Paper by Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky: “In recent years, federal government agencies have increasingly attempted to use plain language in written communications with the public. The Plain Writing Act of 2010, for instance, requires agencies to incorporate “clear and simple” explanations of rules and regulations into their official publications. In the tax context, as part of its “customer service” mission, the Internal Revenue Service bears a “duty to explain” the tax law to hundreds of millions of taxpayers who file tax returns each year. Proponents of the plain language movement have heralded this form of communication as... (More >)
Friended, but not Friends: Federal Ethics Authorities Address Role of Social Media in Politics
CRS Reports & Analysis: “Since the rise of social media over the past decade, new platforms of technology have reinforced the adage that the law lags behind developments in technology. Government agencies, officials, and employees regularly use a number of social media options – e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc. – that have led agencies to update existing ethics rules to reflect the unique issues that they may present. Two areas of ethics regulation affected by the increased role of social media are the ethical standards governing gifts to federal employees and the restrictions on employees’ political activities. These rules apply... (More >)
How Big Data Harms Poor Communities
Kaveh Waddell in the Atlantic: “Big data can help solve problems that are too big for one person to wrap their head around. It’s helped businesses cut costs, cities plan new developments, intelligence agencies discover connections between terrorists, health officials predict outbreaks, and police forces get ahead of crime. Decision-makers are increasingly told to “listen to the data,” and make choices informed by the outputs of complex algorithms. But when the data is about humans—especially those who lack a strong voice—those algorithms can become oppressive rather than liberating. For many poor people in the U.S., the data that’s gathered... (More >)
What Should We Do About Big Data Leaks?
Paul Ford at the New Republic: “I have a great fondness for government data, and the government has a great fondness for making more of it. Federal elections financial data, for example, with every contribution identified, connected to a name and address. Or the results of the census. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of downloading census data but it’s pretty exciting. You can hold America on your hard drive! Meditate on the miracles of zip codes, the way the country is held together and addressable by arbitrary sets of digits. You can download whole books,... (More >)
Data to the Rescue: Smart Ways of Doing Good
Nicole Wallace in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “For a long time, data served one purpose in the nonprofit world: measuring program results. But a growing number of charities are rejecting the idea that data equals evaluation and only evaluation. Of course, many nonprofits struggle even to build the simplest data system. They have too little money, too few analysts, and convoluted data pipelines. Yet some cutting-edge organizations are putting data to work in new and exciting ways that drive their missions. A prime example: The Polaris Project is identifying criminal networks in the human-trafficking underworld and devising strategies to... (More >)
Selected Readings on Data and Humanitarian Response
By Prianka Srinivasan and Stefaan G. Verhulst * The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of data and humanitarian response was originally published in 2016. Data, when used well in a trusted manner, allows humanitarian organizations to innovate how to respond to emergency events, including better coordination of post-disaster relief efforts, the ability to harness local knowledge to create more targeted relief strategies, and tools to predict and monitor disasters in real... (More >)
Elements of a New Ethical Framework for Big Data Research
“The Berkman Center is pleased to announce the publication of a new paper from the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project team. In this paper, Effy Vayena, Urs Gasser, Alexandra Wood, and David O’Brien from the Berkman Center, with Micah Altman from MIT Libraries, outline elements of a new ethical framework for big data research. Emerging large-scale data sources hold tremendous potential for new scientific research into human biology, behaviors, and relationships. At the same time, big data research presents privacy and ethical challenges that the current regulatory framework is ill-suited to address. In light of the immense... (More >)
The Function of—and Need for—Institutional Review Boards
Review by Iain Brassington of The Censor’s Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research (Carl E. Schneider, The MIT Press): “Scientific research can be a laborious and frustrating process even before it gets started—especially when it involves living human subjects. Universities and other research institutions maintain Institutional Review Boards that scrutinize research proposals and their methodologies, consent and privacy procedures, and so on. Similarly intensive reviews are required when the intention is to use human tissue—if, say, tissue from diagnostic cancer biopsies could potentially be used to gauge the prevalence of some other illness across the population. These procedures can... (More >)
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
Book edited by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani: “The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that... (More >)
Research and Evaluation of Participatory Budgeting in the U.S. and Canada
Public Agenda: “Communities across the country are experimenting with participatory budgeting (PB), a democratic process in which residents decide together how to spend part of a public budget. Learning more about how these community efforts are implemented and with what results will help improve and expand successful forms of participatory budgeting across the U.S. and Canada. Public Agenda is supporting local evaluation efforts and sharing research on participatory budgeting. Specifically, we are: Building a community of practice among PB evaluators and researchers. Working with evaluators and researchers to make data and research findings comparable across communities that use participatory... (More >)
