Ebola: A Big Data Disaster

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by Sean Martin McDonald: “…undertaken with support from the Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Media Democracy Fund, explores the use of Big Data in the form of Call Detail Record (CDR) data in humanitarian crisis.

It discusses the challenges of digital humanitarian coordination in health emergencies like the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the marked tension in the debate around experimentation with humanitarian technologies and the impact on privacy. McDonald’s research focuses on the two primary legal and human rights frameworks, privacy and property, to question the impact of unregulated use of CDR’s on human rights. It also highlights how the diffusion of data science to the realm of international development constitutes a genuine opportunity to bring powerful new tools to fight crisis and emergencies.

Analysing the risks of using CDRs to perform migration analysis and contact tracing without user consent, as well as the application of big data to disease surveillance is an important entry point into the debate around use of Big Data for development and humanitarian aid. The paper also raises crucial questions of legal significance about the access to information, the limitation of data sharing, and the concept of proportionality in privacy invasion in the public good. These issues hold great relevance in today’s time where big data and its emerging role for development, involving its actual and potential uses as well as harms is under consideration across the world.

The paper highlights the absence of a dialogue around the significant legal risks posed by the collection, use, and international transfer of personally identifiable data and humanitarian information, and the grey areas around assumptions of public good. The paper calls for a critical discussion around the experimental nature of data modelling in emergency response due to mismanagement of information has been largely emphasized to protect the contours of human rights….

See Sean Martin McDonald – “Ebola: A Big Data Disaster” (PDF).

 

The Governing Cancer of Our Time

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Brooks in The New York Times: “We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force. Our founding fathers chose politics.

Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.

The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.

But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.

As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.

Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.

This antipolitics tendency has had a wretched effect on our democracy. It has led to a series of overlapping downward spirals:

The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience. That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.

The antipolitics people don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations. When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and, disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitics.

The antipolitics people refuse compromise and so block the legislative process. The absence of accomplishment destroys public trust. The decline in trust makes deal-making harder….

This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. The answer to Trump is politics. It’s acknowledging other people exist. It’s taking pleasure in that difference and hammering out workable arrangements. As Harold Laski put it, “We shall make the basis of our state consent to disagreement. Therein shall we ensure its deepest harmony.”…(More)”

The Digital Equilibrium Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by The Digital Equilibrium Project: “Cybersecurity, government and privacy experts are banding together as part of The ‘Digital Equilibrium Project’ to foster a new, productive dialogue on balancing security and privacy in the connected world. The project aims to address the underlying issues fueling acrimonious debates like the contentious court order between Apple and the U.S. Government.

  • The diverse group includes current and former leaders of some of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms and organizations, former officials in the NSA and national law enforcement, and leaders of some of the nation’s most influential privacy organizations. These individuals believe new thinking and collaboration is needed to avert potential catastrophes as the digital and physical worlds become more interdependent.
  • The group will release its foundational paper ‘Balancing Security and Privacy in the Connected World’ on Tuesday, March 1st at the RSA Conference – the world’s largest cybersecurity conference.
  • This project and related paper, months in the making, seek to end the kinds of standoffs we are seeing between Apple and the U.S. Government, addressing the underlying lack of social norms and legal constructs for the digital world.
  • They will convene a mid-year summit to craft a framework or ‘constitution’ for the digital world. The intent of this constitution is to help guide policy creation, broker compromise and serve as the foundation for decision making around cybersecurity issues. Senior executives from the Justice Department, Apple and other technology firms will be invited to participate…..

Next week the group will publish its foundational paper, crafted over extensive meetings, interviews and working sessions. The paper is meant to foster a new, collaborative discussion on the most pressing questions that could determine the future safety and social value of the Internet and the digital technologies that depend on it. In addition to releasing the paper at the RSA Conference, members of the group will discuss the paper and related issues during a main-stage panel session moderated by Art Coviello, former Executive Chairman of RSA Security, and James Kaplan, a McKinsey partner, on Thursday, March 3rd. Panel members will include: Michael Chertoff, Executive Chairman of The Chertoff Group and former Secretary of Homeland Security; Trevor Hughes, President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals; Mike McConnell, former Director of the NSA and Director, National Intelligence; and Nuala O’Connor, President and CEO, Center for Democracy & Technology.

The paper urges governments, corporations and privacy advocates to put aside the polarizing arguments that have cast security and privacy as opposing forces, and calls for a mid-year summit meeting between these parties to formulate a new structure for advancement of these pressing issues. It poses four fundamental questions that must be addressed to ensure the digital world can evolve in ways that ensure individual privacy while enabling the productivity and commercial gains that can improve quality of life around the globe. The four questions are:

  • What practices should organizations adopt to achieve their goals while protecting the privacy of their customers and other stakeholders?
  • How can organizations continue to improve the protection of their digital infrastructures and adopt privacy management practices that protect their employees?
  • What privacy management practices should governments adopt to maintain civil liberties and expectations of privacy, while ensuring the safety and security of their citizens, organizations, and critical infrastructure?
  • What norms should countries adopt to protect their sovereignty while enabling global commerce and collaboration against criminal and terrorist threats?

The Digital Equilibrium Project’s foundational paper will available for download on March 1st at www.digitalequilibriumproject.com”

The city as platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The report of the 2015 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology: “In the age of ubiquitous Internet connections, smartphones and data, the future vitality of cities is increasingly based on their ability to use digital networks in intelligent, strategic ways. While we are accustomed to thinking of cities as geophysical places governed by mayors, conventional political structures and bureaucracies, this template of city governance is under great pressure to evolve. Urban dwellers now live their lives in all sorts of hyper-connected virtual spaces, pulsating with real-time information, intelligent devices, remote-access databases and participatory crowdsourcing. Expertise is distributed, not centralized. Governance is not just a matter of winning elections and assigning tasks to bureaucracies; it is about the skillful collection and curation of information as a way to create new affordances for commerce and social life.

Except among a small class of vanguard cities, however, the far-reaching implications of the “networked city” for economic development, urban planning, social life and democracy, have not been explored in depth. The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program thus convened an eclectic group of thirty experts to explore how networking technologies are rapidly changing the urban landscape in nearly every dimension. The goal was to learn how open networks, onlinecooperation and open data can enhance urban planning and administration, and more broadly, how they might improve economic opportunity and civic engagement. The conference, the 24th Annual Aspen Roundtable on Information Technology, also addressed the implications of new digital technologies for urban transportation, public health and safety, and socio-economic inequality….(Download the InfoTech 2015 Report)”

Letting the people decide … but will government listen?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Mandarin: “If we now have the technology to allow citizens to vote directly on all issues, what job remains for public servants?

While new technology may provide new options to contribute, the really important thing is governmental willingness to actually listen, says Maria Katsonis, the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s director of equality.

The balance between citizen consultation and public service expertise in decision-making remains a hot debate, with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill warning last year that while expertise in policy is important, overzealous bureaucrats and politicians can disenfranchise citizens.

The internet is assisting government to attain opinions from people more easily than ever before. SA, for example, has embraced the use of citizen juries in policy formation through its youSAy portal — though as yet on only some issues. Finland has experimented with digitally crowdsourcing input into the policymaking process.

The Victorian government, meanwhile, has received blowback around claims its recent announcement for a “skyrail” in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs went ahead with very little consultation…

Indeed, even a direct vote doesn’t mean the government is really listening to the people. A notable example of a government using a poorly designed popular vote to rubber stamp its own intentions was an online poll in Queensland on whether to cut public transport fares which was worded to suit the government’s own predilections.

Giving citizens the tools to contribute

Katsonis said she didn’t want to “diss crowdsourcing”; governments should think about where using it might be appropriate, and where it might not. Directly crowdsourcing legislation is perhaps not the best way to use the “wisdom of the crowd”, she suggested….The use of people’s panels to inform policy and budgeting — for example at the City of Melbourne — shows some promise as one tool to improve engagement. Participants of people’s panels — which see groups of ordinary citizens being given background information about the task at hand and then asked to come up with a proposal for what to do — tend to report a higher trust in governmental processes after they’ve gained some experience of the difficulty of making those decisions.

One of the benefits of that system is the chance to give participants the tools to understand those processes for themselves, rather than going in cold, as some other direct participation tools do….

Despite the risks, processes such as citizens’ panels are still a more nuanced approach than calls for frequent referenda or the new breed of internet-based political parties, such as Australia’s Online Direct Democracy, that promise their members of parliament will vote however a majority of voters tell them to….(More)”

Sticky-note strategy: How federal innovation labs borrow from Silicon Valley

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carten Cordell in the Federal Times: “The framework for an integrated security solution in the Philippines is built on a bedrock of sticky notes. So is the strategy for combating piracy in East Africa and a handful of other plans that Zvika Krieger is crafting in a cauldron of collaboration within the State Department.

More specifically, Krieger, a senior adviser for strategy within the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, is working in the bureau’s Strategy Lab, just one pocket of federal government where a Silicon Valley-playbook for innovation is being used to develop policy solutions….

Krieger and a host of other policy thinkers learned a new way to channel innovation for policy solutions called human-centered design, or design thinking. While arguably new in government, the framework has long been in use by the tech sector to design products that will serve the needs of their customers. The strategy of group thinking towards a policy — which is more what these innovation labs seek to achieve — has been used before as well….Where the government has started to use HCD is in developing new policy solutions within a multifaceted group of stakeholders that can contribute a well-rounded slate of expertise. The product is a strategy that is developed from the creative thoughts of a team of experts, rather than a single specialized source….

The core tenet of HCD is to establish a meritocracy of ideas that is both empathetic of thought and immune to hierarchy. In order to get innovative solutions for a complex problem, Krieger forms a team of experts and stakeholders. He then mixes in outside thought leaders he calls “wild cards” to give the group outside perspective.

The delicate balance opens discussion and the mix of ideas ultimately form a strategy for handling the problem. That strategy might involve a technology; but it could also be a new partnership, a new function within an office, or a new acquisition program. Because the team is comprised of multiple experts, it can navigate the complexity more thoroughly, and the wild cards can offer their expertise to provide solutions the stakeholders may not have considered….

Human-centered design has been working its way through pockets of the federal government for a few years now. The Office of Personnel Management opened its Innovation Lab in 2012 and was tasked with improving the USAJobs website. The Department of Health and Human Services opened the IDEA Lab in 2013 to address innovation in its mission. The Department of Veteran Affairs has a Center of Innovation to identify new approaches to meet the current and future needs of veterans, and the departments of Defense and State both have innovation labs tackling policy solutions.

The concept is gaining momentum. This fall, the Obama administration released a strategy report calling for a network of innovation labs throughout federal agencies to develop new policy solutions through HCD.

“I think the word is spreading. It’s kind of like a whisper campaign, in the most positive way,” said an administration official with knowledge of innovation labs and HCD strategies, who was not authorized to speak to the press. “I think, again, the only constraint here is that we don’t have enough of them to be able to imbue this knowledge across government. We need many more people.”

A March 2014 GAO report said that the OPM Innovation Lab had not developed consistent performance targets that would allow it to assess the success of its projects. The report recommended more consistent milestones to assess progress, which the agency addressed through a series of pilot programs….

In the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, an innovation lab called the Collaboratory is in its second year of existence, using HCD strategies to improve projects like the Fulbright program and other educational diplomacy efforts.

The Education Diplomacy initiative, for example, used HCD to devise ways to increase education access abroad using State resources. Defining U.S. embassies as the end user, the Collaboratory then analyzed the areas of need at the installations and began crafting policies.

“We identified a couple of area where we thought we could make substantial gains quite quickly and in a budget neutral way,” Collaboratory Deputy Director Paul Kruchoski said. The process allowed multiple stakeholders like the U.S. Agency for International Development, Peace Corps and the Department of Education to help craft the policy and create what Kruchoski called “feedback loops” to refine throughout the embassies…(More)”

 

Startup Helps Cities Launch Crowdfunding Campaigns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in Government Technology: “Popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been a hotbed for the aspiring to fund product prototypes, publish artistic works and create everything from films to trendy foods. Now governments are stepping into the mix to harness the low-risk funding method for community parks, gardens, sidewalks and more. And as public-sector interest in crowdfunding has grown, so too has interest from startup companies.

One of those, Citizinvestor, offers a crowdfunding platform tailored for government. Co-founders Tony DeSisto, Jordan Raynor, and Erik Rapprich launched the Tampa, Fla.-based civic tech company in 2012 to help localities raise thousands of dollars for numerous projects across the nation. Public officials simply add photos and a description of projects and the Web app pitches them to interested citizens.

While still a young company, Citizinvestor compares well with the more established Kickstarter, notwithtanding Kickstarter’s success — that since launch in 2009, has generated more than $2.2 billion for 100,000-plus projects. Citizinvestor’s own project funding success rate of 60 percent is higher than market leader Kickstarter’s rate of 36 percent. Funded projects have run from an $81,000 dog park to a roughly $1,000 set of bicycle racks….(More)

Our finances are a mess – could behavioral science help clean them up?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Katy Davis at the Conversation: “Typical approaches to solving problematic finances are either to “educate” people about the need to save more or to “incentivize” savings with monetary rewards.

But when we look at traditional financial education and counseling programs, they have had virtually no long-term impact on behavior. Similarly, matched savings programs are expensive and have shown mixed results on savings rates. Furthermore, these approaches often prioritize the need for savings while treating debt repayment as a secondary concern.

Education and incentives haven’t worked because they are based on problematic assumptions about lower-income consumers that turn out to be false….

The good news is that a range of simple, behaviorally informed solutions can easily be deployed to tackle these problems, from policy innovations to product redesign.

For instance, changing the “suggested payoff” in credit card statements for targeted segments (i.e., those who were already paying in full) could help consumers more effectively pay down debt, as could allowing tax refunds to be directly applied toward debt repayment. Well-designed budgeting tools that leverage financial technology could be integrated into government programs. The state of California, for example, is currently exploring ways to implement such technologies across a variety of platforms.

But the public and private sectors both need to play a role for these tools to be effective. Creating an integrated credit-and-saving product, for example, would require buy-in from regulators along with financial providers.

While these banking solutions may not close the economic inequality gap on their own, behaviorally informed design shifts can be the missing piece of the puzzle in these efforts to fix major problems.

Our research indicates that people already want to be doing a better job with their finances; we just need to make it a little less difficult for them….(More)”

Open data and (15 million!) new measures of democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Tucker in the Washington Post: “Last month the University of Gothenberg’s V-Dem Institute released a new“Varieties of Democracy” dataset. It provides about 15 million data points on democracy, including 39 democracy-related indices. It can be accessed at v-dem.net along with supporting documentation. I asked Staffan I. Lindberg, Director of the V-Dem Institute and one of the directors of the project, a few questions about the new data. What follows is a lightly edited version of his answers.


Women’s Political Empowerment Index for Southeast Asia (Data: V-Dem data version 5; Figure V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenberg, Sweden)

Joshua Tucker: What is democracy, and is it even really to have quantitative measures on democracy?

Staffan Lindberg: There is no consensus on the definition of democracy and how to measure it. The understanding of what a democracy really is varies across countries and regions. This motivates the V-Dem approach not to offer one standard definition of the concept but instead to distinguish among five principles different versions of democracy: Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative, and Egalitarian democracy. All of these principles have played prominent roles in current and historical discussions about democracy. Our measurement of these principles are based on two types of data, factual data collected by assisting researchers and survey responses by country experts, which are combined using a rather complex measurement model (which is a“custom-designed Bayesian ordinal item response theory model”, for details see the V-Dem Methodology document)….(More)

Open up!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy (UK): “…The Commission started by looking at how Parliament could use digital technology to work more effectively and in a way that people expect in the modern world. We also considered how digital could enhance the voting system, as this is a fundamental part of the UK’s system of representative democracy. We asked people to tell us their views online or in person and we heard from a wide a range of people. They included not just experts, MPs and interest groups, but members of the public—people of different ages and backgrounds and people with varying levels of interest in politics and the work of Parliament.

One message that resonated very clearly was that digital is only part of the answer. It can help to make democratic processes easier for people to understand and take part in, but other barriers must also be addressed for digital to have a truly transformative effect. As the Democratic Society put it:

“[T]echnology in itself is not a panacea and it will not effectively correct poor existing practices…we need to look beyond new digital tools to existing processes that do and do not work, and then critically explore how technology can help us to make democracy work better.”…./…

The Commission has drawn on digital democracy initiatives from across the world. We participated in the World e-Parliament Conference and have become a popular contact within the UK Parliament for others around the world interested in sharing good practice on digital democracy, openness and transparency.

Launched at the 2012 World e-Parliament conference, the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness is a call to parliaments and legislative assemblies for an increased commitment to transparency, openness and citizen engagement. Dr Andy Williamson told us the UK Parliament should adopt the principles set out in the declaration:

“It’s important to establish a credible and measurable set of objectives. A good starting point for this would be to adopt the principles contained in the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, which can be summarised under the following four primary headings:

  1. Promoting a Culture of Openness

    Parliamentary information belongs to the public.

  2. Making Parliamentary Information Transparent

    Parliament shall adopt policies that ensure proactive publication of parliamentary information, and shall review these policies periodically to take advantage of evolving good practices.

  3. Easing Access to Parliamentary Information

    Parliament shall ensure that information is broadly accessible to all citizens on a non-discriminatory basis through multiple channels, including first-person observation, print media, radio, and live and on-demand broadcasts and streaming

  4. Enabling Electronic Communication of Parliamentary Information

    Parliament shall ensure that information is broadly accessible to all citizens on a non-discriminatory basis through multiple channels, including first-person observation, print media, radio, and live and on-demand broadcasts and streaming.”

We agree.

34 The House of Commons should formally adopt the principles set out in the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness….(More)”