Paper by Karen E. C. Levy: “…critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the technical form of contract to the exclusion of the social contexts within which contracts operate, and the complex ways in which people use them. In the real world, contractual obligations are enforced through all kinds of social mechanisms other than formal adjudication—and contracts serve many functions that are not explicitly legal in nature, or even designed to be formally enforced. I describe three categories of contracting practices in which people engage (the inclusion of facially unenforceable terms, the inclusion of purposefully underspecified terms, and willful nonenforcement of enforceable terms) to illustrate how contracts actually “work.” The technology of smart contracts neglects the fact that people use contracts as social resources to manage their relations. The inflexibility that they introduce, by design, might short-circuit a number of social uses to which law is routinely put. Therefore, I suggest that attention to the social and relational contexts of contracting are essential considerations for the discussion, development, and deployment of smart contracts….(More)”
Entrepreneurial Administration
Research Paper by Phil Weiser: “A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.
Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a result. Consider, for example, that Energy Star, a successful program that has encouraged the manufacture and sale of energy efficient appliances, is developed and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). After the EPA established the program, Congress later codified it and, eventually, other countries followed suit. By contrast, the successful and complementary program encouraging the construction of energy efficient buildings, the well-respected LEED standard, is developed and overseen by a private organization. After it was developed, a number of governmental authorities endorsed it and have encouraged LEED-certified construction projects with both carrots and sticks. Significantly, while neither the Energy Star nor the LEED program were originally anticipated by any regulatory statute, both have had a tremendous impact.
The Energy Star and LEED case studies exemplify the sort of innovative regulatory strategies that are taking root in the modern administrative state. Despite the importance of entrepreneurial administration in practice, scholars have failed to examine the role of entrepreneurial leadership in spurring policy innovation and earning regulatory authority for an agency (or private entity). In short, administrative law needs a richer and more textured account of agency action, why entrepreneurial leadership matters in government, and how agencies should operate.
This Article explains that the conventional view of agency behavior — either following the specific direction of Congress or the President to use notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudication processes — does not adequately portray how public agencies and private entities develop innovative regulatory strategies and earn regulatory authority as a result. In particular, this Article explains how governmental agencies like the EPA or private entities like the Green Building Council (which oversees the LEED standard) depend on entrepreneurial leadership to develop experimental regulatory strategies. It also explains how, in the wake of such experiments, legislative bodies have the opportunity to evaluate regulatory innovations in practice before deciding whether to embrace, revise, reject, or merely tolerate them.
This Article highlights the importance of entrepreneurial leadership in government, providing a number of examples of emerging regulatory experiments and suggesting how Congress should evaluate such experiments. This discussion explains how entrepreneurial leadership and a culture of experimentation and trial-and-error learning is necessary to develop innovative strategies and overcome the pressure to manage the status quo. In so doing, the Article underscores how policy entrepreneurship is integral to agency effectiveness, an important corrective to public choice theory, and a missing piece of modern administrative law scholarship….(More)”.
Avoiding Data Graveyards: Insights from Data Producers & Users in Three Countries
Report by Samantha Custer and Tanya Sethi: “Government, development partner, and civil society leaders make decisions every day about how to allocate, monitor and evaluate development assistance. Policymakers and practitioners can theoretically draw from more data sources in a variety of formats than ever before to inform these decisions,but will they choose to do so? Those who collect data and produce evidence are often far removed from those who ultimately influence and make decisions. Technocratic ideals of evidence-informed policymaking and data-driven decision-making are easily undercut by individual prerogatives, organizational imperatives, and ecosystem-wide blind spots.
In 2016, researchers from the AidData Center for Development Policy interviewed nearly 200 decision-makers and those that advise them in Honduras, Timor-Leste, and Senegal. Central government officials, development partner representatives based in country, and leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) shared their experiences in producing and using data to target development projects, monitor progress, and evaluate results.
Specifically, the report answers three questions:
- Who produces development data and statistics, for what purposes and for whom?
- What are the the technical and political constraints for decision-makers to use development data in their work?
- What can funders and producers do differently to encourage use of data and evidence in decision-making?
Using a theory of change, we identify nine barriers to the use of data and corresponding operating principles for funders and producers to make demand-driven investments in the next generation of development data and statistics….(More)”.
Scientific crowdsourcing in wildlife research and conservation: Tigers (Panthera tigris) as a case study
Özgün Emre Can, Neil D’Cruze, Margaret Balaskas, and David W. Macdonald in PLOS Biology: “With around 3,200 tigers (Panthera tigris) left in the wild, the governments of 13 tiger range countries recently declared that there is a need for innovation to aid tiger research and conservation. In response to this call, we created the “Think for Tigers” study to explore whether crowdsourcing has the potential to innovate the way researchers and practitioners monitor tigers in the wild. The study demonstrated that the benefits of crowdsourcing are not restricted only to harnessing the time, labor, and funds from the public but can also be used as a tool to harness creative thinking that can contribute to development of new research tools and approaches. Based on our experience, we make practical recommendations for designing a crowdsourcing initiative as a tool for generating ideas….(More)”
Geospatial big data and cartography: research challenges and opportunities for making maps that matter
Anthony C. Robinson et al in the International Journal Of Cartography; “Geospatial big data present a new set of challenges and opportunities for cartographic researchers in technical, methodological and artistic realms. New computational and technical paradigms for cartography are accompanying the rise of geospatial big data. Additionally, the art and science of cartography needs to focus its contemporary efforts on work that connects to outside disciplines and is grounded in problems that are important to humankind and its sustainability. Following the development of position papers and a collaborative workshop to craft consensus around key topics, this article presents a new cartographic research agenda focused on making maps that matter using geospatial big data. This agenda provides both long-term challenges that require significant attention and short-term opportunities that we believe could be addressed in more concentrated studies….(More)”.Bit By Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age
Open Review of Book by Matthew J. Salganik: “In the summer of 2009, mobile phones were ringing all across Rwanda. In addition to the millions of calls between family, friends, and business associates, about 1,000 Rwandans received a call from Joshua Blumenstock and his colleagues. The researchers were studying wealth and poverty by conducting a survey of people who had been randomly sampled from a database of 1.5 million customers from Rwanda’s largest mobile phone provider. Blumenstock and colleagues asked the participants if they wanted to participate in a survey, explained the nature of the research to them, and then asked a series of questions about their demographic, social, and economic characteristics.
Everything I have said up until now makes this sound like a traditional social science survey. But, what comes next is not traditional, at least not yet. They used the survey data to train a machine learning model to predict someone’s wealth from their call data, and then they used this model to estimate the wealth of all 1.5 million customers. Next, they estimated the place of residence of all 1.5 million customers by using the geographic information embedded in the call logs. Putting these two estimates together—the estimated wealth and the estimated place of residence—Blumenstock and colleagues were able to produce high-resolution estimates of the geographic distribution of wealth across Rwanda. In particular, they could produce an estimated wealth for each of Rwanda’s 2,148 cells, the smallest administrative unit in the country.
It was impossible to validate these estimates because no one had ever produced estimates for such small geographic areas in Rwanda. But, when Blumenstock and colleagues aggregated their estimates to Rwanda’s 30 districts, they found that their estimates were similar to estimates from the Demographic and Health Survey, the gold standard of surveys in developing countries. Although these two approaches produced similar estimates in this case, the approach of Blumenstock and colleagues was about 10 times faster and 50 times cheaper than the traditional Demographic and Health Surveys. These dramatically faster and lower cost estimates create new possibilities for researchers, governments, and companies (Blumenstock, Cadamuro, and On 2015).
In addition to developing a new methodology, this study is kind of like a Rorschach inkblot test; what people see depends on their background. Many social scientists see a new measurement tool that can be used to test theories about economic development. Many data scientists see a cool new machine learning problem. Many business people see a powerful approach for unlocking value in the digital trace data that they have already collected. Many privacy advocates see a scary reminder that we live in a time of mass surveillance. Many policy makers see a way that new technology can help create a better world. In fact, this study is all of those things, and that is why it is a window into the future of social research….(More)”
UK’s Digital Strategy
Executive Summary: “This government’s Plan for Britain is a plan to build a stronger, fairer country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. …Our digital strategy now develops this further, applying the principles outlined in the Industrial Strategy green paper to the digital economy. The UK has a proud history of digital innovation: from the earliest days of computing to the development of the World Wide Web, the UK has been a cradle for inventions which have changed the world. And from Ada Lovelace – widely recognised as the first computer programmer – to the pioneers of today’s revolution in artificial intelligence, the UK has always been at the forefront of invention. …
Maintaining the UK government as a world leader in serving its citizens online
From personalised services in health, to safer care for the elderly at home, to tailored learning in education and access to culture – digital tools, techniques and technologies give us more opportunities than ever before to improve the vital public services on which we all rely.
The UK is already a world leader in digital government,7 but we want to go further and faster. The new Government Transformation Strategy published on 9 February 2017 sets out our intention to serve the citizens and businesses of the UK with a better, more coherent experience when using government services online – one that meets the raised expectations set by the many other digital services and tools they use every day. So, we will continue to develop single cross-government platform services, including by working towards 25 million GOV.UK Verify users by 2020 and adopting new services onto the government’s GOV.UK Pay and GOV.UK Notify platforms.
We will build on the ‘Government as a Platform’ concept, ensuring we make greater reuse of platforms and components across government. We will also continue to move towards common technology, ensuring that where it is right we are consuming commodity hardware or cloud-based software instead of building something that is needlessly government specific.
We will also continue to work, across government and the public sector, to harness the potential of digital to radically improve the efficiency of our public services – enabling us to provide a better service to citizens and service users at a lower cost. In education, for example, we will address the barriers faced by schools in regions not connected to appropriate digital infrastructure and we will invest in the Network of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science to help teachers and school leaders build their knowledge and understanding of technology. In transport, we will make our infrastructure smarter, more accessible and more convenient for passengers. At Autumn Statement 2016 we announced that the National Productivity Investment Fund would allocate £450 million from 2018-19 to 2020-21 to trial digital signalling technology on the rail network. And in policing, we will enable police officers to use biometric applications to match fingerprint and DNA from scenes of crime and return results including records and alerts to officers over mobile devices at the crime scene.
Read more about digital government.
Unlocking the power of data in the UK economy and improving public confidence in its use
As part of creating the conditions for sustainable growth, we will take the actions needed to make the UK a world-leading data-driven economy, where data fuels economic and social opportunities for everyone, and where people can trust that their data is being used appropriately.
Data is a global commodity and we need to ensure that our businesses can continue to compete and communicate effectively around the world. To maintain our position at the forefront of the data revolution, we will implement the General Data Protection Regulation by May 2018. This will ensure a shared and higher standard of protection for consumers and their data.
Democracy at Work: Moving Beyond Elections to Improve Well-Being
Michael Touchton, Natasha Borges Sugiyama and Brian Wampler in the American Political Science Review: “How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this article, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. We draw from the citizenship debates to argue that democratic practices allow citizens to gain access to a wide range of rights, which then serve as the foundation for improving social well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities from 2006 to 2013 demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. It is important to note that these relationships are independent of local economic growth, which also influences infant mortality. The result of our thorough analysis offers a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development….(More)”.
Handbook of Big Data Technologies
Handbook by Albert Y. Zomaya and Sherif Sakr: “…offers comprehensive coverage of recent advancements in Big Data technologies and related paradigms. Chapters are authored by international leading experts in the field, and have been reviewed and revised for maximum reader value. The volume consists of twenty-five chapters organized into four main parts. Part one covers the fundamental concepts of Big Data technologies including data curation mechanisms, data models, storage models, programming models and programming platforms. It also dives into the details of implementing Big SQL query engines and big stream processing systems. Part Two focuses on the semantic aspects of Big Data management including data integration and exploratory ad hoc analysis in addition to structured querying and pattern matching techniques. Part Three presents a comprehensive overview of large scale graph processing. It covers the most recent research in large scale graph processing platforms, introducing several scalable graph querying and mining mechanisms in domains such as social networks. Part Four details novel applications that have been made possible by the rapid emergence of Big Data technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IOT), Cognitive Computing and SCADA Systems. All parts of the book discuss open research problems, including potential opportunities, that have arisen from the rapid progress of Big Data technologies and the associated increasing requirements of application domains.
Designed for researchers, IT professionals and graduate students, this book is a timely contribution to the growing Big Data field. Big Data has been recognized as one of leading emerging technologies that will have a major contribution and impact on the various fields of science and varies aspect of the human society over the coming decades. Therefore, the content in this book will be an essential tool to help readers understand the development and future of the field….(More)”
Cities need to innovate to survive. Here are four ways they can do it
Alice Charles: “…The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities chronicled a list of Top 10 Urban Innovations from around the world, that are providing best practice examples of how cities are creating innovative solutions to a variety of urban problems.
Top 10 Urban Innovations
Within these innovations, four principles surface again and again. They can be seen as a core framework to find innovative solutions to complex urban problems:
- Unleashing spare capacity: Many innovations cleverly make use of existing yet underutilized resources. Airbnb, for example, enables the renting out of unused private homes; co-locating schools and recreational facilities enables public-private sharing of space; and the circular economy provides opportunities to reuse, recycle and upcycle.
- Cutting out the peaks: From electricity and water to roads and public transport, upwards of 20% of capacity sits idle for much of the time ready to cope with demand peaks; cutting out these peaks with technology-enabled demand management or innovative pricing structures can significantly limit the burden on financial and natural resources.
- Small-scale infrastructure thinking: Cities will always need large-infrastructure projects, but sometimes small-scale infrastructure – from cycle lanes and bike sharing to the planting of trees for climate change adaptation – can also have a big impact on an urban area.
- People-centred innovation: The best way to improve a city is by mobilizing its citizens. From smart traffic lights to garbage taxes, innovations in technology, services and governance are not ends in themselves but means to shape the behaviour and improve the lives of the city’s inhabitants. All innovations should be centred on the citizen, adhering to the principles of universal design and usable by people of all ages and abilities.
Cities are expected to provide a better standard of living, increase community cohesion, wellness and happiness while progressing towards sustainable development. To be successful in meeting these requirements, cities need to transform their strategies to include innovation and enable the convergence of the digital and physical dimensions. Cities need to support the design and development of cutting-edge solutions and processes in collaboration with the private sector, scientific research institutions, academia, citizens and start-ups, to maintain the competitive edge, while progressing towards better performance and urban service deliveries….(More)”