Global

Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Curated on February 17, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Stencel at Duke Reporters’ Lab: “The high volume of political truth-twisting is driving demand for political fact-checkers around the world, with the number of fact-checking sites up 50 percent since last year.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual census of international fact-checking currently counts 96 active projects in 37 countries. That’s up from 64 active fact-checkers in the 2015 count. (Map and List)

Active Fact-checkers 2016 A bumper crop of new fact-checkers across the Western Hemisphere helped increase the ranks of journalists and government watchdogs who verify the accuracy of public statements and track political promises. The new sites include 14 in the United States, two in Canada as well as seven additional fact-checkers in Latin America.There also were new projects in 10 other countries, from North Africa to Central Europe to East Asia…..

The growing numbers have even spawned a new global association, the International Fact-Checking Network hosted by the Poynter Institute, a media training center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Promises, Promises

Some of the growth has come in the form of promise-tracking. Since January 2015, fact-checkers launched six sites in five countries devoted to tracking the status of pledges candidates and party leaders made in political campaigns. In Tunisia, there are two new sites dedicated to promise-tracking — one devoted to the country’s president and the other to its prime minister.

There are another 20 active fact-checkers elsewhere that track promises,…

Nearly two-thirds of the active fact-checkers (61 of 96, or 64 percent) are directly affiliated with a new organization. However this breakdown reflects the dominant business structure in the United States, where 90 percent of fact-checkers are part of a news organization. That includes nine of 11 national projects and 28 of 30 state/local fact-checkers…The story is different outside the United States, where less than half of the active fact-checking projects (24 of 55, or 44 percent) are affiliated with news organizations.

The other fact-checkers are typically associated with non-governmental, non-profit and activist groups focused on civic engagement, government transparency and accountability. A handful are partisan, especially in conflict zones and in countries where the lines between independent media, activists and opposition parties are often blurry and where those groups are aligned against state-controlled media or other governmental and partisan entities….(More)“

Big data’s big role in humanitarian aid

Curated on February 11, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary K. Pratt at Computerworld: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into Europe in 2015 from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some estimates put the number at nearly a million.

The sheer volume of people overwhelmed European officials, who not only had to handle the volatile politics stemming from the crisis, but also had to find food, shelter and other necessities for the migrants.

Sweden, like many of its European Union counterparts, was taking in refugees. The Swedish Migration Board, which usually sees 2,500 asylum seekers in an average month, was accepting 10,000 per week.

“As you can imagine, with that number, it requires a lot of buses, food, registration capabilities to start processing all the cases and to accommodate all of those people,” says Andres Delgado, head of operational control, coordination and analysis at the Swedish Migration Board.

Despite the dramatic spike in refugees coming into the country, the migration agency managed the intake — hiring extra staff, starting the process of procuring housing early, getting supplies ready. Delgado credits a good part of that success to his agency’s use of big data and analytics that let him predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what was heading his way.

“Without having that capability, or looking at the tool every day, to assess every need, this would have crushed us. We wouldn’t have survived this,” Delgado says. “It would have been chaos, actually — nothing short of that.”

The Swedish Migration Board has been using big data and analytics for several years, as it seeks to gain visibility into immigration trends and what those trends will mean for the country…./…

“Can big data give us peace? I think the short answer is we’re starting to explore that. We’re at the very early stages, where there are shining examples of little things here and there. But we’re on that road,” says Kalev H. Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, or the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, which describes itself as a comprehensive “database of human society.”

The topic is gaining traction. A 2013 report, “New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict,” from the International Peace Institute, highlights uses of telecommunications technology, including data, in several crisis situations around the world. The report emphasizes the potential these technologies hold in helping to ease tensions and address problems.

The report’s conclusion offers this idea: “Big data can be used to identify patterns and signatures associated with conflict — and those associated with peace — presenting huge opportunities for better-informed efforts to prevent violence and conflict.”

That’s welcome news to Noel Dickover. He’s the director of PeaceTech Data Networks at the PeaceTech Lab, which was created by the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) to advance USIP’s work on how technology, media and data help reduce violent conflict around the world.

Such work is still in the nascent stages, Dickover says, but people are excited about its potential. “We have unprecedented amounts of data on human sentiment, and we know there’s value there,” he says. “The question is how to connect it.”

Dickover is working on ways to do just that. One example is the Open Situation Room Exchange (OSRx) project, which aims to “empower greater collective impact in preventing or mitigating serious violent conflicts in particular arenas through collaboration and data-sharing.”…(More)

Improving government effectiveness: lessons from Germany

Curated on February 11, 2016July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Gash at Global Government Forum: “All countries face their own unique challenges but advanced democracies also have much in common: the global economic downturn, aging populations, increasingly expensive health and pension spending, and citizens who remain as hard to please as ever.

At an event last week in Bavaria, attended by representatives of Bavaria’s governing party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and their guests, it also became clear that there is a growing consensus that governments face another common problem. They have relied for too long on traditional legislation and regulation to drive change. The consensus was that simply prescribing in law what citizens and companies can and can’t do will not solve the complex problems governments are facing, that governments cannot legislate their way to improved citizen health, wealth and wellbeing….

…a number of developments …from which both UK and international policymakers and practitioners can learn to improve government effectiveness.

Behavioural economics: The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which span out of government in 2013 and is the subject of a new book by one of its founders and former IfG Director of Research, David Halpern, is being watched carefully by many countries abroad. Some are using its services, while others – including the New South Wales Government in Australia –are building their own skills in this area. BIT and others using similar principles have shown that using insights from social psychology – alongside an experimental approach – can help save money and improve outcomes. Well known successes include increasing the tax take through changing wording of reminder letters (work led by another IfG alumni Mike Hallsworth) and increasing pension take-up through auto-enrolment.
Market design: There is an emerging field of study which is examining how algorithms can be used to match people better with services they need – particularly in cases where it is unfair or morally repugnant to let allow a free market to operate. Alvin Roth, the Harvard Professor and Nobel prize winner, writes about these ‘matching markets’ in his book Who Gets What and Why – in which he also explains how the approach can ensure that more kidneys reach compatible donors, and children find the right education.
Big data: Large datasets can now be mined far more effectively, whether it is to analyse crime patterns to spot where police patrols might be useful or to understand crowd flows on public transport. The use of real-time information allows far more sophisticated deployment of public sector resources, better targeted at demand and need, and better tailored to individual preferences.
Transparency: Transparency has the potential to enhance both the accountability and effectiveness of governments across the world – as shown in our latest Whitehall Monitor Annual Report. The UK government is considered a world-leader for its transparency – but there are still areas where progress has stalled, including in transparency over the costs and performance of privately provided public services.
New management models: There is a growing realisation that new methods are best harnessed when supported by effective management. The Institute’s work on civil service reform highlights a range of success factors from past reforms in the UK – and the benefits of clear mechanisms for setting priorities and sticking to them, as is being attempted by governments new(ish) Implementation Taskforces and the Departmental Implementation Units currently cropping up across Whitehall. I looked overseas for a different model that clearly aligns government activities behind citizens’ concerns – in this case the example of the single non-emergency number system operating in New York City and elsewhere. This system supports a powerful, highly responsive, data-driven performance management regime. But like many performance management regimes it can risk a narrow and excessively short-term focus – so such tools must be combined with the mind-set of system stewardship that the Institute has long championed in its policymaking work.
Investment in new capability: It is striking that all of these developments are supported by technological change and research insights developed outside government. But to embed new approaches in government, there appear to be benefits to incubating new capacity, either in specialist departmental teams or at the centre of government….(More)”

Five ways tech is crowdsourcing women’s empowerment

Curated on February 10, 2016December 13, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zara Rahman in The Guardian: “Around the world, women’s rights advocates are crowdsourcing their own data rather than relying on institutional datasets.

Citizen-generated data is especially important for women’s rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women’s rights issues means data isn’t gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state.

Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.

Crowdsourcing data on street harassment in Egypt

Using open source platform Ushahidi, HarassMap provides women with a way to document incidences of street harassment. The project, which began in 2010, is raising awareness of how common street harassment is, giving women’s rights advocates a concrete way to highlight the scale of the problem….

Documenting experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to the police in India

Last year, The Ladies Finger, a women’s zine based in India, partnered with Amnesty International to support its Ready to Report campaign, which aimed to make it easier for survivors of sexual violence to file a police complaint. Using social media and through word of mouth, it asked the community if they had experiences to share about reporting sexual assault and harassment to the police. Using these crowdsourced leads, The Ladies Finger’s reporters spoke to people willing to share their experiences and put together a series of detailed contextualised stories. They included a piece that evoked a national outcry and spurred the Uttar Pradesh government to make an arrest for stalking, after six months of inaction….

Reporting sexual violence in Syria

Women Under Siege is a global project by Women’s Media Centre that is investigating how rape and sexual violence is used in conflicts. Its Syria project crowdsources data on sexual violence in the war-torn country. Like HarassMap, it uses the Ushahidi platform to geolocate where acts of sexual violence take place. Where possible, initial reports are contextualised with deeper media reports around the case in question….

Finding respectful gynaecologists in India

After recognising that many women in her personal networks were having bad experiences with gynaecologists in India, Delhi-based Amba Azaad began – with the help of her friends – putting together a list of gynaecologists who had treated patients respectfully called Gynaecologists We Trust. As the site says, “Finding doctors who are on our side is hard enough, and when it comes to something as intimate as our internal plumbing, it’s even more difficult.”…

Ending tech-related violence against women

In 2011, Take Back the Tech, an initiative from the Association for Progressive Communications, started a map gathering incidences of tech-related violence against women. Campaign coordinator Sara Baker says crowdsourcing data on this topic is particularly useful as “victims/survivors are often forced to tell their stories repeatedly in an attempt to access justice with little to no action taken on the part of authorities or intermediaries”. Rather than telling that story multiple times and seeing it go nowhere, their initiative gives people “the opportunity to make their experience visible (even if anonymously) and makes them feel like someone is listening and taking action”….(More)

A Government of the Future

Curated on February 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Fact Sheet on The President’s Fiscal Year 2017 Budget: “…The President is committed to driving lasting change in how Government works – change that makes a significant, tangible, and positive difference in the economy and the lives of the American people. Over the past seven years, the Administration has launched successful efforts to modernize and improve citizen-facing services, eliminate wasteful spending, reduce the Federal real property footprint, improve the use of evidence to improve program performance, and spur innovation in the private sector by opening to the public tens of thousands of Federal data sets and innovation assets at the national labs.

Supporting the President’s Management Agenda. The Budget includes investments to continue driving the President’s Management Agenda by improving the service we provide to the American public; leveraging the Federal Government’s buying power to bring more value and efficiency to how we use taxpayer dollars; opening Government data and research to the private sector to drive innovation and economic growth; promoting smarter information technology; modernizing permitting and environmental review processes; creating new Idea Labs to support employees with promising ideas; and, attracting and retaining the best talent in the Federal workforce.

Supporting Digital Service Delivery for Citizens. In 2014 the Administration piloted the U.S. Digital Service, a unit of innovators, entrepreneurs, and engineers. This team of America’s best digital experts has worked in collaboration with Federal agencies to implement streamlined and effective digital technology practices on the Nation’s highest priority programs. This work includes collaborating with the Department of Education to launch the new College Scorecard to give students, parents, and their advisors most reliable national data to help with college choice and supporting the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) transition to launch the new myUSCIS which makes it easier for users to access information about the immigration process and immigration services. To institutionalize the dramatic improvements that this approach has demonstrated, the Budget supports the Administration’s aggressive goal of hiring and placing 500 top technology and design experts to serve in the Government by January 2017.

Strengthening Federal Cybersecurity. As outlined above, the Budget provides $19 billion in resources for cybersecurity. This includes the creation of a new $3.1 billion revolving fund, the Information Technology Modernization Fund (ITMF), to retire the Government’s antiquated IT systems and transition to more secure and efficient modern IT systems, funding to streamline governance and secure Federal networks, and investments to strengthen the cybersecurity workforce and cybersecurity education across society.

Building Evidence and Encouraging Innovation. The President has made it clear that policy decisions should be driven by evidence so that the Federal government can do more of what works and less of what does not. The Administration’s evidence-based approaches have resulted in important gains in areas ranging from reducing veteran homelessness, to improving educational outcomes, to enhancing the effectiveness of international development programs. The Budget invests in expanding evidence-based approaches, developing and testing effective practices, and enhancing government’s capacity to build and use evidence, in particular by expanding access to administrative data and further developing Federal, State, local, and tribal data infrastructure.

Reorganizing Government to Succeed in the Global Economy. The Budget also includes proposals to consolidate and reorganize Government agencies to make them leaner and more efficient, and it increases the use of evidence and evaluation to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely on programs that work….(More). See also President Barack Obama’s FY 2017 Budget for the U.S. Government

Dive Against Debris: Employing 25,600 scuba divers to collect data

Curated on February 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DataDrivenJournalism: “In 2011, the team at Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris program with the objective of better documenting the amount of marine debris found in the world’s oceans. This global citizen science program trains volunteer scuba divers from across the globe to conduct underwater surveys, generating quantitative data on the debris they see. After cleaning this data for quality assurance, it is then published on their interactive Dive Against Debris Map. This data and visualization informs the team’s advocacy work, ultimately seeking to generate changes in policy.

The impact of marine debris is devastating, killing marine life and changing their habitats and ecosystems. Animals are extremely vulnerable to ingestion or entanglement which leads to death, as they are unable to distinguish between what is trash and what is not.

Beyond this, as microscopic pieces of plastic enter the food chain, most seafood ingested by humans also likely contains marine debris.

Project AWARE is a growing movement of scuba divers protecting the ocean, with a long history of working on the marine debris issue. Through its work, the Project AWARE team found that there was a significant lack of data available regarding underwater marine debris.

To remedy this, the Dive Against Debris program was launched in 2011. The programs seeks to collect and visualise data generated by their volunteers, then use this data to influence policy changes and raise social awareness around the world. This data collection is unique in that it focuses exclusively on yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found beneath in the ocean, an issue Hannah Pragnell-Raasch, a Program Specialist with Project AWARE, told us “has previously been disregarded as out of sight, out of mind, as the everyday person is not exposed to the harmful impacts.”

To date, Dive Against Debris surveys have been conducted in over 50 countries, with the top reporting countries being the United States, Thailand and Greece. As more divers get involved with Dive Against Debris, Project AWARE continues to bring visibility to the problem of marine debris and helps to identify target areas for waste prevention efforts.

….

Anyone can take part in a Dive Against Debris survey, as long as they are a certified diver. As described in their “Action Zone”, scuba divers can either “join” or “create” an action. To further support the program, Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris Distinctive Specialty, a course of divers, which “aims to equip students (scuba divers) with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct their own Dive Against Debris Surveys.”

Before the data appears on the interactive Dive Against Debris Map, it goes through a quality review in order to ensure data integrity. The survey leader at Project AWARE corrects any data inconsistencies. Then, as the focus is exclusively on what is found underwater, all land data is removed. Project AWARE Aware aims to create “an accurate perspective about underwater marine debris, that policy-makers simply cannot ignore”…. Explore the Dive Against Debris project here…. (More)

Moving from Open Data to Open Knowledge: Announcing the Commerce Data Usability Project

Curated on February 4, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Chen, Tyrone Grandison, and Kristen Honey at the US Department of Commerce: “…in 2016, the DOC is committed to building on this momentum with new and expanded efforts to transform open data into knowledge into action.

DOC Open Data Graphic — Graphic Credit: Radhika Bhatt, Commerce Data Service

DOC has been in the business of open data for a long time. DOC’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) alone collects and disseminates huge amounts of data that fuel the global weather economy—and this information represents just a fraction of the tens of thousands of datasets that DOC collects and manages, on topics ranging from satellite imagery to material standards to demographic surveys.

Unfortunately, far too many DOC datasets are either hard to find, difficult to use, and/or not yet publicly available on Data.gov, the home of U.S. government’s open data. This challenge is not exclusive to DOC; and indeed, under Project Open Data, Federal agencies are working hard on various efforts to make tax-payer funded data more easily discoverable.

CDUP screenshot

One of these efforts is DOC’s Commerce Data Usability Project (CDUP). To unlock the power of data, just making data open isn’t enough. It’s critical to make data easier to find and use—to provide information and tools that make data accessible and actionable for all users. That’s why DOC formed a public-private partnership to create CDUP, a collection of online data tutorials that provide students, developers, and entrepreneurs with the necessary context and code for them to start quickly extracting value from various datasets. Tutorials exist on topics such as:

NOAA’s Severe Weather Data Inventory (SWDI), demonstrating how to use hail data to save life and property. The tutorial helps users see that hail events often occur in the summer (late night to early morning), and in midwestern and southern states.
Security vulnerability data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The tutorial helps users see that spikes and dips in security incidents consistently occur in the same set of weeks each year.
Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The tutorial helps users understand how to use satellite imagery to estimate populations.
American Community Survey (ACS) data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The tutorial helps users understand how nonprofits can identify communities that they want to serve based on demographic traits.

In the coming months, CDUP will continue to expand with a rich, diverse set of additional tutorials….(More)“

Platform for Mumbai’s slum entrepreneurs

Curated on February 3, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We recently saw an initiative that empowered startup talent in a Finnish refugee camp, and now Design Museum Dharavi is a mobile museum that will provide a platform for makers in the Mumbai neighborhood.

The initiative is a brainchild of artist Jorge Rubio and Creative Industries Fund NL. Taking the model of a pop-up, it will stop at various locations throughout the neighborhood. Despite being an ‘informal settlement’, Dharavi is famed for producing very little waste due to a culture of recycling and repurposing. The mobile museum will showcase local makers, enable them to connect with potential clients and run workshops, ultimately elevating the global social perception towards life in the so-called ‘slums’. Home to over a million people, Dharavi has the additional tourism pull from appearing on the film Slumdog Millionaire…..(More)”

Transparency, accountability, and technology

Curated on February 2, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shanthi Kalathil at Plan International: “The recently launched Sustainable Development Goals have kicked off a renewed development agenda that features, among other things, a dedicated emphasis on peace, justice, and strong institutions. This emphasis, encapsulated in Goal #16, contains several sub-priorities, including reducing corruption; developing effective, accountable, and transparent institutions; ensuring inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making; and ensuring access to information.

Indeed, the governance-related Goals merely stamp an official imprimatur on what have now become key buzzwords in development. Naturally, where there are buzzwords, there are “tools.” In many cases, those “tools” turn out to be information and communications technologies, and the data flows they facilitate. It’s no wonder, then, that technology has been embraced by the development community as a crucial component of the global accountability and transparency “toolkit.”

Certainly, information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) has long been a part of the development conversation. More recently, ICTs have emerged prominently in the context of good governance, transparency, and accountability. Yet – despite a growing number of studies and evaluations – there hasn’t been a field-wide deeper reckoning with technology’s role in fostering accountability. Technology often seems to promise greater transparency and empowered citizen voice, fitting seamlessly into broader goals of good governance for development. Yet the actual track record of many initiatives has been spotty, and dedicated examination has been sparse (although efforts are underway to change this). That hasn’t stemmed the enthusiasm to press ahead with tech-related applications and open-data-everything; if anything, calls for more critical examination are often treated as mere bumps on the road to progress.

One problem with the “tool for accountability” frame is that it minimizes the political, economic, and social ramifications of technology itself, including the complex web of laws, regulation, culture, norms, and power relations that accompany any form of communication. This means that, while many of these projects tackle the accountability piece using the recommended political economy lens, there is no corresponding emphasis on the communications and/or technology side of the equation. Referring to technology primarily as a “tool” to facilitate aspects of good governance, accountability, or transparency reinforces the idea that it’s merely a widget, one that doesn’t carry its own complexities. It subsumes technology as a means to a broader end, and in doing so, minimizes its ramifications. This, in turn, can lead to unintended or unsustainable outcomes.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to view accountability projects that employ technology in a different way. It’s time to ditch the “tech toolkit,” and instead embrace the emergence of a truly hybrid field with its own unique political economy. This will require a deeper engagement with the power relations that accompany the introduction of technology, and is likely to illuminate a host of issues that currently lie hidden in the planning stage and beyond. This deeper engagement will also require a rethink of current design, monitoring, and evaluation practices; so, for example, in addition to understanding the accountability challenge in question, program design will have to incorporate an equally substantive analysis of the political economy of the proposed ICT intervention, including stakeholders, potential obstacles, and an examination of all possible outcomes (intended or otherwise). While this will require substantial effort, by moving beyond the toolkit approach, we may be able to engage holistically with transparency, accountability, AND technology in ways that could lead to more sustained development impact. (Read the Report)