Zack Quaintance at Government Technology: “A new study has found that a small human-centered design tweak made by government can increase the number of eligible people who enroll for food benefits.
The study — conducted by the data science firm Civis Analytics and the nonprofit food benefits enrollment advocacy group mRelief — was conducted in Los Angeles County from January to April of this year. It was designed to test a pair of potential improvements. The first was the ability to schedule a call directly with the CalFresh office, which handles food benefits enrollment in California. The second was the ability to schedule a call along with a text reminder to schedule a call. The study was conducted via a randomized control trial that ultimately included about 2,300 people.
What the research found was an 18 percent increase in enrollment within the group that was given the chance to schedule a call. Subsequently, text reminders showed no increase of any significance….(More)”.
Moses John Bockarie at The Conversation: “Global collaboration and sharing data on public health emergencies is important to fight the spread of infectious diseases. If scientists and health workers can openly share their data across regions and organisations, countries can be better prepared and respond faster to disease outbreaks.
This was the case in with the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Close to 100 scientists, clinicians, health workers and data analysts from around the world worked together to help contain the spread of the disease.
But there’s a lack of trust when it comes to sharing data in north-south collaborations. African researchers are suspicious that their northern partners could publish data without acknowledging the input from the less resourced southern institutions where the data was first generated. Until recently, the authorship of key scientific publications, based on collaborative work in Africa, was dominated by scientists from outside Africa.
The Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness, an international network of major research funding organisations, recently published a roadmap to data sharing. This may go some way to address the data sharing challenges. Members of the network are expected to encourage their grantees to be inclusive and publish their results in open access journals. The network includes major funders of research in Africa like the European Commission, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust.
The roadmap provides a guide on how funders can accelerate research data sharing by the scientists they fund. It recommends that research funding institutions make real-time, external data sharing a requirement. And that research needs to be part of a multi-disciplinary disease network to advance public health emergencies responses.
In addition, funding should focus on strengthening institutions’ capacity on a number of fronts. This includes data management, improving data policies, building trust and aligning tools for data sharing.
Allowing researchers to freely access data generated by global academic counterparts is critical for rapidly informing disease control strategies in public health emergencies….(More)”.
VeronikaRozhenkova et al in Cities: “As part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, all countries have agreed to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. We argue that there is a critical need for large-scale comparative city policy data that, when linked with outcome data, could be used to identify where policies are working and where they could be improved. In an assessment of the landscape of existing city policy data, based on a comprehensive scoping review, we find that existing databases are insufficient for the purposes of comparative analysis. We then describe what an “ideal” city policy database would look like, where it could be housed, and how it could be developed. Such a database could be a key tool for achieving SDG 11, the urban Sustainable Development Goal….(More)”.
Chapter by Catherine E. Weaver in Good Governance and Modern International Financial Institutions: “Development scholars and practitioners today see progressive access to information and transparency policies as necessary preconditions for improved effectiveness of international development aid and the legitimacy of modern international financial institutions. This chapter examines the evolution of access to information and broader open data policies in international development institutions. Drawing from the case of the World Bank as a “first mover,” this chapter examines the complex internal processes and factors that shape the adoption and implementation of access to information policy reforms. While challenges to achieving robust information disclosure and open data policies across all multilateral and bilateral aid agencies persist, transparency is now a benchmark for good governance in global development finance and the proverbial genie that cannot be put back in the bottle….(More)”.
Book by Rafael Rubio and Ricardo Vela: “…over the past few years Parliaments across the world have started to explore new forms of developing their traditional functions, assuming what some consider new functions, to try and respond to these demands. In this regard information and communication technologies have show their capacity to support and modernize institutional activity. In the past few years there are very few countries who have not experienced technological advances in the parliamentary realm. It is possible to discover new ideas, new tools, new practices and an increasing number of parliaments use technology to carry out their representative tasks with greater efficiency, drawing them closer to citizens. It still remains to be seen as to whether they have created a real change in parliamentary practice….
Born to be mirrors of public opinion, Parliaments are places in which national sovereignty resides and as such, communication is a key aspect of its DNA. It is thus not surprising that new technologies have special weight in the configuration of Open Parliament. However, the model for Open Parliament is not only about increasing the technology used by and in the Parliament, nor just about its implementation. When they are implanted in a passive way, new technologies often end up being used to replace representation, which constitutes one of the most frequent errors in the initial process of adapting to technologies: putting reality at the service of the tool and not the other way round. Not everything that is possible to carry out is interesting or appropriate, even if it is new and innovative. It makes no sense to start developing functions that adapt to what technology is capable of doing, and losing sight of the needs that technology serves….(More)”.
Paper by Benedicte Bull and Desmond McNeill: “Business has been involved in cooperation with multilateral organizations through public-private partnerships (PPPs) since the late 1990s. With their adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), multilateral institutions increasingly consider partnerships as a means to achieve their goals given their own limited implementation capacity. However, the global economic order has changed significantly since the first expansion of PPPs, particularly due to growing participation by non-western states and companies. This article asks how this shift has changed the eagerness to form partnerships, as well as their qualitative content. It analyzes the 3964 partnerships in the SDG partnership registry, focusing on the subset of them that includes business partners. We divide these into five groups: local implementation, resource mobilization, advocacy, policy, and operational partnerships.
We study PPPs involving companies from different varieties of capitalism—private, market based forms, and state-led forms of capitalism. We find that PPPs are still dominated by companies and other actors from Western countries. Moreover, business participate more in U.S.- and Canadianled partnerships than others. We also find strong differences regarding what category of PPPs that companies from different backgrounds engage in, and discuss the linkages between varieties of capitalism and PPP participation…(More)”.
Nick Paumgarten at the New Yorker: “…Parcak is a pioneer in the use of remote sensing, via satellite, to find and map potential locations that would otherwise be invisible to us. Variations in the chemical composition of the earth reveal the ghost shadows of ancient walls and citadels, watercourses and planting fields. The nifty kid-friendly name for all this is “archeology from space,” which also happens to be the title of Parcak’s new book. That’s a bit of a misnomer, because, technically, the satellites in question are in the mid-troposphere, and also the archeology still happens on, or under, the ground. In spite of the whiz-bang abracadabra of the multispectral imagery, Parcak is, at heart, a shovel bum…..Another estimate of Parcak’s, based on satellite data: there are roughly fifty million unmapped archeological sites around the world. Many, if not most, will be gone or corrupted by 2040, she says, the threats being not just looting but urban development, illegal construction, and climate change. In 2016, Parcak won the ted Prize, a grant of a million dollars; she used it to launch a project called GlobalXplorer, a crowdsourcing platform, by which citizen Indiana Joneses can scrutinize satellite maps and identify potential new sites, adding these to a database without publicly revealing the coördinates. The idea is to deploy more eyeballs (and, ultimately, more benevolent shovel bums) in the race against carbon and greed….(More)”.
Chapter by Francisco Luis Benítez Martínez, María Visitación Hurtado Torres and Esteban Romero Frías: “Currently Distributed Ledger Technologies-DLTs, and especially the Blockchain technology, are an excellent opportunity for public institutions to transform the channels of citizen participation and reinvigorate democratic processes. These technologies permit the simplification of processes and make it possible to safely and securely manage the data stored in its records. This guarantees the transmission and public transparency of information, and thus leads to the development of a new citizen governance model by using technology such as a BaaS (Blockchain as a Service) platform. G-Cloud solutions would facilitate a faster deployment in the cities and provide scalability to foster the creation of Smart Citizens within the philosophy of Open Government. The development of an eParticipation model that can configure a tokenizable system of the actions and processes that citizens currently exercise in democratic environments is an opportunity to guarantee greater participation and thus manage more effective local democratic spaces. Therefore, a Blockchain solution in eDemocracy platforms is an exciting new opportunity to claim a new pattern of management amongst the agents that participate in the public sphere….(More)”.
Blog by Jim Nelson: “The idea is that web sites will verify you much as a bartender checks your ID before pouring a drink. The bar doesn’t store a copy of your card and the bartender doesn’t look at your name or address; only your age is pertinent to receive service. The next time you enter the bar the bartender once again asks for proof of age, which you may or may not relinquish. That’s the promise of self-sovereign identity.
At the Decentralized Web Summit, questions and solutions were bounced around in the hopes of solving this fundamental problem. Developers spearheading the next web hashed out the criteria for decentralized identity, including:
secure: to prevent fraud, maintain privacy, and ensure trust between all parties
self-sovereign: individual ownership of private information
consent: fine-tuned control over what information third-parties are privy to
directed identity: manage multiple identities for different contexts (for example, your doctor can access certain aspects while your insurance company accesses others)
and, of course, decentralized: no central authority or governing body holds private keys or generates identifiers
One problem with decentralized identity is that these problems often compete, pulling in polar directions.
Courtesy of Jolocom
For example, while security seems like a no-brainer, with self-sovereign identity the end-user is in control (and not Facebook, Google, or Twitter). It’s incumbent on them to secure their information. This raises questions of key management, data storage practices, and so on. Facebook, Google, and Twitter pay full-time engineers to do this job; handing that responsibility to end-users shifts the burden to someone who may not be so technically savvy. The inconvenience of key management and such also creates more hurdles for widespread adoption of the decentralized web.
The good news is, there are many working proposals today attempting to solve the above problems. One of the more promising is DID (Decentralized Identifier).
A DID is simply a URI, a familiar piece of text to most people nowadays. Each DID references a record stored in a blockchain. DIDs are not tied to any particular blockchain, and so they’re interoperable with existing and future technologies. DIDs are cryptographically secure as well.
DIDs require no central authority to produce or validate. If you want a DID, you can generate one yourself, or as many was you want. In fact, you should generate lots of them. Each unique DID gives the user fine-grained control over what personal information is revealed when interacting with a myriad of services and people.
Christopher Beam at MIT Technology Review: “In 2013, police in Grants Pass, Oregon, got a tip that a man named Curtis W. Croft had been illegally growing marijuana in his backyard. So they checked Google Earth. Indeed, the four-month-old satellite image showed neat rows of plants growing on Croft’s property. The cops raided his place and seized 94 plants.
In 2018, Brazilian police in the state of Amapá used real-time satellite imagery to detect a spot where trees had been ripped out of the ground. When they showed up, they discovered that the site was being used to illegally produce charcoal, and arrested eight people in connection with the scheme.
Chinese government officials have denied or downplayed the existence of Uighur reeducation camps in Xinjiang province, portraying them as “vocational schools.” But human rights activists have used satellite imagery to show that many of the “schools” are surrounded by watchtowers and razor wire.
Every year, commercially available satellite images are becoming sharper and taken more frequently. In 2008, there were 150 Earth observation satellites in orbit; by now there are 768. Satellite companies don’t offer 24-hour real-time surveillance, but if the hype is to be believed, they’re getting close. Privacy advocates warn that innovation in satellite imagery is outpacing the US government’s (to say nothing of the rest of the world’s) ability to regulate the technology. Unless we impose stricter limits now, they say, one day everyone from ad companies to suspicious spouses to terrorist organizations will have access to tools previously reserved for government spy agencies. Which would mean that at any given moment, anyone could be watching anyone else.
The images keep getting clearer
Commercial satellite imagery is currently in a sweet spot: powerful enough to see a car, but not enough to tell the make and model; collected frequently enough for a farmer to keep tabs on crops’ health, but not so often that people could track the comings and goings of a neighbor. This anonymity is deliberate. US federal regulations limit images taken by commercial satellites to a resolution of 25 centimeters, or about the length of a man’s shoe….(More)”.
