Colombia’s Data-Driven Fight Against Crime

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

One Monday in 1988, El Mundo newspaper of Medellín, Colombia, reported, as it did every Monday, on the violent deaths in the city of two million people over the weekend. An article giving an hour-by-hour description of the deaths from Saturday night to Sunday night was remarkable for, among other things, the journalist’s skill in finding different ways to report a murder. “Someone took the life of Luís Alberto López at knife point … Luís Alberto Patiño ceased to exist with a bullet in his head … Mario Restrepo turned up dead … An unidentified person killed Néstor Alvarez with three shots.” In reporting 27 different murders, the author repeated his phrasing only once.

….What Guerrero did to make Cali safer was remarkable because it worked, and because of the novelty of his strategy. Before becoming mayor, Guerrero was not a politician, but a Harvard-trained epidemiologist who was president of the Universidad del Valle in Cali. He set out to prevent murder the way a doctor prevents disease. What public health workers are doing now to stop the spread of Ebola, Guerrero did in Cali to stop the spread of violence.

Although his ideas have now been used in dozens of cities throughout Latin America, they are worth revisiting because they are not employed in the places that need them most. The most violent places in Latin America are Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — indeed, they are among the most violent countries in the world not at war. The wave of youth migration to the United States is from these countries, and the refugees are largely fleeing violence.

One small municipality in El Salvador, Santa Tecla, has employed Cali’s strategies since about 10 years ago, and the homicide rate has dropped there. But Santa Tecla is an anomaly. Most of the region’s cities have not tried to do what Guerrero did — and they are failing to protect their citizens….

Guerrero went on to spread his ideas. Working with the Pan-American Health Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank, he took his epidemiological methods to 18 other countries.

“The approach was very low-cost and pragmatic,” said Joan Serra Hoffman, a senior specialist in crime and violence prevention in Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. “You could see it was conceived by someone who was an academic and a policy maker. It can be fully operational for between $50,000 and $80,000.”…

How to use the Internet to end corrupt deals between companies and governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stella Dawson at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “Every year governments worldwide spend more than $9.5 trillion on public goods and services, but finding out who won those contracts, why and whether they deliver as promised is largely invisible.
Enter the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica and Paraguay became the first countries to announce on Tuesday that they have adopted the new global standards for publishing contracts online as part of a project to shine a light on how public money is spent and to combat massive corruption in public procurement.
“The mission is to end secret deals between companies and governments,” said Gavin Hayman, the incoming executive director for Open Contracting Partnership.
The concept is simple. Under Open Contracting, the government publishes online the projects it is putting out for bid and the terms; companies submit bids online; the winning contract is published including the reasons why; and then citizens can monitor performance according to the terms of the contract.
The Open Contracting initiative, developed by the World Wide Web Foundation with the support of the World Bank and Omidyar Network, has been several years in the making and is part of a broader global movement to increase the accountability of governments by using Internet technologies to make them more transparent.
A pioneer in data transparency was the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global coalition of governments, companies and civil society that works on improving accountability by publishing the revenues received in 35 member countries for their natural resources.
Publish What You Fund is a similar initiative for the aid industry. It delivered a common open standards in 2011 for donor countries to publish how much money they gave in development aid and details of what projects that money funded and where.
There’s also the Open Government Partnership, an international forum of 65 countries, each of which adopts an action plan laying out how it will improve the quality of government through collaboration with civil society, frequently using new technologies.
All of these initiatives have helped crack open the door of government.
What’s important about Open Contracting is the sheer scale of impact it could have. Public procurement accounts for about 15 percent of global GDP and according to Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation which seeks to expand free access to the web worldwide and backed the OCDS project, corruption adds an estimated $2.3 trillion to the cost of those contracts every year.
A study by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, looked at four countries already publishing their contracts online — the United Kingdom, Georgia, Colombia and Slovakia. It found open contracting increased visibility and encouraged more companies to submit bids, the quality and price competitiveness improved and citizen monitoring meant better service delivery….”
 

Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its feasibility, have been swept away by the enthusiasm and the large number of papers that have been sent in….”

 

How Wikipedia Data Is Revolutionizing Flu Forecasting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “This time last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta launched a competition to find the best way to forecast the characteristics of the 2013-2014 influenza season using data gathered from the internet. Today, Kyle Hickmann from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and a few pals reveal the results of their model which used real-time data from Wikipedia to forecast the ground truth data gathered by the CDC that surfaces about two weeks later.

They say their model has the potential to transform flu forecasting from a black art to a modern science as well-founded as weather forecasting.
Flu takes between 3,000 and 49,000 lives each year in the U.S. so an accurate forecast can have a significant impact on the way society prepares for the epidemic. The current method of monitoring flu outbreaks is somewhat antiquated. It relies on a voluntary system in which public health officials report the percentage of patients they see each week with influenza-like illnesses. This is defined as the percentage of people with a temperature higher than 100 degrees, a cough and no other explanation other than flu.
These numbers give a sense of the incidence of flu at any instant but the accuracy is clearly limited. They do not, for example, account for people with flu who do not seek treatment or people with flu-like symptoms who seek treatment but do not have flu.
There is another significant problem. The network that reports this data is relatively slow. It takes about two weeks for the numbers to filter through the system so the data is always weeks old.
That’s why the CDC is interested in finding new ways to monitor the spread of flu in real time. Google, in particular, has used the number of searches for flu and flu-like symptoms to forecast flu in various parts of the world. That approach has had considerable success but also some puzzling failures. One problem, however, is that Google does not make its data freely available and this lack of transparency is a potential source of trouble for this kind of research.
So Hickmann and co have turned to Wikipedia. Their idea is that the variation in numbers of people accessing articles about flu is an indicator of the spread of the disease. And since Wikipedia makes this data freely available to any interested party, it is an entirely transparent source that is likely to be available for the foreseeable future….
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1410.7716 : Forecasting the 2013–2014 Influenza Season using Wikipedia”

Research Handbook On Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Padideh Ala’i and Robert G. Vaughn: ‘”Transparency” has multiple, contested meanings. This broad-ranging volume accepts that complexity and thoughtfully contrasts alternative views through conceptual pieces, country cases, and assessments of policies–such as freedom of information laws, whistleblower protections, financial disclosure, and participatory policymaking procedures.’
– Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University Law School, US
In the last two decades transparency has become a ubiquitous and stubbornly ambiguous term. Typically understood to promote rule of law, democratic participation, anti-corruption initiatives, human rights, and economic efficiency, transparency can also legitimate bureaucratic power, advance undemocratic forms of governance, and aid in global centralization of power. This path-breaking volume, comprising original contributions on a range of countries and environments, exposes the many faces of transparency by allowing readers to see the uncertainties, inconsistencies and surprises contained within the current conceptions and applications of the term….
The expert contributors identify the goals, purposes and ramifications of transparency while presenting both its advantages and shortcomings. Through this framework, they explore transparency from a number of international and comparative perspectives. Some chapters emphasize cultural and national aspects of the issue, with country-specific examples from China, Mexico, the US and the UK, while others focus on transparency within global organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO. A number of relevant legal considerations are also discussed, including freedom of information laws, financial disclosure of public officials and whistleblower protection…”

Ebola and big data: Call for help

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “WITH at least 4,500 people dead, public-health authorities in west Africa and worldwide are struggling to contain Ebola. Borders have been closed, air passengers screened, schools suspended. But a promising tool for epidemiologists lies unused: mobile-phone data.
When people make mobile-phone calls, the network generates a call data record (CDR) containing such information as the phone numbers of the caller and receiver, the time of the call and the tower that handled it—which gives a rough indication of the device’s location. This information provides researchers with an insight into mobility patterns. Indeed phone companies use these data to decide where to build base stations and thus improve their networks, and city planners use them to identify places to extend public transport.
But perhaps the most exciting use of CDRs is in the field of epidemiology. Until recently the standard way to model the spread of a disease relied on extrapolating trends from census data and surveys. CDRs, by contrast, are empirical, immediate and updated in real time. You do not have to guess where people will flee to or move. Researchers have used them to map malaria outbreaks in Kenya and Namibia and to monitor the public response to government health warnings during Mexico’s swine-flu epidemic in 2009. Models of population movements during a cholera outbreak in Haiti following the earthquake in 2010 used CDRs and provided the best estimates of where aid was most needed.
Doing the same with Ebola would be hard: in west Africa most people do not own a phone. But CDRs are nevertheless better than simulations based on stale, unreliable statistics. If researchers could track population flows from an area where an outbreak had occurred, they could see where it would be likeliest to break out next—and therefore where they should deploy their limited resources. Yet despite months of talks, and the efforts of the mobile-network operators’ trade association and several smaller UN agencies, telecoms firms have not let researchers use the data (see article).
One excuse is privacy, which is certainly a legitimate worry, particularly in countries fresh from civil war, or where tribal tensions exist. But the phone data can be anonymised and aggregated in a way that alleviates these concerns. A bigger problem is institutional inertia. Big data is a new field. The people who grasp the benefits of examining mobile-phone usage tend to be young, and lack the clout to free them for research use.”

Can Bottom-Up Institutional Reform Improve Service Delivery?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working paper by Molina, Ezequiel: “This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on citizens’ assessment of service delivery performance. The second contribution is the introduction a theoretical framework to understand the pathway of change, the necessary building blocks that are needed for social audits to be effective. Using this framework, the third contribution of this article is answering the following questions: i) under what conditions do citizens decide to monitor government activity and ii) under what conditions do governments facilitate citizen engagement and become more accountable.”

Traversing Digital Babel

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Alon Peled: “The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex. New technologies are piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig. Obsolete programming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agency systems. Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receiving services, and even—as seen in interoperability failures on 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina—cost lives. In this book, Alon Peled offers a groundbreaking approach for enabling information sharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to “nudge” agencies to exchange information assets. Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), through which agencies would trade information.
After describing public sector information sharing failures and the advantages of incentivized sharing, Peled examines the U.S. Open Data program, and the gap between its rhetoric and results. He offers examples of creative public sector information sharing in the United States, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Peled argues that information is a contested commodity, and draws lessons from the trade histories of other contested commodities—including cadavers for anatomical dissection in nineteenth-century Britain. He explains how agencies can exchange information as a contested commodity through a PSIE program tailored to an individual country’s needs, and he describes the legal, economic, and technical foundations of such a program. Touching on issues from data ownership to freedom of information, Peled offers pragmatic advice to politicians, bureaucrats, technologists, and citizens for revitalizing critical information flows.”

New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report edited by Francesco Mancini for the International Peace Institute: “In an era of unprecedented interconnectivity, this report explores the ways in which new technologies can assist international actors, governments, and civil society organizations to more effectively prevent violence and conflict. It examines the contributions that cell phones, social media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, blogging, and big data analytics can make to short-term efforts to forestall crises and to long-term initiatives to address the root causes of violence.
Five case studies assess the use of such tools in a variety of regions (Africa, Asia, Latin America) experiencing different types of violence (criminal violence, election-related violence, armed conflict, short-term crisis) in different political contexts (restrictive and collaborative governments).
Drawing on lessons and insights from across the cases, the authors outline a how-to guide for leveraging new technology in conflict-prevention efforts:
1. Examine all tools.
2. Consider the context.
3. Do no harm.
4. Integrate local input.
5. Help information flow horizontally.
6. Establish consensus regarding data use.
7. Foster partnerships for better results.”