Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The World Bank: “The Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance project is an initiative of the World Bank’s Global Indicators Group, which produces a range of datasets and benchmarking products on regulations and business activity around the world. These datasets include Doing Business, Enterprise Surveys, Enabling the Business of Agriculture and Women, Business and the Law.

The Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance project explores how governments interact with the public when shaping regulations that affect their business community. Concerned stakeholders could be professional associations, civic groups or foreign investors. The project charts how interested groups learn about new regulations being considered, and the extent to which they are able to engage with officials on the content. It also measures whether or not governments assess the possible impact of new regulations in their countries (including economic, social and environmental considerations) and whether those calculations form part of the public consultation. Finally, Global Indicators of Regulatory Governance capture two additional components of a predictable regulatory environment: the ability of stakeholders to challenge regulations, and the ability of people to access all the laws and regulations currently in force in one, consolidated place.

http://rulemaking.worldbank.org/en/about-usThe project grew out of an increasing recognition of the importance of transparency and accountability in government actions. Citizen access to the government rulemaking process is central for the creation of a business environment in which investors make long-range plans and investments. Greater levels of consultation are also associated with a higher quality of regulation….(More)”

Declaration of Cities Coalition for Digital Rights

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New York City, Barcelona and Amsterdam: “We, the undersigned cities, formally come together to form the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights, to protect and uphold human rights on the internet at the local and global level.

The internet has become inseparable from our daily lives. Yet, every day, there are new cases of digital rights abuse, misuse and misinformation and concentration of power around the world: freedom of expression being censored; personal information, including our movements and communications, monitored, being shared and sold without consent; ‘black box’ algorithms being used to make unaccountable decisions; social media being used as a tool of harassment and hate speech; and democratic processes and public opinion being undermined.

As cities, the closest democratic institutions to the people, we are committed to eliminating impediments to harnessing technological opportunities that improve the lives of our constituents, and to providing trustworthy and secure digital services and infrastructures that support our communities. We strongly believe that human rights principles such as privacy, freedom of expression, and democracy must be incorporated by design into digital platforms starting with locally-controlled digital infrastructures and services.

As a coalition, and with the support of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), we will share best practices, learn from each other’s challenges and successes, and coordinate common initiatives and actions. Inspired by the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition (IRPC), the work of 300 international stakeholders over the past ten years, we are committed to the following five evolving principles:

01.Universal and equal access to the internet, and digital literacy

02.Privacy, data protection and security

03.Transparency, accountability, and non-discrimination of data, content and algorithms

04.Participatory Democracy, diversity and inclusion

05.Open and ethical digital service standards”

When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Rozas et all:  “Blockchain technologies have generated excitement, yet their potential to enable new forms of governanceremains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterised by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organisation; and critical accounts of such discourses which, whilst contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralised institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. Therefore the question arises, can we build perspectives of blockchain-based governance that go beyond markets and states? In this article we draw on the Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain.

We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualisation of affordances that this technology may provide to communities. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focussed on blockchain-based commons governance. By carrying out this analysis, we aim to expand the debate from one dominated by a culture of competition to one that promotes a culture of cooperation….(More)”.

Better “nowcasting” can reveal what weather is about to hit within 500 meters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “Weather forecasting is impressively accurate given how changeable and chaotic Earth’s climate can be. It’s not unusual to get 10-day forecasts with a reasonable level of accuracy.

But there is still much to be done.  One challenge for meteorologists is to improve their “nowcasting,” the ability to forecast weather in the next six hours or so at a spatial resolution of a square kilometer or less.

In areas where the weather can change rapidly, that is difficult. And there is much at stake. Agricultural activity is increasingly dependent on nowcasting, and the safety of many sporting events depends on it too. Then there is the risk that sudden rainfall could lead to flash flooding, a growing problem in many areas because of climate change and urbanization. That has implications for infrastructure, such as sewage management, and for safety, since this kind of flooding can kill.

So meteorologists would dearly love to have a better way to make their nowcasts.

Enter Blandine Bianchi from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a few colleagues, who have developed a method for combining meteorological data from several sources to produce nowcasts with improved accuracy. Their work has the potential to change the utility of this kind of forecasting for everyone from farmers and gardeners to emergency services and sewage engineers.

Current forecasting is limited by the data and the scale on which it is gathered and processed. For example, satellite data has a spatial resolution of 50 to 100 km and allows the tracking and forecasting of large cloud cells over a time scale of six to nine hours. By contrast, radar data is updated every five minutes, with a spatial resolution of about a kilometer, and leads to predictions on the time scale of one to three hours. Another source of data is the microwave links used by telecommunications companies, which are degraded by rainfall….(More)”

The Janus Face of the Liberal Information Order

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Paper by Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman: “…Domestically, policy-makers and scholars argued that information openness, like economic openness, would go hand-in-glove with political liberalization and the spread of democratic values. This was perhaps, in part an accident of timing: the Internet – which seemed to many to be inherently resistant to censorship – burgeoned shortly after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Politicians celebrated the dawn of a new era of open communication, while scholars began to argue that the spread of the Internet would lead to the spread of democracy (Diamond 2010;Shirky 2008).

A second wave of literature suggested that Internet-based social media had played a crucial role in spreading freedom in the Arab Spring (Howard 2010; Hussain and Howard 2013). There were some skeptics who highlighted the vexed relationship between open networks and the closed national politics of autocracies (Goldsmith and Wu 2006), or who pointed out that the Internet was nowhere near as censorship-resistant as early optimists had supposed (Deibert et al. 2008). Even these pessimists seemed to believe that the Internet could bolster liberalism in healthy democracies, although it would by no means necessarily prevail over tyranny.

The international liberal order for information, however, finds itself increasingly on shaky ground. Non-democratic regimes ranging from China to Saudi Arabia have created domestic technological infrastructures, which undermine and provide an alternative to the core principles of the regime (Boas 2006; Deibert 2008).

The European Union, while still generally supportive of open communication and free speech, has grown skeptical of the regime’s focus on unfettered economic access and has used privacy and anti-trust policy to challenge its most neo-liberal elements (Newman 2008). Non-state actors like Wikileaks have relied on information openness as a channel of disruption and perhaps manipulation. 

More troubling are the arguments of a new literature – that open information flows are less a harbinger of democracy than a vector of attack…

How can IR scholars make sense of this Janus-face quality of information? In this brief memo, we argue that much of the existing work on information technology and information flows suffers from two key deficiencies.

First – there has been an unhelpful separation between two important debates about information flows and liberalism. One – primarily focused on the international level – concerned global governance of information networks, examining how states (especially the US) arrived at and justified their policy stances, and how power dynamics shaped the battles between liberal and illiberal states over what the relevant governance arrangements should be (Klein 2002; Singh 2008; Mueller 2009). …

This leads to the second problem – that research has failed to appreciate the dynamics of contestation over time…(More)”

What’s inside the black box of digital innovation?

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George Atalla at Ernst and Young: “Analysis of the success or failure of government digital transformation projects tends to focus on the technology that has been introduced. Seldom discussed is the role played by organizational culture and by a government’s willingness to embrace new approaches and working practices. And yet factors such as an ability to transcend bureaucratic working styles and collaborate with external partners are just as vital to success as deploying the right IT…

The study, Inside the Black Box: Journey Mapping Digital Innovation in Government, used a range of qualitative research tools including rich pictures, journey maps and self-reporting questionnaires to tease out individual characteristics of team members, team sentiment, organizational governance and the role played by cultural factors. The approach was unique in that it captured the nuances of the process of digital innovation, rather than merely measuring inputs and outputs.

The aim of the study was to look inside the “black box” of digital transformation to find out what really goes on within the teams responsible for delivery. In every case, the implementation journey involved ups and downs, advances and setbacks, but there were always valuable lessons to learn. We have extracted the six key insights for governments, outlined below, to provide guidance for government and public sector leaders who are embarking on their own innovation journey…(More)”.

Technologies of International Relations

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Book edited by Carolin Kaltofen, Madeline Carr and Michele Acuto: “This book examines the role of technology in the core voices for International Relations theory and how this has shaped the contemporary thinking of ‘IR’ across some of the discipline’s major texts. Through an interview format between different generations of IR scholars, the conversations of the book analyse the relationship between technology and concepts like power, security and global order. They explore to what extent ideas about the role and implications of technology help to understand the way IR has been framed and world politics are conceived of today. This innovative text will appeal to scholars in Politics and International Relations as well as STS, Human Geography and Anthropology….(More)” .

Security in Smart Cities: Models, Applications, and Challenges

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Book edited by Aboul Ella Hassanien, Mohamed Elhoseny, Syed Hassan Ahmed and Amit Kumar Singh: “This book offers an essential guide to IoT Security, Smart Cities, IoT Applications, etc. In addition, it presents a structured introduction to the subject of destination marketing and an exhaustive review on the challenges of information security in smart and intelligent applications, especially for IoT and big data contexts. Highlighting the latest research on security in smart cities, it addresses essential models, applications, and challenges.

Written in plain and straightforward language, the book offers a self-contained resource for readers with no prior background in the field. Primarily intended for students in Information Security and IoT applications (including smart cities systems and data heterogeneity), it will also greatly benefit academic researchers, IT professionals, policymakers and legislators. It is well suited as a reference book for both undergraduate and graduate courses on information security approaches, the Internet of Things, and real-world intelligent applications….(More)

The free flow of non-personal data

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Joint statement by Vice-President Ansip and Commissioner Gabriel on the European Parliament’s vote on the new EU rules facilitating the free flow of non-personal data: “The European Parliament adopted today a Regulation on the free flow of non-personal data proposed by the European Commission in September 2017. …

“We welcome today’s vote at the European Parliament. A digital economy and society cannot exist without data and this Regulation concludes another key pillar of the Digital Single Market. Only if data flows freely can Europe get the best from the opportunities offered by digital progress and technologies such as artificial intelligence and supercomputers.  

This Regulation does for non-personal data what the General Data Protection Regulation has already done for personal data: free and safe movement across the European Union. 

With its vote, the European Parliament has sent a clear signal to all businesses of Europe: it makes no difference where in the EU you store and process your data – data localisation requirements within the Member States are a thing of the past. 

The new rules will provide a major boost to the European data economy, as it opens up potential for European start-ups and SMEs to create new services through cross-border data innovation. This could lead to a 4% – or €739 billion – higher EU GDP until 2020 alone. 

Together with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Regulation on the free flow of non-personal data will allow the EU to fully benefit from today’s and tomorrow’s data-based global economy.” 

Background

Since the Communication on the European Data Economy was adopted in January 2017 as part of the Digital Single Market strategy, the Commission has run a public online consultation, organised structured dialogues with Member States and has undertaken several workshops with different stakeholders. These evidence-gathering initiatives have led to the publication of an impact assessment….The Regulation on the free flow of non-personal data has no impact on the application of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as it does not cover personal data. However, the two Regulations will function together to enable the free flow of any data – personal and non-personal – thus creating a single European space for data. In the case of a mixed dataset, the GDPR provision guaranteeing free flow of personal data will apply to the personal data part of the set, and the free flow of non-personal data principle will apply to the non-personal part. …(More)”.

Craft metrics to value co-production

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Liz Richardson and Beth Perry at Nature: “Advocates of co-production encourage collaboration between professional researchers and those affected by that research, to ensure that the resulting science is relevant and useful. Opening up science beyond scientists is essential, particularly where problems are complex, solutions are uncertain and values are salient. For example, patients should have input into research on their conditions, and first-hand experience of local residents should shape research on environmental-health issues.

But what constitutes success on these terms? Without a better understanding of this, it is harder to incentivize co-production in research. A key way to support co-production is reconfiguring that much-derided feature of academic careers: metrics.

Current indicators of research output (such as paper counts or the h-index) conceptualize the value of research narrowly. They are already roundly criticized as poor measures of quality or usefulness. Less appreciated is the fact that these metrics also leave out the societal relevance of research and omit diverse approaches to creating knowledge about social problems.

Peer review also has trouble assessing the value of research that sits at disciplinary boundaries or that addresses complex social challenges. It denies broader social accountability by giving scientists a monopoly on determining what is legitimate knowledge1. Relying on academic peer review as a means of valuing research can discourage broader engagement.

This privileges abstract and theoretical research over work that is localized and applied. For example, research on climate-change adaptation, conducted in the global south by researchers embedded in affected communities, can make real differences to people’s lives. Yet it is likely to be valued less highly by conventional evaluation than research that is generalized from afar and then published in a high-impact English-language journal….(More)”.