The State of Open Data Portals in Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Steinberg at Center for Data Innovation: “Many Latin American countries publish open data—government data made freely available online in machine-readable formats and without license restrictions. However, there is a tremendous amount of variation in the quantity and type of datasets governments publish on national open data portals—central online repositories for open data that make it easier for users to find data. Despite the wide variation among the countries, the most popular datasets tend to be those that either provide transparency into government operations or offer information that citizens can use directly. As governments continue to update and improve their open data portals, they should take steps to ensure that they are publishing the datasets most valuable to their citizens.

To better understand this variation, we collected information about open data portals in 20 Latin American countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Not all Latin American countries have an open data portal, but even if they do not operate a unified portal, some governments may still have open data. Four Latin American countries—Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—do not have open data portals. One country— El Salvador—does not have a government-run open data portal, but does have a national open data portal (datoselsalvador.org) run by volunteers….

There are many steps Latin American governments can take to improve open data in their country. Those nations without open data portals should create them, and those who already have them should continue to update them and publish more datasets to better serve their constituents. One way to do this is to monitor the popular datasets on other countries’ open data portals, and where applicable, ensure the government produces similar datasets. Those running open data portals should also routinely monitor search queries to see what users are looking for, and if they are looking for datasets that have not yet been posted, work with the relevant government agencies to make these datasets available.

In summary, there are stark differences in the amount of data published, the format of the data, and the most popular datasets in open data portals in Latin America. However, in every country there is an appetite for data that either provides public accountability for government functions or supplies helpful information to citizens…(More)”.

Using Collaboration to Harness Big Data for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jake Porway at SSIR: “These days, it’s hard to get away from the hype around “big data.” We read articles about how Silicon Valley is using data to drive everything from website traffic to autonomous cars. We hear speakers at social sector conferences talk about how nonprofits can maximize their impact by leveraging new sources of digital information like social media data, open data, and satellite imagery.

Braving this world can be challenging, we know. Creating a data-driven organization can require big changes in culture and process. Some nonprofits, like Crisis Text Line and Watsi, started off boldly by building their own data science teams. But for the many other organizations wondering how to best use data to advance their mission, we’ve found that one ingredient works better than all the software and tech that you can throw at a problem: collaboration.

As a nonprofit dedicated to applying data science for social good, DataKind has run more than 200 projects in collaboration with other nonprofits worldwide by connecting them to teams of volunteer data scientists. What do the most successful ones have in common? Strong collaborations on three levels: with data science experts, within the organization itself, and across the nonprofit sector as a whole.

1. Collaborate with data science experts to define your project. As we often say, finding problems can be harder than finding solutions. ….

2. Collaborate across your organization to “build with, not for.” Our projects follow the principles of human-centered design and the philosophy pioneered in the civic tech world of “design with, not for.” ….

3. Collaborate across your sector to move the needle. Many organizations think about building data science solutions for unique challenges they face, such as predicting the best location for their next field office. However, most of us are fighting common causes shared by many other groups….

By focusing on building strong collaborations on these three levels—with data experts, across your organization, and across your sector—you’ll go from merely talking about big data to making big impact….(More).

A distributed model for internet governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Global Partners Digital: “Across the world, increased internet adoption has radically altered people’s lives – creating the need for new methods of internet governance that are more effective, flexible, inclusive, and legitimate. Conversations about reforming the internet governance ecosystem are already taking place at the CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation, and within the wider IGF community.

A new paper by GovLab co-founder and GPD Advisory Board member Stefaan Verhulst – A distributed model for internet governance – seeks to contribute to this evolving debate by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework for internet governance – one which accommodates existing and emerging decision-making approaches, while also enabling broader participation by a wider range of institutions and actors….(More)”

Using Open Data to Combat Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Richard Rose: “Open data makes transparent whether public officials are conducting their activities in conformity with standards that can be bureaucratic, political or moral. Actions that violate these standards are colloquially lumped together under the heterogeneous heading of corruption. However, the payment of a large bribe for a multi-million contract differs in kind from a party saying one thing to win votes and doing another once in office or an individual public figure promoting high standards of personal morality while conducting himself in private very differently. This paper conceptually distinguishes different forms of corruption with concrete examples. It also shows how sanctions for different forms of corruption require different sanctions: punishment by the courts, by political leaders or the electorate, or by public morality and a sense of individual shame. Such sanctions are most effective when there is normative agreement that standards have been violated. There are partisan as well as normative disagreements about whether standards have been violated. The paper concludes by pointing out that differences in violating standards require different policy responses….(More)”

ePolicyWorks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About ePolicyWorks: “Launched by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP), ePolicyWorks is a Web-based approach to policymaking that engages citizens and stakeholders in new and innovative ways. The initiative leverages the latest technology to address barriers to employment for people with disabilities and fosters real-time collaboration and communication around key issues.

Features: Participants in the ePolicyWorks initiative benefit from a variety of tools and features to help them stay informed, build relationships and partner on important policy developments. These include Web-based dialogues on key issues, interactive Twitter chats and RSS feeds. These online collaborative spaces are where stakeholders can learn and contribute to the conversation about the intersection between employment, disability and specific policy areas.

 Issue Areas: ePolicyWorks’ goal is to break down barriers to employment for people with disabilities. The initiative is focused on the use of technology to support jobseekers in their search and employees in their careers; accessible transportation to get people to and from work; youth and young adult jobseekers; and how stay-at-work/return-to-work policies support employees and businesses….(More)”

AI and the Law: Setting the Stage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Urs Gasser: “Lawmakers and regulators need to look at AI not as a homogenous technology, but a set of techniques and methods that will be deployed in specific and increasingly diversified applications. There is currently no generally agreed-upon definition of AI. What is important to understand from a technical perspective is that AI is not a single, homogenous technology, but a rich set of subdisciplines, methods, and tools that bring together areas such as speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, reasoning, attention and memory, robotics and control, etc. ….

Given the breadth and scope of application, AI-based technologies are expected to trigger a myriad of legal and regulatory issues not only at the intersections of data and algorithms, but also of infrastructures and humans. …

When considering (or anticipating) possible responses by the law vis-à-vis AI innovation, it might be helpful to differentiate between application-specific and cross-cutting legal and regulatory issues. …

Information asymmetries and high degrees of uncertainty pose particular difficulty to the design of appropriate legal and regulatory responses to AI innovations — and require learning systems. AI-based applications — which are typically perceived as “black boxes” — affect a significant number of people, yet there are nonetheless relatively few people who develop and understand AI-based technologies. ….Approaches such as regulation 2.0, which relies on dynamic, real-time, and data-driven accountability models, might provide interesting starting points.

The responses to a variety of legal and regulatory issues across different areas of distributed applications will likely result in a complex set of sector-specific norms, which are likely to vary across jurisdictions….

Law and regulation may constrain behavior yet also act as enablers and levelers — and are powerful tools as we aim for the development of AI for social good. …

Law is one important approach to the governance of AI-based technologies. But lawmakers and regulators have to consider the full potential of available instruments in the governance toolbox. ….

In a world of advanced AI technologies and new governance approaches towards them, the law, the rule of law, and human rights remain critical bodies of norms. …

As AI applies to the legal system itself, however, the rule of law might have to be re-imagined and the law re-coded in the longer run….(More).

News consumption app helps users diversify their sources

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “In an era where the term ‘fake news’ has become commonplace, news app Read Across the Aisle by US-based BeeLine Reader is designed to help users break out from the ‘filter bubble’ of media sources they are inclined to read from by offering articles from opposing angles. The app, which is Kickstarter funded, hopes to combat political polarization by allowing readers to see the partisan bias of the news sources they are accessing. It tracks the user’s own political news bias over time, and finds reliable new sources from both the left and right wing to offer a reader a well-rounded spectrum of approaches.

Research has found that Internet users, particularly in the realm of news and social media, tend to immerse themselves with those who have similar opinions, meaning other information can be missed or deemed false. App users are informed when their reading habits skew too far to one side of the political spectrum, and are consequently prompted to read articles written by the press from the opposing side.

As the once-popular newspapers have made way for online news consumption, technology to support the industry has excelled. Recent innovations covered by Springwise include a blockchain transparency tool applied to newsfeeds to create algorithms of trustworthy news sources, and a news website that encourages readers to empathise with opposing views….(More)”.

A.I. experiments (with Google)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “With all the exciting A.I. stuff happening, there are lots of people eager to start tinkering with machine learning technology. A.I. Experiments is a showcase for simple experiments that let anyone play with this technology in hands-on ways, through pictures, drawings, language, music, and more.

Submit your own

We want to make it easier for any coder – whether you have a machine learning background or not – to create your own experiments. This site includes open-source code and resources to help you get started. If you make something you’d like to share, we’d love to see it and possibly add it to the showcase….(More)”

Detecting riots with Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cardiff University News: “An analysis of data taken from the London riots in 2011 showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and detect serious incidents, such as shops being broken in to and cars being set alight, before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service.

The computer system could also discern information about where the riots were rumoured to take place and where groups of youths were gathering. The new research, published in the peer-review journal ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, showed that on average the computer systems could pick up on disruptive events several minutes before officials and over an hour in some cases.

“Antagonistic narratives and cyber hate”

The researchers believe that their work could enable police officers to better manage and prepare for both large and small scale disruptive events.

Co-author of the study Dr Pete Burnap, from Cardiff University’s School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: “We have previously used machine-learning and natural language processing on Twitter data to better understand online deviance, such as the spread of antagonistic narratives and cyber hate…”

“We will never replace traditional policing resource on the ground but we have demonstrated that this research could augment existing intelligence gathering and draw on new technologies to support more established policing methods.”

Scientists are continually looking to the swathes of data produced from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to help them to detect events in real-time.

Estimates put social media membership at approximately 2.5 billion non-unique users, and the data produced by these users have been used to predict elections, movie revenues and even the epicentre of earthquakes.

In their study the research team analysed 1.6m tweets relating to the 2011 riots in England, which began as an isolated incident in Tottenham on August 6 but quickly spread across London and to other cities in England, giving rise to looting, destruction of property and levels of violence not seen in England for more than 30 years.

Machine-learning algorithms

The researchers used a series of machine-learning algorithms to analyse each of the tweets from the dataset, taking into account a number of key features such as the time they were posted, the location where they were posted and the content of the tweet itself.

Results showed that the machine-learning algorithms were quicker than police sources in all but two of the disruptive events reported…(More)”.

Index: Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Hannah Pierce

By Hannah Pierce and Audrie Pirkl

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on collective intelligence and was originally published in 2017.

The Collective Intelligence Universe

  • Amount of money that Reykjavik’s Better Neighbourhoods program has provided each year to crowdsourced citizen projects since 2012: € 2 million (Citizens Foundation)
  • Number of U.S. government challenges that people are currently participating in to submit their community solutions: 778 (Challenge.gov).
  • Percent of U.S. arts organizations used social media to crowdsource ideas in 2013, from programming decisions to seminar scheduling details: 52% (Pew Research)
  • Number of Wikipedia members who have contributed to a page in the last 30 days: over 120,000 (Wikipedia Page Statistics)
  • Number of languages that the multinational crowdsourced Letters for Black Lives has been translated into: 23 (Letters for Black Lives)
  • Number of comments in a Reddit thread that established a more comprehensive timeline of the theater shooting in Aurora than the media: 1272 (Reddit)
  • Number of physicians that are members of SERMO, a platform to crowdsource medical research: 800,000 (SERMO)
  • Number of citizen scientist projects registered on SciStarter: over 1,500 (Collective Intelligence 2017 Plenary Talk: Darlene Cavalier)
  • Entrants to NASA’s 2009 TopCoder Challenge: over 1,800 (NASA)

Infrastructure

  • Number of submissions for Block Holm (a digital platform that allows citizens to build “Minecraft” ideas on vacant city lots) within the first six months: over 10,000 (OpenLearn)
  • Number of people engaged to The Participatory Budgeting Project in the U.S.: over 300,000. (Participatory Budgeting Project)
  • Amount of money allocated to community projects through this initiative: $238,000,000

Health

  • Percentage of Internet-using adults with chronic health conditions that have gone online within the US to connect with others suffering from similar conditions: 23% (Pew Research)
  • Number of posts to Patient Opinion, a UK based platform for patients to provide anonymous feedback to healthcare providers: over 120,000 (Nesta)
    • Percent of NHS health trusts utilizing the posts to improve services in 2015: 90%
    • Stories posted per month: nearly 1,000 (The Guardian)
  • Number of tumors reported to the English National Cancer Registration each year: over 300,000 (Gov.UK)
  • Number of users of an open source artificial pancreas system: 310 (Collective Intelligence 2017 Plenary Talk: Dana Lewis)

Government

  • Number of submissions from 40 countries to the 2017 Open (Government) Contracting Innovation Challenge: 88 (The Open Data Institute)
  • Public-service complaints received each day via Indonesian digital platform Lapor!: over 500 (McKinsey & Company)
  • Number of registered users of Unicef Uganda’s weekly, SMS poll U-Report: 356,468 (U-Report)
  • Number of reports regarding government corruption in India submitted to IPaidaBribe since 2011: over 140,000 (IPaidaBribe)

Business

  • Reviews posted since Yelp’s creation in 2009: 121 million reviews (Statista)
  • Percent of Americans in 2016 who trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations: 84% (BrightLocal)
  • Number of companies and their subsidiaries mapped through the OpenCorporates platform: 60 million (Omidyar Network)

Crisis Response

Public Safety

  • Number of sexual harassment reports submitted to from 50 cities in India and Nepal to SafeCity, a crowdsourcing site and mobile app: over 4,000 (SafeCity)
  • Number of people that used Facebook’s Safety Check, a feature that is being used in a new disaster mapping project, in the first 24 hours after the terror attacks in Paris: 4.1 million (Facebook)