The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Deborah Avant and Oliver Westerwinter: “Traditional analyses of global security cannot explain the degree to which there is “governance” of important security issues — from combatting piracy to curtailing nuclear proliferation to reducing the contributions of extractive industries to violence and conflict. They are even less able to explain why contemporary governance schemes involve the various actors and take the many forms they do.

Juxtaposing the insights of scholars writing about new modes of governance with the logic of network theory, The New Power Politics offers a framework for understanding contemporary security governance and its variation. The framework rests on a fresh view of power and how it works in global politics. Though power is integral to governance, it is something that emerges from, and depends on, relationships. Thus, power is dynamic; it is something that governors must continually cultivate with a wide range of consequential global players, and how a governor uses power in one situation can have consequences for her future relationships, and thus, future power.

Understanding this new power politics is crucial for explaining and shaping the future of global security politics. This stellar group of scholars analyzes both the networking strategies of would-be governors and their impacts on the effectiveness of governance and whether it reflects broad or narrow concerns on a wide range of contemporary governance issues….(More)”

‘Big data’ was supposed to fix education. It didn’t. It’s time for ‘small data’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pasi Sahlberg and Jonathan Hasak in the Washington Post: “One thing that distinguishes schools in the United States from schools around the world is how data walls, which typically reflect standardized test results, decorate hallways and teacher lounges. Green, yellow, and red colors indicate levels of performance of students and classrooms. For serious reformers, this is the type of transparency that reveals more data about schools and is seen as part of the solution to how to conduct effective school improvement. These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms; they are based on analytics and statistics, not on emotions and relationships that drive learning in schools. They also report outputs and outcomes, not the impacts of learning on the lives and minds of learners….

If you are a leader of any modern education system, you probably care a lot about collecting, analyzing, storing, and communicating massive amounts of information about your schools, teachers, and students based on these data sets. This information is “big data,” a term that first appeared around 2000, which refers to data sets that are so large and complex that processing them by conventional data processing applications isn’t possible. Two decades ago, the type of data education management systems processed were input factors of education system, such as student enrollments, teacher characteristics, or education expenditures handled by education department’s statistical officer. Today, however, big data covers a range of indicators about teaching and learning processes, and increasingly reports on student achievement trends over time.

With the outpouring of data, international organizations continue to build regional and global data banks. Whether it’s the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Commission, or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, today’s international reformers are collecting and handling more data about human development than before. Beyond government agencies, there are global education and consulting enterprises like Pearson and McKinsey that see business opportunities in big data markets.

Among the best known today is the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy of 15-year-olds around the world. OECD now also administers an Education GPS, or a global positioning system, that aims to tell policymakers where their education systems place in a global grid and how to move to desired destinations. OECD has clearly become a world leader in the big data movement in education.

Despite all this new information and benefits that come with it, there are clear handicaps in how big data has been used in education reforms. In fact, pundits and policymakers often forget that Big data, at best, only reveals correlations between variables in education, not causality. As any introduction to statistics course will tell you, correlation does not imply causation….
We believe that it is becoming evident that big data alone won’t be able to fix education systems. Decision-makers need to gain a better understanding of what good teaching is and how it leads to better learning in schools. This is where information about details, relationships and narratives in schools become important. These are what Martin Lindstrom calls “small data”: small clues that uncover huge trends. In education, these small clues are often hidden in the invisible fabric of schools. Understanding this fabric must become a priority for improving education.

To be sure, there is not one right way to gather small data in education. Perhaps the most important next step is to realize the limitations of current big data-driven policies and practices. Too strong reliance on externally collected data may be misleading in policy-making. This is an example of what small data look like in practice:

  • It reduces census-based national student assessments to the necessary minimum and transfer saved resources to enhance the quality of formative assessments in schools and teacher education on other alternative assessment methods. Evidence shows that formative and other school-based assessments are much more likely to improve quality of education than conventional standardized tests.
  • It strengthens collective autonomy of schools by giving teachers more independence from bureaucracy and investing in teamwork in schools. This would enhance social capital that is proved to be critical aspects of building trust within education and enhancing student learning.
  • It empowers students by involving them in assessing and reflecting their own learning and then incorporating that information into collective human judgment about teaching and learning (supported by national big data). Because there are different ways students can be smart in schools, no one way of measuring student achievement will reveal success. Students’ voices about their own growth may be those tiny clues that can uncover important trends of improving learning.

Edwards Deming once said that “without data you are another person with an opinion.” But Deming couldn’t have imagined the size and speed of data systems we have today….(More)”

Can Crowdsourcing Help Make Life Easier For People With Disabilities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean Captain at FastCompany: “These days GPS technology can get you as close as about 10 feet from your destination, close enough to see it—assuming you can see.

But those last few feet are a chasm for the blind (and GPS accuracy sometimes falls only within about 30 feet).

“Actually finding the bus stop, not the right street, but standing in the right place when the bus comes, is pretty hard,” says Dave Power, president and CEO of the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston. Helen Keller’s alma mater is developing a mobile app that will provide audio directions—contributed by volunteers—so that blind people can get close enough to the stop for the bus driver to notice them.

Perkins’s app is one of 29 projects that recently received a total of $20 million in funding from Google.org’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities awards. Several of the winning initiatives rely on crowdsourced information to help the disabled—be they blind, in a wheelchair, or cognitively impaired. It’s a commonsense approach to tackling big logistical projects in a world full of people who have snippets of downtime during which they might perform bite-size acts of kindness online. But moving these projects from being just clever concepts to extensive services, based on the goodwill of volunteers, is going to be quite a hurdle.

People with limited mobility may have trouble traversing the last few feet between them and a wheelchair ramp, automatic doors, or other accommodations that aren’t easy to find (or may not even exist in some places).Wheelmap, based in Berlin, is trying to help by building online maps of accessible locations. Its website incorporates crowdsourced data. The site lets users type in a city and search for accessible amenities such as restaurants, hotels, and public transit.

Paris-based J’accede (which received 500,000 euros from Google, which is the equivalent of about $565,000) provides similar capabilities in both a website and an app, with a slicker design somewhat resembling TripAdvisor.

Both services have a long way to go. J’accede lists 374 accessible bars/restaurants in its hometown and a modest selection in other French cities like Marseille. “We still have a lot of work to do to cover France,” says J’accede’s president Damien Birambeau in an email. The goal is to go global though, and the site is available in English, German, and Spanish, in addition to French. Likewise, Wheelmap (which got 825,000 euros, or $933,000) performs best in the German capital of Berlin and cities like Hamburg, but is less useful in other places.

These sites face the same challenge as many other volunteer-based, crowdsourced projects: getting a big enough crowd to contribute information to the service. J’accede hopes to make the process easier. In June, it will connect itself with Google Places, so contributors will only need to supply details about accommodations at a site; information like the location’s address and phone number will be pulled in automatically. But both J’accede and Wheelmap recognize that crowdsourcing has its limits. They are now going beyond voluntary contributions, setting up automated systems to scrape information from other databases of accessible locations, such as those maintained by governments.

Wheelmap and J’accede are dwarfed by general-interest crowdsourced sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which offer some information about accessibility, too. For instance, among the many filters they offer users searching for restaurants—such as price range and cuisine type—TripAdvisor and Yelp both offer a Wheelchair Accessible checkbox. Applying that filter to Parisian establishments brings up about 1,000 restaurants on TripAdvisor and 2,800 in Yelp.

So what can Wheelmap and J’accede provide that the big players can’t? Details. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, will face different obstacles than a partially blind person or a person with cognitive disabilities,” says Birambeau. “These different needs and profiles means that we need highly detailed information about the accessibility of public places.”…(More)”

Hail the maintainers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel at AEON: “The trajectory of ‘innovation’ from core, valued practice to slogan of dystopian societies, is not entirely surprising, at a certain level. There is a formulaic feel: a term gains popularity because it resonates with the zeitgeist, reaches buzzword status, then suffers from overexposure and cooptation. Right now, the formula has brought society to a question: after ‘innovation’ has been exposed as hucksterism, is there a better way to characterise relationships between society and technology?

There are three basic ways to answer that question. First, it is crucial to understand that technology is not innovation. Innovation is only a small piece of what happens with technology. This preoccupation with novelty is unfortunate because it fails to account for technologies in widespread use, and it obscures how many of the things around us are quite old. In his book, Shock of the Old (2007), the historian David Edgerton examines technology-in-use. He finds that common objects, like the electric fan and many parts of the automobile, have been virtually unchanged for a century or more. When we take this broader perspective, we can tell different stories with drastically different geographical, chronological, and sociological emphases. The stalest innovation stories focus on well-to-do white guys sitting in garages in a small region of California, but human beings in the Global South live with technologies too. Which ones? Where do they come from? How are they produced, used, repaired? Yes, novel objects preoccupy the privileged, and can generate huge profits. But the most remarkable tales of cunning, effort, and care that people direct toward technologies exist far beyond the same old anecdotes about invention and innovation.

Second, by dropping innovation, we can recognise the essential role of basic infrastructures. ‘Infrastructure’ is a most unglamorous term, the type of word that would have vanished from our lexicon long ago if it didn’t point to something of immense social importance. Remarkably, in 2015 ‘infrastructure’ came to the fore of conversations in many walks of American life. In the wake of a fatal Amtrak crash near Philadelphia, President Obama wrestled with Congress to pass an infrastructure bill that Republicans had been blocking, but finally approved in December 2015. ‘Infrastructure’ also became the focus of scholarly communities in history and anthropology, even appearing 78 times on the programme of the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Artists, journalists, and even comedians joined the fray, most memorably with John Oliver’s hilarious sketch starring Edward Norton and Steve Buscemi in a trailer for an imaginary blockbuster on the dullest of subjects. By early 2016, the New York Review of Books brought the ‘earnest and passive word’ to the attention of its readers, with a depressing essay titled ‘A Country Breaking Down’.

Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, most of which falls far outside the realm of innovation

The best of these conversations about infrastructure move away from narrow technical matters to engage deeper moral implications. Infrastructure failures – train crashes, bridge failures, urban flooding, and so on – are manifestations of and allegories for America’s dysfunctional political system, its frayed social safety net, and its enduring fascination with flashy, shiny, trivial things. But, especially in some corners of the academic world, a focus on the material structures of everyday life can take a bizarre turn, as exemplified in work that grants ‘agency’ to material things or wraps commodity fetishism in the language of high cultural theory, slick marketing, and design. For example, Bloomsbury’s ‘Object Lessons’ series features biographies of and philosophical reflections on human-built things, like the golf ball. What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

Third, focusing on infrastructure or on old, existing things rather than novel ones reminds us of the absolute centrality of the work that goes into keeping the entire world going…..

 

We organised a conference to bring the work of the maintainers into clearer focus. More than 40 scholars answered a call for papers asking, ‘What is at stake if we move scholarship away from innovation and toward maintenance?’ Historians, social scientists, economists, business scholars, artists, and activists responded. They all want to talk about technology outside of innovation’s shadow.

One important topic of conversation is the danger of moving too triumphantly from innovation to maintenance. There is no point in keeping the practice of hero-worship that merely changes the cast of heroes without confronting some of the deeper problems underlying the innovation obsession. One of the most significant problems is the male-dominated culture of technology, manifest in recent embarrassments such as the flagrant misogyny in the ‘#GamerGate’ row a couple of years ago, as well as the persistent pay gap between men and women doing the same work.

There is an urgent need to reckon more squarely and honestly with our machines and ourselves. Ultimately, emphasising maintenance involves moving from buzzwords to values, and from means to ends. In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good. Crack cocaine, for example, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s, which involved a great deal of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue. Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Perhaps this point is cynical, but it draws our attention to a perverse reality: contemporary discourse treats innovation as a positive value in itself, when it is not.

Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there? We must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that technology can offer. Our increasingly unequal and fearful world would be grateful….(More)”

Citizen scientists aid Ecuador earthquake relief

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Zastrow at Nature: “After a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck Ecuador’s Pacific coast on 16 April, a new ally joined the international relief effort: a citizen-science network called Zooniverse.

On 25 April, Zooniverse launched a website that asks volunteers to analyse rapidly-snapped satellite imagery of the disaster, which led to more than 650 reported deaths and 16,000 injuries. The aim is to help relief workers on the ground to find the most heavily damaged regions and identify which roads are passable.

Several crisis-mapping programmes with thousands of volunteers already exist — but it can take days to train satellites on the damaged region and to transmit data to humanitarian organizations, and results have not always proven useful. The Ecuador quake marked the first live public test for an effort dubbed the Planetary Response Network (PRN), which promises to be both more nimble than previous efforts, and to use more rigorous machine-learning algorithms to evaluate the quality of crowd-sourced analyses.

The network relies on imagery from the satellite company Planet Labs in San Francisco, California, which uses an array of shoebox-sized satellites to map the planet. In order to speed up the crowd-sourced process, it uses the Zooniverse platform to distribute the tasks of spotting features in satellite images. Machine-learning algorithms employed by a team at the University of Oxford, UK, then classify the reliability of each volunteer’s analysis and weight their contributions accordingly.

Rapid-fire data

Within 2 hours of the Ecuador test project going live with a first set of 1,300 images, each photo had been checked at least 20 times. “It was one of the fastest responses I’ve seen,” says Brooke Simmons, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, who leads the image processing. Steven Reece, who heads the Oxford team’s machine-learning effort, says that results — a “heat map” of damage with possible road blockages — were ready in another two hours.

In all, more than 2,800 Zooniverse users contributed to analysing roughly 25,000 square kilometres of imagery centred around the coastal cities of Pedernales and Bahia de Caraquez. That is where the London-based relief organization Rescue Global — which requested the analysis the day after the earthquake — currently has relief teams on the ground, including search dogs and medical units….(More)”

A Political Economy Framework for the Urban Data Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Report by Ben Edwards, Solomon Greene and G. Thomas Kingsley: “With cities growing rapidly throughout much of the developing world, the global development community increasingly recognizes the need to build the capacities of local leaders to analyze and apply data to improve urban policymaking and service delivery. Civil society leaders, development advocates, and local governments are calling for an “urban data revolution” to accompany the new UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a revolution that would provide city leaders new tools and resources for data-driven governance. The need for improved data and analytic capacity in rapidly growing cities is clear, as is the exponential increase in the volume and types of data available for policymaking. However, the institutional arrangements that will allow city leaders to use data effectively remain incompletely theorized and poorly articulated.

This paper begins to fill that gap with a political economy framework that introduces three new concepts: permission, incentive, and institutionalization. We argue that without addressing the permission constraints and competing incentives that local government officials face in using data, investments in improved data collection at the local level will fail to achieve smarter urban policies. Granting permission and aligning incentives are also necessary to institutionalize data-driven governance at the local level and create a culture of evidence-based decisionmaking that outlives individual political administrations. Lastly, we suggest how the SDGs could support a truly transformative urban data revolution in which city leaders are empowered and incentivized to use data to drive decisionmaking for sustainable development…(More)”

Crowdsourcing global governance: sustainable development goals, civil society, and the pursuit of democratic legitimacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joshua C. Gellers in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics: “To what extent can crowdsourcing help members of civil society overcome the democratic deficit in global environmental governance? In this paper, I evaluate the utility of crowdsourcing as a tool for participatory agenda-setting in the realm of post-2015 sustainable development policy. In particular, I analyze the descriptive representativeness (e.g., the degree to which participation mirrors the demographic attributes of non-state actors comprising global civil society) of participants in two United Nations orchestrated crowdsourcing processes—the MY World survey and e-discussions regarding environmental sustainability. I find that there exists a perceptible demographic imbalance among contributors to the MY World survey and considerable dissonance between the characteristics of participants in the e-discussions and those whose voices were included in the resulting summary report. The results suggest that although crowdsourcing may present an attractive technological approach to expand participation in global governance, ultimately the representativeness of that participation and the legitimacy of policy outputs depend on the manner in which contributions are solicited and filtered by international institutions….(More)”

UN-Habitat Urban Data Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Driven Journalism: “UN-Habitat has launched a new web portal featuring a wealth of city data based on its repository of research on urban trends.

Launched during the 25th Governing Council, the Urban Data Portal allows users to explore data from 741 cities in 220 countries, and compare these for 103 indicators such as slum prevalence and city prosperity.

compare.PNG
Image: A comparison of share in national urban population and average annual rate of urban population change for San Salvador, El Salvador, and Asuncion, Paraguay.

The urban indicators data available are analyzed, compiled and published by UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory, which supports governments, local authorities and civil society organizations to develop urban indicators, data and statistics.

Leveraging GIS technology, the Observatory collects data by taking aerial photographs, zooming into particular areas, and then sending in survey teams to answer any remaining questions about the area’s urban development.

The Portal also contains data collected by national statistics authorities, via household surveys and censuses, with analysis conducted by leading urbanists in UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities and the Global Report on Human Settlements report series.

For the first time, these datasets are available for use under an open licence agreement, and can be downloaded in straightforward database formats like CSV and JSON….(More)

The Wisdom of the Many in Global Governance: An Epistemic-Democratic Defence of Diversity and Inclusion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stevenson, H. : “Over the past two decades, a growing body of literature has highlighted moral reasons for taking global democracy seriously. This literature justifies democracy on the grounds of its intrinsic value. But democracy also has instrumental value: the rule of the many is epistemically superior to the rule of one or the rule of the few. This paper draws on the tradition of epistemic democracy to develop an instrumentalist justification for democratizing global governance. The tradition of epistemic democracy is enjoying a renaissance within political theory and popular non-fiction, yet its relevance for international relations remains unexplored. I develop an epistemic-democratic framework for evaluating political institutions, which is constituted by three principles. The likelihood of making correct decisions within institutions of global governance will be greater when (1) human development and capacity for participation is maximised; (2) the internal cognitive diversity of global institutions is maximised; and (3) public opportunities for sharing objective and subjective knowledge are maximised. Applying this framework to global governance produces a better understanding of the nature and extent of the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance, as well as the actions required to address this deficit….(More)”

Open Data Supply: Enriching the usability of information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Phoensight: “With the emergence of increasing computational power, high cloud storage capacity and big data comes an eager anticipation of one of the biggest IT transformations of our society today.

Open data has an instrumental role to play in our digital revolution by creating unprecedented opportunities for governments and businesses to leverage off previously unavailable information to strengthen their analytics and decision making for new client experiences. Whilst virtually every business recognises the value of data and the importance of the analytics built on it, the ability to realise the potential for maximising revenue and cost savings is not straightforward. The discovery of valuable insights often involves the acquisition of new data and an understanding of it. As we move towards an increasing supply of open data, technological and other entrepreneurs will look to better utilise government information for improved productivity.

This report uses a data-centric approach to examine the usability of information by considering ways in which open data could better facilitate data-driven innovations and further boost our economy. It assesses the state of open data today and suggests ways in which data providers could supply open data to optimise its use. A number of useful measures of information usability such as accessibility, quantity, quality and openness are presented which together contribute to the Open Data Usability Index (ODUI). For the first time, a comprehensive assessment of open data usability has been developed and is expected to be a critical step in taking the open data agenda to the next level.

With over two million government datasets assessed against the open data usability framework and models developed to link entire country’s datasets to key industry sectors, never before has such an extensive analysis been undertaken. Government open data across Australia, Canada, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States reveal that most countries have the capacity for improvements in their information usability. It was found that for 2015 the United Kingdom led the way followed by Canada, Singapore, the United States and Australia. The global potential of government open data is expected to reach 20 exabytes by 2020, provided governments are able to release as much data as possible within legislative constraints….(More)”