Sector: philanthropy & aid

Politics and the New Machine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Lepore in the NewYorker on “What the turn from polls to data science means for democracy”: “…The modern public-opinion poll has been around since the Great Depression, when the response rate—the number of people who take a survey as a percentage of those who were asked—was more than ninety. The participation rate—the number of people who take a survey as a percentage of the population—is far lower. Election pollsters sample only a minuscule portion of the electorate, not uncommonly something on the order of a couple of thousand people out of the more than two hundred million Americans who are eligible to vote. The promise of this work is that the sample is exquisitely representative. But the lower the response rate the harder and more expensive it becomes to realize that promise, which requires both calling many more people and trying to correct for “non-response bias” by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond. Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has recalled how, in the nineteen-eighties, when the response rate at the firm where he was working had fallen to about sixty per cent, people in his office said, “What will happen when it’s only twenty? We won’t be able to be in business!” A typical response rate is now in the single digits.

Meanwhile, polls are wielding greater influence over American elections than ever….

Still, data science can’t solve the biggest problem with polling, because that problem is neither methodological nor technological. It’s political. Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if it’s bad?

A “poll” used to mean the top of your head. Ophelia says of Polonius, “His beard as white as snow: All flaxen was his poll.” When voting involved assembling (all in favor of Smith stand here, all in favor of Jones over there), counting votes required counting heads; that is, counting polls. Eventually, a “poll” came to mean the count itself. By the nineteenth century, to vote was to go “to the polls,” where, more and more, voting was done on paper. Ballots were often printed in newspapers: you’d cut one out and bring it with you. With the turn to the secret ballot, beginning in the eighteen-eighties, the government began supplying the ballots, but newspapers kept printing them; they’d use them to conduct their own polls, called “straw polls.” Before the election, you’d cut out your ballot and mail it to the newspaper, which would make a prediction. Political parties conducted straw polls, too. That’s one of the ways the political machine worked….

Ever since Gallup, two things have been called polls: surveys of opinions and forecasts of election results. (Plenty of other surveys, of course, don’t measure opinions but instead concern status and behavior: Do you own a house? Have you seen a doctor in the past month?) It’s not a bad idea to reserve the term “polls” for the kind meant to produce election forecasts. When Gallup started out, he was skeptical about using a survey to forecast an election: “Such a test is by no means perfect, because a preelection survey must not only measure public opinion in respect to candidates but must also predict just what groups of people will actually take the trouble to cast their ballots.” Also, he didn’t think that predicting elections constituted a public good: “While such forecasts provide an interesting and legitimate activity, they probably serve no great social purpose.” Then why do it? Gallup conducted polls only to prove the accuracy of his surveys, there being no other way to demonstrate it. The polls themselves, he thought, were pointless…

If public-opinion polling is the child of a strained marriage between the press and the academy, data science is the child of a rocky marriage between the academy and Silicon Valley. The term “data science” was coined in 1960, one year after the Democratic National Committee hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from M.I.T., to provide strategic analysis in advance of the upcoming Presidential election. Pool and his team collected punch cards from pollsters who had archived more than sixty polls from the elections of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, representing more than a hundred thousand interviews, and fed them into a UNIVAC. They then sorted voters into four hundred and eighty possible types (for example, “Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrat”) and sorted issues into fifty-two clusters (for example, foreign aid). Simulmatics’ first task, completed just before the Democratic National Convention, was a study of “the Negro vote in the North.” Its report, which is thought to have influenced the civil-rights paragraphs added to the Party’s platform, concluded that between 1954 and 1956 “a small but significant shift to the Republicans occurred among Northern Negroes, which cost the Democrats about 1 per cent of the total votes in 8 key states.” After the nominating convention, the D.N.C. commissioned Simulmatics to prepare three more reports, including one that involved running simulations about different ways in which Kennedy might discuss his Catholicism….

Data science may well turn out to be as flawed as public-opinion polling. But a stage in the development of any new tool is to imagine that you’ve perfected it, in order to ponder its consequences. I asked Hilton to suppose that there existed a flawless tool for measuring public opinion, accurately and instantly, a tool available to voters and politicians alike. Imagine that you’re a member of Congress, I said, and you’re about to head into the House to vote on an act—let’s call it the Smeadwell-Nutley Act. As you do, you use an app called iThePublic to learn the opinions of your constituents. You oppose Smeadwell-Nutley; your constituents are seventy-nine per cent in favor of it. Your constituents will instantly know how you’ve voted, and many have set up an account with Crowdpac to make automatic campaign donations. If you vote against the proposed legislation, your constituents will stop giving money to your reëlection campaign. If, contrary to your convictions but in line with your iThePublic, you vote for Smeadwell-Nutley, would that be democracy? …(More)”

 

Crowdsourced pollution data via smartphones

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Citizens in eleven cities in Europe were recently recruited to help crowdsource pollution measurements, as part of the large-scale research project iSPEX-EU. Participants used their smartphones, an app and a lens called a spectropolarimeter, to collect data about air quality across the continent, which will be used by iSPEX to make comprehensive maps.

The project ran for six weeks and saw thousands of measurements taken in Athens, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Manchester, Milan, Rome, and Toulouse. To contribute, citizens registered their interest, downloaded the free app and were sent an iSPEX lens. Then, on a clear day they placed the lens over their smartphone camera and photographed the sky in multiple directions. The app registered the location and direction of each picture and measured the light spectrum and the polarization of the light.
From the data, iSPEX are able to calculate how much fine dust — known as aerosols — there is in the atmosphere in that place and create a map showing levels of air pollution across Europe. The crowdsourced data can be used to aid government research by filling in any blank spaces and ensuring that the official data is honest.

We’ve seen attempts at similar projects before, such asSmart Citizen, but iSPEX EU benefits from the flexibility and simplicity of its tools. Smartphones have been successfully harnessed as scientific apparatus, enabling researchers to crowdsource data about issues including cancer and tree disease….(More)”

New Human Need Index fills a data void to help those in need

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Scott W. Allard at Brookings: “My 2009 book, “Out of Reach,” examined why it can be hard for poor families to get help from the safety net. One critical barrier is the lack of information about local program resources and nonprofit social service organizations. Good information is key to finding help, but also to important if we are to target resources effectively and assess if program investments were successful.

As I prepared data for the book in 2005, my research team struggled to compile useful information about services and programs in the three major metro areas at the center of the study. We grappled with out-of-date print directories, incomplete online listings, bad addresses, disconnected phone numbers, and inaccurate information about the availability of services. It wasn’t clear families experiencing hardship could easily find the help they needed. It also wasn’t clear how potential volunteers or donors could know where to direct their energies, or whether communities could know whether they were deploying adequate and relevant safety net resources. In the book’s conclusion, however, I was optimistic things would get better. A mix of emerging technology, big data systems, and a generation of young entrepreneurs would certainly close these information gaps over the next several years.

Recently, I embarked upon an effort to again identify the social service organizations operating in one of the book’s original study sites. To my surprise, the work was much harder this time around. Print directories are artifacts of the past. Online referral tools provided only spotty coverage. Addresses and service information can still be quite out of date. In many local communities, it felt as if there was less information available now than a decade ago.

Lack of data about local safety net programs, particularly nonprofit organizations, has long been a problem for scholars, community advocates, nonprofit leaders, and philanthropists. Data about providers and populations served are expensive to collect, update, and disseminate. There are no easy ways to monetize data resources or find regular revenue streams to support data work. There are legal obstacles and important concerns about confidentiality. Many organizations don’t have the resources to do much analytic or learning work.

The result is striking. We spend tens of billions of dollars on social services for low-income households each year, but we have only the vaguest ideas of where those dollars go, what impact they have, and where unmet needs exist.

Into this information void steps the Salvation Army and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University with a possible path forward. Working together and with an advisory board of scholars, the Salvation Army and the Lilly School have created a real-time Human Needs Index drawn from service provision tracking systems maintained by more than 7,000 Salvation Army sites nationwide. The index provides useful insight into consumption of an array of emergency services (e.g., food, shelter, clothing) at a given place and point in time across the entire country…(More)”

Advancing Open and Citizen-Centered Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the United States released our third Open Government National Action Plan, announcing more than 40 new or expanded initiatives to advance the President’s commitment to an open and citizen-centered government….In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

One example is the College Scorecard, which shares data through application programming interfaces (APIs) to help students and families make informed choices about education. Open APIs help create an ecosystem around government data in which civil society can provide useful visual tools, making this data more accessible and commercial developers can enable even more value to be extracted to further empower students and their families. In addition to these newer approaches, the plan also highlights significant longstanding open government priorities such as access to information, fiscal transparency, and records management, and continues to push for greater progress in that work.

The plan also focuses on supporting implementation of the landmark 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sets out a vision and priorities for global development over the next 15 years and was adopted last month by 193 world leaders including President Obama. The plan includes commitments to harness open government and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both in the United States and globally, including in the areas of education, health, food security, climate resilience, science and innovation, justice and law enforcement. It also includes a commitment to take stock of existing U.S. government data that relates to the 17 SDGs, and to creating and using data to support progress toward the SDGs.

Some examples of open government efforts newly included in the plan:

  • Promoting employment by unlocking workforce data, including training, skill, job, and wage listings.
  • Enhancing transparency and participation by expanding available Federal services to theOpen311 platform currently available to cities, giving the public a seamless way to report problems and request assistance.
  • Releasing public information from the electronically filed tax forms of nonprofit and charitable organizations (990 forms) as open, machine-readable data.
  • Expanding access to justice through the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable.
  • Promoting open and accountable implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals….(More)”

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”

Can Human-Centered Design “Fix” Humanitarian Aid?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carnegie Council: “Design thinking has emerged as a new tool in humanitarianism. Proponents of the trend believe it can solve the problem long plaguing the aid community: that great ideas fail to be adopted in poor communities because they don’t always take context into account. But are design’s more inclusive methods still a kind of neo-imperialism? Is there a different way?

In this episode of Carnegie Council’s podcast Impact: Where Business and Ethics Meet, host Julia Taylor-Kennedy interviews Debbie Aung Din Taylor,Bruce Nussbaum, Susan Eve Oguya, and Jocelyn Wyatt….

With the rise of social enterprise and corporate social responsibility in the business world, and more efficiency and impact measurements in the non-profit world, one of the trends we’re tracking on the podcast is how global business and global society borrow ideas and methods from one another. This week, we’re looking at an approach that was developed in the business world that’s proving hugely effective in humanitarian work. It’s called human-centered design. And some say it might work even better in the social sector than it did in large corporations. We’ll get back to that later….(More)”

 

Lawyer’s crowdsourcing site aims to help people have their day in court

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Guardian: “With warnings coming thick and fast about the stark ramifications of the government’s sweeping cuts to legal aid, it was probably inevitable that someone would come up with a new way to plug some gaps in access to justice. Enter the legal crowdfunder, CrowdJustice, an online platform where people who might not otherwise get their case heard can raise cash to pay for legal representation and court costs.

The brainchild of 33-year-old lawyer Julia Salasky, and the first of its kind in the UK, CrowdJustice provides people who have a public interest case but lack adequate financial resources with a forum where they can publicise their case and, if all goes to plan, generate funding for legal action by attracting public support and donations.

“We are trying to increase access to justice – that’s the baseline,” says Salasky. “I think it’s a social good.”

The platform was launched just a few months ago, but has already attracteda range of cases both large and small, including some that could set important legal precedents.

CrowdJustice has helped the campaign, Jengba (Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association) to raise funds to intervene in a supreme court case to consider reforming the law of joint enterprise that can find people guilty of a crime, including murder, committed by someone else. The group amassed £10,000 in donations for legal assistance as part of their ongoing challenge to the legal doctrine of “joint enterprise”, which disproportionately prosecutes people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds for violent crimes where it is alleged they have acted together for a common purpose.

In another case, a Northern Irish woman who discovered she wasn’t entitled to her partner’s occupational pension after he died because of a bureaucratic requirement that did not apply to married couples, used CrowdJustice to help raise money to take her case all the way to the supreme court. “If she wins, it will have an enormous precedent-setting value for the legal rights of all couples who cohabit,” Salasky says….(The Guardian)”

In post-earthquake Nepal, open data accountability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Deepa Rai at the Worldbank blog: “….Following the earthquake, there was an overwhelming response from technocrats and data crunchers to use data visualizations for disaster risk assessment. The Government of Nepal made datasets available through its Disaster Data Portal and many organizations and individuals also pitched in and produced visual data platforms.
However, the use of open data has not been limited to disaster response. It was, and still is, instrumental in tracking how much funding has been received and how it’s being allocated. Through the use of open data, people can make their own analysis based on the information provided online.

Direct Relief, a not-for-profit company, has collected such information and helped gathered data from the Prime Minister’s relief fund and then created infographics which have been useful for media and immediate distribution on social platforms. MapJournal’s visual maps became vital during the Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) to assess and map areas where relief and reconstruction efforts were urgently needed.

Direct Relief Medical Relief partner locations
Direct Relief medical relief partner locations in context of population affected and injuries by district
Photo Credit: Data Relief Services

Open data and accountability
However, the work of open data doesn’t end with relief distribution and disaster risk assessment. It is also hugely impactful in keeping track of how relief money is pledged, allocated, and spent. One such web application,openenet.net is making this possible by aggregating post disaster funding data from international and national sources into infographics. “The objective of the system,” reads the website “is to ensure transparency and accountability of relief funds and resources to ensure that it reaches to targeted beneficiaries. We believe that transparency of funds in an open and accessible manner within a central platform is perhaps the first step to ensure effective mobilization of available resources.”
Four months after the earthquake, Nepali media have already started to report on aid spending — or the lack of it. This has been made possible by the use of open data from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) and illustrates how critical data is for the effective use of aid money.
Open data platforms emerging after the quakes have been crucial in questioning the accountability of aid provisions and ultimately resulting in more successful development outcomes….(More)”

Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Minna Ruckenstein and Mika Pantzar in New Media and Society: “This article investigates the metaphor of the Quantified Self (QS) as it is presented in the magazine Wired (2008–2012). Four interrelated themes—transparency, optimization, feedback loop, and biohacking—are identified as formative in defining a new numerical self and promoting a dataist paradigm. Wired captures certain interests and desires with the QS metaphor, while ignoring and downplaying others, suggesting that the QS positions self-tracking devices and applications as interfaces that energize technological engagements, thereby pushing us to rethink life in a data-driven manner. The thematic analysis of the QS is treated as a schematic aid for raising critical questions about self-quantification, for instance, detecting the merging of epistemological claims, technological devices, and market-making efforts. From this perspective, another definition of the QS emerges: a knowledge system that remains flexible in its aims and can be used as a resource for epistemological inquiry and in the formation of alternative paradigms….(More)”

Weak States, Poor Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Angus Deaton in Project Syndicate: “Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans’ various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.

Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine. Certainly, not all of these services are as good as they might be, nor held in equal regard by everyone; but people mostly pay their taxes, and if the way that money is spent offends some, a lively public debate ensues, and regular elections allow people to change priorities.

All of this is so obvious that it hardly needs saying – at least for those who live in rich countries with effective governments. But most of the world’s population does not.

In much of Africa and Asia, states lack the capacity to raise taxes or deliver services. The contract between government and governed – imperfect in rich countries – is often altogether absent in poor countries. The New York cop was little more than impolite (and busy providing a service); in much of the world, police prey on the people they are supposed to protect, shaking them down for money or persecuting them on behalf of powerful patrons.

Even in a middle-income country like India, public schools and public clinics face mass (unpunished) absenteeism. Private doctors give people what (they think) they want – injections, intravenous drips, and antibiotics – but the state does not regulate them, and many practitioners are entirely unqualified.

Throughout the developing world, children die because they are born in the wrong place – not of exotic, incurable diseases, but of the commonplace childhood illnesses that we have known how to treat for almost a century. Without a state that is capable of delivering routine maternal and child health care, these children will continue to die.

Likewise, without government capacity, regulation and enforcement do not work properly, so businesses find it difficult to operate. Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.

The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.

Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity….

One thing that we can do is to agitate for our own governments to stop doing those things that make it harder for poor countries to stop being poor. Reducing aid is one, but so is limiting the arms trade, improving rich-country trade and subsidy policies, providing technical advice that is not tied to aid, and developing better drugs for diseases that do not affect rich people. We cannot help the poor by making their already-weak governments even weaker….(More)”

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