what3words

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

what3words: “Street addresses worldwide are inaccurate, unreliable and don’t exist at all in many places. Poor addressing is expensive and frustrating, hampers economic growth and development, restricts social mobility and affects lives.

Inaccurate addressing limits businesses and frustrates customers

Street addresses can usually identify a building, but aren’t accurate enough to help a courier or taxi driver find the correct entrance. This results in delayed or failed deliveries, and numerous ‘where are you’ phone calls.

There’s no human-friendly way to give a location to a machine

As personal devices, autonomous vehicles and the IoT streamline the way we live, we have an increasing need to communicate very accurate location. Addresses are too broad to direct a drone or an autonomous car, whilst GPS coordinates are complicated and prone to input mistakes.

Billions of people worldwide have no reliable address at all

Without an address, people struggle to access health and education services, register land and vote. Many of these people live in rapidly expanding cities, or informal settlements….

what3words is the simplest way to talk about any precise location. Our system has divided the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique address made of just 3 words. Now everyone and everywhere has a reliable address….(More)”.

Paraguay’s transparency alchemists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Story by the Open Contracting Partnership: “….The “Cocido de oro” scandal is seen as part of a well-organized and well-informed youth movement that has sprung up in Paraguay in recent years. An equally dramatic controversyinvolving alleged corruption and unfair staff appointments at one of the country’s top public universities led to the resignation of the Chancellor and other senior staff in September 2015. Mostly high school and university students, they are no longer willing to tolerate the waste and corruption in public spending — a hangover from 35 years of authoritarian rule. They expect their government to be more open and accountable, and public decision-making processes to be more inclusive and democratic.

Thanks to government initiatives that have sought to give citizens greater access to information about public institutions, these students, along with investigative journalists and other civil society groups, are starting to engage actively in civic affairs. And they are data-savvy, basing recommendations on empirical evidence about government policies and processes, how they are implemented, and whether they are working.

Leading the pack is the country’s public procurement office, which runs a portal that ranks among the most open government data sources in the world. Together with information about budgets, public bodies’ payrolls, and other government data, this is helping Paraguayans to tackle some of the biggest long-standing problems faced by the government, like graft, overpricing, nepotism and influence-peddling….

The government recognizes there’s still a long way to go in their quest to open up public data. Few institutions have opened their databases or publish their data on an open data portal, and use of the data that has been published is still limited, according to a report on the country’s third OGP Action Plan. Priority data sets aren’t accessible in ways that meet the needs of civil society, the report adds.

And yet, the tremors of a tectonic shift in transparency and accountability in Paraguay are already being felt. In a short time, armed with access to information, citizens have started engaging with how public money is and should be spent.

The government is now doubling down on its strategy of fostering public participation, using cutting-edge technology to increase citizens’ access to data about their state institutions. Health, education, and municipal-level government, and procurement spending across these areas are being prioritized….(More).

Cross-sector Collaboration in Data Science for Social Good: Opportunities, Challenges, and Open Questions Raised by Working with Academic Researchers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by presented by Anissa Tanweer and Brittany Fiore-Gartland at the Data Science for Social Good Conference: “Recent years have seen growing support for attempts to solve complex social problems through the use of increasingly available, increasingly combinable, and increasingly computable digital data. Sometimes referred to as “data science for social good” (DSSG), these efforts are not concentrated in the hands of any one sector of society. Rather, we see DSSG emerging as an inherently multi-sector and collaborative phenomenon, with key participants hailing from governments, nonprofit organizations, technology companies, and institutions of higher education. Based on three years of participant observation in a university-hosted DSSG program, in this paper we highlight academic contributions to multi-sector DSSG collaborations, including expertise, labor, ethics, experimentation, and neutrality. After articulating both the opportunities and challenges that accompany those contributions, we pose some key open questions that demand attention from participants in DSSG programs and projects. Given the emergent nature of the DSSG phenomenon, it is our contention that how these questions come to be answered will have profound implications for the way society is organized and governed….(More)”.

Let’s create a nation of social scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan in Times Higher Education: “How might social science become more influential, more relevant and more useful in the years to come?

Recent debates about impact have largely assumed a model of social science in which a cadre of specialists, based in universities, analyse and interpret the world and then feed conclusions into an essentially passive society. But a very different view sees specialists in the academy working much more in partnership with a society that is itself skilled in social science, able to generate hypotheses, gather data, experiment and draw conclusions that might help to answer the big questions of our time, from the sources of inequality to social trust, identity to violence.

There are some powerful trends to suggest that this second view is gaining traction. The first of these is the extraordinary explosion of new ways to observe social phenomena. Every day each of us leaves behind a data trail of who we talk to, what we eat and where we go. It’s easier than ever to survey people, to spot patterns, to scrape the web or to pick up data from sensors. It’s easier than ever to gather perceptions and emotions as well as material facts and easier than ever for organisations to practice social science – whether investment organisations analysing market patterns, human resources departments using behavioural science, or local authorities using ethnography.

That deluge of data is a big enough shift on its own. However, it is also now being used to feed interpretive and predictive tools using artificial intelligence to predict who is most likely to go to hospital, to end up in prison, which relationships are most likely to end in divorce.

Governments are developing their own predictive tools, and have also become much more interested in systematic experimentation, with Finland and Canada in the lead,  moving us closer to Karl Popper’s vision of “methods of trial and error, of inventing hypotheses which can be practically tested…”…

The second revolution is less visible but could be no less profound. This is the hunger of many people to be creators of knowledge, not just users; to be part of a truly collective intelligence. At the moment this shift towards mass engagement in knowledge is most visible in neighbouring fields.  Digital humanities mobilise many volunteers to input data and interpret texts – for example making ancient Arabic texts machine-readable. Even more striking is the growth of citizen science – eBird had 1.5 million reports last January; some 1.5 million people in the US monitor river streams and lakes, and SETI@home has 5 million volunteers. Thousands of patients also take part in funding and shaping research on their own conditions….

We’re all familiar with the old idea that it’s better to teach a man to fish than just to give him fish. In essence these trends ask us a simple question: why not apply the same logic to social science, and why not reorient social sciences to enhance the capacity of society itself to observe, analyse and interpret?…(More)”.

Ethical Guidelines for Applying Predictive Tools Within Human Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MetroLab Network: “Predictive analytical tools are already being put to work within human service agencies to help make vital decisions about when and how to intervene in the lives of families and communities. The sector may not be entirely comfortable with this trend, but it should not be surprised. Predictive models are in wide use within the justice and education sectors and, more to the point, they work: risk assessment is fundamental to what social services do, and these tools can help agencies respond more quickly to prevent harm, to create more personalized interventions, and allocate scarce public resources to where they can do the most good.

There is also a strong case that predictive risk models (PRM) can reduce bias in decision-making. Designing a predictive model forces more explicit conversations about how agencies think about different risk factors and how they propose to guard against disadvantaging certain demographic or socioeconomic groups. And the standard that agencies are trying to improve upon is not perfect equity—it is the status quo, which is neither transparent nor uniformly fair. Risk scores do not eliminate the possibility of personal or institutional prejudice but they can make it more apparent by providing a common reference point.

That the use of predictive analytics in social services can reduce bias is not to say that it will. Careless or unskilled development of these predictive tools could worsen disparities among clients receiving social services. Child and civil rights advocates rightly worry about the potential for “net widening”—drawing more people in for unnecessary scrutiny by the government. They worry that rather than improving services for vulnerable clients, these models will replicate the biases in existing public data sources and expose them to greater trauma. Bad models scale just as quickly as good ones, and even the best of them can be misused.

The stakes here are real: for children and families that interact with these social systems and for the reputation of the agencies that turn to these tools. What, then, should a public leader know about risk modeling, and what lessons does it offer about how to think about data science, data stewardship, and the public interest?…(More)”.

Are robots taking our jobs?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hasan Bakhshi et al at Nesta: “In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into the impacts of automation on work. This makes sense: artificial intelligence and robotics are encroaching on areas of human activity that were simply unimaginable a few years ago.

We ourselves have made contributions to this debate (here, here and here). In The Future of Skills, however, we argue that public dialogues that consider automation alone are dangerous and misleading.

They are dangerous, because popular narratives matter for economic outcomes, and a narrative of relentless technological displacement of labour markets risks chilling innovation and growth, at a time when productivity growth is flagging in developed countries.

They are misleading because there are opportunities for boosting growth – if our education and training systems are agile enough to respond appropriately. However, while there is a burgeoning field of research on the automatability of occupations, there is far less that focuses on skills, and even less that generates actionable insights for stakeholders in areas like job redesign and learning priorities.

There is also a need to recognise that parallel to automation is a set of broader technological, demographic, economic and environmental trends which will have profound implications for employment. In some cases, the trends will reinforce one another; in others, they will produce second-order effects which may be missed when viewed in isolation…..

Skills investment must be at the centre of any long-term strategy for adjusting to structural change. A precondition is access to good quality, transparent analysis of future skills needs, as without it, labour market participants and policymakers risk flying blind. The approach we’ve developed is a step towards improving our understanding of this vital agenda and one that invites a more pro-active reaction than the defensive one that has characterised public discussions on automation in recent years. We’d love to hear your comments….(More).”

Crowdsourcing Accountability: ICT for Service Delivery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Guy Grossman, Melina Platas and Jonathan Rodden: “We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by service providers, and inputs at service points in health, education and water in Arua District, Uganda. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find evidence of only marginal and uneven short-term improvements in health and water services, and no discernible long-term effects. Relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important….(More)”.

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

Bridging Governments’ Borders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robyn Scott & Lisa Witter at SSIR: “…Our research found that “disconnection” falls into five, negatively reinforcing categories in the public sector; a closer look at these categories may help policy makers see the challenge before them more clearly:

1. Disconnected Governments

There is a truism in politics and government that all policy is local and context-dependent. Whether this was ever an accurate statement is questionable; it is certainly no longer. While all policy must ultimately be customized for local conditions, it absurd to assume there is little or nothing to learn from other countries. Three trends, in fact, indicate that solutions will become increasingly fungible between countries…..

2. Disconnected Issues

What climate change policy can endure without a job-creation strategy? What sensible criminal justice reform does not consider education? Yet even within countries, departments and their employees often remain as foreign to each other as do nations….

3. Disconnected Public Servants

The isolation of governments, and of government departments, is caused by and reinforces the isolation of people working in government, who have few incentives—and plenty of disincentives—to share what they are working on…..

4. Disconnected Citizens

…There are areas of increasingly visible progress in bridging the disconnections of government, citizen engagement being one. We’re still in the early stages, but private sector fashions such as human-centered design and design thinking have become government buzzwords. And platforms enabling new types of citizen engagement—from participatory budgeting to apps that people use to report potholes—are increasingly popping up around the world…..

5. Disconnected Ideas

According to the World Bank’s own data, one third of its reports are never read, even once. Foundations and academia pour tens of millions of dollars into policy research with few targeted channels to reach policymakers; they also tend to produce and deliver information in formats that policymakers don’t find useful. People in government, like everyone else, are frequently on their mobile phones, and short of time….(More)”

 

We need a safe space for policy failure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Althaus & David Threlfall in The Mandarin: “Who remembers Google Schemer, the Apple Pippin, or Microsoft Zune? No one — and yet such no-go ideas didn’t hold back these prominent companies. In IT, such high profile failures are simply steps on the path to future success. When a start-up or major corporate puts a product onto the market they identify the kinks in their invention immediately, design a fix, and release a new version. If the whole idea falls flat — and who ever listened to music on a Zune instead of an iPod? — the next big thing is just around the corner. Learning from failure is celebrated as a key feature of innovation.

But in the world of public policy, this approach is only now creeping into our collective consciousness. We tread ever so lightly.

Drug policy, childcare reform, or information technology initiatives are areas where innovation could provide policy improvements, but who is going to be a first-mover innovator in this policy area without fearing potential retribution should anything go wrong?…

Public servants don’t have the luxury of ‘making a new version’ without fear of blame or retribution. Critically, their process often lacks the ability to test assumptions before delivery….

The most persuasive or entertaining narrative often trumps the painstaking work — and potential missteps — required to build an evidence base to support political and policy decisions. American academics Elizabeth Shanahan, Mark McBeth and Paul Hathaway make a remarkable claim regarding the power of narrative in the policy world: “Research in the field of psychology shows that narratives have a stronger ability to persuade individuals and influence their beliefs than scientific evidence does.” If narrative and stories overtake what we normally accept as evidence, then surely we ought to be taking more notice of what the narratives are, which we choose and how we use them…

Failing the right way

Essential policy spheres such as health, education and social services should benefit from innovative thinking and theory testing. What is necessary in these areas is even more robust attention to carefully calibrated and well-thought through experimentation. Rewards need to outweigh risks, and risks need to be properly managed. This has always been the case in clinical trials in medicine. Incredible breakthroughs in medical practice made throughout the 20th century speak to the success of this model. Why should policymaking suffer from a timid inertia given the potential for similar success?

An innovative approach, focused on learning while failing right, will certainly require a shift in thinking. Every new initiative will need to be designed in a holistic way, to not just solve an issue but learn from every stage of the design and delivery process. Evaluation doesn’t follow implementation but instead becomes part of the entire cycle. A small-scale, iterative approach can then lead to bigger successes down the track….(More)”.