New portal managed and developed by IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC)“…aims to serve as a unique access point to timely, comprehensive migration statistics and reliable information about migration data globally. The site is designed to help policy makers, national statistics officers, journalists and the general public interested in the field of migration to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of international migration data, currently scattered across different organisations and agencies.
Especially in critical times, such as those faced today, it is essential to ensure that responses to migration are based on sound facts and accurate analysis. By making the evidence about migration issues accessible and easy to understand, the Portal aims to contribute to a more informed public debate….
The five main sections of the Portal are designed to help you quickly and easily find the data and information you need.
DATA – Our interactive world map visualizes international, publicly-available and internationally comparable migration data.
THEMES – Thematic overviews explain how various aspects of migration are measured, what are the data sources, their strengths and weaknesses and provide context and analysis of key migration data.
TOOLS – Migration data tools are regularly added to help you find the right tools, guidelines and manuals on how to collect, interpret and disseminate migration data.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Compact on Migration (GCM) – Migration Data, the SDGs and the new Global Compact on Migration (GCM) – Reviews the migration-related targets in the SDGs, how they are defined and measured, and provides information on the new GCM and the migration data needs to support its implementation.
BLOG – Our blog and the Talking Migration Data video series provide a place for the migration data community to share their opinion on new developments and policy, new data or methods….(More)”.
Phys.org: “Determining how many people live in Seattle, perhaps of a certain age, perhaps from a specific country, is the sort of question that finds its answer in the census, a massive data dump for places across the country.
But just how fresh is that data? After all, the census is updated once a decade, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s smaller but more detailed American Community Survey, annually. There’s also a delay between when data are collected and when they are published. (The release of data for 2016 started gradually in September 2017.)
Enter Facebook, which, with some caveats, can serve as an even more current source of information, especially about migrants. That’s the conclusion of a study led by Emilio Zagheni, associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington, published Oct. 11 in Population and Development Review. The study is believed to be the first to demonstrate how present-day migration statistics can be obtained by compiling the same data that advertisers use to target their audience on Facebook, and by combining that source with information from the Census Bureau.
Migration indicates a variety of political and economic trends and is a major driver of population change, Zagheni said. As researchers further explore the increasing number of databases produced for advertisers, Zagheni argues, social scientists could leverage Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter more often to glean information on geography, mobility, behavior and employment. And while there are some limits to the data – each platform is a self-selected, self-reporting segment of the population – the number of migrants according to Facebook could supplement the official numbers logged by the U.S. Census Bureau, Zagheni said….(Full Paper).
Sarah Worthing at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Despite the need for concerted, joint efforts among public sector leaders, those working with or in government know too well that such collaborations are rare. The motivation and ability to collaborate in government is usually lacking. So how did these leaders—some with competing agendas—manage to do it?
A new tool for collaboration
Policy labs are units embedded within the public sector—“owned” by one or several ministries—that anchor systematic public sector innovation efforts by facilitating creative approaches to policymaking. Since the inception of the first labs over a decade ago, many innovation experts and academics have touted labs as the leading-edge of public policy innovation. They can generate novel, citizen-centric, effective policies and service provisions, because they include a wide range of governmental and, in many cases, non-governmental actors in tackling complex public policy issues like social inequality, mass migration, and terrorism. MindLab in Denmark, for example, brought together government decision makers from across five ministries in December 2007 to co-create policy strategies on tackling climate change while also propelling new business growth. The collaboration resulted in a range of business strategies for climate change that were adopted during the 2009 UN COP15 Summit in Copenhagen. Under normal circumstances, these government leaders often push conflicting agendas, compete over resources, and are highly risk-adverse in undertaking intragovermental partnerships—all “poison pills” for the kind of collaboration successful public sector innovation needs. However, policy labs like MindLab, Policy Lab UK, and almost 100 similar cross-governmental units are finding ways to overcome these barriers and drive public sector innovation.
Five ways policy labs facilitate successful intragovermental collaboration
To examine how labs do this, we conducted a multiple-case analysis of policy labs in the European Union and United States.
1. Reducing potential future conflict through experiential on-boarding processes. Policy labs conduct extensive screening and induction activities to provide policymakers with both knowledge of and faith in the policy lab’s approach to policymaking. …
2. Utilization of spatial cues to flatten hierarchical and departmental differences. Policy labs strategically use non-traditional spatial elements such as moveable whiteboards, tactile and colorful prototyping materials, and sitting cubes, along with the absence of expected elements such as conference tables and chairs, to indicate that unconventional norms—non-hierarchical and relational norms—govern lab spaces….
3. Reframing policy issues to focus on affected citizens. Policy labs highlight individual citizens’ stories to help reconstruct policymakers’ perceptions toward a more common and human-centered understanding of a policy issue…
4. Politically neutral, process-focused facilitation. Lab practitioners employ design methods that can help bring together divided policymakers and break scripted behavior patterns. Many policy labs use variations of design thinking and foresight methods, with a focus on iterative prototyping and testing, stressing the need for skilled but politically neutral facilitation to work through points of conflict and reach consensus on solutions. …
5. Mitigating risk through policy lab branding….(More)”.
Paper by Anne Fleur van Veenstra and Bas Kotterink: “Societal challenges such as migration, poverty, and climate change can be considered ‘wicked problems’ for which no optimal solution exists. To address such problems, public administrations increasingly aim for data–driven policy making. Data-driven policy making aims to make optimal use of sensor data, and collaborate with citizens to co-create policy. However, few public administrations have realized this so far. Therefore, in this paper an approach for data-driven policy making is developed that can be used in the setting of a Policy Lab. A Policy Lab is an experimental environment in which stakeholders collaborate to develop and test policy. Based on literature, we first identify innovations in data-driven policy making. Subsequently, we map these innovations to the stages of the policy cycle. We found that most innovations are concerned with using new data sources in traditional statistics and that methodologies capturing the benefits of data-driven policy making are still under development. Further research should focus on policy experimentation while developing new methodologies for data-driven policy making at the same time….(More)”.
Book by Cristiano Bee: “…provides an overview of key issues in the debate concerning the emergence of active citizenship in Europe.
The specific focus of enquiry is the promotion of patterns of civic and political engagement and civic and political participation by the EU and the relative responses drawn by organizations of the civil society operating at the supranational level and in Italy, Turkey and the UK. More specifically, it addresses key debates on the engagement and participation of organized civil society across the permanent state of euro-crisis, considering the production of policy discourses along the continuum that characterized three subsequent and interrelated emergency situations (democratic, financial and migration crises) that have hit Europe since 2005. …(More)”.
Between March and December 2016 the project team (one project manager, one Pashto and Dari speaker, two native Arabic speakers and an English copy editor) monitored Facebook conversations related to flight and migration in the Afghan and Arabic speaking communities.
To do this, the team created Facebook accounts, joined relevant Facebook groups and summarised their findings in weekly monitoring reports to UNHCR staff and other interested people. I received these reports every week while working as the UNHCR team leader for the Communicating with Communities team in Greece and found them very useful since they gave me insights into what were some of the burning issues that week.
The project did not monitor Twitter because Twitter was not widely used by the communities.
In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe. Among other things, these discussion provided information on how the refugees and migrants are consuming and exchanging information (related: see this BBC Media Action report).
Of course, this type of research is much more resource intensive than what most organisations have in mind when they want to do social media monitoring, but this report shows that additional resources can also result in more meaningful information.
Smuggling prices according to monitored Facebook page. Source: From A Refugee Perspective
Monitoring the conversations on Facebook enabled the team to track trends, such as the rise and fall of prices that smugglers asked for different routes (see image). In addition, it provided fascinating insights into how smugglers are selling their services online….(More)”
Pew Research Center: “Migrants leaving their homes for a new country often carry a smartphone to communicate with family that may have stayed behind and to help search for border crossings, find useful information about their journey or search for details about their destination. The digital footprints left by online searches can provide insight into the movement of migrants as they transit between countries and settle in new locations, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of refugee flows between the Middle East and Europe.1
Refugees from just two Middle Eastern countries — Syria and Iraq — made up a combined 38% of the record 1.3 million people who arrived and applied for asylum in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland in 2015 and a combined 37% of the 1.2 million first-time asylum applications in 2016. Most Syrian and Iraqi refugees during this period crossed from Turkey to Greece by sea, before continuing on to their final destinations in Europe.
Since many refugees from Syria and Iraq speak Arabic as their native, if not only, language, it is possible to identify key moments in their migration by examining trends in internet searches conducted in Turkey using Arabic, as opposed to the dominant Turkic languages in that country. For example, Turkey-based searches for the word “Greece” in Arabic closely mirror 2015 and 2016 fluctuations in the number of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece. The searches also provide a window into how migrants planned to move across borders — for example, the search term “Greece” was often combined with “smuggler.” In addition, an hourly analysis of searches in Turkey shows spikes in the search term “Greece” during early morning hours, a typical time for migrants making their way across the Mediterranean.
Comparing online searches with migration data
This report’s analysis compares data from internet searches with government and international agency refugee arrival and asylum application data in Europe from 2015 and 2016. Internet searches were captured from Google Trends, a publicly-available analytical tool that standardizes search volume by language and location over time. The analysis examines searches in Arabic, done in Turkey and Germany, for selected words such as “Greece” or “German” that can be linked to migration patterns. For a complete list of search terms employed, see the methodology. Google releases hourly, daily and weekly search data.
Google does not release the actual number of searches conducted but provides a metric capturing the relative change in searches over a specified time period. The metric ranges from 0 to 100 and indicates low- or high-volume search activity for the time period. Predicting or deciphering human behavior from the analysis of internet searches has limitations and remains experimental. But, internet search data does offer a potentially promising way to explore migration flows crossing international borders.
Migration data cited in this report come from two sources. The first is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which provides data on new arrivals into Greece on a monthly basis. The second is first-time asylum applications from Eurostat, Europe’s statistical agency. Since both Syrian and Iraqi asylum seekers have had fairly high acceptance rates in Europe, it is likely that most Syrian and Iraqi migrants entering during 2015 and 2016 were counted by UNHCR and applied for asylum with European authorities.
The unique circumstances of this Syrian and Iraqi migration — the technology used by refugees, the large and sudden movement of refugees and language groups in transit and destination countries — presents a unique opportunity to integrate the analysis of online searches and migration data. The conditions that permit this type of analysis may not apply in other circumstances where migrants are moving between countries….(More)”
Matt Stokes et al at nesta: “This report, and accompanying guide, produced as part of the DSI4EU project, maps the projects and organisations using technology to tackle social challenges across Europe, and explores the barriers to the growth of digital social innovation.
Key findings
There are almost 2,000 organisations and over 1,000 projects involved in digital social innovation (DSI) across Europe, with the highest concentration of activity in Western and Southern Europe.
Despite this activity, there are relatively few examples of DSI initiatives delivering impact at scale. The growth of DSI is being held back by barriers at the system level and at the level of individual projects.
Projects and organisations involved in DSI are still relatively poorly connected to each other. There is a pressing need to grow strong networks within and across countries and regions to boost collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
The growth of DSI is being held back by lack of funding and investment across the continent, especially outside Western Europe, and structural digital skills shortages.
Civil society organisations and the public sector have been slow to adopt DSI, despite the opportunity it offers them to deliver better services at a lower cost, although there are emerging examples of good practice from across Europe.
Practitioners struggle to engage citizens and users, understand and measure the impact of their digital social innovations, and plan for growth and sustainability.
Across Europe, thousands of people, projects and organisations are using digital technologies to tackle social challenges in fields like healthcare, education, employment, democratic participation, migration and the environment. We call this phenomenon digital social innovation.
Through crowdmapping DSI across Europe, we find that there are almost 2,000 organisations and over 1,000 projects using open and collaborative technologies to tackle social challenges. We complement this analysis by piloting experimental data methods such as Twitter analysis to understand in further depth the distribution of DSI across Europe. You can explore the data on projects and organisations on digitalsocial.eu.
However, despite widespread activity, few initiatives have grown to deliver impact at scale, to be institutionalised, or to become “the new normal”.
In this research, we find that weak networks between stakeholders, insufficient funding and investment, skills shortages, and slow adoption by public sector and established civil society organisations is holding back the growth of DSI…(More)”.
Mark Latonero at Harvard Business Review: “The Trump administration’s latest travel ban is back in U.S. federal court. The Fourth Circuit, based in Virginia, and Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, are hearing cases challenging the latest executive order banning immigrants and refugees from six Muslim majority countries from entering the United States. Joining the fray are 162 technology companies, whose lawyers collectively filed an amicus brief to both courts. Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber are among the companies urging federal judges to rule against the executive order, detailing why it is unjust and how it would hurt their businesses.
While the 40-page brief is filled with arguments in support of immigration, it hardly speaks about refugees, except to note that those seeking protection should be welcomed. Any multinational company with a diverse workforce would be concerned about limits to international hiring and employee travel. But tech companies should also be concerned about the refugee populations that depend on their digital services for safety and survival.
In researching migration and the refugee crisis in Europe, my team and I interviewed over 140 refugees from Syria, and I’ve learned that technology has been crucial to those fleeing war and violence across the Middle East and North Africa. Services like Google Maps, Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, and Western Union have helped refugees find missing loved ones or locate safe places to sleep. Mobile phones have been essential — refugees have even used them on sinking boats to call rescue officials patrolling the Mediterranean.
Refugees’ reliance on these platforms demonstrates what tech companies often profess: that innovation can empower people to improve their lives and society. Tech companies did not intend for their tools to facilitate one of the largest mass movements of refugees in history, but they have a responsibility to look out for the safety and security of the vulnerable consumers using their products.
Some tech companies have intervened directly in the refugee crisis. Google has created apps to help refugees in Greece find medical facilities and other services; Facebook promised to provide free Wi-Fi in U.N. refugee camps. A day after President Trump issued the first travel ban, which initially suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, Airbnb announced it would provide free housing to refugees left stranded….
The sector should extend these efforts by making sure its technologies aren’t used to target broad groups of people based on nationality or religion. Already the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) is asking for the social media accounts — even passwords — of visitors from other counties. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed complaints against the CPB, stating that Muslim American citizens have been subjected to enhanced screening that includes scrutiny of their social media accounts and cell phones.
Trump has talked about creating a database to identify and register Muslims in America, including refugees. A number of companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, have stated they will not help build a Muslim registry if asked by the government. In addition, a group of nearly 3,000 American tech employees signed an online pledge promising they would not develop data processing systems to help the U.S. government target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin….(More)”.
Rania Fakhoury at the Conversation: “Privacy is no longer a social norm, said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, as social media took a leap to bring more private information into the public domain.
But what does it mean for governments, citizens and the exercise of democracy? Donald Trump is clearly not the first leader to use his Twitter account as a way to both proclaim his policies and influence the political climate. Social media presents novel challenges to strategic policy, and has become a managerial issues for many governments.
But it also offers a free platform for public participation in government affairs. Many argue that the rise of social media technologies can give citizens and observers a better opportunity to identify pitfalls of government and their politics.
As government embrace the role of social media and the influence of negative or positive feedback on the success of their project, they are also using this tool to their advantages by spreading fabricated news.
This much freedom of expression and opinion can be a double-edged sword.
A tool that triggers change
On the positive side, social media include social networking applications such as Facebook and Google+, microblogging services such as Twitter, blogs, video blogs (vlogs), wikis, and media-sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr, among others.
Today four out of five countries in the world have social media features on their national portals to promote interactive networking and communication with the citizen. Although we don’t have any information about the effectiveness of such tools or whether they are used to their full potential, 20% of these countries shows that they have “resulted in new policy decisions, regulation or service”.
Social media can be an effective tool to trigger changes in government policies and services if well used. It can be used to prevent corruption, as it is direct method of reaching citizens. In developing countries, corruption is often linked to governmental services that lack automated processes or transparency in payments.
The UK is taking the lead on this issue. Its anti-corruption innovation hub aims to connect several stakeholders – including civil society, law enforcement and technologies experts – to engage their efforts toward a more transparent society.
With social media, governments can improve and change the way they communicate with their citizens – and even question government projects and policies. In Kazakhstan, for example, a migration-related legislative amendment entered into force early January 2017 and compelled property owners to register people residing in their homes immediately or else face a penalty charge starting in February 2017.
Citizens were unprepared for this requirement, and many responded with indignation on social media. At first the government ignored this reaction. However, as the growing anger soared via social media, the government took action and introduced a new service to facilitate the registration of temporary citizens….
But the campaigns that result do not always evolve into positive change.
Egypt and Libya are still facing several major crises over the last years, along with political instability and domestic terrorism. The social media influence that triggered the Arab Spring did not permit these political systems to turn from autocracy to democracy.
Brazil exemplifies a government’s failure to react properly to a massive social media outburst. In June 2013 people took to the streets to protest the rising fares of public transportation. Citizens channelled their anger and outrage through social media to mobilise networks and generate support.
As in the Arab Spring countries, the use of social media in Brazil did not result in economic improvement. The country has tumbled down into depression, and unemployment has risen to 12.6%…..
Government typically asks “how can we adapt social media to the way in which we do e-services, and then try to shape their policies accordingly. They would be wiser to ask, “how can social media enable us to do things differently in a way they’ve never been done before?” – that is, policy-making in collaboration with people….(More)”.
