Northern Europe

Public Brainpower: Civil Society and Natural Resource Management

Curated on November 1, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Indra Øverland: ” …examines how civil society, public debate and freedom of speech affect natural resource governance. Drawing on the theories of Robert Dahl, Jurgen Habermas and Robert Putnam, the book introduces the concept of ‘public brainpower’, proposing that good institutions require: fertile public debate involving many and varied contributors to provide a broad base for conceiving new institutions; checks and balances on existing institutions; and the continuous dynamic evolution of institutions as the needs of society change.

The book explores the strength of these ideas through case studies of 18 oil and gas-producing countries: Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Qatar, Russia, Saudi, UAE, UK and Venezuela. The concluding chapter includes 10 tenets on how states can maximize their public brainpower, and a ranking of 33 resource-rich countries and the degree to which they succeed in doing so.

The Introduction and the chapters ‘Norway: Public Debate and the Management of Petroleum Resources and Revenues’, ‘Kazakhstan: Civil Society and Natural-Resource Policy in Kazakhstan’, and ‘Russia: Public Debate and the Petroleum Sector’ of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com….(More)”.

Out of the Syrian crisis, a data revolution takes shape

Curated on October 30, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Maxmen in Nature: “…Whenever war, hurricanes or other disasters ravage part of the globe, one of the biggest problems for aid organizations is a lack of reliable data. People die because front-line responders don’t have the information they need to act efficiently. Doctors and epidemiologists plod along with paper surveys and rigid databases in crisis situations, watching with envy as tech companies expertly mine big data for comparatively mundane purposes.

Three years ago, one frustrated first-responder decided to do something about it. The result is an innovative piece of software called the Dharma Platform, which almost anyone can use to rapidly collect information and share, analyse and visualize it so that they can act quickly. And although public-health veterans tend to be sceptical of technological fixes, Dharma is winning fans. MSF and other organizations now use it in 22 countries. And so far, the Rise Fund, a ‘global impact fund’ whose board boasts U2 lead singer Bono, has invested US$14.3 million in the company behind it.

“I think Dharma is special because it has been developed by people who have worked in these chaotic situations,” says Jeremy Farrar, director of biomedical-funding charity the Wellcome Trust in London, “and it’s been road-tested and improved in the midst of reality.”

Now, the ultimate trial is in Syria: Salim, whose name has been changed in this story to protect him, started entering patient records into the Dharma Platform in March, and he is looking at health trends even as he shares his data securely with MSF staff in Amman.

It’s too soon to say that Dharma has transformed his hospital. And some aid organizations and governments may be reluctant to adopt it. But Aziz, who has deployed Dharma in Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, is confident that it will usher in a wave of platforms that accelerate evidence-based responses in emergencies, or even in health care generally. “This is like the first version of the iPhone or Yahoo! Messenger,” he says. “Maybe something better will come along, but this is the direction we’re going in.”…(More)”

Growing government innovation labs: an insider’s guide

Curated on October 26, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UNDP and Futurgov: “Effective and inspirational labs exist in many highly developed countries. In Western Europe, MindLab (Denmark) and The Behavioural Insights Team (UK) push their governments to re-imagine public services. In Asia, the Innovation Bureau in Seoul, South Korea, co-designs better services with citizens.

However, this guide is aimed towards those working in the development context. The authors believe their collective experience of running labs in Eurasia, Asia and the Middle East is directly transferrable to other regions who face similar challenges, for example, moving from poverty to inequality, or from a recent history of democratisation towards more open government.

This report does not offer a “how-to” of innovation techniques — there are plenty of guides out there. Instead, we give the real story of how government innovation labs develop in regions like ours: organic and people-driven, often operating under the radar until safe to emerge. We share a truthful examination of the twists and turns of seeding, starting up and scaling labs, covering the challenges we faced and our failures, as much as our successes. …(More)”.

“Nudge units” – where they came from and what they can do

Curated on October 25, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeina Afif at the Worldbank: “You could say that the first one began in 2009, when the US government recruited Cass Sunstein to head The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to streamline regulations. In 2010, the UK established the first Behavioural Insights Unit (BIT) on a trial basis, under the Cabinet Office. Other countries followed suit, including the US, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. Shortly after, countries such as India, Indonesia, Peru, Singapore, and many others started exploring the application of behavioral insights to their policies and programs. International institutions such as the World Bank, UN agencies, OECD, and EU have also established behavioral insights units to support their programs. And just this month, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland launched its own Behavioral Economics Unit.

The Future
As eMBeD, the behavioral science unit at the World Bank, continues to support governments across the globe in the implementation of their units, here are some common questions we often get asked.

What are the models for a Behavioral Insights Unit in Government?
As of today, over a dozen countries have integrated behavioral insights with their operations. While there is not one model to prescribe, the setup varies from centralized or decentralized to networked….

In some countries, the units were first established at the ministerial level. One example is MineduLab in Peru, which was set up with eMBeD’s help. The unit works as an innovation lab, testing rigorous and leading research in education and behavioral science to address issues such as teacher absenteeism and motivation, parents’ engagement, and student performance….

What should be the structure of the team?
Most units start with two to four full-time staff. Profiles include policy advisors, social psychologists, experimental economists, and behavioral scientists. Experience in the public sector is essential to navigate the government and build support. It is also important to have staff familiar with designing and running experiments. Other important skills include psychology, social psychology, anthropology, design thinking, and marketing. While these skills are not always readily available in the public sector, it is important to note that all behavioral insights units partnered with academics and experts in the field.

The U.S. team, originally called the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, is staffed mostly by seconded academic faculty, researchers, and other departmental staff. MineduLab in Peru partnered with leading experts, including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Fortalecimiento de la Gestión de la Educación (FORGE), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and the World Bank….(More)”

TfL’s free open data boosts London’s economy

Curated on October 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by Transport for London: “Research by Deloitte shows that the release of open data by TfL is generating annual economic benefits and savings of up to £130m a year…

TfL has worked with a wide range of professional and amateur developers, ranging from start-ups to global innovators, to deliver new products in the form that customers want. This has led to more than 600 apps now being powered specifically using TfL’s open data feeds, used by 42 per cent of Londoners.

The report found that TfL’s data provides the following benefits:

Saved time for passengers. TfL’s open data allows customers to plan journeys more accurately using apps with real-time information and advice on how to adjust their routes. This provides greater certainty on when the next bus/Tube will arrive and saves time – estimated at between £70m and £90m per year.

Better information to plan journeys, travel more easily and take more journeys. Customers can use apps to better plan journeys, enabling them to use TfL services more regularly and access other services. Conservatively, the value of these journeys is estimated at up to £20m per year.

Creating commercial opportunities for third party developers. A wide range of companies now use TfL’s open data commercially to help generate revenue, many of whom are based in London. Having free and up-to-date access to this data increases the ‘Gross Value Add’ (analogous to GDP) that these companies contribute to the London economy, both directly and across the supply chain and wider economy, of between £12m and £15m per year.

Leveraging value and savings from partnerships with major customer facing technology platform owners. TfL receives back significant data on areas it does not itself collect data (e.g. crowdsourced traffic data). This allows TfL to get an even better understanding of journeys in London and improve its operations….(More).

Blockchain Could Help Us Reclaim Control of Our Personal Data

Curated on October 8, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Mainelli at Harvard Business Review: “…numerous smaller countries, such as Singapore, are exploring national identity systems that span government and the private sector. One of the more successful stories of governments instituting an identity system is Estonia, with its ID-kaarts. Reacting to cyber-attacks against the nation, the Estonian government decided that it needed to become more digital, and even more secure. They decided to use a distributed ledger to build their system, rather than a traditional central database. Distributed ledgers are used in situations where multiple parties need to share authoritative information with each other without a central third party, such as for data-logging clinical assessments or storing data from commercial deals. These are multi-organization databases with a super audit trail. As a result, the Estonian system provides its citizens with an all-digital government experience, significantly reduced bureaucracy, and significantly high citizen satisfaction with their government dealings.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have increased the awareness of distributed ledgers with their use of a particular type of ledger — blockchain — to hold the details of coin accounts among millions of users. Cryptocurrencies have certainly had their own problems with their wallets and exchanges — even ID-kaarts are not without their technical problems — but the distributed ledger technology holds firm for Estonia and for cryptocurrencies. These technologies have been working in hostile environments now for nearly a decade.

The problem with a central database like the ones used to house social security numbers, or credit reports, is that once it’s compromised, a thief has the ability to copy all of the information stored there. Hence the huge numbers of people that can be affected — more than 140 million people in the Equifax breach, and more than 50 million at Home Depot — though perhaps Yahoo takes the cake with more than three billion alleged customer accounts hacked. Of course, if you can find a distributed ledger online, you can copy it, too. However, a distributed ledger, while available to everyone, may be unreadable if its contents are encrypted. Bitcoin’s blockchain is readable to all, though you can encrypt things in comments. Most distributed ledgers outside cryptocurrencies are encrypted in whole or in part. The effect is that while you can have a copy of the database, you can’t actually read it.

This characteristic of encrypted distributed ledgers has big implications for identity systems. You can keep certified copies of identity documents, biometric test results, health data, or academic and training certificates online, available at all times, yet safe unless you give away your key. At a whole system level, the database is very secure. Each single ledger entry among billions would need to be found and then individually “cracked” at great expense in time and computing, making the database as a whole very safe.

Distributed ledgers seem ideal for private distributed identity systems, and many organizations are working to provide such systems to help people manage the huge amount of paperwork modern society requires to open accounts, validate yourself, or make payments. Taken a small step further, these systems can help you keep relevant health or qualification records at your fingertips. Using “smart” ledgers, you can forward your documentation to people who need to see it, while keeping control of access, including whether another party can forward the information. You can even revoke someone’s access to the information in the future….(More)”.

Let’s create a nation of social scientists

Curated on October 4, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan in Times Higher Education: “How might social science become more influential, more relevant and more useful in the years to come?

Recent debates about impact have largely assumed a model of social science in which a cadre of specialists, based in universities, analyse and interpret the world and then feed conclusions into an essentially passive society. But a very different view sees specialists in the academy working much more in partnership with a society that is itself skilled in social science, able to generate hypotheses, gather data, experiment and draw conclusions that might help to answer the big questions of our time, from the sources of inequality to social trust, identity to violence.

There are some powerful trends to suggest that this second view is gaining traction. The first of these is the extraordinary explosion of new ways to observe social phenomena. Every day each of us leaves behind a data trail of who we talk to, what we eat and where we go. It’s easier than ever to survey people, to spot patterns, to scrape the web or to pick up data from sensors. It’s easier than ever to gather perceptions and emotions as well as material facts and easier than ever for organisations to practice social science – whether investment organisations analysing market patterns, human resources departments using behavioural science, or local authorities using ethnography.

That deluge of data is a big enough shift on its own. However, it is also now being used to feed interpretive and predictive tools using artificial intelligence to predict who is most likely to go to hospital, to end up in prison, which relationships are most likely to end in divorce.

Governments are developing their own predictive tools, and have also become much more interested in systematic experimentation, with Finland and Canada in the lead, moving us closer to Karl Popper’s vision of “methods of trial and error, of inventing hypotheses which can be practically tested…”…

The second revolution is less visible but could be no less profound. This is the hunger of many people to be creators of knowledge, not just users; to be part of a truly collective intelligence. At the moment this shift towards mass engagement in knowledge is most visible in neighbouring fields. Digital humanities mobilise many volunteers to input data and interpret texts – for example making ancient Arabic texts machine-readable. Even more striking is the growth of citizen science – eBird had 1.5 million reports last January; some 1.5 million people in the US monitor river streams and lakes, and SETI@home has 5 million volunteers. Thousands of patients also take part in funding and shaping research on their own conditions….

We’re all familiar with the old idea that it’s better to teach a man to fish than just to give him fish. In essence these trends ask us a simple question: why not apply the same logic to social science, and why not reorient social sciences to enhance the capacity of society itself to observe, analyse and interpret?…(More)”.

BBC Four to investigate how flu pandemic spreads by launching BBC Pandemic app

Curated on October 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

BBC Press Release: “In a first of its kind nationwide citizen science experiment, Dr Hannah Fry is asking volunteers to download the BBC Pandemic App onto their smartphones. The free app will anonymously collect vital data on how far users travel over a 24 hour period. Users will be asked for information about the number of people they have come into contact with during this time. This data will be used to simulate the spread of a highly infectious disease to see what might happen when – not if – a real pandemic hits the UK.

By partnering with researchers at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the BBC Pandemic app will identify the human networks and behaviours that spread infectious disease. The data collated from the app will help improve public health planning and outbreak control.

The results of the experiment will be revealed in a 90 minute landmark documentary, BBC Pandemic which will air in spring 2018 on BBC Four with Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Javid Abdelmoneim. The pair will chart the creation of the first ever life-saving pandemic, provide new insight into the latest pandemic science and use the data collected by the BBC Pandemic app to chart how an outbreak would spread across the UK.

In the last 100 years there have been four major flu pandemics including the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 that killed up to 100 million people world wide. The Government National Risk Register estimates that infectious diseases are an even greater risk since 2015 and pandemic flu is the key concern as 50% of the population could be affected.

“Nobody knows when the next epidemic will hit, how far it will spread, or how many people will be affected. And yet, because of the power of mathematics, we can still be prepared for whatever lies ahead. What’s really important is that every single download will help improve our models so please please do take part – it will make a difference.” explains Dr Fry.

Dr Abdelmoneim says: “We shouldn’t underestimate the flu virus. It could easily be the cause of a major pandemic that could sweep around the world in a matter of weeks. I’m really excited about the BBC Pandemic app. If it can help predict the spread of a disease and be used to work out ways to slow that spread, it will be much easier for society and our healthcare system to manage”.

Cassian Harrison, Editor BBC Four says: “This is a bold and tremendously exciting project; bringing genuine insight and discovery, and taking BBC Four’s Experimental brief absolutely literally!”…(More)”

Google Gets Serious About Mapping Wheelchair Accessibility

Curated on September 20, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda Poon at CityLab: “If there’s one thing Google’s got at its disposal, it’s a global army of avid map users. Now the company is leveraging that power to make its Maps feature more useful for people with mobility challenges—a group that often gets overlooked in the world of transit and urban innovation.

Google Maps already indicates if a location is wheelchair accessible—a result of a personal project by one of its employees—but its latest campaign will crowdsource data from its 30 million Local Guides worldwide, who contribute tips and photos about neighborhood establishments in exchange for points and small prizes like extra digital storage space. The company is calling on them to answer five simple questions—like whether a building has accessible entrances or bathrooms—when they submit a review for a location. In the coming weeks, Google will host workshops and “geowalks” specifically focused on mobility across seven cities, from New York City and London to Tokyo and Surabaya, Indonesia.

“The [users] have multiple motivations, and one is wanting to help their own community get around.” says Laura Slabin, Google’s director of local content and community. “So we’re leveraging the fact that people are motivated by altruism.”

But as simple as the questions seem—Is there wheelchair-accessible seating? or Is there a wheelchair-accessible elevator?—answering them requires careful attention to detail. That’s why Google even sent out a nifty tip sheet to help its physically abled members answer those questions….(More)”.