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)”

Participatory Budgeting — Not A One-Size-Fits All Approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexandra Flynn at Osgood Digital Commons: “Municipal staff and politicians are moving aside to let someone else make budget decisions – community residents. This practice, known as participatory budgeting or PB, is a completely different way of managing public money. It allows the public to both identify projects and programs that they want to see in their neighbourhoods, and to vote on which ones to fund. The process was developed twenty-five years ago and there are now over 1,500 participatory budgets around the world …

There is no one-size-fits all model for participatory budgeting. The UN-Habitat suggests that the following are essential pieces for the introduction of a participatory budgeting process: the will of the mayor, public interest, clarity on administration and the decisionmaking process, education tools on the budgeting process, widely distributed information on the participatory budgeting process through all possible means, and information on infrastructure and public service shortfalls. The UN-Habitat recommends that participatory budgeting should not be used if honesty and transparency are lacking in local administration. Municipal governments should be clear that the final decision rests with the elected representatives of the local authority and that the process does not replace representative democracy with direct referendums.

Municipalities may want to consider the following issues when implementing participatory budgeting in their communities….(More)”

Data as a Means, Not an End: A Brief Case Study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tracie Neuhaus & Jarasa Kanok  in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “In 2014, City Year—the well-known national education nonprofit that leverages young adults in national service to help students and schools succeed—was outgrowing the methods it used for collecting, managing, and using performance data. As the organization established its strategy for long-term impact, leaders identified a business problem: The current system for data collection and use would need to evolve to address the more-complex challenges the organization was undertaking. Staff throughout the organization were citing pain points one might expect, including onerous manual data collection, and long lag times to get much-needed data and reports on student attendance, grades, and academic and social-emotional assessments. After digging deeper, leaders realized they couldn’t fix the organization’s challenges with technology or improved methods without first addressing more fundamental issues. They saw City Year lacked a common “language” for the data it collected and used. Staff varied widely in their levels of data literacy, as did the scope of data-sharing agreements with the 27 urban school districts where City Year was working at the time. What’s more, its evaluation group had gradually become a default clearinghouse for a wide variety of service requests from across the organization that the group was neither designed nor staffed to address. The situation was much more complex than it appeared.

With significant technology roadmap decisions looming, City Year engaged with us to help it develop its data strategy. Together we came to realize that these symptoms were reflective of a single issue, one that exists in many organizations: City Year’s focus on data wasn’t targeted to address the very different kinds of decisions that each staff member—from the front office to the front lines—needed to make. …

Many of us in the social sector have probably seen elements of this dynamic. Many organizations create impact reports designed to satisfy external demands from donors, but these reports have little relevance to the operational or strategic choices the organizations face every day, much less address harder-to-measure, system-level outcomes. As a result, over time and in the face of constrained resources, measurement is relegated to a compliance activity, disconnected from identifying and collecting the information that directly enables individuals within the organization to drive impact. Gathering data becomes an end in itself, rather than a means of enabling ground-level work and learning how to improve the organization’s impact.

Overcoming this all-too-common “measurement drift” requires that we challenge the underlying orthodoxies that drive it and reorient measurement activities around one simple premise: Data should support better decision-making. This enables organizations to not only shed a significant burden of unproductive activity, but also drive themselves to new heights of performance.

In the case of City Year, leaders realized that to really take advantage of existing technology platforms, they needed a broader mindset shift….(More)”

Kids learn about anti-discrimination via online soccer game

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “As Euro 2016 captures the attention of soccer fanatics around the world, a new app is tapping into the popularity of the event, and using it bring about positive education. EduKicks is a new game for kids that teaches anti-discrimination through gaming and soccer.

IMG_0972

Launched earlier this week, the multiplayer game focuses on personal, social, and health education for children aged between 9-13. After downloading the app on their smartphone or tablet, users take turns spinning a wheel, and face either a movement card or an education card. The movement cards asks players to complete a soccer-related activity, such as tick-tocking with the insides of their feet. Education cards require them to answer a question. For example, the app might ask “How many women working in the football industry have experienced sexism?” and users choose between 22 percent, 66 percent, or 51 percent. Topics cover racism, religious discrimination, sexism, homophobia, disability, and more. The aim is to use the momentum and popularity of football to make learning more engaging and enjoyable….(More)”

Bridging data gaps for policymaking: crowdsourcing and big data for development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 for the DevPolicyBlog: “…By far the biggest innovation in data collection is the ability to access and analyse (in a meaningful way) user-generated data. This is data that is generated from forums, blogs, and social networking sites, where users purposefully contribute information and content in a public way, but also from everyday activities that inadvertently or passively provide data to those that are able to collect it.

User-generated data can help identify user views and behaviour to inform policy in a timely way rather than just relying on traditional data collection techniques (census, household surveys, stakeholder forums, focus groups, etc.), which are often cumbersome, very costly, untimely, and in many cases require some form of approval or support by government.

It might seem at first that user-generated data has limited usefulness in a development context due to the importance of the internet in generating this data combined with limited internet availability in many places. However, U-Report is one example of being able to access user-generated data independent of the internet.

U-Report was initiated by UNICEF Uganda in 2011 and is a free SMS based platform where Ugandans are able to register as “U-Reporters” and on a weekly basis give their views on topical issues (mostly related to health, education, and access to social services) or participate in opinion polls. As an example, Figure 1 shows the result from a U-Report poll on whether polio vaccinators came to U-Reporter houses to immunise all children under 5 in Uganda, broken down by districts. Presently, there are more than 300,000 U-Reporters in Uganda and more than one million U-Reporters across 24 countries that now have U-Report. As an indication of its potential impact on policymaking,UNICEF claims that every Member of Parliament in Uganda is signed up to receive U-Report statistics.

Figure 1: U-Report Uganda poll results

Figure 1: U-Report Uganda poll results

U-Report and other platforms such as Ushahidi (which supports, for example, I PAID A BRIBE, Watertracker, election monitoring, and crowdmapping) facilitate crowdsourcing of data where users contribute data for a specific purpose. In contrast, “big data” is a broader concept because the purpose of using the data is generally independent of the reasons why the data was generated in the first place.

Big data for development is a new phrase that we will probably hear a lot more (see here [pdf] and here). The United Nations Global Pulse, for example, supports a number of innovation labs which work on projects that aim to discover new ways in which data can help better decision-making. Many forms of “big data” are unstructured (free-form and text-based rather than table- or spreadsheet-based) and so a number of analytical techniques are required to make sense of the data before it can be used.

Measures of Twitter activity, for example, can be a real-time indicator of food price crises in Indonesia [pdf] (see Figure 2 below which shows the relationship between food-related tweet volume and food inflation: note that the large volume of tweets in the grey highlighted area is associated with policy debate on cutting the fuel subsidy rate) or provide a better understanding of the drivers of immunisation awareness. In these examples, researchers “text-mine” Twitter feeds by extracting tweets related to topics of interest and categorising text based on measures of sentiment (positive, negative, anger, joy, confusion, etc.) to better understand opinions and how they relate to the topic of interest. For example, Figure 3 shows the sentiment of tweets related to vaccination in Kenya over time and the dates of important vaccination related events.

Figure 2: Plot of monthly food-related tweet volume and official food price statistics

Figure 2: Plot of monthly food-related Tweet volume and official food price statistics

Figure 3: Sentiment of vaccine related tweets in Kenya

Figure 3: Sentiment of vaccine-related tweets in Kenya

Another big data example is the use of mobile phone usage to monitor the movement of populations in Senegal in 2013. The data can help to identify changes in the mobility patterns of vulnerable population groups and thereby provide an early warning system to inform humanitarian response effort.

The development of mobile banking too offers the potential for the generation of a staggering amount of data relevant for development research and informing policy decisions. However, it also highlights the public good nature of data collected by public and private sector institutions and the reliance that researchers have on them to access the data. Building trust and a reputation for being able to manage privacy and commercial issues will be a major challenge for researchers in this regard….(More)”

Priorities for the National Privacy Research Strategy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
James Kurose and Keith Marzullo at the White House: “Vast improvements in computing and communications are creating new opportunities for improving life and health, eliminating barriers to education and employment, and enabling advances in many sectors of the economy. The promise of these new applications frequently comes from their ability to create, collect, process, and archive information on a massive scale.

However, the rapid increase in the quantity of personal information that is being collected and retained, combined with our increased ability to analyze and combine it with other information, is creating concerns about privacy. When information about people and their activities can be collected, analyzed, and repurposed in so many ways, it can create new opportunities for crime, discrimination, inadvertent disclosure, embarrassment, and harassment.

This Administration has been a strong champion of initiatives to improve the state of privacy, such as the “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” proposal and the creation of the Federal Privacy Council. Similarly, the White House report Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values highlights the need for large-scale privacy research, stating: “We should dramatically increase investment for research and development in privacy-enhancing technologies, encouraging cross-cutting research that involves not only computer science and mathematics, but also social science, communications and legal disciplines.”

Today, we are pleased to release the National Privacy Research Strategy. Research agencies across government participated in the development of the strategy, reviewing existing Federal research activities in privacy-enhancing technologies, soliciting inputs from the private sector, and identifying priorities for privacy research funded by the Federal Government. The National Privacy Research Strategy calls for research along a continuum of challenges, from how people understand privacy in different situations and how their privacy needs can be formally specified, to how these needs can be addressed, to how to mitigate and remediate the effects when privacy expectations are violated. This strategy proposes the following priorities for privacy research:

  • Foster a multidisciplinary approach to privacy research and solutions;
  • Understand and measure privacy desires and impacts;
  • Develop system design methods that incorporate privacy desires, requirements, and controls;
  • Increase transparency of data collection, sharing, use, and retention;
  • Assure that information flows and use are consistent with privacy rules;
  • Develop approaches for remediation and recovery; and
  • Reduce privacy risks of analytical algorithms.

With this strategy, our goal is to produce knowledge and technology that will enable individuals, commercial entities, and the Federal Government to benefit from technological advancements and data use while proactively identifying and mitigating privacy risks. Following the release of this strategy, we are also launching a Federal Privacy R&D Interagency Working Group, which will lead the coordination of the Federal Government’s privacy research efforts. Among the group’s first public activities will be to host a workshop to discuss the strategic plan and explore directions of follow-on research. It is our hope that this strategy will also inspire parallel efforts in the private sector….(More)”

How A Videogame Can Be A Source For Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jiwon Kim at PSFK: “The nonprofit Games For Change has a mission to utilize games to change the world. More specifically, it’s to facilitate “the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.”….PSFK decided to explore the three finalists up to win the award for the most innovative game of 2016:

1. Life is Strange: This game is comprised of five episodes that allow the gamer to turn back the time and change a chain of events. The gamers follow the protagonist, Maxine, as she uses her power to rewind time to save her friends and her town. This game is innovative in the sense that gamers intimately interact with this intricate plot while exploring important issues such as suicide, substance issues and relationships. The game is like a beautiful animated movie with great music, except the gamer decides the ending.

2. That Dragon, Cancer: The game’s creator, Ryan Green, is a programmer who wanted to share his experience of raising a young son struggling with cancer. The narrative video game retells how Ryan’s son and the rest of his family went on an emotional roller coaster ride that lasted years. Unfortunately, his son passed away but the Green family hopes that this game provides a deep insight into this difficult journey and dealing with feelings of hope and loss. The game brings in a new perspective and a new medium for intimate stories to be shared.

3. Lumino City: This game is entirely handcrafted with paper, miniature lights and motors. Lumino City is a beautiful 10-foot high city that serves as the setting of an exciting adventure. Gamers get to be Lumi, the protagonist, as she goes off on a journey to find her grandfather. Everything about this game is innovative in the sense that the creators fuse the digital world and traditional arts and crafts together….(More).

Nudging for Success

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “A groundbreaking report published today by ideas42 reveals several innovations that college administrators and policymakers can leverage to significantly improve college graduation rates at a time where completion is more out of reach than ever for millions of students.

The student path through college to graduation day is strewn with subtle, often invisible barriers that, over time, hinder students’ progress and cause some of them to drop out entirely. In Nudging for Success: Using Behavioral Science to Improve the Postsecondary Student Journey, ideas42 focuses on simple, low-cost ways to combat these unintentional obstacles and support student persistence and success at every stage in the college experience, from pre-admission to post-graduation. Teams worked with students, faculty and administrators at colleges around the country.

Even for students whose tuition is covered by financial aid, whose academic preparation is exemplary, and who are able to commit themselves full-time to their education, the subtle logistical and psychological sticking points can have a huge impact on their ability to persist and fully reap the benefits of a higher education.

Less than 60% of full-time students graduate from four-year colleges within six years, and less than 30% graduate from community colleges within three years. There are a myriad of factors often cited as deterrents to finishing school, such as the cost of tuition or the need to juggle family and work obligations, but behavioral science and the results of this report demonstrate that lesser-known dynamics like self-perception are also at play.

From increasing financial aid filing to fostering positive friend groups and a sense of belonging on campus, the 16 behavioral solutions outlined in Nudging for Success represent the potential for significant impact on the student experience and persistence. At Arizona State University, sending behaviorally-designed email reminders to students and parents about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) priority deadline increased submissions by 72% and led to an increase in grant awards. Freshman retention among low-income, first generation, under-represented or other students most at risk of dropping out increased by 10% at San Francisco State University with the use of a testimonial video, self-affirming exercises, and monthly messaging aimed at first-time students.

“This evidence demonstrates how behavioral science can be the key to uplifting millions of Americans through education,” said Alissa Fishbane, Managing Director at ideas42. “By approaching the completion crisis from the whole experience of students themselves, administrators and policymakers have the opportunity to reduce the number of students who start, but do not finish, college—students who take on the financial burden of tuition but miss out on the substantial benefits of earning a degree.”

The results of this work drive home the importance of examining the college experience from the student perspective and through the lens of human behavior. College administrators and policymakers can replicate these gains at institutions across the country to make it simpler for students to complete the degree they started in ways that are often easier and less expensive to implement than existing alternatives—paving the way to stronger economic futures for millions of Americans….(More)”

Transforming governance: how can technology help reshape democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Briefing by Matt Leighninger: “Around the world, people are asking how we can make democracy work in new and better ways. We are frustrated by political systems in which voting is the only legitimate political act, concerned that many republics don’t have the strength or appeal to withstand authoritarian figures, and disillusioned by the inability of many countries to address the fundamental challenges of health, education and economic development.

We can no longer assume that the countries of the global North have ‘advanced’ democracies, and that the nations of the global South simply need to catch up. Citizens of these older democracies have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions; Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other valuable democratic innovations have emerged. The stage is set for a more equitable, global conversation about what we mean by democracy.

How can we adjust our democratic formulas so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the parts of this equation may come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organisations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as ‘civic technology’ or ‘civic tech’, these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts, and help neighbours remain connected. If we want to create democracies in which citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, we should be asking a number of questions about civic tech, including:

  • How can online tools best support new forms of democracy?
  • What are the examples of how this has happened?
  • What are some variables to consider in comparing these examples?
  • How can we learn from each other as we move forward?

This background note has been developed to help democratic innovators explore these questions and examine how their work can provide answers….(More)”

Transparency reports make AI decision-making accountable

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Phys.org: “Machine-learning algorithms increasingly make decisions about credit, medical diagnoses, personalized recommendations, advertising and job opportunities, among other things, but exactly how usually remains a mystery. Now, new measurement methods developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers could provide important insights to this process.

 Was it a person’s age, gender or education level that had the most influence on a decision? Was it a particular combination of factors? CMU’s Quantitative Input Influence (QII) measures can provide the relative weight of each factor in the final decision, said Anupam Datta, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.

“Demands for algorithmic transparency are increasing as the use of algorithmic decision-making systems grows and as people realize the potential of these systems to introduce or perpetuate racial or sex discrimination or other social harms,” Datta said.

“Some companies are already beginning to provide transparency reports, but work on the computational foundations for these reports has been limited,” he continued. “Our goal was to develop measures of the degree of influence of each factor considered by a system, which could be used to generate transparency reports.”

These reports might be generated in response to a particular incident—why an individual’s loan application was rejected, or why police targeted an individual for scrutiny or what prompted a particular medical diagnosis or treatment. Or they might be used proactively by an organization to see if an artificial intelligence system is working as desired, or by a regulatory agency to see whether a decision-making system inappropriately discriminated between groups of people….(More)”