Migration tracking is a mess

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Huub Dijstelbloem in Nature: “As debates over migration, refugees and freedom of movement intensify, technologies are increasingly monitoring the movements of people. Biometric passports and databases containing iris scans or fingerprints are being used to check a person’s right to travel through or stay within a territory. India, for example, is establishing biometric identification for its 1.3 billion citizens.

But technologies are spreading beyond borders. Security policies and humanitarian considerations have broadened the landscape. Drones and satellite images inform policies and direct aid to refugees. For instance, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), maps refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere with its Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT; see www.unitar.org/unosat/map/1928).

Three areas are in need of research, in my view: the difficulties of joining up disparate monitoring systems; privacy issues and concerns over the inviolability of the human body; and ‘counter-surveillance’ deployed by non-state actors to highlight emergencies or contest claims that governments make.

Ideally, state monitoring of human mobility would be bound by ethical principles, solid legislation, periodical evaluations and the checks and balances of experts and political and public debates. In reality, it is ad hoc. Responses are arbitrary, fuelled by the crisis management of governments that have failed to anticipate global and regional migration patterns. Too often, this results in what the late sociologist Ulrich Beck called organized irresponsibility: situations of inadequacy in which it is hard to blame a single actor.

Non-governmental organizations, activists and migrant groups are using technologies to register incidents and to blame and shame states. For example, the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used satellite imagery and other evidence to reconstruct the journey of a boat that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011 with 72 passengers. A fortnight later, it returned to the Libyan coast with just 9 survivors. Although the boat had been spotted by several aircraft and vessels, no rescue operation had been mounted (go.nature.com/2mbwvxi). Whether the states involved can be held accountable is still being considered.

In the end, technologies to monitor mobility are political tools. Their aims, design, use, costs and consequences should be developed and evaluated accordingly….(More)”.

The Whatsapp-inspired, Facebook-investor funded app tackling India’s doctor shortage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechInAsia: “A problem beyond India’s low doctor-to-patient ratio is the distribution of those doctors. Most, particularly specialists, congregate in bigger cities and get seen by patients in the surrounding areas. Only 19 percent of specialists are available in community health centers across India, and most fall well below the country’s requirement for specialists. Community health centers are located in smaller towns and help patients in the area decide if they need to visit a larger, better-equipped city facility….

The IIT-Madras grad’s company, DocsApp, co-founded with fellow IIT-Madras alum Enbasekar D (CTO), joins startups like Practo, DocDoc, and Medinfi in helping patients find physicians. However, the app’s main focus is specialists, and it lets patients chat with doctors and get consultations.

DocsApp’s name is directly inspired by WhatsApp. As long as you have a chat screen on your phone, you can input your problems and location, find a doctor, and ask questions. A user can pay for his or her own appointment over mobile. If treatment requires a physical visit, the user’s money is refunded….

Doctor profiles include the physician’s experience, medical counsel ID, patient reviews, specialty, and languages – DocsApp covers 17 different languages. DocsApp has 1,200 doctors in 15 specialties. All doctors on the platform are verified by looking up certification, an interview, and a facilities review.

If a consultation reveals that a patient needs a prescription, the doctor can provide a digitally-signed e-prescription. DocsApp can deliver medicines within two days to any location in India, says Satish.

Once a user has access to one of the doctors, he or she can message the doctor 24/7 and get a response in 30 minutes – Satish says that the company’s average is now 18 minutes. The team of 55 is aiming for a minute or less….

Telemedicine is one of the ways tech is combatting India’s doctor shortage. Other startups in the industry in the country include Visit, which focuses on both physical and mental health, and SeeDoc, a physician video consultation app.

A chat is a little less personal than a physical visit, which can open the door for patients who want to discuss more taboo topics in India, like mental health and fertility questions. Satish adds that women who live in locations where it’s best to be accompanied by a man when going out also find convenience, as they don’t necessarily need to wait for a husband to come back from work before addressing a medical question she has about her child…(More)”.

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound.

 Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’ whose job is to establish and manage the country’s relationship with the world’s most powerful tech companies?

Denmark’s “digital ambassador” is a first. No country has ever created such a role. Their job will be to liase with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Given the fraught relationship many European countries have with American big-tech – especially on issues of taxation, privacy, and national security – Denmark’s decision to extend an olive branch seems sensible.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”….(More)”

Toward a User-Centered Social Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tris Lumley at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Over the last three years, a number of trends have crystallized that I believe herald the promise of a new phase—perhaps even a new paradigm—for the social sector. I want to explore three of the most exciting, and sketch out where I believe they might take us and why we’d all do well to get involved.

  • The rise of feedback
  • New forms of collaboration
  • Disruption through technology

Taken individually, these three themes are hugely significant in their potential impact on the work of nonprofits and those that invest in them. But viewed together, as interwoven threads, I believe they have the potential to transform both how we work and the underlying fundamental incentives and structure of the social sector.

The rise of feedback

The nonprofit sector is built on a deep and rich history of community engagement. Yet, in a funding market that incentivizes accountability to funders, this strong tradition of listening, engagement, and ownership by primary constituents—the people and communities nonprofits exist to serve—has sometimes faded. Opportunities for funding can drive strategies. Practitioner experience and research evidence can shape program designs. Engagement with service users can become tokenistic, or shallow….

In recognition of this growing momentum, Keystone Accountability and New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) published a paper in 2016 to explore the relationship between impact measurement and user voice. It is our shared belief that many of the recent criticisms of the impact movement—such as impact reporting being used primarily for fundraising rather than improving programs—would be addressed if impact evidence and user voice were seen as two sides of the same coin, and we more routinely sought to synthesize our understanding of nonprofits’ programs from both aspects at once…

New forms of collaboration

As recent critiques of collective impact have pointed out, the social sector has a long history of collaboration. Yet it has not always been the default operating model of nonprofits or their funders. The fragmented nature of the social sector today exposes an urgent imperative for greater focus on collaboration….

Yet the need for greater collaboration and new forms to incentivize and enable it is increasing. Deepening austerity policies, the shrinking of the state in many countries, and the sheer scale of the social issues we face have driven the “demand” side of collaboration. The collective impact movement has certainly been one driver of momentum on the “supply” side, and a number of other forms of collaboration are emerging.

The Young People’s Foundation model, developed in the UK by the John Lyons Charity, is one response to deepening cuts in nonprofit funding. Young People’s Foundations are new organizations that serve three purposes for nonprofits working with young people in the local area—creating a network, leading on collaborative funding bids and contracting processes, and sharing assets across the network.

Elsewhere, philanthropic donors and foundations are increasingly exploring collaboration in practical terms, through pooled grant funds that provide individual donors unrivalled leverage, and that allow groups of funders to benefit from each other’s strengths through coordination and shared strategies. The Dasra Girl Alliance in India is an example of a pooled fund that brings together philanthropic donors and institutional development funders, and fosters collaboration between the nonprofits it supports….

Disruption through technology

Technology might appear an incongruous companion to feedback and collaboration, which are both very human in nature, yet it’s likely to transform our sector….(More)”

State of Open Corporate Data: Wins and Challenges Ahead

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sunlight Foundation: “For many people working to open data and reduce corruption, the past year could be summed up in two words: “Panama Papers.” The transcontinental investigation by a team from International Center of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) blew open the murky world of offshore company registration. It put corporate transparency high on the agenda of countries all around the world and helped lead to some notable advances in access to official company register data….

While most companies are created and operated for legitimate economic activity,  there is a small percentage that aren’t. Entities involved in corruption, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion frequently use such companies as vehicles for their criminal activity. “The Idiot’s Guide to Money Laundering from Global Witness” shows how easy it is to use layer after layer of shell companies to hide the identity of the person who controls and benefits from the activities of the network. The World Bank’s “Puppet Masters” report found that over 70% of grand corruption cases, in fact, involved the use of offshore vehicles.

For years, OpenCorporates has advocated for company information to be in the public domain as open data, so it is usable and comparable.  It was the public reaction to Panama Papers, however, that made it clear that due diligence requires global data sets and beneficial registries are key for integrity and progress.

The call for accountability and action was clear from the aftermath of the leak. ICIJ, the journalists involved and advocates have called for tougher action on prosecutions and more transparency measures: open corporate registers and beneficial ownership registers. A series of workshops organized by the B20 showed that business also needed public beneficial ownership registers….

Last year the UK became the first country in the world to collect and publish who controls and benefits from companies in a structured format, and as open data. Just a few days later, we were able to add the information in OpenCorporates. The UK data, therefore, is one of a kind, and has been highly anticipated by transparency skeptics and advocates advocates alike. So fa,r things are looking good. 15 other countries have committed to having a public beneficial ownership register including Nigeria, Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand and Norway. Denmark has announced its first public beneficial ownership data will be published in June 2017. It’s likely to be open data.

This progress isn’t limited to beneficial ownership. It is also being seen in the opening up of corporate registers . These are what OpenCorporates calls “core company data”. In 2016, more countries started releasing company register as open data, including Japan, with over 4.4 million companies, Israel, Virginia, Slovenia, Texas, Singapore and Bulgaria. We’ve also had a great start to 2017 , with France publishing their central company database as open data on January 5th.

As more states have embracing open data, the USA jumped from average score of 19/100 to 30/100. Singapore rose from 0 to 20. The Slovak Republic from 20 to 40. Bulgaria wet from 35 to 90.  Japan rose from 0 to 70 — the biggest increase of the year….(More)”

Facebook introduces a way to help your neighbors after a disaster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Casey Newton at the Verge: “Last year Facebook announced Community Help, a new part of its Safety Check feature designed to connect disaster victims with Facebook users in the area who are offering their help. Now whenever Safety Check is activated, Community Help will let users find or offer food, shelter, transportation, and other forms of assistance. After testing the feature in December, Facebook is beginning to roll it out today in the United States, Canada, India, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Facebook says Community Help represents a logical next step for Safety Check, which was first announced in November 2014. Initially, each Safety Check was essentially created manually by Facebook’s team.

In November, the company announced that Safety Check would become more automated. Global crisis reporting agencies send Facebook alerts, which it then attempts to match to user posts in a geographic area. When it finds a spike in user posts, coupled with the alert, Facebook activates Safety Check. The company says employees oversee the process to prevent false positives — something it hasn’t always succeeded at doing.

In discussions with relief agencies, Facebook says it found that disaster victims were often coming to Facebook in search of help — or to offer some. In some cases, product designer Preethi Chethan says, they were pasting Facebook posts into spreadsheets to help sort them.

Community Help is designed to make post-disaster matchmaking easier. You’ll find it inside Safety Check — go there in the wake of a calamity, and after marking yourself safe you can create a post seeking or offering help. For starters, Community Help will only be available after natural disasters and accidents….(More)”.

Information for accountability: Transparency and citizen engagement for improved service delivery in education systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lindsay Read and Tamar Manuelyan Atinc at Brookings: “There is a wide consensus among policymakers and practitioners that while access to education has improved significantly for many children in low- and middle-income countries, learning has not kept pace. A large amount of research that has attempted to pinpoint the reasons behind this quality deficit in education has revealed that providing extra resources such as textbooks, learning materials, and infrastructure is largely ineffective in improving learning outcomes at the system level without accompanying changes to the underlying structures of education service delivery and associated systems of accountability.

Information is a key building block of a wide range of strategies that attempts to tackle weaknesses in service delivery and accountability at the school level, even where political systems disappoint at the national level. The dissemination of more and better quality information is expected to empower parents and communities to make better decisions in terms of their children’s schooling and to put pressure on school administrators and public officials for making changes that improve learning and learning environments. This theory of change underpins both social accountability and open data initiatives, which are designed to use information to enhance accountability and thereby influence education delivery.

This report seeks to extract insight into the nuanced relationship between information and accountability, drawing upon a vast literature on bottom-up efforts to improve service delivery, increase citizen engagement, and promote transparency, as well as case studies in Australia, Moldova, Pakistan, and the Philippines. In an effort to clarify processes and mechanisms behind information-based reforms in the education sector, this report also categorizes and evaluates recent impact evaluations according to the intensity of interventions and their target change agents—parents, teachers, school principals, and local officials. The idea here is not just to help clarify what works but why reforms work (or do not)….(More)”

Montreal monitoring city traffic via drivers’ Bluetooth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Rather than rely on once-yearly spot checks of traffic throughout the city, Montreal, Canada, decided to build a more comprehensive picture of what was working well, and what wasn’t working very well, around the city. Working with traffic management company Orange Traffic, the city installed more than 100 sensors along the busiest vehicular routes. The sensors pick up mobile phone Bluetooth signals, making the system inexpensive to use and install as no additional hardware or devices are needed.

Once the sensors pick up a Bluetooth signal, they track it through several measurement points to get an idea of how fast or slow traffic is moving. The data is sent to the city’s Urban Mobility Management Center. City officials are keen to emphasize that no personal data is recorded as Bluetooth signals cannot be linked to individuals. Traffic management and urban planning teams will be able to use the data to redesign problematic intersections and improve the overall mobility of the city’s streets and transport facilities.

Smart cities are those making safety and efficiency a priority, from providing digital driver licenses in India to crowdsourcing a map of cars in bike lanes in New York City….(More)”

Iran’s Civic Tech Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Leah Hunter at Forbes: “This is the story of Firuzeh Mahmoudi, founder of United4Iran and Irancubator, the first civic tech-focused startup incubator in Iran. She is also a creator of civil justice apps and a businessperson. Her business? Creating social good in a country she loves.

“Our mission is to improve civil liberties in Iran, and we do that in three ways,” says Mahmoudi, 45, who spent four years working for the United Nations in countries across the world as an international project coordinator before becoming a founder….

Mahmoudi realized that there wasn’t anyone focused on apps made for civic engagement inside Iran, so she built a team to create Irancubator. She works with 30 consultants and partners in the Iranian-American community. She also has a staff of 10 in her San Francisco Bay Area office—most of whom are Iranian, and were still in the country until 2009. “I really worked hard in bringing in resilient people…people who are smart, creative, kind. It’s so important to be kind. How you do the work, and how you show up, is that critical. If you try to make the world a better place, you’d better be nice. If you want to make the government be nicer, you’d better be nice, too.”

She and her team, based in the San Francisco Bay Area are creating apps like the Iran Prison Atlas – a database of all the country’s political prisoners, the judges who sentenced them and the prisons where they’re held. “We believe how these people are treated is a litmus test for our country,” Mahmoudi explains.

They are building an app women can use to track their ovulation cycles and periods. It also acts as a Trojan horse; as you dig deeper, it includes all sorts of information on women’s rights, including how to have equal rights in a marriage. (In Iran, divorce rights for women—as well as the right to equal custody of their children afterward—require a document signed before the wedding ceremony.) “This one’s not specifically targeting the richer women who are living in Northern Tehran. It’s an app that aims to engage people who live in rural areas, or not be as well-off or educated or perhaps more conservative or religious,” Mahmoudi explains. “Once you get in the app, you realize there are other parts. They include information on one’s rights as a woman in a marriage. Or basic concepts that may be completely foreign to them. Like maybe say, “Hey, do you know there’s a concept called ‘marital rape’? Even if someone’s your husband, they can’t treat you this way.”…

Right now, Irancubator is building a dozen apps. The first is launching in late January. Named RadiTo, this app works similarly to YouTube, but for radio instead of TV, allowing people in Iran to broadcast channels about the topics they care about. Someone can create a channel about LGBT rights or about children and education in their language. “Whatever they want—they can have a secure, safe platform to broadcast their message,” Mahmoudi explains.

From an operational perspective, this isn’t easy. Mahmoudi and her staff aren’t just building a startup. They’re operating from the other side of the world, working for users with whom they cannot directly communicate.  “Any startup is challenging and has so many hurdles. For us, it’s another level, working with so many security challenges,” says Mahmoudi….

The biggest challenge of all: they cannot go back to Iran. “The Islamic Republic coined me as an anti-revolutionary fugitive in one of their articles,” Mahmoudi says. “Half of my staff are refugees who got out.”…(More).

Rethinking how we collect, share, and use development results data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Development Gateway: “The international development community spends a great deal of time, effort, and money gathering data on thousands of indicators embedded in various levels of Results Frameworks. These data comprise outputs (school enrollment, immunization figures), program outcomes (educational attainment, disease prevalence), and, in some cases, impacts (changes in key outcomes over time).

Ostensibly, we use results data to allocate resources to the places, partners, and programs most likely to achieve lasting success. But is this data good enough – and is it used well enough – to genuinely increase development impact in priority areas?

Experience suggests that decision-makers at all levels may often face inadequate, incorrect, late, or incomplete results data. At the same time, a figurative “Tower of Babel” of both project-level M&E and program-level outcome data can make it difficult for agencies and organizations to share and use data effectively. Further, potential users may not have the skills, resources, or enabling environment to meaningfully analyze and apply results data to decisions. With these challenges in mind, the development community needs to re-think its investments in results data, making sure that the right users are able to collect, share, and use this information to maximum effect.

Our Initiative

To this end, Development Gateway (DG), with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to “diagnose” the results data ecosystem in three countries, identifying ways to improve data quality, sharing, and use in the health and agriculture sectors. Some of our important questions include:

  • Quality: Who collects data and how? Is data quality adequate? Does the data meet actual needs? How much time does data collection demand? How can data collection, quality, and reporting be improved?
  • Sharing: How can we compare results data from different donors, governments, and implementers? Is there demand for comparability? Should data be shared more freely? If so, how?
  • Use: How is results data analyzed and used to inform actual policies and plans? Does (or can) access to results data improve decision-making? Do the right people have the right data? How else can (or should) we promote data use?…(More)”