Why Funders Should Go Meta

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stuart Buck & Anna Harvey: “We don’t mean the former Facebook. Rather, philanthropies should prefer to fund meta-issues—i.e., research and evaluation, along with efforts to improve research quality. In many cases, it would be far more impactful than what they are doing now.

This is true at two levels.

First, suppose you want to support a certain cause–economic development in Africa, or criminal justice reform in the US, etc. You could spend millions or even billions on that cause.

But let’s go meta: a force multiplier would be funding high-quality research on what works on those issues. If you invest significantly in social and behavioral science research, you might find innumerable ways to improve on the existing status quo of donations.

Instead of only helping the existing nonprofits who seek to address economic development or criminal justice reform, you’d be helping to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The result could be a much better set of investments for all donors.

Perhaps some of your initial ideas end up not working, when exhaustively researched. At worst, that’s a temporary embarrassment, but it’s actually all for the better—now you and others know to avoid wasting more money on those ideas. Perhaps some of your favored policies are indeed good ideas (e.g., vaccination), but don’t have anywhere near enough take-up by the affected populations. Social and behavioral science research (as in the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project) could help find cost-effective ways to solve that problem…(More)”.

Building the analytic capacity to support critical technology strategy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Erica R.H. Fuchs: “Existing federal agencies relevant to the science and technology enterprise are appropriately focused on their missions, but the U.S. lacks the intellectual foundations, data infrastructure, and analytics to identify opportunities where the value of investment across missions (e.g., national security, economic prosperity, social well-being) is greater than the sum of its parts.

The U.S. government lacks systematic mechanisms to assess the nation’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in technology and to assess the long chain of suppliers involved in producing products critical to national missions.

Two examples where modern data and analytics—leveraging star interdisciplinary talent from across the nation—and a cross-mission approach could transform outcomes include 1) the difficulties the federal government had in facilitating the production and distribution of personal protective equipment in spring 2020, and 2) the lack of clarity about the causes and solutions to the semiconductor shortage. Going forward, the scale-up of electric vehicles promises similar challenges…

The critical technology analytics (CTA) would identify 1) how emerging technologies and institutional innovations could potentially transform timely situational awareness of U.S. and global technology capabilities, 2) opportunities for innovation to transform U.S. domestic and international challenges, and 3) win-win opportunities across national missions. The program would be strategic and forward-looking, conducting work on a timeline of months and years rather than days and weeks, and would seek to generalize lessons from individual cases to inform the data and analytics capabilities that the government needs to build to support cross-mission critical technology policy…(More)”.

Lawless Surveillance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Barry Friedman: “Here in the United States, policing agencies are engaging in mass collection of personal data, building a vast architecture of surveillance. License plate readers collect our location information. Mobile forensics data terminals suck in the contents of cell phones during traffic stops. CCTV maps our movements. Cheap storage means most of this is kept for long periods of time—sometimes into perpetuity. Artificial intelligence makes searching and mining the data a snap. For most of us whose data is collected, stored, and mined, there is no suspicion whatsoever of wrongdoing.

This growing network of surveillance is almost entirely unregulated. It is, in short, lawless. The Fourth Amendment touches almost none of it, either because what is captured occurs in public, and so is supposedly “knowingly exposed,” or because of doctrine that shields information collected from third parties. It is unregulated by statutes because legislative bodies—when they even know about these surveillance systems—see little profit in taking on the police.

In the face of growing concern over such surveillance, this Article argues there is a constitutional solution sitting in plain view. In virtually every other instance in which personal information is collected by the government, courts require that a sound regulatory scheme be in place before information collection occurs. The rulings on the mandatory nature of regulation are remarkably similar, no matter under which clause of the Constitution collection is challenged.

This Article excavates this enormous body of precedent and applies it to the problem of government mass data collection. It argues that before the government can engage in such surveillance, there must be a regulatory scheme in place. And by changing the default rule from allowing police to collect absent legislative prohibition, to banning collection until there is legislative action, legislatures will be compelled to act (or there will be no surveillance). The Article defines what a minimally-acceptable regulatory scheme for mass data collection must include, and shows how it can be grounded in the Constitution…(More)”.

All Democracy Is Global

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Larry Diamond: “The world is mired in a deep, diffuse, and protracted democratic recession. According to Freedom House, 2021 was the 16th consecutive year in which more countries declined in freedom than gained. Tunisia, the sole democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring protests that began in 2010, is morphing into a dictatorship. In countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Hungary, and Turkey, elections have long ceased to be democratic. Autocrats in Algeria, Belarus, Ethiopia, Sudan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe have clung to power despite mounting public demands for democratization. In Africa, seven democracies have slid back into autocracy since 2015, including Benin and Burkina Faso.

Democracy is looking shaky even in countries that hold free and fair elections. In emerging-market behemoths such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, democratic institutions and norms are under attack. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has made threats of an autogolpe (self-coup) and a possible return to military rule if he does not win reelection in October. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has steadily chipped away at press freedoms, minority rights, judicial independence, the integrity of the civil service, and the autonomy of civil society. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has attempted to silence critics and remove democratic checks and balances.

Democratic prospects have risen and fallen in decades past, but they now confront a formidable new problem: democracy is at risk in the very country that has traditionally been its most ardent champion. Over the past dozen years, the United States has experienced one of the biggest declines in political rights and civil liberties of any country measured by the Freedom House annual survey. The Economist now ranks the United States as a “flawed democracy” behind Spain, Costa Rica, and Chile. U.S. President Donald Trump deserves much of the blame: he abused presidential power on a scale unprecedented in U.S. history and, after being voted out of office, propagated the “Big Lie” of election fraud and incited the violent rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. But American democracy was in peril before Trump assumed office, with rising polarization exposing acute flaws in American democratic institutions. The Electoral College, the representational structure of the Senate, the Senate filibuster, the brazen gerrymandering of House districts, and lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court have all made it possible for a political minority to exert prolonged outsize influence.

Can a country in the throes of its own democratic decay do anything to arrest the broader global decline? For many, the answer is no…(More)”.

Social capital: measurement and associations with economic mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Raj Chetty et al: “Social capital—the strength of an individual’s social network and community—has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health. However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers, we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (3) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other. We demonstrate the importance of distinguishing these forms of social capital by analysing their associations with economic mobility across areas. The share of high-SES friends among individuals with low SES—which we term economic connectedness—is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date Other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average. Differences in economic connectedness can explain well-known relationships between upward income mobility and racial segregation, poverty rates, and inequality. To support further research and policy interventions, we publicly release privacy-protected statistics on social capital by ZIP code at https://www.socialcapital.org…(More)”.

Learning to Share: Lessons on Data-Sharing from Beyond Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by CDT: “What role has social media played in society? Did it influence the rise of Trumpism in the U.S. and the passage of Brexit in the UK? What about the way authoritarians exercise power in India or China? Has social media undermined teenage mental health? What about its role in building social and community capital, promoting economic development, and so on?

To answer these and other important policy-related questions, researchers such as academics, journalists, and others need access to data from social media companies. However, this data is generally not available to researchers outside of social media companies and, where it is available, it is often insufficient, meaning that we are left with incomplete answers.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have passed or proposed legislation to address the problem by requiring social media companies to provide certain data to vetted researchers (Vogus, 2022a). Researchers themselves have thought a lot about the problem, including the specific types of data that can further public interest research, how researchers should be vetted, and the mechanisms companies can use to provide data (Vogus, 2022b).

For their part, social media companies have sanctioned some methods to share data to certain types of researchers through APIs (e.g., for researchers with university affiliations) and with certain limitations (such as limits on how much and what types of data are available). In general, these efforts have been insufficient. In part, this is due to legitimate concerns such as the need to protect user privacy or to avoid revealing company trade secrets.  But, in some cases, the lack of sharing is due to other factors such as lack of resources or knowledge about how to share data effectively or resistance to independent scrutiny.

The problem is complex but not intractable. In this report, we look to other industries where companies share data with researchers through different mechanisms while also addressing concerns around privacy. In doing so, our analysis contributes to current public and corporate discussions about how to safely and effectively share social media data with researchers. We review experiences based on the governance of clinical trials, electricity smart meters, and environmental impact data…(More)”

‘Very Harmful’ Lack of Data Blunts U.S. Response to Outbreaks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sharon LaFraniere: “After a middle-aged woman tested positive for Covid-19 in January at her workplace in Fairbanks, public health workers sought answers to questions vital to understanding how the virus was spreading in Alaska’s rugged interior.

The woman, they learned, had underlying conditions and had not been vaccinated. She had been hospitalized but had recovered. Alaska and many other states have routinely collected that kind of information about people who test positive for the virus. Part of the goal is to paint a detailed picture of how one of the worst scourges in American history evolves and continues to kill hundreds of people daily, despite determined efforts to stop it.

But most of the information about the Fairbanks woman — and tens of millions more infected Americans — remains effectively lost to state and federal epidemiologists. Decades of underinvestment in public health information systems has crippled efforts to understand the pandemic, stranding crucial data in incompatible data systems so outmoded that information often must be repeatedly typed in by hand. The data failure, a salient lesson of a pandemic that has killed more than one million Americans, will be expensive and time-consuming to fix….(More)”.

The precise cost in needless illness and death cannot be quantified. The nation’s comparatively low vaccination rate is clearly a major factor in why the United States has recorded the highest Covid death rate among large, wealthy nations. But federal experts are certain that the lack of comprehensive, timely data has also exacted a heavy toll.

“It has been very harmful to our response,” said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, who leads the White House effort to control the pandemic. “It’s made it much harder to respond quickly.”

Details of the Fairbanks woman’s case were scattered among multiple state databases, none of which connect easily to the others, much less to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal agency in charge of tracking the virus. Nine months after she fell ill, her information was largely useless to epidemiologists because it was impossible to synthesize most of it with data on the roughly 300,000 other Alaskans and the 95 million-plus other Americans who have gotten Covid.

Accelerating Government Innovation With Leadership and Stimulus Funding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Wiseman: “With the evolving maturity of innovation offices and digital teams comes the imperative for leaders and managers to provide pathways for these organizations to succeed and work together effectively, in terms of embracing new ideas and scaling those that prove effective beyond a prototype or pilot. The availability of a large, one-time infusion of federal funds to support state and local services and programs through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure law, and other recent laws provides State and local leaders with a unique opportunity to collaborate with their federal partners and promote innovation that improves the lives of their people. Data and innovation teams can help government be more efficient and effective in spending stimulus funds at the state and local level in the coming years.

In this new report, Jane Wiseman explores various ways that executives can leverage stimulus funding to incentivize success across multiple innovation and data roles, drive forward work from those roles into digital service development and delivery. Through close examination of multiple cases in the field, the author develops a framework with specific recommendations for how leaders can drive opportunities for innovators to complement each other to the benefit of public good, including key skills or characteristics that correlate to success.

This report is intended to help leaders of current government innovation groups, including chief data officers, chief digital officers, innovation team leaders, and similar groups, to learn from successful models that they can apply directly to their operations to be more effective. The report also provides lessons and recommendation for senior executives in government, such as a cabinet secretary, governor, county executive or mayor, to help them think through the possible models of effective practices to support the range of innovation roles, define success…(More)”.

Changing Perceptions about Harm Can Temper Moral Outrage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jordan Wylie and Ana Gantman: “Comprehensive sex education works. Years of research show that it is much more effective than an abstinence-only approach at preventing teen pregnancy. In fact, abstinence-only programs may actually increase unplanned pregnancies and can contribute to harmful shaming and sexist attitudes.

Yet abstinence, or “sexual risk avoidance,” programs persist in the U.S. Why? Ultimately many people believe that teenagers should not have sex. If adolescents just abstain, they reason, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases will no longer be a problem. By contrast, comprehensive sex education operates under the premise that some young people do engage in sexual behavior, so it is worthwhile to help them understand how to avoid unwanted outcomes. For dedicated abstinence-only advocates, however, that approach is morally wrong.

Given the deeply held moral beliefs many people bring to this topic, it’s easy to think the debate over sex ed is doomed to a stalemate between those who want to ban it and those who want to promote it. And this is just one of several subjects where policy makers face a tough choice: ban or prohibit a potentially harmful activity, or allow it to continue while mitigating the harm. Mitigation options include needle-exchange programs that help people who use intravenous drugs lower their risk of contracting blood-borne illnesses. Another example is mandatory waiting periods for firearms purchases, which allow people to possess firearms but also reduce homicides.

These harm-reduction strategies are often effective, but they can be unpopular. That’s because issues like sexual behavior, drug use and gun ownership involve highly moralized opinions. Research shows that when people feel moral outrage toward a behavior, they are more likely to support policies that aim to completely stop that activity rather than make it safer.

But our research suggests that not all expressions of moral outrage are alike. Through a series of studies that involved surveying more than 1,000 Americans, we found that, in some cases, people base their moral opposition on the harm that an action causes. In those instances, if you can find ways to make an activity safer, you can also make it more morally acceptable…(More)”

Unlocking the Potential of Open 990 Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cinthia Schuman Ottinger & Jeff Williams: “As the movement to expand public use of nonprofit data collected by the Internal Revenue Service advances, it’s a good time to review how far the social sector has come and how much work remains to reach the full potential of this treasure trove…Organizations have employed open Form 990 data in numerous ways, including to:

  • Create new tools for donors.For instance, the Nonprofit Aid Visualizer, a partnership between Candid and Vanguard Charitable, uses open 990 data to find communities vulnerable to COVID-19, and help address both their immediate needs and long-term recovery. Another tool, COVID-19 Urgent Service Provider Support Tool, developed by the consulting firm BCT Partners, uses 990 data to direct donors to service providers that are close to communities most affected by COVID-19.
  • More efficiently prosecute charitable fraud. This includes a campaign by the New York Attorney General’s Office that recovered $1.7 million from sham charities and redirected funds to legitimate groups.
  • Generate groundbreaking findings on fundraising, volunteers, equity, and management. A researcher at Texas Tech University, for example, explored more than a million e-filed 990s to overturn long-held assumptions about the role of cash in fundraising. He found that when nonprofits encourage noncash gifts as opposed to only cash contributions, financial contributions to those organizations increase over time.
  • Shed light on harmful practices that hurt the poor. A large-scale investigative analysis of nonprofit hospitals’ tax forms revealed that 45 percent of them sent a total of $2.7 billion in medical bills to patients whose incomes were likely low enough to qualify for free or discounted care. When this practice was publicly exposed, some hospitals reevaluated their practices and erased unpaid bills for qualifying patients. The expense of mining data like this previously made such research next to impossible.
  • Help donors make more informed giving decisions. In hopes of maximizing contributions to Ukrainian relief efforts, a record number of donors are turning to resources like Charity Navigator, which can now use open Form 990 data to evaluate and rate a large number of charities based on finances, governance, and other factors. At the same time, donors informed by open 990 data can seek more accountability from the organizations they support. For example, anti-corruption researchers scouring open 990 data and other records uncovered donations by Russian oligarchs aligned with President Putin. This pressured US nonprofits that accepted money from the oligarchs to disavow this funding…(More)”.