energy

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data….

We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us.

Yet much of the most valuable data resides with the private sector—for example, in the form of click histories, online purchases, sensor data, and call data records. This limits its potential to benefit the public and to turn data into a social asset. Consider how data held by business could help improve policy interventions (such as better urban planning) or resiliency at a time of climate change, or help design better public services to increase food security.

Data responsibility suggests steps that organizations can take to break down these private barriers and foster so-called data collaboratives, or ways to share their proprietary data for the public good. For the private sector, data responsibility represents a new type of corporate social responsibility for the 21st century.

While Nepal’s Ncell belongs to a relatively small group of corporations that have shared their data, there are a few encouraging signs that the practice is gaining momentum. In Jakarta, for example, Twitter exchanged some of its data with researchers who used it to gather and display real-time information about massive floods. The resulting website, PetaJakarta.org, enabled better flood assessment and management processes. And in Senegal, the Data for Development project has brought together leading cellular operators to share anonymous data to identify patterns that could help improve health, agriculture, urban planning, energy, and national statistics.

Examples like this suggest that proprietary data can help improve and save lives. But to fully harness the potential of data, data holders need to fulfill at least three conditions. I call these the “the three pillars of data responsibility.”…

The difficulty of translating insights into results points to some of the larger social, political, and institutional shifts required to achieve the vision of data responsibility in the 21st century. The move from data shielding to data sharing will require that we make a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data. We must incorporate new levels of pro-activeness, and make often-unfamiliar commitments to transparency and accountability.

By way of conclusion, here are four immediate steps—essential but not exhaustive—we can take to move forward:

Data holders should issue a public commitment to data responsibility so that it becomes the default—an expected, standard behavior within organizations.
Organizations should hire data stewards to determine what and when to share, and how to protect and act on data.
We must develop a data responsibility decision tree to assess the value and risk of corporate data along the data lifecycle.
Above all, we need a data responsibility movement; it is time to demand data responsibility to ensure data improves and safeguards people’s lives…(More)”

What Does Big Data Mean For Sustainability?

Curated on January 30, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Saurabh Tyagi at Sustainable Brands: “Everything around us is impacted by big data today. The phenomenon took shape earlier in this decade and there are now a growing number of compelling ways in which big data analytics is being applied to solve real-world problems….Out of the many promises of big data, environment sustainability is one of the most important ones to implement and maintain. Why so?

Climate change has moved to the top of the list of global risks, affecting every country and disrupting economies. While a major part of this damage is irreversible, it is still possible with use of a wide range of technological measures to control the global increase in temperature. Big data can generate useful insights that can be as relevant towards fostering environment sustainability as they have been to other sectors such as healthcare.

Understanding operations

Big data’s usefulness is in its ability to help businesses understand and act on the environmental impacts of their operations. Some of these are within their boundaries while others are outside their direct control. Previously, this information was dispersed across different formats, locations and sites. However, now businesses are trying to make out the end-to-end impact of their operations throughout the value chain. This includes things that are outside of their direct control, including raw material sourcing, employee travels, product disposal, and the like.

Assessing environmental risks

Big data is also useful in assessing environmental risks. For example, Aqueduct is an interactive water-risk mapping tool from the World Resources Institute that monitors and calculates water risk anywhere in the world based on various parameters related to the water’s quantity, quality and other changing regulatory issue in that area. With this free online, users can choose the factors on which they want to focus and also zoom in at a particular location.

Big data is also enabling environmental sustainability by helping us to understand the demand for energy and food as the world population increases and climate change reduces these resources by every passing year.

Optimizing resource usage

Another big contribution of big data to the corporate world is its ability to help them optimize usage of resources. At the Initiative for Global Environment Leadership (IGEL) conference in 2014, David Parker, VP of Big Data for SAP, discussed how Italian tire company Pirelli uses SAP’s big data management system, HANA, to optimize its inventory. The company uses data generated by sensors in its tires globally to reduce waste, increase profits and reduce the number of defective tires going to landfills, thus doing its bit for environment. Similarly, Dutch energy company Alliander uses HANA to maintain the grid’s peak efficiency, which in turn increases profits and reduces environmental impact. While at one time it used to take 10 weeks for the company to optimize the grid, now it takes only three days to accomplish the same; a task which Alliander used to do once in a year now can be accomplished once every month….

Big data helps better regulation

Big data can also be integrated into government policies to ensure better environmental regulation. Governments can now implement the latest sensor technology and adopt real-time reporting of environmental quality data. This data can be used monitor the emissions of large utility facilities and if required put some regulatory framework in place to regularize the emissions. The firms are given complete freedom to experiment and chose the best possible mean of achieving the required result….(More)”

Technology tools in human rights

Curated on January 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Engine Room: “Over the past few years, we have been witnessing a wave of new technology tools for human rights documentation. Along with the arrival of the new tools, human rights defenders are facing new tools, new possibilities, new challenges, and new expectations of human rights documentation initiatives.

Produced with support from the Oak Foundation, this report is designed as a first attempt to detail available technologies that are designed for human rights documentation, understand the various perspectives on the challenges human rights documentation initiatives face when adopting new tools and practices, and analyse what is working and what is not for human rights documentation initiatives seeking to integrate new tools in their work….

Primary takeaways:

Traditional methods still apply: The environment in which HRDs are working has not dramatically inherently changed due to technology and data.
Unreliability and unknown risks provide huge barriers to engagement with technology: In high-pressured situations such as that of HRDs, methodologies used need to be concrete and reliable.
Priorities of HRDs centre around their particular issue: Digital technologies often come as an afterthought, rather than integrated into established strategies for communication or campaigning.
The lifespan of technology tools is a big barrier to longterm use: Sustainability of tools and maintenance is a big barrier to engaging with them and can cause fatigue among users having to change their practices often.
Past failed attempts at using tools makes future attempts more difficult: After having invested time and energy into changing a workflow or process only for it not to work, people are often reluctant to do the same again.
HRDs understand their context best: Tools recommendations coming from external parties sometimes do more harm than good.
There is a lack of technical capacity within HRD initiatives: As a result, when tools are introduced, groups become reliant on external parties for technical troubleshooting and support.

(Download the report)

How The Tech Community Mobilized To Help Refugees

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Melendez at FastCompany: “Thousands of techies the world over have banded together to help refugees flooding Europe to stay connected.

The needs of the waves of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other points—more than a million in 2015—go beyond just shelter, safety, and sustenance.

“You can imagine, crossing to a border or coming to a place you don’t know. Information needs are massive,” says Alyoscia D’Onofrio, senior director at the governance technical unit of the International Rescue Committee, which assists refugees and displaced people around the world.

“One of the big differences between this crisis response and many that have gone before is that you’re got probably a much tech-savvier population on the move and probably much better access to handsets and networks.”

Helping to connect those newcomers to information—and each other—is a group of 15,000 digital volunteers who call themselves the Techfugees.

“We are here not to solve the biggest problems of hygiene, water, clean energy because these are sectors that need a lot of expertise,” says Joséphine Goube, the CEO of the nonprofit that quickly came together last year.

Instead, often with the aid of smartphones many migrants and asylum seekers bring with them, the continent’s tech community aids refugees and asylum seekers in getting back online to find their footing in unfamiliar places….

The IRC has received substantial funding from tech companies to support its efforts, and individual tech workers have flocked to dozens of conferences and hackathons organized by Techfugees around the world since an initial conference in London last October.

“We were actually overwhelmed by the response to our conference,” says Goube, “It just went viral.”

Affiliates of the group have since helped provide infrastructure for refugees to connect to Wi-Fi—even in places with limited electricity—and energize their phones through solar-powered charging hubs. They’ve also developed websites and apps to teach new arrivals everything from basic coding skills that could help them earn a living to how to navigate government bureaucracies in their new countries.

“Things that seem very trivial to us can actually be very complicated,” says Vincent Olislagers, a member of a team developing an interactive chatbot called HealthIntelligence, which is designed to provide refugees in Norway with information about using the country’s health care system. The tool was developed after the team met with a recent arrival to the country who had difficulty arranging hospital transportation for his pregnant wife due to language barriers and financial constraints.

“He had to call, for his wife, his caretaker at the refugee center,” Olislagers says. “The caretaker had to send an ambulance at the right location.”

The team is working with Norwegian health officials and refugee aid groups to ultimately make the chatbot available as part of a standard package of materials provided to refugees entering the country. The project was a finalist in an October hackathon organized by Techfugees in Oslo. The hackathon’s ultimate winner was a group called KomInn, which pairs families fluent in Norwegian with newcomers who come to their homes to practice the language over dinner. That group developed a digital tool to streamline finding matches, which had previously been a laborious process, says Goube….(More)”

Data can become Nigeria’s new ‘black gold’

Curated on November 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Labi Ogunbiyi in the Financial Times: “In the early 2000s I decided to leave my job heading the African project finance team in a global law firm to become an investor. My experience of managing big telecoms, infrastructure and energy transactions — and, regrettably, often disputes — involving governments, project sponsors, investors, big contractors, multilateral and development agencies had left me dissatisfied. Much of the ownership of the assets being fought over remained in the hands of international conglomerates. Africa’s lack of capacity to raise the capital to own them directly — and to develop the technical skills necessary for growth — was a clear weakness…

Yet, nearly 15 years after the domestic oil and gas sector began to evolve, oil is no longer the country’s only “black gold”. If I take a comparative look at how Nigeria’s energy sector has evolved since the early 2000’s, compared with how its ICT and broader technology industry has emerged, and the opportunities that both represent for the future, the contrast is stark. Nigeria, and the rest of the continent, has been enjoying a technology revolution and the opportunity that it represents has the potential to affect every sector of the economy. According to Africa Infotech Consulting, Nigeria’s mobile penetration rate — a measure of the number of devices by population — is more than 90 per cent, less than 20 years after the first mobile network appeared on the continent. Recent reports suggest more than 10 per cent of Nigerians have a smartphone. The availability and cost of fast data have improved dramatically….(More)”

Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power

Curated on November 27, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “…Over much of the last decade, we have seen progressive social movementspowered by the web spring up across the world. There was the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa. In the United States, we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement andthe #BlackLivesMatter protests.

Social networks also played a role in electoral politics — first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, and then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008.

Yet now those movements look like the prelude to a wider, tech-powered crack up in the global order. In Britain this year, organizing on Facebook played a major role in the once-unthinkable push to get the country to leave the European Union. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand mayor who was vastly outspent by opponents, managed to marshal a huge army of online supporters to help him win the presidency.

The Islamic State has used social networks to recruit jihadists from around the world to fight in Iraq and Syria, as well as to inspire terrorist attacks overseas.

And in the United States, both Bernie Sanders, a socialist who ran for president as a Democrat, and Mr. Trump, who was once reviled by most members of the party he now leads, relied on online movements to shatter the political status quo.

Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons.

One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.

“When the technology gets boring, that’s when the crazy social effects get interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.

One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of the Overton Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.

From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias (there were exceptions, of course, like the Willie Horton ad). But the internet shifted that window.

“White ethno nationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance,”Mr. Shirky said. “Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans — they didn’t know how many others shared their views.”

Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world victories.

Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isn’t just shifting on the right. We see it happening on the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an anti-Wall Street platform that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago….(More)”

Using Cloud Computing to Untangle How Trees Can Cool Cities

Curated on November 27, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Timothy Boucher at CoolGreenScience: “We’ve all used Google Earth — to explore remote destinations around the world or to check out our house from above. But Google Earth Engine is a valuable tool for conservationists and geographers like myself that allows us to tackle some tricky remote-sensing analysis.

After having completed a few smaller spatial science projects in the cloud (mostly on the Google Earth Engine, or GEE, platform), I decided to give it a real workout — by analyzing more than 300 gigabytes of data across 28 United States and seven Chinese cities.

This project was part of a larger study looking at trees in cities. Why trees? Trees provide numerous valuable ecosystem services to communities: benefits associated with air and water quality, energy conservation, cooler air temperatures, and many other environmental and social benefits.

It’s easy to understand the benefits of trees: stand outside on a hot sunny day and you immediately feel cooler in the shade of a tree. But what’s not as obvious as the cooling effect are tree’s ability to remove particulate matter (PM_2.5) floating around in the air we breath. And this important, as this type of air pollution is implicated in the deaths of ~3 million people per year.

The Conservancy researched the relationship between city air quality and the cooling effects of trees. Results of this study will inform the Global Cities Program initiative on Planting Healthy Air for cities — the objective being to show how much trees can clean and cool, how much it will cost, and so forth….(More)”

Playing politics: exposing the flaws of nudge thinking

Curated on November 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Pat Kane in The New Scientist: “The cover of this book echoes its core anxiety. A giant foot presses down on a sullen, Michael Jackson-like figure – a besuited citizen coolly holding off its massive weight. This is a sinister image to associate with a volume (and its author, Cass Sunstein) that should be able to proclaim a decade of success in the government’s use of “behavioural science”, or nudge theory. But doubts are brewing about its long-term effectiveness in changing public behaviour – as well as about its selective account of evolved human nature.

Sunstein insists that the powers that be cannot avoid nudging us. Every shop floor plan, every new office design, every commercial marketing campaign, every public information campaign, is an “architecting of choices”. As anyone who ever tried to leave IKEA quickly will suspect, that endless, furniture-strewn path to the exit is no accident.

Nudges “steer people in particular directions, but also allow them to go their own way”. They are entreaties to change our habits, to accept old or new norms, but they presume thatwe are ultimately free to refuse the request.

However, our freedom is easily constrained by “cognitive biases”. Our brains, say the nudgers, are lazy, energy-conserving mechanisms, often overwhelmed by information. So a good way to ensure that people pay into their pensions, for example, is to set payment as a “default” in employment contracts, so the employee has to actively untick the box. Defaults of all kinds exploit our preference for inertia and the status quo in order to increase future security….

Sunstein makes useful distinctions between nudges and the other things governments and enterprises can do. Nudges are not “mandates” (laws, regulations, punishments). A mandate would be, for example, a rigorous and well-administered carbon tax, secured through a democratic or representative process. A “nudge” puts smiley faces on your energy bill, and compares your usage to that of the eco-efficient Joneses next door (nudgers like to game our herd-like social impulses).

In a fascinating survey section, which asks Americans and others what they actually think about being the subjects of the “architecting” of their choices, Sunstein discovers that “if people are told that they are being nudged, they will react adversely and resist”.

This is why nudge thinking may be faltering – its understanding of human nature unnecessarily (and perhaps expediently) downgrades our powers of conscious thought….(More)

See The Ethics of Influence: Government in the age of behavioral science Cass R. Sunstein, Cambridge University Press

Embracing Digital Democracy: A Call for Building an Online Civic Commons

Curated on November 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John Gastil and Robert C. Richards Jr. in Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming): “Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them….(More)”

Three ways to grow the open data economy

Curated on November 1, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shadbolt in The Guardian: “…here are three areas where action by the UK government can help to support and promote a flourishing open data economy

Strengthen our data infrastructure

We are used to thinking of areas like transport and energy requiring physical infrastructure. From roads and rail networks to the national grid and power stations, we understand that investment and management of these vital parts of an infrastructure are essential to the economic wellbeing and future prosperity of the nation.

This is no less true of key data assets. Our data infrastructure is a core part of our national infrastructure. From lists of legally constituted companies to the country’s geospatial data, our data infrastructure needs to be managed, maintained, in some cases built and in all cases made as widely available as possible.

To maximise the benefits to the UK’s economy and to reduce costs in delivery of public services, the data we rely on needs to be adaptable, trustworthy, and as open as possible….

While we do have some excellent examples of infrastructure data from the likes of Companies House, Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Defra, core parts of the data infrastructure that we need within the UK are missing, unreliable, or of a low quality. The government must invest here just as it invests in our other traditional infrastructure.

Support and promote data innovation

If we are to make best use of data, we need a bridge between academic research, public, private and third sectors, and a thriving startup ecosystem where new ideas and approaches can grow.

We have learned that properly targeted challenges could identify potential savings for government – similar to Prescribing Analytics, an ODI-incubated startup which used publicly available data to identify £200m in prescriptions savings per year for the NHS – but, more importantly, translate that potential into procurable products and services that could deliver those savings.

A data challenge series run at a larger scale, funded by Innovate UK, openly contested and independently managed, would stimulate the creation of new companies, jobs, products and services. It would also act as a forcing function to strengthen data infrastructure around key challenges, and raise awareness and capacity for those working to solve them. The data needed to satisfy the challenges would have to be made available and usable, bringing data innovation into government and bolstering the offer of the startups and SMEs who take part.

Invest in data literacy

In order to take advantage of the data revolution, policymakers, businesses and citizens need to understand how to make use of data. In other words, they must become data literate.

Data literacy is needed through our whole educational system and society more generally. Crucially, policymakers are going to need to be informed by insights that can only be gleaned through understanding and analysing data effectively….(More)”