Paper by Aichida Ul-Aflaha, Mary McNeil and Saki Kumagai: “This paper summarizes the World Bank’s knowledge on open, participatory, and responsive governance. It offers a rethinking and broadening of the term “open government” in light of the World Bank Group’s Strategic Framework for Mainstreaming Citizen Engagement in World Bank Group Operations and World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law. The building blocks of open government are documented based on experience and growing trends. The paper also tries to identify new frontiers and presents a summary of action steps for advancing the open, participatory, and responsive governance agenda within... (More >)
Coronavirus: seven ways collective intelligence is tackling the pandemic
Article by Kathy Peach: “Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond. At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and insights to solve a problem. Advances in 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... (More >)
Global Traffic Scorecard
Press Release: “…the 2019 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard… identified, analyzed and ranked congestion and mobility trends in more than 900 cities, across 43 countries. To reflect an increasingly diverse mobility landscape, the 2019 Global Traffic Scorecard includes both public transport and biking metrics for the first time…. At the global level, Bogota topped the list of the cities most impacted by traffic congestion with drivers losing 191 hours a year to congestion, followed by Rio de Janeiro (190 hours), Mexico City (158 hours) and Istanbul (150 hours). Latin American and European cities again dominated the Top 10, highlighting the... (More >)
Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050
Paper by Ilona M. Otto et al: “…In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The results reported in this study are based on an online expert survey, an expert workshop, and an extensive literature review (SI Appendix). Our results complement the existing shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) that are used alongside... (More >)
Systems Thinking and Regulatory Governance: A Review of the International Academic Literature
Paper by Jeroen van der Heijden: “This research paper presents findings from a broad scoping of the international academic literature on the use of systems thinking and systems science in regulatory governance and practice. It builds on a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published in the top 15 journals for regulatory scholarship. The aim of the research paper is to introduce those working in a regulatory environment to the key concepts of systems thinking and systems science, and to discuss the state of the art of regulatory knowledge on these topics. It addresses five themes: (1) the evolution of... (More >)
Wanted: Data Stewards: (Re-)Defining The Roles and Responsibilities of Data Stewards for an Age of Data Collaboration
Wanted: Data Stewards: (Re-)Defining The Roles and Responsibilities of Data Stewards for an Age of Data Collaboration Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Michelle Winowatan at Data & Policy: “As data grows increasingly prevalent in our economy, it is increasingly clear, too, that tremendous societal value can be derived from reusing and combining previously separate datasets. One avenue that holds particular promise are data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are a new form of partnership in which data (such as data owned by corporations) or data expertise is made accessible for external parties (such as academics or statistical offices)... (More >)
Freedom in the World 2020 – A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy
Report by Freedom House: “Democracy and pluralism are under assault. Dictators are toiling to stamp out the last vestiges of domestic dissent and spread their harmful influence to new corners of the world. At the same time, many freely elected leaders are dramatically narrowing their concerns to a blinkered interpretation of the national interest. In fact, such leaders—including the chief executives of the United States and India, the world’s two largest democracies—are increasingly willing to break down institutional safeguards and disregard the rights of critics and minorities as they pursue their populist agendas. As a result of these and... (More >)
Beyond Randomized Controlled Trials
Iqbal Dhaliwal, John Floretta & Sam Friedlander at SSIR: “…In its post-Nobel phase, one of J-PAL’s priorities is to unleash the treasure troves of big digital data in the hands of governments, nonprofits, and private firms. Primary data collection is by far the most time-, money-, and labor-intensive component of the vast majority of experiments that evaluate social policies. Randomized evaluations have been constrained by simple numbers: Some questions are just too big or expensive to answer. Leveraging administrative data has the potential to dramatically expand the types of questions we can ask and the experiments we can run,... (More >)
Open peer-review platform for COVID-19 preprints
Michael A. Johansson & Daniela Saderi in Nature: “The public call for rapid sharing of research data relevant to the COVID-19 outbreak (see go.nature.com/2t1lyp6) is driving an unprecedented surge in (unrefereed) preprints. To help pinpoint the most important research, we have launched Outbreak Science Rapid PREreview, with support from the London-based charity Wellcome. This is an open-source platform for rapid review of preprints related to emerging outbreaks (see https://outbreaksci.prereview.org). These reviews comprise responses to short, yes-or-no questions, with optional commenting. The questions are designed to capture structured, high-level input on the importance and quality of the research, which can... (More >)
Frameworks for Collective Intelligence: A Systematic Literature Review
Paper by Shweta Suran, Vishwajeet Pattanaik, and Dirk Draheim: “Over the last few years, Collective Intelligence (CI) platforms have become a vital resource for learning, problem solving, decision-making, and predictions. This rising interest in the topic has to led to the development of several models and frameworks available in published literature. Unfortunately, most of these models are built around domain-specific requirements, i.e., they are often based on the intuitions of their domain experts and developers. This has created a gap in our knowledge in the theoretical foundations of CI systems and models, in general. In this article, we attempt... (More >)
