Mapping humanitarian action on Instagram

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anthony McCosker, Jane Farmer, Tracy De Cotta, Peter Kamstra, Natalie Jovanovski, Arezou Soltani Panah, Zoe Teh, and Sam Wilson: “Every day, people undertake many different kinds of voluntary service and humanitarian action. This might involve fundraising and charity work, giving time, helping or inspiring others, or promoting causes. However, because so much of the research on volunteering and humanitarian action focuses on formal activities along with large-scale campaigns and global crisis events, we know very little about what people are doing informally and in their local community.

Humanitarianism is changing with the digital age and with new modes of networked communication and interaction. The research presented in this report offers new insights into the way people engage with humanitarian activities in their local contexts and everyday lives. We turned to Instagram as a novel data source that can offer insights into everyday humanitarian action. As a popular visual social media platform, Instagram provides a certain kind of intimate access to the humanitarian acts and the social good values that people want to capture, share and promote to others.

We sought to develop a typology of everyday humanitarian actions, the targets of those actions and situations and contexts they happen in through an analysis of Instagram data. Our research methodology and findings unlock a new approach to understanding humanitarian action in situ, and opens opportunities for organisation-led campaigns to improve and support self-mobilisation.

By using geographical information provided by Instagram users when they post, we demonstrate the relationships between humanitarian activities and locations across Victoria, Australia, illustrating the heavy concentration of activity within Melbourne’s CBD and inner suburbs. The data shows patterns in the kinds of actions, the situations in which they occur, and the humanitarian targets and values shared. On the basis of the findings, the report points to next steps in how humanitarian and charity organisations can innovate using social data to build a digitally active humanitarian movement by mapping and amplifying and better understanding humanitarian deeds where and when they happen. While the analysis offers many nuanced insights into everyday humanitarian activity, we highlight three key findings.

  • When people post to Instagram about humanitarian action they are most often promoting causes and activities, fundraising and giving time
  • Groups give time (volunteering, giving), individuals give or raise money (charity, fundraising)
  • Humanitarian action posted to Instagram is heavily concentrated around Melbourne CBD and inner suburbs, with a focus on public spaces, restaurant and entertainment precincts along the Yarra River and Swanston Street…(More)”.

The Stoplight Battling to End Poverty

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Nick Dall at OZY: “Over midafternoon coffees and Fantas, Robyn-Lee Abrahams and Joyce Paulse — employees at my local supermarket in Cape Town, South Africa — tell me how their lives have changed in the past 18 months. “I never dreamed my daughter would go to college,” says Paulse. “But yesterday we went online together and started filling in the forms.”

Abrahams notes how she used to live hand to mouth. “But now I’ve got a savings account, which I haven’t ever touched.” The sacrifice? “I eat less chocolate now.”

Paulse and Abrahams are just two of thousands of beneficiaries of the Poverty Stoplight, a self-evaluation tool that’s now redefining poverty in countries as diverse as Argentina and the U.K.; Mexico and Tanzania; Chile and Papua New Guinea. By getting families to rank their own economic condition red, yellow or green based upon 50 indicators, the Poverty Stoplight gives families the agency to pull themselves out of poverty and offers organizations insight into whether their programs are working.

Social entrepreneur Martín Burt, who founded Fundación Paraguaya 33 years ago to promote entrepreneurship and economic empowerment in Paraguay, developed the first, paper-based prototype of the Poverty Stoplight in 2010 to help the organization’s microfinance clients escape the poverty cycle….Because poverty is multidimensional, “you can have a family with a proper toilet but no savings,” points out Burt. Determining questionnaires span six different aspects of people’s lives, including softer indicators such as community involvement, self-confidence and family violence. The survey, a series of 50 multiple-choice questions with visual cues, is aimed at households, not individuals, because “you cannot get a 10-year-old girl out of poverty in isolation,” says Burt. Confidentiality is another critical component….(More)”.

Humans are a post-truth species

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yuval Noah Harari at the Guardian: “….A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (“nobody’s land”), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early 20th century, a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of “a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]”. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored.

In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter “p” does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, “F” stands for “P”, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiensconquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.

So if you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Qur’an. For millennia, much of what passed for “news” and “facts” in human social networks were stories about miracles, angels, demons and witches, with bold reporters giving live coverage straight from the deepest pits of the underworld. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries an Untouchable – yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts for ever.

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). Note, however, that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion. Just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s toolkit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous and creative – just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace and Harry Potter….(More)”.

Hope for Democracy: 30 years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Nelson Dias: “Hope for Democracy” is not only the title of this book, but also the translation of a state of mind infected by innovation and transformative action of many people who in different parts of the world, are engaged in the construction of more lasting and intense ways of living democracy.

The articles found within this publication are “scales” of a fascinating journey through the paths of participatory democracy, from North America to Asia, Oceania to Europe, and Latin America to Africa.

With no single directions, it is up to the readers to choose the route they want to travel, being however invited to reinforce this “democratizing wave”, encouraging the emergence of new and renewed spaces of participation in the territories where they live and work….(More)

The distributed power of smartphones for medical research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adi Gaskell: “One of the more significant areas of promise in health technology is the ability for data to be generated by us as individuals, and for AI to provide insights based upon this live stream of lifestyle data.  An example of what’s possible comes via a project researchers at Imperial College London have undertaken with the Vodafone Foundation.

The project aims to tap into the power of users smartphones to crunch cancer related data whilst they sleep.  Such distributed computing projects have been popular for some time, but this is one of the first to utilize the power in our smartphones.

The rationale for the project is identical to that of the early distributed computing ventures, such as SETI@Home, which utilized spare computing resources to process data from space.  The average smartphone contains a huge amount of computing power that generally lies dormant over night.

Dream Lab

Users participate by downloading the DreamLab app onto their phone and run it for six hours overnight as the phone charges.  The sleep downloads a small packet of data overnight, with the processors in the phone then running millions of calculations, uploading the results to a central server, and clearing the data from the phone.

The app has already been used in Australia, with researchers using it to crunch data for pancreatic cancer, and is now ready to be used for the first time in Europe.  If they can secure 100,000 users running the app each night, the team can process as much data as a single desktop computer could process in 100 years.

“Through harnessing distributed computing power, DreamLab is helping to make personalised medicine a reality,” the researchers say.  “This project demonstrates how Imperial’s innovative research partnerships with corporate partners and members of the public are working together to tackle some of the biggest problems we face today, generating real societal impact.”…(More)”.

NZ to perform urgent algorithm ‘stocktake’ fearing data misuse within government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Asha McLean at ZDNet: “The New Zealand government has announced it will be assessing how government agencies are using algorithms to analyse data, hoping to ensure transparency and fairness in decisions that affect citizens.

A joint statement from Minister for Government Digital Services Clare Curran and Minister of Statistics James Shaw said the algorithm “stocktake” will be conducted with urgency, but cites only the growing interest in data analytics as the reason for the probe.

“The government is acutely aware of the need to ensure transparency and accountability as interest grows regarding the challenges and opportunities associated with emerging technology such as artificial intelligence,” Curran said.

It was revealed in April that Immigration New Zealand may have been using citizen data for less than desirable purposes, with claims that data collected through the country’s visa application process that was being used to determine those in breach of their visa conditions was in fact filtering people based on their age, gender, and ethnicity.

Rejecting the idea the data-collection project was racial profiling, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway told Radio New Zealand that Immigration looks at a range of issues, including at those who have made — and have had rejected — multiple visa applications.

“It looks at people who place the greatest burden on the health system, people who place the greatest burden on the criminal justice system, and uses that data to prioritise those people,” he said.

“It is important that we protect the integrity of our immigration system and that we use the resources that immigration has as effectively as we can — I do support them using good data to make good decisions about where best to deploy their resources.”

In the statement on Wednesday, Shaw pointed to two further data-modelling projects the government had embarked on, with one from the Ministry of Health looking into the probability of five-year post-transplant survival in New Zealand.

“Using existing data to help model possible outcomes is an important part of modern government decision-making,” Shaw said….(More)”.

Democracy doomsday prophets are missing this critical shift

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruno Kaufmann and Joe Mathews in the Washington Post: “The new conventional wisdom seems to be that electoral democracy is in decline. But this ignores another widespread trend: direct democracy at the local and regional level is booming, even as disillusion with representative government at the national level grows.

Today, 113 of the world’s 117 democratic countries offer their citizens legally or constitutionally established rights to bring forward a citizens’ initiative, referendum or both. And since 1980, roughly 80 percent of countries worldwide have had at least one nationwide referendum or popular vote on a legislative or constitutional issue.

Of all the nationwide popular votes in the history of the world, more than half have taken place in the past 30 years. As of May 2018, almost 2,000 nationwide popular votes on substantive issues have taken place, with 1,059 in Europe, 191 in Africa, 189 in Asia, 181 in the Americas and 115 in Oceania, based on our research.

That is just at the national level. Other major democracies — Germany, the United States and India — do not permit popular votes on substantive issues nationally but support robust direct democracy at the local and regional levels. The number of local votes on issues has so far defied all attempts to count them — they run into the tens of thousands.

This robust democratization, at least when it comes to direct legislation, provides a context that’s generally missing when doomsday prophets suggest that democracy is dying by pointing to authoritarian-leaning leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Indeed, the two trends — the rise of populist authoritarianism in some nations and the rise of local and direct democracy in some areas — are related. Frustration is growing with democratic systems at national levels, and yes, some people become more attracted to populism. But some of that frustration is channeled into positive energy — into making local democracy more democratic and direct.

Cities from Seoul to San Francisco are hungry for new and innovative tools that bring citizens into processes of deliberation that allow the people themselves to make decisions and feel invested in government actions. We’ve seen local governments embrace participatory budgeting, participatory planning, citizens’ juries and a host of experimental digital tools in service of that desired mix of greater public deliberation and more direct public action….(More).”

New Zealand explores machine-readable laws to transform government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Apolitical: “The team working to drive New Zealand’s government into the digital age believes that part of the problem is the ways that laws themselves are written. Earlier this year, over a three-week experiment, they’ve tested the theory by rewriting legislation itself as software code.…

The team in New Zealand, led by the government’s service innovations team LabPlus, has attempted to improve the interpretation of legislation and vastly ease the creation of digital services by rewriting legislation as code.

Legislation-as-code means taking the “rules” or components of legislation — its logic, requirements and exemptions — and laying them out programmatically so that it can be parsed by a machine. If law can be broken down by a machine, then anyone, even those who aren’t legally trained, can work with it. It helps to standardise the rules in a consistent language across an entire system, giving a view of services, compliance and all the different rules of government.

Over the course of three weeks the team in New Zealand rewrote two sets of legislation as software code: the Rates Rebate Act, a tax rebate designed to lower the costs of owning a home for people on low incomes, and the Holidays Act, which was enacted to grant each employee in New Zealand a guaranteed four weeks a year of holiday.

The way that both policies are written makes them difficult to interpret, and, consequently, deliver. They were written for a paper-based world, and require different service responses from distinct bodies within government based on what the legal status of the citizen using them is. For instance, the residents of retirement villages are eligible to rebates through the Rates Rebate Act, but access it via different people and provide different information than normal ratepayers.

The teams worked to rewrite the legislation, first as “pseudocode” — the rules behind the legislation in a logical chain — then as human-readable legislation and finally as software code, designed to make it far easier for public servants and the public to work out who was eligible for what outcome. In the end, the team had working code for how to digitally deliver two policies.

A step towards digital government

The implications of such techniques are significant. Firstly, machine-readable legislation could speed up interactions between government and business, sparing private organisations the costs in time and money they currently spend interpreting the laws they need to comply with.

If legislation changes, the machine can process it automatically and consistently, saving the cost of employing an expert, or a lawyer, to do this job.

More transformatively for policymaking itself, machine-readable legislation allows public servants to test the impact of policy before they implement it.

“What happens currently is that people design the policy up front and wait to see how it works when you eventually deploy it,” said Richard Pope, one of the original pioneers in the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) and the co-author of the UK’s digital service standard. “A better approach is to design the legislation in such a way that gives the teams that are making and delivering a service enough wiggle room to be able to test things.”…(More)”.

Government to establish a ‘National Data Commissioner’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rohan Pearce at Computerworld – Australia: “A new position of the ‘National Data Commissioner’ will be established as part of a $65 million, four-year open data push by the federal government.

The creation of the new position is part of the government’s response to the Productivity Commission inquiry into the availability and use of public and private data by individuals and organisations.

The government in November revealed that it would legislate a new Consumer Data Right as part of its response to the PC’s recommendations. The government said that this will allow individuals to access data relating to their banking, energy, phone and Internet usage, potentially making it easier to compare and switch between service providers.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will have oversight of the Consumer Data Right.

The government said today it would introduce a new data sharing and release framework to streamline the way government data is made available for use by researchers and public and private sector organisations.

The framework’s aim will be to promote the greater use of data and drive related economic and innovation benefits as well as to “Build trust with the Australian community about the government’s use of data”.

The government said it would push a risk-based approach to releasing publicly funded data sets.

The National Data Commissioner will be supported by a National Data Advisory Council. The council “will advise the National Data Commissioner on ethical data use, technical best practice, and industry and international developments.”…(More).

Making sense of evidence: A guide to using evidence in policy

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Handbook by the Government of New Zealand: “…helps you take a structured approach to using evidence at every stage of the policy and programme development cycle. Whether you work for central or local government, or the community and voluntary sector, you’ll find advice to help you:

  • understand different types and sources of evidence
  • know what you can learn from evidence
  • appraise evidence and rate its quality
  • decide how to select and use evidence to the best effect
  • take into account different cultural values and knowledge systems
  • be transparent about how you’ve considered evidence in your policy development work…(More)”

(See also Summary; This handbook is a companion to Making sense of evaluation: A handbook for everyone.).