Ebola: A Big Data Disaster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by Sean Martin McDonald: “…undertaken with support from the Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Media Democracy Fund, explores the use of Big Data in the form of Call Detail Record (CDR) data in humanitarian crisis.

It discusses the challenges of digital humanitarian coordination in health emergencies like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the marked tension in the debate around experimentation with humanitarian technologies and the impact on privacy. McDonald’s research focuses on the two primary legal and human rights frameworks, privacy and property, to question the impact of unregulated use of CDR’s on human rights. It also highlights how the diffusion of data science to the realm of international development constitutes a genuine opportunity to bring powerful new tools to fight crisis and emergencies.

Analysing the risks of using CDRs to perform migration analysis and contact tracing without user consent, as well as the application of big data to disease surveillance is an important entry point into the debate around use of Big Data for development and humanitarian aid. The paper also raises crucial questions of legal significance about the access to information, the limitation of data sharing, and the concept of proportionality in privacy invasion in the public good. These issues hold great relevance in today’s time where big data and its emerging role for development, involving its actual and potential uses as well as harms is under consideration across the world.

The paper highlights the absence of a dialogue around the significant legal risks posed by the collection, use, and international transfer of personally identifiable data and humanitarian information, and the grey areas around assumptions of public good. The paper calls for a critical discussion around the experimental nature of data modelling in emergency response due to mismanagement of information has been largely emphasized to protect the contours of human rights….

See Sean Martin McDonald – “Ebola: A Big Data Disaster” (PDF).

 

Toward WSIS 3.0: Adopting Next-Gen Governance Solutions for Tomorrow’s Information Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lea Kaspar  & Stefaan G. Verhulst at CircleID: “… Collectively, this process has been known as the “World Summit on the Information Society” (WSIS). During December 2015 in New York, twelve years after that first meeting in Geneva and with more than 3 billion people now online, member states of the United Nations unanimously adopted the final outcome document of the WSIS ten-year Review process.

The document (known as the WSIS+10 document) reflects on the progress made over the past decade and outlines a set of recommendations for shaping the information society in coming years. Among other things, it acknowledges the role of different stakeholders in achieving the WSIS vision, reaffirms the centrality of human rights, and calls for a number of measures to ensure effective follow-up.

For many, these represent significant achievements, leading observers to proclaim the outcome a diplomatic victory. However, as is the case with most non-binding international agreements, the WSIS+10 document will remain little more than a hollow guidepost until it is translated into practice. Ultimately, it is up to the national policy-makers, relevant international agencies, and the WSIS community as a whole to deliver meaningful progress towards achieving the WSIS vision.

Unfortunately, the WSIS+10 document provides little actual guidance for practitioners. What is even more striking, it reveals little progress in its understanding of emerging governance trends and methods since Geneva and Tunis, or how these could be leveraged in our efforts to harness the benefits of information and communication technologies (ICT).

As such, the WSIS remains a 20th-century approach to 21st-century challenges. In particular, the document fails to seek ways to make WSIS post 2015:

  • evidence-based in how to make decisions;
  • collaborative in how to measure progress; and
  • innovative in how to solve challenges.

Three approaches toward WSIS 3.0

Drawing on lessons in the field of governance innovation, we suggest in what follows three approaches, accompanied by practical recommendations, that could allow the WSIS to address the challenges raised by the information society in a more evidence-based, innovative and participatory way:

1. Adopt an evidence-based approach to WSIS policy making and implementation.

Since 2003, we have had massive experimentation in both developed and developing countries in a number of efforts to increase access to the Internet. We have seen some failures and some successes; above all, we have gained insight into what works, what doesn’t, and why. Unfortunately, much of the evidence remains scattered and ad-hoc, poorly translated into actionable guidance that would be effective across regions; nor is there any reflection on what we don’t know, and how we can galvanize the research and funding community to address information gaps. A few practical steps we could take to address this:….

2. Measure progress towards WSIS goals in a more open, collaborative way, founded on metrics and data developed through a bottom-up approach

The current WSIS+10 document has many lofty goals, many of which will remain effectively meaningless unless we are able to measure progress in concrete and specific terms. This requires the development of clear metrics, a process which is inevitably subjective and value-laden. Metrics and indicators must therefore be chosen with great care, particularly as they become points of reference for important decisions and policies. Having legitimate, widely-accepted indicators is critical. The best way to do this is to develop a participatory process that engages those actors who will be affected by WSIS-related actions and decisions. …These could include:…

3. Experiment with governance innovations to achieve WSIS objectives.

Over the last few years, we have seen a variety of innovations in governance that have provided new and often improved ways to solve problems and make decisions. They include, for instance:

  • The use of open and big data to generate new insights in both the problem and the solution space. We live in the age of abundant data — why aren’t we using it to inform our decision making? Data on the current landscape and the potential implications of policies could make our predictions and correlations more accurate.
  • The adoption of design thinking, agile development and user-focused research in developing more targeted and effective interventions. A linear approach to policy making with a fixed set of objectives and milestones allows little room for dealing with unforeseen or changing circumstances, making it difficult to adapt and change course. Applying lessons from software engineering — including the importance of feedback loops, continuous learning, and agile approach to project design — would allow policies to become more flexible and solutions more robust.
  • The application of behavioral sciences — for example, the concept of ‘nudging’ individuals to act in their own best interest or adopt behaviors that benefit society. How choices (e.g. to use new technologies) are presented and designed can be more powerful in informing adoption than laws, rules or technical standards.
  • The use of prizes and challenges to tap into the wisdom of the crowd to solve complex problems and identify new ideas. Resource constraints can be addressed by creating avenues for people/volunteers to act as resource in creating solutions, rather than being only their passive benefactors….(More)

DemTools: Cultivating Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DemTools by NDI Tech: “Democratic activists and human rights organizers aren’t computer geeks.And they don’t have to be.

The internet is changing the relationships between citizens and governments around the world — but many political institutions are hobbled by a lack of access to empowering web technologies.

DemTools harnesses the power of free, open-source software to provide civic organizations, legislatures, and political parties with the capabilities to effectively engage 21st century citizens and build better democracies.

Download the DemTools Guide Book…

Meet DemTools:

 Civi: Powerful, flexible contact management and citizen engagement
DKAN: Organize, Store, Graph, Map and Share Your Data

Freedom of Information, Right to Access Information, Open Data: Who is at the Table?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Shepherd in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: “Many national governments have adopted the idea of the ‘right to access information’ (RTI) or ‘freedom of information’ (FOI) as an essential element of the rights of citizens to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights, trust in public discourse and transparent, accountable and open government. Over 100 countries worldwide have introduced access to information legislation: 50+ in Europe; a dozen in Africa; 20 in the Americas and Caribbean; more than 15 in Asia and the Pacific; and two in the Middle East (Banisar, 2014). This article will provide an overview of access to information legislation and focus on the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 as a case example. It will discuss the impact of the UK FOI Act on public authorities, with particular attention to records management implications, drawing on research undertaken by University College London. In the final section, it will reflect on relationships between access to information and open government data. If governments are moving to more openness, what implications might this have for those charged with implementing FOI and RTI policies, including for records management professionals?…(More)”

The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey: “Fact-finding is at the heart of human rights advocacy, and is often at the center of international controversies about alleged government abuses. In recent years, human rights fact-finding has greatly proliferated and become more sophisticated and complex, while also being subjected to stronger scrutiny from governments. Nevertheless, despite the prominence of fact-finding, it remains strikingly under-studied and under-theorized. Too little has been done to bring forth the assumptions, methodologies, and techniques of this rapidly developing field, or to open human rights fact-finding to critical and constructive scrutiny.

The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of fact-finding with rigorous and critical analysis of the field of practice, while providing a range of accounts of what actually happens. It deepens the study and practice of human rights investigations, and fosters fact-finding as a discretely studied topic, while mapping crucial transformations in the field. The contributions to this book are the result of a major international conference organized by New York University Law School’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Engaging the expertise and experience of the editors and contributing authors, it offers a broad approach encompassing contemporary issues and analysis across the human rights spectrum in law, international relations, and critical theory. This book addresses the major areas of human rights fact-finding such as victim and witness issues; fact-finding for advocacy, enforcement, and litigation; the role of interdisciplinary expertise and methodologies; crowd sourcing, social media, and big data; and international guidelines for fact-finding….(More)”

Can non-Western democracy help to foster political transformation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Youngs at Open Democracy: “…many non-Western countries are showing signs of a newly-vibrant civic politics, organized in ways that are not centered on NGOs but on more loosely structured social movements in participatory forms of democracy where active citizenship is crucial—not just structured or formal, representative democratic institutions. Bolivia is a good example.

Many Western governments were skeptical about President Evo Morales’ political project, fearing that he would prove to be just as authoritarian as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But some Western donors (including Germany and the European Union) have already increased their support to indigenous social movements in Bolivia because they’ve become a vital channel of influence and accountability between government and society.

Secondly, it’s clear that the political dimensions of democracy will be undermined if economic conditions and inequalities are getting worse, so democracy promotion efforts need to be delinked from pressures to adopt neo-liberal economic policies. Western interests need to do more to prove that they are not supporting democracy primarily as a means to further their economic interest in ‘free markets.’ That’s why the European Union is supporting a growing number of projects designed to build up social insurance schemes during the early phases of democratic transitions. European diplomats, at least, say that they see themselves as supporters of social and economic democracy.

Donors are becoming more willing to support the role of labor unions in pro-democracy coalition-building; and to protect labor standards as a crucial part of political transitions in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Georgia, China, Egypt and Ecuador. But they should do more to assess how the embedded structures of economic power can undermine the quality of democratic processes. Support for civil society organizations that are keen on exploring heterodox economic models should also be stepped up.

Thirdly, non-Western structures and traditions can help to reduce violent conflict successfully. Tribal chiefs, traditional decision-making circles and customary dispute resolution mechanisms are commonplace in Africa and Asia, and have much to teach their counterparts in the West. In Afghanistan, for example, international organizations realized that the standard institutions of Western liberal democracy were gaining little traction, and were probably deepening rather than healing pre-existing divisions, so they’ve started to support local-level deliberative forums instead.

Something similar is happening in the Balkans, where the United States and the European Union are giving priority to locally tailored, consensual power-sharing arrangements. The United Nations is working with customary justice systems in Somalia. And in South Sudan and Kenya, donors have worked with tribal chiefs and supported traditional authorities to promote a better understanding of human rights and gender justice issues. These forms of power-sharing and ‘consensual communitarianism’ can be quite effective in protecting minorities while also encouraging dialogue and deliberation.

As these brief examples show, different countries can both offer and receive ideas about democratic transformation regardless of geography, though this is never straightforward. It involves finding a balance between defending genuinely-universal norms on the one hand, and encouraging democratic experimentation on the other. This is a thin line to walk, and it requires, for example, recognition that the basic precepts of liberal democracy are not synonymous with what can be seen as an amoral individualism, particularly in highly religious communities.

Pro-democracy reformers and civic groups in non-Western countries often take international organizations to task for pushing too hard on questions of ‘Western liberal rights’ rather than supporting variations to the standard, individualist template, even where tribal structures and traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms work reasonably well. This has led to resistance against international support in places as diverse as Libya, Mali and Pakistan…..

Academic critical theorists argue that Western democracy promoters fail to take alternative models of democracy on board because they would endanger their own geostrategic and economic interests….(More)”

Drones and Aerial Observation: New Technologies for Property Rights, Human Rights, and Global Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New America Foundation: “Clear and secure rights to property—land, natural resources, and other goods and assets—are crucial to human prosperity. Most people lack such rights. That lack is in part a consequence of political and social breakdowns, and in part driven by informational deficits. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are able to gather large amounts of information cheaply and efficiently by virtue of their aerial perspective, as can unpowered platforms like kites and balloons.

That information, in the form of images, maps, and other data, can be used by communities to improve the quality and character of their property rights. These same tools are also useful in other, related aspects of global development. Drone surveillance can help conservationists protect endangered wildlife and aid scientists in understanding the changing climate; drone imagery can be used by advocates and analysts to document and deter human rights violations; UAVs can be used by first responders to search for lost people or to evaluate the extent of damage after natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes.

This primer discusses the capabilities and limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles in advancing property rights, human rights and development more broadly. It contains both nuts-and-bolts advice to drone operators and policy guidance.

Click below to download the text of this primer, or on the corresponding link for a particular chapter…. (More)

Crowdfunding sites aim to make the law accessible to all

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Ford at the Financial Times: “Using the internet to harness the financial power of crowds is hardly novel. Almost since the first electronic impulse pinged its way across the world wide web, entrepreneurs have been dreaming up sites to facilitate everything from charitable donation to hard-nosed investment.

Peer-to-peer lending is now almost part of the mainstream. JustGiving, the charitable portal, has been going since 2000. But employing the web to raise money for legal actions remains a less well ploughed piece of virtual terrain.

At first glance, you might wonder why this is. There is already a booming offline trade in the commercial funding of litigation, especially in America and Britain, whether through lawyers’ no-win, no-fee arrangements or third party investment. And, indeed, a few pioneering crowdfunding vehicles have recently emerged in the US. One such is Invest4Justice, a site that boldly touts returns of “500 per cent plus in a few months”.

Whether these eye-catching figures are ultimately deliverable is — as lawyers like to say — moot. But there are risks in seeking to share the fruits of a third party’s action that can make it perilous for the crowdfunding investor. One is that when actions fail, those same backers might have to pay not only their own, but the successful party’s, costs….

But not all crowdfunding ventures seek to reward participants in the currency of cold financial return. Crowdjustice, Britain’s first legal crowdfunding website, seeks to scratch quite a different itch in the psyches of its participants….Among the causes it has taken up are a criminal appeal and a planning dispute in Lancashire involving a landfill site. The only real requirement for consideration is that the legal David confronting the corporate or governmental Goliath must have already engaged a lawyer to take on their case….This certainly means the risk of being dragged into proceedings is far lower. But it also raises a question: why would the public want to donate money to lawyers in the first place?

Ms Salasky thinks it ranges from a sense of justice to enlightened self-interest. “Donors can be people who take human rights seriously, but they could also be those who worry that something which is happening to someone else could also happen to them,” she says. It is one reason why perhaps the most potent application is seen to be in the fields of environmental and planning law. …(More)”

 

Four things policy-makers need to know about social media data and real time analytics.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ella McPherson at LSE’s Impact Blog: “I recently gave evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee. This was based on written evidence co-authored with my colleague, Anne Alexander, and submitted to their ongoing inquiry into social media data and real time analytics. Both Anne and I research the use of social media during contested times; Anne looks at its use by political activists and labour movement organisers in the Arab world, and I look at its use in human rights reporting. In both cases, the need to establish facticity is high, as is the potential for the deliberate or inadvertent falsification of information. Similarly to the case that Carruthers makes about war reporting, we believe that the political-economic, methodological, and ethical issues raised by media dynamics in the context of crisis are bellwethers for the dynamics in more peaceful and mundane contexts.

From our work we have learned four crucial lessons that policy-makers considering this issue should understand:

1.  Social media information is vulnerable to a variety of distortions – some typical of all information, and others more specific to the characteristics of social media communications….

2.  If social media information is used to establish events, it must be verified; while technology can hasten this process, it is unlikely to ever occur real time due to the subjective, human element of judgment required….

 

3.  Verifying social media information may require identifying its source, which has ethical implications related to informed consent and anonymisation….

4.  Another way to think about social media information is as what Hermida calls an ‘awareness system,’ which reduces the need to collect source identities; under this approach, researchers look at volume rather than veracity to recognise information of interest… (More)“

Democratising the Data Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge: “What will the “data revolution” do? What will it be about? What will it count? What kinds of risks and harms might it bring? Whom and what will it serve? And who will get to decide?

Today we are launching a new discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, which is intended to advance thinking and action around civil society engagement with the data revolution. It looks beyond the disclosure of existing information, towards more ambitious and substantive forms of democratic engagement with data infrastructures.1

It concludes with a series of questions about what practical steps institutions and civil society organisations might take to change what is measured and how, and how these measurements are put to work.

You can download the full PDF report here, or continue to read on in this blog post.

What Counts?

How might civil society actors shape the data revolution? In particular, how might they go beyond the question of what data is disclosed towards looking at what is measured in the first place? To kickstart discussion around this topic, we will look at three kinds of intervention: changing existing forms of measurement, advocating new forms of measurement and undertaking new forms of measurement.

Changing Existing Forms of Measurement

Rather than just focusing on the transparency, disclosure and openness of public information, civil society groups can argue for changing what is measured with existing data infrastructures. One example of this is recent campaigning around company ownership in the UK. Advocacy groups wanted to unpick networks of corporate ownership and control in order to support their campaigning and investigations around tax avoidance, tax evasion and illicit financial flows.

While the UK company register recorded information about “nominal ownership”, it did not include information about so-called “beneficial ownership”, or who ultimately benefits from the ownership and control of companies. Campaigners undertook an extensive programme of activities to advocate for changes and extensions to existing data infrastructures – including via legislation, software systems, and administrative protocols.2

Advocating New Forms of Measurement

As well as changing or recalibrating existing forms of measurement, campaigners and civil society organisations can make the case for the measurement of things which were not previously measured. For example, over the past several decades social and political campaigning has resulted in new indicators about many different issues – such as gender inequality, health, work, disability, pollution or education.3 In such cases activists aimed to establish a given indicator as important and relevant for public institutions, decision makers, and broader publics – in order to, for example, inform policy development or resource allocation.

Undertaking New Forms of Measurement

Historically, many civil society organisations and advocacy groups have collected their own data to make the case for action on issues that they work on – from human rights abuses to endangered species….(More)”