Strengthening CRVS Systems to Improve Migration Policy: A Promising Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Tawheeda Wahabzada and Deirdre Appel: “Migration is one of the most pressing issues of our time and innovation for migration policy can take on several different shapes to help solve challenges. It is seen through radical technological breakthrough such as biometric identifiers that completely transform the status quo as well as technological disruptions like mobile phone fund transforms that alter an existing process. There is also incremental innovation, or the gradual improvement of an existing process or institution even. Regardless of where the fall on the spectrum, their innovative applications are all relevant to migration policy.

Incremental innovation for civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems can greatly benefit migrants and the policymakers trying to help them. According to World Health Organization, a well-functioning CRVS system registers all births and deaths, issues birth and death certificates, and compiles and disseminates vital statistics, including cause of death information. It may also record marriages and divorces. Each of these services brings a world of crucial advantages. But despite the social and legal benefits for individuals, especially migrants, these systems remain underfunded and under functioning. More than 100 low and middle-income countries lack functional CRVS systems and about one-third of all births are not registered. This amounts to more than one billion people without a legal identity leaving them unable to prove who they are and creating serious barriers to access health, education, financial, and other social services.

Throughout countries in Africa, there are great differences in CRVS coverage, where birth coverage ranges from above 90 percent in some North African countries to under 50 percent across several countries in different regions; and with death registration having greater gaps with either no information or lower coverage rates. For countries with low functioning CRVS systems, potential migrants from these countries could face additional obstacles in obtaining birth certificates and proof of identification….(More)”. See also https://data4migration.org/blog/

Arts Data in the Public Sector: Strategies for local arts agencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Bloomberg Associates: “Cities are increasingly using data to help shape policy and identify service gaps, but data about arts and culture is often met with skepticism. Local arts agencies, the city and county entities at the forefront of understanding and serving their local creative communities, often face difficulties in identifying meaningful metrics that capture quality as well as quantity in this unique field. With the Covid-19 pandemic and intensifying demand for equity, the desire for reliable, longitudinal information will only increase in the coming years as municipalities with severely limited resources face critical decisions in their effort toward recovery.

So how can arts-minded cities leverage data to better serve grantees, promote equity in service delivery, and demonstrate the impact of arts and culture across a range of significant policy priorities, among other ambitions?

Produced by our Cultural Assets Management team, Arts Data in the Public Sector highlights the data practices of fifteen local arts agencies across the U.S. to capture a meaningful cross-section of constituencies, resources, and strategies. Through best practices and case studies, the Guide offers useful insights and practical resources that can assist and inspire local government arts funders and advocates as they work to establish more equitable and inclusive practices and to affirm the importance of arts and culture as a public service well into the future…(More)”.

Leveraging Location and Mobility Data: Perils & Practices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Suha Mohamed: “…Mobility data refers to information (often passively captured) that provides insights into the location and movement of a population – often through their interactions with digital mobility devices (like our smartphones) or transport services. Sources of mobility data, while diverse, include call detail records from telecom companies, GPS details from phones or vehicles, geotagged social media data or first or third-party software data. 

Geolocation, a subset of mobility data, may be useful in shaping responsive courses of action as it can be leveraged in granular form to understand hyperlocal realities or, when aggregated, regional, national or international patterns. However, privacy concerns arise from the sensitive or personal data that may be inferred from these records and the often opaque conditions around its usage. The ongoing deployment of contact tracing applications, which largely depend on individual-level location data, have demonstrated extensive potential for misuse and surveillance….

Despite the surveillance and privacy concerns around the use of contact tracing apps and mobility data, it is undeniable that this data has immense public value and has helped officials understand the development of the COVID-19 virus and map its variants and waves. It has also been used to track: areas of mobility that contribute towards increased transmission of the virus, adherence to social distancing norms and the effectiveness of measures like lockdowns or restrictions….(More)”.

Improving Consumer Welfare with Data Portability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Daniel Castro: “Data protection laws and regulations can contain restrictive provisions, which limit data sharing and use, as well as permissive provisions, which increase it. Data portability is an example of a permissive provision that allows consumers to obtain a digital copy of their personal information from an online service and provide this information to other services. By carefully crafting data portability provisions, policymakers can enable consumers to obtain more value from their data, create new opportunities for businesses to innovate with data, and foster competition….(More)”.

Senators unveil bipartisan bill requiring social media giants to open data to researchers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rebecca Klar: “Meta and other social media companies would be required to share their data with outside researchers under a new bill announced by a bipartisan group of senators on Thursday. 

Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) underscored the need for their bill based on information leaked about Meta’s platforms in the so-called Facebook Papers, though the proposal would also apply to other social media companies.

The bill, the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, would allow independent researchers to submit proposals to the National Science Foundation. If the requests are approved, social media companies would be required to provide the necessary data subject to certain privacy protections. 

“It’s increasingly clear that more transparency is needed so that the billions of people who use Facebook, Twitter, and similar platforms can fully understand the impact of those tradeoffs. This bipartisan proposal is an important step that will bring much needed information about the impact of social media companies to light and ought to be a crucial part of any comprehensive strategy that Congress can take to regulate major social media companies,” Coons said in a statement. 

If companies failed to comply with the requirement under the bill, they would be subject to enforcement from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and face losing immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is a controversial provision that provides immunity for internet companies based on content posted by third parties, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed measures to weaken its reach….(More)”.

Data Science and Official Statistics: Toward a New Data Culture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Stefan Schweinfest and Ronald Jansen: “In the digital age, data are generated continuously by many different devices and are being used by many different actors. National statistical offices (NSOs) should benefit from these opportunities to improve data for decision-making. What could be the expanding role for official statistics in this context and how does this relate to emerging disciplines like data science? This article explores some new ideas. In the avalanche of new data, society may need a data steward, and the NSO could take on that role, while paying close attention to the protection of privacy. Data science will become increasingly important for extracting meaningful information from large amounts of data. NSOs will need to hire data scientists and data engineers and will need to train their staff in these fast-developing fields. NSOs will also need to clearly communicate new and experimental data and foster a good understanding of statistics. Collaboration of official statistics with the private sector, academia, and civil society will be the new way of working and the fundamental principles of official statistics may have to apply to all those actors. This article envisions that we are gradually working toward such a new data culture…(More)”.

Business Data Sharing through Data Marketplaces: A Systematic Literature Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Abbas, Antragama E., Wirawan Agahari, Montijn van de Ven, Anneke Zuiderwijk, and Mark de Reuver: “Data marketplaces are expected to play a crucial role in tomorrow’s data economy, but such marketplaces are seldom commercially viable. Currently, there is no clear understanding of the knowledge gaps in data marketplace research, especially not of neglected research topics that may advance such marketplaces toward commercialization. This study provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of data marketplace research. We employ a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach to examine 133 academic articles and structure our analysis using the Service-Technology-Organization-Finance (STOF) model. We find that the extant data marketplace literature is primarily dominated by technical research, such as discussions about computational pricing and architecture. To move past the first stage of the platform’s lifecycle (i.e., platform design) to the second stage (i.e., platform adoption), we call for empirical research in non-technological areas, such as customer expected value and market segmentation….(More)”.

‘Anyway, the dashboard is dead’: On trying to build urban informatics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jathan Sadowski: “How do the idealised promises and purposes of urban informatics compare to the material politics and practices of their implementation? To answer this question, I ethnographically trace the development of two data dashboards by strategic planners in an Australian city over the course of 2 years. By studying this techno-political process from its origins onward, I uncovered an interesting story of obdurate institutions, bureaucratic momentum, unexpected troubles, and, ultimately, frustration and failure. These kinds of stories, which often go untold in the annals of innovation, contrast starkly with more common framings of technological triumph and transformation. They also, I argue, reveal much more about how techno-political systems are actualised in the world…(More)”.

Data protection in the context of covid-19. A short (hi)story of tracing applications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Elise Poillot, Gabriele Lenzini, Giorgio Resta, and Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich: “The volume presents the results of a research project  (named “Legafight”) funded by the Luxembourg Fond National de la Recherche in order to verify if and how digital tracing applications could be implemented in the Grand-Duchy in order to counter and abate the Covid-19 pandemic. This inevitably brought to a deep comparative overview of the various existing various models, starting from that of the European Union and those put into practice by Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy, with attention also to some Anglo-Saxon approaches (the UK and Australia). Not surprisingly the main issue which had to be tackled was that of the protection of the personal data collected through the tracing applications, their use by public health authorities and the trust laid in tracing procedures by citizens. Over the last 18 months tracing apps have registered a rise, a fall, and a sudden rebirth as mediums devoted not so much to collect data, but rather to distribute real time information which should allow informed decisions and be used as repositories of health certifications…(More)”.

Helpline data used to monitor population distress in a pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexander Tsai in Nature: “An important challenge in addressing mental-health problems is that trends can be difficult to detect because detection relies heavily on self-disclosure. As such, helplines — telephone services that provide crisis intervention to callers seeking help — might serve as a particularly useful source of anonymized data regarding the mental health of a population. This profiling could be especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, given the potential emergence or exacerbation of mental-health problems. Together, the threat of disease to oneself and others that is associated with a local epidemic, the restrictiveness of local non-pharmaceutical interventions (such as stay-at-home orders) and the potential associated loss of income could have contributed to a decline in the mental health of a population while at the same time inhibiting or delaying people’s search for help for problems. Writing in Nature, Brülhart et al. present evidence suggesting that helpline-call data can be used to monitor real-time changes in the mental health of a population — including over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More so than in other areas of medicine, the stigma that can be associated with mental illness often prevents people from fully disclosing their experiences and feelings to those in their social networks, or even to licensed mental-health-care professionals. Furthermore, although mental illness contributes immensely to the global disease burden, primary health-care providers are overburdened, mental-health systems are underfunded and access to evidence-based treatment remains poor. For these reasons, helplines have, since their introduction in the United Kingdom by Samaritans in 1953, played a key part in providing low- or no-cost, anonymous support to people with unmet acute and chronic mental-health needs around the world.

Brülhart and colleagues updated and expanded on their previous work looking at helpline calls in one country by assembling data on more than 7 million helpline calls in 19 countries over the course of 2019, 2020 and part of 2021. They found that, within 6 weeks of the start of a country’s initial outbreak (defined as the week in which the cumulative number of reported SARS-CoV-2 infections was higher than 1 in 100,000 inhabitants), call volumes to helplines peaked at 35% higher than pre-pandemic levels (Fig. 1). By examining the changes in the proportion of calls relating to different categories, Brülhart and co-workers attribute these increases to fear, loneliness and concerns about health. The authors also found that suicide-related calls increased in the wake of more-stringent, non-pharmaceutical interventions, but that such calls decreased when income-support policies were introduced. The latter finding is perhaps unsurprising, but is a welcome addition to the evidence base that supports ongoing appeals for financial and other support to mitigate the adverse effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on uncertainties over employment, income and housing security…(More)”.