DATA – Page 385 – The Living Library

Open Data in Developing Economies: Toward Building an Evidence Base on What Works and How

Curated on November 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young: “Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social development.

Open Data in Developing Economies features in-depth case studies on how open data is having an impact across Screen Shot 2017-11-14 at 5.41.30 AM the developing world-from an agriculture initiative in Colombia to data-driven healthcare
projects in Uganda and South Africa to crisis response in Nepal. The analysis built on these case studies aims to create actionable intelligence regarding:

(a) the conditions under which open data is most (and least) effective in development, presented in the form of a Periodic Table of Open Data;

(b) strategies to maximize the positive contributions of open data to development; and

Endorsements:

“An empirically grounded assessment that helps us move beyond the hype that greater access to information can improve the lives of people and outlines the enabling factors for open data to be leveraged for development.”-Ania Calderon, Executive Director, International Open Data Charter

“This book is compulsory reading for practitioners, researchers and decision-makers exploring how to harness open data for achieving development outcomes. In an intuitive and compelling way, it provides valuable recommendations and critical reflections to anyone working to share the benefits of an increasingly networked and data-driven society.”-Fernando Perini, Coordinator of the Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, International Development Research Centre, Canada

Download full-text PDF – See also: http://odimpact.org/

When Data Science Destabilizes Democracy and Facilitates Genocide

Curated on November 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Thomas in Fast.AI on “What is the ethical responsibility of data scientists?”…What we’re talking about is a cataclysmic change… What we’re talking about is a major foreign power with sophistication and ability to involve themselves in a presidential election and sow conflict and discontent all over this country… You bear this responsibility. You’ve created these platforms. And now they are being misused, Senator Feinstein said this week in a senate hearing. Who has created a cataclysmic change? Who bears this large responsibility? She was talking to executives at tech companies and referring to the work of data scientists.

Data science can have a devastating impact on our world, as illustrated by inflammatory Russian propaganda being shown on Facebook to 126 million Americans leading up to the 2016 election (and the subject of the senate hearing described above) or by lies spread via Facebook that are fueling ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Over half a million Rohinyga have been driven from their homes due to systematic murder, rape, and burning. Data science is foundational to Facebook’s newsfeed, in determining what content is prioritized and who sees what….

The examples of bias in data science are myriad and include:

Google Photos automatically labeling Black people as “gorillas”
Software to assesses criminal recidivism risk that is twice as likely to mistakenly predict that Black defendants are high risk
Google’s popular Word2Vec language library creating sexist analogies such as man→computer programmer :: woman→homemaker.
Neural networks learning that “hotness” is having light skin
An app to compare job candidates’ word choice, tone, and facial movements with current employees, which Princeton Professor Arvind Narayanan described as AI whose only conceivable purpose is to perpetuate societal biases
Google Translate converting gender neutral sentences to “He is a doctor. She is a nurse”…

You can do awesome and meaningful things with data science (such as diagnosing cancer, stopping deforestation, increasing farm yields, and helping patients with Parkinson’s disease), and you can (often unintentionally) enable terrible things with data science, as the examples in this post illustrate. Being a data scientist entails both great opportunity, as well as great responsibility, to use our skills to not make the world a worse place. Ultimately, doing data science is about humans, not just the users of our products, but everyone who will be impacted by our work. (More)”.

Technopolitics in the Age of Big Data

Curated on November 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Stefania Milan and Miren Gutierrez in the book on Networks, Movements and Technopolitics in Latin America: ‘Big data’ offer novel opportunities for civic engagement and foster the emergence of data activism, a form of technopolitics from the ground–up that assumes people’s active engagement with data for empowerment. Proactive data activism, in particular, sees citizens taking advantage of the possibilities offered by data for advocacy and social change. This chapter combines social movement studies and media studies to analyze the emergence of proactive data activism in the Latin American continent. Analyzing the case of InfoAmazonia—a project blending citizen participation and data analysis to generate news about the endangered Amazon region—this chapter adds to our understanding of technopolitics as a way to reinterpret reality, empower people, facilitate collective action, and challenge the establish social norms embedded in our understanding of technology and social change. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of how data can restructure social reality, and in particular civil society action….(More) (Other chapters)”.

Transatlantic Data Privacy

Curated on November 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer in Georgetown Law Journal: “International flows of personal information are more significant than ever, but differences in transatlantic data privacy law imperil this data trade. The resulting policy debate has led the EU to set strict limits on transfers of personal data to any non-EU country—including the United States—that lacks sufficient privacy protections. Bridging the transatlantic data divide is therefore a matter of the greatest significance.

In exploring this issue, this Article analyzes the respective legal identities constructed around data privacy in the EU and the United States. It identifies profound differences in the two systems’ images of the individual as bearer of legal interests. The EU has created a privacy culture around “rights talk” that protects its “datasubjects.” In the EU, moreover, rights talk forms a critical part of the postwar European project of creating the identity of a European citizen. In the United States, in contrast, the focus is on a “marketplace discourse” about personal information and the safeguarding of “privacy consumers.” In the United States, data privacy law focuses on protecting consumers in a data marketplace.

This Article uses its models of rights talk and marketplace discourse to analyze how the EU and United States protect their respective data subjects and privacy consumers. Although the differences are great, there is still a path forward. A new set of institutions and processes can play a central role in developing mutually acceptable standards of data privacy. The key documents in this regard are the General Data Protection Regulation, an EU-wide standard that becomes binding in 2018, and the Privacy Shield, an EU–U.S. treaty signed in 2016. These legal standards require regular interactions between the EU and United States and create numerous points for harmonization, coordination, and cooperation. The GDPR and Privacy Shield also establish new kinds of governmental networks to resolve conflicts. The future of international data privacy law rests on the development of new understandings of privacy within these innovative structures….(More)”.

The Challenge of VR to the Liberal Democratic Order

Curated on November 15, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Edward Castronova: “The rapid expansion of virtual reality (VR) technology in the years 2016-2021 awakens a significant constitutional issue. In a liberal democratic order, rule is by consent of the governed. In the medium-term future, many of the governed will be immersed fully within VR environments, environments which, we are told, will provide entertainment of extraordinary power. These people will be happy. Happy people do not demand change. Yet there surely will be a change as VR takes hold: The quality of life will erode. People fully immersed in VR will come to be isolated, sedentary, and unhealthy. Objectively speaking, this is nothing to be desired. Subjectively, however, it will seem to be wonderful. The people themselves will be happy, and they will resist interference. At the moment this matter concerns only a few thousand nerds, but trends in technology and entertainment point to a future in which many people will be happily living awful, VR-dominated lives. How then will the liberal democratic order promote human well-being while remaining a liberal and democratic order?…(More)”

Manipulating Social Media to Undermine Democracy

Curated on November 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Freedom of the Net 2017 Report by the Freedom House: “Governments around the world have dramatically increased their efforts to manipulate information on social media over the past year. The Chinese and Russianregimes pioneered the use of surreptitious methods to distort online discussions and suppress dissent more than a decade ago, but the practice has since gone global. Such state-led interventions present a major threat to the notion of the internet as a liberating technology.

Online content manipulation contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, along with a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media.

Nearly half of the 65 countries assessed in Freedom on the Net 2017 experienced declines during the coverage period, while just 13 made gains, most of them minor. Less than one-quarter of users reside in countries where the internet is designated Free, meaning there are no major obstacles to access, onerous restrictions on content, or serious violations of user rights in the form of unchecked surveillance or unjust repercussions for legitimate speech.

The use of “fake news,” automated “bot” accounts, and other manipulation methods gained particular attention in the United States. While the country’s online environment remained generally free, it was troubled by a proliferation of fabricated news articles, divisive partisan vitriol, and aggressive harassment of many journalists, both during and after the presidential election campaign.

Russia’s online efforts to influence the American election have been well documented, but the United States was hardly alone in this respect. Manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 17 other countries over the past year, damaging citizens’ ability to choose their leaders based on factual news and authentic debate. Although some governments sought to support their interests and expand their influence abroad—as with Russia’s disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe—in most cases they used these methods inside their own borders to maintain their hold on power.

Venezuela, the Philippines, and Turkey were among 30 countries where governments were found to employ armies of “opinion shapers” to spread government views, drive particular agendas, and counter government critics on social media. The number of governments attempting to control online discussions in this manner has risen each year since Freedom House began systematically tracking the phenomenon in 2009. But over the last few years, the practice has become significantly more widespread and technically sophisticated, with bots, propaganda producers, and fake news outlets exploiting social media and search algorithms to ensure high visibility and seamless integration with trusted content.

Unlike more direct methods of censorship, such as website blocking or arrests for internet activity, online content manipulation is difficult to detect. It is also more difficult to combat, given its dispersed nature and the sheer number of people and bots employed for this purpose… (More)”.

Selected Readings on CrowdLaw

Curated on November 14, 2017May 29, 2019 by Gabriella Capone

By Beth Simone Noveck and Gabriella Capone

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of CrowdLaw was published in 2018, and most recently updated on February 13, 2019.

Introduction

The public is beginning to demand — and governments are beginning to provide — new opportunities for the engagement of citizens on an ongoing basis as collaborators in public problem-solving rather than merely as voters. Nowhere is the explosion in citizen participation accelerating more than in the context of lawmaking, where legislators and regulators are turning to new technology to solicit both public opinion and know-how to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the legislative process.

Such participatory lawmaking, known as crowdlaw (also, CrowdLaw), is a tech-enabled approach for the collaborative drafting of legislation, policies or constitutions between governments and citizens. CrowdLaw is an alternative to the traditional method of lawmaking, which is typically done by the political elite — politicians, bureaucrats, and staff — working in legislatures behind closed doors, with little input from the people affected. Instead, this new form of inclusive lawmaking opens the legislative function of government to a broader array of actors.

From Brazil to Iceland to Libya, there is an explosion in new collaborative lawmaking experiments. Despite the growing movement, the field of participatory lawmaking requires further research and experimentation. Given the traditionally deep distrust of groups expressed in the social psychology literature on groupthink, which condemns the presumed tendency of groups to drift to extreme positions, it is not self-evident that crowdlaw practices are better and should be institutionalized. Also, depending on its design, crowdlaw has the potential to accomplish different normative goals, which are often viewed as being at odds, including: improving democratic legitimacy by giving more people a voice in the process, or creating better quality legislation by introducing greater expertise. There is a need to study crowdlaw practices and assess their impact.

To complement our evolving theoretical and empirical research on and case studies of crowdlaw, we have compiled these selected readings on public engagement in lawmaking and policymaking. For reasons of space, we do not include readings on citizen engagement or crowdsourcing and open innovation generally (see GovLab’s Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Opinions and Ideas) but focus, instead, on engagement in these specific institutional contexts.

We invite you to visit Crowd.Law for additional resources, as well as:

CrowdLaw Design Recommendations

CrowdLaw Twitter List

CrowLaw Unconferences:

Annotated Readings

Aitamurto, Tanja – Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide (Paper, 10 pages, 2016)

This paper explores the risks of crowdsourcing for policymaking and the challenges that arise as a result of a severe conflict between the logics of the crowds and the logics of policymaking. Furthermore, he highlights the differences between traditional policymaking, which is done by a small group of experts, and crowdsourced policymaking, which utilizes a large, anonymous crowd with mixed levels of expertise.
“By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice,” and thus how this conflict prevents governments from gathering valuable insights from the crowd’s input. Poblet then addresses how to resolve this conflict and further overcome these challenges.

Atlee, Tom – vTaiwan (Blog series, 5 parts, 2018)

In this five-part blog series, Atlee describes in detail Taiwan’s citizen engagement platform vTaiwan and his takeaways after several months of research.
In order to cover what he deems “an inspiring beginning of a potentially profound evolutionary shift in all aspects of our collective governance,” Atlee divides his findings into the following sections:
- The first post includes a quick introduction and overview of the platform.
- The second delves deeper into its origins, process, and mechanics.
- The third describes two real actions completed by vTaiwan and its associated g0v community.
- The fourth provides a long list of useful sources discovered by Atlee.
- The fifth and final post offers a high-level examination of vTaiwan and makes comments to provide lessons for other governments.

Capone, Gabriella and Beth Simone Noveck – “CrowdLaw”: Online Public Participation in Lawmaking, (Report, 71 pages, 2017)

Capone and Noveck provide recommendations for the thoughtful design of crowdlaw initiatives, a model legislative framework for institutionalizing legislative participation, and a summary of 25 citizen engagement case studies from around the world — all in an effort to acknowledge and promote best crowdlaw practices. The report, written to inform the public engagement strategy of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, can apply to crowdlaw initiatives across different contexts and jurisdictions.
CrowdLaw advocates for engagement opportunities that go beyond citizens suggesting ideas, and inviting integration of participation throughout the legislative life-cycle — from agenda-setting to evaluation of implemented legislation. Additionally, Capone and Noveck highlight the importance of engaging with the recipient public institutions to ensure that participatory actions are useful and desired. Finally, they lay out a research and experimentation agenda for crowdlaw, noting that the increased data capture and sharing, as well as the creation of empirical standards for evaluating initiatives, are integral to the progress and promise of crowdlaw.
The 25 case studies are organized by a six-part taxonomy of: (1) the participatory task requested, (2) the methods employed by the process, (3) the stages of the legislative process, (4) the platforms used, from mobile to in-person meetings, (5) the institutionalization or degree of legal formalization of the initiative, and (6) the mechanisms and metrics for ongoing evaluation of the initiative

Faria, Cristiano Ferri Soares de – The open parliament in the age of the internet: can the people now collaborate with legislatures in lawmaking? (Book, 352 pages, 2013)

Faria explores the concept of participatory parliaments, and how participatory and deliberative democracy can complement existing systems of representative democracy. Currently the first and only full-length book surveying citizen engagement in lawmaking.
As the World Bank’s Tiago Peixoto writes: “This is a text that brings the reader into contact with the main theories and arguments relating to issues of transparency, participation, actors’ strategies, and processes of institutional and technological innovation. […] Cristiano Faria captures the state of the art in electronic democracy experiences in the legislative at the beginning of the 21st century.”
Chapters 4 and 5, deep dive into two case studies: the Chilean Senate’s Virtual Senator project, and the Brazilian House of Representatives e-Democracy project.

Johns, Melissa, and Valentina Saltane (World Bank Global Indicators Group) – Citizen Engagement in Rulemaking: Evidence on Regulatory Practices in 185 Countries (Report, 45 pages, 2016)

This report “presents a new database of indicators measuring the extent to which rulemaking processes are transparent and participatory across 185 countries. […] [It] presents a nses ew global data set on citizen engagement in rulemaking and provides detailed descriptive statistics for the indicators. The paper then provides preliminary analysis on how the level of citizen engagement correlates with other social and economic outcomes. To support this analysis, we developed a composite citizen engagement in rulemaking score around the publication of proposed regulations, consultation on their content and the use of regulatory impact assessments.”
The authors outline the global landscape of regulatory processes and the extent to which citizens are kept privy to regulatory happenings and/or able to participate in them.
Findings include that: “30 of the sampled economies regulators voluntarily publish proposed regulations despite having no formal requirement to do so” and that, “In 98 of the 185 countries surveyed for this paper, ministries and regulatory agencies do not conduct impact assessments of proposed regulations.” Also: “High-income countries tend to perform well on the citizen engagement in rulemaking score.”

Noveck, Beth Simone – The Electronic Revolution in Rulemaking (Journal article, 90 pages, 2004)

Noveck addresses the need for the design of effective practices, beyond the legal procedure that enables participation, in order to fully institutionalize the right to participate in e-rulemaking processes. At the time of writing, e-rulemaking practices failed to “do democracy,” which requires building a community of practice and taking advantage of enabling technology. The work, which focuses on public participation in informal rulemaking processes, explores “how the use of technology in rulemaking can promote more collaborative, less hierarchical, and more sustained forms of participation — in effect, myriad policy juries — where groups deliberate together.”
Noveck looks to reorient on the improvement of participatory practices that exploit new technologies: a design-centered approach as opposed a critique the shortcomings of participation. Technology can be a critical tool in promoting meaningful, deliberative engagement among citizens and government. With this, participation is to be not a procedural right, but a set of technologically-enabled practices enabled by government.

Peña-López, Ismael – decidim.barcelona, Spain. Voice or chatter? Case studies (Report, 54 pages, 2017)

Peña-López analyzes the origins and impact of the opensource decidim.barcelona platform, a component of the city’s broader movement towards participatory democracy. The case is divided into “the institutionalization of the ethos of the 15M Spanish Indignados movement, the context building up to the decidim.barcelona initiative,” and then reviews “its design and philosophy […] in greater detail. […] In the final section, the results of the project are analyzed and the shifts of the initiative in meaning, norms and power, both from the government and the citizen end are discussed.”
A main finding includes that “decidim.barcelona has increased the amount of information in the hands of the citizens, and gathered more citizens around key issues. There has been an increase in participation, with many citizen created proposals being widely supported, legitimated and accepted to be part of the municipality strategic plan. As pluralism has been enhanced without damaging the existing social capital, we can only think that the increase of participation has led to an improvement of democratic processes, especially in bolstering legitimacy around decision making.”

Simon, Julie, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman, and Geoff Mulgan (Nesta) – Digital Democracy: The Tools Transforming Political Engagement (Report, 100 pages, 2017)

Reviews the origins, implementation, and outcomes of 13 case studies representing the best in digital democracy practices that are consistently reviewed. The report then provides six key themes that underpin a “good digital democracy process.” Particularly instructive are the interviews with actors in each of the different projects, and their accounts of what contributed to their project’s successes or failures. The Nesta team also provides insightful analysis as to what contributed to the relative success or failure of the initiatives.

Suteu, Silvia – Constitutional Conventions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Iceland and Ireland (Journal article, 26 pages, 2015)

This piece from the Boston College International & Comparative Law Review “assesses whether the novelty in the means used in modern constitution-making translates further into novelty at a more substantive level, namely, in the quality of the constitution-making process and legitimacy of the end product. Additionally, this Essay analyzes standards of direct democratic engagements, which adequately fit these new developments, with a focus on the cases of Iceland and Ireland.”
It provides four motivations for focusing on constitution-making processes:
- legitimacy: a good process can create a model for future political interactions,
- the correlation between participatory constitution-making and the increased availability of popular involvement mechanisms,
- the breadth of participation is a key factor to ensuring constitutional survival, and
- democratic renewal.
Suteu traces the Icelandic and Irish processes of crowdsourcing their constitutions, the former being known as the first crowdsourced constitution, and the latter being known for its civil society-led We the Citizens initiative which spurred a constitutional convention and the adoption of a citizen assembly in the process.

Bernal, Carlos – How Constitutional Crowd-drafting can enhance Legitimacy in Constitution-Making(Paper, 27 pages, 2018)

Bernal examines the use of online engagement for facilitating citizen participation in constitutional drafting, a process he dubs “Crowddrafting.” Highlighting examples from places such as Kenya, Iceland, and Egypt, he lays out the details the process including key players, methods, actions, and tools.
Bernal poses three stages where citizens can participate in constitutional crowddrafting: foundational, deliberation, and pre-ratification. Citing more examples, he concisely explains how each process works and states their expected outcomes. Although he acknowledges the challenges that it may face, Bernal concludes by proposing that “constitutional crowddrafting is a strategy for strengthening the democratic legitimacy of constitution-making processes by enabling inclusive mechanisms of popular participation of individuals and groups in deliberations, expression of preferences, and decisions related to the content of the constitution.”
He suggests that crowddrafting can increase autonomy, transparency, and equality, and can engage groups or individuals that are often left out of deliberative processes. While it may create potential risks, Bernal explains how to mitigate those risks and achieve the full power of enhanced legitimacy from constitutional crowddrafting.

Finnbogadóttir, Vigdís & Gylfason,Thorvaldur – The New Icelandic Constitution: How did it come about? Where is it? (Book, 2016)

This book, co-authored by a former President of Iceland (also the world’s first democratically directly elected female president) tells the story the crowdsourced Icelandic constitution as a powerful example of participatory democracy.
“In 2010 a nationally elected Constitutional Council met, and four months later a draft constitution was born. On the 20th. of October 2012, The People of Iceland voted to tell their Parliament to ratify it as its new constitution.” Four years later, the book discusses the current state of the Icelandic constitution and explores whether Parliament is respecting the will of the people.

Mitozo, Isabele & Marques, Francisco Paulo Jamil – Context Matters! Looking Beyond Platform Structure to Understand Citizen Deliberation on Brazil’s Portal e‐Democracia (Article, 21 pages, 2019)

This article analyzes the Portal e‐Democracia participatory platform, sponsored by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Since 2009, the online initiative has provided different opportunities for legislators to engage with constituents and representatives through various methods such as surveys, forums, and collaborative wiki tools. Hence, the article examines the participatory behavior of Brazilian citizens during four particular forums hosted on Portal e-Democracia.
The researchers confirmed their hypothesis (i.e., that debates with diverse characteristics can develop even under the same design structures) and also drew several additional conclusions, suggesting that the issue at stake and sociopolitical context of the issue might be more important to characterizing the debate than the structure is.

Alsina, Victòria and Luis Martí, José – The Birth of the CrowdLaw Movement: Tech-Based Citizen Participation, Legitimacy and the Quality of Lawmaking

This paper introduces the idea of CrowdLaw followed by a deep dive into its roots, true meaning, and the inspiration behind its launch.
The authors first distinguish CrowdLaw from other forms of political participation, setting the movement apart from others. They then restate and explain the CrowdLaw Manifesto, a set 12 collaboratively-written principles intended to booster the design, implementation and evaluation of new tech-enabled practices of public engagement in law and policymaking. Finally, the authors conclude by emphasizing the importance of certain qualities that are inherent to the concept of CrowdLaw.

Beth Simone Noveck – Crowdlaw: Collective Intelligence and Lawmaking

In this essay, Noveck provides an all-encompassing and detailed description of the CrowdLaw concept. After establishing the value proposition for CrowdLaw methods, Noveck explores good practices for incorporating them into each stage of the law and policymaking process
Using illustrative examples of successful cases from around the world, Noveck affirms why CrowdLaw should become more widely adopted by highlighting its potential, while simultaneously suggesting how to implement CrowdLaw processes for interested institutions

Understanding Corporate Data Sharing Decisions: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Sharing Corporate Data with Researchers

Curated on November 14, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Leslie Harris at the Future of Privacy Forum: “Data has become the currency of the modern economy. A recent study projects the global volume of data to grow from about 0.8 zettabytes (ZB) in 2009 to more than 35 ZB in 2020, most of it generated within the last two years and held by the corporate sector.

As the cost of data collection and storage becomes cheaper and computing power increases, so does the value of data to the corporate bottom line. Powerful data science techniques, including machine learning and deep learning, make it possible to search, extract and analyze enormous sets of data from many sources in order to uncover novel insights and engage in predictive analysis. Breakthrough computational techniques allow complex analysis of encrypted data, making it possible for researchers to protect individual privacy, while extracting valuable insights.

At the same time, these newfound data sources hold significant promise for advancing scholarship and shaping more impactful social policies, supporting evidence-based policymaking and more robust government statistics, and shaping more impactful social interventions. But because most of this data is held by the private sector, it is rarely available for these purposes, posing what many have argued is a serious impediment to scientific progress.

A variety of reasons have been posited for the reluctance of the corporate sector to share data for academic research. Some have suggested that the private sector doesn’t realize the value of their data for broader social and scientific advancement. Others suggest that companies have no “chief mission” or public obligation to share. But most observers describe the challenge as complex and multifaceted. Companies face a variety of commercial, legal, ethical, and reputational risks that serve as disincentives to sharing data for academic research, with privacy – particularly the risk of reidentification – an intractable concern. For companies, striking the right balance between the commercial and societal value of their data, the privacy interests of their customers, and the interests of academics presents a formidable dilemma.

To be sure, there is evidence that some companies are beginning to share for academic research. For example, a number of pharmaceutical companies are now sharing clinical trial data with researchers, and a number of individual companies have taken steps to make data available as well. What is more, companies are also increasingly providing open or shared data for other important “public good” activities, including international development, humanitarian assistance and better public decision-making. Some are contributing to data collaboratives that pool data from different sources to address societal concerns. Yet, it is still not clear whether and to what extent this “new era of data openness” will accelerate data sharing for academic research.

Today, the Future of Privacy Forum released a new study, Understanding Corporate Data Sharing Decisions: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Sharing Corporate Data with Researchers. In this report, we aim to contribute to the literature by seeking the “ground truth” from the corporate sector about the challenges they encounter when they consider making data available for academic research. We hope that the impressions and insights gained from this first look at the issue will help formulate further research questions, inform the dialogue between key stakeholders, and identify constructive next steps and areas for further action and investment….(More)”.

Smart Cities, Smarter Citizens

Curated on November 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Free eBook courtesy of PTC.com: “The smart city movement is on a roll. Technology leaders are looking to transform major cities through advanced computer technologies, sensors, high-speed data networks, predictive analytics, big data, and IoT. But, as Mike Barlow explains in this O’Reilly report, the story goes beyond technology. Citizens, too, will need to play a large role in turning cities into smart, livable environments.

According to a United Nations report, by 2050 two-thirds of humanity will live in more than 40 mega-cities of 10 million people each. All of them will need to determine how to deliver more services with fewer resources. Cities will have to improve efficiency and reduce expenditures wherever possible, through new technologies and other means.

To create a thriving environment where innovation can blossom, citizens will not only be called upon to generate much of the data, but they’ll also need to be at the center of decision-making, based on what that data reveals.

Download this report today, and learn about the progress that various groups and organizations have already made in major cities around the world, and what lies ahead for all of us….(More)”.