Paper by Henry Chang: “Some of the appealing characteristics of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which blockchain is a type of, include guaranteed integrity, disintermediation and distributed resilience. These characteristics give rise to the possible consequences of immutability, unclear ownership, universal accessibility and trans-border storage. These consequences have the potential to contravene data protection principles of Purpose Specification, Use Limitation, Data Quality, Individual Participation and Trans-Border Data Flow. This paper endeavors to clarify the various types of DLTs, how they work, why they exhibit the depicted characteristics and the consequences. Using the universal privacy principles developed by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this paper then describes how each of the consequence causes concerns for privacy protection and how attempts are being made to address them in the design and implementation of various applications of blockchain and DLT, and indicates where further research and best-practice developments lie….(More)”.
Could the open government movement shut the door on Freedom of Information
For democracy to work, citizens need to know what their government is doing. Then they can hold government officials and institutions accountable.
Over the last 50 years, Freedom of Information – or FOI – laws have been one of the most useful methods for citizens to learn what government is doing. These state and federal laws give people the power to request, and get, government documents. From everyday citizens to journalists, FOI laws have proven a powerful way to uncover the often-secret workings of government.
But a potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws.
We are scholars of government administration, ethics and transparency. And our research leads us to believe that while FOI laws have always faced many challenges, including resistance, evasion, and poor implementation and enforcement, the last decade has brought a different kind of challenge in the form of a new approach to transparency….
The open government movement could help FOI implementation. Government information posted online, which is a core goal of open government advocates, can reduce the number of FOI requests. Open government initiatives can explicitly promote FOI by encouraging the passage of FOI laws, offering more training for officials who fill FOI requests, and developing technologies to make it easier to process and track FOI requests.
On the other hand, the relationship between open government and FOI may not always be positive in practice.
First, as with all kinds of public policy issues, resources – both money and political attention – are inherently scarce. Government officials now have to divide their attention between FOI and other open government initiatives. And funders now have to divide their financial resources between FOI and other open government initiatives.
Second, the open government reform movement as well as the FOI movement have long depended on nonprofit advocacy groups – from the National Freedom of Information Coalition and its state affiliates to the Sunlight Foundation – to obtain and disseminate government information. This means that the financial stability of those nonprofit groups is crucial. But their efforts, as they grow, may each only get a shrinking portion of the total amount of grant money available. Freedominfo.org, a website for gathering and comparing information on FOI laws around the world, had to suspend its operations in 2017 due to resources drying up.
We believe that priorities among government officials and good government advocates may also shift away from FOI. At a time when open data is “hot,” FOI programs could get squeezed as a result of this competition. Further, by allowing governments to claim credit for more politically convenient reforms such as online data portals, the open government agenda may create a false sense of transparency – there’s a lot more government information that isn’t available in those portals.
This criticism was leveled recently against Kenya, whose government launched a high-profile open data portal for publishing data on government performance and activities in 2011, yet delayed passage of an FOI law until 2016.
Similarly, in the United Kingdom, one government minister said in 2012,“I’d like to make Freedom of Information redundant, by pushing out so much data that people won’t have to ask for it.”…(More)”
Making Better Use of Health Care Data
Benson S. Hsu, MD and Emily Griese in Harvard Business Review: “At Sanford Health, a $4.5 billion rural integrated health care system, we deliver care to over 2.5 million people in 300 communities across 250,000 square miles. In the process, we collect and store vast quantities of patient data – everything from admission, diagnostic, treatment and discharge data to online interactions between patients and providers, as well as data on providers themselves. All this data clearly represents a rich resource with the potential to improve care, but until recently was underutilized. The question was, how best to leverage it.
While we have a mature data infrastructure including a centralized data and analytics team, a standalone virtual data warehouse linking all data silos, and strict enterprise-wide data governance, we reasoned that the best way forward would be to collaborate with other institutions that had additional and complementary data capabilities and expertise.
We reached out to potential academic partners who were leading the way in data science, from university departments of math, science, and computer informatics to business and medical schools and invited them to collaborate with us on projects that could improve health care quality and lower costs. In exchange, Sanford created contracts that gave these partners access to data whose use had previously been constrained by concerns about data privacy and competitive-use agreements. With this access, academic partners are advancing their own research while providing real-world insights into care delivery.
The resulting Sanford Data Collaborative, now in its second year, has attracted regional and national partners and is already beginning to deliver data-driven innovations that are improving care delivery, patient engagement, and care access. Here we describe three that hold particular promise.
- Developing Prescriptive Algorithms…
- Augmenting Patient Engagement…
- Improving Access to Care…(More)”.
The world’s first blockchain-powered elections just happened in Sierra Leone
Yomi Kazeem in Quartz: “On Mar. 7, elections in Sierra Leone marked a global landmark: the world’s first ever blockchain-powered presidential elections….
In Sierra Leone’s Western District, the most populous in the country, votes cast were manually recorded by Agora, a Swiss foundation offering digital voting solutions, using a permissioned blockchain. The idea was simple: just like blockchain technology helps ensure transparency with crytpocurrency transactions using public ledgers, by recording each vote on blockchain, Agora ensured transparency with votes cast in the district. While entries on permissioned blockchains can be viewed by everyone, entries can only be validated by authorized persons.
A lack of transparency has plagued many elections around the world, but particularly in some African countries where large sections of the electorate are often suspicions incumbent parties or ethnic loyalties have been responsible for the manipulation of the results in favor of one candidate or another. These suspicions remain even when there is little evidence of manipulation. A more transparent system could help restore trust.
Leonardo Gammar, CEO of Agora, says Sierra Leone’s NEC was “open minded” about the potential of blockchain in its elections after talks began late last year. “I also thought that if we can do it in Sierra Leone, we can do it everywhere else,” he says. That thinking is rooted in Sierra Leone’s developmental challenges which make electoral transparency difficult: poor network connectivity, low literacy levels and frequent electoral violence.
The big picture for Agora is to deploy solutions to automate the entire electoral process with citizens voting electronically using biometric data and personalized cryptographic keys and the votes in turn validated by blockchain. Gammar hopes Agora can replicate its work in other African elections on a larger scale but admits that doing so will require understanding the differing challenges each country faces.
Gammar says blockchain-powered electronic voting will be cheaper for African countries by cutting out the printing cost of paper-based elections but perhaps, more importantly, vastly reduce electoral violence…(More)”.
How to Make A.I. That’s Good for People
Fei-Fei Li in the New York Times: “For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis. If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, A.I. is surely one of its driving forces.
It is an especially exciting time for a researcher like me. When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face. But thanks to the growth of big data, advances in algorithms like neural networks and an abundance of powerful computer hardware, something momentous has occurred: A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.
I worry, however, that enthusiasm for A.I. is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society. Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.
I call this approach “human-centered A.I.” It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.
First, A.I. needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence….
No technology is more reflective of its creators than A.I. It has been said that there are no “machine” values at all, in fact; machine values arehuman values. A human-centered approach to A.I. means these machines don’t have to be our competitors, but partners in securing our well-being. However autonomous our technology becomes, its impact on the world — for better or worse — will always be our responsibility….(More).
How tech used to track the flu could change the game for public health response
Cathie Anderson in the Sacramento Bee: “Tech entrepreneurs and academic researchers are tracking the spread of flu in real-time, collecting data from social media and internet-connected devices that show startling accuracy when compared against surveillance data that public health officials don’t report until a week or two later….
Smart devices and mobile apps have the potential to reshape public health alerts and responses,…, for instance, the staff of smart thermometer maker Kinsa were receiving temperature readings that augured the surge of flu patients in emergency rooms there.
Kinsa thermometers are part of the movement toward the Internet of Things – devices that automatically transmit information to a database. No personal information is shared, unless users decide to input information such as age and gender. Using data from more than 1 million devices in U.S. homes, the staff is able to track fever as it hits and use an algorithm to estimate impact for a broader population….
Computational researcher Aaron Miller worked with an epidemiological team at the University of Iowa to assess the feasibility of using Kinsa data to forecast the spread of flu. He said the team first built a model using surveillance data from the CDC and used it to forecast the spread of influenza. Then the team created a model where they integrated the data from Kinsa along with that from the CDC.
“We got predictions that were … 10 to 50 percent better at predicting the spread of flu than when we used CDC data alone,” Miller said. “Potentially, in the future, if you had granular information from the devices and you had enough information, you could imagine doing analysis on a really local level to inform things like school closings.”
While Kinsa uses readings taken in homes, academic researchers and companies such as sickweather.com are using crowdsourcing from social media networks to provide information on the spread of flu. Siddharth Shah, a transformational health industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, pointed to an award-winning international study led by researchers at Northeastern University that tracked flu through Twitter posts and other key parameters of flu.
When compared with official influenza surveillance systems, the researchers said, the model accurately forecast the evolution of influenza up to six weeks in advance, much earlier than prior models. Such advance warnings would give health agencies significantly more time to expand upon medical resources or to alert the public to measures they can take to prevent transmission of the disease….
For now, Shah said, technology will probably only augment or complement traditional public data streams. However, he added, innovations already are changing how diseases are tracked. Chronic disease management, for instance, is going digital with devices such as Omada health that helps people with Type 2 diabetes better manage health challenges and Noom, a mobile app that helps people stop dieting and instead work toward true lifestyle change….(More).
Will Blockchain Disrupt Government Corruption?
Carlos Santiso in Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Will blockchain technology be the next disrupting technology to revolutionize government? Probably not. Can it be a game changer in the global fight against corruption? Possibly so. New technologies are disrupting our lives and transforming government. Governments around the world are going digital, embracing digital innovations to modernize their bureaucracies and recast their relations with citizens. Technology is changing how governments are expected to meet the rising expectations of citizens in terms of quality, speed, and integrity. Digital citizens are expecting more from their governments, demanding better services and greater accountability. Governments struggle to catch up.
Technology has become the greatest ally of transparency, as it allows one to leverage the insights that can be gleaned from the exponential growth of data. Digitally savvy citizens are far less tolerant about corruption and have more means to uncover it. There are heightened and even inflated expectations about the potential of blockchain to improve the delivery of public services and strengthen integrity in government. Pilots and proofs of concept are mushrooming, driven by a myriad of technology-driven start-ups in a wide variety of industries. This enthusiasm is generating intense debate, and an “expectations bubble” is building up rapidly.
Given the hype, it is important to assess both the promises and the pitfalls of blockchain, thinking through what it can and cannot do, based on hard evidence. Initiatives such as blockchan.ge by New York University’s Governance Lab are starting to look closer at whether and how blockchain technologies can be used for social change. Blockchain has emerged first in the financial industry, building on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. The requirements and implications of blockchain in the public sector, however, are yet to be fully understood. Key issues include being clearer about the problems it is expected to address, its advantages compared to alternative digital solutions, its fitness-for-purpose in different institutional contexts, and, ultimately, the value it could add to existing institutions….(More)”
Sub-National Democracy and Politics Through Social Media
Book edited by This book analyzes the impact of social media on democracy and politics at the subnational level in developed and developing countries. Over the last decade or so, social media has transformed politics. Offering political actors opportunities to organize, mobilize, and connect with constituents, voters, and supporters, social media has become an important tool in global politics as well as a force for democracy. Most of the available research literature focuses on the impact of social media at the national level; this book fills that gap by analyzing the political uses of social media at the sub-national level.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One, “Social Media for Democracy” includes chapters that analyze potential contributions of social media tools to the realizing of basic values of democracy, such as public engagement, transparency, accountability, participation and collaboration at the sub-national level. Part Two, “Social Media in Politics” focuses on the use of social media tools by political actors in political processes and activities (online campaigns, protests etc.) at the local, regional and state government levels during election and non-election periods. Combining theoretical and empirical analysis, each chapter provides evaluations of overarching issues, questions, and problems as well as real-world experiences with social media, politics, and democracy in a diverse sample of municipalities…(More)”.
Exploring the Motives of Citizen Reporting Engagement: Self-Concern and Other-Orientation
In smart city contexts, voluntary citizen reporting can be a particularly valuable source of information for local authorities. A key question in this regard is what motivates citizens to contribute their data. Drawing on motivation research in social psychology, the paper examines the question of whether self-concern or other-orientation is a stronger driver of citizen reporting engagement.
To test their hypotheses, the authors rely on a sample of users from the mobile application “Zurich as good as new” in Switzerland, which enables citizens to report damages in and other issues with the city’s infrastructure. Data was collected from two different sources: motivation was assessed in an online user survey (n = 650), whereas citizen reporting engagement was measured by the number of reports per user from real platform-use data. The analysis was carried out using negative binomial regression.
The findings suggest that both self-concern and other-orientation are significant drivers of citizen reporting engagement, although the effect of self-concern appears to be stronger in comparison. As such, this study contributes to a better understanding of what motivates citizens to participate in citizen reporting platforms, which are a cornerstone application in many smart cities….(More)”.
Nudging the city and residents of Cape Town to save water
Leila Harris, Jiaying Zhao and Martine Visser in The Conversation: “Cape Town could become the world’s first major city to run out of water – what’s been termed Day Zero….To its credit, the city has worked with researchers at the University of Cape Town to test strategies to nudge domestic users into reducing their water use. Nudges are interventions to encourage behaviour change for better outcomes, or in this context, to achieve environmental or conservation goals.
What key insights could help inform the city’s strategies? Research from psychology and behavioural economics could prove useful to refine efforts and help to achieve further water savings.
The most effective tactics
Research suggests the following types of nudges could be effective in promoting conservation behaviours.
Social norms: International research, as well as studies conducted in Cape Town, suggest that effective conservation can be promoted by giving feedback to consumers on how they perform relative to their neighbours. To this end, Cape Town introduced a water map that highlights homes that are compliant with targets.
The city has also been bundling information on usage with easy to implement water saving tips, something that research has shown to be particularly effective.
Research also suggests that combining behavioural interventions with traditional measures – such as tariff increases and restrictions – are often effective to reduce use in the short-term.
Real-time feedback: Cape Town is presenting the daily water level in major dams on a dashboard. This approach is consistent with research that shows that real-time information can effectively reduce water and energy consumption.
Such efforts could even be more effective if information is highlighted in relation to the critical level that’s been set for Day Zero, in this case 13.5%.
In the early days of a drought, it is also advisable to make information like this readily accessible through news outlets, social media, or even text messages. The water tracker produced by eighty20, a private Cape Town-based company, provides an example.
Social recognition: There’s evidence that efforts to celebrate successes or encourage competition can be effective – for instance, recognising neighbourhoods for meeting conservation targets. Prizes needn’t be monetary. Sometimes simple recognition, such as a certificate, can be effective.
Social recognition was found to be the most successful intervention among nine others nudges tested in research conducted in Cape Town in 2016. In this experiment, households who reduced consumption by 10% were recognised on the city’s website.
Another study showed that competition between the various floors of a government building in the Western Cape led to energy savings of up to 14%.
Cooperation: In the months ahead, the city would also do well to consider the support it might offer to encourage cooperation, particularly as the situation becomes more acute and as tensions rise.
Past studies have shown that social reputation and efforts to promote reciprocity can go a long way to encourage cooperation. The point is argued in a recent article featuring the importance of cooperation among Capetonians across different income groups.
Some residents of Cape Town are already pushing for a cooperative approach such as helping neighbours who might have difficulty travelling to collection points. Support for these efforts should be an important part of policies in the run up to Day Zero. These are often the examples that provide bright spots in challenging times.
Research also suggests that to navigate moments of crisis effectively, clear and trustworthy communication is critical. This also needs to be a priority….(More)“.