When Data Science Destabilizes Democracy and Facilitates Genocide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Thomas in Fast.AI on “What is the ethical responsibility of data scientists?”…What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change… What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country… You bear this responsibility. You’ve created these platforms. And now they are being misused, Senator Feinstein said this week in a senate hearing. Who has created a cataclysmic change? Who bears this large responsibility? She was talking to executives at tech companies and referring to the work of data scientists.

Data science can have a devastating impact on our world, as illustrated by inflammatory Russian propaganda being shown on Facebook to 126 million Americans leading up to the 2016 election (and the subject of the senate hearing described above) or by lies spread via Facebook that are fueling ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Over half a million Rohinyga have been driven from their homes due to systematic murder, rape, and burning. Data science is foundational to Facebook’s newsfeed, in determining what content is prioritized and who sees what….

The examples of bias in data science are myriad and include:

You can do awesome and meaningful things with data science (such as diagnosing cancer, stopping deforestation, increasing farm yields, and helping patients with Parkinson’s disease), and you can (often unintentionally) enable terrible things with data science, as the examples in this post illustrate. Being a data scientist entails both great opportunity, as well as great responsibility, to use our skills to not make the world a worse place. Ultimately, doing data science is about humans, not just the users of our products, but everyone who will be impacted by our work. (More)”.

Participatory Budgeting: Does Evidence Match Enthusiasm?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton at Open Government Partnership: “Participatory budgeting (PB) empowers citizens to allocate portions of public budgets in a way that best fits the needs of the people. In turn, proponents expect PB to improve citizens’ lives in important ways, by expanding their participation in politics, providing better public services such as in healthcare, sanitation, or education, and giving them a sense of efficacy.

Below we outline several potential outcomes that emerge from PB. Of course, assessing PB’s potential impact is difficult, because reliable data is rare and PB is often one of several programs that could generate similar improvements at the same time. Impact evaluations for PB are thus at a very early stage. Nevertheless, considerable case study evidence and some broader, comparative studies point to outcomes in the following areas:

Citizens’ attitudes: Early research focused on the attitudes of citizens who participate in PB, and found that PB participants feel empowered, support democracy, view the government as more effective, and better understand budget and government processes after participating (Wampler and Avritzer 2004; Baiocchi 2005; Wampler 2007).

Participants’ behavior: Case-study evidence shows that PB participants increase their political participation beyond PB and join civil society groups. Many scholars also expect PB to strengthen civil society by increasing its density (number of groups), expanding its range of activities, and brokering new partnerships with government and other CSOs. There is some case study evidence that this occurs (Baiocchi 2005; McNulty 2011; Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011; Van Cott 2008) as well as evidence from over 100 PB programs across Brazil’s larger municipalities (Touchton and Wampler 2014). Proponents also expect PB to educate government officials surrounding community needs, to increase their support for participatory processes, and to potentially expand participatory processes in complementary areas. Early reports from five counties in Kenya suggest that PB ther is producing at least some of these impacts.

Electoral politics and governance: PB can also promote social change, which may alter local political calculations and the ways that governments operate. PB may deliver votes to the elected officials that sponsor it, improve budget transparency and resource allocation, decrease waste and fraud, and generally improve accountability. However, there is very little evidence in this area because few studies have been able to measure these impacts in any direct way.

Social well-being: Finally, PB is designed to improve residents’ well-being. Implemented PB projects include funding for healthcare centers, sewage lines, schools, wells, and other areas that contribute directly to well-being. These effects may take years to appear, but recent studies attribute improvements in infant mortality in Brazil to PB (Touchton and Wampler 2014; Gonçalves 2014). Beyond infant mortality, the range of potential impacts extends to other health areas, sanitation, education, and poverty in general. We are cautious here because results from Brazil might not appear elsewhere: what works in urban Brazil might not in rural Indonesia….(More)”.

What public transit can learn from Uber and Lyft

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Junfeng Jiao, Juan Miró and Nicole McGrath in The Conversation: “…New technologies and business models can inspire us to reconsider how we move through society. “Sharing economy” companies use digital technologies to connect customers who want something with people offering it directly – in the case of Uber and Lyft, transportation services. Applying this approach to public transit offers new solutions to mobility problems. “Uberizing” public transit services – bringing them to customers on demand – can transform our approach to transportation issues….

In fact, public transit “Uberization” has already begun. Many U.S. cities are teaming up with ride-hailing companies to provide on-demand public transit, as well as so-called first- and last-mile connections to transit services. These offerings appeal to riders’ desire for individual flexibility. By connecting ride-hailing apps with public buses and rail, cities can help residents seamlessly move from one form of transportation to another.

Among many examples, in mid-2017 Capital Metro, the regional public transit agency for Austin, Texas, piloted the Pickup app, which allows customers to request rides to anywhere within its service zone in a section of northeast Austin from their phones. In Central Florida, five cities have launched a unique pilot program that offers discounted intercity Uber trips. And the city of Centennial, Colorado recently partnered with Lyft to provide transit users free trips to and from their Dry Creek light rail station.

Another option is offering fixed-route, on-demand bus service, like Ford’s Chariot, which is currently available in New York City, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco. This approach, which is a cross between a ride-hailing app and a bus route, provides more flexibility than traditional public transit while keeping costs low. Chariot operates during commuter hours, guarantees riders a seat once they reserve a ride online, and accepts employer-paid commuter benefits. Not to be left behind, Lyft and Uber are also trying to fill this hybrid bus/on-demand type service with Lyft Shuttle and UberPool.

This idea is not as new as it may seem. For years Americans have relied on a dependable on-demand, door-to-door public transportation system: The yellow school bus. According to the American School Bus Council, every school day in 2015 nearly 484,000 school buses transported 27 million children to and from school and school-related activities.

However, most school buses are used only twice a day, in the early morning and again in the afternoon. Local governments, transit agencies and private enterprises should consider partnering with school systems to turn school buses into on-demand transit services during idle hours.

We can also look to other countries for innovative ideas, such as colectivos – buses in South America that operate as shared taxis running on fixed routes. Via, a new ride-hailing vanpool service operating in New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C., was inspired by “sherut” shared taxis in Israel. Other forms of informal transit, such as Thailand’s tuk-tuks or jeepneys in the Philippines, may also inspire ways of filling transit gaps here in the United States. The beauty of Uberizing transportation services is that it can take many different forms.

Importantly, Uberization is not a replacement for traditional public transit. While there is some indication that ride-hailing apps reduce transit ridership, shared mobility services actually complement public transit….(More)”

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

Curated on Posted on 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)”

Our Gutenberg Moment: It’s Time To Grapple With The Internet’s Effect On Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alberto Ibargüen at HuffPost: “When clashes wracked Charlottesville, many Americans saw neo-nazi demonstrators as the obvious instigators. But others focused on counter-demonstrators, a view amplified by the president blaming “many sides.” The rift in perception underscored an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth about the flow of information today: Americans no longer have a shared foundation of facts upon which we can agree.

Politics has long been a messy, divisive business. I lived through the 1960s, a period of similar dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disunity, brilliantly chronicled by Ken Burns’ new film “The Vietnam War” on PBS. But common, local knowledge —of history and current events — has always been the great equalizer in American society. Today, however, a decrease in shared knowledge has led to a collapse in trust. Over the past few years, we have watched our capacity to compromise wane as not only our politics, but also our most basic value systems, have become polarized.

The key difference between then and now is how news is delivered and consumed. At the beginning of our Republic, the reach of media was local and largely verifiable. That direct relationship between media outlets and their communities — local newspapers and, later, radio and TV stations — held until the second half of the 20th century. Network TV began to create a sense of national community but it fractioned with the sudden ability to offer targeted, membership-based models via cable.

But cable was nothing compared to Internet. Internet’s unique ability to personalize and to create virtual communities of interest accelerated the decline of newspapers and television business models and altered the flow of information in ways that we are still uncovering. “Media” now means digital and cable, cool mediums that require hot performance. Trust in all media, including traditional media, is at an all-time low, and we’re just now beginning to grapple with the threat to democracy posed by this erosion of trust.

Internet is potentially the greatest democratizing tool in history. It is also democracy’s greatest challenge. In offering access to information that can support any position and confirm any bias, social media has propelled the erosion of our common set of everyday facts….(More)”.

Blockchain Could Help Us Reclaim Control of Our Personal Data

Curated on Posted on 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)”.

Enhancing Citizen Engagement in the Face of Climate Change Risks: A Case Study of the Flood Early Warning System and Health Information System in Semarang City, Indonesia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Aniessa Delima Sari and Nyoman Prayoga in book on Climate Change in Cities: “This case study describes how two climate resilience action projects in Semarang City, Indonesia, were able to provide new mechanisms allowing better engagement between the Semarang city government and its citizens. With the introduction of the Flood Early Warning System (FEWS), flood-prone communities in the Beringin River Basin are now able to evacuate to safe shelters before flood incidents occur. Through the Health Information and Early Warning System (HIEWS), citizens can access real-time information related to dengue fever cases in the city. Although the focus areas are different, both projects aim to help communities become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, specifically floods and vector-borne disease. We find similar patterns in the two cases, in which efforts to enhance community participation are essential to guarantee the success of the projects. Enhanced community engagement is achieved through the thoughtful consideration of local knowledge and social networks, intensive assistance to increase awareness and motivation of the community, and understanding governance structures to ensure that funds are allocated through formal handover processes to continue and expand the results of the interventions. These findings are useful and important to guide any climate change adaptation projects toward better sustainability and ownership, especially in the application of an early warning system or information system that requires technology, sustainable budget allocation from the local government to operate and maintain the system, and buy-in from local communities…(More)”

Google Gets Serious About Mapping Wheelchair Accessibility

Curated on Posted on 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)”.

Voice or chatter? Making ICTs work for transformative citizen engagement

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Research Report Summary by Making All Voices Count: “What are the conditions in democratic governance that make information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated citizen engagement transformative? While substantial scholarship exists on the role of the Internet and digital technologies in triggering moments of political disruption and cascading upheavals, academic interest in the sort of deep change that transforms institutional cultures of democratic governance, occurring in ‘slow time’, has been relatively muted.

This study attempts to fill this gap. It is inspired by the idea of participation in everyday democracy and seeks to explore how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can promote democratic governance and amplify citizen voice.

ICT-mediated citizen engagement is defined by this study as comprising digitally-mediated information outreach, dialogue, consultation, collaboration and decision-making, initiated either by government or by citizens, towards greater government accountability and responsiveness.

The study involved empirical explorations of citizen engagement initiatives in eight sites – two in Asia (India and Philippines), one in Africa (South Africa), three in South America (Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay) and two in Europe (Netherlands and Spain).

This summary of the larger Research Report presents recommendations for how public policies and programmes can promote ICTs for citizen engagement and transformative citizenship.  In doing so it provides an overview of the discussion the authors undertake on three inter-related dimensions, namely:

  • calibrating digitally mediated citizen participation as a measure of political empowerment and equality
  • designing techno-public spaces as bastions of inclusive democracy
  • ensuring that the rule of law upholds democratic principles in digitally mediated governance…(More. Full research report)

Who serves the poor ? surveying civil servants in the developing world

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Worldbank working paper by Daniel Oliver Rogger: “Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants — the professional body of administrators who manage government policy — and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world’s poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of ‘stylized facts’ of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil servants allow us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices….(More)”.