The Magic of “Multisolving”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Sawin at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “In Japan, manufacturing facilities use “green curtains”—living panels of climbing plants—to clean the air, provide vegetables for company cafeterias, and reduce energy use for cooling. A walk-to-school program in the United Kingdom fights a decline in childhood physical activity while reducing traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. A food-gleaning program staffed by young volunteers and families facing food insecurity in Spain addresses food waste, hunger, and a desire for sustainability.

Each of these is a real-life example of what I call “multisolving”—where people pool expertise, funding, and political will to solve multiple problems with a single investment of time and money. It’s an approach with great relevance in this era of complex, interlinked, social and environmental challenges. But what’s the best formula for implementing projects that tackle many problems at once?

Climate Interactive, which uses systems analysis to help people address climate change, recently completed a year-long study of multisolving for climate and health. We learned there is no one-size-fits-all recipe, but we did identify three operating principles and three practices that showed up again and again in the projects we studied. What’s more, anyone wanting to access the power of cross-sectoral partnership can adopt them….(More)”.

Introducing CitizENGAGE – How Citizens Get Things Done

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Gov Partnership: “In a world full of autocracy, bureaucracy, and opacity, it can be easy to feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle against these trends.

Trust in government is at historic lows. Autocratic leaders have taken the reins in countries once thought bastions of democracy. Voter engagement has been declining around the globe for years.

Despite this reality, there is another, powerful truth: citizens are using open government to engage in their communities in innovative, exciting ways, bringing government closer and creating a more inclusive system.

These citizens are everywhere.

In Costa Rica, they are lobbying the government for better and fairer housing for indigenous communities.

In Liberia, they are bringing rights to land back to the communities who are threatened by companies on their traditional lands.

In Madrid, they are using technology to make sure you can participate in government – not just every four years, but every day.

In Mongolia, they are changing the face of education and healthcare services by empowering citizens to share their needs with government.

In Paraguay, hundreds of municipal councils are hearing directly from citizens and using their input to shape how needed public services are delivered.

These powerful examples are the inspiration for the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) new global campaign to CItizENGAGE.  The campaign will share the stories of citizens engaging in government and changing lives for the better.

CitizENGAGE includes videos, photo essays, and impact stories about citizens changing the way government is involved in their lives. These stories talk about the very real impact open government can have on the lives of everyday citizens, and how it can change things as fundamental as schools, roads, and houses.

We invite you to visit CitizENGAGE and find out more about these reforms, and get inspired. Whether or not your government participates in OGP, you can take the lessons from these powerful stories of transformation and use them to make an impact in your own community….(More)”.

Let’s make private data into a public good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mariana Mazzucato: “The internet giants depend on our data. A new relationship between us and them could deliver real value to society….We should ask how the value of these companies has been created, how that value has been measured, and who benefits from it. If we go by national accounts, the contribution of internet platforms to national income (as measured, for example, by GDP) is represented by the advertisement-related services they sell. But does that make sense? It’s not clear that ads really contribute to the national product, let alone to social well-being—which should be the aim of economic activity. Measuring the value of a company like Google or Facebook by the number of ads it sells is consistent with standard neoclassical economics, which interprets any market-based transaction as signaling the production of some kind of output—in other words, no matter what the thing is, as long as a price is received, it must be valuable. But in the case of these internet companies, that’s misleading: if online giants contribute to social well-being, they do it through the services they provide to users, not through the accompanying advertisements.

This way we have of ascribing value to what the internet giants produce is completely confusing, and it’s generating a paradoxical result: their advertising activities are counted as a net contribution to national income, while the more valuable services they provide to users are not.

Let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us, and should thus belong to all of us. The underlying infrastructure that all these companies rely on was created collectively (via the tax dollars that built the internet), and it also feeds off network effects that are produced collectively. There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa. But the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs. Using big data and AI to improve the services provided by the welfare state—from health care to social housing—is just one example.

Only by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We’re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there’s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it’s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators….(More)”.

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marshall Allen at ProPublica: “With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.

Are you a woman who’s purchased plus-size clothing? You’re considered at risk of depression. Mental health care can be expensive.

Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.

“We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”

Insurers contend they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn’t be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: “I can’t say it hasn’t happened.”

At a time when every week brings a new privacy scandal and worries abound about the misuse of personal information, patient advocates and privacy scholars say the insurance industry’s data gathering runs counter to its touted, and federally required, allegiance to patients’ medical privacy. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, only protects medical information.

“We have a health privacy machine that’s in crisis,” said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law who specializes in issues related to machine learning and algorithms. “We have a law that only covers one source of health information. They are rapidly developing another source.”…(More)”.

‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymised” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people.

Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

The government pulled the data from its website, but not before it had been downloaded 1,500 times.

This privacy nightmare is one of many examples of seemingly innocuous, “de-identified” pieces of information being reverse-engineered to expose people’s identities. And it’s only getting worse as people spend more of their lives online, sprinkling digital breadcrumbs that can be traced back to them to violate their privacy in ways they never expected.

Nameless New York taxi logs were compared with paparazzi shots at locations around the city to reveal that Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba were bad tippers. In 2017 German researchers were able to identify people based on their “anonymous” web browsing patterns. This week University College London researchers showed how they could identify an individual Twitter user based on the metadata associated with their tweets, while the fitness tracking app Polar revealed the homes and in some cases names of soldiers and spies.

“It’s convenient to pretend it’s hard to re-identify people, but it’s easy. The kinds of things we did are the kinds of things that any first-year data science student could do,” said Vanessa Teague, one of the University of Melbourne researchers to reveal the flaws in the open health data.

One of the earliest examples of this type of privacy violation occurred in 1996 when the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission released “anonymised” data showing the hospital visits of state employees. As with the Australian data, the state removed obvious identifiers like name, address and social security number. Then the governor, William Weld, assured the public that patients’ privacy was protected….(More)”.

Is Open Data Working for Women in Africa?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Web Foundation: “Open data has the potential to change politics, economies and societies for the better by giving people more opportunities to engage in the decisions that affect their lives. But to reach the full potential of open data, it must be available to and used by all. Yet, across the globe — and in Africa in particular — there is a significant data gap.

This report — Is open data working for women in Africa — maps the current state of open data for women across Africa, with insights from country-specific research in Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda and South Africa with additional data from a survey of experts in 12 countries across the continent.

Our findings show that, despite the potential for open data to empower people, it has so far changed little for women living in Africa.

Key findings

  • There is a closed data culture in Africa — Most countries lack an open culture and have legislation and processes that are not gender-responsive. Institutional resistance to disclosing data means few countries have open data policies and initiatives at the national level. In addition, gender equality legislation and policies are incomplete and failing to reduce gender inequalities. And overall, Africa lacks the cross-organisational collaboration needed to strengthen the open data movement.
  • There are barriers preventing women from using the data that is available — Cultural and social realities create additional challenges for women to engage with data and participate in the technology sector. 1GB of mobile data in Africa costs, on average, 10% of average monthly income. This high cost keeps women, who generally earn less than men, offline. Moreover, time poverty, the gender pay gap and unpaid labour create economic obstacles for women to engage with digital technology.
  • Key datasets to support the advocacy objectives of women’s groups are missing — Data on budget, health and crime are largely absent as open data. Nearly all datasets in sub-Saharan Africa (373 out of 375) are closed, and sex-disaggregated data, when available online, is often not published as open data. There are few open data policies to support opening up of key datasets and even when they do exist, they largely remain in draft form. With little investment in open data initiatives, good data management practices or for implementing Right To Information (RTI) reforms, improvement is unlikely.
  • There is no strong base of research on women’s access and use of open data — There is lack of funding, little collaboration and few open data champions. Women’s groups, digital rights groups and gender experts rarely collaborate on open data and gender issues. To overcome this barrier, multi-stakeholder collaborations are essential to develop effective solutions….(More)”.

Prizes are a powerful spur to innovation and breakthroughs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill in the Financial Times: “…All too often today we leave research and innovation in the hands of the so-called professionals, often with disappointing results. Winning a prize often matters less than the stimulus it provides for innovators in neighbouring fields In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of professional scientists. Unesco estimates that there were 7.8m full-time researchers in 2013.

The number of scientific journals has also increased, making it difficult even for specialists to remain on top of all the latest advances in their field. In spite of this explosion of knowledge and research spending, there has been a striking lack of breakthrough innovations, as economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have noted.

Maybe this is because all the low-hanging technological fruit has been eaten. Or perhaps it is because our research and development methodology has gone awry.

Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, is one of those who is trying to revive the concept of prizes as a means of encouraging innovation. His public foundation runs the Challenge Prize Centre, offering awards of up to £10m for innovation in the fields of energy and the environment, healthcare, and community wellbeing. “Setting a specific target, opening up to anyone to meet it, and providing a financial reward if they succeed is the opposite of how most R&D is done,” Mr Mulgan says. “We should all focus more on outcomes than inputs.”…
But these prizes are far from being a panacea. Indeed, they can sometimes lead to perverse results, encouraging innovators to fixate on just one, original goal while ignoring serendipitous surprises along the way. Many innovations are the happy byproduct of research rather than its primary outcome. An academic paper on the effectiveness of innovation prizes concluded that they could be a useful addition to the armoury but were no substitute for other proven forms of research and development. The authors also warned that if prizes were poorly designed, managed, and awarded they could prove “ineffective or even harmful”.

That makes it essential to design competitions in careful and precise detail. It also helps if there are periodic payouts along the way to encourage the most promising ideas. Many companies have embraced the concept of open innovation and increasingly look to collaborate with outside partners to develop fresh ideas, sometimes by means of corporate prizes….(More)”.

Bad Governance and Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Textbook by Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer: “This book explains why the role of corruption varies greatly between public services, between people, between national systems of governance, and between measures of corruption.

More than 1.8 billion people pay the price of bad government each year, by sending a bribe to a public official.

In developing countries, corruption affects social services, such as health care and education, and law enforcement institutions, such as the police. When public officials do not act as bureaucrats delivering services by the book, people can try to get them by hook or by crook. The book’s analysis draws on unique evidence: a data base of sample surveys of 175,000 people in 125 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America. The authors avoid one-size-fits-all proposals for reform and instead provide measures that can be applied to particular public services to reduce or eliminate opportunities for corruption….(More)”.

What if people were paid for their data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Data Slavery” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. ..Given the current state of digital affairs, in which the collection and exploitation of personal data is dominated by big tech firms, Ms Morone’s approach, in which individuals offer their data for sale, seems unlikely to catch on. But what if people really controlled their data—and the tech giants were required to pay for access? What would such a data economy look like?…

Labour, like data, is a resource that is hard to pin down. Workers were not properly compensated for labour for most of human history. Even once people were free to sell their labour, it took decades for wages to reach liveable levels on average. History won’t repeat itself, but chances are that it will rhyme, Mr Weyl predicts in “Radical Markets”, a provocative new book he has co-written with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago. He argues that in the age of artificial intelligence, it makes sense to treat data as a form of labour.

To understand why, it helps to keep in mind that “artificial intelligence” is something of a misnomer. Messrs Weyl and Posner call it “collective intelligence”: most AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples, in a process called machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognise objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI. As the data economy grows up, such data work will take many forms. Much of it will be passive, as people engage in all kinds of activities—liking social-media posts, listening to music, recommending restaurants—that generate the data needed to power new services. But some people’s data work will be more active, as they make decisions (such as labelling images or steering a car through a busy city) that can be used as the basis for training AI systems….

But much still needs to happen for personal data to be widely considered as labour, and paid for as such. For one thing, the right legal framework will be needed to encourage the emergence of a new data economy. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May, already gives people extensive rights to check, download and even delete personal data held by companies. Second, the technology to keep track of data flows needs to become much more capable. Research to calculate the value of particular data to an AI service is in its infancy.

Third, and most important, people will have to develop a “class consciousness” as data workers. Most people say they want their personal information to be protected, but then trade it away for nearly nothing, something known as the “privacy paradox”. Yet things may be changing: more than 90% of Americans think being in control of who can get data on them is important, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank….(More)”.

Neuroscience for Cities Playbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tool resulting from a collaboration between Future Cities Catapult, Centric Lab and University College London: “It brings forward a framework of how neuroscience research can be put into practice in cities. This has been presented as a set of new tools, methodologies and strategies for organisations big and small, to adopt neuroscience insights into their supply chain.

With an aim to reach out to a wide audience from businesses to urban planners and academicians and policymakers, We are sure you will find the playbook a useful resource to explore the potential applications of this important area of research.

This playbook helps cities in three stages. The first is identifying the core environmental stressors, which have the widest mental and physical effects on city citizen, even a small reduction will make a fundamental difference in quality of life. The second is understanding the unintended human consequences of urban trends such as urban sprawl or automation. The final is highlighting the different opportunities for enhancing the user experience of cities through neuroscience-informed technology and urban planning.

The idea of using neuroscience to help design cities only arose in last ten years, and the technology to make it possible in the last three years. We are now on the cusp of a revolution in how metrics from neuroscience inform urban innovation strategies and increase the quality of life of the cities inhabitants. Developments in neuroscience are showing us new ways to understand how people experience the built environment, revealing new opportunities for innovation and improved experiences, leading in turn to greater productivity, wellbeing and attraction. Neuroscientists are also discovering important insights about outcomes for the less advantaged in our cities, providing compelling evidence in support of interventions to tackle the negative health impacts of city living, and ways to reduce barriers to access and opportunity.

Success will be a reduction in mental and physical health outbreaks; less cases of depression, dementia, anxiety disorders, etc. It can be seen in economic terms; a healthy population is a productive population….(More)”.