How Blockchain Is Kickstarting the Financial Lives of Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Orcutt at MIT Technology Review: “Finland’s digital money system for asylum seekers shows what blockchain technology can offer the unbanked….

For a refugee in a new country, identity—at least in the official sense—can be among the hardest things to recover. And without an official ID it is nearly impossible to advance in society.

Finland, which like many European nations has recently seen a large influx of asylum seekers, is using a cryptographic ledger called blockchain to help them get on their feet faster.

For two years the Finnish Immigration Service has been giving asylum seekers who don’t have bank accounts prepaid Mastercards instead of the traditional cash disbursements, and today the program has several thousand active cardholders. Developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, the card is also linked to a unique digital identity stored on a blockchain, the same technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has demonstrated how blockchain technology can be used to transmit value between individuals without the need for corporate middlemen. Core to the technology is a software protocol that creates a permanent record of every single Bitcoin transaction. Anyone can access this record, called the blockchain, by downloading the Bitcoin software. Computers running the software all over the world maintain the blockchain, and use it to verify new transactions.

Blockchains are seen as a promising avenue for opening new financial opportunities to people who don’t have access to modern financial services. Besides eliminating the need for a traditional financial institution to mediate transactions, they provide a means for creating and securely storing a digital form of identification that can’t be corrupted and is easily accessible from anywhere….

In Finland, a MONI card can help address several challenges facing asylum seekers, says Jouko Salonen, director of the Finnish Immigration Service. Most importantly, a MONI account functions like a bank account, removing a major barrier to gaining employment. People can use their accounts to buy things, pay bills, and even receive direct deposits from employers. Meanwhile, every transaction is recorded in a public, virtually incorruptible database maintained by a decentralized global network of computers. That enables the Immigration Service to keep track of the cardholders and their spending….(More)”

Internet of Things tackles global animal poaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “ZSL (Zoological Society of London), one of the most famous zoos in Europe, has teamed up with non-profit technology company Digital Catapult to support the development of anti-poaching technology. The partnership will use the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies to create a sensor and satellite-enabled network that will be able to help conservationists monitor wildlife and respond to poaching threats on land and sea in some of the world’s most remote national parks.

Up to 35,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2016, and black rhino and mountain gorilla populations continue to be at high risk. LPWAN could help prevent poaching in game reserves by enabling remote sensors to communicate with one another over long distance while using only a small amount of power. These connected sensors are able to detect activities nearby and determine whether these originate from wildlife or poachers, creating immediate alerts for those monitoring the area.

Digital Catapult has installed a LPWAN base station at the ZSL headquarters at London Zoo, which will enable prototypes to be tested on site. This technology will build on the revolutionary work already underway in areas including Kenya, Nepal, Australia, the Chagos Archipelago, and Antarctica.

The practise of poaching has been the target of many technology companies, with a similar project using artificial intelligence to monitor poachers recently coming to light. One of the many devastating impacts of poaching is the potential to cause extinction of some animals, and one startup has tackled this potential catastrophe with rhinos by producing a 3D printed horn that could help the species avoid being a target….(More)”.

These 16 companies want to make technology work for everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Sloan School Press Release: “One company helps undocumented people create a digital identity. Another uses artificial intelligence to help students transition to college. Yet another provides free training to budding tech pros.

These organizations are just a few of the many that are using technology to solve problems and help people all over the world — and they are all finalists in the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy’s second annual Inclusive Innovation Challenge. During a time of great technological innovation, many people are not benefiting from this progress. The challenge is recognizing companies that are using technology to improve opportunities for working people…..

Here are the finalists:

AdmitHub
Did you know that of the students who have been admitted to college each spring, 14 percent don’t actually attend come fall? Or that of those who do attend, 48 percent haven’t graduated six years later. Boston-based AdmitHub created a virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence to help students navigate the financial, academic, and social situations that accompany going to college, and they do it all through text messaging, communicating with students on their terms and easing the transition to college.

African Renewable Energy Distributor Ltd.
This company has developed solar-powered, portable kiosks where people can charge their phones, access Wi-Fi, or access an intranet while offline. Using a micro franchise business model, the Rwanda-based company hopes to empower women and people with disabilities who can run the kiosks.

AID:Tech
More than two billion people worldwide have no legal identity, something that is necessary for accessing public and financial services. Aid:Tech aims to end that, by providing a platform for undocumented people to create a digital ID using blockchain so that every transaction is secure and traceable. Aid:Tech is based out of Dublin, with offices in New York and London….(More)”

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

Intragovernmental Collaborations: Pipedreams or the Future of the Public Sector?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Worthing at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Despite the need for concerted, joint efforts among public sector leaders, those working with or in government know too well that such collaborations are rare. The motivation and ability to collaborate in government is usually lacking. So how did these leaders—some with competing agendas—manage to do it?

A new tool for collaboration

Policy labs are units embedded within the public sector—“owned” by one or several ministries—that anchor systematic public sector innovation efforts by facilitating creative approaches to policymaking. Since the inception of the first labs over a decade ago, many innovation experts and academics have touted labs as the leading-edge of public policy innovation. They can generate novel, citizen-centric, effective policies and service provisions, because they include a wide range of governmental and, in many cases, non-governmental actors in tackling complex public policy issues like social inequality, mass migration, and terrorism. MindLab in Denmark, for example, brought together government decision makers from across five ministries in December 2007 to co-create policy strategies on tackling climate change while also propelling new business growth. The collaboration resulted in a range of business strategies for climate change that were adopted during the 2009 UN COP15 Summit in Copenhagen. Under normal circumstances, these government leaders often push conflicting agendas, compete over resources, and are highly risk-adverse in undertaking intragovermental partnerships—all “poison pills” for the kind of collaboration successful public sector innovation needs. However, policy labs like MindLab, Policy Lab UK, and almost 100 similar cross-governmental units are finding ways to overcome these barriers and drive public sector innovation.

Five ways policy labs facilitate successful intragovermental collaboration

To examine how labs do this, we conducted a multiple-case analysis of policy labs in the European Union and United States.

1. Reducing potential future conflict through experiential on-boarding processes. Policy labs conduct extensive screening and induction activities to provide policymakers with both knowledge of and faith in the policy lab’s approach to policymaking. …

2. Utilization of spatial cues to flatten hierarchical and departmental differences. Policy labs strategically use non-traditional spatial elements such as moveable whiteboards, tactile and colorful prototyping materials, and sitting cubes, along with the absence of expected elements such as conference tables and chairs, to indicate that unconventional norms—non-hierarchical and relational norms—govern lab spaces….

3. Reframing policy issues to focus on affected citizens. Policy labs highlight individual citizens’ stories to help reconstruct policymakers’ perceptions toward a more common and human-centered understanding of a policy issue…

4. Politically neutral, process-focused facilitation. Lab practitioners employ design methods that can help bring together divided policymakers and break scripted behavior patterns. Many policy labs use variations of design thinking and foresight methods, with a focus on iterative prototyping and testing, stressing the need for skilled but politically neutral facilitation to work through points of conflict and reach consensus on solutions. …

5. Mitigating risk through policy lab branding….(More)”.

Systems Approaches to Public Sector Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by the OECD: “Complexity is a core feature of most policy issues today and in this context traditional analytical tools and problem-solving methods no longer work. This report, produced by the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, explores how systems approaches can be used in the public sector to solve complex or “wicked” problems . Consisting of three parts, the report discusses the need for systems thinking in the public sector; identifies tactics that can be employed by government agencies to work towards systems change; and provides an in-depth examination of how systems approaches have been applied in practice. Four cases of applied systems approaches are presented and analysed: preventing domestic violence (Iceland), protecting children (the Netherlands), regulating the sharing economy (Canada) and designing a policy framework to conduct experiments in government (Finland). The report highlights the need for a new approach to policy making that accounts for complexity and allows for new responses and more systemic change that deliver greater value, effectiveness and public satisfaction….(More)”.

Massive Ebola data site planned to combat outbreaks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Maxmen at Nature: “More than 11,000 people died when Ebola tore through West Africa between 2014 and 2016, and yet clinicians still lack data that would enable them to reliably identify the disease when a person first walks into a clinic. To fill that gap and others before the next outbreak hits, researchers are developing a platform to organize and share Ebola data that have so far been scattered beyond reach.

The information system is coordinated by the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO), an international research network based at the University of Oxford, UK, and is expected to launch by the end of the year. …

During the outbreak, for example, a widespread rumour claimed that the plague was an experiment conducted by the West, which led some people to resist going to clinics and helped Ebola to spread.

Merson and her collaborators want to avoid the kind of data fragmentation that hindered efforts to stop the outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. As the Ebola crisis was escalating in October 2014, she visited treatment units in the three countries to advise on research. Merson found tremendous variation in practices, which complicated attempts to merge and analyse the information. For instance, some record books listed lethargy and hiccups as symptoms, whereas others recorded fatigue but not hiccups.

“People were just collecting what they could,” she recalls. Non-governmental organizations “were keeping their data private; academics take a year to get it out; and West Africa had set up surveillance but they were siloed from the international systems”, she says. …

In July 2015, the IDDO received pilot funds from the UK charity the Wellcome Trust to pool anonymized data from the medical records of people who contracted Ebola — and those who survived it — as well as data from clinical trials and public health projects during outbreaks in West Africa, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The hope is that a researcher could search for data to help in diagnosing, treating and understanding the disease. The platform would also provide a home for new data as they emerge. A draft research agenda lists questions that the information might answer, such as how long the virus can survive outside the human body, and what factors are associated with psychological issues in those who survive Ebola.

One sensitive issue is deciding who will control the data. …It’s vital that these discussions happen now, in a period of relative calm, says Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London. When the virus emerges again, clinicians, scientists, and regulatory boards will need fast access to data so as not to repeat mistakes made last time. “We need to sit down and make sure we have a data platform in place so that we can respond to a new case of Ebola in hours and days, and not in months and years,” he says. “A great danger is that the world will move on and forget the horror of Ebola in West Africa.”…(More)”

Can AI tools replace feds?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Derek B. Johnson at FCW: “The Heritage Foundation…is calling for increased reliance on automation and the potential creation of a “contractor cloud” offering streamlined access to private sector labor as part of its broader strategy for reorganizing the federal government.

Seeking to take advantage of a united Republican government and a president who has vowed to reform the civil service, the foundation drafted a pair of reports this year attempting to identify strategies for consolidating, merging or eliminating various federal agencies, programs and functions. Among those strategies is a proposal for the Office of Management and Budget to issue a report “examining existing government tasks performed by generously-paid government employees that could be automated.”

Citing research on the potential impacts of automation on the United Kingdom’s civil service, the foundation’s authors estimated that similar efforts across the U.S. government could yield $23.9 billion in reduced personnel costs and a reduction in the size of the federal workforce by 288,000….

The Heritage report also called on the federal government to consider a “contracting cloud.” The idea would essentially be for a government version of TaskRabbit, where agencies could select from a pool of pre-approved individual contractors from the private sector who could be brought in for specialized or seasonal work without going through established contracts. Greszler said the idea came from speaking with subcontractors who complained about having to kick over a certain percentage of their payments to prime contractors even as they did all the work.

Right now the foundation is only calling for the government to examine the potential of the issue and how it would interact with existing or similar vehicles for contracting services like the GSA schedule. Greszler emphasized that any pool of workers would need to be properly vetted to ensure they met federal standards and practices.

“There has to be guidelines or some type of checks, so you’re not having people come off the street and getting access to secure government data,” she said….(More)

Ireland Opens E-Health Open Data Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adi Gaskell at HuffPost: “… an open data portal has been launched by eHealth Ireland.  The portal aims to bring together some 300 different open data sources into one place, making it easier to find data from across the Irish Health Sector.

The portal includes data from a range of sources, including statistics on hospital day and inpatient cases, waiting list statistics and information around key new digital initiatives.

Open data

The resource features datasets from both the Department of Health and HealthLink, so the team believe that the data is of the highest quality, and also compliant with the Open Health Data Policy.  This ensures that the approach taken with the release of data is consistent and in accordance with national and international guidelines.

“I am delighted to welcome the launch of the eHealth Ireland Open Data Portal today. The aim of Open Data is twofold; on the one hand facilitating transparency of the Public Sector and on the other providing a valuable resource that can drive innovation. The availability of Open Data can empower citizens and support clinicians, care providers, and researchers make better decisions, spur new innovations and identify efficiencies while ensuring that personal data remains confidential,” Richard Corbridge, CIO at the Health Service Executive says.

Data from both HealthLink and the National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) will be uploaded to the portal each month, with new datasets due to be added on a regular basis….

The project follows a number of clearly defined Open Health Data Principles that are designed to support the health service in the provision of better patient care and in the support of new innovations in the sector, all whilst ensuring that patient data is secured and governed appropriately…(More)”.

E-residency and blockchain

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Clare Sullivan and Eric Burger in Computer Law & Security Review: “In December 2014, Estonia became the first nation to open its digital borders to enable anyone, anywhere in the world to apply to become an e-Resident. Estonian e-Residency is essentially a commercial initiative. The e-ID issued to Estonian e-Residents enables commercial activities with the public and private sectors. It does not provide citizenship in its traditional sense, and the e-ID provided to e-Residents is not a travel document. However, in many ways it is an international ‘passport’ to the virtual world. E-Residency is a profound change and the recent announcement that the Estonian government is now partnering with Bitnation to offer a public notary service to Estonian e-Residents based on blockchain technology is of significance. The application of blockchain to e-Residency has the potential to fundamentally change the way identity information is controlled and authenticated. This paper examines the legal, policy, and technical implications of this development….(More)”.