The digital revolution liberating Latin American people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Luis Alberto Moreno in the Financial Times: “Imagine a place where citizens can deal with the state entirely online, where all health records are electronic and the wait for emergency care is just seven minutes. Singapore? Switzerland? Try Colima, Mexico.

Pessimists fear the digital revolution will only widen social and economic disparities in the developing world — particularly in Latin America, the world’s most unequal region. But Colima, though small and relatively prosperous, shows how some of the region’s governments are harnessing these tools to modernise services, improve quality of life and share the benefits of technology more equitably.

In the past 10 years, this state of about 600,000 people has transformed the way government works, going completely digital. Its citizens can carry out 62 procedures online, from applying for permits to filing crime reports. No internet at home? Colima offers hundreds of free WiFi hotspots.

Colombia and Peru are taking broadband to remote corners of their rugged territories. Bogotá has subsidised the ex­pansion of its fibre optic network, which now links virtually every town in the country. Peru is expanding a programme that aims to bring WiFi to schools, hospitals and other public buildings in each of its 25 regions. The Colombian plan, Vive Digital, fosters internet adoption among all its citizens. Taxes on computers, tablets and smartphones have been scrapped. Low-income families have been given vouchers to sign up for broadband. In five years, the percentage of households connected to the internet jumped from 16 per cent to 50 per cent. Among small businesses it soared from 7 per cent to 61 per cent .

Inexpensive devices and ubiquitous WiFi, however, do not guarantee widespread usage. Diego Molano Vega, an architect of Vive Digital, found that many programs designed for customers in developed countries were ill suited to most Colombians. “There are no poor people in Silicon Valley,” he says. Latin American governments should use their purchasing power to push for development of digital services easily adopted by their citizens and businesses. Chile is a leader: it has digitised hundreds of trámites — bureaucratic procedures involving endless forms and queues. In a 4,300km-longcountry of mountains, deserts and forests, this enables access to all sorts of services through the internet. Entrepreneurs can now register businesses online for free in a single day.

In Chile, entrepreneurs can now register new businesses online for free in a single day…

Technology can be harnessed to boost equity in education. Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state launched a free online service to prepare high school students for a tough national exam in which a good grade is a prerequisite for admission to federal universities. On average the results of the students who used the service were 31 per cent higher than those of their peers, prompting 10 other states to adopt the system.

Digital tools can also help raise competitiveness in business. Uruguay’s livestock information system keeps track of the country’s cattle. The publicly financed electronic registry ensures every beast can be traced, making it easier to monitor outbreaks of diseases….(More)”

 

Science to the people!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Magan, at Digital Agenda for Europe:” …I attended the 2nd Barcelona Citizen Science Day organised as part of the city’s Science Festival. The programme was full and varied and in itself a great example of the wonderful world of do-it-yourself, hands-on, accessible, practical science. A huge variety of projects (see below) was delivered with enthusiasm, passion, and energy!

The day was rounded off with a presentation by Public Lab who showed how a bit of technical ingenuity like cheap cameras on kites and balloons can be used to keep governments and large businesses more honest and accountable – for example, data they collected is being used in court cases against BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what was most striking is the empowerment that these Citizen Science projects give individuals to do things for themselves – to take measures to monitor, protect or improve their urban or rural environment; to indulge their curiosity or passions; to improve their finances; to work with others; to do good while having serious fun….If you want to have a deeper look, here are some of the many projects presented on a great variety of themes:

Water

Wildlife

Climate

Arts

Public health

Human

A nice booklet capturing them is available and there’s aslo a summary in Catalan only.

Read more about citizen science in the European Commission….(More)”

How a Mexico City Traffic Experiment Connects to Community Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoe Mendelson in Next Cities: “Last November, Gómez-Mont, Jose Castillo, an urban planning professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and Carlos Gershenson, their data analyst, won the Audi Urban Future award for their plan to use big data to solve Mexico City’s traffic problem. The plan consists of three parts, the first a data-donating platform that collects information on origin and destination, transit times, and modes of transit. The app, Living Mobs, is now in use in beta form. The plan also establishes data-sharing partnerships with companies, educational institutions and government agencies. So far, they’ve already signed on Yaxi, Microsoft, Movistar and Uber among others, and collected 14,000 datasets.

The data will be a welcome new resource for the city. “We just don’t have enough,” explains Gómez-Mont, “we call it ‘big city, little data.” The city’s last origin-destination survey conducted in 2007 only caught data from 50,000 people, which at the time was somewhat of a feat. Now, just one of their current data-sharing partners, Yaxi, has 10,000 cars circulating alone. Still, they have one major obstacle to a comprehensive citywide survey that can only be partially addressed by their data-donating platform (which also, of course, does depend on people having smartphones): 60 percent of transportation in Mexico City is on a hard-to-track informal bus system.

The data will eventually end up in an app that gives people real-time transit information. But an underlying idea — that traffic can be solved simply by asking people to take turns — is the project’s most radical and interesting component. Gómez-Mont paints a seductive alternative futuristic vision of incentivized negotiation of the city.

“Say I wake up and while getting ready for work I check and see that Périferico is packed and I say, ‘OK, today I’m going to use my bike or take public transit,’ and maybe I earn some kind of City Points, which translates into a tax break. Or maybe I’m on Périferico and earn points for getting off to relieve congestion.” She even envisions a system through which people could submit their calendar data weeks in advance. With the increasing popularity of Google Calendar and other similar systems that sync with smartphones, advanced “data donation” doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

Essentially, the app would create the opportunity for an entire city to behave as a group and solve its own problems together in real time.

Gómez-Mont insists that mobility is not just a problem for the government to solve. “It’s also very much about citizens and how we behave and what type of culture is embedded in the world outside of the government,” she notes….(More)”.

Beyond Propaganda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Foreign Policy: “This essay is adapted from the first in a series of publications by the Legatum Institute’s Transitions Forum on the politics of information in the 21st century.

Pity the poor propagandist! Back in the 20th century, it was a lot easier to control an authoritarian country’s hearts and minds. All domestic media could be directed out of a government office. Foreign media could be jammed. Borders were sealed, and your population couldn’t witness the successes of a rival system. You had a clear narrative with at least a theoretically enticing vision of social justice or national superiority, one strong enough to fend off the seductions of liberal democracy and capitalism. Anyone who disagreed could be isolated, silenced, and suppressed.

Those were the halcyon days of what the Chinese call “thought work” — and Soviets called the “engineering of human souls.” And until recently, it seemed as if they were gone forever. Today’s smart phones and laptops mean any citizen can be their own little media center. Borders are more open. Western films, cars, and search engines permeate virtually everywhere. All regimes are experimenting with at least some version of capitalism, which theoretically means that everyone has more in common.

Yet the story is far from straightforward. Neo-authoritarian, “hybrid,” and illiberal democratic regimes in countries such as Venezuela, Turkey, China, Syria, and Russia have not given up on propaganda. They have found completely new ways of pursuing it, many of them employing technologies invented in the democratic world.

Why fight the information age and globalization when you can use it?

Often, the techniques are quite subtle. After analyzing the real-time censorship of 1,382 Chinese websites during the first half of 2011 — 11,382,221 posts in all — researchers from Harvard University found that the government’s propagandists did in fact tolerate criticism of politicians and policies. But they immediately censored any online attempts to organize collective protests, including some that were not necessarily critical of the regime. One heavily censored event, for example, was meant to highlight fears that nuclear spillage from Japan would reach China….(More)”

Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Carlos Moedas, EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation: “On 25 April this year, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 hit Nepal. To get real-time geographical information, the response teams used an online mapping tool called Open Street Map. Open Street Map has created an entire online map of the world using local knowledge, GPS tracks and donated sources, all provided on a voluntary basis. It is open license for any use.

Open Street Map was created by a 24 year-old computer science student at University College London in 2004, has today 2 million users and has been used for many digital humanitarian and commercial purposes: From the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

This story is one of many that demonstrate that we are moving into a world of open innovation and user innovation. A world where the digital and physical are coming together. A world where new knowledge is created through global collaborations involving thousands of people from across the world and from all walks of life.

Ladies and gentlemen, over the next two days I would like us to chart a new path for European research and innovation policy. A new strategy that is fit for purpose for a world that is open, digital and global. And I would like to set out at the start of this important conference my own ambitions for the coming years….

Open innovation is about involving far more actors in the innovation process, from researchers, to entrepreneurs, to users, to governments and civil society. We need open innovation to capitalise on the results of European research and innovation. This means creating the right ecosystems, increasing investment, and bringing more companies and regions into the knowledge economy. I would like to go further and faster towards open innovation….

I am convinced that excellent science is the foundation of future prosperity, and that openness is the key to excellence. We are often told that it takes many decades for scientific breakthroughs to find commercial application.

Let me tell you a story which shows the opposite. Graphene was first isolated in the laboratory by Profs. Geim and Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2003 (Nobel Prizes 2010). The development of graphene has since benefitted from major EU support, including ERC grants for Profs. Geim and Novoselov. So I am proud to show you one of the new graphene products that will soon be available on the market.

This light bulb uses the unique thermal dissipation properties of graphene to achieve greater energy efficiencies and a longer lifetime that LED bulbs. It was developed by a spin out company from the University of Manchester, called Graphene Lighting, as is expected to go on sale by the end of the year.

But we must not be complacent. If we look at indicators of the most excellent science, we find that Europe is not top of the rankings in certain areas. Our ultimate goal should always be to promote excellence not only through ERC and Marie Skłodowska-Curie but throughout the entire H2020.

For such an objective we have to move forward on two fronts:

First, we are preparing a call for European Science Cloud Project in order to identify the possibility of creating a cloud for our scientists. We need more open access to research results and the underlying data. Open access publication is already a requirement under Horizon 2020, but we now need to look seriously at open data…

When innovators like LEGO start fusing real bricks with digital magic, when citizens conduct their own R&D through online community projects, when doctors start printing live tissues for patients … Policymakers must follow suit…(More)”

In Brazil, missing persons posters automatically print in nearby homes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “In Brazil, 200,000 people go missing each year and posters are still one of the most effective ways of locating them. Now, Mães da Sé NGO — the nonprofit dedicated to helping families find missing people — has partnered with HP for the Print for Help campaign. Using HP’s ePrint technology, which facilitates mobile and email printing, the campaign will help spread the word about missing individuals by automatically producing posters through nearby homes printers.

By registering printers with citizens’ email addresses and zip codes, Mães da Sé is able to email and automatically print posters in the area where a person went missing. Citizens can then assist with the search effort by displaying the poster in busy areas in their neighborhood, and create a network of helpers. By streamlining and speeding up the process of poster printing, the efforts in the first few hours, which are crucial in a search, can be maximized….(More)”.

Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work…(More)”

Beating the news’ with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest using Open Source Indicators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Naren Ramakrishnan et al: “We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24×7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the uptick and downtick of incidents during the June 2013 protests in Brazil. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings….(More)”

Big Data’s Impact on Public Transportation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

InnovationEnterprise: “Getting around any big city can be a real pain. Traffic jams seem to be a constant complaint, and simply getting to work can turn into a chore, even on the best of days. With more people than ever before flocking to the world’s major metropolitan areas, the issues of crowding and inefficient transportation only stand to get much worse. Luckily, the traditional methods of managing public transportation could be on the verge of changing thanks to advances in big data. While big data use cases have been a part of the business world for years now, city planners and transportation experts are quickly realizing how valuable it can be when making improvements to city transportation. That hour long commute may no longer be something travelers will have to worry about in the future.

In much the same way that big data has transformed businesses around the world by offering greater insight in the behavior of their customers, it can also provide a deeper look at travellers. Like retail customers, commuters have certain patterns they like to keep to when on the road or riding the rails. Travellers also have their own motivations and desires, and getting to the heart of their actions is all part of what big data analytics is about. By analyzing these actions and the factors that go into them, transportation experts can gain a better understanding of why people choose certain routes or why they prefer one method of transportation over another. Based on these findings, planners can then figure out where to focus their efforts and respond to the needs of millions of commuters.

Gathering the accurate data needed to make knowledgeable decisions regarding city transportation can be a challenge in itself, especially considering how many people commute to work in a major city. New methods of data collection have made that effort easier and a lot less costly. One way that’s been implemented is through the gathering of call data records (CDR). From regular transactions made from mobile devices, information about location, time, and duration of an action (like a phone call) can give data scientists the necessary details on where people are traveling to, how long it takes them to get to their destination, and other useful statistics. The valuable part of this data is the sample size, which provides a much bigger picture of the transportation patterns of travellers.

That’s not the only way cities are using big data to improve public transportation though. Melbourne in Australia has long been considered one of the world’s best cities for public transit, and much of that is thanks to big data. With big data and ad hoc analysis, Melbourne’s acclaimed tram system can automatically reconfigure routes in response to sudden problems or challenges, such as a major city event or natural disaster. Data is also used in this system to fix problems before they turn serious.Sensors located in equipment like tram cars and tracks can detect when maintenance is needed on a specific part. Crews are quickly dispatched to repair what needs fixing, and the tram system continues to run smoothly. This is similar to the idea of the Internet of Things, wherein embedded sensors collect data that is then analyzed to identify problems and improve efficiency.

Sao Paulo, Brazil is another city that sees the value of using big data for its public transportation. The city’s efforts concentrate on improving the management of its bus fleet. With big data collected in real time, the city can get a more accurate picture of just how many people are riding the buses, which routes are on time, how drivers respond to changing conditions, and many other factors. Based off of this information, Sao Paulo can optimize its operations, providing added vehicles where demand is genuine whilst finding which routes are the most efficient. Without big data analytics, this process would have taken a very long time and would likely be hit-or-miss in terms of accuracy, but now, big data provides more certainty in a shorter amount of time….(More)”

Why open data should be central to Fifa reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gavin Starks in The Guardian: “Over the past two weeks, Fifa has faced mounting pressure to radically improve its transparency and governance in the wake of corruption allegations. David Cameron has called for reforms including expanding the use of open data.

Open data is information made available by governments, businesses and other groups for anyone to read, use and share. Data.gov.uk was launched as the home of UK open government data in January 2010 and now has almost 21,000 published datasets, including on government spending.

Allowing citizens to freely access data related to the institutions that govern them is essential to a well-functioning democratic society. It is the first step towards holding leaders to account for failures and wrongdoing.

Fifa has a responsibility for the shared interests of millions of fans around the world. Football’s popularity means that Fifa’s governance has wide-ranging implications for society, too. This is particularly true of decisions about hosting the World Cup, which is often tied to large-scale government investment in infrastructure and even extends to law-making. Brazil spent up to £10bn hosting the 2014 World Cup and had to legalise the sale of beer at matches.

Following Sepp Blatter’s resignation, Fifa will gather its executive committee in July to plan for a presidential election, expected to take place in mid-December. Open data should form the cornerstone of any prospective candidate’s manifesto. It can help Fifa make better spending decisions and ensure partners deliver value for money, restore the trust of the international football community.

Fifa’s lengthy annual financial report gives summaries of financial expenditure,budgeted at £184m for operations and governance alone in 2016, but individual transactions are not published. Publishing spending data incentivises better spending decisions. If all Fifa’s outgoings – which totalled around £3.5bn between 2011 and 2014 – were made open, it would encourage much more efficiency….(more)”