Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab: “Next Monday, May 23rd, governments, non-profit organizations and citizen groups will gather in Istanbul at the first World Humanitarian Summit. A range of important issues will be on the agenda, not least of which the refugee crisis confronting the Middle East and Europe. Also on the agenda will be an issue of growing importance and relevance, even if it does not generate front-page headlines: the increasing potential (and use) of data in the humanitarian context.

To explore this topic, a new paper, “Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action,” is being released today, and will be presented tomorrow at the Understanding Risk Forum. This paper is the result of a collaboration between the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), The GovLab (NYU Tandon School of Engineering), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Leiden UniversityCentre for Innovation. It seeks to identify the potential benefits and risks of using data in the humanitarian context, and begins to outline an initial framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian settings.

Both anecdotal and more rigorously researched evidence points to the growing use of data to address a variety of humanitarian crises. The paper discusses a number of data risk case studies, including the use of call data to fight Malaria in Africa; satellite imagery to identify security threats on the border between Sudan and South Sudan; and transaction data to increase the efficiency of food delivery in Lebanon. These early examples (along with a few others discussed in the paper) have begun to show the opportunities offered by data and information. More importantly, they also help us better understand the risks, including and especially those posed to privacy and security.

One of the broader goals of the paper is to integrate the specific and the theoretical, in the process building a bridge between the deep, contextual knowledge offered by initiatives like those discussed above and the broader needs of the humanitarian community. To that end, the paper builds on its discussion of case studies to begin establishing a framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian contexts. It identifies four “Minimum Humanitarian standards for the Responsible use of Data” and four “Characteristics of Humanitarian Organizations that use Data Responsibly.” Together, these eight attributes can serve as a roadmap or blueprint for humanitarian groups seeking to use data. In addition, the paper also provides a four-step practical guide for a data responsibility framework (see also earlier blog)….(More)” Full Paper: Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Society’s biggest problems need more than a nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “So-called “nudge units” are popping up in governments all around the world.

The best-known examples include the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team, created in 2010, and the White House-based Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, introduced by the Obama administration in 2014. Their mission is to leverage findings from behavioral science so that people’s decisions can be nudged in the direction of their best intentions without curtailing their ability to make choices that don’t align with their priorities.

Overall, these – and other – governments have made important strides when it comes to using behavioral science to nudge their constituents into better choices.

Yet, the same governments have done little to improve their own decision-making processes. Consider big missteps like the Flint water crisis. How could officials in Michigan decide to place an essential service – safe water – and almost 100,000 people at risk in order to save US$100 per day for three months? No defensible decision-making process should have allowed this call to be made.

When it comes to many of the big decisions faced by governments – and the private sector – behavioral science has more to offer than simple nudges.

Behavioral scientists who study decision-making processes could also help policy-makers understand why things went wrong in Flint, and how to get their arms around a wide array of society’s biggest problems – from energy transitions to how to best approach the refugee crisis in Syria.

When nudges are enough

The idea of nudging people in the direction of decisions that are in their own best interest has been around for a while. But it was popularized in 2008 with the publication of the bestseller “Nudge“ by Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard.

A common nudge goes something like this: if we want to eat better but are having a hard time doing it, choice architects can reengineer the environment in which we make our food choices so that healthier options are intuitively easier to select, without making it unrealistically difficult to eat junk food if that’s what we’d rather do. So, for example, we can shelve healthy foods at eye level in supermarkets, with less-healthy options relegated to the shelves nearer to the floor….

Sometimes a nudge isn’t enough

Nudges work for a wide array of choices, from ones we face every day to those that we face infrequently. Likewise, nudges are particularly well-suited to decisions that are complex with lots of different alternatives to choose from. And, they are advocated in situations where the outcomes of our decisions are delayed far enough into the future that they feel uncertain or abstract. This describes many of the big decisions policy-makers face, so it makes sense to think the solution must be more nudge units.

But herein lies the rub. For every context where a nudge seems like a realistic option, there’s at least another context where the application of passive decision support would be either be impossible – or, worse, a mistake.

Take, for example, the question of energy transitions. These transitions are often characterized by the move from infrastructure based on fossil fuels to renewables to address all manner of risks, including those from climate change. These are decisions that society makes infrequently. They are complex. And, the outcomes – which are based on our ability to meet conflicting economic, social and environmental objectives – will be delayed.

But, absent regulation that would place severe restrictions on the kinds of options we could choose from – and which, incidentally, would violate the freedom-of-choice tenet of choice architecture – there’s no way to put renewable infrastructure options at proverbial eye level for state or federal decision-makers, or their stakeholders.

Simply put, a nudge for a decision like this would be impossible. In these cases, decisions have to be made the old-fashioned way: with a heavy lift instead of a nudge.

Complex policy decisions like this require what we call active decision support….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Faisal Al Mutar at The World Post: “The Internet has also allowed activists to access information as never before. I recently joined the Movements.org team, a part of the New York-based organization, Advancing Human Rights. This new platform allows activists from closed societies to connect directly with people around the world with skills to help them. In the first month of its launch, thousands of activists from 92 countries have come to Movements.org to defend human rights.

Movements.org is a promising example of how technology can be utilized by activists to change the world. Dissidents from some of the most repressive dictatorships — Russia, Iran, Syria and China — are connecting with individuals from around the globe who have unique skills to aid them.

Here are just a few of the recent success stories:

  • A leading Saudi expert on combatting state-sponsored incitement in textbooks posted a request to speak with members of the German government due to their strict anti-hate-speech laws. A former foundation executive connected him with senior German officials.
  • A secular Syrian group posted a request for PR aid to explain to Americans that the opposition is not comprised solely of radical elements. The founder of a strategic communication firm based in Los Angeles responded and offered help.
  • A Yemeni dissident asked for help creating a radio station focused on youth empowerment. He was contacted by a Syrian dissident who set up Syrian radio programs to offer advice.
  • Journalists from leading newspapers offered to tell human rights stories and connected with activists from dictatorships.
  • A request was created for a song to commemorate the life of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russia tax lawyer who died in prisoner. A NYC-based song-writer created a beautiful song and activists from Russia (including a member of Pussy Riot) filmed a music video of it.
  • North Korean defectors posted requests to get information in and out of their country and technologists posted offers to help with radio and satellite communication systems.
  • A former Iranian political prisoner posted a request to help sustain his radio station which broadcasts into Iran and helps keep information flowing to Iranians.

There are more and more cases everyday….(More)”

How to Crowdsource the Syrian Cease-Fire

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Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy: “Can the wizards of Silicon Valley develop a set of killer apps to monitor the fragile Syria cease-fire without putting foreign boots on the ground in one of the world’s most dangerous countries?

They’re certainly going to try. The “cessation of hostilities” in Syria brokered by the United States and Russia last month has sharply reduced the levels of violence in the war-torn country and sparked a rare burst of optimism that it could lead to a broader cease-fire. But if the two sides lay down their weapons, the international community will face the challenge of monitoring the battlefield to ensure compliance without deploying peacekeepers or foreign troops. The emerging solution: using crowdsourcing, drones, satellite imaging, and other high-tech tools.

The high-level interest in finding a technological solution to the monitoring challenge was on full display last month at a closed-door meeting convened by the White House that brought together U.N. officials, diplomats, digital cartographers, and representatives of Google, DigitalGlobe, and other technology companies. Their assignment was to brainstorm ways of using high-tech tools to keep track of any future cease-fires from Syria to Libya and Yemen.

The off-the-record event came as the United States, the U.N., and other key powers struggle to find ways of enforcing cease-fires from Syria at a time when there is little political will to run the risk of sending foreign forces or monitors to such dangerous places. The United States has turned to high-tech weapons like armed drones as weapons of war; it now wants to use similar systems to help enforce peace.

Take the Syria Conflict Mapping Project, a geomapping program developed by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to resolve conflict and promote human rights. The project has developed an interactive digital map that tracks military formations by government forces, Islamist extremists, and more moderate armed rebels in virtually every disputed Syrian town. It is now updating its technology to monitor cease-fires.

The project began in January 2012 because of a single 25-year-old intern, Christopher McNaboe. McNaboe realized it was possible to track the state of the conflict by compiling disparate strands of publicly available information — including the shelling and aerial bombardment of towns and rebel positions — from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites. It has since developed a mapping program using software provided by Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based big data company that does contract work for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, from the CIA to the FBI….

Walter Dorn, an expert on technology in U.N. peace operations who attended the White House event, said he had promoted what he calls a “coalition of the connected.”

The U.N. or other outside powers could start by tracking social media sites, including Twitter and YouTube, for reports of possible cease-fire violations. That information could then be verified by “seeded crowdsourcing” — that is, reaching out to networks of known advocates on the ground — and technological monitoring through satellite imagery or drones.

Matthew McNabb, the founder of First Mile Geo, a start-up which develops geolocation technology that can be used to gather data in conflict zones, has another idea. McNabb, who also attended the White House event, believes “on-demand” technologies like SurveyMonkey, which provides users a form to create their own surveys, can be applied in conflict zones to collect data on cease-fire violations….(More)

Nudging voters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Hasnas and Annette Hasnas at the Hill: “A perennial complaint about our democracy is that too large a portion of the electorate is poorly informed about important political issues. This is the problem of the ignorant voter. Especially this year, with its multiplicity of candidates, keeping track of the candidates’ various, and often shifting, policy positions can be extraordinarily difficult. As a result, many of those voting in the presidential primaries will cast their ballots with little idea of where the candidates stand on several important issues.

Isn’t there some way to nudge the voters into making more informed choices? Well, actually, yes, there is. But in making this claim, we use the word nudge advisedly.

Among contemporary policy analysts, “nudge” is a term of art. It refers to creating a context within which people make choices–a “choice architecture”–that makes it more likely that people will select one option rather than another. The typical example of a nudge is a school cafeteria in which fruits and vegetables are placed in front in easy to reach locations and less healthy fare is placed in less visible and harder to reach locations. No one is forced to select the fruit or vegetables, but the choice architecture makes it more likely that people will.
The key feature of a nudge is that it is not coercive. It is an effort to influence choice, not to impose it. People are always able to “opt out” of the nudge. Thus, to nudge is to design the context in which individuals make decisions so as to influence their choice without eliminating any options.

We think that nudging can be employed to help voters make more informed decisions in the voting booth.

Imagine the following scenario. A bipartisan good government group creates a list of the most significant contemporary policy issues. It then invites all candidates to state their positions on the issues. In the current campaign, candidates could be invited to state where they stand on gay marriage, immigration, intervention in Syria, climate change, tax reform, the minimum wage, gun control, income inequality, etc. This information would be collected and fed into the relevant election commission computer. When voters enter the voting booth, they would have the option of electronically recording their policy preferences on the same form that the candidates completed. The computer would display a ranking of the candidates on the basis of how closely their positions aligned with the voter’s. After receiving this information, voters would cast their ballots.

Our proposal is a nudge. It is completely non-coercive. No candidate would be required to complete the list of his or her policy positions, although refusing to do so might be viewed negatively by voters. No voter would be required to utilize the option. All would remain free to simply walk into the booth and cast their vote. Even those who utilize the option remain free to disregard its results and vote for whomever they please. The proposal simply alters the choice architecture of voting to build in access to a source of information about the candidates. Yet, it makes it more likely that citizens will cast more informed votes than they do at present….(More)”

Startup Helps Cities Launch Crowdfunding Campaigns

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 in Government Technology: “Popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been a hotbed for the aspiring to fund product prototypes, publish artistic works and create everything from films to trendy foods. Now governments are stepping into the mix to harness the low-risk funding method for community parks, gardens, sidewalks and more. And as public-sector interest in crowdfunding has grown, so too has interest from startup companies.

One of those, Citizinvestor, offers a crowdfunding platform tailored for government. Co-founders Tony DeSisto, Jordan Raynor, and Erik Rapprich launched the Tampa, Fla.-based civic tech company in 2012 to help localities raise thousands of dollars for numerous projects across the nation. Public officials simply add photos and a description of projects and the Web app pitches them to interested citizens.

While still a young company, Citizinvestor compares well with the more established Kickstarter, notwithtanding Kickstarter’s success — that since launch in 2009, has generated more than $2.2 billion for 100,000-plus projects. Citizinvestor’s own project funding success rate of 60 percent is higher than market leader Kickstarter’s rate of 36 percent. Funded projects have run from an $81,000 dog park to a roughly $1,000 set of bicycle racks….(More)

Big data’s big role in humanitarian aid

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary K. Pratt at Computerworld: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into Europe in 2015 from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some estimates put the number at nearly a million.

The sheer volume of people overwhelmed European officials, who not only had to handle the volatile politics stemming from the crisis, but also had to find food, shelter and other necessities for the migrants.

Sweden, like many of its European Union counterparts, was taking in refugees. The Swedish Migration Board, which usually sees 2,500 asylum seekers in an average month, was accepting 10,000 per week.

“As you can imagine, with that number, it requires a lot of buses, food, registration capabilities to start processing all the cases and to accommodate all of those people,” says Andres Delgado, head of operational control, coordination and analysis at the Swedish Migration Board.

Despite the dramatic spike in refugees coming into the country, the migration agency managed the intake — hiring extra staff, starting the process of procuring housing early, getting supplies ready. Delgado credits a good part of that success to his agency’s use of big data and analytics that let him predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what was heading his way.

“Without having that capability, or looking at the tool every day, to assess every need, this would have crushed us. We wouldn’t have survived this,” Delgado says. “It would have been chaos, actually — nothing short of that.”

The Swedish Migration Board has been using big data and analytics for several years, as it seeks to gain visibility into immigration trends and what those trends will mean for the country…./…

“Can big data give us peace? I think the short answer is we’re starting to explore that. We’re at the very early stages, where there are shining examples of little things here and there. But we’re on that road,” says Kalev H. Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, or the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, which describes itself as a comprehensive “database of human society.”

The topic is gaining traction. A 2013 report, “New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict,” from the International Peace Institute, highlights uses of telecommunications technology, including data, in several crisis situations around the world. The report emphasizes the potential these technologies hold in helping to ease tensions and address problems.

The report’s conclusion offers this idea: “Big data can be used to identify patterns and signatures associated with conflict — and those associated with peace — presenting huge opportunities for better-informed efforts to prevent violence and conflict.”

That’s welcome news to Noel Dickover. He’s the director of PeaceTech Data Networks at the PeaceTech Lab, which was created by the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) to advance USIP’s work on how technology, media and data help reduce violent conflict around the world.

Such work is still in the nascent stages, Dickover says, but people are excited about its potential. “We have unprecedented amounts of data on human sentiment, and we know there’s value there,” he says. “The question is how to connect it.”

Dickover is working on ways to do just that. One example is the Open Situation Room Exchange (OSRx) project, which aims to “empower greater collective impact in preventing or mitigating serious violent conflicts in particular arenas through collaboration and data-sharing.”…(More)

Five ways tech is crowdsourcing women’s empowerment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zara Rahman in The Guardian: “Around the world, women’s rights advocates are crowdsourcing their own data rather than relying on institutional datasets.

Citizen-generated data is especially important for women’s rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women’s rights issues means data isn’t gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state.

Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.

Crowdsourcing data on street harassment in Egypt

Using open source platform Ushahidi, HarassMap provides women with a way to document incidences of street harassment. The project, which began in 2010, is raising awareness of how common street harassment is, giving women’s rights advocates a concrete way to highlight the scale of the problem….

Documenting experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to the police in India

Last year, The Ladies Finger, a women’s zine based in India, partnered with Amnesty International to support its Ready to Report campaign, which aimed to make it easier for survivors of sexual violence to file a police complaint. Using social media and through word of mouth, it asked the community if they had experiences to share about reporting sexual assault and harassment to the police. Using these crowdsourced leads, The Ladies Finger’s reporters spoke to people willing to share their experiences and put together a series of detailed contextualised stories. They included a piece that evoked a national outcry and spurred the Uttar Pradesh government to make an arrest for stalking, after six months of inaction….

Reporting sexual violence in Syria

Women Under Siege is a global project by Women’s Media Centre that is investigating how rape and sexual violence is used in conflicts. Its Syria project crowdsources data on sexual violence in the war-torn country. Like HarassMap, it uses the Ushahidi platform to geolocate where acts of sexual violence take place. Where possible, initial reports are contextualised with deeper media reports around the case in question….

Finding respectful gynaecologists in India

After recognising that many women in her personal networks were having bad experiences with gynaecologists in India, Delhi-based Amba Azaad began – with the help of her friends – putting together a list of gynaecologists who had treated patients respectfully called Gynaecologists We Trust. As the site says, “Finding doctors who are on our side is hard enough, and when it comes to something as intimate as our internal plumbing, it’s even more difficult.”…

Ending tech-related violence against women

In 2011, Take Back the Tech, an initiative from the Association for Progressive Communications, started a map gathering incidences of tech-related violence against women. Campaign coordinator Sara Baker says crowdsourcing data on this topic is particularly useful as “victims/survivors are often forced to tell their stories repeatedly in an attempt to access justice with little to no action taken on the part of authorities or intermediaries”. Rather than telling that story multiple times and seeing it go nowhere, their initiative gives people “the opportunity to make their experience visible (even if anonymously) and makes them feel like someone is listening and taking action”….(More)

Hacking the streets: ‘Smart’ writing in the smart city

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Spencer Jordan at FirstMonday: “Cities have always been intimately bound up with technology. As important nodes within commercial and communication networks, cities became centres of sweeping industrialisation that affected all facets of life (Mumford, 1973). Alienation and estrangement became key characteristics of modernity, Mumford famously noting the “destruction and disorder within great cities” during the long nineteenth century. The increasing use of digital technology is yet another chapter in this process, exemplified by the rise of the ‘smart city’. Although there is no agreed definition, smart cities are understood to be those in which digital technology helps regulate, run and manage the city (Caragliu,et al., 2009). This article argues that McQuire’s definition of ‘relational space’, what he understands as the reconfiguration of urban space by digital technology, is critical here. Although some see the impact of digital technology on the urban environment as deepening social exclusion and isolation (Virilio, 1991), others, such as de Waal perceive digital technology in a more positive light. What is certainly clear, however, is that the city is once again undergoing rapid change. As Varnelis and Friedberg note, “place … is in a process of a deep and contested transformation”.

If the potential benefits from digital technology are to be maximised it is necessary that the relationship between the individual and the city is understood. This paper examines how digital technology can support and augment what de Certeau calls spatial practice, specifically in terms of constructions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ (de Certeau, 1984). The very act of walking is itself an act of enunciation, a process by which the city is instantiated; yet, as de Certeau and Bachelard remind us, the city is also wrought from the stories we tell, the narratives we construct about that space (de Certeau, 1984; Bachelard, 1994). The city is thus envisioned both through physical exploration but also language. As Turchi has shown, the creative stories we make on these voyages can be understood as maps of that world and those we meet (Turchi, 2004). If, as the situationists Kotányi and Vaneigem stated, “Urbanism is comparable to the advertising propagated around Coca-Cola — pure spectacular ideology”, there needs to be a way by which the hegemony of the market, Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, can be challenged. This would wrestle control from the market forces that are seen to have overwhelmed the high street, and allow a refocusing on the needs of both the individual and the community.

This article argues that, though anachronistic, some of the situationists’ ideas persist within hacking, what Himanen (2001) identified as the ‘hacker ethic’. As Taylor argues, although hacking is intimately connected to the world of computers, it can refer to the unorthodox use of any ‘artefact’, including social ‘systems’ . In this way, de Certeau’s urban itineraries, the spatial practice of each citizen through the city, can be understood as a form of hacking. As Wark states, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” If the city itself is called into being through our physical journeys, in what de Certeau called ‘spaces of enunciation’, then new configurations and possibilities abound. The walker becomes hacker, Wark’s “abstractors of new worlds”, and the itinerary a deliberate subversion of an urban system, the dream houses of Benjamin’s arcades. This paper examines one small research project, Waterways and Walkways, in its investigation of a digitally mediated exploration across Cardiff, the Welsh capital. The article concludes by showing just one small way in which digital technology can play a role in facilitating the re-conceptualisation of our cities….(More)”

Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics

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Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work….(More)”