Reweaving the social fabric after the crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andy Haldane at the Financial Times: “Yet one source of capital, as in past pandemics, is bucking these trends: social capital. This typically refers to the network of relationships across communities that support and strengthen societies. From surveys, we know that people greatly value these networks, even though social capital itself is rarely assigned a monetary value.

The social distancing policies enacted across the world to curb the spread of Covid-19 might have been expected to weaken social networks and damage social capital. In fact, the opposite has happened. People have maintained physical distance while pursuing social togetherness. Existing networks have been strengthened and new ones ­created, often digitally. Even as other capital has crumbled, the stock of social capital has risen, acting as a counter­cyclical stabiliser across communities. We see this daily on our doorsteps through small acts of neighbourly kindness.

We see it in the activities of community groups, charities and philanthropic movements, whose work has risen in importance and prominence. And we see it too in the vastly increased numbers of people volunteering to help. Before the crisis struck, the global volunteer corps numbered a staggering 1bn people. Since then, more people than ever have signed up for civic service, including 750,000 volunteers who are supporting the UK National Health Service. They are the often-invisible army helping fight this invisible enemy.

This same pattern appeared during past periods of societal stress, from pandemics to wars. Then, as now, faith and community groups provided the glue bonding societies together. During the 19th century, the societal stresses arising from the Industrial Revolution — homelessness, family separation, loneliness — were the catalyst for the emergence of the charitable sector.

The economic and social progress that followed the Industrial Revolution came courtesy of a three-way partnership among the private, public and social sectors. The private sector provided the innovative spark; the state provided insurance to the incomes, jobs and health of citizens; and the social sector provided the support network to cope with disruption to lives and livelihoods. Back then, social capital (every bit as much as human, financial and physical capital) provided the foundations on which capitalism was built….(More)”.

The tricky math of lifting coronavirus lockdowns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Temple at MIT Technology Review: “…A crucial point of the work—which Steinhardt and MIT’s Andrew Ilyas​ wrote up in a draft paper that hasn’t yet been published or peer-reviewed—is that communities need to get much better at tracking infections. “With the data we currently have, we actually just don’t know what the level of safe mobility is,” Steinhardt says. “We need much better mechanisms for tracking prevalence in order to do any of this safely.”

The analysis relies on other noisy and less-than-optimal measurements as well, including using hospitalization admissions and deaths to estimate disease prevalence before the lockdowns. They also had to make informed assumptions, which others might disagree with, about how much shelter-in-place rules have altered the spread of the disease. Much of the overall uncertainty is due to the spottiness of testing to date. If case counts are rising, but so is testing, it’s difficult to decipher whether infections are still increasing or a greater proportion of infected people are being evaluated.

This produces some confusing results in the study for any policymaker looking for clear direction. Notably, in Los Angeles, the estimated growth rate of the disease since the shelter-in-place order went into effect ranges from negative to positive. This suggests either that the city could start loosening restrictions or that it needs to tighten them further.

Ultimately, the researchers stress that communities need to build up disease surveillance measures to reduce this uncertainty, and strike an appropriate balance between reopening the economy and minimizing public health risks.

They propose several ways to do so, including conducting virological testing on a random sample of some 20,000 people per day in a given area; setting up wide-scale online surveys that ask people to report potential symptoms, similar to what Carnegie Mellon researchers are doing through efforts with both Facebook and Google; and potentially testing for the prevalence of viral material in wastewater, a technique that has “sounded the alarm” on polio outbreaks in the past.

A team of researchers affiliated with MIT, Harvard, and startup Biobot Analytics recently analyzed water samples from a Massachusetts treatment facility, and detected levels of the coronavirus that were “significantly higher” than expected on the basis of confirmed cases in the state, according to a non-peer-reviewed paper released earlier this month….(More)”.

Lack of design input in healthcare is putting both patients and doctors at risk, says physician

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marcus Fairs at DeZeen: “Hospitals “desperately need designers” to improve everything from the way they tackle coronavirus to the layout of operating theatres and the design of medical charts, according to a senior US doctor.

“We desperately need designers to help organize the environment and products to help keep the correct focus on a patient, and reduce distraction,” said Dr Sam Smith, a clinical physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“We need designers at every turn, but they are so infrequently consulted,” he added. “In the end, most physicians burn out early because, in part, we are lacking well designed cognitive and physical spaces to help process the information smoothly.”…

“Visual hierarchy is a huge problem in medicine,” Smith said, giving an example. “This is very evident in online medical charts. Very poor visual hierarchy exists because designers were not consulted in the platform or details of the patient information organization or presentation.”

“This inability to incorporate good visual hierarchy, for example organizing a complex medical history in a visual way to emphasize what really needs attention for the patient, has led to ineffective care, and even patient harm on occasions over the years,” he explained.

“I have seen it in my 20 years of practice time and time again. Doctors are humans too, and the demands on them processing huge amounts of information are high.”…(More)”.

Covid-19: the rise of a global collective intelligence?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marc Santolini at the Conversation: “All around the world, scientists and practitioners are relentlessly harnessing data on the pandemic to model its progression, predict the impact of possible interventions and develop solutions to medical equipment shortages, generating open-source data and codes to be reused by others.

Research and innovation is now in a collaborative frenzy just as contagious as the coronavirus. Is this the rise of the famous “collective intelligence” supposed to solve our major global problems?

The rise of a global collective intelligence

The beginning of the epidemic saw “traditional” research considerably accelerate and open its means of production, with journals such as Science, Nature and The Lancet immediately granting public access to publications on the coronavirus and Covid-19.

The academic world is in ebullition. Every day, John Hopkins University updates an open and collaborative stream of data on the epidemic, which have already been reused more than 11,000 times. Research results are published immediately on pre-print servers or laboratory websites. Algorithms and interactive visualizations are flourishing on GitHub; outreach videos on YouTube. The figures are staggering, with nearly 9,000 academic articles published on the subject to date.

More recently, popular initiatives bringing together a variety of actors have emerged outside institutional frameworks, using online platforms. For example, a community of biologists, engineers and developers has emerged on the Just One Giant Lab (JOGL) collaborative platform to develop low-cost, open-source solutions against the virus. This platform, which we developed with Leo Blondel (Harvard University) and Thomas Landrain (La Paillasse, PILI) over the past three years, is designed as a virtual, open and distributed research institute aimed at developing solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) defined by the United Nations. Communities use it to self-organize and provide innovative solutions to urgent problems requiring fundamentally interdisciplinary skills and knowledge. The platform facilitates coordination by linking needs and resources within the community, animating research programs, and organising challenges….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing a crisis response for COVID-19 in oncology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aakash Desai et al in Nature Medicine: “Crowdsourcing efforts are currently underway to collect and analyze data from patients with cancer who are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. These community-led initiatives will fill key knowledge gaps to tackle crucial clinical questions on the complexities of infection with the causative coronavirus SARS-Cov-2 in the large, heterogeneous group of vulnerable patients with cancer…(More)”

Digital solutions to revolutionise community empowerment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alan Marcus: “…The best responses to Covid-19 have harmonised top-down policies and grassroots organisation. In the UK, more than 700,000 volunteers for the National Health Service are being organised through GoodSAM—an app that, like many gig economy platforms, allows individuals to switch on availability for delivering supplies to vulnerable people.

Perhaps the best example is Taiwan, where officials have kept the rate of infection to a fraction of even highly-rated Singapore. Coordinating public and private groups, the country has deployed a range of online services, including a system for mapping and allocating rationed face masks developed by Digital Minister Audrey Tang and members of an online hacktivist chatroom. …

Effective responses to the crisis show the value of inclusive government and hint at more resilient models for managing our communities. So far, governments, businesses and individuals have pooled resources to deliver country-wide responses. However, this model should be pushed further. Digital tools should be provided to communities to organise themselves, develop locally tailored solutions and get involved in the governance of their town or neighbourhood.

This model requires open communication between local people and the organisations responsible for administrating neighbourhoods—be they governments or businesses. … 

The platform provides significant opportunities for optimising crisis response and elevating quality of life. For example, a popular solution for market vendors forced to close by Covid-19 has been offering delivery services. As well as the businesses, this benefits local people, who can bypass overcrowded superstores or overcapacity online grocery deliveries. While grassroots movements are largely left to organise themselves, this is a missed opportunity for collaboration with local administrators.

By communicating with vendors, the administrator can not only establish an online platform to coordinate their services, but also connect them with local people to help deliver the service, such as van owners who can loan their vehicles. Moreover, the administrator can collect feedback on local infrastructure needed to improve services, such as communal cold lockers for receiving groceries when no-one is home.

By integrating this model into the day-to-day governance of our communities, we can unite community action with top-down resources, empowering local people to co-own the evolution of their neighbourhoods and helping administrators prioritise projects that maximise quality of life.

As Solnit wrote: “A disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation.” Pushed to their limits, countries are pioneering ways of coordinating local and national action. From this wave of innovation, we can empower communities to become more resilient in crises, more inclusive in their governance and more engaged in the determination of their future….(More)”.

Congress in Crisis: How Legislatures are Continuing to Meet during the Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The GovLab: “In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, legislatures at the national, state and local level are adapting to keep the lawmaking process going while minimizing the need for face-to-face meetings. While some have simply lowered quorum thresholds or reduced the number of sessions while continuing to meet in person, others are trialing more ambitious remote participation systems where lawmakers convene, deliberate, and vote virtually. Still others have used shift as an opportunity to create mechanisms for greater civic engagement.

For a short overview of how legislatures in Brazil, Chile, France, and other countries are using technology to convene, deliberate and vote remotely, see the GovLab’s short video, Continuity of Congress.”

To recover faster from Covid-19, open up: Managerial implications from an open innovation perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Henry Chesbrough: “Covid-19 has severely tested our public health systems. Recovering from Covid-19 will soon test our economic systems. Innovation will have an important role to play in recovering from the aftermath of the coronavirus. This article discusses both how to manage innovation as part of that recovery, and also derives some lessons from how we have responded to the virus so far, and what those lessons imply for managing innovation during the recovery.

Covid-19’s assault has prompted a number of encouraging developments. One development has been the rapid mobilization of scientists, pharmaceutical companies and government officials to launch a variety of scientific initiatives to find an effective response to the virus. As of the time of this writing, there are tests underway of more than 50 different compounds as possible vaccines against the virus.1 Most of these will ultimately fail, but the severity of the crisis demands that we investigate every plausible candidate. We need rapid, parallel experimentation, and it must be the test data that select our vaccine, not internal political or bureaucratic processes.

A second development has been the release of copious amounts of information about the virus, its spread, and human responses to various public health measures. The Gates Foundation, working with the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have joined forces to publish all of the known medical literature on the coronavirus, in machine-readable form. This was done with the intent to accelerate the analysis of the existing research to identify possible new avenues of attack against Covid-19. The coronavirus itself was synthesized early on in the outbreak by scientists in China, providing the genetic sequence of the virus, and showing where it differed from earlier viruses such as SARS and MERS. This data was immediately shared widely with scientists and researchers around the world. At the same time, GITHUB and the Humanitarian Data Exchange each have an accumulating series of datasets on the geography of the spread of the disease (including positive test cases, hospitalizations, and deaths).

What these developments have in common is openness. In fighting a pandemic, speed is crucial, and the sooner we know more and are able to take action, the better for all of us. Opening up mobilizes knowledge from many different places, causing our learning to advance and our progress against the disease to accelerate. Openness unleashes a volunteer army of researchers, working in their own facilities, across different time zones, and different countries. Openness leverages the human capital available in the world to tackle the disease, and also accesses the physical capital (such as plant and equipment) already in place to launch rapid testing of possible solutions. This openness corresponds well to an academic body of work called open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough, 2019).

Innovation is often analyzed in terms of costs, and the question of whether to “make or buy” often rests on which approach costs less. But in a pandemic, time is so valuable and essential, that the question of costs is far less important than the ability to get to a solution sooner. The Covid-19 disease appears to be doubling every 3–5 days, so a delay of just a few weeks in the search for a new vaccine (they normally take 1–2 years to develop, or more) might witness multiple doublings of size of the population infected with the disease. It is for this reason that Bill Gates is providing funds to construct facilities in advance for producing the leading vaccine candidates. Though the facilities for the losing candidates will not be used, it will save precious time to make the winning vaccine in high volume, once it is found.

Open innovation can help speed things up….(More)”.

Who Do You Trust? The Consequences of Partisanship and Trust in Government for Public Responsiveness to COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel Goldstein and Johannes Wiedemann: “To combat the novel coronavirus, there must be relatively uniform implementation of preventative measures, e.g., social distancing and stay-at-home orders, in order to minimize continued spread. We analyze cellphone mobility data to measure county-level compliance with these critical public health policies. Leveraging staggered roll-out, we estimate the causal effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy, which we find to have significantly curtailed movement.

However, examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the critical role that several sociopolitical attributes hold for producing asymmetrical compliance across society. We examine measures of partisanship, partisan identity being shared with government leaders, and trust in government (measured by the proxies of voter turnout and social capital). We find that Republican counties comply less, but comply relatively more when directives are given by co-partisan leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting in the authority of co-partisans. Furthermore, our proxy measures suggest that trust in government increases overall compliance. However, when trust (as measured by social capital) is interacted with county-level partisanship, which we interpret as community-level trust, we find that trust amplifies compliance or noncompliance, depending upon the prevailing community sentiment.

We argue that these results align with a theory of public policy compliance in which individual behavior is informed by one’s level of trust in the experts who craft policy and one’s trust in those who implement it, i.e., politicians and bureaucrats. Moreover, this evaluation is amplified by local community sentiments. Our results are supportive of this theory and provide a measure of the real-world importance of trust in government to citizen welfare. Moreover, our results illustrate the role that political polarization plays in creating asymmetrical compliance with mitigation policies, an outcome that may prove severely detrimental to successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic….(More)”.

National AI Strategies from a human rights perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Global Partners Digital: “…looks at existing strategies adopted by governments and regional organisations since 2017. It assesses the extent to which human rights considerations have been incorporated and makes a series of recommendations to policymakers looking to develop or revise AI strategies in the future….

Our report found that while the majority of National AI Strategies mention human rights, very few contain a deep human rights-based analysis or concrete assessment of how various AI applications impact human rights. In all but a few cases, they also lacked depth or specificity on how human rights should be protected in the context of AI, which was in contrast to the level of specificity on other issues such as economic competitiveness or innovation advantage. 

The report provides recommendations to help governments develop human rights-based national AI strategies. These recommendations fall under six broad themes:

  • Include human rights explicitly and throughout the strategy: Thinking about the impact of AI on human rights-and how to mitigate the risks associated with those impacts- should be core to a national strategy. Each section should consider the risks and opportunities AI provides as related to human rights, with a specific focus on at-risk, vulnerable and marginalized communities.
  • Outline specific steps to be taken to ensure human rights are protected: As strategies engage with human rights, they should include specific goals, commitments or actions to ensure that human rights are protected.
  • Build in incentives or specific requirements to ensure rights-respecting practice: Governments should take steps within their strategies to incentivize human rights-respecting practices and actions across all sectors, as well as to ensure that their goals with regards to the protection of human rights are fulfilled.
  • Set out grievance and remediation processes for human rights violations: A National AI Strategy should look at the existing grievance and remedial processes available for victims of human rights violations relating to AI. The strategy should assess whether the process needs revision in light of the particular nature of AI as a technology or in the capacity-building of those involved so that they are able to receive complaints concerning AI.
  • Recognize the regional and international dimensions to AI policy: National strategies should clearly identify relevant regional and global fora and processes relating to AI, and the means by which the government will promote human rights-respecting approaches and outcomes at them through proactive engagement.
  • Include human rights experts and other stakeholders in the drafting of National AI Strategies: When drafting a national strategy, the government should ensure that experts on human rights and the impact of AI on human rights are a core part of the drafting process….(More)”.