There isn’t always an app for that: How tech can better assist refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Glennie and Meghan Benton at Nesta: “Refugees are natural innovators. Often armed with little more than a smartphone, they must be adaptable and inventive if they are to navigate unpredictable, dangerous environments and successfully establish themselves in a new country.

Take Mojahed Akil, a young Syrian computer science student whose involvement in street protests in Aleppo brought him to the attention – and torture chambers – of the regime. With the support of his family, Mojahed was able to move across the border to the relative safety of Gaziantep, a city in southwest Turkey. Yet once he was there, he found it very difficult to communicate with those around him (most of whom only spoke Turkish but not Arabic or English) and to access essential information about laws, regulations and local services.

To overcome these challenges, Mojahed used his software training to develop a free smartphone app and website for Syrians living in Turkey. The Gherbetna platform offers both information (for example, about job listings) and connections (through letting users ask for help from the app’s community of contributors). Since its launch in 2014, it is estimated that Gherbetna has been downloaded by more than 50,000 people.

Huge efforts, but mixed results

Over the last 18 months, an explosion of creativity and innovation from tech entrepreneurs has tried to make life better for refugees. A host of new tools and resources now exists to support refugees along every stage of their journey. Our new report for the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration explores some of these tools trying to help refugees integrate, and examines how policymakers can support the best new initiatives.

Our report finds that the speed of this ‘digital humanitarianism’ has been a double-edged sword, with a huge amount of duplication in the sector and some tools failing to get off the ground. ‘Failing fast’ might be a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, but what are the risks if vulnerable refugees rely on an app that disappears from one day to the next?

For example, consider Migreat, a ‘skyscanner for migration’, which pivoted at the height of the refugee crisis to become an asylum information app. Its selling point was that it was obsessively updated by legal experts, so users could trust the information — and rely less on smugglers or word of mouth. At its peak, Migreat had two million users a month, but according to an interview with Josephine Goube (one of the cofounders of the initiative) funding challenges meant the platform had to fold. Its digital presence still exists, but is no longer being updated, a ghost of February 2016.

Perhaps an even greater challenge is that few of these apps were designed with refugees, so many do not meet their needs. Creating an app to help refugees navigate local services is a bit like putting a sticking plaster on a deep wound: it doesn’t solve the problem that most services, and especially digital services, are not attuned to refugee needs. Having multilingual, up-to-date and easy-to-navigate government websites might be more helpful.

A new ‘digital humanitarianism’…(More)”

USGS expands sensor network to track monster hurricane

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Rockwell at FCW: “The internet of things is tracking Hurricane Matthew. As the monster storm draws a bead on the south Atlantic coast after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, its impact will be measured by a sensor network deployed by the U.S. Geological Survey.

USGS hurricane response crews are busy installing two kinds of sensors in areas across four states where the agency expects the storm to hit hardest. The information the sensors collect will help with disaster recovery efforts and critical weather forecasts for the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As is the case with most things these days, the storm will be tracked online.

The information collected will be distributed live on the USGS Flood Viewer to help federal and state officials gauge the extent and the storm’s damage as it passes through each area.

FEMA, which tasked USGS with the sensor distribution, is also talking with other federal and state officials further up the Atlantic coastline about whether the equipment is needed there. Recent forecasts call for Matthew to take a sharp easterly turn and head out to sea as it reaches the North Carolina coast.

USGS crews are in installing storm-surge sensors at key sites along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in anticipation of the storm, said Brian McCallum, associate director for data at the USGS South Atlantic Water Science Center.

In all, USGS is deploying more than 300 additional weather and condition sensors, he told FCW in an interview on Oct. 5.

The devices come in two varieties. The first are 280 storm surge sensors, set out in protective steel tubes lashed to piers, bridges and other solid structures in the storm’s projected path. The low-cost devices will provide the highest density of storm data, such as depth and duration of the storm surge, McCallum said. The devices won’t communicate their information in real time, however; McCallum said USGS crews will come in behind the storm to upload the sensor data to the Internet.

The second set of sensors, however, could be thought of as the storm’s “live tweets.” USGS is installing 25 rapid-deployment gauges to augment its existing collection of sensors and fill in gaps along the coast….(More)”

Evaluating World Bank Support to Budget Analysis and Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Linnea Mills and Clay G. Wescott: “BOOST is a new resource launched in 2010 to facilitate improved quality, classification, and access to budget data and promote effective use for improved government decision making, transparency and accountability. Using the Government’s own data from public expenditure accounts held in the Government’s Financial Management Information System, and benefiting from a consistent methodology, the BOOST data platform makes highly granular fiscal data accessible and ready-for-use. National authorities can significantly enhance fiscal transparency by publishing summary data and analysis or by providing open access to the underlying dataset. This paper addresses four research questions: Did BOOST help improve the quality of expenditure analysis available to government decision makers? Did it help to develop capacity in central finance and selected spending agencies to sustain expenditure analysis? Did it help to improve public access to expenditure analysis anddata? Did it help to increase awareness of the opportunities for BOOST and expenditure analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as countries outside this region where BOOST has been used (Georgia, Haiti and Tunisia).

Evidence has been drawn from various sources. Survey questionnaires were sent to all World Bank task team leaders for Gates Trust Fund supported countries. Completed questionnaires were received from 18 predominantly African countries (Annex 4). These 18 countries constitute the majority but not all of the countries implementing BOOST with financial support from the Trust Fund. Information has also been gathered through a BOOST stakeholder questionnaire targeting government officials, civil society representatives and representatives from parliaments at country level, field visits to Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda, interviews with stakeholders at the Bank and at country level, participation at regional conferences on BOOST in South Africa and Senegal, and document review. Interviews covered participants from some countries that did not complete questionnaires, such as Haiti.

The research will help to inform the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, the administrator of the trust fund on the achievements of the program, and the value of continuing support. It will inform client country Governments, and non-Government actors interested in improved dissemination and analysis of quality public financial data. The research should also be useful for vendors of similar products like OpenGov; and to international scholars and experts working to better understand public expenditure management in developing countries….(More)”

Europe Should Promote Data for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at Center for Data Innovation: “Changing demographics in Europe are creating enormous challenges for the European Union (EU) and its member states. The population is getting older, putting strain on the healthcare and welfare systems. Many young people are struggling to find work as economies recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Europe is facing a swell in immigration, increasingly from war-torn Syria, and governments are finding it difficult to integrate refugees and other migrants into society.These pressures have already propelled permanent changes to the EU. This summer, a slim majority of British voters chose to leave the Union, and many of those in favor of Brexit cited immigration as a motive for their vote.

Europe needs to find solutions to these challenges. Fortunately, advances in data-driven innovation that have helped businesses boost performance can also create significant social benefits. They can support EU policy priorities for social protection and inclusion by better informing policy and program design, improving service delivery, and spurring social innovations. While some governments, nonprofit organizations, universities, and companies are using data-driven insights and technologies to support disadvantaged populations, including unemployed workers, young people, older adults, and migrants, progress has been uneven across the EU due to resource constraints, digital inequality, and restrictive data regulations. renewed European commitment to using data for social good is needed to address these challenges.

This report examines how the EU, member-states, and the private sector are using data to support social inclusion and protection. Examples include programs for employment and labor-market inclusion, youth employment and education, care for older adults, and social services for migrants and refugees. It also identifies the barriers that prevent European countries from fully capitalizing on opportunities to use data for social good. Finally, it proposes a number of actions policymakers in the EU should take to enable the public and private sectors to more effectively tackle the social challenges of a changing Europe through data-driven innovation. Policymakers should:

  • Support the collection and use of relevant, timely data on the populations they seek to better serve;
  • Participate in and fund cross-sector collaboration with data experts to make better use of data collected by governments and non-profit organizations working on social issues;
  • Focus government research funding on data analysis of social inequalities and require grant applicants to submit plans for data use and sharing;
  • Establish appropriate consent and sharing exemptions in data protection regulations for social science research; and
  • Revise EU regulations to accommodate social-service organizations and their institutional partners in exploring innovative uses of data….(More)”

Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a mortgage: What policymakers can learn from dating websites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Angelina Carvalho, Chiranjit Chakraborty and Georgia Latsi at Bank Underground: “Policy makers have access to more and more detailed datasets. These can be joined together to give an unprecedentedly rich description of the economy. But the data are often noisy and individual entries are not uniquely identifiable. This leads to a trade-off: very strict matching criteria may result in a limited and biased sample; making them too loose risks inaccurate data. The problem gets worse when joining large datasets as the potential number of matches increases exponentially. Even with today’s astonishing computer power, we need efficient techniques. In this post we describe a bipartite matching algorithm on such big data to deal with these issues. Similar algorithms are often used in online dating, closely modelled as the stable marriage problem.

The home-mover problem

The housing market matters and affects almost everything that central banks care about. We want to know why, when and how people move home. And a lot do move: one in nine UK households in 2013/4 according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Fortunately, it is also a market that we have an increasing amount of information about. We are going to illustrate the use of the matching algorithm in the context of identifying the characteristics of these movers and the mortgages that many of them took out.

A Potential Solution

The FCA’s Product Sales Data (PSD) on owner-occupied mortgage lending contains loan level product, borrower and property characteristics for all loans originated in the UK since Q2 2005. This dataset captures the attributes of each loan at the point of origination but does not follow the borrowers afterwards. Hence, it does not meaningfully capture if a loan was transferred to another property or closed for certain reason. Also, there is no unique borrower identifier and that is why we cannot easily monitor if a borrower repaid their old mortgage and got a new one against another property.

However, the dataset identify whether a borrower is a first time buyer or a home-mover, together with other information. Even though we do not have information before 2005, we can still try to use this dataset to identify some of the owners’ moving patterns. We try to find from where a home-mover may have moved (origination point) and who moved in to his/her vacant property. If we can successfully track the movers, it will also help us to remove corresponding old mortgages to calculate the stock of mortgages from our flow data. A previous Bank Underground post showed how probabilistic record linkage techniques can be used to join related datasets that do not have unique common identifiers.  We have used bipartite graph matching techniques here to extend those ideas….(More)”

Is internet freedom a tool for democracy or authoritarianism?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in the Conversation: “The irony of internet freedom was on full display shortly after midnight July 16 in Turkey when President Erdogan used FaceTime and independent TV news to call for public resistance against the military coup that aimed to depose him.

In response, thousands of citizens took to the streets and aided the government in beating back the coup. The military plotters had taken over state TV. In this digital age they apparently didn’t realize television was no longer sufficient to ensure control over the message.

This story may appear like a triumphant example of the internet promoting democracy over authoritarianism.

Not so fast….This duality of the internet, as a tool to promote democracy or authoritarianism, or simultaneously both, is a complex puzzle.

The U.S. has made increasing internet access around the world a foreign policy priority. This policy was supported by both Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. State Department has allocated tens of millions of dollars to promote internet freedom, primarily in the area of censorship circumvention. And just this month, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution declaring internet freedom a fundamental human right. The resolution condemns internet shutdowns by national governments, an act that has become increasingly common in variety of countries across the globe, including Turkey, Brazil, India and Uganda.

On the surface, this policy makes sense. The internet is an intuitive boon for democracy. It provides citizens around the world with greater freedom of expression, opportunities for civil society, education and political participation. And previous research, including our own, has been optimistic about the internet’s democratic potential.

However, this optimism is based on the assumption that citizens who gain internet access use it to expose themselves to new information, engage in political discussions, join social media groups that advocate for worthy causes and read news stories that change their outlook on the world.

And some do.

But others watch Netflix. They use the internet to post selfies to an intimate group of friends. They gain access to an infinite stream of music, movies and television shows. They spend hours playing video games.

However, our recent research shows that tuning out from politics and immersing oneself in online spectacle has political consequences for the health of democracy….Political use of the internet ranks very low globally, compared to other uses. Research has found that just 9 percent of internet users posted links to political news and only 10 percent posted their own thoughts about political or social issues. In contrast, almost three-quarters (72 percent) say they post about movies and music, and over half (54 percent) also say they post about sports online.

This inspired our study, which sought to show how the internet does not necessarily serve as democracy’s magical solution. Instead, its democratic potential is highly dependent on how citizens choose to use it….

Ensuring citizens have access to the internet is not sufficient to ensure democracy and human rights. In fact, internet access may negatively impact democracy if exploited for authoritarian gain.

The U.S. government, NGOs and other democracy advocates have invested a great deal of time and resources toward promoting internet access, fighting overt online censorship and creating circumvention technologies. Yet their success, at best, has been limited.

The reason is twofold. First, authoritarian governments have adapted their own strategies in response. Second, the “if we build it, they will come” philosophy underlying a great deal of internet freedom promotion doesn’t take into account basic human psychology in which entertainment choices are preferred over news and attitudes toward the internet determine its use, not the technology itself.

Allies in the internet freedom fight should realize that the locus of the fight has shifted. Greater efforts must be put toward tearing down “psychological firewalls,” building demand for internet freedom and influencing citizens to employ the internet’s democratic potential.

Doing so ensures that the democratic online toolkit is a match for the authoritarian one….(More)”

Smart Cities – International Case Studies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“These case studies were developed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), in association with the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS).

Anyang, Korea Anyang, a 600,000 population city near Seoul is developing international recognition on its smart city project that has been implemented incrementally since 2003. This initiative began with the Bus Information System to enhance citizen’s convenience at first, and has been expanding its domain into wider Intelligent Transport System as well as crime and disaster prevention in an integrated manner. Anyang is considered a benchmark for smart city with a 2012 Presidential Award in Korea and receives large number of international visits. Anyang’s Integrated Operation and Control Center (IOCC) acts as the platform that gathers, analyzes and distributes information for mobility, disasters management and crime. Anyang is currently utilizing big data for policy development and is continuing its endeavor to expand its smart city services into areas such as waste and air quality management. Download Anyang case study

Medellín, Colombia Medellin is a city that went from being known for its security problems to being an international referent of technological and social innovation, urban transformation, equity, and citizen participation. This report shows how Medellin has implemented a series of strategies that have made it a smart city that is developing capacity and organic structure in the entities that control mobility, the environment, and security. In addition, these initiatives have created mechanisms to communicate and interact with citizens in order to promote continuous improvement of smart services.

Through the Program “MDE: Medellin Smart City,” Medellin is implementing projects to create free Internet access zones, community centers, a Mi-Medellin co-creation portal, open data, online transactions, and other services. Another strategy is the creation of the Smart Mobility System which, through the use of technology, has achieved a reduction in the number of accidents, improvement in mobility, and a reduction in incident response time. Download Medellin case study

Namyangju, Korea…

Orlando, U.S.…

Pangyo, Korea…

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil… 

Santander, España…

Singapore…

Songdo, Korea…

Tel Aviv, Israel… (More)”

OpenData.Innovation: an international journey to discover innovative uses of open government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nesta: “This paper by Mor Rubinstein (Open Knowledge International) and Josh Cowls and Corinne Cath (Oxford Internet Institute) explores the methods and motivations behind innovative uses of open government data in five specific country contexts – Chile, Argentine, Uruguay, Israel, and Denmark; and considers how the insights it uncovers might be adopted in a UK context.

Through a series of interviews with ‘social hackers’ and open data practitioners and experts in countries with recognised open government data ‘hubs’, the authors encountered a diverse range of practices and approaches in how actors in different sectors of society make innovative uses of open government data. This diversity also demonstrated how contextual factors shape the opportunities and challenges for impactful open government data use.

Based on insights from these international case studies, the paper offers a number of recommendations – around community engagement, data literacy and practices of opening data – which aim to support governments and citizens unlock greater knowledge exchange and social impact through open government data….(More)”

Civic Data Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Burak Arikan at Medium: “Big data is the term used to define the perpetual and massive data gathered by corporations and governments on consumers and citizens. When the subject of data is not necessarily individuals but governments and companies themselves, we can call it civic data, and when systematically generated in large amounts, civic big data. Increasingly, a new generation of initiatives are generating and organizing structured data on particular societal issues from human rights violations, to auditing government budgets, from labor crimes to climate justice.

These civic data initiatives diverge from the traditional civil society organizations in their outcomes,that they don’t just publish their research as reports, but also open it to the public as a database.Civic data initiatives are quite different in their data work than international non-governmental organizations such as UN, OECD, World Bank and other similar bodies. Such organizations track social, economical, political conditions of countries and concentrate upon producing general statistical data, whereas civic data initiatives aim to produce actionable data on issues that impact individuals directly. The change in the GDP value of a country is useless for people struggling for free transportation in their city. Incarceration rate of a country does not help the struggle of the imprisoned journalists. Corruption indicators may serve as a parameter in a country’s credit score, but does not help to resolve monopolization created with public procurement. Carbon emission statistics do not prevent the energy deals between corrupt governments that destroy the nature in their region.

Partnership / financing network of oil refinery and thermal power plants around SOCAR (The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan). Data mapping by Network of Dispossession.

Needless to say, civic data initiatives also differ from governmental institutions, which are reluctant to share any more that they are legally obligated to. Many governments in the world simply dump scanned hardcopies of documents on official websites instead of releasing machine-readable data, which prevents systematic auditing of government activities.Civic data initiatives, on the other hand, make it a priority to structure and release their data in formats that are both accessible and queryable.

Civic data initiatives also deviate from general purpose information commons such as Wikipedia. Because they consistently engage with problems, closely watch a particular societal issue, make frequent updates,even record from the field to generate and organize highly granular data about the matter….

Several civic data initiatives generate data on variety of issues at different geographies, scopes, and scales. The non-exhaustive list below have information on founders, data sources, and financial support. It is sorted according to each initiative’s founding year. Please send your suggestions to contact at graphcommons.com. See more detailed information and updates on the spreadsheet of civic data initiatives.

Open Secrets tracks data about the money flow in the US government, so it becomes more accessible for journalists, researchers, and advocates.Founded as a non-profit in 1983 by Center for Responsive Politics, gets support from variety of institutions.

PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. Uses on-the-record interviews as its data source. Founded in 2007 as a non-profit organization by Tampa Bay Times. Supported by Democracy Fund, Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, FordFoundation, Knight Foundation, Craigslist Charitable Fund, and the CollinsCenter for Public Policy…..

La Fabrique de La loi (The Law Factory) maps issues of local-regional socio-economic development, public investments, and ecology in France.Started in 2014, the project builds a database by tracking bills from government sources, provides a search engine as well as an API. The partners of the project are CEE Sciences Po, médialab Sciences Po, RegardsCitoyens, and Density Design.

Mapping Media Freedom identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout European Union member states,candidates for entry and neighbouring countries. Initiated by Index onCensorship and European Commission in 2004, the project…(More)”

Refugees and the Technology of Exile

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lepeska in Wilson Quaterly: “While working for a Turkish tech firm, Akil learned how to program for mobile phones, and decided to make a smartphone app to help Syrians get all the information they need to build new lives in Turkey. In early 2014, he and a friend launched Gherbtna, named for an Arabic word referring to the loneliness of foreign exile….

About one-tenth of the 2.7 million Syrians in Turkey live in refugee camps. The rest fend for themselves, mostly in big cities. Now that they look set to stay in Turkey for some time, their need to settle and build stable, secure lives is much more acute. This may explain why downloads of Gherbtna more than doubled in the past six months. “We started this project to help people, and when we have reached all Syrian refugees, to help them find jobs, housing, whatever they need to build a new life in Turkey, then we have achieved our goal,” said Akil. “Our ultimate dream for Gherbtna is to reach all refugees around the world, and help them.”

Humanity is currently facing its greatest refugee crisis since World War II, with more than 60 million people forced from their homes. Much has been written about their use of technology — how Google Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other tools have proven invaluable to the displaced and desperate. But helping refugees find their way, connect with family, or read the latest updates about route closings is one thing. Enabling them to grasp minute legal details, find worthwhile jobs and housing, enroll their children in school, and register for visas and benefits when they don’t understand the local tongue is another.

Due to its interpretation of the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, Ankara does not categorize Syrians in Turkey as refugees, nor does it accord them the pursuant rights and advantages. Instead, it has given them the unusual legal status of temporary guests, which means that they cannot apply for asylum and that Turkey can send them back to their countries of origin whenever it likes. What’s more, the laws and processes that apply to Syrians have been less than transparent and have changed several times. Despite all this — or perhaps because of it — government outreach has been minimal. Turkey has spent some $10 billion on refugees, and it distributes Arabic-language brochures at refugee camps and in areas with many Syrian residents. Yet it has created no Arabic-language website, app, or other online tool to communicate the relevant laws, permits, and legal changes to Syrians and other refugees.

Independent apps targeting these hurdles have begun to proliferate. Gherbtna’s main competitor in Turkey is the recently launched Alfanus (“Lantern” in Arabic), which its Syrian creators call an “Arab’s Guide to Turkey.” Last year, Souktel, a Palestinian mobile solutions firm, partnered with the international arm of the American Bar Association to launch a text-message service that provides legal information to Arabic speakers in Turkey. Norway is running a competition to develop a game-based learning app to educate Syrian refugee children. German programmers created Germany Says Welcome and the similar Welcome App Dresden. And Akil’s tech firm, Namaa Solutions, recently launched Tarjemly Live, a live translation app for English, Arabic, and Turkish.

But the extent to which these technologies have succeeded — have actually helped Syrians adjust and build new lives in Turkey, in particular — is in doubt. Take Gherbtna. The app has nine tools, including Video, Laws, Alerts, Find a Job, and “Ask me.” It offers restaurant and job listings; advice on getting a residence permit, opening a bank account, or launching a business; and much more. Like Souktel, Gherbtna has partnered with the American Bar Association to provide translations of Turkish laws. The app has been downloaded about 50,000 times, or by about 5 percent of Syrians in Turkey. (It is safe to assume, however, that a sizable percentage of refugees do not have smartphones.) Yet among two dozen Gherbtna users recently interviewed in Gaziantep and Istanbul — two Turkish cities with the most dense concentration of Syrians — most found it lacking. Many appreciate Gherbtna’s one-stop-shop appeal, but find little cause to keep using it. ”…(More)”