New Report by the OECD: “Trust plays a very tangible role in the effectiveness of government. Few perceptions are more palpable than that of trust or its absence. Governments ignore this at their peril. Yet, public trust has been eroding just when policy makers need it most, given persistent unemployment, rising inequality and a variety of global pressures. This report examines the influence of trust on policy making and explores some of the steps governments can take to strengthen public trust…(More)”
The Routledge Handbook of Global Public Policy and Administration
The handbook is organized into three thematic sections – Contemporary Challenges, Policy and Administration Responses and Forging a Resilient Public Administration – to allow readers to quickly access knowledge and improve their understanding of topics. The opening chapter, introductions to sections and extensive glossary aid readers to most effectively learn from the book. Each chapter provides a balanced overview of current knowledge, identifying issues and discussing relevant debates. The book is written by authors from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia….(More)’
Accelerating the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through AI
“Special edition of ITU news magazine (PDF)… about:
- How Artificial Intelligence (AI) can boost sustainable development
- How to prepare for the opportunities and risks of an AI-driven society
- The AI for Good Global Summit that ITU is hosting in June with XP…(More)”
Fighting famine with mobile data
Steve Schwartz at Tableau: “For most people, asking about the price of a bag of rice is inconsequential. For Moustapha Toure, it is a question of life and death for thousands.
A Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Officer with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Maiduguri, Nigeria, Moustapha and his team are currently collecting price data and assessing food security in a corner of the country wracked by the effects of the Boko Haram insurgency.
When the conflict broke out in 2009, the threat of violence made it difficult for humanitarian workers like Moustapha to access the communities they serve.
“The security situation made it impossible for the team to go to local markets, talk to vendors, or even chat with people in their homes—all the things they usually do to gather data on local food prices,” said the WFP Nigeria Country Director, Ronald Sibanda.
To overcome this challenge, WFP, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), turned to an innovative new approach for collecting data via mobile phones, known as mobile Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (mVAM). Using mVAM, WFP and its partners can remotely collect food security and price data. Not only does this approach provide a way to hear from people in inaccessible areas, but it also makes near real-time reporting to local decision-makers possible. That means WFP staff like Moustapha are able to make reliable, data-informed decisions that may impact the lives of more than one million people across the affected Nigerian states.
A Vital Lifeline for a Looming Famine
The mVAM team could be in demand now more than ever. Along with Yemen, Somalia, and South Sudan, Nigeria is one of the four countries at risk of famine. Stephen O’Brien, the United Nation’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, recently described this global food security emergency as the most serious humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.
For seven years, the Boko Haram conflict has affected communities in north-eastern Nigeria, leaving some 5.1 million people food insecure in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states and forcing an estimated 1.9 million people to leave behind their homes, land, and livelihoods.
Without this remotely-collected information, little would be known about these areas and how the conflict is affecting food security. However, this data—collected on a regular basis—actually presents a unique opportunity. In the new system, WFP’s VAM team can take a leap forward from traditional PDF reports which take at least a few weeks, to produce a near real-time look at the situation on the ground…(More)”.
Big Data and the Well-Being of Women and Girls: Applications on the Social Scientific Frontier
Report by Bapu Vaitla et al for Data2X: “Conventional forms of data—household surveys, national economic accounts, institutional records, and so on—struggle to capture detailed information on the lives of women and girls. The many forms of big data, from geospatial information to digital transaction logs to records of internet activity, can help close the global gender data gap. This report profiles several big data projects that quantify the economic, social, and health status of women and girls…
This report illustrates the potential of big data in filling the global gender data gap. The rise of big data, however, does not mean that traditional sources of data will become less important. On the contrary, the successful implementation of big data approaches requires investment in proven methods of social scientific research, especially for validation and bias correction of big datasets. More broadly, the invisibility of women and girls in national and international data systems is a political, not solely a technical, problem. In the best case, the current “data revolution” will be reimagined as a step towards better “data governance”: a process through which novel types of information catalyze the creation of new partnerships to advocate for scientific, policy, and political reforms that include women and girls in all spheres of social and economic life….(More)”.
Civic Tech & GovTech: An Overlooked Lucrative Opportunity for Technology Startups
Elena Mesropyan at LTP: “Civic technology, or Civic Tech, is defined as a technology that enables greater participation in government or otherwise assists government in delivering citizen services and strengthening ties with the public. In other words, Civic Tech is where the public lends its talents, usually voluntarily, to help government do a better job. Moreover, Omidyar Network(which invested over $90 million across 35 civic tech organizations over the past decade) emphasizes that like a movement, civic tech is mission-driven, focused on making a change that benefits the public, and in most cases enables better public input into decision making.
As an emerging sector, Civic Tech is defined as incorporating any technology that is used to empower citizens or help make government more accessible, efficient, and effective. Civic tech isn’t just talk, Omidyar notes, it is a community of people coming together to create tangible projects and take action. The civic tech and open data movements have grown with the ubiquity of personal technology.
Civic tech can be defined as a convergence of various fields. An example of such convergence has been given by Knight Foundation, a national foundation with a goal to foster informed and engaged communities to power a healthy democracy:
Source: The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field
In the report called Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements, Civic Tech is divided into three categories:
- Citizen to Citizen (C2C): Technology that improves citizen mobilization or improves connections between citizens
- Citizen to Government (C2G): Technology that improves the frequency or quality of interaction between citizens and government
- Government Technology (Govtech): Innovative technology solutions that make government more efficient and effective at service delivery
In 2015, Forbes reported that Civic Tech makes up almost a quarter of local and state government spendings on technology….
Civic tech initiatives address a diverse range of industries – from energy and payments to agriculture and telecommunications. Mattermark outlines the following top ten industries associated with government and civic tech:
- Finance (OpenGov, Valor Water Analytics, GovSense, Munetrix, PayIt, Meter Feeder, Municode, NIC, etc.)
- Security
- Enterprise Software, Infrastructure (Aclara Technologies)
- Healthcare (MAXIMUS)
- Mobile (Socrata, appcitylife, Passport, etc.)
- Education, Access to Information (ClearGov)
- Marketing
- Data Storage, Management, Analytics (AmigoCloud, Cityworks, FiscalNote, StreetLight Data, Vizalytics Technology,Appallicious, etc.)
- Information Security (EagleEye Intelligence)
…There are certainly much more examples of GovTech/civic tech companies, and just tech startups offering solutions across the board that can significantly improve the way governments are run, and services are delivered to citizens and businesses. More importantly, GovTech should no longer be considered a charity and solely non-profit type of venture. Recently reviewed global P2G payments flows only, for example, are estimated to be at $7.7 trillion and represent a significant feature of the global payments landscape. For the low- and lower-middle-income countries alone, the number hits $375 billion (~50% of annual government expenditure)….(More)”
From disaster planning to conservation: mobile phones as a new tracking tool
, and We can learn a lot about things by studying how they move through the world and interact with the environment.
In the past, for example, it was possible to study the mobility of people within the United States by monitoring things such as the movement of banknotes. Today we can use something that is much more global and widely available than US cash.
Mobile phones have almost totally infiltrated human society, with the number estimated at more than 7 billion in 2014. Ownership of mobile phones continues to grow, even in some of the poorest countries.
Many of those phones are geolocated, continuously providing the geographic location of the user, so effectively acting as tracking devices for human populations.
As biologists, our understanding of animals has been transformed over the past four decades by our ability to track their movements and behaviour.
We were interested to see what we can learn from the use of mobile phones tracking, as we show in a study published this month in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
It’s now possible to use the mobile phone data to gain a better insight into human movement under certain conditions.
For example, mobile phone data was used to study the movement of people during the 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak in Haiti, and Hurricane Sandy in the United States in 2012.
It was interesting to note that the human reaction to escape from certain events we found was close to that of some animal groups, such as birds and fish, when fleeing from attack.
Such studies can help predict how people will respond in the future to any emergencies, and help to improve the delivery of any aid or disaster relief.
Conservation with mobile phones
The detail, immediacy and sheer volume of data from mobile phones also offers innovative ways to monitor and possibly solve some of the most pressing conservation problems that animal populations now face.
For example, geolocated phones are changing the way we tackle the crisis of illegal wildlife trade.
Not only is it a major driver of species extinctions, but the human cost is high with more than 1,000 wildlife rangers killed in the line of duty over a ten-year period.
In India, rangers on the front line use a smartphone app to monitor movements and record sightings of targeted species, such as tigers, and to report suspicious activity.
In Africa, mobile phones help rangers collate social and environmental information about reserves and encounter rates with animals killed by poachers….(More)”
The Crowd & the Cloud
The Crowd & the Cloud (TV series): “Are you interested in birds, fish, the oceans or streams in your community? Are you concerned about fracking, air quality, extreme weather, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, Zika or other epidemics? Now you can do more than read about these issues. You can be part of the solution.
Smartphones, computers and mobile technology are enabling regular citizens to become part of a 21st century way of doing science. By observing their environments, monitoring neighborhoods, collecting information about the world and the things they care about, so-called “citizen scientists” are helping professional scientists to advance knowledge while speeding up new discoveries and innovations.
The results are improving health and welfare, assisting in wildlife conservation, and giving communities the power to create needed change and help themselves.
Citizen science has amazing promise, but also raises questions about data quality and privacy. Its potential and challenges are explored in THE CROWD & THE CLOUD, a 4-part public television series premiering in April 2017. Hosted by former NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati, each episode takes viewers on a global tour of the projects and people on the front lines of this disruptive transformation in how science is done, and shows how anyone, anywhere can participate….(More)”
Migration tracking is a mess
Huub Dijstelbloem in Nature: “As debates over migration, refugees and freedom of movement intensify, technologies are increasingly monitoring the movements of people. Biometric passports and databases containing iris scans or fingerprints are being used to check a person’s right to travel through or stay within a territory. India, for example, is establishing biometric identification for its 1.3 billion citizens.
But technologies are spreading beyond borders. Security policies and humanitarian considerations have broadened the landscape. Drones and satellite images inform policies and direct aid to refugees. For instance, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), maps refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere with its Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT; see www.unitar.org/unosat/map/1928).
Three areas are in need of research, in my view: the difficulties of joining up disparate monitoring systems; privacy issues and concerns over the inviolability of the human body; and ‘counter-surveillance’ deployed by non-state actors to highlight emergencies or contest claims that governments make.
Ideally, state monitoring of human mobility would be bound by ethical principles, solid legislation, periodical evaluations and the checks and balances of experts and political and public debates. In reality, it is ad hoc. Responses are arbitrary, fuelled by the crisis management of governments that have failed to anticipate global and regional migration patterns. Too often, this results in what the late sociologist Ulrich Beck called organized irresponsibility: situations of inadequacy in which it is hard to blame a single actor.
Non-governmental organizations, activists and migrant groups are using technologies to register incidents and to blame and shame states. For example, the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used satellite imagery and other evidence to reconstruct the journey of a boat that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011 with 72 passengers. A fortnight later, it returned to the Libyan coast with just 9 survivors. Although the boat had been spotted by several aircraft and vessels, no rescue operation had been mounted (go.nature.com/2mbwvxi). Whether the states involved can be held accountable is still being considered.
In the end, technologies to monitor mobility are political tools. Their aims, design, use, costs and consequences should be developed and evaluated accordingly….(More)”.
UK’s Digital Strategy
Executive Summary: “This government’s Plan for Britain is a plan to build a stronger, fairer country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. …Our digital strategy now develops this further, applying the principles outlined in the Industrial Strategy green paper to the digital economy. The UK has a proud history of digital innovation: from the earliest days of computing to the development of the World Wide Web, the UK has been a cradle for inventions which have changed the world. And from Ada Lovelace – widely recognised as the first computer programmer – to the pioneers of today’s revolution in artificial intelligence, the UK has always been at the forefront of invention. …
Maintaining the UK government as a world leader in serving its citizens online
From personalised services in health, to safer care for the elderly at home, to tailored learning in education and access to culture – digital tools, techniques and technologies give us more opportunities than ever before to improve the vital public services on which we all rely.
The UK is already a world leader in digital government,7 but we want to go further and faster. The new Government Transformation Strategy published on 9 February 2017 sets out our intention to serve the citizens and businesses of the UK with a better, more coherent experience when using government services online – one that meets the raised expectations set by the many other digital services and tools they use every day. So, we will continue to develop single cross-government platform services, including by working towards 25 million GOV.UK Verify users by 2020 and adopting new services onto the government’s GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify platforms.
We will build on the ‘Government as a Platform’ concept, ensuring we make greater reuse of platforms and components across government. We will also continue to move towards common technology, ensuring that where it is right we are consuming commodity hardware or cloud-based software instead of building something that is needlessly government specific.
We will also continue to work, across government and the public sector, to harness the potential of digital to radically improve the efficiency of our public services – enabling us to provide a better service to citizens and service users at a lower cost. In education, for example, we will address the barriers faced by schools in regions not connected to appropriate digital infrastructure and we will invest in the Network of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science to help teachers and school leaders build their knowledge and understanding of technology. In transport, we will make our infrastructure smarter, more accessible and more convenient for passengers. At Autumn Statement 2016 we announced that the National Productivity Investment Fund would allocate £450 million from 2018-19 to 2020-21 to trial digital signalling technology on the rail network. And in policing, we will enable police officers to use biometric applications to match fingerprint and DNA from scenes of crime and return results including records and alerts to officers over mobile devices at the crime scene.
Read more about digital government.
Unlocking the power of data in the UK economy and improving public confidence in its use
As part of creating the conditions for sustainable growth, we will take the actions needed to make the UK a world-leading data-driven economy, where data fuels economic and social opportunities for everyone, and where people can trust that their data is being used appropriately.
Data is a global commodity and we need to ensure that our businesses can continue to compete and communicate effectively around the world. To maintain our position at the forefront of the data revolution, we will implement the General Data Protection Regulation by May 2018. This will ensure a shared and higher standard of protection for consumers and their data.