After Big Data: The Coming Age of “Big Indicators”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Zolli at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Consider, for a moment, some of the most pernicious challenges facing humanity today: the increasing prevalence of natural disasters; the systemic overfishing of the world’s oceans; the clear-cutting of primeval forests; the maddening persistence of poverty; and above all, the accelerating effects of global climate change.

Each item in this dark litany inflicts suffering on the world in its own, awful way. Yet as a group, they share some common characteristics. Each problem is messy, with lots of moving parts. Each is riddled with perverse incentives, which can lead local actors to behave in a way that is not in the common interest. Each is opaque, with dynamics that are only partially understood, even by experts; each can, as a result, often be made worse by seemingly rational and well-intentioned interventions. When things do go wrong, each has consequences that diverge dramatically from our day-to-day experiences, making their full effects hard to imagine, predict, and rehearse. And each is global in scale, raising questions about who has the legal obligation to act—and creating incentives for leaders to disavow responsibility (and sometimes even question the legitimacy of the problem itself).

With dynamics like these, it’s little wonder systems theorists label these kinds of problems “wicked” or even “super wicked.” It’s even less surprising that these challenges remain, by and large, externalities to the global system—inadequately measured, perennially underinvested in, and poorly accounted for—until their consequences spill disastrously and expensively into view.

For real progress to occur, we’ve got to move these externalities into the global system, so that we can fully assess their costs, and so that we can sufficiently incentivize and reward stakeholders for addressing them and penalize them if they don’t. And that’s going to require a revolution in measurement, reporting, and financial instrumentation—the mechanisms by which we connect global problems with the resources required to address them at scale.

Thankfully, just such a revolution is under way.

It’s a complex story with several moving parts, but it begins with important new technical developments in three critical areas of technology: remote sensing and big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing.

Remote sensing and big data allow us to collect unprecedented streams of observations about our planet and our impacts upon it, and dramatic advances in AI enable us to extract the deeper meaning and patterns contained in those vast data streams. The rise of the cloud empowers anyone with an Internet connection to access and interact with these insights, at a fraction of the traditional cost.

In the years to come, these technologies will shift much of the current conversation focused on big data to one focused on “big indicators”—highly detailed, continuously produced, global indicators that track change in the health of the Earth’s most important systems, in real time. Big indicators will form an important mechanism for guiding human action, allow us to track the impact of our collective actions and interventions as never before, enable better and more timely decisions, transform reporting, and empower new kinds of policy and financing instruments. In short, they will reshape how we tackle a number of global problems, and everyone—especially nonprofits, NGOs, and actors within the social and environmental sectors—will play a role in shaping and using them….(More)”.

Making Credit Ratings Data Publicly Available

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marc D. Joffe and Frank Partnoy: “In the aftermath of the 2007-08 global financial crisis, regulators and policy makers recognized the importance of making bond ratings publicly available. Although rating agencies have made some dataavailable, obtaining this information in bulk can be difficult or impossible. At some times, the data is costly; at other times, it is simply unavailable. Some rating agencies have provided data only on a subscription basis for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

The cost and lack of availability of ratings data are particularly striking given the regulatory requirement that rating agencies publish such data. We describe the relevant Securities and Exchange Commission publication rules and requirements. Unfortunately, the ways in which the major credit rating agencies have responded to these rules have not made data available in an easily accessed or comprehensive way and have instead hindered academic and think-tank research into credit ratings. Financial researchers who lack the funds required to purchase bulk ratings must use a variety of ad hoc methods to obtain rating data or limit their studies of credit ratings.

This brief paper describes our recent initiative to make credit ratings data publicly available. We provide links to a software tool written in Python that crawls credit rating agency websites, downloads the XRBL files, and converts them to Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. We also provide a link to the most recently processed ratings data, separated by agency and asset category, as well as the entire universe of ratings actions, including more than eight million assignments, upgrades, downgrades, and withdrawals…(More)”.

Upholding Democracy Amid the Challenges of New Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Eyal Benvenisti at the The European Journal of International Law: “The law on global governance that emerged after the Second World War was grounded in irrefutable trust in international organizations and an assumption that their subjection to legal discipline and judicial review would be unnecessary and, in fact, detrimental to their success. The law that evolved systematically insulated international organizations from internal and external scrutiny and absolved them of any inherent legal obligations – and, to a degree, continues to do so.

Indeed, it was only well after the end of the Cold War that mistrust in global governance began to trickle through into the legal discourse and the realization gradually took hold that the operation of international organizations needed to be subject to the disciplining power of the law. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have sought to identify the conditions under which trust in global bodies can be regained, mainly by borrowing and adapting domestic public law precepts that emphasize accountability through communications with those affected.

Today, although a ‘culture of accountability’ may have taken root, its legal tools are still shaping up and are often contested. More importantly, these communicative tools are ill-equipped to address the new modalities of governance that are based on decision-making by machines using raw data (rather than two-way exchange with stakeholders) as their input.

The new information and communication technologies challenge the foundational premise of the accountability school – that ‘the more communication, the better’ – as voters-turned-users obtain their information from increasingly fragmented and privatized marketplaces of ideas that are manipulated for economic and political gain.

In this article, I describe and analyse how the law has evolved to acknowledge the need for accountability, how it has designed norms for this purpose and continues in this endeavour – yet how the challenges it faces today are leaving its most fundamental assumptions open to question. I argue that, given the growing influence of public and private global governance bodies on our daily lives and the shape of our political communities, the task of the law of global governance is no longer limited to ensuring the accountability of global bodies, but is also to protect human dignity and the very viability of the democratic state….(More)”.

Urban Big Data: City Management and Real Estate Markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Richard Barkham, Sheharyar Bokhari and Albert Saiz: “In this report, we discuss recent trends in the application of urban big data and their impact on real estate markets. We expect such technologies to improve quality of life and the productivity of cities over the long run.

We forecast that smart city technologies will reinforce the primacy of the most successful global metropolises at least for a decade or more. A few select metropolises in emerging countries may also leverage these technologies to leapfrog on the provision of local public services.

In the long run, all cities throughout the urban system will end up adopting successful and cost-effective smart city initiatives. Nevertheless, smaller-scale interventions are likely to crop up everywhere, even in the short run. Such targeted programs are more likely to improve conditions in blighted or relatively deprived neighborhoods, which could generate gentrification and higher valuations there. It is unclear whether urban information systems will have a centralizing or suburbanizing impact. They are likely to make denser urban centers more attractive, but they are also bound to make suburban or exurban locations more accessible…(More)”.

“Crowdsourcing” ten years in: A review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kerri Wazny at the Journal of Global Health: “First coined by Howe in 2006, the field of crowdsourcing has grown exponentially. Despite its growth and its transcendence across many fields, the definition of crowdsourcing has still not been agreed upon, and examples are poorly indexed in peer–reviewed literature. Many examples of crowdsourcing have not been scaled–up past the pilot phase.

In spite of this, crowdsourcing has great potential, especially in global health where resources are lacking. This narrative review seeks to review both indexed and grey crowdsourcing literature broadly in order to explore the current state of the field….(More)”.

Selected Readings on Data, Gender, and Mobility

Curated on Posted on by Michelle Winowatan

By Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of data, gender, and mobility was originally published in 2017.

This edition of the Selected Readings was  developed as part of an ongoing project at the GovLab, supported by Data2X, in collaboration with UNICEF, DigitalGlobe, IDS (UDD/Telefonica R&D), and the ISI Foundation, to establish a data collaborative to analyze unequal access to urban transportation for women and girls in Chile. We thank all our partners for their suggestions to the below curation – in particular Leo Ferres at IDS who got us started with this collection; Ciro Cattuto and Michele Tizzoni from the ISI Foundation; and Bapu Vaitla at Data2X for their pointers to the growing data and mobility literature. 

Introduction

Daily mobility is key for gender equity. Access to transportation contributes to women’s agency and independence. The ability to move from place to place safely and efficiently can allow women to access education, work, and the public domain more generally. Yet, mobility is not just a means to access various opportunities. It is also a means to enter the public domain.

Women’s mobility is a multi-layered challenge
Women’s daily mobility, however, is often hampered by social, cultural, infrastructural, and technical barriers. Cultural bias, for instance, limits women mobility in a way that women are confined to an area with close proximity to their house due to society’s double standard on women to be homemakers. From an infrastructural perspective, public transportation mostly only accommodates home-to-work trips, when in reality women often make more complex trips with stops, for example, at the market, school, healthcare provider – sometimes called “trip chaining.” From a safety perspective, women tend to avoid making trips in certain areas and/or at certain time, due to a constant risk of being sexually harassed on public places. Women are also pushed toward more expensive transportation – such as taking a cab instead of a bus or train – based on safety concerns.

The growing importance of (new sources of) data
Researchers are increasingly experimenting with ways to address these interdependent problems through the analysis of diverse datasets, often collected by private sector businesses and other non-governmental entities. Gender-disaggregated mobile phone records, geospatial data, satellite imagery, and social media data, to name a few, are providing evidence-based insight into gender and mobility concerns. Such data collaboratives – the exchange of data across sectors to create public value – can help governments, international organizations, and other public sector entities in the move toward more inclusive urban and transportation planning, and the promotion of gender equity.
The below curated set of readings seek to focus on the following areas:

  1. Insights on how data can inform gender empowerment initiatives,
  2. Emergent research into the capacity of new data sources – like call detail records (CDRs) and satellite imagery – to increase our understanding of human mobility patterns, and
  3. Publications exploring data-driven policy for gender equity in mobility.

Readings are listed in alphabetical order.

We selected the readings based upon their focus (gender and/or mobility related); scope and representativeness (going beyond one project or context); type of data used (such as CDRs and satellite imagery); and date of publication.

Annotated Reading List

Data and Gender

Blumenstock, Joshua, and Nathan Eagle. Mobile Divides: Gender, Socioeconomic Status, and Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda. ACM Press, 2010.

  • Using traditional survey and mobile phone operator data, this study analyzes gender and socioeconomic divides in mobile phone use in Rwanda, where it is found that the use of mobile phones is significantly more prevalent in men and the higher class.
  • The study also shows the differences in the way men and women use phones, for example: women are more likely to use a shared phone than men.
  • The authors frame their findings around gender and economic inequality in the country to the end of providing pointers for government action.

Bosco, Claudio, et al. Mapping Indicators of Female Welfare at High Spatial Resolution. WorldPop and Flowminder, 2015.

  • This report focuses on early adolescence in girls, which often comes with higher risk of violence, fewer economic opportunity, and restrictions on mobility. Significant data gaps, methodological and ethical issues surrounding data collection for girls also create barriers for policymakers to create evidence-based policy to address those issues.
  • The authors analyze geolocated household survey data, using statistical models and validation techniques, and creates high-resolution maps of various sex-disaggregated indicators, such as nutrition level, access to contraception, and literacy, to better inform local policy making processes.
  • Further, it identifies the gender data gap and issues surrounding gender data collection, and provides arguments for why having a comprehensive data can help create better policy and contribute to the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Buvinic, Mayra, Rebecca Furst-Nichols, and Gayatri Koolwal. Mapping Gender Data Gaps. Data2X, 2014.

  • This study identifies gaps in gender data in developing countries on health, education, economic opportunities, political participation, and human security issues.
  • It recommends ways to close the gender data gap through censuses and micro-level surveys, service and administrative records, and emphasizes how “big data” in particular can fill the missing data that will be able to measure the progress of women and girls well being. The authors argue that dentifying these gaps is key to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment, one of the SDGs.

Catalyzing Inclusive FInancial System: Chile’s Commitment to Women’s Data. Data2X, 2014.

  • This article analyzes global and national data in the banking sector to fill the gap of sex-disaggregated data in Chile. The purpose of the study is to describe the difference in spending behavior and priorities between women and men, identify the challenges for women in accessing financial services, and create policies that promote women inclusion in Chile.

Ready to Measure: Twenty Indicators for Monitoring SDG Gender Targets. Open Data Watch and Data2X, 2016.

  • Using readily available data this study identifies 20 SDG indicators related to gender issues that can serve as a baseline measurement for advancing gender equality, such as percentage of women aged 20-24 who were married or in a union before age 18 (child marriage), proportion of seats held by women in national parliament, and share of women among mobile telephone owners, among others.

Ready to Measure Phase II: Indicators Available to Monitor SDG Gender Targets. Open Data Watch and Data2X, 2017.

  • The Phase II paper is an extension of the Ready to Measure Phase I above. Where Phase I identifies the readily available data to measure women and girls well-being, Phase II provides informations on how to access and summarizes insights from this data.
  • Phase II elaborates the insights about data gathered from ready to measure indicators and finds that although underlying data to measure indicators of women and girls’ wellbeing is readily available in most cases, it is typically not sex-disaggregated.
  • Over one in five – 53 out of 232 – SDG indicators specifically refer to women and girls. However, further analysis from this study reveals that at least 34 more indicators should be disaggregated by sex. For instance, there should be 15 more sex-disaggregated indicators for SDG number 3: “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”
  • The report recommends national statistical agencies to take the lead and assert additional effort to fill the data gap by utilizing tools such as the statistical model to fill the current gender data gap for each of the SDGs.

Reed, Philip J., Muhammad Raza Khan, and Joshua Blumenstock. Observing gender dynamics and disparities with mobile phone metadata. International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), 2016.

  • The study analyzes mobile phone logs of millions of Pakistani residents to explore whether there is a difference in mobile phone usage behavior between male and female and determine the extent to which gender inequality is reflected in mobile phone usage.
  • It utilizes mobile phone data to analyze the pattern of usage behavior between genders, and socioeconomic and demographic data obtained from census and advocacy groups to assess the state of gender equality in each region in Pakistan.
  • One of its findings is a strong positive correlation between proportion of female mobile phone users and education score.

Stehlé, Juliette, et al. Gender homophily from spatial behavior in a primary school: A sociometric study. 2013.

    • This paper seeks to understand homophily, a human behavior characterizes by interaction with peers who have similarities in “physical attributes to tastes or political opinions”. Further, it seeks to identify the magnitude of influence, a type of homophily has to social structures.
    • Focusing on gender interaction among primary school aged children in France, this paper collects data from wearable devices from 200 children in the period of 2 days and measure the physical proximity and duration of the interaction among those children in the playground.
  • It finds that interaction patterns are significantly determined by grade and class structure of the school. Meaning that children belonging to the same class have most interactions, and that lower grades usually do not interact with higher grades.
  • From a gender lens, this study finds that mixed-gender interaction lasts shorter relative to same-gender interaction. In addition, interaction among girls is also longer compared to interaction among boys. These indicate that the children in this school tend to have stronger relationships within their own gender, or what the study calls gender homophily. It further finds that gender homophily is apparent in all classes.

Data and Mobility

Bengtsson, Linus, et al. Using Mobile Phone Data to Predict the Spatial Spread of Cholera. Flowminder, 2015.

  • This study seeks to predict the 2010 cholera epidemic in Haiti using 2.9 million anonymous mobile phone SIM cards and reported cases of Cholera from the Haitian Directorate of Health, where 78 study areas were analyzed in the period of October 16 – December 16, 2010.
  • From this dataset, the study creates a mobility matrix that indicates mobile phone movement from one study area to another and combines that with the number of reported case of cholera in the study areas to calculate the infectious pressure level of those areas.
  • The main finding of its analysis shows that the outbreak risk of a study area correlates positively with the infectious pressure level, where an infectious pressure of over 22 results in an outbreak within 7 days. Further, it finds that the infectious pressure level can inform the sensitivity and specificity of the outbreak prediction.
  • It hopes to improve infectious disease containment by identifying areas with highest risks of outbreaks.

Calabrese, Francesco, et al. Understanding Individual Mobility Patterns from Urban Sensing Data: A Mobile Phone Trace Example. SENSEable City Lab, MIT, 2012.

  • This study compares mobile phone data and odometer readings from annual safety inspections to characterize individual mobility and vehicular mobility in the Boston Metropolitan Area, measured by the average daily total trip length of mobile phone users and average daily Vehicular Kilometers Traveled (VKT).
  • The study found that, “accessibility to work and non-work destinations are the two most important factors in explaining the regional variations in individual and vehicular mobility, while the impacts of populations density and land use mix on both mobility measures are insignificant.” Further, “a well-connected street network is negatively associated with daily vehicular total trip length.”
  • This study demonstrates the potential for mobile phone data to provide useful and updatable information on individual mobility patterns to inform transportation and mobility research.

Campos-Cordobés, Sergio, et al. “Chapter 5 – Big Data in Road Transport and Mobility Research.” Intelligent Vehicles. Edited by Felipe Jiménez. Butterworth-Heinemann, 2018.

  • This study outlines a number of techniques and data sources – such as geolocation information, mobile phone data, and social network observation – that could be leveraged to predict human mobility.
  • The authors also provide a number of examples of real-world applications of big data to address transportation and mobility problems, such as transport demand modeling, short-term traffic prediction, and route planning.

Lin, Miao, and Wen-Jing Hsu. Mining GPS Data for Mobility Patterns: A Survey. Pervasive and Mobile Computing vol. 12,, 2014.

  • This study surveys the current field of research using high resolution positioning data (GPS) to capture mobility patterns.
  • The survey focuses on analyses related to frequently visited locations, modes of transportation, trajectory patterns, and placed-based activities. The authors find “high regularity” in human mobility patterns despite high levels of variation among the mobility areas covered by individuals.

Phithakkitnukoon, Santi, Zbigniew Smoreda, and Patrick Olivier. Socio-Geography of Human Mobility: A Study Using Longitudinal Mobile Phone Data. PLoS ONE, 2012.

  • This study used a year’s call logs and location data of approximately one million mobile phone users in Portugal to analyze the association between individuals’ mobility and their social networks.
  • It measures and analyze travel scope (locations visited) and geo-social radius (distance from friends, family, and acquaintances) to determine the association.
  • It finds that 80% of places visited are within 20 km of an individual’s nearest social ties’ location and it rises to 90% at 45 km radius. Further, as population density increases, distance between individuals and their social networks decreases.
  • The findings in this study demonstrates how mobile phone data can provide insights to “the socio-geography of human mobility”.

Semanjski, Ivana, and Sidharta Gautama. Crowdsourcing Mobility Insights – Reflection of Attitude Based Segments on High Resolution Mobility Behaviour Data. vol. 71, Transportation Research, 2016.

  • Using cellphone data, this study maps attitudinal segments that explain how age, gender, occupation, household size, income, and car ownership influence an individual’s mobility patterns. This type of segment analysis is seen as particularly useful for targeted messaging.
  • The authors argue that these time- and space-specific insights could also provide value for government officials and policymakers, by, for example, allowing for evidence-based transportation pricing options and public sector advertising campaign placement.

Silveira, Lucas M., et al. MobHet: Predicting Human Mobility using Heterogeneous Data Sources. vol. 95, Computer Communications , 2016.

  • This study explores the potential of using data from multiple sources (e.g., Twitter and Foursquare), in addition to GPS data, to provide a more accurate prediction of human mobility. This heterogenous data captures popularity of different locations, frequency of visits to those locations, and the relationships among people who are moving around the target area. The authors’ initial experimentation finds that the combination of these sources of data are demonstrated to be more accurate in identifying human mobility patterns.

Wilson, Robin, et al. Rapid and Near Real-Time Assessments of Population Displacement Using Mobile Phone Data Following Disasters: The 2015 Nepal Earthquake. PLOS Current Disasters, 2016.

  • Utilizing call detail records of 12 million mobile phone users in Nepal, this study seeks spatio-temporal details of the population after the earthquake on April 25, 2015.
  • It seeks to answer the problem of slow and ineffective disaster response, by capturing near real-time displacement pattern provided by mobile phone call detail records, in order to inform humanitarian agencies on where to distribute their assistance. The preliminary results of this study were available nine days after the earthquake.
  • This project relies on the foundational cooperation with mobile phone operator, who supplied the de-identified data from 12 million users, before the earthquake.
  • The study finds that shortly after the earthquake there was an anomalous population movement out of the Kathmandu Valley, the most impacted area, to surrounding areas. The study estimates 390,000 people above normal had left the valley.

Data, Gender and Mobility

Althoff, Tim, et al. “Large-Scale Physical Activity Data Reveal Worldwide Activity Inequality.” Nature, 2017.

  • This study’s analysis of worldwide physical activity is built on a dataset containing 68 million days of physical activity of 717,527 people collected through their smartphone accelerometers.
  • The authors find a significant reduction in female activity levels in cities with high active inequality, where high active inequality is associated with low city walkability – walkability indicators include pedestrian facilities (city block length, intersection density, etc.) and amenities (shops, parks, etc.).
  • Further, they find that high active inequality is associated with high levels of inactivity-related health problems, like obesity.

Borker, Girija. “Safety First: Street Harassment and Women’s Educational Choices in India.” Stop Street Harassment, 2017.

  • Using data collected from SafetiPin, an application that allows user to mark an area on a map as safe or not, and Safecity, another application that lets users share their experience of harassment in public places, the researcher analyzes the safety of travel routes surrounding different colleges in India and their effect on women’s college choices.
  • The study finds that women are willing to go to a lower ranked college in order to avoid higher risk of street harassment. Women who choose the best college from their set of options, spend an average of $250 more each year to access safer modes of transportation.

Frias-Martinez, Vanessa, Enrique Frias-Martinez, and Nuria Oliver. A Gender-Centric Analysis of Calling Behavior in a Developing Economy Using Call Detail Records. Association for the Advancement of Articial Intelligence, 2010.

  • Using encrypted Call Detail Records (CDRs) of 10,000 participants in a developing economy, this study analyzes the behavioral, social, and mobility variables to determine the gender of a mobile phone user, and finds that there is a difference in behavioral and social variables in mobile phone use between female and male.
  • It finds that women have higher usage of phone in terms of number of calls made, call duration, and call expenses compared to men. Women also have bigger social network, meaning that the number of unique phone numbers that contact or get contacted is larger. It finds no statistically significant difference in terms of distance made between calls in men and women.
  • Frias-Martinez et al recommends to take these findings into consideration when designing a cellphone based service.

Psylla, Ioanna, Piotr Sapiezynski, Enys Mones, Sune Lehmann. “The role of gender in social network organization.” PLoS ONE 12, December 20, 2017.

  • Using a large dataset of high resolution data collected through mobile phones, as well as detailed questionnaires, this report studies gender differences in a large cohort. The researchers consider mobility behavior and individual personality traits among a group of more than 800 university students.
  • Analyzing mobility data, they find both that women visit more unique locations over time, and that they have more homogeneous time distribution over their visited locations than men, indicating the time commitment of women is more widely spread across places.

Vaitla, Bapu. Big Data and the Well-Being of Women and Girls: Applications on the Social Scientific Frontier. Data2X, Apr. 2017.

  • In this study, the researchers use geospatial data, credit card and cell phone information, and social media posts to identify problems–such as malnutrition, education, access to healthcare, mental health–facing women and girls in developing countries.
  • From the credit card and cell phone data in particular, the report finds that analyzing patterns of women’s spending and mobility can provide useful insight into Latin American women’s “economic lifestyles.”
  • Based on this analysis, Vaitla recommends that various untraditional big data be used to fill gaps in conventional data sources to address the common issues of invisibility of women and girls’ data in institutional databases.

Democratising the future: How do we build inclusive visions of the future?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chun-Yin San at Nesta: “In 2011, Lord Martin Rees, the British Astronomer-Royal, launched a scathing critique on the UK Government’s long-term thinking capabilities. “It is depressing,” he argued, “that long-term global issues of energy, food, health and climate get trumped on the political agenda by the short term”. We are facing more and more complex, intergenerational issues like climate change, or the impact of AI, which require long-term, joined-up thinking to solve.

But even when governments do invest in foresight and strategic planning, there is a bigger question around whose vision of the future it is. These strategic plans tend to be written in opaque and complex ways by ‘experts’, with little room for scrutiny, let alone input, by members of the public….

There have been some great examples of more democratic futures exercises in the past. Key amongst them was the Hawai’i 2000 project in the 1970s, which bought together Hawaiians from different walks of life to debate the sort of place that Hawai’i should become over the next 30 years. It generated some incredibly inspiring and creative collective visions of the future of the tropical American state, and also helped embed long-term strategic thinking into policy-making instruments – at least for a time.

A more recent example took place over 2008 in the Dutch Caribbean nation of Aruba, which engaged some 50,000 people from all parts of Aruban society. The Nos Aruba 2025 project allowed the island nation to develop a more sustainable national strategic plan than ever before – one based on what Aruba and its people had to offer, responding to the potential and needs of a diverse community. Like Hawai’i 2000, what followed Nos Aruba 2025 was a fundamental change in the nature of participation in the country’s governance, with community engagement becoming a regular feature in the Aruban government’s work….

These examples demonstrate how futures work is at its best when it is participatory. …However, aside from some of the projects above, examples of genuine engagement in futures remain few and far between. Even when activities examining a community’s future take place in the public domain – such as the Museum of London’s ongoing City Now City Future series – the conversation can often seem one-sided. Expert-generated futures are presented to people with little room for them to challenge these ideas or contribute their own visions in a meaningful way. This has led some, like academics Denis Loveridge and Ozcan Saritas, to remark that futures and foresight can suffer from a serious case of ‘democratic deficit‘.

There are three main reasons for this:

  1. Meaningful participation can be difficult to do, as it is expensive and time-consuming, especially when it comes to large-scale exercises meant to facilitate deep and meaningful dialogue about a community’s future.

  2. Participation is not always valued in the way it should be, and can be met with false sincerity from government sponsors. This is despite the wide-reaching social and economic benefits to building collective future visions, which we are currently exploring further in our work.

  3. Practitioners may not necessarily have the know-how or tools to do citizen engagement effectively. While there are plenty of guides to public engagement and a number of different futures toolkits, there are few openly available resources for participatory futures activities….(More)”

Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Paul Fawcett, Matthew Flinders, Colin Hay, and Matthew Wood: “There is a mounting body of evidence pointing towards rising levels of public dissatisfaction with the formal political process. Depoliticization refers to a more discrete range of contemporary strategies that add to this growing trend towards anti-politics by either removing or displacing the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation.

This book examines the relationship between these two trends as understood within the broader shift towards governance. It brings together a number of contributions from scholars who have a varied range of concerns but who nevertheless share a common interest in developing the concept of depoliticization through their engagement with a set of theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical questions. This volume explores these questions from a variety of different perspectives and uses a number of different empirical examples and case studies from both within the nation state as well as from other regional, global, and multi-level arenas.

In this context, this volume examines the potential and limits of depoliticization as a concept and its position and contribution in the nexus between the larger and more established literatures on governance and anti-politics….(More)”.

Innovation Contests: How to Engage Citizens in Solving Urban Problems?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sarah Hartmann, Agnes Mainka and Wolfgang G. Stock in Enhancing Knowledge Discovery and Innovation in the Digital Era: “Cities all over the world are challenged with problems evolving from increasing urbanity, population growth, and density. For example, one prominent issue that is addressed in many cities is mobility. To develop smart city solutions, governments are trying to introduce open innovation. They have started to open their governmental and city related data as well as awake the citizens’ awareness on urban problems through innovation contests.

Citizens are the users of the city and therefore, have a practical motivation to engage in innovation contests as for example in hackathons and app competitions. The collaboration and co-creation of civic services by means of innovation contests is a cultural development of how governments and citizens work together in an open governmental environment. A qualitative analysis of innovation contests in 24 world cities reveals this global trend. In particular, such events increase the awareness of citizens and local businesses for identifying and solving urban challenges and are helpful means to transfer the smart city idea into practicable solutions….(More)”.

The nation state goes virtual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Symons at Nesta’s Predictions for 2018: “As the world changes, people expect their governments and public services to do so too. When it’s easy to play computer games with someone on the other side of the world, or set up a company bank account in five minutes, there is an expectation that paying taxes, applying for services or voting should be too…..

To add to this, large political upheavals such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have left some people feeling alienated from their national identity. Since the the UK voted to leave the EU, demand for Irish passports has increased by 50 per cent, a sign that people feel dissatisfied by the constraints of geographically determined citizenship when they can no longer relate to their national identity.

In response, some governments see these changes as an opportunity to reconceptualise what we mean by a nation state.

The e-Residency offer

The primary actor in this disruption is Estonia, which leads the world in digital government. In 2015 they introduced an e-Residency, allowing anyone anywhere in the world to receive a government-issued digital identity. The e-Residency gives people access to digital public services and the ability to register and run online businesses from the country, in exactly the same way as someone born in Estonia. As of November 2017, over 27,000 people have applied to be Estonian e-Residents, and they have established over 4,200 companies. Estonia aims to have ten million virtual residents by 2025….

While Estonia is a sovereign nation using technology to redefine itself, there are movements taking advantage of decentralising technologies in a bid to do away with the nation state altogether. Bitnation is a blockchain-based technology which enables people to create and join virtual nations. This allows people to agree their own social contracts between one another, using smart contract technology, removing the need for governments as an administrator or mediator. Since it began in 2014, it has been offering traditional government services, such as notaries, dispute resolution, marriages and voting systems, without the need for a middleman.

As of November 2017, there are over 10,000 Bitnation citizens. …

As citizens, we may be able to educate our children in Finland, access healthcare from South Korea and run our businesses in New Zealand, all without having to leave the comfort of our homes. Governments may see this as means of financial sustainability in the longer term, generating income by selling such services to a global population instead of centralised taxation systems levied on a geographic population.

Such a model has been described as ‘nation-as-a-service’, and could mean countries offering different tiers of citizenship, with taxes based on the number of services used, or tier of citizenship chosen. This could also mean multiple citizenships, including of city-states, as well as nations….

This is the moment for governments to start taking the full implications of the digital age seriously. From electronic IDs and data management through to seamless access to services, citizens will only demand better digital services. Countries such as Azerbaijan, are already developing their own versions of the e-Residency. Large internet platforms such as Amazon are gearing up to replace entire government functions. If governments don’t grasp the nettle, they may find themselves left behind by technology and other countries which won’t wait around for them….(More)”.