Daniele Quercia in Built Environment: “It is well known that the layout and configuration of urban space plugs directly into our sense of community wellbeing. The twentieth-century city planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city’s dwellers create their own personal ‘mental maps’ of the city based on features such as the routes they use and the areas they visit. Maps that are easy to remember and navigate bring comfort and ultimately contribute to people’s wellbeing. Unfortunately, traditional social science experiments (including those used to capture mental maps) take time, are costly, and cannot be conducted at city scale. This paper describes how, starting in mid-2012, a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines set about tackling these issues. They were able to translate a few traditional experiments into 1-minute ‘web games with a purpose’. This article describes those games, the main insights they offer, their theoretical implications for urban planning, and their practical implications for improvements in navigation technologies….(More)”
Data governance: a Royal Society and British Academy project
Call for Evidence from The British Academy and the Royal Society: “…The project seeks to make recommendations for cross-sectoral governance arrangements that can ensure the UK remains a world leader in this area. The project will draw on scholars and scientists from across disciplines and will look at current and historical case studies of data governance, and of broader technology governance, from a range of countries and sectors. It will seek to enable connected debate by creating common frameworks to move debates on data governance forward.
Background
It is essential to get the best possible environment for the safe and rapid use of data in order to enhance UK’s wellbeing, security and economic growth. The UK has world class academic expertise in data science, in ethics and aspects other of governance; and it has a rapidly growing tech sector and there is a real opportunity for the UK to lead internationally in creating insights and mechanisms for enabling the new data sciences to benefit society.
While there are substantial arrangements in place for the safe use of data in the UK, these inevitably were designed early in the days of information technology and tend to rest on outdated notions of privacy and consent. In addition, newer considerations such as statistical stereotyping and bias in datasets, and implications for the freedom of choice, autonomy and equality of opportunity of individuals, come to the fore in this new technological context, as do transparency, accountability and openness of decision making.
Terms of Reference
The project seeks to:
- Identify the communities with interests in the governance of data and its uses, but which may be considering these issues in different contexts and with varied aims and assumptions, in order to facilitate dialogue between these communities. These include academia, industry and the public sector.
- Clarify where there are connections between different debates, identifying shared issues and common questions, and help to develop a common framework and shared language for debate.
- Identify which social, ethical and governance challenges arise in the context of developments in data use.
- Set out the public interests at stake in governance of data and its uses, and the relationships between them, and how the principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) apply in the context of data use.
- Make proposals for the UK to establish a sustained and flexible platform for debating issues of data governance, developing consensus about future legal and technical frameworks, and ensuring that learning and good practice spreads as fast as possible….(More)”
App gamifies safe street design, gets kids involved
Springwise: “It’s unlikely that cars will ever completely disappear, so cities are finding ways to help two wheels and four wheels safely co-exist. In-ground LED lights warn cars when a cyclist is approaching, and this app provides a driver’s safety performance report after each journey. In Norway, as part of a project to get more citizens walking and cycling, Oslo’s Traffic Agent app gives young school children a way to report street safety.
Initially focusing on home-to-school routes, the app assigns each child an agent number. The agents then log safe or unsafe conditions they come across in their travel to school. The app was developed by the Agency of Urban Environment, the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research and the Oslo City Teaching Agency, in consultation with children. And the Traffic Agent team is working closely with parent-teacher associations to get as many schools and children as possible involved in the project.
In the near future, Oslo’s city planners plan to ban cars from the city center but an urban environment that is safe for pedestrians and cyclists is an important first step…(More)”
Responsible Data in Agriculture
Report by Lindsay Ferris and Zara Rahman for GODAN: “The agriculture sector is creating increasing amounts of data, from many different sources. From tractors equipped with GPS tracking, to open data released by government ministries, data is becoming ever more valuable, as agricultural business development and global food policy decisions are being made based upon data. But the sector is also home to severe resource inequality. The largest agricultural companies make billions of dollars per year, in comparison with subsistence farmers growing just enough to feed themselves, or smallholder farmers who grow enough to sell on a year-by-year basis. When it comes to data and technology, these differences in resources translate to stark power imbalances in data access and use. The most well resourced actors are able to delve into new technologies and make the most of those insights, whereas others are unable to take any such risks or divert any of their limited resources. Access to and use of data has radically changed the business models and behaviour of some of those well resourced actors, but in contrast, those with fewer resources are receiving the same, limited access to information that they always have.
In this paper, we have approached these issues from a responsible data perspective, drawing upon the experience of the Responsible Data community1 who over the past three years have created tools, questions and resources to deal with the ethical, legal, privacy and security challenges that come from new uses of data in various sectors. This piece aims to provide a broad overview of some of the responsible data challenges facing these actors, with a focus on the power imbalance between actors, and looking into how that inequality affects behaviour when it comes to the agricultural data ecosystem. What are the concerns of those with limited resources, when it comes to this new and rapidly changing data environment? In addition, what are the ethical grey areas or uncertainties that we need to address in the future? As a first attempt to answer these questions, we spoke to 14 individuals with various perspectives on the sector to understand what the challenges are for them and for the people they work with. We also carried out desk research to dive deeper into these issues, and we provide here an analysis of our findings and responsible data challenges….(More)”
The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science
New book by Cass R. Sunstein: “In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge (2008), breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people’s attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates…(More)”
Discrimination by Design
Lena Groeger at ProPublica: “A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. It appeared alongside many of the other such face-altering filters that have become a signature of the service. But instead of surrounding your face with flower petals or giving you the nose and ears of a Dalmatian, the filter added slanted eyes, puffed cheeks and large front teeth. A number of Snapchat users decried the filter as racist, saying it mimicked a “yellowface” caricature of Asians. The company countered that they meant to represent anime characters and deleted the filter within a few hours.
“Snapchat is the prime example of what happens when you don’t have enough people of color building a product,” wrote Bay Area software engineer Katie Zhu in an essay she wrote about deleting the app and leaving the service. In a tech world that hires mostly white men, the absence of diverse voices means that companies can be blind to design decisions that are hurtful to their customers or discriminatory.A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.
A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.
But this isn’t just Snapchat’s problem. Discriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. It would be impossible to cover them all, so we’ll focus on the more tangible and visual design that humans interact with every day.
You can’t talk about discriminatory design without mentioning city planner Robert Moses, whose public works projects shaped huge swaths of New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s. The physical design of the environment is a powerful tool when it’s used to exclude and isolate specific groups of people. And Moses’ design choices have had lasting discriminatory effects that are still felt in modern New York.
A notorious example: Moses designed a number of Long Island Parkway overpasses to be so low that buses could not drive under them. This effectively blocked Long Island from the poor and people of color who tend to rely more heavily on public transportation. And the low bridges continue to wreak havoc in other ways: 64 collisions were recorded in 2014 alone (here’s a bad one).
The design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation has a history riddled with racial tensions and prejudiced policies. In the 1990s the Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union went to court over the racial inequity they saw in the city’s public transportation system. The Union alleged that L.A.’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent “a disproportionately high share of its resources on commuter rail services, whose primary users were wealthy non-minorities, and a disproportionately low share on bus services, whose main patrons were low income and minority residents.” The landmark case was settled through a court-ordered consent decree that placed strict limits on transit funding and forced the MTA to invest over $2 billion in the bus system.
Of course, the design of a neighborhood is more than just infrastructure. Zoning laws and regulations that determine how land is used or what schools children go to have long been used as a tool to segregate communities. All too often, the end result of zoning is that low-income, often predominantly black and Latino communities are isolated from most of the resources and advantages of wealthy white communities….(More)”
Situation vacant: technology triathletes wanted
Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Financial Times: “It is time to celebrate a new breed of triathletes, who work in technology. When I was dean in the public affairs school at Princeton, I would tell students to aim to work in the public, private and civic sectors over the course of their careers.
Solving public problems requires collaboration among government, business and civil society. Aspiring problem solvers need the culture and language of all three sectors and to develop a network of contacts in each.
The public problems we face, in the US and globally, require lawyers, economists and issue experts but also technologists. A lack of technologists capable of setting up HealthCare.gov, a website designed to implement the Affordable Care act, led President Barack Obama to create the US Digital Service, which deploys Swat tech teams to address specific problems in government agencies.
But functioning websites that deliver government services effectively are only the most obvious technological need for the public sector.
Government can reinvent how it engages with citizens entirely, for example by personalising public education with digital feedback or training jobseekers. But where to find the talent? The market for engineers, designers and project managers sees big tech companies competing for graduates from the world’s best universities.
Governments can offer only a fraction of those salaries, combined with a rigid work environment, ingrained resistance to innovation and none of the amenities and perks so dear to Silicon Valley .
Government’s comparative advantage, however, is mission and impact, which is precisely what Todd Park sells…Still, demand outstrips supply. ….The goal is to create an ecosystem for public interest technology comparable to that in public interest law. In the latter, a number of American philanthropists created role models, educational opportunities and career paths for aspiring lawyers who want to change the world.
That process began in the 1960s, and today every great law school has a public interest programme with scholarships for the most promising students. Many branches of government take on top law school graduates. Public interest lawyers coming out of government find jobs with think-tanks and advocacy organisations and take up research fellowships, often at the law schools that educated them. When they need to pay the mortgage or send their kids to college, they can work at large law firms with pro bono programmes….We need much more. Every public policy school at a university with a computer science, data science or technology design programme should follow suit. Every think-tank should also become a tech tank. Every non-governmental organisation should have at least one technologist on staff. Every tech company should have a pro bono scheme rewarding public interest work….(More)”
The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism
Book edited by Tamara Witschge, C. W. Anderson, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida: “The production and consumption of news in the digital era is blurring the boundaries between professionals, citizens and activists. Actors producing information are multiplying, but still media companies hold central position. Journalism research faces important challenges to capture, examine, and understand the current news environment. The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism starts from the pressing need for a thorough and bold debate to redefine the assumptions of research in the changing field of journalism. The 38 chapters, written by a team of global experts, are organised into four key areas:
Section A: Changing Contexts
Section B: News Practices in the Digital Era
Section C: Conceptualizations of Journalism
Section D: Research Strategies
By addressing both institutional and non-institutional news production and providing ample attention to the question ‘who is a journalist?’ and the changing practices of news audiences in the digital era, this Handbook shapes the field and defines the roadmap for the research challenges that scholars will face in the coming decades….(More)”
Managing Federal Information as a Strategic Resource
White House: “Today the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is releasing an update to the Federal Government’s governing document for the management of Federal information resources: Circular A-130, Managing Information as a Strategic Resource.
The way we manage information technology(IT), security, data governance, and privacy has rapidly evolved since A-130 was last updated in 2000. In today’s digital world, we are creating and collecting large volumes of data to carry out the Federal Government’s various missions to serve the American people. This data is duplicated, stored, processed, analyzed, and transferred with ease. As government continues to digitize, we must ensure we manage data to not only keep it secure, but also allow us to harness this information to provide the best possible service to our citizens.
Today’s update to Circular A-130 gathers in one resource a wide range of policy updates for Federal agencies regarding cybersecurity, information governance, privacy, records management, open data, and acquisitions. It also establishes general policy for IT planning and budgeting through governance, acquisition, and management of Federal information, personnel, equipment, funds, IT resources, and supporting infrastructure and services. In particular, A-130 focuses on three key elements to help spur innovation throughout the government:
- Real Time Knowledge of the Environment. In today’s rapidly changing environment, threats and technology are evolving at previously unimagined speeds. In such a setting, the Government cannot afford to authorize a system and not look at it again for years at a time. In order to keep pace, we must move away from periodic, compliance-driven assessment exercises and, instead, continuously assess our systems and build-in security and privacy with every update and re-design. Throughout the Circular, we make clear the shift away from check-list exercises and toward the ongoing monitoring, assessment, and evaluation of Federal information resources.
- Proactive Risk Management. To keep pace with the needs of citizens, we must constantly innovate. As part of such efforts, however, the Federal Government must modernize the way it identifies, categorizes, and handles risk to ensure both privacy and security. Significant increases in the volume of data processed and utilized by Federal resources requires new ways of storing, transferring, and managing it Circular A-130 emphasizes the need for strong data governance that encourages agencies to proactively identify risks, determine practical and implementable solutions to address said risks, and implement and continually test the solutions. This repeated testing of agency solutions will help to proactively identify additional risks, starting the process anew.
- Shared Responsibility. Citizens are connecting with each other in ways never before imagined. From social media to email, the connectivity we have with one another can lead to tremendous advances. The updated A-130 helps to ensure everyone remains responsible and accountable for assuring privacy and security of information – from managers to employees to citizens interacting with government services. …(More)”
How Technology Can Restore Our Trust in Democracy
Cenk Sidar in Foreign Policy: “The travails of the Arab Spring, the rise of the Islamic State, and the upsurge of right-wing populism throughout the countries of West all demonstrate a rising frustration with the liberal democratic order in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. There is a growing intellectual consensus that the world is sailing into uncharted territory: a realm marked by authoritarianism, shallow populism, and extremism.
One way to overcome this global resentment is to use the best tools we have to build a more inclusive and direct democracy. Could new technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), data analytics, crowdsourcing, and Blockchain help to restore meaningful dialogue and win back people’s hearts and minds?
Underpinning our unsettling current environment is an irony: Thanks to modern communication technology, the world is more connected than ever — but average people feel more disconnected. In the United States, polls show that trust in government is at a 50-year low. Frustrated Trump supporters and the Britons who voted for Brexit both have a sense of having “lost out” as the global elite consolidates its power and becomes less responsive to the rest of society. This is not an irrational belief: Branko Milanovic, a leading inequality scholar, has found that people in the lower and middle parts of rich countries’ income distributions have been the losers of the last 15 years of globalization.
The same 15 years have also brought astounding advances in technology, from the rise of the Internet to the growing ubiquity of smartphones. And Western society has, to some extent, struggled to find its bearings amid this transition. Militant groups seduce young people through social media. The Internet enables consumers to choose only the news that matches their preconceived beliefs, offering a bottomless well of partisan fury and conspiracy theories. Cable news airing 24/7 keeps viewers in a state of agitation. In short, communication technologies that are meant to bring us together end up dividing us instead (and not least because our politicians have chosen to game these tools for their own advantage).
It is time to make technology part of the solution. More urgently than ever, leaders, innovators, and activists need to open up the political marketplace to allow technology to realize its potential for enabling direct citizen participation. This is an ideal way to restore trust in the democratic process.
As the London School of Economics’ Mary Kaldor put it recently: “The task of global governance has to be reconceptualized to make it possible for citizens to influence the decisions that affect their lives — to reclaim substantive democracy.” One notable exception to the technological disconnect has been fundraising, as candidates have tapped into the Internet to enable millions of average voters to donate small sums. With the right vision, however, technological innovation in politics could go well beyond asking people for money….(More)”