What Are Data? A Categorization of the Data Sensitivity Spectrum

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John M.M. Rumbold and Barbara K. Pierscionek in Big Data Research: “The definition of data might at first glance seem prosaic, but formulating a definitive and useful definition is surprisingly difficult. This question is important because of the protection given to data in law and ethics. Healthcare data are universally considered sensitive (and confidential), so it might seem that the categorisation of less sensitive data is relatively unimportant for medical data research. This paper will explore the arguments that this is not necessarily the case and the relevance of recognizing this.

The categorization of data and information requires re-evaluation in the age of Big Data in order to ensure that the appropriate protections are given to different types of data. The aggregation of large amounts of data requires an assessment of the harms and benefits that pertain to large datasets linked together, rather than simply assessing each datum or dataset in isolation. Big Data produce new data via inferences, and this must be recognized in ethical assessments. We propose a schema for a granular assessment of data categories. The use of schemata such as this will assist decision-making by providing research ethics committees and information governance bodies with guidance about the relative sensitivities of data. This will ensure that appropriate and proportionate safeguards are provided for data research subjects and reduce inconsistency in decision making…(More)”.

Influenzanet: Citizens Among 10 Countries Collaborating to Monitor Influenza in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carl E Koppeschaar et al in the Special Issue of JMIR Public Health and Surveillance on Participatory Disease Surveillance: “The wide availability of the Internet and the growth of digital communication technologies have become an important tool for epidemiological studies and health surveillance. Influenzanet is a participatory surveillance system monitoring the incidence of influenza-like illness (ILI) in Europe since 2003. It is based on data provided by volunteers who self-report their symptoms via the Internet throughout the influenza season and currently involves 10 countries.

Objective: In this paper, we describe the Influenzanet system and provide an overview of results from several analyses that have been performed with the collected data, which include participant representativeness analyses, data validation (comparing ILI incidence rates between Influenzanet and sentinel medical practice networks), identification of ILI risk factors, and influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies previously published. Additionally, we present new VE analyses for the Netherlands, stratified by age and chronic illness and offer suggestions for further work and considerations on the continuity and sustainability of the participatory system.

Methods: Influenzanet comprises country-specific websites where residents can register to become volunteers to support influenza surveillance and have access to influenza-related information. Participants are recruited through different communication channels. Following registration, volunteers submit an intake questionnaire with their postal code and sociodemographic and medical characteristics, after which they are invited to report their symptoms via a weekly electronic newsletter reminder. Several thousands of participants have been engaged yearly in Influenzanet, with over 36,000 volunteers in the 2015-16 season alone.

Results: In summary, for some traits and in some countries (eg, influenza vaccination rates in the Netherlands), Influenzanet participants were representative of the general population. However, for other traits, they were not (eg, participants underrepresent the youngest and oldest age groups in 7 countries). The incidence of ILI in Influenzanet was found to be closely correlated although quantitatively higher than that obtained by the sentinel medical practice networks. Various risk factors for acquiring an ILI infection were identified. The VE studies performed with Influenzanet data suggest that this surveillance system could develop into a complementary tool to measure the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, eventually in real time.

Conclusions: Results from these analyses illustrate that Influenzanet has developed into a fast and flexible monitoring system that can complement the traditional influenza surveillance performed by sentinel medical practices. The uniformity of Influenzanet allows for direct comparison of ILI rates between countries. It also has the important advantage of yielding individual data, which can be used to identify risk factors. The way in which the Influenzanet system is constructed allows the collection of data that could be extended beyond those of ILI cases to monitor pandemic influenza and other common or emerging diseases….(More)”. (see also https://www.influenzanet.eu/)

How Software is Eating the World and Reprogramming Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaime Gómez Ramírez at Open Mind: “Democracy, the government of the majority typically through elected representatives, is undergoing a major crisis. Human societies have experimented with democracy since at least the fifth century BC in the polis of Athens. Whether democracy is scalable is an open question that could help understand the current mistrust in democratic institutions and the rise of populism. The majority rule is a powerful narrative that is fed every few years with elections. In Against elections, the cultural historian Van Reybrouck claims that elections were never meant to make democracy possible, rather the opposite, it was a tool designed for those in power to prevent “the rule of the mob”. Elections created a new elite and power remained in the hands of a minority, but this time endowed with democratic legitimacy….

The 2008 financial crisis have changed the perception of, the once taken for granted, complementary nature of democracy and capitalism. The belief that capitalism and democracy go hand by hand is not credible anymore. The concept of nation is a fiction in need of a continuous stock of intergenerational believers. The nation state successfully assimilated heterogeneous groups of people under a common language and shared cultural values. But this seems today a rather fragile foundation to resist the centrifugal forces that financial capitalism impinges upon the social fabric.

Nation states will not collapse over night, but they are an industrial era device in a digital world. To do not fall into obsolescence they will need to change their operative system. Since the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen coined the phrase “software is eating the world” the logic of financial capitalism has accelerated this trend. Five software companies: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet (FANG) equal more than 10 per cent percent of the S&P 500 cap. Todays dominant industries in entertainment, retail, telecom, marketing companies and others are software companies. Software is also taking a bigger share in industries that traditionally exist in the physical space like automakers and energy. Education and health care have shown more resistance to software-based entrepreneurial change but a very profound transformation is underway. This is already visible with the growing popularity of MOOCs and personalized health monitoring systems.

Software-based business not only have up trending market share but more importantly, software can reprogram the world. The internet of things will allow to have full connectivity of smart devices in an economy with massive deflationary costs in computing. Computing might even become free. This has profound consequences for business, industry and most importantly, for how citizens want to organize society and governance.

The most promising technological innovation in years is the blockchain technology, an encrypted and distributed ledger system. Blockchain is an universal and freely accessible repository of documents including property and insurance contracts, publicly auditable, and resistant to special group interests manipulation and corruption. New kinds of governance models and services could be tested and implemented using the blockchain. The time is ripe for fundamental software-based transformation in governance. Democracy and free society will ignore this at its own peril…(More)”.

The frontiers of data interoperability for sustainable development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report from the Joined-Up Data Standards [JUDS] project: “…explores where progress has been made, what challenges still remain, and how the new Collaborative on SDG Data Interoperability will play a critical role in moving forward the agenda for interoperability policy.

There is an ever-growing need for a more holistic picture of development processes worldwide and interoperability solutions that can be scaled, driven by global development agendas such as the 2030 Agenda and the Open Data movement. This requires the ability to join up data across multiple data sources and standards to create actionable information.

Solutions that create value for front-line decision makers — health centre managers, local school authorities or water and sanitation committees, for example, and those engaged in government accountability – will be crucial to meet the data needs of the SDGs, and do so in an internationally comparable way. While progress has been made at both a national and international level, moving from principle to practice by embedding interoperability into day-to-day work continues to present challenges.

Based on research and learning generated by the JUDS project team at Development Initiatives and Publish What You Fund, as well as inputs from interviews with key stakeholders, this report aims to provide an overview of the different definitions and components of interoperability and why it is important, and an outline of the current policy landscape.

We offer a set of guiding principles that we consider essential to implementing interoperability, and contextualise the five frontiers of interoperability for sustainable development that we have identified. The report also offers recommendations on what the role of the Collaborative could be in this fast-evolving landscape….(More)”.

Delivering the digital state

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

William D. Eggers and Steve Hurst at Deloitte: “…Consumer surveys indicate that satisfaction with government services has fallen to an eight-year low. Recent Gallup polls show that Americans continue to name dissatisfaction with government as the nation’s second most-important problem, after the economy.

Many government officials, moreover, are entirely aware of this dissatisfaction. In our digital government survey of state and local government officials, 73 percent believed their organization’s digital capabilities were behind those in the private sector. In another recent survey, state IT personnel and decision makers identified the most critical areas needing better digital capabilities; these included health and human services, motor vehicles, employment, public safety, licensing, renewals, and permitting.

Clearly, there’s a huge gap between the service state and provincial governments offer today and that provided by companies such as Amazon, eBay, Uber, and Airbnb. To provide the same seamless experience these companies do, a state government would need a robust digital platform offering the equivalent of one-stop shopping, making a range of functions available in a few clicks. This government platform would “know you” based on past transactions, and anticipate your needs. It would be able to navigate the breadth of content to connect you with the right service or the answer you seek.

Most states can’t do that today, largely because of the way in which they organize and govern digital technology: with databases that can’t communicate with one another, limited information sharing, and overly complex rules and protocols. The 2017 Center for Digital Government survey identified some of the most significant obstacles: legacy systems, lack of qualified staff, poor procurement processes, security issues, inadequate funding, and current employee practices.

To deliver the customer experience their citizens want, states need to focus on three crucial elements:

  1. An end-to-end digital experience developed from the customer’s point of view, accessible anywhere, anytime, and from any device.
  2. A unique, uniform digital ID that grants agencies access to the appropriate data and services.
  3. Mechanisms that allow agencies to share data across the state enterprise….(More)”

Open Data in Developing Economies: Toward Building an Evidence Base on What Works and How

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young: “Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social development.

Open Data in Developing Economies features in-depth case studies on how open data is having an impact across Screen Shot 2017-11-14 at 5.41.30 AMthe developing world-from an agriculture initiative in Colombia to data-driven healthcare
projects in Uganda and South Africa to crisis response in Nepal. The analysis built on these case studies aims to create actionable intelligence regarding:

(a) the conditions under which open data is most (and least) effective in development, presented in the form of a Periodic Table of Open Data;

(b) strategies to maximize the positive contributions of open data to development; and

(c) the means for limiting open data’s harms on developing countries.

Endorsements:

“An empirically grounded assessment that helps us move beyond the hype that greater access to information can improve the lives of people and outlines the enabling factors for open data to be leveraged for development.”-Ania Calderon, Executive Director, International Open Data Charter

“This book is compulsory reading for practitioners, researchers and decision-makers exploring how to harness open data for achieving development outcomes. In an intuitive and compelling way, it provides valuable recommendations and critical reflections to anyone working to share the benefits of an increasingly networked and data-driven society.”-Fernando Perini, Coordinator of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, International Development Research Centre, Canada

Download full-text PDF – See also: http://odimpact.org/

Can Measures Change the World?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Nelson, Anita Chandra & Carolyn Miller in Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Our ability to track and report all sorts of things is growing by the day, resulting in a proliferation of measures—the percentage of children attending preschool, the cost of housing, access to mental health services, to name just a few. It’s time that organizations begin to focus just as much effort on understanding how those measures can be more effectively used to change complex social systems….

It is often said that “what gets measured gets done.” This common phrase implicitly frames measurement not just as a tool for capturing information about systems but also as an intervention itself. This belief in the transformative power of measurement may partially explain the huge sums of money spent each year by governmental, nongovernmental, and private sector organizations in developing, maintaining, and publicizing measures….(More)”

Participatory Grant Making: Has its Time Come?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cynthia Gibson for the Ford Foundation: “…During the past decade, all sectors of society have faced heightened demand for greater accountability and transparency. People have become more distrustful of established institutions, they are demanding more information about issues and decisions afecting them and their families and communities, and they want more voice in decision-making processes. Technological innovation also has created new possibilities — and new pressures — for organizations and institutions to become more democratic by involving the public in their work.

Philanthropy is not immune from these trends. While for decades, philanthropy was seen as endowed foundations set up by the rich, recent years have seen a surge in crowdfunding, giving circles, donor-advised funds, and a panoply of digital giving platforms that allow anyone to be a philanthropist. Alongside these, traditions of giving from within communities that existed long before philanthropy became professionalized have become more prominent.

Philanthropy and other felds also are being reshaped by the attitudes and capacities of a new generation of young people who have grown up with the Internet and embrace its culture of transparency and bottom-up action. Additionally, there is a growing awareness that many public challenges are exceedingly complex and won’t respond to one-shot solutions from experts or institutions working on their own.

These and other trends refect a backlash against the “establishment” occurring in politics, higher education, the media, and other felds in which elite interests are perceived to have drowned out the concerns of ordinary people. Americans of all stripes and political persuasions have come to believe they have little say in guiding public decisions and improving the health and well-being of their communities..

This paper assesses the embrace of participatory approaches to date by philanthropy and other felds. In assessing philanthropy’s record, the paper fnds examples of individual foundations and networks of funders that are experimenting with participatory approaches. It also, however, fnds that there is a great deal of talk about participation in the feld but comparatively little commitment to integrating these practices into foundations’ strategies and activities, and especially their cultures, over the long term…(More)”.

Participatory Budgeting: Does Evidence Match Enthusiasm?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton at Open Government Partnership: “Participatory budgeting (PB) empowers citizens to allocate portions of public budgets in a way that best fits the needs of the people. In turn, proponents expect PB to improve citizens’ lives in important ways, by expanding their participation in politics, providing better public services such as in healthcare, sanitation, or education, and giving them a sense of efficacy.

Below we outline several potential outcomes that emerge from PB. Of course, assessing PB’s potential impact is difficult, because reliable data is rare and PB is often one of several programs that could generate similar improvements at the same time. Impact evaluations for PB are thus at a very early stage. Nevertheless, considerable case study evidence and some broader, comparative studies point to outcomes in the following areas:

Citizens’ attitudes: Early research focused on the attitudes of citizens who participate in PB, and found that PB participants feel empowered, support democracy, view the government as more effective, and better understand budget and government processes after participating (Wampler and Avritzer 2004; Baiocchi 2005; Wampler 2007).

Participants’ behavior: Case-study evidence shows that PB participants increase their political participation beyond PB and join civil society groups. Many scholars also expect PB to strengthen civil society by increasing its density (number of groups), expanding its range of activities, and brokering new partnerships with government and other CSOs. There is some case study evidence that this occurs (Baiocchi 2005; McNulty 2011; Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011; Van Cott 2008) as well as evidence from over 100 PB programs across Brazil’s larger municipalities (Touchton and Wampler 2014). Proponents also expect PB to educate government officials surrounding community needs, to increase their support for participatory processes, and to potentially expand participatory processes in complementary areas. Early reports from five counties in Kenya suggest that PB ther is producing at least some of these impacts.

Electoral politics and governance: PB can also promote social change, which may alter local political calculations and the ways that governments operate. PB may deliver votes to the elected officials that sponsor it, improve budget transparency and resource allocation, decrease waste and fraud, and generally improve accountability. However, there is very little evidence in this area because few studies have been able to measure these impacts in any direct way.

Social well-being: Finally, PB is designed to improve residents’ well-being. Implemented PB projects include funding for healthcare centers, sewage lines, schools, wells, and other areas that contribute directly to well-being. These effects may take years to appear, but recent studies attribute improvements in infant mortality in Brazil to PB (Touchton and Wampler 2014; Gonçalves 2014). Beyond infant mortality, the range of potential impacts extends to other health areas, sanitation, education, and poverty in general. We are cautious here because results from Brazil might not appear elsewhere: what works in urban Brazil might not in rural Indonesia….(More)”.

Augmented CI and Human-Driven AI: How the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence Could Enhance Their Impact on Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “As the technology, research and policy communities continue to seek new ways to improve governance and solve public problems, two new types of assets are occupying increasing importance: data and people. Leveraging data and people’s expertise in new ways offers a path forward for smarter decisions, more innovative policymaking, and more accountability in governance. Yet, unlocking the value of these two assets not only requires increased availability and accessibility (through, for instance, open data or open innovation), it also requires innovation in methodology and technology.

The first of these innovations involves Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI offers unprecedented abilities to quickly process vast quantities of data that can provide data-driven insights to address public needs. This is the role it has for example played in New York City, where FireCast, leverages data from across the city government to help the Fire Department identify buildings with the highest fire risks. AI is also considered to improve education, urban transportation,  humanitarian aid and combat corruption, among other sectors and challenges.

The second area is Collective Intelligence (CI). Although it receives less attention than AI, CI offers similar potential breakthroughs in changing how we govern, primarily by creating a means for tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd” and allowing groups to create better solutions than even the smartest experts working in isolation could ever hope to achieve. For example, in several countries patients’ groups are coming together to create new knowledge and health treatments based on their experiences and accumulated expertise. Similarly, scientists are engaging citizens in new ways to tap into their expertise or skills, generating citizen science – ranging from mapping our solar system to manipulating enzyme models in a game-like fashion.

Neither AI nor CI offer panaceas for all our ills; they each pose certain challenges, and even risks.  The effectiveness and accuracy of AI relies substantially on the quality of the underlying data as well as the human-designed algorithms used to analyse that data. Among other challenges, it is becoming increasingly clear how biases against minorities and other vulnerable populations can be built into these algorithms. For instance, some AI-driven platforms for predicting criminal recidivism significantly over-estimate the likelihood that black defendants will commit additional crimes in comparison to white counterparts. (for more examples, see our reading list on algorithmic scrutiny).

In theory, CI avoids some of the risks of bias and exclusion because it is specifically designed to bring more voices into a conversation. But ensuring that that multiplicity of voices adds value, not just noise, can be an operational and ethical challenge. As it stands, identifying the signal in the noise in CI initiatives can be time-consuming and resource intensive, especially for smaller organizations or groups lacking resources or technical skills.

Despite these challenges, however, there exists a significant degree of optimism  surrounding both these new approaches to problem solving. Some of this is hype, but some of it is merited—CI and AI do offer very real potential, and the task facing both policymakers, practitioners and researchers is to find ways of harnessing that potential in a way that maximizes benefits while limiting possible harms.

In what follows, I argue that the solution to the challenge described above may involve a greater interaction between AI and CI. These two areas of innovation have largely evolved and been researched separately until now. However, I believe that there is substantial scope for integration, and mutual reinforcement. It is when harnessed together, as complementary methods and approaches, that AI and CI can bring the full weight of technological progress and modern data analytics to bear on our most complex, pressing problems.

To deconstruct that statement, I propose three premises (and subsequent set of research questions) toward establishing a necessary research agenda on the intersection of AI and CI that can build more inclusive and effective approaches to governance innovation.

Premise I: Toward Augmented Collective Intelligence: AI will enable CI to scale

Premise II: Toward Human-Driven Artificial Intelligence: CI will humanize AI

Premise III: Open Governance will drive a blurring between AI and CI

…(More)”.