The Intersection of Data, Equity, and City Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Yuki Mitsuda: “The Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator program was established in September 2021 to help realize the Third Wave of Open Data at the subnational level by building data capacity among city intrapreneurs. In its first iteration, the program supported innovators from ten cities around the world to better use data to address the opportunities and challenges they face.

Reflecting on the six-month program, the work enabled participants to meet the needs of their cities and the people within them. They also revealed shared themes across cities — common challenges and issues that defined urban, data-driven work in the 21st century. This blog explores one of the emerging themes we saw from participants in the City Incubator program: the intersection of equity, data, and city governments…

Three of our city incubator participants designed their data innovations around the ways cities and citizens can use data to measure and improve equity. 

  • Jennifer Bodnarchuk, a Senior Data Scientist at the Innovation & Technology Department in the City of Winnipeg, for example, led the development of a Diversity Dashboard that quantified and visualized their municipal government’s workforce representation. The tool can be used to measure the level of diversity represented in city-wide employment to move towards equitable hiring in the public sector. 
  • Henry Xavier Hernandez, the Chief Information Officer at the Information Technology Department in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and his team leveraged the City Incubator to develop Citizen 360, a public market analysis platform that helps businesses, organizations, and individuals identify economic opportunities in the city. This tool can aid small business owners from all backgrounds who are navigating the journey of starting a new business.
  • Andrea Calderon led Albuquerque’s Equity Index, which helps evaluate the reach of city service distribution with the goal of increasing municipal investment in pockets of the city where equitable city service provision has not yet been achieved. Albuquerque’s Equity Index work entailed assessing air quality in the city through the framework of cumulative impacts, which measures “exposures, public health, or environmental effects from the combined emissions in a geographic area” in pursuit of environmental justice…(More)”.

Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

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Book by Geoff Mulgan: “As the world confronts both the fast catastrophe of Covid and the slow crisis of climate change, we also face a third, less visible emergency: a crisis of imagination. Millions of us can picture the world going awry, yet our confident visions of the future are largely dominated by technology and hardware. Most citizens struggle to envisage how we could live better-improve our democracy, welfare, neighborhoods or education-fueling a pervasive, pessimistic resignation.

This book argues that, although the threats are real, our fatalism has overshot. Achieving a better future depends on creative imagination: the ability to see where we might want to go, and how we might want to get there. Political veteran Geoff Mulgan offers the lessons we can learn from the past and the methods we can use now to open up our thinking about the future; to discover how to look at things not only in terms of what they are, but also what they could be.

Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy and history, Mulgan shows how we can recharge our collective imagination. At a time when the public wants to see transformational social change, he provides a roadmap for the future…(More)”.

Democracy: by design and on the move

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Erica Dorn and Federico Vaz: “We live in an era of hyper-mobility, marked by the mass movement of people virtually, trans-locally, and globally. More people are on the move than ever before in human history. Today, dispersed across the globe, there are between 272 million and one billion migrants. More than 15 million people worldwide live without nationality, and an even larger number of people live undocumented.

Much like James C. Scott, it can be tempting to think that the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around‘. For the kinetic elite, borders are thresholds of access. Meanwhile, for a growing number of displaced people, borders represent inhumane exclusion.

More than 15 million people worldwide live without nationality, and an even larger number of people live undocumented

Current democratic structures designed to be representative of the people cannot adapt to the increasing number of people on the move. As a result, an overwhelming gap exists between the rapidly changing reality of democracies made up of ineligible voters, and the need for inclusive participation in the democratic process.

In the US, several cities, including New York, have taken measures to pass non-citizen voting policies. These promote the inclusion of more residents in local elections. However, given generally low voter turnout, it will take more than voting rights to create more inclusive democracies…(More)”.

The Political Impact of the Sustainable Development Goals: Transforming Governance Through Global Goals?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Frank Biermann, Thomas Hickmann, and Carole-Anne Sénit: “Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence, and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies….(More)”.

Roadside safety messages increase crashes by distracting drivers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jonathan Hall and Joshua Madsen: “Behavioural interventions involve gently suggesting that people reconsider or change specific undesirable behaviours. They are a low-cost, easy-to-implement and increasingly common tool used by policymakers to encourage socially desirable behaviours.

Examples of behavioural interventions include telling people how their electricity usage compares to their neighbours or sending text messages reminding people to pay fines.

Many of these interventions are expressly designed to “seize people’s attention” at a time when they can take the desired action. Unfortunately, seizing people’s attention can crowd out other, more important considerations, and cause even a simple intervention to backfire with costly individual and social consequences.

One such behavioural intervention struck us as odd: Several U.S. states display year-to-date fatality statistics (number of deaths) on roadside dynamic message signs (DMSs). The hope is that these sobering messages will reduce traffic crashes, a leading cause of death of five- to 29-year-olds worldwide. Perhaps because of its low cost and ease of implementation, at least 28 U.S. states have displayed fatality statistics at least once since 2012. We estimate that approximately 90 million drivers have been exposed to such messages.

a road sign saying 1669 DEATHS THIS YEAR ON TEXAS ROADS
A roadside dynamic messaging sign in Texas, displaying the death toll from road crashes. (Jonathan Hall), Author provided

Startling results

As academic researchers with backgrounds in information disclosure and transportation policy, we teamed up to investigate and quantify the effects of these messages. What we found startled us.

Contrary to policymakers’ expectations (and ours), we found that displaying fatality messages increases the number of crashes…(More)”.

Six Prescriptions for Applied Behavioral Science as It Comes of Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dilip Soman and Nina Mažar: “…But it has now been over 14 years since the publication of Nudge and more than 10 years since the first behavioral unit in government started functioning. While we have made a lot of progress as a field, we believe that the applied science is at a critical juncture. Our efforts at this stage will determine whether the field matures in a systematic and stable manner, or grows wildly and erratically. Unless we take stock of the science, the practice, and the mechanisms that we can put into place to align the two, we will run the danger of the promise of behavioral science being an illusion for many—not because the science itself was faulty, but because we did not successfully develop a science for using the science.  

We offer six prescriptions for how the field of applied behavioral science can better align itself so that it grows in a systematic and not in a wild manner. 

1. Offer a balanced and nuanced view of the promise of behavioral science 

We believe that it is incumbent on leaders in both the academic and applied space to offer a balanced view of the promise of behavioral science. While we understand that the nature of the book publication process or of public lectures tends to skew on additives to highlight success, we also believe that it is perhaps more of a contribution for the field to highlight limitations and nuances. Rather than narratives along the lines of “A causes B,” it would be helpful for our leaders to highlight narratives such as “A causes B in some conditions and C in others.” Dissemination of this new narrative could take the form of traditional knowledge mobilization tools, such as books, popular press articles, interviews, podcasts, and essays. Our recent coedited book, Behavioral Science in the Wild, is one attempt at this.

2.Publish null and nonsurprising results 

Academic incentives usually create a body of work that (a) is replete with positive results, (b) overrepresents surprising results, (c) is not usually replicated, and (d) is focused on theory and phenomena and not on practical problems. As has been discussed elsewhere, this occurs because of the academic incentive structure, which favors surprising and positive results. We call on our field to change this culture by creating platforms that allow and encourage authors to publish null results, as well as unsurprising results…(More)”.

Omnivorous Analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Anne Lee Steele: “Satellite imagery has woven itself into the fabric of the internet. We recognize these crisp, high-definition, bird’s-eye-view images most commonly from Google Earth—but we employ them in much more besides: from reporting on stuck shipping containers to getting directions to a friend’s house, to tracking forest fires in real time and scrolling through real estate listings. Given their ever-widening range of commercial, consumer, and civic uses, it won’t surprise most people to hear that the industry that produces them (also known as Earth Observation, or EO) is growing at an exponential rate, and is only expected to expand further in the coming years.

Yet despite the prominence of satellite imagery in the geographical imagination of the internet, the imperatives of the industry are much less clear. The corporations that produce them are much less well known, and the military interests that back them remain as murky as ever. The highly visible commercial side of the industry is still deeply intertwined with its classified counterpart, and two companies, Maxar and Planet, have emerged to dominate the industry—supporting civilian functions with one hand, while supplying US defense needs with the other. 

Indeed, the ubiquity of commercial satellite imagery gives nearly anyone godlike powers of reconnaissance and surveillance not that far removed from those enjoyed by militaries and intelligence agencies—a fact that causes no small amount of anxiety within the Pentagon. The pervasiveness and power of their imagery compels us to ask: Where do they come from? And how are they being put to use?…(More)”.

A Future Built on Data: Data Strategies, Competitive Advantage and Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Susan Ariel Aaronson: “In the twenty-first century, data became the subject of national strategy. This paper examines these visions and strategies to better understand what policy makers hope to achieve. Data is different from other inputs: it is plentiful, easy to use and can be utilized and shared by many different people without being used up. Moreover, data can be simultaneously a commercial asset and a public good. Various types of data can be analyzed to create new products and services or to mitigate complex “wicked” problems that transcend generations and nations (a public good function). However, an economy built on data analysis also brings problems — firms and governments can manipulate or misuse personal data, and in so doing undermine human autonomy and human rights. Given the complicated nature of data and its various types (for example, personal, proprietary, public, and so on), a growing number of governments have decided to outline how they see data’s role in the economy and polity. While it is too early to evaluate the effectiveness of these strategies, policy makers increasingly recognize that if they want to build their country’s future on data, they must also focus on trust….(More)”.

How We Can Encode Human Rights In The Blockchain

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Nathan Schneider: “Imagine there is a new decentralized finance app quietly spreading around the world that’s like a payday lender from hell. Call it DevilsBridge. Rather than getting it from the App Store, you access its blockchain contracts directly, using a Web browser with a crypto-wallet plugin. DevilsBridge provides small loans in cryptocurrency that “bridge” people to the next paycheck. The interest rates are far below those of conventional payday lenders, which is life-changing for many users.

But if the payments go unpaid, they grow. They balloon. They reach multiples upon multiples of the principal. As time goes on, pressure ratchets up on borrowers, who become notorious for undertaking desperate, violent crimes to pay back their exorbitant debts. The deal, after all, is that if a debt reaches the magic threshold of $1 million, the debtor becomes a target. A private market of poison-dart-shooting drones receives a bounty to assassinate the mega-debtors.

Anywhere there are laws, of course, this is all wildly illegal. But nobody knows who created DevilDAO, the decentralized autonomous organization that operates DevilsBridge, or who its members are. The identities of the drone owners also hide behind cryptographic gibberish. Sometimes local police can trace the drones back to their bases, or investigators can trace a DevilDAO member’s address to a real person. But in most places where the assassinations happen, authorities are ill-equipped for airborne chases or scrutinizing blockchain analytics.

This may sound like a cartoonish scenario, but it’s freshly plausible thanks to the advent of decentralized, autonomous systems on blockchains. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin jokingly nodded to such dystopian possibilities in early 2014, when he listed possible uses for his proposed blockchain, from crop insurance to decentralized social networks — or perhaps, he said as he walked away from the mic, it could allow for the creation of Skynet, the robot intelligence in the “Terminator” movies that tries to exterminate the human race.

The potential for blockchain-enabled human-rights abuses is real. At the same time, these technologies introduce new ways of encoding and enforcing rights. Imagine the blockchain that DevilsBridge runs on introduces a software update. It bans any smart contract that kills humans. An anonymous investigator presents evidence of what the app is doing, and an anonymous jury confirms its validity; instantly, the contracts for DevilsBridge and DevilDAO no longer function…(More)”.

AI Ethics: Global Perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Course Modules: “A Cybernetics Approach to Ethical AI Design” explores the relationship between cybernetics and AI ethics, and looks at how cybernetics can be leveraged to reframe how we think about and how we undertake ethical AI design. This module, by Ellen Broad, Associate Professor and Associate Director at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics, is divided into three sections, beginning with an introduction to cybernetics. Following that, we explore different ways of thinking about AI ethics, before concluding by bringing the two concepts together to understand a new approach to ethical AI design.

How should organizations put AI ethics and responsible AI into practice? Is the answer AI ethics principles and AI ethics boards or should everyone developing AI systems become experts in ethics? In “An Ethics Model for Innovation: The PiE (Puzzle-solving in Ethics) Model”, Cansu Canca, Founder and Director of the AI Ethics Lab, presents the model developed and employed at AI Ethics Lab: The Puzzle-solving in Ethics (PiE) Model. The PiE Model is a comprehensive and structured practice framework for organizations to integrate ethics into their operations as they develop and deploy AI systems. The PiE Model aims to make ethics a robust and integral part of innovation and enhance innovation through ethical puzzle-solving.

Nuria Oliver, Co-Founder and Scientific Director of the ELLIS Alicante Unit, presents “Data Science against COVID-19: The Valencian Experience”. In this module, we explore the ELLIS Alicante Foundation’s Data-Science for COVID-19 team’s work in the Valencian region of Spain. The team was founded in response to the pandemic in March 2020 to assist policymakers in making informed, evidence-based decisions. The team tackles four different work areas: modeling human mobility, building computational epidemiological models, predictive models on the prevalence of the disease, and operating one of the largest online citizen surveys related to COVID-19 in the world. This lecture explains the four work streams and shares lessons learned from their work at the intersection between data, AI, and the pandemic…(More)”.