Replicating the Justice Data Lab in the USA: Key Considerations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Tracey Gyateng and Tris Lumley: “Since 2011, NPC has researched, supported and advocated for the development of impact-focussed Data Labs in the UK. The goal has been to unlock government administrative data so that organisations (primarily nonprofits) who provide a social service can understand the impact of their services on the people who use them.

So far, one of these Data Labs has been developed to measure re-offending outcomes- the Justice Data Lab-, and others are currently being piloted for employment and education. Given our seven years of work in this area, we at NPC have decided to reflect on the key factors needed to create a Data Lab with our report: How to Create an Impact Data Lab. This blog outlines these factors, examines whether they are present in the USA, and asks what the next steps should be — drawing on the research undertaken with the Governance Lab….Below we examine the key factors and to what extent they appear to be present within the USA.

Environment: A broad culture that supports impact measurement. Similar to the UK, nonprofits in the USA are increasingly measuring the impact they have had on the participants of their service and sharing the difficulties of undertaking robust, high quality evaluations.

Data: Individual person-level administrative data. A key difference between the two countries is that, in the USA, personal data on social services tends to be held at a local, rather than central level. In the UK social services data such as reoffending, education and employment are collated into a central database. In the USA, the federal government has limited centrally collated personal data, instead this data can be found at state/city level….

A leading advocate: A Data Lab project team, and strong networks. Data Labs do not manifest by themselves. They requires a lead agency to campaign with, and on behalf of, nonprofits to set out a persuasive case for their development. In the USA, we have developed a partnership with the Governance Lab to seek out opportunities where Data Labs can be established but given the size of the country, there is scope for further collaborations/ and or advocates to be identified and supported.

Customers: Identifiable organisations that would use the Data Lab. Initial discussions with several US nonprofits and academia indicate support for a Data Lab in their context. Broad consultation based on an agreed region and outcome(s) will be needed to fully assess the potential customer base.

Data owners: Engaged civil servants. Generating buy-in and persuading various stakeholders including data owners, analysts and politicians is a critical part of setting up a data lab. While the exact profiles of the right people to approach can only be assessed once a region and outcome(s) of interest have been chosen, there are encouraging signs, such as the passing of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policy Making Act of 2017 in the house of representatives which, among other things, mandates the appointment of “Chief Evaluation Officers” in government departments- suggesting that there is bipartisan support for increased data-driven policy evaluation.

Legal and ethical governance: A legal framework for sharing data. In the UK, all personal data is subject to data protection legislation, which provides standardised governance for how personal data can be processed across the country and within the European Union. A universal data protection framework does not exist within the USA, therefore data sharing agreements between customers and government data-owners will need to be designed for the purposes of Data Labs, unless there are existing agreements that enable data sharing for research purposes. This will need to be investigated at the state/city level of a desired Data Lab.

Funding: Resource and support for driving the set-up of the Data Lab. Most of our policy lab case studies were funded by a mixture of philanthropy and government grants. It is expected that a similar mixed funding model will need to be created to establish Data Labs. One alternative is the model adopted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), which was created by the Washington State Legislature and is funded on a project basis, primarily by the state. Additionally funding will be needed to enable advocates of a Data Lab to campaign for the service….(More)”.

The Refugee Identity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Medium essay byPaul Currion: “From Article 6 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law” ) to Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 (“By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”) to the formation of the ID2020 Alliance (whose fourth goal is to “Enable more efficient and effective delivery of development and humanitarian aid), identity has been central to the modern project of development.

Discussion of identity within the aid sector is embedded in a much larger set of political, social, economic, legal and technical discussions at a national and global level. This review will not address that larger set of discussions, but will instead focus specifically on humanitarian aid, and more specifically refugees, and more specifically still on refugee camps as a location in which identity provision is both critical and contested. It is the first output of a DFID-funded research project examining data requirements for service delivery (by UN agencies and NGOs) within refugee camps.

Given how central the issue of identity is for refugees, there is surprisingly little literature about how identity provision is implemented in the context of refugee camps.1 This essay introduces some of the critical issues relating to identity (particularly in the context of the digitisation of aid) and explores how they relate to the research project. It is accompanied by a bibliography for those who are interested in exploring the issue further.,,,(More)”.

How We Identified Burned Villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christophe Koettl in the New York Times: “In mid-February a source in the human rights community told me that villages in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of Congo were being burned amid a renewal of communal fighting. People fleeing the violence told aid workers of arson attacks.

The clashes between the Hema and Lendu communities — on the eastern side of the Ituri province, bordering Uganda — started in December and escalated in early February.

Historically, these distant conflicts have been difficult to analyze. But new technologies allow us to investigate them in close to real time.

I immediately collected active-fire data from NASA — thermal anomalies, or hot spots, that are recorded daily. It showed dozens of fires on the densely forested mountain ridge and along the shoreline of Lake Albert, one of the African Great Lakes between Congo and Uganda.

(Human rights groups also used this type of data, in combination with other evidence, to document the military’s scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya in Myanmar.)

Active-fire data does not provide the cause of a fire, so one must exercise caution in interpreting it, especially when researching violence. It is more commonly used to track wildfires and agricultural fires.

The satellites that collect this information do not provide actual images; they only record the location of active fires, and very large ones at that. So don’t get your hopes up about watching your neighbors barbecue from space — we aren’t quite there yet.

Google and other online mapping platforms often show only blurry satellite images, or have no location names for remote areas such as the small fishing villages around Lake Albert. This makes it difficult to find places where people live. To deal with this challenge, I exported residential data from the online mapping site Openstreetmap.

I then overlaid the NASA data with this new data in Google Earth to look for recorded fires that were in or near populated places. This process gave me a shortlist of 10 locations to investigate.

Location of satellite-recorded active fires (the flames) and residential area data (the white outlines) helped to identify remote locations that had possibly been burned. © Google Earth/DigitalGlobe

Next, the satellite company DigitalGlobe provided me with high-resolution satellite imagery and analysis of these places. The results were disturbing: All the villages I had identified were at least partially burned, with hundreds of destroyed homes.

As this was not a comprehensive analysis of the whole area affected by violence, the actual number of burned villages is probably much higher. Aid organizations are reporting around 70 burned villages and more than 2,000 destroyed homes.

This new visual evidence provided us with a strong basis to report out the whole story. We now had details from both sides of the lake, not just at the refugee landing site in Uganda….(More)”

Launching the Data Culture Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New project by MIT Center for Civic Media and the Engagement Lab@Emerson College: “Learning to work with data is like learning a new language — immersing yourself in the culture is the best way to do it. For some individuals, this means jumping into tools like Excel, Tableau, programming, or R Studio. But what does this mean for a group of people that work together? We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data?

About a year ago we (Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D’Ignazio) found that more and more users of our DataBasic.io suite of tools and activities were asking this question — online and in workshops. In response, with support from the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, we’ve worked together with 25 organizations to create the Data Culture Project. We’re happy to launch it publicly today! Visit datacultureproject.org to learn more.

The Data Culture Project is a hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other — from IT to marketing to programs to evaluation. These are not boring spreadsheet trainings! Try running our fun activities — one per month works as a brown bag lunch to focus people on a common learning goal. For example, “Sketch a Story” brings people together around basic concepts of quantitative text analysis and visual storytelling. “Asking Good Questions” introduces principles of exploratory data analysis in a fun environment. What’s more, you can use the sample data that we provide, or you can integrate your organization’s data as the topic of conversation and learning….(More)”.

Epistemic Public Reason: A Formal Model of Strategic Communication and Deliberative Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brian Kogelmann and Benjamin Ogden: “Epistemic democrats argue that democratic institutions are uniquely suited to select optimal or good policies. Part of why this is so is due to the role deliberation plays in a well-functioning democracy. Yet deliberative democrats disagree about how democratic discourse ought to proceed. Thus, it is unclear what kind of deliberation the epistemic democratic thinks will aid in the selection of good policies.

This paper remedies this lacuna by developing a game theoretic model of competing theories of deliberative democracy found in the literature – what we broadly call shared discourse and open discourse. The model finds that there is a genuine trade-off between the two theories. Open discourse gives too much power to the (potentially arbitrary) first mover, while closed discourse has a tendency to over-implement potentially unjust reforms. We believe these results ought to shift where deliberative democrats focus their attention when debating which theory of democratic discourse is best…(More)”.

How Blockchain can benefit migration programmes and migrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Solon Ardittis at the Migration Data Portal: “According to a recent report published by CB Insights, there are today at least 36 major industries that are likely to benefit from the use of Blockchain technology, ranging from voting procedures, critical infrastructure security, education and healthcare, to car leasing, forecasting, real estate, energy management, government and public records, wills and inheritance, corporate governance and crowdfunding.

In the international aid sector, a number of experiments are currently being conducted to distribute aid funding through the use of Blockchain and thus to improve the tracing of the ways in which aid is disbursed. Among several other examples, the Start Network, which consists of 42 aid agencies across five continents, ranging from large international organizations to national NGOs, has launched a Blockchain-based project that enables the organization both to speed up the distribution of aid funding and to facilitate the tracing of every single payment, from the original donor to each individual assisted.

As Katherine Purvis of The Guardian noted, “Blockchain enthusiasts are hopeful it could be the next big development disruptor. In providing a transparent, instantaneous and indisputable record of transactions, its potential to remove corruption and provide transparency and accountability is one area of intrigue.”

In the field of international migration and refugee affairs, however, Blockchain technology is still in its infancy.

One of the few notable examples is the launch by the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) in May 2017 of a project in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan which, through the use of Blockchain technology, enables the creation of virtual accounts for refugees and the uploading of monthly entitlements that can be spent in the camp’s supermarket through the use of an authorization code. Reportedly, the programme has contributed to a reduction by 98% of the bank costs entailed by the use of a financial service provider.

This is a noteworthy achievement considering that organizations working in international relief can lose up to 3.5% of each aid transaction to various fees and costs and that an estimated 30% of all development funds do not reach their intended recipients because of third-party theft or mismanagement.

At least six other UN agencies including the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN Women, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Development Group (UNDG), are now considering Blockchain applications that could help support international assistance, particularly supply chain management tools, self-auditing of payments, identity management and data storage.

The potential of Blockchain technology in the field of migration and asylum affairs should therefore be fully explored.

At the European Union (EU) level, while a Blockchain task force has been established by the European Parliament to assess the ways in which the technology could be used to provide digital identities to refugees, and while the European Commission has recently launched a call for project proposals to examine the potential of Blockchain in a range of sectors, little focus has been placed so far on EU assistance in the field of migration and asylum, both within the EU and in third countries with which the EU has negotiated migration partnership agreements.

This is despite the fact that the use of Blockchain in a number of major programme interventions in the field of migration and asylum could help improve not only their cost-efficiency but also, at least as importantly, their degree of transparency and accountability. This at a time when media and civil society organizations exercise increased scrutiny over the quality and ethical standards of such interventions.

In Europe, for example, Blockchain could help administer the EU Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF), both in terms of transferring funds from the European Commission to the eligible NGOs in the Member States and in terms of project managers then reporting on spending. This would help alleviate many of the recurrent challenges faced by NGOs in managing funds in line with stringent EU regulations.

As crucially, Blockchain would have the potential to increase transparency and accountability in the channeling and spending of EU funds in third countries, particularly under the Partnership Framework and other recent schemes to prevent irregular migration to Europe.

A case in point is the administration of EU aid in response to the refugee emergency in Greece where, reportedly, there continues to be insufficient oversight of the full range of commitments and outcomes of large EU-funded investments, particularly in the housing sector. Another example is the set of recent programme interventions in Libya, where a growing number of incidents of human rights abuses and financial mismanagement are being brought to light….(More)”.

And Yet They Thrive!—Regaining the Relevance of a Transparency System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Pontus Hedlin in Development Policy Review: “Over the past decade, a host of donor organizations implemented transparency systems to make international development aid more transparent to the public. These initiatives have met with little public interest, but their proliferation and development show no sign of diminishing. This article shows how internal importance to the political system, fueled by formal rankings and the exhibition of transparency systems as a flagship initiative, can replace relevance to the public as a driving force for sustainable development. The article concludes by discussing the possibility of a future development where transparency systems finally do connect with user groups, such as citizens of both donor and recipient countries, and gain a relevance even beyond original intentions….(More)”.

The Tyranny of Metrics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jerry Z. Muller on “How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens our schools, medical care, businesses, and government…

Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we’ve gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing–and shows how we can begin to fix the problem.

Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging “gaming the stats” or “teaching to the test.” That’s because what can and does get measured is not always worth measuring, may not be what we really want to know, and may draw effort away from the things we care about. Along the way, we learn why paying for measured performance doesn’t work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But metrics can be good when used as a complement to—rather than a replacement for—judgment based on personal experience, and Muller also gives examples of when metrics have been beneficial…(More)”.

Extracting crowd intelligence from pervasive and social big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Leye Wang, Vincent Gauthier, Guanling Chen and Luis Moreira-Matias of Special Issue of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing: “With the prevalence of ubiquitous computing devices (smartphones, wearable devices, etc.) and social network services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), humans are generating massive digital traces continuously in their daily life. Considering the invaluable crowd intelligence residing in these pervasive and social big data, a spectrum of opportunities is emerging to enable promising smart applications for easing individual life, increasing company profit, as well as facilitating city development. However, the nature of big data also poses fundamental challenges on the techniques and applications relying on the pervasive and social big data from multiple perspectives such as algorithm effectiveness, computation speed, energy efficiency, user privacy, server security, data heterogeneity and system scalability. This special issue presents the state-of-the-art research achievements in addressing these challenges. After the rigorous review process of reviewers and guest editors, eight papers were accepted as follows.

The first paper “Automated recognition of hypertension through overnight continuous HRV monitoring” by Ni et al. proposes a non-invasive way to differentiate hypertension patients from healthy people with the pervasive sensors such as a waist belt. To this end, the authors train a machine learning model based on the heart rate data sensed from waists worn by a crowd of people, and the experiments show that the detection accuracy is around 93%.

The second paper “The workforce analyzer: group discovery among LinkedIn public profiles” by Dai et al. describes two users’ group discovery methods among LinkedIn public profiles. One is based on K-means and another is based on SVM. The authors contrast results of both methods and provide insights about the trending professional orientations of the workforce from an online perspective.

The third paper “Tweet and followee personalized recommendations based on knowledge graphs” by Pla Karidi et al. present an efficient semantic recommendation method that helps users filter the Twitter stream for interesting content. The foundation of this method is a knowledge graph that can represent all user topics of interest as a variety of concepts, objects, events, persons, entities, locations and the relations between them. An important advantage of the authors’ method is that it reduces the effects of problems such as over-recommendation and over-specialization.

The fourth paper “CrowdTravel: scenic spot profiling by using heterogeneous crowdsourced data” by Guo et al. proposes CrowdTravel, a multi-source social media data fusion approach for multi-aspect tourism information perception, which can provide travelling assistance for tourists by crowd intelligence mining. Experiments over a dataset of several popular scenic spots in Beijing and Xi’an, China, indicate that the authors’ approach attains fine-grained characterization for the scenic spots and delivers excellent performance.

The fifth paper “Internet of Things based activity surveillance of defence personnel” by Bhatia et al. presents a comprehensive IoT-based framework for analyzing national integrity of defence personnel with consideration to his/her daily activities. Specifically, Integrity Index Value is defined for every defence personnel based on different social engagements, and activities for detecting the vulnerability to national security. In addition to this, a probabilistic decision tree based automated decision making is presented to aid defence officials in analyzing various activities of a defence personnel for his/her integrity assessment.

The sixth paper “Recommending property with short days-on-market for estate agency” by Mou et al. proposes an estate with short days-on-market appraisal framework to automatically recommend those estates using transaction data and profile information crawled from websites. Both the spatial and temporal characteristics of an estate are integrated into the framework. The results show that the proposed framework can estimate accurately about 78% estates.

The seventh paper “An anonymous data reporting strategy with ensuring incentives for mobile crowd-sensing” by Li et al. proposes a system and a strategy to ensure anonymous data reporting while ensuring incentives simultaneously. The proposed protocol is arranged in five stages that mainly leverage three concepts: (1) slot reservation based on shuffle, (2) data submission based on bulk transfer and multi-player dc-nets, and (3) incentive mechanism based on blind signature.

The last paper “Semantic place prediction from crowd-sensed mobile phone data” by Celik et al. semantically classifes places visited by smart phone users utilizing the data collected from sensors and wireless interfaces available on the phones as well as phone usage patterns, such as battery level, and time-related information, with machine learning algorithms. For this study, the authors collect data from 15 participants at Galatasaray University for 1 month, and try different classification algorithms such as decision tree, random forest, k-nearest neighbour, naive Bayes, and multi-layer perceptron….(More)”.

Bitcoin, blockchain and the fight against poverty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “…This month, Hernando de Soto, an acclaimed development economist from Peru, joined forces with Patrick Byrne, a controversial American luminary of the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem, to launch an unusual project to fight poverty.

What they hope to do is to use decentralised digital ledgers — similar to those used for bitcoin — to record the formal and informal property holdings of dispossessed communities, with the idea of giving them more security.  This innovation might seem a million miles away from the Shining Path saga, and from our normal concept of philanthropy.

After all, at this time of year, we tend to assume that “aid” is about donating money, sponsoring schools and so on. But De Soto is convinced that the key to tackling extreme poverty — and the desperate violence that can accompany it — is to focus on property rights. After all, he argues, when conflict explodes in poor communities, this is usually because people feel insecure and dispossessed. Even if poor people hold property, their ownership is often based on informal rights rather than any official government ledger — and their homes and land can be seized by big companies or government officials.

Giving better property rights to the poor would mean more prosperity and security for everyone, De Soto believes. And he argues that one crucial reason why Shining Path was defeated was that the Peruvian government eventually did precisely that, awarding peasants land rights (partly on his advice). So he wants to repeat the trick around the world, using decentralised digital ledgers that will let poor communities record their formal and informal property rights in a permanent manner — without government interference.

“When you have property rights, you can get credit, you can advance,” De Soto says. “It’s the key to economic growth — much better than aid.” He believes that blockchain technology, which was set up as a platform for digital currencies such as bitcoin, will let the poor help themselves, as he regards cyber rights as more important than charity….(More)”.