Positive deviance, big data, and development: A systematic literature review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Basma Albanna and Richard Heeks: “Positive deviance is a growing approach in international development that identifies those within a population who are outperforming their peers in some way, eg, children in low‐income families who are well nourished when those around them are not. Analysing and then disseminating the behaviours and other factors underpinning positive deviance are demonstrably effective in delivering development results.

However, positive deviance faces a number of challenges that are restricting its diffusion. In this paper, using a systematic literature review, we analyse the current state of positive deviance and the potential for big data to address the challenges facing positive deviance. From this, we evaluate the promise of “big data‐based positive deviance”: This would analyse typical sources of big data in developing countries—mobile phone records, social media, remote sensing data, etc—to identify both positive deviants and the factors underpinning their superior performance.

While big data cannot solve all the challenges facing positive deviance as a development tool, they could reduce time, cost, and effort; identify positive deviants in new or better ways; and enable positive deviance to break out of its current preoccupation with public health into domains such as agriculture, education, and urban planning. In turn, positive deviance could provide a new and systematic basis for extracting real‐world development impacts from big data…(More)”.

The five drivers for improving public sector performance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lessons from the new World Bank Global Report: “Almost daily, headlines in the world’s leading newspapers are full of examples of public sector failures: public money is mismanaged or outright misused; civil servants are not motivated or are poorly trained; government agencies fail to coordinate with each other; and as a result, citizens are either deprived of quality public services, or must go through a bureaucratic maze to access them.

These public-sector challenges are often present even in the world’s most developed countries. They are of course further exacerbated by lower levels of development.

So what hope do low and middle-income countries have to make their public sectors function more effectively? Is this just a futile enterprise altogether?

We believe it is not. Our new Global Report, Improving Public Sector Performance Through Innovation and Inter-Agency Coordination, argues that positive change is possible in many low and middle-income countries. The report collects 15 inspiring country cases of such reforms and shows that such change does not necessarily require huge financial investment or complex IT systems. What seems to be required, instead, are five interconnected drivers of success:

  • Political leadership is needed because few, if any, of the innovations are a purely technocratic exercise.  Leaders need to find ways to collaborate with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders to overcome inherent opposition.
  • Institutional capacity building of existing bodies is a common element across many of the 15 cases. For reforms to endure, one ultimately needs to create sustainable institutions.
  • Incentives matter, both at the institutional level (e.g., through government-wide policy, creating systems and structures that shape institutional objectives, and program monitoring systems) as well as at the level of civil servants (e.g., through performance targets and reward systems).
  • Increased transparency can help deliver change in public sector performance by breaking down government silos and ensuring inter-agency information-sharing, and publishing or disseminating performance information.  Transparency can also be a powerful driver for changing incentives.
    • Technology, while not a panacea, is present in two-thirds of the featured cases. The reformers applied relevant, even basic, IT tools and know-how to their specific functional requirements and did not over-design their efforts.  Furthermore, the technology application is rarely a stand-alone solution; rather, it is accompanied by policies and procedures to change behavior….(More)”.

Surveillance Studies: A Reader

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood: “Surveillance is everywhere: in workplaces monitoring the performance of employees, social media sites tracking clicks and uploads, financial institutions logging transactions, advertisers amassing fine-grained data on customers, and security agencies siphoning up everyone’s telecommunications activities. Surveillance practices-although often hidden-have come to define the way modern institutions operate. Because of the growing awareness of the central role of surveillance in shaping power relations and knowledge across social and cultural contexts, scholars from many different academic disciplines have been drawn to “surveillance studies,” which in recent years has solidified as a major field of study.

Torin Monahan and David Murakami Wood’s Surveillance Studies is a broad-ranging reader that provides a comprehensive overview of the dynamic field. In fifteen sections, the book features selections from key historical and theoretical texts, samples of the best empirical research done on surveillance, introductions to debates about privacy and power, and cutting-edge treatments of art, film, and literature. While the disciplinary perspectives and foci of scholars in surveillance studies may be diverse, there is coherence and agreement about core concepts, ideas, and texts. This reader outlines these core dimensions and highlights various differences and tensions. In addition to a thorough introduction that maps the development of the field, the volume offers helpful editorial remarks for each section and brief prologues that frame the included excerpts. …(More)”.

Houston’s $6 Billion Census Problem: Frightened Immigrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Natasha Rausch at Bloomberg: “At Houston’s City Hall last week, Mayor Sylvester Turner gathered with company CEOs, university professors, police officers, politicians and local judges to discuss a $6 billion problem they all have in common: the 2020 census.

City officials and business leaders are worried about people like 21-year-old Ana Espinoza, a U.S. citizen by birth who lives with undocumented relatives. Espinoza has no intention of answering the census because she worries it could expose her family and get them deported….

Getting an accurate count has broad economic implications across the city, said Laura Murillo, chief executive officer of the Hispanic Chamber. “For everyone, the census is important. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat, black or white or green.”…

For growing businesses, the census is crucial for understanding the population they’re serving in different regions. Enterprise Rent-A-Car used the 2010 census to help diversify the company’s employee base. The data prompted Enterprise to staff a new location in Houston with Spanish-speaking employees to better serve area customers, said the company’s human resources manager Phil Dyson.

“It’s been one of our top locations,” he said.

Doing the Math

Texas stands to lose at least $1,161 in federal funding for each person not counted, according to a March report by Andrew Reamer, a research professor at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. Multiplied by the estimated 506,000 unathorized immigrants who live in the nation’s fourth-largest city, that puts at stake about $6 billion for Houston over the 10 years the census applies.

That’s just for programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The potential loss is even larger when grants are taken into account for items like highways and community development, he said…(More)”.

How Big Tech Is Working With Nonprofits and Governments to Turn Data Into Solutions During Disasters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kelsey Sutton at Adweek: “As Hurricane Michael approached the Florida Panhandle, the Florida Division of Emergency Management tapped a tech company for help.

Over the past year, Florida’s DEM has worked closely with GasBuddy, a Boston-based app that uses crowdsourced data to identify fuel prices and inform first responders and the public about fuel availability or power outages at gas stations during storms. Since Hurricane Irma in 2017, GasBuddy and DEM have worked together to survey affected areas, helping Florida first responders identify how best to respond to petroleum shortages. With help from the location intelligence company Cuebiq, GasBuddy also provides estimated wait times at gas stations during emergencies.

DEM first noticed GasBuddy’s potential in 2016, when the app was collecting and providing data about fuel availability following a pipeline leak.

“DEM staff recognized how useful such information would be to Florida during any potential future disasters, and reached out to GasBuddy staff to begin a relationship,” a spokesperson for the Florida State Emergency Operations Center explained….

Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder and chief research and development officer at the Governance Laboratory at New York University, advocates for private corporations to partner with public institutions and NGOs. Private data collected by corporations is richer, more granular and more up-to-date than data collected through traditional social science methods, making that data useful for noncorporate purposes like research, Verhulst said. “Those characteristics are extremely valuable if you are trying to understand how society works,” Verhulst said….(More)”.

Declaration on Ethics and Data Protection in Artifical Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Declaration: “…The 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners considers that any creation, development and use of artificial intelligence systems shall fully respect human rights, particularly the rights to the protection of personal data and to privacy, as well as human dignity, non-discrimination and fundamental values, and shall provide solutions to allow individuals to maintain control and understanding of artificial intelligence systems.

The Conference therefore endorses the following guiding principles, as its core values to preserve human rights in the development of artificial intelligence:

  1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies should be designed, developed and used in respect of fundamental human rights and in accordance with the fairness principle, in particular by:
  2. Considering individuals’ reasonable expectations by ensuring that the use of artificial intelligence systems remains consistent with their original purposes, and that the data are used in a way that is not incompatible with the original purpose of their collection,
  3. taking into consideration not only the impact that the use of artificial intelligence may have on the individual, but also the collective impact on groups and on society at large,
  4. ensuring that artificial intelligence systems are developed in a way that facilitates human development and does not obstruct or endanger it, thus recognizing the need for delineation and boundaries on certain uses,…(More)

Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good,

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ann Mei Chang: “As we know all too well, the pace of progress is falling far short of both the desperate needs in the world and the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, it’s hard to find anyone who disputes the need for innovation for global development.

So, why does innovation still seem to be largely relegated to scrappy social enterprises and special labs at larger NGOs and funders while the bulk of the development industry churns on with business as usual?

We need to move more quickly to bring best practices such as the G7 Principles to Accelerate Innovation and Impact and the Principles for Digital Development into the mainstream. We know we can drive greater impact at scale by taking measured risks, designing with users, building for scale and sustainability, and using data to drive faster feedback loops.

In Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good, I detail practical tips for how to put innovation principles into practice…(More)”.

The Moral Machine experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jean-François Bonnefon, Iyad Rahwan et al in Nature:  “With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles.

This platform gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment. First, we summarize global moral preferences. Second, we document individual variations in preferences, based on respondents’ demographics. Third, we report cross-cultural ethical variation, and uncover three major clusters of countries. Fourth, we show that these differences correlate with modern institutions and deep cultural traits. We discuss how these preferences can contribute to developing global, socially acceptable principles for machine ethics. All data used in this article are publicly available….(More)”.

Introducing the online guide to the World Development Indicators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Bank: “The World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank’s premier compilation of international statistics on global development. Drawing from officially recognized sources and including national, regional, and global estimates, the WDI provides access to almost 1,600 indicators for 217 economies, with some time series extending back more than 50 years. The database helps users—analysts, policymakers, academics, and all those curious about the state of the world—to find information related to all aspects of development, both current and historical.

An annual World Development Indicators report was available in print or PDF format until last year. This year, we introduce the World Development Indicators website: a new discovery tool and storytelling platform for our data which takes users behind the scenes with information about data coverage, curation, and methodologies. The goal is to provide a useful, easily accessible guide to the database and make it easy for users to discover what type of indicators are available, how they’re collected, and how they can be visualized to analyze development trends….(More)”.

Challenges facing social media platforms in conflict prevention in Kenya since 2007: A case of Ushahidi platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by A.K. Njeru, B. Malakwen and M. Lumala in the International Academic Journal of Social Sciences and Education: “Throughout history information is a key factor in conflict management around the world. The media can play its important role of being the society’s watch dog of the society, by exposing to the masses what is essential but hidden, however the same media may also be used to mobilize masses to violence. Social media can therefore act as a tool for widening the democratic space, but can also lead to destabilization of peace.

The aim of the study was to establish the challenges facing social media platforms in conflict prevention in Kenya since 2007: a case of Ushahidi platform in Kenya. The paradigm that was found suitable for this study is Pragmatism. The study used a mixed approach. In this study, interviews, focus group discussions and content analysis of the Ushahidi platform were chosen as the tools of data collection. In order to bring order, structure and interpretation to the collected data, the researcher systematically organized the data by coding it into categories and constructing matrixes. After classifying the data, the researcher compared and contrasted it to the information retrieved from the literature review.

The study found that One major weak point social media as a tool for conflict prevention is the lack of ethical standards and professionalism for the users. It is too liberal and thus can be used to spread unverified information and distorted facts that might be detrimental to peace building and conflict prevention. This has led to some of the users already questioning the credibility of the information that is circulated through social media. The other weak point about social media as tool for peace building is that it is dependent to a major extent on the access to internet. The availability of internet in low units doesn’t necessarily mean cheap access. So over time the high cost of internet might affect the efficiency of the social media as a tool. The study concluded that information credibility is essential if social media as a tool is to be effective in conflict prevention and peace building.

The nature of social media which allows for anonymity of identity gives room for unverified information to be floated around the social media networks; this can be detrimental to the conflict prevention and peace building initiatives. There is therefore need for information verification and authentication by a trusted agent, to offer information appertaining to violence, conflict prevention and peace building on the social media platforms. The study recommends that Ushahidi platform should be seen as an agent of social change and should discuss the social mobilization which may be able to bring about. The study further suggest that if we can look at Ushahidi platform as a development agent, can we then take this a step further and ask, or try to find, a methodology that looks at the Ushahidi platform as peacemaking agent, or to assist in the maintenance of peace in a post-conflict thereby tapping into Ushahidi platform’s full potential….(More)”.