Paper by Felix Ritchie: “The ‘Five Safes’ is a popular way to structure thinking about data access solutions. Originally used mainly by statistical agencies and social science academics, in recent years it has been adopted more widely across government, health organisations and private sector bodies. This paper explains the Five Safes, how the concept is used to organise and simplify decision-making, and how it helps to address concerns of different constituencies. We show how it aligns to recent regulation, anticipating the shift towards multi-dimensional data management strategies. We provide a number of practical examples as case studies for further information. We also briefly consider what issues the Five Safes does not address, and how the framework sits within a wider body of work on data access which challenges traditional data access models…(More)”.
Are robots taking our jobs?
Hasan Bakhshi et al at Nesta: “In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into the impacts of automation on work. This makes sense: artificial intelligence and robotics are encroaching on areas of human activity that were simply unimaginable a few years ago.
We ourselves have made contributions to this debate (here, here and here). In The Future of Skills, however, we argue that public dialogues that consider automation alone are dangerous and misleading.
They are dangerous, because popular narratives matter for economic outcomes, and a narrative of relentless technological displacement of labour markets risks chilling innovation and growth, at a time when productivity growth is flagging in developed countries.
They are misleading because there are opportunities for boosting growth – if our education and training systems are agile enough to respond appropriately. However, while there is a burgeoning field of research on the automatability of occupations, there is far less that focuses on skills, and even less that generates actionable insights for stakeholders in areas like job redesign and learning priorities.
There is also a need to recognise that parallel to automation is a set of broader technological, demographic, economic and environmental trends which will have profound implications for employment. In some cases, the trends will reinforce one another; in others, they will produce second-order effects which may be missed when viewed in isolation…..
Skills investment must be at the centre of any long-term strategy for adjusting to structural change. A precondition is access to good quality, transparent analysis of future skills needs, as without it, labour market participants and policymakers risk flying blind. The approach we’ve developed is a step towards improving our understanding of this vital agenda and one that invites a more pro-active reaction than the defensive one that has characterised public discussions on automation in recent years. We’d love to hear your comments….(More).”
Using big data to predict suicide risk among Canadian youth
SAS Insights “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, accounting for one-fifth of deaths of people under the age of 25 in 2011. The Canadian Mental Health Association states that among 15 – 24 year olds the number is an even more frightening at 24 percent – the third highest in the industrialized world. Yet despite these disturbing statistics, the signals that an individual plans on self-injury or suicide are hard to isolate….
Team members …collected 2.3 million tweets and used text mining software to identify 1.1 million of them as likely to have been authored by 13 to 17 year olds in Canada by building a machine learning model to predict age, based on the open source PAN author profiling dataset. Their analysis made use of natural language processing, predictive modelling, text mining, and data visualization….
However, there were challenges. Ages are not revealed on Twitter, so the team had to figure out how to tease out the data for 13 – 17 year olds in Canada. “We had a text data set, and we created a model to identify if people were in that age group based on how they talked in their tweets,” Soehl said. “From there, we picked some specific buzzwords and created topics around them, and our software mined those tweets to collect the people.”
Another issue was the restrictions Twitter places on pulling data, though Soehl believes that once this analysis becomes an established solution, Twitter may work with researchers to expedite the process. “Now that we’ve shown it’s possible, there are a lot of places we can go with it,” said Soehl. “Once you know your path and figure out what’s going to be valuable, things come together quickly.”
The team looked at the percentage of people in the group who were talking about depression or suicide, and what they were talking about. Horne said that when SAS’ work went in front of a Canadian audience working in health care, they said that it definitely filled a gap in their data — and that was the validation he’d been looking for. The team also won $10,000 for creating the best answer to this question (the team donated the award money to two mental health charities: Mind Your Mind and Rise Asset Development)
What’s next?
That doesn’t mean the work is done, said Jos Polfliet. “We’re just scraping the surface of what can be done with the information.” Another way to use the results is to look at patterns and trends….(More)”
User Centric E-Government: Challenges and Opportunities
Book edited by Saqib Saeed, Zaigham Mahmood and T. Ramayah: “This book provides user studies and theories related to user-centered technology design processes for e-government projects. The book mainly discusses inherent issues of technology design implications, user experiences, and guidelines for technology appropriation. Ethnographic studies focusing on real life examples will enable readers to understand the problems in an effective way. Furthermore, the theories and results will help researchers and practitioners to handle these challenges in an efficient way.
E-Government is about harnessing the information revolution to improve the efficiency of government processes and the lives of citizens. It aims at a citizen centered approach to governance through effective use of the Internet and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). E-Government promotes transparency and effectiveness of a government’s processes as well as citizens’ participation (e-participation) in the affairs of the government. Whereas E-government projects are huge undertakings for government departments, a user-centric approach requires citizens’ participation in the design and delivery of e government services. In both these respects, there are huge challenges and governments require long term commitment as well as correct planning and availability of financial resources to address them.
System design for e-governmental applications is inherently a complex process. In successful e-government projects, appropriately designed technology infrastructure plays a pivotal rule. The technology appropriation process requires that e-government technologies should be in line with the work practices of end users, so that successful usage of these technologies can be realized. E-governmental systems which fail to take into account such human factors result in failure and wasting huge amounts of public money as well as a loss of confidence of the public in such technological infrastructures. It is highly important that citizens are enabled to have access to the appropriate information technology, have knowledge and skills to use the available technology, and have the positive commitment to affect the governments’ strategies. So, enabling citizens to effectively participate is much more difficult. This book addresses these inherent challenges and available opportunities with respect to user-centric e-government….(More)”.
Mapping service design and policy design
UK Policy Lab: “…Over the summer in the Policy Lab we have started mapping different policy options, showing the variety of ways policy-makers might use their power to influence people’s actions and behaviours. We have grouped these into seven categories from low level to large scale interventions.
Carrots or sticks
These styles of intervention include traditional law-making powers (sticks) or applying softer influencing powers (carrots) such as system stewardship. In reality policy-making is much more complex than most people imagine. From this starting point we’ve created a grid of 28 different ways policy-makers operate at different stages of maturity. This is still work in progress so we would very much welcome your thoughts. We are currently building examples for each of the styles from across government. The design choices for policy-makers early in policy development shape how a policy is delivered and the kind of results that can be achieved. We have played around a lot with the language, and will continue to test this in the Lab. However, it should be clear from the array of possibilities that determining which course of action, which levers will deliver the outcomes needed, in any particular circumstance requires great skill and judgement…(More)”.
Humanizing technology
Kaliya Young at Open Democracy: “Can we use the internet to enhance deep human connection and support the emergence of thriving communities in which everyone’s needs are met and people’s lives are filled with joy and meaning?….
Our work on ‘technical’ technologies won’t generate broad human gains unless we invest an equal amount of time, energy and resources in the development of social and emotional technologies that drive how our whole society is organized and how we work together. I think we are actually on the cusp of having the tools, understanding and infrastructure to make that happen, without all our ideas and organizing being intermediated by giant corporations. But what does that mean in practice?
I think two things are absolutely vital.
First of all, how do we connect all the people and all the groups that want to align their goals in pursuit of social justice, deep democracy, and the development of new economies that share wealth and protect the environment? How are people supported to protect their own autonomy while also working with multiple other groups in processes of joint work and collective action?
One key element of the answer to that question is to generate a digital identity that is not under the control of a corporation, an organization or a government.
I have been co-leading the community surrounding the Internet Identity Workshop for the last 12 years. After many explorations of the techno-possibility landscape we have finally made some breakthroughs that will lay the foundations of a real internet-scale infrastructure to support what are called ‘user-centric’ or ‘self-sovereign’ identities.
This infrastructure consists of a network with two different types of nodes—people and organizations—with each individual being able to join lots of different groups. But regardless of how many groups they join, people will need a digital identity that is not owned by Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook. That’s the only way they will be able to control their own autonomous interactions on the internet. If open standards are not created for this critical piece of infrastructure then we will end up in a future where giant corporations control all of our identities. In many ways we are in this future now.
This is where something called ‘Shared Ledger Technology’ or SLT comes in—more commonly known as ‘blockchain’ or ‘distributed ledger technology.’ SLT represents a huge innovation in terms of databases that can be read by anyone and which are highly resistant to tampering—meaning that data cannot be erased or changed once entered. At the moment there’s a lot of work going on to design the encryption key management that’s necessary to support the creation and operation of these unique private channels of connection and communication between individuals and organizations. The Sovrin Foundation has built an SLT specifically for digital identity key management, and has donated the code required to the HyperLeger Foundation under ‘project Indy.’…
To put it simply, technical technologies are easier to turn in the direction of democracy and social justice if they are developed and applied with social and emotional intelligence. Combining all three together is the key to using technology for liberating ends….(More)”.
Data’s big moment? Here’s what you need to know
Opinion piece by Claire Melamed, and Mahamudu Bawumia: “Knowledge is power, and knowledge will empower humanity to tackle the most serious challenges of our time. We are all reliant on accurate knowledge to achieve the collective ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the clock is ticking.
So let’s test your knowledge: A) Are boys or girls under 2 years old more likely to be stunted? B) Are slum-dwellers more likely to be young or old? C) What proportion of disabled people are unemployed? D) What proportion of migrants have birth certificates?
Answer — no one knows.
Data is the story of people’s lives in numbers. Data allows researchers, campaigners, and policymakers to understand how societies work, who gains, and who loses from changes and crises. If you’re not in the data, you’re not in the picture — and too many people are still uncounted. There’s a huge need for concerted efforts to uncover the realities of life for the “left behind” in 2017, and a coalition of partners have been working to disaggregate data on gender, race, age, disabilities, migratory status, and more.
But data has a PR problem. Much as it used to be fine to say “I hate mathematics,” today we all encounter people who think numbers are a distraction from the real business of helping people. But we cannot turn our backs on the greatest renewable resource of our time — the resource that will inform and guide humanity to both define and solve our problems….(More)”.
Building the Learning City
Daniel Castro at GovTech: “…Like other technologies, smart cities will evolve and mature over time. The earliest will provide basic insights from data and enable local leaders to engage in evidence-based governance. These efforts will be important, but they will represent only incremental change from what cities have already been doing. For example, Baltimore created its CitiStat program in 1999 to measure all municipal functions and improve oversight and accountability of city agencies. Early smart cities will have substantially more data at their disposal, but they will not necessarily use this data in fundamentally new ways.
The second stage of smart cities will use predictive analytics to identify patterns and forecast trends. These types of insights will be especially valuable to city planners and local officials responsible for improving municipal services and responding to changing demands. These cities will reduce downtime on critical municipal infrastructure by performing preventive maintenance on vehicles, bridges and buildings, and more quickly intervene when public health and safety issues arise. This stage will rely on powerful data-driven technologies, such as the systems that enable Netflix to offer movie recommendations and Amazon to suggest additional products for customers.
The third stage of smart cities will focus on using “prescriptive analytics” to use data to optimize processes automatically. Whereas the second stage of smart cities will be primarily about using data to supply insights about the future that will allow city leaders to evaluate different choices, this third stage will be about relying on algorithms to make many of these decisions independently. Much like a system of smart traffic signals uses real-time data to optimize traffic flow, these algorithms will help to automate more government functions and increase the productivity of municipal employees.
At all three stages of smart city development, there is an opportunity for city leaders to look beyond local needs and consider how they can design a smart city that will be part of a larger network of cities that share and learn from one another. On its own, a smart city can use data to track local trends, but as part of a network, a smart city can benchmark itself against a set of similar peers. For example, water and waste management departments can compare metrics to assess their relative performance and identify opportunities for change.
If they hope to successfully develop into learning cities, cities can begin the process of setting up to work jointly with their peers by participating in forums such as the Global City Teams Challenge, an initiative to bring together government and industry stakeholders working on common smart city problems. But longer-term change will require city leaders to reorient their planning to consider not only the needs of their city, but also how they fit into the larger network….(More)”
Voice or chatter? Making ICTs work for transformative citizen engagement
Research Report Summary by Making All Voices Count: “What are the conditions in democratic governance that make information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated citizen engagement transformative? While substantial scholarship exists on the role of the Internet and digital technologies in triggering moments of political disruption and cascading upheavals, academic interest in the sort of deep change that transforms institutional cultures of democratic governance, occurring in ‘slow time’, has been relatively muted.
This study attempts to fill this gap. It is inspired by the idea of participation in everyday democracy and seeks to explore how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can promote democratic governance and amplify citizen voice.
ICT-mediated citizen engagement is defined by this study as comprising digitally-mediated information outreach, dialogue, consultation, collaboration and decision-making, initiated either by government or by citizens, towards greater government accountability and responsiveness.
The study involved empirical explorations of citizen engagement initiatives in eight sites – two in Asia (India and Philippines), one in Africa (South Africa), three in South America (Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay) and two in Europe (Netherlands and Spain).
This summary of the larger Research Report presents recommendations for how public policies and programmes can promote ICTs for citizen engagement and transformative citizenship. In doing so it provides an overview of the discussion the authors undertake on three inter-related dimensions, namely:
- calibrating digitally mediated citizen participation as a measure of political empowerment and equality
- designing techno-public spaces as bastions of inclusive democracy
- ensuring that the rule of law upholds democratic principles in digitally mediated governance…(More. Full research report)
Data Sharing Vital in Fight Against Childhood Obesity
According to UNICEF, solving some of the most complex problems affecting children around the world will require access to different data sets and expertise from diverse sectors. The rapid rise in the availability of quality data offers a wealth of information to address complex problems affecting children. The charity has identified an opportunity to tap into this potential through collaborative working, prompting the development of DataCollaboratives.org in partnership with The Governance Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and the Omidyar Network. The aim for DataCollaboratives is to encourage organisations from different sectors, including private companies, research institutions, government agencies and others, to exchange and share data to help solve public problems.
The initiative is now being promoted in Scotland through UNICEF’s partnership with The Data Lab, who will work together to deliver a Data Collaboratives hub in Scotland where data scientists and strategists will work on some of the most important issues facing children around the world. Finding solutions to these problems has the potential to transform the lives of some of the most disadvantaged children in Scotland, the UK, and around the globe….(More)”.