Drones Marshaled to Drop Lifesaving Supplies Over Rwandan Terrain

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Markoff at the New York Times: “From a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, aloud pop signals the catapult launch of a small fixed-wing drone that is designed to carry medical supplies to remote locations almost 40 miles away.

The drones are the brainchild of a small group of engineers at a SiliconValley start-up called Zipline, which plans to begin operating a service with them for the government of Rwanda in July. The fleet of robot planes will initially cover more than half the tiny African nation, creating a highly automated network to shuttle blood and pharmaceuticals to remote locations in hours rather than weeks or months.

Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest nations, was ranked 170th by gross domestic product in 2014 by the International Monetary Fund. And so it is striking that the country will be the first, company executives said, to establish a commercial drone delivery network — putting it ahead of places like the United States, where there have been heavily ballyhooed futuristicdrone delivery systems promising urban and suburban package delivery from tech giants such as Amazon and Google….

That Rwanda is set to become the first country with a drone delivery network illustrates the often uneven nature of the adoption of new technology. In the United States, drones have run into a wall of regulation and conflicting rules. But in Rwanda, the country’s master development plan has placed a priority on the use of the machines, first for medicine and then more broadly for economic development….

The new drone system will initially be capable of making 50 to 150 daily deliveries of blood and emergency medicine to Rwanda’s 21 transfusing facilities, mostly in hospitals and clinics in the western half of the nation.

The drone system is based on a fleet of 15 small aircraft, each with twin electric motors, a 3.5-pound payload and an almost eight-foot wingspan.The system’s speed makes it possible to maintain a “cold chain” —essentially a temperature-controlled supply chain needed to provide blood and vaccines — which is often not practical to establish in developing countries.

The Zipline drones will use GPS receivers to navigate and communicate via the Rwandan cellular network. They will be able to fly in rough weather conditions, enduring winds up to 30 miles per hour….(More)”

Data to the Rescue: Smart Ways of Doing Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Wallace in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “For a long time, data served one purpose in the nonprofit world: measuring program results. But a growing number of charities are rejecting the idea that data equals evaluation and only evaluation.

Of course, many nonprofits struggle even to build the simplest data system. They have too little money, too few analysts, and convoluted data pipelines. Yet some cutting-edge organizations are putting data to work in new and exciting ways that drive their missions. A prime example: The Polaris Project is identifying criminal networks in the human-trafficking underworld and devising strategies to fight back by analyzing its data storehouse along with public information.

Other charities dive deep into their data to improve services, make smarter decisions, and identify measures that predict success. Some have such an abundance of information that they’re even pruning their collection efforts to allow for more sophisticated analysis.

The groups highlighted here are among the best nationally. In their work, we get a sneak peek at how the data revolution might one day achieve its promise.

House Calls: Living Goods…

Living Goods launched in eastern Africa in 2007 with an innovative plan to tackle health issues in poor families and reduce deaths among children. The charity provides loans, training, and inventory to locals in Uganda and Kenya — mostly women — to start businesses selling vitamins, medicine, and other health products to friends and neighbors.

Founder Chuck Slaughter copied the Avon model and its army of housewives-turned-sales agents. But in recent years, Living Goods has embraced a 21st-century data system that makes its entrepreneurs better health practitioners. Armed with smartphones, they confidently diagnose and treat major illnesses. At the same time, they collect information that helps the charity track health across communities and plot strategy….

Unraveling Webs of Wickedness: Polaris Project…

Calls and texts to the Polaris Project’s national human-trafficking hotline are often heartbreaking, terrifying, or both.

Relatives fear that something terrible has happened to a missing loved one. Trafficking survivors suffering from their ordeal need support. The most harrowing calls are from victims in danger and pleading for help.

Last year more than 5,500 potential cases of exploitation for labor or commercial sex were reported to the hotline. Since it got its start in 2007, the total is more than 24,000.

As it helps victims and survivors get the assistance they need, the Polaris Project, a Washington nonprofit, is turning those phone calls and texts into an enormous storehouse of information about the shadowy world of trafficking. By analyzing this data and connecting it with public sources, the nonprofit is drawing detailed pictures of how trafficking networks operate. That knowledge, in turn, shapes the group’s prevention efforts, its policy work, and even law-enforcement investigations….

Too Much Information: Year Up…

Year Up has a problem that many nonprofits can’t begin to imagine: It collects too much data about its program. “Predictive analytics really start to stink it up when you put too much in,” says Garrett Yursza Warfield, the group’s director of evaluation.

What Mr. Warfield describes as the “everything and the kitchen sink” problem started soon after Year Up began gathering data. The group, which fights poverty by helping low-income young adults land entry-level professional jobs, first got serious about measuring its work nearly a decade ago. Though challenged at first to round up even basic information, the group over time began tracking virtually everything it could: the percentage of young people who finish the program, their satisfaction, their paths after graduation through college or work, and much more.

Now the nonprofit is diving deeper into its data to figure out which measures can predict whether a young person is likely to succeed in the program. And halfway through this review, it’s already identified and eliminated measures that it’s found matter little. A small example: Surveys of participants early in the program asked them to rate their proficiency at various office skills. Those self-evaluations, Mr. Warfield’s team concluded, were meaningless: How can novice professionals accurately judge their Excel spreadsheet skills until they’re out in the working world?…

On the Wild Side: Wildnerness Society…Without room to roam, wild animals and plants breed among themselves and risk losing genetic diversity. They also fall prey to disease. And that’s in the best of times. As wildlife adapt to climate change, the chance to migrate becomes vital even to survival.

National parks and other large protected areas are part of the answer, but they’re not enough if wildlife can’t move between them, says Travis Belote, lead ecologist at the Wilderness Society.

“Nature needs to be able to shuffle around,” he says.

Enter the organization’s Wildness Index. It’s a national map that shows the parts of the country most touched by human activity as well as wilderness areas best suited for wildlife. Mr. Belote and his colleagues created the index by combining data on land use, population density, road location and size, water flows, and many other factors. It’s an important tool to help the nonprofit prioritize the locations it fights to protect.

In Idaho, for example, the nonprofit compares the index with information about known wildlife corridors and federal lands that are unprotected but meet the criteria for conservation designation. The project’s goal: determine which areas in the High Divide — a wild stretch that connects Greater Yellowstone with other protected areas — the charity should advocate to legally protect….(More)”

See also HOW NONPROFITS CAN PUT DATA TO USE

The Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big Data and the Global South

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Payal Arora at the International Journal of Communication: “To date, little attention has been given to the impact of big data in the Global South, about 60% of whose residents are below the poverty line. Big data manifests in novel and unprecedented ways in these neglected contexts. For instance, India has created biometric national identities for her 1.2 billion people, linking them to welfare schemes, and social entrepreneurial initiatives like the Ushahidi project that leveraged crowdsourcing to provide real-time crisis maps for humanitarian relief.

While these projects are indeed inspirational, this article argues that in the context of the Global South there is a bias in the framing of big data as an instrument of empowerment. Here, the poor, or the “bottom of the pyramid” populace are the new consumer base, agents of social change instead of passive beneficiaries. This neoliberal outlook of big data facilitating inclusive capitalism for the common good sidelines critical perspectives urgently needed if we are to channel big data as a positive social force in emerging economies. This article proposes to assess these new technological developments through the lens of databased democracies, databased identities, and databased geographies to make evident normative assumptions and perspectives in this under-examined context….(More)”.

Data Mining Reveals the Four Urban Conditions That Create Vibrant City Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology from the arXiv: “Lack of evidence to city planning has ruined cities all over the world. But data-mining techniques are finally revealing the rules that make cities successful, vibrant places to live. …Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.

Jacobs’s conclusions have become hugely influential. Her ideas have had a significant impact on the development of many modern cities such as Toronto and New York City’s Greenwich Village. However, her ideas have also attracted criticism because of the lack of empirical evidence to back them up, a problem that is widespread in urban planning.
Today, that looks set to change thanks to the work of Marco De Nadai at the University of Trento and a few pals, who have developed a way to gather urban data that they use to test Jacobs’s conditions and how they relate to the vitality of city life. The new approach heralds a new age of city planning in which planners have an objective way of assessing city life and working out how it can be improved.
In her book, Jacobs argues that vibrant activity can only flourish in cities when the physical environment is diverse. This diversity, she says, requires four conditions. The first is that city districts must serve more than two functions so that they attract people with different purposes at different times of the day and night. Second, city blocks must be small with dense intersections that give pedestrians many opportunities to interact. The third condition is that buildings must be diverse in terms of age and form to support a mix of low-rent and high-rent tenants. By contrast, an area with exclusively new buildings can only attract businesses and tenants wealthy enough to support the cost of new building. Finally, a district must have a sufficient density of people and buildings.

While Jacobs’s arguments are persuasive, her critics say there is little evidence to show that these factors are linked with vibrant city life. That changed last year when urban scientists in Seoul, South Korea, published the result of a 10-year study of pedestrian activity in the city at unprecedented resolution. This work successfully tested Jacobs’s ideas for the first time.
However, the data was gathered largely through pedestrian surveys, a process that is time-consuming, costly, and generally impractical for use in most modern cities.
De Nadai and co have come up with a much cheaper and quicker alternative using a new generation of city databases and the way people use social media and mobile phones. The new databases include OpenStreetMap, the collaborative mapping tool; census data, which records populations and building use; land use data, which uses satellite images to classify land use according to various categories; Foursquare data, which records geographic details about personal activity; and mobile-phone records showing the number and frequency of calls in an area.
De Nadai and co gathered this data for six cities in Italy—Rome, Naples, Florence, Bologna, Milan, and Palermo.
Their analysis is straightforward. The team used mobile-phone activity as a measure of urban vitality and land-use records, census data, and Foursquare activity as a measure of urban diversity. Their goal was to see how vitality and diversity are correlated in the cities they studied. The results make for interesting reading….(More)

How tech is forcing firms to be better global citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Lawson at the BBC: “…technology is forcing companies to up their game and interact with communities more directly and effectively….

Platforms such as Kritical Mass have certainly given a fillip to the idea of crowd-supported philanthropy, attracting individuals and corporate sponsors to its projects, whether that’s saving vultures in Kenya or bringing solar power to rural communities in west Africa.

Sponsors can offer funding, volunteers, expertise or marketing. So rather than imposing corporate ideas of “do-gooding” on communities in a patronising manner, firms can simply respond to demand.

HelpfulPeeps has pushed its volunteering platform into more than 40 countries worldwide, connecting people who want to share their time, knowledge and skills with each other for free.

In the UK, online platform Neighbourly connects community projects and charities with companies and people willing to volunteer their resources. For example, Starbucks has pledged 2,500 days of volunteering and has so far backed 70 community projects….

Judging by the strong public appetite for supporting good causes and campaigning against injustice on sites such as Change.org, Avaaz.org, JustGiving andGoFundMe, his assessment appears to be correct.

And LinkedIn says millions of members have signalled on their profiles that they want to serve on a non-profit board or use their skills to volunteer….

Tech companies in particular are offering expertise and skills to good causes as way of making a tangible difference.

For example, in January, Microsoft announced that through its new organisation,Microsoft Philanthropies, it will donate $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to serve non-profits and university researchers over the next three years…

And data analytics specialist Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) has offered its data-crunching skills to help the Capital Area Food Bank charity distribute food more efficiently to hungry people around the Washington DC area.

APT used data to develop a “hunger heat map” to help CAFB target resources and plan for future demand better.

In another project, APT helped The Cara Program – a Chicago-based charity providing training and job placements to people affected by homelessness or poverty – evaluate what made its students more employable….

And Launch, an open platform jointly founded by Nasa, Nike, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of State aims to provide support for start-ups and “inspire innovation”.

In the age of internet transparency, it seems corporates no longer have anywhere to hide – a spot of CSR whitewashing is not going to cut it anymore….(More)”.

The 4 Types of Cities and How to Prepare Them for the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John D. Macomber at Harvard Business Review: “The prospect of urban innovation excites the imagination. But dreaming up what a “smart city” will look like in some gleaming future is, by its nature, a utopian exercise. The messy truth is that cities are not the same, and even the most innovative approach can never achieve universal impact. What’s appealing for intellectuals in Copenhagen or Amsterdam is unlikely to help millions of workers in Jakarta or Lagos. To really make a difference, private entrepreneurs and civic entrepreneurs need to match projects to specific circumstances. An effective starting point is to break cities into four segments across two distinctions: legacy vs. new cities, and developed vs. emerging economies. The opportunities to innovate will differ greatly by segment.

Segment 1: Developed Economy, Legacy City
Examples: London, Detroit, Tokyo, Singapore

Characteristics: Any intervention in a legacy city has to dismantle something that existed before — a road or building, or even a regulatory authority or an entrenched service business. Slow demographic growth in developed economies creates a zero-sum situation (which is part of why the licensed cabs vs Uber/Lyft contest is so heated). Elites live in these cities, so solutions arise that primarily help users spend their excess cash. Yelp, Zillow, and Trip Advisor are examples of innovations in this context.
Implications for city leaders: Leaders should try to establish a setting where entrepreneurs can create solutions that improve quality of life — without added government expense. …

Implications for entrepreneurs: Denizens of developed legacy cities have discretionary income. …

Segment 2: Emerging Economy, Legacy City
Examples: Mumbai, São Paolo, Jakarta

Characteristics: Most physical and institutional structures are already in place in these megacities, but with fast-growing populations and severe congestion, there is an opportunity to create value by improving efficiency and livability, and there is a market of customers with cash to pay for these benefits.

Implications for city leaders: Leaders should loosen restrictions so that private finance can invest in improvements to physical infrastructure, to better use what already exists. …

Implications for entrepreneurs: Focus on public-private partnerships (PPP). …

Segment 3: Emerging Economy, New City
Examples: Phu My Hung, Vietnam; Suzhou, China; Astana, Kazakhstan; Singapore (historically)

Characteristics: These cities tend to have high population growth and high growth rates in GDP per capita, demographic and economic tailwinds that help to boost returns. The urban areas have few existing physical or social structures to dismantle as they grow, hence fewer entrenched obstacles to new offerings. There is also immediate ROI for investments in basic services as population moves in, because they capture new revenues from new users. Finally, in these cities there is an important chance to build it right the first time, notably with respect to the roads, bridges, water, and power that will determine both economic competitiveness and quality of life for decades. The downside? If this chance is missed, new urban agglomerations will be characterized by informal sprawl and new settlements will be hard to reach after the fact with power, roads, and sanitation.
Implications for city leaders: Leaders should first focus on building hard infrastructure that will support services such as schools, hospitals, and parks. …

Implications for entrepreneurs: In these cities, it’s too soon to think about optimizing existing infrastructure or establishing amusing ways for wealthy people to spend their disposable income. …

Segment 4: Developed Economy, New City
Examples and characteristics: Such cities are very rare. All the moment, almost all self-proclaimed “new cities” in the developed world are in fact large, integrated real-estate developments with an urban theme, usually in close proximity to a true municipality. Examples of these initiatives include New Songdo City in South Korea, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, and Hafen City Hamburg in Germany.

Implications for city leaders: These satellites of existing metropolises compete for jobs and to attract talented participants in the creative economy. ….

Implications for entrepreneurs: Align with city leaders on services that are important to knowledge workers, and help build the cities’ brand. ….

Cities are different. So are solutions….(More)

New #ODimpact Release: How is Open Data Creating Economic Opportunities and Solving Public Problems?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Young at The GovLab: “Last month, the GovLab and Omidyar Network launched Open Data’s Impact (odimpact.org), a custom-built repository offering a range of in-depth case studies on global open data projects. The initial launch of theproject featured the release of 13 open data impact case studies – ten undertaken by the GovLab, as well asthree case studies from Becky Hogge (@barefoot_techie), an independent researcher collaborating withOmidyar Network. Today, we are releasing a second batch of 12 case studies – nine case studies from theGovLab and three from Hogge…

The batch of case studies being revealed today examines two additional dimensions of impact. They find that:

  • Open data is creating new opportunities for citizens and organizations, by fostering innovation and promoting economic growth and job creation.
  • Open data is playing a role in solving public problems, primarily by allowing citizens and policymakers access to new forms of data-driven assessment of the problems at hand. It also enables data-driven engagement, producing more targeted interventions and enhanced collaboration.

The specific impacts revealed by today’s release of case studies are wide-ranging, and include both positive and negative transformations. We have found that open data has enabled:

  • The creation of new industries built on open weather data released by the United States NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
  • The generation of billions of dollars of economic activity as a result of the Global Positioning System(GPS) being opened to the global public in the 1980s, and the United Kingdom’s Ordnance Survey geospatial offerings.
  • A more level playing field for small businesses in New York City seeking market research data.
  • The coordinated sharing of data among government and international actors during the response to theEbola outbreak in Sierra Leone.
  • The identification of discriminatory water access decisions in the case Kennedy v the City of Zanesville, resulting in a $10.9 million settlement for the African-American plaintiffs.
  • Increased awareness among Singaporeans about the location of hotspots for dengue fever transmission.
  • Improved, data-driven emergency response following earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • Troubling privacy violations on Eightmaps related to Californians’ political donation activity….(More)”

All case studies available at odimpact.org.

 

Letting the people decide … but will government listen?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Mandarin: “If we now have the technology to allow citizens to vote directly on all issues, what job remains for public servants?

While new technology may provide new options to contribute, the really important thing is governmental willingness to actually listen, says Maria Katsonis, the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s director of equality.

The balance between citizen consultation and public service expertise in decision-making remains a hot debate, with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill warning last year that while expertise in policy is important, overzealous bureaucrats and politicians can disenfranchise citizens.

The internet is assisting government to attain opinions from people more easily than ever before. SA, for example, has embraced the use of citizen juries in policy formation through its youSAy portal — though as yet on only some issues. Finland has experimented with digitally crowdsourcing input into the policymaking process.

The Victorian government, meanwhile, has received blowback around claims its recent announcement for a “skyrail” in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs went ahead with very little consultation…

Indeed, even a direct vote doesn’t mean the government is really listening to the people. A notable example of a government using a poorly designed popular vote to rubber stamp its own intentions was an online poll in Queensland on whether to cut public transport fares which was worded to suit the government’s own predilections.

Giving citizens the tools to contribute

Katsonis said she didn’t want to “diss crowdsourcing”; governments should think about where using it might be appropriate, and where it might not. Directly crowdsourcing legislation is perhaps not the best way to use the “wisdom of the crowd”, she suggested….The use of people’s panels to inform policy and budgeting — for example at the City of Melbourne — shows some promise as one tool to improve engagement. Participants of people’s panels — which see groups of ordinary citizens being given background information about the task at hand and then asked to come up with a proposal for what to do — tend to report a higher trust in governmental processes after they’ve gained some experience of the difficulty of making those decisions.

One of the benefits of that system is the chance to give participants the tools to understand those processes for themselves, rather than going in cold, as some other direct participation tools do….

Despite the risks, processes such as citizens’ panels are still a more nuanced approach than calls for frequent referenda or the new breed of internet-based political parties, such as Australia’s Online Direct Democracy, that promise their members of parliament will vote however a majority of voters tell them to….(More)”

Improving government effectiveness: lessons from Germany

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Gash at Global Government Forum: “All countries face their own unique challenges but advanced democracies also have much in common: the global economic downturn, aging populations, increasingly expensive health and pension spending, and citizens who remain as hard to please as ever.

At an event last week in Bavaria, attended by representatives of Bavaria’s governing party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and their guests, it also became clear that there is a growing consensus that governments face another common problem. They have relied for too long on traditional legislation and regulation to drive change. The consensus was that simply prescribing in law what citizens and companies can and can’t do will not solve the complex problems governments are facing, that governments cannot legislate their way to improved citizen health, wealth and wellbeing….

…a number of developments …from which both UK and international policymakers and practitioners can learn to improve government effectiveness.

  1. Behavioural economics: The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which span out of government in 2013 and is the subject of a new book by one of its founders and former IfG Director of Research, David Halpern, is being watched carefully by many countries abroad. Some are using its services, while others – including the New South Wales Government in Australia –are building their own skills in this area. BIT and others using similar principles have shown that using insights from social psychology – alongside an experimental approach – can help save money and improve outcomes. Well known successes include increasing the tax take through changing wording of reminder letters (work led by another IfG alumni Mike Hallsworth) and increasing pension take-up through auto-enrolment.
  2. Market design: There is an emerging field of study which is examining how algorithms can be used to match people better with services they need – particularly in cases where it is unfair or morally repugnant to let allow a free market to operate. Alvin Roth, the Harvard Professor and Nobel prize winner, writes about these ‘matching markets’ in his book Who Gets What and Why – in which he also explains how the approach can ensure that more kidneys reach compatible donors, and children find the right education.
  3. Big data: Large datasets can now be mined far more effectively, whether it is to analyse crime patterns to spot where police patrols might be useful or to understand crowd flows on public transport. The use of real-time information allows far more sophisticated deployment of public sector resources, better targeted at demand and need, and better tailored to individual preferences.
  4. Transparency: Transparency has the potential to enhance both the accountability and effectiveness of governments across the world – as shown in our latest Whitehall Monitor Annual Report. The UK government is considered a world-leader for its transparency – but there are still areas where progress has stalled, including in transparency over the costs and performance of privately provided public services.
  5. New management models: There is a growing realisation that new methods are best harnessed when supported by effective management. The Institute’s work on civil service reform highlights a range of success factors from past reforms in the UK – and the benefits of clear mechanisms for setting priorities and sticking to them, as is being attempted by governments new(ish) Implementation Taskforces and the Departmental Implementation Units currently cropping up across Whitehall. I looked overseas for a different model that clearly aligns government activities behind citizens’ concerns – in this case the example of the single non-emergency number system operating in New York City and elsewhere. This system supports a powerful, highly responsive, data-driven performance management regime. But like many performance management regimes it can risk a narrow and excessively short-term focus – so such tools must be combined with the mind-set of system stewardship that the Institute has long championed in its policymaking work.
  6. Investment in new capability: It is striking that all of these developments are supported by technological change and research insights developed outside government. But to embed new approaches in government, there appear to be benefits to incubating new capacity, either in specialist departmental teams or at the centre of government….(More)”

When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tiago Peixoto and Jonathan Fox (Worldbank): “This paper reviews evidence on the use of 23 information and communication technology (ICT) platforms to project citizen voice to improve public service delivery. This meta-analysis focuses on empirical studies of initiatives in the global South, highlighting both citizen uptake (‘yelp’) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (‘teeth’). The conceptual framework further distinguishes between two trajectories for ICT-enabled citizen voice: Upwards accountability occurs when users provide feedback directly to decision-makers in real time, allowing policy-makers and program managers to identify and address service delivery problems – but at their discretion. Downwards accountability, in contrast, occurs either through real time user feedback or less immediate forms of collective civic action that publicly call on service providers to become more accountable and depends less exclusively on decision- makers’ discretion about whether or not to act on the information provided. This distinction between the ways in which ICT platforms mediate the relationship between citizens and service providers allows for a precise analytical focus on how different dimensions of such platforms contribute to public sector responsiveness. These cases suggest that while ICT platforms have been relevant in increasing policymakers’ and senior managers’ capacity to respond, most of them have yet to influence their willingness to do so….(More)”