philanthropy & aid

Big data’s big role in humanitarian aid

Curated on February 11, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary K. Pratt at Computerworld: “Hundreds of thousands of refugees streamed into Europe in 2015 from Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some estimates put the number at nearly a million.

The sheer volume of people overwhelmed European officials, who not only had to handle the volatile politics stemming from the crisis, but also had to find food, shelter and other necessities for the migrants.

Sweden, like many of its European Union counterparts, was taking in refugees. The Swedish Migration Board, which usually sees 2,500 asylum seekers in an average month, was accepting 10,000 per week.

“As you can imagine, with that number, it requires a lot of buses, food, registration capabilities to start processing all the cases and to accommodate all of those people,” says Andres Delgado, head of operational control, coordination and analysis at the Swedish Migration Board.

Despite the dramatic spike in refugees coming into the country, the migration agency managed the intake — hiring extra staff, starting the process of procuring housing early, getting supplies ready. Delgado credits a good part of that success to his agency’s use of big data and analytics that let him predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what was heading his way.

“Without having that capability, or looking at the tool every day, to assess every need, this would have crushed us. We wouldn’t have survived this,” Delgado says. “It would have been chaos, actually — nothing short of that.”

The Swedish Migration Board has been using big data and analytics for several years, as it seeks to gain visibility into immigration trends and what those trends will mean for the country…./…

“Can big data give us peace? I think the short answer is we’re starting to explore that. We’re at the very early stages, where there are shining examples of little things here and there. But we’re on that road,” says Kalev H. Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, or the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, which describes itself as a comprehensive “database of human society.”

The topic is gaining traction. A 2013 report, “New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict,” from the International Peace Institute, highlights uses of telecommunications technology, including data, in several crisis situations around the world. The report emphasizes the potential these technologies hold in helping to ease tensions and address problems.

The report’s conclusion offers this idea: “Big data can be used to identify patterns and signatures associated with conflict — and those associated with peace — presenting huge opportunities for better-informed efforts to prevent violence and conflict.”

That’s welcome news to Noel Dickover. He’s the director of PeaceTech Data Networks at the PeaceTech Lab, which was created by the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) to advance USIP’s work on how technology, media and data help reduce violent conflict around the world.

Such work is still in the nascent stages, Dickover says, but people are excited about its potential. “We have unprecedented amounts of data on human sentiment, and we know there’s value there,” he says. “The question is how to connect it.”

Dickover is working on ways to do just that. One example is the Open Situation Room Exchange (OSRx) project, which aims to “empower greater collective impact in preventing or mitigating serious violent conflicts in particular arenas through collaboration and data-sharing.”…(More)

Private Provision of Public Goods via Crowdfunding

Curated on February 9, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Robert Chovanculiak and Marek Hudík: “Private provision of public goods is typically associated with three main problems: (1) high organization costs, (2) the assurance problem, and (3) the free-rider problem. We argue that technologies which enable crowdfunding (the method of funding projects by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people via the internet), have made the overall conditions for private provision of public goods more favorable: these technologies lowered the organization costs and enabled to employ more efficient mechanisms which reduce the assurance and free-rider problems. It follows that if the reason for government provision of public goods is higher efficiency as suggested by the standard theory, then with the emergence of crowdfunding we should observe a decline of the government role in this area….(More)”

Opening Governance – Change, Continuity and Conceptual Ambiguity

Curated on January 25, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to special issue of IDS Bulletin by Rosemary McGee and Duncan Edwards: “Open government and open data are new areas of research, advocacy and activism that have entered the governance field alongside the more established areas of transparency and accountability. This article reviews recent scholarship in these areas, pinpointing contributions to more open, transparent, accountable and responsive governance via improved practice, projects and programmes. The authors set the rest of the articles from this IDS Bulletin in the context of the ideas, relationships, processes, behaviours, policy frameworks and aid funding practices of the last five years, and critically discuss questions and weaknesses that limit the effectiveness and impact of this work. Identifying conceptual ambiguity as a key problem, they offer a series of definitions to help overcome the technical and political difficulties this causes. They also identify hype and euphemism, and offer a series of conclusions to help restore meaning and ideological content to work on open government and open data in transparent and accountable governance….(More)”

Passive Philanthropy

Curated on January 22, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

PSFK: “What if you could cure cancer in your sleep? What if throwing out food meant feeding more people? What if helping coffee farmers in developing nations was as easy as a retweet? Today, businesses pay big money in order to reach the same audience as some viral tweets, and the same strategy is being applied to the reach and impact of social good campaigns. Nonprofits have also begun to leverage creative opportunities to spread awareness and raise funds to harness socially-aware citizens and rethink how social good is spread and executed. Take, for instance, an app that tracks exercise and donates to the charity of choice based on distance….

The DreamLab is a free app that turns smartphones into a research tool for cancer researchers in the Garvan Institute in Australia when their users are sleeping. Developed in conjunction with Vodaphone, the app uses the processing power of idle phones as an alternative to supercomputers which can be difficult to access. After downloading the app, participants simply open it and charge their phone. Once the phone reaches 95 percent charge, it gets to work, acting as a networked processor alongside other users with the app. Each phone solves a small piece of a larger puzzle and sends it back to Garvan.

If 1,000 people are using the app, cancer puzzles can be solved 30x faster.

As DreamLab researchers work toward finding a cure for cancer, Feeding Forward is working toward ending hunger. In America, hunger is not a problem of supply, but rather of distribution. Feeding Forward aims to solves this by connecting restaurants, grocery stores, caterers, or other businesses that are forced to throw away perishable food products with those in need.

Businesses simply need post their excess food on the platform and a driver will come pick it up to deliver to a food bank in need. Donors receive profiles of the people they helped and can also write off the donation as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Since their launch in 2013, Feeding Forward has achieved a pick up rate of 99 percent, distributing 780,000 pounds of food saving business $3.9 million.

DreamLab and Feeding Forward are putting activities people are already going to do to use, while One Big Tweet harnesses the power of people’s social media accounts as a fundraising strategy. Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation are getting people to donate their Twitter followings for charity, asking people to sign up to post an automated tweet from a corporate sponsor who purchased the privilege at an auction for social good. The more people who donate their accounts, the higher the value of the tweet at auction. After four months, over 700 people with a collective reach of 3.2 mil followers, signed up to help make the One Big Tweet worth $49,000. While the charity is still in search of a buyer, Cafédirect promises the tweet that will be sent out through participants’ accounts will only happen once and be “safe enough for your Gran to read.” All money from the sale will go directly to continuing the work they do with coffee and tea farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America…(MoreMore)

Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain

Curated on January 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Government Office for Science: “In a major report on distributed ledgers published today (19 January 2016), the Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity.

A distributed ledger is a database that can securely record financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through entirely transparent updates of information.

Its first incarnation was ‘Blockchain’ in 2008, which underpinned digital cash systems such as Bitcoin. The technology has now evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems and dramatically improve the sharing of information.

Distributed ledger technology could provide government with new tools to reduce fraud, error and the cost of paper intensive processes. It also has the potential to provide new ways of assuring ownership and provenance for goods and intellectual property.

Distributed ledgers are already being used in the diamond markets and in the disbursing of international aid payments.

Sir Mark Walport said:

Distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform the delivery of public and private services. It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust and make a leading contribution to the government’s digital transformation plan.

Any new technology creates challenges, but with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, distributed ledgers could yield significant benefits for the UK.

The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.

They include:

government should provide ministerial leadership to ensure that it provides the vision, leadership and the platform for distributed ledger technology within government; this group should consider governance, privacy, security and standards
government should establish trials of distributed ledgers in order to assess the technology’s usability within the public sector
government could support the creation of distributed ledger demonstrators for local government that will bring together all the elements necessary to test the technology and its application.
the UK research community should invest in the research required to ensure that distributed ledgers are scalable, secure and provide proof of correctness of their contents….View the report ‘Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain’.”

Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems

Curated on January 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.

These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.

Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”

Humanity 360: World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2015

Curated on January 13, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

OCHA: “WORLD HUMANITARIAN DATA AND TRENDS

Highlights major trends, challenges and opportunities in the nature of humanitarian crises, showing how the humanitarian landscape is evolving in a rapidly changing world.

EXPLORE...

LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND: HUMANITARIAN EFFECTIVENESS IN THE AGE OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Exploring what humanitarian effectiveness means in today’s world ‐ better meeting the needs of people in crisis, better moving people out of crisis.

EXPLORE…

TOOLS FOR DATA COORDINATION AND COLLECTION

The Innovation the Grantmaking Process Needs

Curated on January 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Simone Noveck and Andrew Young (TheGovLab) at Governing: “Although traditional grants provide greater flexibility than a contract for the recipient to decide how, precisely, to use the funds to advance a particular goal, prize-backed challenges like those on Challenge.gov have the potential to reach more diverse experts. Challenges are just one example of innovations in the grantmaking process being tested in government, philanthropy and the private sector. These innovations in “open grantmaking” have the potential to yield more legitimate and more accountable processes than their closed-door antecedents. They also have the potential to produce more creative strategies for solving problems and, ultimately, more effective outcomes.

Certainly the time has come for innovation in grantmaking. Despite its importance, we have a decidedly 20th-century system in place for deciding how we make these billions of dollars of crucial public investments. To make the most of limited funding — and help build confidence in the ability of public investments to make a positive difference — it is essential for our government agencies to try more innovative approaches to designing, awarding and measuring their grantmaking activities.

In most instances, grantmaking follows a familiar lifecycle: An agency describes and publicizes the grant in a public call for proposals, qualifying individuals or entities send in applications, and the agencies select the winners through internal deliberations. Members of the public — including outside experts, past grantees and service recipients — often have few opportunities to provide meaningful input before, during or after the granting process. And after awarding grants, the agencies themselves usually have limited continuing interactions with those they fund.

The current closed-door system, to be sure, developed to safeguard the legitimacy and fairness of the process. From application to judging, most government grantmaking has been confidential and at arm’s length. For statutory, regulatory or even cultural reasons, the grantmaking process in many agencies is characterized by caution rather than by creativity.

But it doesn’t always have to be this way, and new, more open grantmaking innovations might prove to be more effective in many contexts. Here are 10 recommendations for innovating the grantmaking process drawn from examples of how government agencies, foundations and philanthropists are changing how they give out money:…(More)”

The Quest for Good Governance

Curated on December 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book byAlina Mungiu-Pippidi: “Why do some societies manage to control corruption so that it manifests itself only occasionally, while other societies remain systemically corrupt? This book is about how societies reach that point when integrity becomes the norm and corruption the exception in regard to how public affairs are run and public resources are allocated. It primarily asks what lessons we have learned from historical and contemporary experiences in developing corruption control, which can aid policy-makers and civil societies in steering and expediting this process. Few states now remain without either an anticorruption agency or an Ombudsman, yet no statistical evidence can be found that they actually induce progress. Using both historical and contemporary studies and easy to understand statistics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi looks at how to diagnose, measure and change governance so that those entrusted with power and authority manage to defend public resources….(More)”

The Internet’s Loop of Action and Reaction Is Worsening

Curated on December 10, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton said this week that we should think about shutting down parts of the Internet to stop terrorist groups from inspiring and recruiting followers in distant lands. Mr. Trump even suggested an expert who’d be perfect for the job: “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening, and we have to talk to them — maybe, in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way,” he said on Monday in South Carolina.

Many online responded to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton with jeers, pointing out both constitutional and technical limits to their plans. Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who now spends much of his time on philanthropy, has as much power to close down the Internet as he does to fix Mr. Trump’s hair.

Yet I had a different reaction to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton’s fantasy of a world in which you could just shut down parts of the Internet that you didn’t like: Sure, it’s impossible, but just imagine if we could do it, just for a bit. Wouldn’t it have been kind of a pleasant dream world, in these overheated last few weeks, to have lived free of social media?

Hear me out. If you’ve logged on to Twitter and Facebook in the waning weeks of 2015, you’ve surely noticed that the Internet now seems to be on constant boil. Your social feed has always been loud, shrill, reflexive and ugly, but this year everything has been turned up to 11. The Islamic State’s use of the Internet is perhaps only the most dangerous manifestation of what, this year, became an inescapable fact of online life: The extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible.“The academic in me says that discourse norms have shifted,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the director of the Dangerous Speech Project, an effort to study speech that leads to violence. “It’s become so common to figuratively walk through garbage and violent imagery online that people have accepted it in a way. And it’s become so noisy that you have to shout more loudly, and more shockingly, to be heard.”

You might argue that the angst online is merely a reflection of the news. Terrorism, intractable warfare, mass shootings, a hyperpartisan presidential race, police brutality, institutional racism and the protests over it have dominated the headlines. It’s only natural that the Internet would get a little out of control over that barrage.

But there’s also a way in which social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that much of the media establishment becomes trapped in escalating, infinite loops of 140-character, knee-jerk insta-reaction.

“Presidential elections have always been pretty nasty, but these days the mudslinging is omnipresent in a way that’s never been the case before,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University, who is the author of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” a study of online “trolling.” “When Donald Trump says something that I would consider insane, it’s not just that it gets reported on by one or two or three outlets, but it becomes this wave of iterative content on top of content on top of content in your feed, taking over everything you see.”

The spiraling feedback loop is exhausting and rarely illuminating. The news brims with instantly produced “hot takes” and a raft of fact-free assertions. Everyone — yours truly included — is always on guard for the next opportunity to meme-ify outrage: What crazy thing did Trump/Obama/The New York Times/The New York Post/Rush Limbaugh/etc. say now, and what clever quip can you fit into a tweet to quickly begin collecting likes?

There is little room for indulging nuance, complexity, or flirting with the middle ground. In every issue, you are either with one aggrieved group or the other, and the more stridently you can express your disdain — short ofhurling profanities at the president on TV, which will earn you a brief suspension — the better reaction you’ll get….(More)”