Martin Hilbert in the Development Policy Review: “The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost-effective prospect for improved decision-making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and security. At the same time, the well-known caveats of the Big Data debate, such as privacy concerns and human resource scarcity, are aggravated in developing countries by long-standing structural shortages in the areas of infrastructure, economic resources and institutions. The result is a new kind of digital divide: a divide in the use of data-based knowledge to inform intelligent decision-making. The article systematically reviews several available policy options in terms of fostering opportunities and minimising risks…..(More)”
Smarter as the New Urban Agenda
New book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives….(More)”
China’s Biggest Polluters Face Wrath of Data-Wielding Citizens
Bloomberg News: “Besides facing hefty fines, criminal punishments and the possibility of closing, the worst emitters in China risk additional public anger as new smartphone applications and lower-cost monitoring devices widen access to data on pollution sources.
The Blue Map app, developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs with support from the SEE Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation, provides pollution data from more than 3,000 large coal-power, steel, cement and petrochemical production plants. Origins Technology Ltd. in July began sale of the Laser Egg, a palm-sized air quality monitor used to track indoor and outdoor air quality by measuring fine particulate matter in the air.
“Letting people know the sources of regional pollution will help the push for control over emissions of every chimney,” said Ma Jun, the founder and director of the Beijing-based IPE.
The phone map and Laser Egg are the latest levers in prying control over information on air quality from the hands of the few to the many, and they’re beginning to weigh on how officials respond to the issue. Numerous smartphone applications, including those developed by SINA Corp. and Moji Fengyun (Beijing) Software Technology Development Co., now provide people in China with real-time access to air quality readings, essentially democratizing what was once an information pipeline available only to the government.
“China’s continuing struggle to control and reduce air pollution exemplifies the government’s fear that lifestyle issues will mutate into demands for political change,” said Mary Gallagher, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
Even the government is getting in on the act. The Ministry of Environmental Protection rolled out a smartphone application called “Nationwide Air Quality” with the help ofWuhan Juzheng Environmental Science & Technology Co. at the end of 2013.
“As citizens know more about air pollution, more pressure will be put on the government,” said Xu Qinxiang, a technology manager at Wuhan Juzheng. “This will urge the government to control pollutant sources and upgrade heavy industries.”
Laser Egg
Sources of air quality data come from the China National Environment Monitoring Center, local environmental protection bureaus and non-Chinese sources such as the U.S. Embassy’s website in Beijing, Xu said.
Air quality is a controversial subject in China. Since 2012, the public has pushed the government to move more quickly than planned to begin releasing data measuring pollution levels — especially of PM2.5, the particulates most harmful to human health.
The reading was 267 micrograms per cubic meter at 10 a.m. Monday near Tiananmen Square, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center. The World Health Organization cautions against 24-hour exposure to concentrations higher than 25.
The availability of data appears to be filling a need, especially with the arrival of colder temperatures and the associated smog that blanketed Beijing and northern Chinarecently….
“With more disclosure of the data, everyone becomes more sensitive, hoping the government can do something,” Li Yajuan, a 27-year-old office secretary, said in an interview in Beijing’s Fuchengmen area. “It’s our own living environment after all.”
Efforts to make products linked to air data continue. IBM has been developing artificial intelligence to help fight Beijing’s toxic air pollution, and plans to work with other municipalities in China and India on similar projects to manage air quality….(More)”
Controlling the crowd? Government and citizen interaction on emergency-response platforms
Gregory Asmolov at the Policy and Internet Blog: “My interest in the role of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations was triggered by my personal experience. In 2010 I was one of the co-founders of the Russian “Help Map” project, which facilitated volunteer-based response to wildfires in central Russia. When I was working on this project, I realized that a crowdsourcing platform can bring the participation of the citizen to a new level and transform sporadic initiatives by single citizens and groups into large-scale, relatively well coordinated operations. What was also important was that both the needs and the forms of participation required in order to address these needs be defined by the users themselves.
To some extent the citizen-based response filled the gap left by the lack of a sufficient response from the traditional institutions.[1] This suggests that the role of ICTs in disaster response should be examined within the political context of the power relationship between members of the public who use digital tools and the traditional institutions. My experience in 2010 was the first time I was able to see that, while we would expect that in a case of natural disaster both the authorities and the citizens would be mostly concerned about the emergency, the actual situation might be different.
Apparently the emergence of independent, citizen-based collective action in response to a disaster was considered as some type of threat by the institutional actors. First, it was a threat to the image of these institutions, which didn’t want citizens to be portrayed as the leading responding actors. Second, any type of citizen-based collective action, even if not purely political, may be an issue of concern in authoritarian countries in particular. Accordingly, one can argue that, while citizens are struggling against a disaster, in some cases the traditional institutions may make substantial efforts to restrain and contain the action of citizens. In this light, the role of information technologies can include not only enhancing citizen engagement and increasing the efficiency of the response, but also controlling the digital crowd of potential volunteers.
The purpose of this paper was to conceptualize the tension between the role of ICTs in the engagement of the crowd and its resources, and the role of ICTs in controlling the resources of the crowd. The research suggests a theoretical and methodological framework that allows us to explore this tension. The paper focuses on an analysis of specific platforms and suggests empirical data about the structure of the platforms, and interviews with developers and administrators of the platforms. This data is used in order to identify how tools of engagement are transformed into tools of control, and what major differences there are between platforms that seek to achieve these two goals. That said, obviously any platform can have properties of control and properties of engagement at the same time; however the proportion of these two types of elements can differ significantly.
One of the core issues for my research is how traditional actors respond to fast, bottom-up innovation by citizens.[2]. On the one hand, the authorities try to restrict the empowerment of citizens by the new tools. On the other hand, the institutional actors also seek to innovate and develop new tools that can restore the balance of power that has been challenged by citizen-based innovation. The tension between using digital tools for the engagement of the crowd and for control of the crowd can be considered as one of the aspects of this dynamic.
That doesn’t mean that all state-backed platforms are created solely for the purpose of control. One can argue, however, that the development of digital tools that offer a mechanism of command and control over the resources of the crowd is prevalent among the projects that are supported by the authorities. This can also be approached as a means of using information technologies in order to include the digital crowd within the “vertical of power”, which is a top-down strategy of governance. That is why this paper seeks to conceptualize this phenomenon as “vertical crowdsourcing”.
The question of whether using a digital tool as a mechanism of control is intentional is to some extent secondary. What is important is that the analysis of platform structures relying on activity theory identifies a number of properties that allow us to argue that these tools are primarily tools of control. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper is used in order to follow the transformation of tools for the engagement of the crowd into tools of control over the crowd. That said, some of the interviews with the developers and administrators of the platforms may suggest the intentional nature of the development of tools of control, while crowd engagement is secondary….Read the full article: Asmolov, G. (2015) Vertical Crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing Governance of Crowds and State–Citizen Partnership in Emergency Situations.”
The Discourse of Public Participation Media
Book by Joanna Thornborrow: “The Discourse of Public Participation Media takes a fresh look at what ‘ordinary’ people are doing on air – what they say, and how and where they get to say it.
Using techniques of discourse analysis to explore the construction of participant identities in a range of different public participation genres, Joanna Thornborrow argues that the role of the ‘ordinary’ person in these media environments is frequently anything but.
Tracing the development of discourses of public participation media, the book focusses particularly on the 1990s onwards when broadcasting was expanding rapidly: the rise of the TV talk show, increasing formats for public participation in broadcast debate and discussion, and the explosion of reality TV in the first decade of the 21st century. During this period, traditional broadcasting has also had to move with the times and incorporate mobile and web-based communication technologies as new platforms for public access and participation – text and email as well as the telephone – and an audience that moves out of the studio and into the online spaces of chat rooms, comment forums and the ‘twitterverse’.
This original study examines the shifting discourses of public engagement and participation resulting from these new forms of communication, making it an ideal companion for students of communication, media and cultural studies, media discourse, broadcast talk and social interaction….(More)”
Big Data in the Policy Cycle: Policy Decision Making in the Digital Era
Paper by Johann Höchtl et al in the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce: “Although of high relevance to political science, the interaction between technological change and political change in the era of Big Data remains somewhat of a neglected topic. Most studies focus on the concept of e-government and e-governance, and on how already existing government activities performed through the bureaucratic body of public administration could be improved by technology. This paper attempts to build a bridge between the field of e-governance and theories of public administration that goes beyond the service delivery approach that dominates a large part of e-government research. Using the policy cycle as a generic model for policy processes and policy development, a new look on how policy decision making could be conducted on the basis of ICT and Big Data is presented in this paper….(More)”
Five Studies: How Behavioral Science Can Help in International Development
Dwyer Gunn in Pacific Standard: “In 2012, there were 896 million people around the world—12.7 percent of the global population—living on less than two dollars a day. The World Food Programestimates that 795 million people worldwide don’t have enough food to “lead a healthy life”; 25 percent of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Over three million children die every year thanks to poor nutrition, and hunger is the leading cause of death worldwide. In 2012, just three preventable diseases (pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria) killed 4,600 children every day.
Last month, the World Bank announced the launch of the Global Insights Initiative (GINI). The initiative, which follows in the footsteps of so-called “nudge units” in the United Kingdom and United States, is the Bank’s effort to incorporate insights from the field of behavioral science into the design of international development programs; too often, those programs failed to account for how people behave in the real world. Development policy, according to the Bank’s 2015 World Development Report, is overdue for a “redesign based on careful consideration of human factors.” Researchers have applauded the announcement, but it raises an interesting question: What can nudges really accomplish in the face of the developing world’s overwhelming poverty and health-care deficits?
In fact, researchers have found that instituting small program changes, informed by a better understanding of people’s motivations and limitations, can have big effects on everything from savings rates to vaccination rates to risky sexual behavior. Here are five studies that demonstrate the benefits of bringing empirical social science into the developing world….(More)”
State of the Commons
Creative Commons: “Creative Commoners have known all along that collaboration, sharing, and cooperation are a driving force for human evolution. And so for many it will come as no surprise that in 2015 we achieved a tremendous milestone: over 1.1 billion CC licensed photos, videos, audio tracks, educational materials, research articles, and more have now been contributed to the shared global commons…..
Whether it’s open education, open data, science, research, music, video, photography, or public policy, we are putting sharing and collaboration at the heart of the Web. In doing so, we are much closer to realizing our vision: unlocking the full potential of the Internet to drive a new era of development, growth, and productivity.
I am proud to share with you our 2015 State of the Commons report, our best effort to measure the immeasurable scope of the commons by looking at the CC licensed content, along with content marked as public domain, that comprise the slice of the commons powered by CC tools. We are proud to be a leader in the commons movement, and we hope you will join us as we celebrate all we have accomplished together this year. ….Report at https://stateof.creativecommons.org/2015/”
New frontiers in social innovation research
Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.
The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.
His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.
The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.
There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.
As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.
The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.
The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..
Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)
The ‘data revolution’ will be open
Martin Tisne at Devex: “There is a huge amount of talk about a “data revolution.” The phrase emerged in the years preceding this September’s announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and has recently been strongly reaffirmed by the launch of a Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data.
The importance of data in measuring, assessing and verifying the new SDGs has been powerfully made and usually includes a mention of the data needing to be “open.” However, the role of “open” has not been clearly articulated. Fundamentally, the discussion focuses on the role of data (statistics, for example) in decision-making, and not on the benefits of that data being open to the public. Until this case is made, difficult decisions to make data open will go by the wayside.
Much of the debate justly focuses on why data matters for decision-making. Knowing how many boys and girls are in primary and secondary schools, how good their education is, and the number of teachers in their schools, are examples of relevant data used in shaping education delivery, and perhaps policy. Likewise, new satellite and cellphone data can help us prevent and understand the causes of death by HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
Proponents of the data revolution make powerful points, such as that 1 in 3 births go unregistered. If you are uncounted, you will be ignored. If you don’t have an identity, you do not exist.
Yet as important as this information is, I still can’t help but think: Do we change the course of history with the mere existence of more data or because people access it, mobilize and press for change?
We need an equally eloquent narrative for why open data matters and what it means.
To my thinking, we need the data to be open because we need to hold governments accountable for their promises under the SDGs, in order to incentivize action. The data needs to be available, accessible and comparable to enable journalists and civil society to prod, push and test the validity of these promises. After all, what good are the goals if governments do not deliver, beginning with the funding to implement? We will need to know what financial resources, both public and private, will be put to work and what budget allocations governments will make in their draft budgets. We need to have those debates in the open, not in smoke-filled rooms.
Second, the data needs to be open in order to be verified, quality-checked and improved. …(More)”