A Behavioral Economics Approach to Digitalisation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dirk Beerbaum and Julia M. Puaschunder: “A growing body of academic research in the field of behavioural economics, political science and psychology demonstrate how an invisible hand can nudge people’s decisions towards a preferred option. Contrary to the assumptions of the neoclassical economics, supporters of nudging argue that people have problems coping with a complex world, because of their limited knowledge and their restricted rationality. Technological improvement in the age of information has increased the possibilities to control the innocent social media users or penalise private investors and reap the benefits of their existence in hidden persuasion and discrimination. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated and uninformed citizen and investor, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers (Puaschunder 2017a, b; 2018a, b).

The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold. The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and coding rules, relevant for political power and influencing the investor’s decision usefulness (Puaschunder 2017a, b; 2018a, b). This paper takes as a case the “transparency technology XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)” (Sunstein 2013, 20), which should make data more accessible as well as usable for private investors. It is part of the choice architecture on regulation by governments (Sunstein 2013). However, XBRL is bounded to a taxonomy (Piechocki and Felden 2007).

Considering theoretical literature and field research, a representation issue (Beerbaum, Piechocki and Weber 2017) for principles-based accounting taxonomies exists, which intelligent machines applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Mwilu, Prat and Comyn-Wattiau 2015) nudge to facilitate decision usefulness. This paper conceptualizes ethical questions arising from the taxonomy engineering based on machine learning systems: Should the objective of the coding rule be to support or to influence human decision making or rational artificiality? This paper therefore advocates for a democratisation of information, education and transparency about nudges and coding rules (Puaschunder 2017a, b; 2018a, b)…(More)”.

Big data analytics to identify illegal construction waste dumping: A Hong Kong study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WeishengLu at Resources, Conservation and Recycling: “Illegal dumping, referring to the intentional and criminal abandonment of waste in unauthorized areas, has long plagued governments and environmental agencies worldwide. Despite the tremendous resources spent to combat it, the surreptitious nature of illegal dumping indicates the extreme difficulty in its identification. In 2006, the Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme (CWDCS) was implemented, regulating that all construction waste must be disposed of at government waste facilities if not otherwise properly reused or recycled.

While the CWDCS has significantly improved construction waste management in Hong Kong, it has also triggered illegal dumping problems. Inspired by the success of big data in combating urban crime, this paper aims to identify illegal dumping cases by mining a publicly available data set containing more than 9 million waste disposal records from 2011 to 2017. Using behavioral indicators and up-to-date big data analytics, possible drivers for illegal dumping (e.g., long queuing times) were identified. The analytical results also produced a list of 546 waste hauling trucks suspected of involvement in illegal dumping. This paper contributes to the understanding of illegal dumping behavior and joins the global research community in exploring the value of big data, particularly for combating urban crime. It also presents a three-step big data-enabled urban crime identification methodology comprising ‘Behavior characterization’, ‘Big data analytical model development’, and ‘Model training, calibration, and evaluation’….(More)”.

The Nail Finds a Hammer: Self-Sovereign Identity, Design Principles, and Property Rights in the Developing World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Michael Graglia, Christopher Mellon and Tim Robustelli: “Our interest in identity systems was an inevitable outgrowth of our earlier work on blockchain-based1 land registries.2 Property registries, which at the simplest level are ledgers of who has which rights to which asset, require a very secure and reliable means of identifying both people and properties. In the course of investigating solutions to that problem, we began to appreciate the broader challenges of digital identity and its role in international development. And the more we learned about digital identity, the more convinced we became of the need for self-sovereign identity, or SSI. This model, and the underlying principles of identity which it incorporates, will be described in detail in this paper.

We believe that the great potential of SSI is that it can make identity in the digital world function more like identity in the physical world, in which every person has a unique and persistent identity which is represented to others by means of both their physical attributes and a collection of credentials attested to by various external sources of authority. These credentials are stored and controlled by the identity holder—typically in a wallet—and presented to different people for different reasons at the identity holder’s discretion. Crucially, the identity holder controls what information to present based on the environment, trust level, and type of interaction. Moreover, their fundamental identity persists even though the credentials by which it is represented may change over time.

The digital incarnation of this model has many benefits, including both greatly improved privacy and security, and the ability to create more trustworthy online spaces. Social media and news sites, for example, might limit participation to users with verified identities, excluding bots and impersonators.

The need for identification in the physical world varies based on location and social context. We expect to walk in relative anonymity down a busy city street, but will show a driver’s license to enter a bar, and both a driver’s license and a birth certificate to apply for a passport. There are different levels of ID and supporting documents required for each activity. But in each case, access to personal information is controlled by the user who may choose whether or not to share it.

Self-sovereign identity gives users complete control of their own identities and related personal data, which sits encrypted in distributed storage instead of being stored by a third party in a central database. In older, “federated identity” models, a single account—a Google account, for example—might be used to log in to a number of third-party sites, like news sites or social media platforms. But in this model a third party brokers all of these ID transactions, meaning that in exchange for the convenience of having to remember fewer passwords, the user must sacrifice a degree of privacy.

A real world equivalent would be having to ask the state to share a copy of your driver’s license with the bar every time you wanted to prove that you were over the age of 21. SSI, in contrast, gives the user a portable, digital credential (like a driver’s license or some other document that proves your age), the authenticity of which can be securely validated via cryptography without the recipient having to check with the authority that issued it. This means that while the credential can be used to access many different sites and services, there is no third-party broker to track the services to which the user is authenticating. Furthermore, cryptographic techniques called “zero-knowledge proofs” (ZKPs) can be used to prove possession of a credential without revealing the credential itself. This makes it possible, for example, for users to prove that they are over the age of 21 without having to share their actual birth dates, which are both sensitive information and irrelevant to a binary, yes-or-no ID transaction….(More)”.

Governing Open Data Platforms to Cultivate Innovation Ecosystems: The Case of the Government of Buenos Aires

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carla Bonina, Ben Eaton and Stefan Henningsson: “Open Government Data (OGD) is increasingly an object of research. Whilst referred to as a platform problem, few studies examine the phenomenon using platform concepts. One challenge governments face is to establish thriving OGD ecosystems through appropriate platform governance. The governance of innovating complements on the demand side of platforms, such as services using OGD datasets by entrepreneurs for citizen users, is well studied in platform literature. However, understanding of the supply side and how third parties can be governed to help innovate platform core architecture, such a ministries sourcing quality datasets for OGD platforms, is lacking. In our preliminary study of emergent OGD platforms in Latin America, we construct a model extending concepts of boundary resources from the demand side to the supply side to expand our understanding of platform governance. In addition to contributing to platform governance theories, we improve our understanding of OGD platform ecosystem cultivation….(More)”.

Mapping humanitarian action on Instagram

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anthony McCosker, Jane Farmer, Tracy De Cotta, Peter Kamstra, Natalie Jovanovski, Arezou Soltani Panah, Zoe Teh, and Sam Wilson: “Every day, people undertake many different kinds of voluntary service and humanitarian action. This might involve fundraising and charity work, giving time, helping or inspiring others, or promoting causes. However, because so much of the research on volunteering and humanitarian action focuses on formal activities along with large-scale campaigns and global crisis events, we know very little about what people are doing informally and in their local community.

Humanitarianism is changing with the digital age and with new modes of networked communication and interaction. The research presented in this report offers new insights into the way people engage with humanitarian activities in their local contexts and everyday lives. We turned to Instagram as a novel data source that can offer insights into everyday humanitarian action. As a popular visual social media platform, Instagram provides a certain kind of intimate access to the humanitarian acts and the social good values that people want to capture, share and promote to others.

We sought to develop a typology of everyday humanitarian actions, the targets of those actions and situations and contexts they happen in through an analysis of Instagram data. Our research methodology and findings unlock a new approach to understanding humanitarian action in situ, and opens opportunities for organisation-led campaigns to improve and support self-mobilisation.

By using geographical information provided by Instagram users when they post, we demonstrate the relationships between humanitarian activities and locations across Victoria, Australia, illustrating the heavy concentration of activity within Melbourne’s CBD and inner suburbs. The data shows patterns in the kinds of actions, the situations in which they occur, and the humanitarian targets and values shared. On the basis of the findings, the report points to next steps in how humanitarian and charity organisations can innovate using social data to build a digitally active humanitarian movement by mapping and amplifying and better understanding humanitarian deeds where and when they happen. While the analysis offers many nuanced insights into everyday humanitarian activity, we highlight three key findings.

  • When people post to Instagram about humanitarian action they are most often promoting causes and activities, fundraising and giving time
  • Groups give time (volunteering, giving), individuals give or raise money (charity, fundraising)
  • Humanitarian action posted to Instagram is heavily concentrated around Melbourne CBD and inner suburbs, with a focus on public spaces, restaurant and entertainment precincts along the Yarra River and Swanston Street…(More)”.

Governments fail to capitalise on swaths of open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Valentina Romei in the Financial Times: “…Behind the push for open data is a desire to make governments more transparent, accountable and efficient — but also to allow businesses to create products and services that spark economic development. The global annual opportunity cost of failing to do this effectively is about $5tn, according to one estimate from McKinsey, the consultancy.

The UK is not the only country falling short, says the Open Data Barometer, which monitors the status of government data across the world. Among the 30 leading governments — those that have championed the open data movement and have made progress over five years — “less than a quarter of the data with the biggest potential for social and economic impact” is truly open. This goal of transparency, it seems, has not proved sufficient for “creating value” — the movement’s latest focus. In 2015, nearly a decade after advocates first discussed the principles of open government data, 62 countries adopted the six Open Data Charter principles — which called for data to be open by default, usable and comparable….

The use of open data has already bore fruit for some countries. In 2015, Japan’s ministry of land, infrastructure and transport set up an open data site aimed at disabled and elderly people. The 7,000 data points published are downloadable and the service can be used to generate a map that shows which passenger terminals on train, bus and ferry networksprovide barrier-free access.

In the US, The Climate Corporation, a digital agriculture company, combined 30 years of weather data and 60 years of crop yield data to help farmers increase their productivity. And in the UK, subscription service Land Insight merges different sources of land data to help individuals and developers compare property information, forecast selling prices, contact land owners and track planning applications…
Open Data 500, an international network of organisations that studies the use and impact of open data, reveals that private companies in South Korea are using government agency data, with technology, advertising and business services among the biggest users. It shows, for example, that Archidraw, a four-year-old Seoul-based company that provides 3D visualisation tools for interior design and property remodelling, has used mapping data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport…(More)”.

Creating Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, and Rob Kitchin: “In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While “smart city” advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack.

This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils.

Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These chapters discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity. This book will be of interest to urban policymakers, as well as researchers in Regional Studies and Urban Planning…(More)”.

Beyond Open vs. Closed: Balancing Individual Privacy and Public Accountability in Data Sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bill Howe et al: “Data too sensitive to be “open” for analysis and re-purposing typically remains “closed” as proprietary information. This dichotomy undermines efforts to make algorithmic systems more fair, transparent, and accountable. Access to proprietary data in particular is needed by government agencies to enforce policy, researchers to evaluate methods, and the public to hold agencies accountable; all of these needs must be met while preserving individual privacy and firm competitiveness. In this paper, we describe an integrated legaltechnical approach provided by a third-party public-private data trust designed to balance these competing interests.

Basic membership allows firms and agencies to enable low-risk access to data for compliance reporting and core methods research, while modular data sharing agreements support a wide array of projects and use cases. Unless specifically stated otherwise in an agreement, all data access is initially provided to end users through customized synthetic datasets that offer a) strong privacy guarantees, b) removal of signals that could expose competitive advantage for the data providers, and c) removal of biases that could reinforce discriminatory policies, all while maintaining empirically good fidelity to the original data. We find that the liberal use of synthetic data, in conjunction with strong legal protections over raw data, strikes a tunable balance between transparency, proprietorship, privacy, and research objectives; and that the legal-technical framework we describe can form the basis for organizational data trusts in a variety of contexts….(More)”.

Blockchain Technologies for Social Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Launch of New Platform and Field Report:

Screen Shot 2018-10-31 at 2.33.43 PM“Blockchain technologies are a new form of data disclosure technologies that have received extensive coverage and attention because of their potential to transform (or “disrupt”) industry sectors – ranging from financial services and publishing to supply chain management and real-estate. Additionally, blockchain is increasingly believed to be capable of positively empowering underserved populations in a myriad of ways – from improving service delivery for homeless people in New York City to bringing the “unbanked” into the global economy. As such, blockchain has been heralded as an avenue for creating positive social change, or “Blockchange.”

Yet for all the enthusiasm, we know very little about how blockchain can actually impact social change — what kinds of applications can serve what needs, what technological attributes matter most, what risks are involved, and under what conditions blockchain can have maximum social impact.

Exploring Three Application Areas

Today, the GovLab is launching the Blockchange platform: a hub for research and evidence into blockchain’s capacity to create social change. In particular, we are exploring the promise and practice of blockchain for creating societal benefits and addressing information asymmetries through three applications: improved identity management, smart contracting, and the ability to track and trace transactions. Blockchange features a repository of Curated Examples of projects that are actively seeking to leverage blockchain for social change across each of the these three areas, as well as efforts to create an ecosystem of blockchain use for societal benefit.

Focus on Identity

In addition, the platform provides access to our first Blockchange Field Report, which focuses on Blockchain’s potential and limitation for trusted identity management.

Of the three types of Blockchange applications, identity should be considered  foundational because it a) plays a prominent role in social change; b) underpins most other blockchange applications; and c) provides a necessary missing ID protocol layer of the Internet.

The field report, Blockchan.ge: Blockchain Technologies for Social Change – Field Report on the Emergent Use of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Identity Management, was developed through a yearlong exploration project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Our initial analysis centered on the current theory, practice and dominant narratives in the blockchain and identity spaces – and at the nexus of the two….(More)”.

Folksonomies: how to do things with words on social media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Oxford Dictionaries: “Folksonomy, a portmanteau word for ‘folk taxonomy’, is a term for collaborative tagging: the production of user-created ‘tags’ on social media that help readers to find and sort content. In other words, hashtags: #ThrowbackThursday, #DogLife, #MeToo. Because ordinary people create folksonomy tags, folksonomies include categories devised by small communities, subcultures, or even individuals, not merely those by accepted taxonomic systems like the Dewey Decimal System.

The term first arose in the wake of Web 2.0 – the Web’s transition, in the early 2000s, from a read-only platform to a read-write platform that allows users to comment on and collaboratively tag what they read. Rather unusually, we know the exact date it was coined: 24 July, 2004. The information architect Thomas Vander Wal came up with it in response to a query over what to call this kind of informal social classification.

Perhaps the most visible folksonomies are those on social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Instagram. Often, people create tags on these platforms in order to gather under a single tag content that many different users have created, making it easier to find posts related to that tag. (If I’m interested in dogs, I might look at content gathered under the tag #DogLife.) Because tags reflect the interests of people who create them, researchers have pursued ways to use tags to build more comprehensive profiles of users, with an eye to surveillance or to selling them relevant ads.

But people may also use tags as prompts for the creation of new content, not merely the curation of content they would have posted anyway. As I write this post, a trending tag on Twitter, #MakeAHorrorMovieMoreHorrific, is prompting thousands of people to write satirical takes on how classic horror movies might be made more ‘horrifying’ by adding unhappy features of our ordinary lives. (‘I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I Put It on Facebook’; ‘Rosemary’s Baby Is Teething’; ‘The Exercise’)

From a certain perspective, this is not so different from a library’s acknowledgment of a new category of text: if a new academic field, like ‘the history of the book’, catches on, then libraries rearrange their shelves and catalogues to accommodate the history of the book as a category; the new shelf space and catalogue space creates a demand for new books in that category, which encourages authors and publishers to produce new books to meet the demand.

But new folksonomy tags (with important exceptions, as in the realm of activism) are often short-lived and meant to be short-lived, obscure and meant to be obscure. What library cataloguer would think to accommodate the category #glitterhorse, which has a surprising number of posts on Twitter and Instagram? How can Vander Wal’s original definition of folksonomy as a tool for information retrieval accommodate tags that function, not as search terms, but as theatrical asides, like #sorrynotsorry? What about tags that are so narrowly specific that no search could ever turn up more than one usage?

Perhaps the best way to understand the weird things that people do with folksonomy tags is to appeal, not to information science, but to narratology, the study of narrative structures. …(More)”.