers representing companies involved in open data projects pointed to challenges around associating attributions with data (or versions of datasets).

So while data source attribution is still an option, and might make sense for specific projects — particularly where transparency is paramount — it is no longer a condition for businesses looking to share data under the new permissive license. The chief remaining obligation is that the main community data license agreement text be included with the new datasets…(More)”.