Global

Syrians discover new use for mobile phones – finding water

Curated on October 15, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Magdalena Mis at Reuters: “Struggling with frequent water cuts, residents of Syria‘s battered city of Aleppo have a new way to find the water needed for their daily lives – an interactive map on mobile phones.

The online map, created by the Red Cross and accessible through mobile phones with 3G technology, helps to locate the closest of over 80 water points across the divided city of 2 million and guides them to it using a Global Positioning System.

“The map is very simple and works on every phone, and everybody now has access to a mobile phone with 3G,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman Pawel Krzysiek told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview from Damascus on Wednesday.

“The important thing is that it’s not just a map – which many people may not know how to read – it’s the GPS that’s making a difference because people can actually be guided to the water point closest to them,” he said.

Aleppo was Syria’s most populated city and commercial hub before the civil war erupted in 2011, but many areas have been reduced to rubble and the city has been carved up between government forces and various insurgent groups.

Water cuts are a regular occurrence, amounting to about two weeks each month, and the infrastructure is on the brink of collapse, Krzysiek said.

The water supply was restored on Wednesday after a four-day cut caused by damage to the main power line providing electricity to some 80 percent of households, Krzysiek said.

More cuts are likely because fighting is preventing engineers from repairing the power line, and diesel, used for standby generators, may run out, he added….

Krzysiek said the ICRC started working on the map after a simple version created for engineers was posted on its Facebook page in the summer, sparking a wave of comments and requests.

“Suddenly people started to share this map and were sending comments on how to improve it and asking for a new, more detailed one.”

Krzysiek said that about 140,000 people were using the old version of the map and 20,000 had already used the new version, launched on Monday…(More)”

Weak States, Poor Countries

Curated on October 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Angus Deaton in Project Syndicate: “Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans’ various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.

Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine. Certainly, not all of these services are as good as they might be, nor held in equal regard by everyone; but people mostly pay their taxes, and if the way that money is spent offends some, a lively public debate ensues, and regular elections allow people to change priorities.

All of this is so obvious that it hardly needs saying – at least for those who live in rich countries with effective governments. But most of the world’s population does not.

In much of Africa and Asia, states lack the capacity to raise taxes or deliver services. The contract between government and governed – imperfect in rich countries – is often altogether absent in poor countries. The New York cop was little more than impolite (and busy providing a service); in much of the world, police prey on the people they are supposed to protect, shaking them down for money or persecuting them on behalf of powerful patrons.

Even in a middle-income country like India, public schools and public clinics face mass (unpunished) absenteeism. Private doctors give people what (they think) they want – injections, intravenous drips, and antibiotics – but the state does not regulate them, and many practitioners are entirely unqualified.

Throughout the developing world, children die because they are born in the wrong place – not of exotic, incurable diseases, but of the commonplace childhood illnesses that we have known how to treat for almost a century. Without a state that is capable of delivering routine maternal and child health care, these children will continue to die.

Likewise, without government capacity, regulation and enforcement do not work properly, so businesses find it difficult to operate. Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.

The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.

Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity….

One thing that we can do is to agitate for our own governments to stop doing those things that make it harder for poor countries to stop being poor. Reducing aid is one, but so is limiting the arms trade, improving rich-country trade and subsidy policies, providing technical advice that is not tied to aid, and developing better drugs for diseases that do not affect rich people. We cannot help the poor by making their already-weak governments even weaker….(More)”

We Need Both Networks and Communities

Curated on October 11, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Henry Mintzberg at HBR: “If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house.

Social media certainly connects us to whoever is on the other end of the line, and so extends our social networks in amazing ways. But this can come at the expense of deeper personal relationships. When it feels like we’re up-to-date on our friends’ lives through Facebook or Instagram, we may become less likely to call them, much less meet up. Networks connect; communities care.

….A century or two ago, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.” In contrast,the word has now become fashionable to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community”—”people with common interests [but] not common values, history, or memory.”

Does this matter for managing in the digital age, even for dealing with our global problems? It sure does. In a 2012 New York Times column, Thomas Friedman reported asking an Egyptian friend about the protest movements in that country: “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate,” he replied. Friedman added that “at their worst, [social media sites] can become addictive substitutes for real action.” That is why, while the larger social movements, as in Cairo’s Tahrir Square or on Wall Street, may raise consciousness about the need for renewal in society, it is the smaller social initiatives, usually developed by small groups in communities, that do much of the renewing….

We tend to make a great fuss about leadership these days, but communityship is more important. The great leaders create, enhance, and support a sense of community in their organizations, and that requires hands-on management. Hence managers have get beyond their individual leadership, to recognize the collective nature of effective enterprise.

Especially for operating around the globe, electronic communication has become essential. But the heart of enterprise remains rooted in personal collaborative relationships, albeit networked by the new information technologies. Thus, in localities and organizations, across societies and around the globe, beware of “networked individualism“ where people communicate readily while struggling to collaborate.

The new digital technologies, wonderful as they are in enhancing communication, can have a negative effect on collaboration unless they are carefully managed. An electronic device puts us in touch with a keyboard, that’s all….(More)”

A new model to explore non-profit social media use for advocacy and civic engagement

Curated on October 11, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Chapman, Katrina Miller-Stevens, John C Morris, and Brendan O’Hallarn in First Monday: “In an age when electronic communication is ubiquitous, non-profit organizations are actively using social media platforms as a way to deliver information to end users. In spite of the broad use of these platforms, little scholarship has focused on the internal processes these organizations employ to implement these tools. A limited number of studies offer models to help explain an organization’s use of social media from initiation to outcomes, yet few studies address a non-profit organization’s mission as the driver to employ social media strategies and tactics. Furthermore, the effectiveness of social media use is difficult for non-profit organizations to measure. Studies that attempt to address this question have done so by viewing social media platform analytics (e.g., Facebook analytics) or analyzing written content by users of social media (Nah and Saxton, 2013; Auger, 2013; Uzunoğlu and Misci Kip, 2014; or Guo and Saxton, 2014). The value added of this study is to present a model for practice (Weil, 1997) that explores social media use and its challenges from a non-profit organization’s mission through its desired outcome, in this case an outcome of advocacy and civic engagement.

We focus on one non-profit organization, Blue Star Families, that actively engages in advocacy and civic engagement. Blue Star Families was formed in 2009 to “raise the awareness of the challenges of military family life with our civilian communities and leaders” (Blue Star Families, 2010). Blue Star Families is a virtual organization with no physical office location. Thus, the organization relies on its Web presence and social media tools to advocate for military families and engage service members and their families, communities, and citizens in civic engagement activities (Blue Star Families, 2010).

The study aims to provide organizational-level insights of the successes and challenges of working in the social media environment. Specifically, the study asks: What are the processes non-profit organizations follow to link organizational mission to outcomes when using social media platforms? What are the successes and challenges of using social media platforms for advocacy and civic engagement purposes? In our effort to answer these questions, we present a new model to explore non-profit organizations’ use of social media platforms by building on previous models and frameworks developed to explore the use of social media in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

This research is important for three reasons. First, most previous studies of social media tend to employ models that focus on the satisfaction of the social media tools for organizational members, rather than the utility of social media as a tool to meet organizational goals. Our research offers a means to explore the utility of social media from an organization perspective. Second, the exemplar case for our research, Blue Star Families, Inc., is a non-profit organization whose mission is to create and nurture a virtual community spread over a large geographical — if not global — area. Because Blue Star Families was founded as an online organization that could not exist without social media, it provides a case for which social media is a critical component of the organization’s activity. Finally, we offer some “lessons learned” from our case to identify issues for other organizations seeking to create a significant social media presence.

This paper is organized as follows: first, the growth of social media is briefly addressed to provide background context. Second, previous models and frameworks exploring social media are discussed. This is followed by a presentation of a new model exploring the use of social media from an organizational perspective, starting with the driver of a non-profit organization’s mission, to its desired outcomes of advocacy and civic engagement. Third, the case study methodology is explained. Next, we present an analysis and discussion applying the new model to Blue Star Families’ use of social media platforms. We conclude by discussing the challenges of social media revealed in the case study analysis, and we offer recommendations to address these challenges….(More)”

US Administration Celebrates Five-Year Anniversary of Challenge.gov

Curated on October 8, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Fact Sheet: “Today, the Administration is celebrating the five-year anniversary of Challenge.gov, a historic effort by the Federal Government to collaborate with members of the public through incentive prizes to address our most pressing local, national, and global challenges. True to the spirit of the President’s charge from his first day in office, Federal agencies have collaborated with more than 200,000 citizen solvers—entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, students, and more—in more than 440 challenges, on topics ranging from accelerating the deployment of solar energy, to combating breast cancer, to increasing resilience after Hurricane Sandy.

Highlighting continued momentum from the President’s call to harness the ingenuity of the American people, the Administration is announcing:

Nine new challenges from Federal agencies, ranging from commercializing NASA technology, to helping students navigate their education and career options, to protecting marine habitats.
Expanding support for use of challenges and prizes, including new mentoring support from the General Services Administration (GSA) for interested agencies and a new $244 million innovation platform opened by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with over 70 partners.

In addition, multiple non-governmental institutions are announcing 14 new challenges, ranging from improving cancer screenings, to developing better technologies to detect, remove, and recover excess nitrogen and phosphorus from water, to increasing the resilience of island communities….

Expanding the Capability for Prize Designers to find one another

The GovLab and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will launch an expert network for prizes and challenges. The Governance Lab (GovLab) and MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance will develop and launch the Network of Innovators (NoI) expert networking platform. NoI will make easily searchable the know-how of innovators on topics ranging from developing prize-backed challenges, opening up data, and use of crowdsourcing for public good. Platform users will answer questions about their skills and experiences, creating a profile that enables them to be matched to those with complementary knowledge to enable mutual support and learning. A beta version for user testing within the Federal prize community will launch in early October, with a full launch at the end of October. NoI will be open to civil servants around the world…(More)”

Five principles for applying data science for social good

Curated on October 7, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jake Porway at O’Reilly: “….Every week, a data or technology company declares that it wants to “do good” and there are countless workshops hosted by major foundations musing on what “big data can do for society.” Add to that a growing number of data-for-good programs from Data Science for Social Good’s fantastic summer program toBayes Impact’s data science fellowships to DrivenData’s data-science-for-good competitions, and you can see how quickly this idea of “data for good” is growing.

Yes, it’s an exciting time to be exploring the ways new datasets, new techniques, and new scientists could be deployed to “make the world a better place.” We’ve already seen deep learning applied to ocean health,satellite imagery used to estimate poverty levels, and cellphone data used to elucidate Nairobi’s hidden public transportation routes. And yet, for all this excitement about the potential of this “data for good movement,” we are still desperately far from creating lasting impact. Many efforts will not only fall short of lasting impact — they will make no change at all….

So how can these well-intentioned efforts reach their full potential for real impact? Embracing the following five principles can drastically accelerate a world in which we truly use data to serve humanity.

1. “Statistics” is so much more than “percentages”

We must convey what constitutes data, what it can be used for, and why it’s valuable.

There was a packed house for the March 2015 release of the No Ceilings Full Participation Report. Hillary Clinton, Melinda Gates, and Chelsea Clinton stood on stage and lauded the report, the culmination of a year-long effort to aggregate and analyze new and existing global data, as the biggest, most comprehensive data collection effort about women and gender ever attempted. One of the most trumpeted parts of the effort was the release of the data in an open and easily accessible way.

I ran home and excitedly pulled up the data from the No Ceilings GitHub, giddy to use it for our DataKind projects. As I downloaded each file, my heart sunk. The 6MB size of the entire global dataset told me what I would find inside before I even opened the first file. Like a familiar ache, the first row of the spreadsheet said it all: “USA, 2009, 84.4%.”

What I’d encountered was a common situation when it comes to data in the social sector: the prevalence of inert, aggregate data. ….

2. Finding problems can be harder than finding solutions

We must scale the process of problem discovery through deeper collaboration between the problem holders, the data holders, and the skills holders.

In the immortal words of Henry Ford, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” Right now, the field of data science is in a similar position. Framing data solutions for organizations that don’t realize how much is now possible can be a frustrating search for faster horses. If data cleaning is 80% of the hard work in data science, then problem discovery makes up nearly the remaining 20% when doing data science for good.

The plague here is one of education. …

3. Communication is more important than technology

We must foster environments in which people can speak openly, honestly, and without judgment. We must be constantly curious about each other.

At the conclusion of one of our recent DataKind events, one of our partner nonprofit organizations lined up to hear the results from their volunteer team of data scientists. Everyone was all smiles — the nonprofit leaders had loved the project experience, the data scientists were excited with their results. The presentations began. “We used Amazon RedShift to store the data, which allowed us to quickly build a multinomial regression. The p-value of 0.002 shows …” Eyes glazed over. The nonprofit leaders furrowed their brows in telegraphed concentration. The jargon was standing in the way of understanding the true utility of the project’s findings. It was clear that, like so many other well-intentioned efforts, the project was at risk of gathering dust on a shelf if the team of volunteers couldn’t help the organization understand what they had learned and how it could be integrated into the organization’s ongoing work…..

4. We need diverse viewpoints

To tackle sector-wide challenges, we need a range of voices involved.

One of the most challenging aspects to making change at the sector level is the range of diverse viewpoints necessary to understand a problem in its entirety. In the business world, profit, revenue, or output can be valid metrics of success. Rarely, if ever, are metrics for social change so cleanly defined….

Challenging this paradigm requires diverse, or “collective impact,” approaches to problem solving. The idea has been around for a while (h/t Chris Diehl), but has not yet been widely implemented due to the challenges in successful collective impact. Moreover, while there are many diverse collectives committed to social change, few have the voice of expert data scientists involved. DataKind is piloting a collective impact model called DataKind Labs, that seeks to bring together diverse problem holders, data holders, and data science experts to co-create solutions that can be applied across an entire sector-wide challenge. We just launchedour first project with Microsoft to increase traffic safety and are hopeful that this effort will demonstrate how vital a role data science can play in a collective impact approach.

5. We must design for people

Data is not truth, and tech is not an answer in-and-of-itself. Without designing for the humans on the other end, our work is in vain.

So many of the data projects making headlines — a new app for finding public services, a new probabilistic model for predicting weather patterns for subsistence farmers, a visualization of government spending — are great and interesting accomplishments, but don’t seem to have an end user in mind. The current approach appears to be “get the tech geeks to hack on this problem, and we’ll have cool new solutions!” I’ve opined that, though there are many benefits to hackathons, you can’t just hack your way to social change….(More)”

Data-Driven Innovation: Big Data for Growth and Well-Being

Curated on October 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“A new OECD report on data-driven innovation finds that countries could be getting much more out of data analytics in terms of economic and social gains if governments did more to encourage investment in “Big Data” and promote data sharing and reuse.

The migration of economic and social activities to the Internet and the advent of The Internet of Things – along with dramatically lower costs of data collection, storage and processing and rising computing power – means that data-analytics is increasingly driving innovation and is potentially an important new source of growth.

The report suggest countries act to seize these benefits, by training more and better data scientists, reducing barriers to cross-border data flows, and encouraging investment in business processes to incorporate data analytics.

Few companies outside of the ICT sector are changing internal procedures to take advantage of data. For example, data gathered by companies’ marketing departments is not always used by other departments to drive decisions and innovation. And in particular, small and medium-sized companies face barriers to the adoption of data-related technologies such as cloud computing, partly because they have difficulty implementing organisational change due to limited resources, including the shortage of skilled personnel.

At the same time, governments will need to anticipate and address the disruptive effects of big data on the economy and overall well-being, as issues as broad as privacy, jobs, intellectual property rights, competition and taxation will be impacted. Read the Policy Brief…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Expand

Preface	Read
Foreword	Read
Executive summary	Read
The phenomenon of data-driven innovation	Read
Mapping the global data ecosystem and its points of control	Read
How data now drive innovation	Read
Drawing value from data as an infrastructure	Read
Building trust for data-driven innovation	Read
Skills and employment in a data-driven economy	Read
Promoting data-driven scientific research	Read
The evolution of health care in a data-rich environment	Read
Cities as hubs for data-driven innovation	Read
Governments leading by example with public sector data	Read

Anxieties of Democracy

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Debate at the Boston Review opened by Ira Katznelson: “…..Across the range of established democracies, we see skepticism bordering on cynicism about whether parliamentary governments can successfully address pressing domestic and global challenges. These doubts about representative democracy speak to both its fairness and its ability to make good policy.

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability….(More)

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Open Data Charter

Curated on October 1, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

International Open Data Charter: “Open data sits at the heart of a global movement with the potential to generate significant social and economic benefits around the world. Through the articulation and adoption of common principles in support of open data, governments can work towards enabling more just, and prosperous societies.

In July 2013, G8 leaders signed the G8 Open Data Charter, which outlined a set of five core open data principles. Many nations and open government advocates welcomed the G8 Charter, but there was a general sense that the principles could be refined and improved to support broader global adoption of open data principles. In the months following, a number of multinational groups initiated their own activities to establish more inclusive and representative open data principles, including the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Open Data Working Group….

During 2015, open data experts from governments, multilateral organizations, civil society and private sector, worked together to develop an international Open Data Charter, with six principles for the release of data:

Open by Default;
Timely and Comprehensive;
Accessible and Useable;
Comparable and Interoperable;
For Improved Governance and Citizen Engagement; and
For Inclusive Development and Innovation….

Next Steps

Promote adoption of the Charter.
Continue to bring together a diverse, inclusive group of stakeholders to engage in the process of adoption of the international Open Data Charter.
Develop a governance model for the ongoing management of the Charter, setting out the roles and responsibilities of a Charter partnership, and its working groups in the process of developing supporting resources, consultations, promotion, adoption, and oversight.
Continue development of and consultation on supporting Charter guides, documents and tools, which will be brought together in a searchable, online Resource Centre. ..(More)”

What we can learn from the failure of Google Flu Trends

Curated on October 1, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lazer and Ryan Kennedy at Wired: “….The issue of using big data for the common good is far more general than Google—which deserves credit, after all, for offering the occasional peek at their data. These records exist because of a compact between individual consumers and the corporation. The legalese of that compact is typically obscure (how many people carefully read terms and conditions?), but the essential bargain is that the individual gets some service, and the corporation gets some data.

What is left out that bargain is the public interest. Corporations and consumers are part of a broader society, and many of these big data archives offer insights that could benefit us all. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has said, “We must remember that technology remains a tool of humanity.” How can we, and corporate giants, then use these big data archives as a tool to serve humanity?

Google’s sequel to GFT, done right, could serve as a model for collaboration around big data for the public good. Google is making flu-related search data available to the CDC as well as select research groups. A key question going forward will be whether Google works with these groups to improve the methodology underlying GFT. Future versions should, for example, continually update the fit of the data to flu prevalence—otherwise, the value of the data stream will rapidly decay.

This is just an example, however, of the general challenge of how to build models of collaboration amongst industry, government, academics, and general do-gooders to use big data archives to produce insights for the public good. This came to the fore with the struggle (and delay) for finding a way to appropriately share mobile phone data in west Africa during the Ebola epidemic (mobile phone data are likely the best tool for understanding human—and thus Ebola—movement). Companies need to develop efforts to share data for the public good in a fashion that respects individual privacy.

There is not going to be a single solution to this issue, but for starters, we are pushing for a “big data” repository in Boston to allow holders of sensitive big data to share those collections with researchers while keeping them totally secure. The UN has its Global Pulse initiative, setting up collaborative data repositories around the world. Flowminder, based in Sweden, is a nonprofit dedicated to gathering mobile phone data that could help in response to disasters. But these are still small, incipient, and fragile efforts.

The question going forward now is how build on and strengthen these efforts, while still guarding the privacy of individuals and the proprietary interests of the holders of big data….(More)”