Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Seemay Chou: “In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make the case that the biggest barriers to progress today are institutional. They’re not because of physical limitations or intellectual scarcity. They’re the product of legacy systems — systems that were built with one logic in mind, but now operate under another. And until we go back and address them at the root, we won’t get the future we say we want.

I’m a scientist. Over the past five years, I’ve experimented with science outside traditional institutes. From this vantage point, one truth has become inescapable. The journal publishing system — the core of how science is currently shared, evaluated, and rewarded — is fundamentally broken. And I believe it’s one of the legacy systems that prevents science from meeting its true potential for society.

It’s an unpopular moment to critique the scientific enterprise given all the volatility around its funding. But we do have a public trust problem. The best way to increase trust and protect science’s future is for scientists to have the hard conversations about what needs improvement. And to do this transparently. In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. Yet we all feel trapped in a system that is, by definition, us.

I no longer believe that incremental fixes are enough. Science publishing must be built anew. I help oversee billions of dollars in funding across several science and technology organizations. We are expanding our requirement that all scientific work we fund will not go towards traditional journal publications. Instead, research we support should be released and reviewed more openly, comprehensively, and frequently than the status quo.

This policy is already in effect at Arcadia Science and Astera Institute, and we’re actively funding efforts to build journal alternatives through both Astera and The Navigation Fund. We hope others cross this line with us, and below I explain why every scientist and science funder should strongly consider it…(More)”.

Reliable data facilitates better policy implementation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ganesh Rao and Parul Agarwal: “Across India, state government departments are at the forefront of improving human capabilities through education, health, and nutrition programmes. Their ability to do so effectively depends on administrative (or admin) data1 collected and maintained by their staff. This data is collected as part of regular operations and informs both day-to-day decision-making and long-term policy. While policymaking can draw on (reasonably reliable) sample surveys alone, effective implementation of schemes and services requires accurate individual-level admin data. However, unreliable admin data can be a severe constraint, forcing bureaucrats to rely on intuition, experience, and informed guesses. Improving the reliability of admin data can greatly enhance state capacity, thereby improving governance and citizen outcomes.  

There has been some progress on this front in recent years. For instance, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity has significantly improved direct benefit transfer (DBT) mechanisms by ensuring that certain recipient data is reliable. However, challenges remain in accurately capturing the well-being of targeted citizens. Despite significant investments in the digitisation of data collection and management systems, persistent reliability issues undermine the government’s efforts to build a data-driven decision-making culture…

There is growing evidence of serious quality issues in admin data. At CEGIS, we have conducted extensive analyses of admin data across multiple states, uncovering systemic issues in key indicators across sectors and platforms. These quality issues compound over time, undermining both micro-level service delivery and macro-level policy planning. This results in distorted budget allocations, gaps in service provision, and weakened frontline accountability…(More)”.

Project Push creates an archive of news alerts from around the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Neel Dhanesha: “A little over a year ago, Matt Taylor began to feel like he was getting a few too many push notifications from the BBC News app.

It’s a feeling many of us can probably relate to. Many people, myself included, have turned off news notifications entirely in the past few months. Taylor, however, went in the opposite direction.

Instead of turning off notifications, he decided to see how the BBC — the most popular news app in the U.K., where Taylor lives —  compared to other news organizations around the world. So he dug out an old Google Pixel phone, downloaded 61 news apps onto it, and signed up for push notifications on all of them.

As notifications roll in, a custom-built script (made with the help of ChatGPT) uploads their text to a server and a Bluesky page, providing a near real-time view of push notifications from services around the world. Taylor calls it Project Push.

People who work in news “take the front page very seriously,” said Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times who built Project Push in his spare time. “There are lots of editors who care a lot about that, but actually one of the most important people in the newsroom is the person who decides that they’re going to press a button that sends an immediate notification to millions of people’s phones.”

The Project Push feed is a fascinating portrait of the news today. There are the expected alerts — breaking news, updates to ongoing stories like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latest shenanigans in Washington — but also:

— Updates on infrastructure plans that, without the context, become absolutely baffling (a train will instead be a bus?).

— Naked attempts to increase engagement.

— Culture updates that some may argue aren’t deserving of a push alert from the Associated Press.

— Whatever this is.

Taylor tells me he’s noticed some geographic differences in how news outlets approach push notifications. Publishers based in Asia and the Middle East, for example, send far more notifications than European or American ones; CNN Indonesia alone pushed about 17,000 of the 160,000 or so notifications Project Push has logged over the past year…(More)”.

Engagement Integrity: Ensuring Legitimacy at a time of AI-Augmented Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “As participatory practices are increasingly tech-enabled, ensuring engagement integrity is becoming more urgent. While considerable scholarly and policy attention has been paid to information integrity (OECD, 2024; Gillwald et al., 2024; Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017; Ghosh & Scott, 2018), including concerns about disinformation, misinformation, and computational propaganda, the integrity of engagement itself — how to ensure collective decision-making is not tech manipulated — remains comparatively under-theorized and under-protected. I define engagement integrity as the procedural fairness and resistance to manipulation of tech-enabled deliberative and participatory processes.

My definition is different from prior discussions of engagement integrity, which mainly emphasized ethical standards when scientists engage with the public (e.g., in advisory roles, communication, or co-research). The concept is particularly salient in light of recent innovations that aim to lower the transaction costs of engagement using artificial intelligence (AI) (Verhulst, 2018). From AI-facilitated citizen assemblies (Simon et al., 2023) to natural language processing (NLP) -enhanced policy proposal platforms (Grobbink & Peach, 2020) to automated analysis of unstructured direct democracy proposals (Grobbink & Peach, 2020) to large-scale deliberative polls augmented with agentic AI (Mulgan, 2022), these developments promise to enhance inclusion, scalability, and sense-making. However, they also create new attack surfaces and vectors of influence that could undermine legitimacy.

This concern is not speculative…(More)”.

Unlock Your City’s Hidden Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Andreas Pawelke, Basma Albanna and Damiano Cerrone: “Cities around the world face urgent challenges — from climate change impacts to rapid urbanization and infrastructure strain. Municipal leaders struggle with limited budgets, competing priorities, and pressure to show quick results, making traditional approaches to urban transformation increasingly difficult to implement.

Every city, however, has hidden success stories — neighborhoods, initiatives, or communities that are achieving remarkable results despite facing similar challenges as their peers.

These “positive deviants” often remain unrecognized and underutilized, yet they contain the seeds of solutions that are already adapted to local contexts and constraints.

Data-Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) combines urban data, advanced analytics, and community engagement to systematically uncover these bright spots and amplify their impact. This new approach offers a pathway to urban transformation that is not only evidence-based but also cost-effective and deeply rooted in local realities.

DPPD is particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments, where expensive external solutions often fail to take hold. By starting with what’s already working, cities can make strategic investments that build on existing strengths rather than starting from scratch. Leveraging AI tools that improve community engagement, the approach becomes even more powerful — enabling cities to envision potential futures, and engage citizens in meaningful co-creation…(More)”

The Next Wave of Innovation Districts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner: “A next wave of innovation districts is gaining momentum given the structural changes underway in the global economy. The examples cited above telegraph where existing innovation districts are headed and explain why new districts are forming. The districts highlighted and many others are responding to fast-changing and highly volatile macro forces and the need to de-risk, decarbonize, and diversify talent.

The next wave of innovation districts is distinctive for multiple reasons.

  • The sectors leveraging this innovation geography expand way beyond the traditional focus on life sciences to include advanced manufacturing for military and civilian purposes.
  • The deeper emphasis on decarbonization is driving the use of basic and applied R&D to invent new clean technology products and solutions as well as organizing energy generation and distribution within the districts themselves to meet crucial carbon targets.
  • The stronger emphasis on the diversification of talent includes the upskilling of workers for new production activities and a broader set of systems to drive inclusive innovation to address long-standing inequities.
  • The districts are attracting a broader group of stakeholders, including manufacturing companies, utilities, university industrial design and engineering departments and hard tech startups.
  • The districts ultimately are looking to engage a wider base of investors given the disparate resources and traditions of capitalization that support defense tech, clean tech, med tech and other favored forms of innovation.

Some regions or states are also seeking ways to connect a constellation of districts and other economic hubs to harness the imperative to innovate accentuated by these and other macro forces. The state of South Australia is one such example. It has prioritized several innovation hubs across this region to foster South Australia’s knowledge and innovation ecosystem, as well as identify emerging economic clusters in industry sectors of global competitiveness to advance the broader economy…(More)”.

The EU’s AI Power Play: Between Deregulation and Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Raluca Csernatoni: “From the outset, the European Union (EU) has positioned itself as a trailblazer in AI governance with the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for AI systems in use, the AI Act. The EU’s approach to governing artificial intelligence (AI) has been characterized by a strong precautionary and ethics-driven philosophy. This ambitious regulation reflects the EU’s long-standing approach of prioritizing high ethical standards and fundamental rights in tech and digital policies—a strategy of fostering both excellence and trust in human-centric AI models. Yet, framed as essential to keep pace with U.S. and Chinese AI giants, the EU has recently taken a deregulatory turn that risks trading away democratic safeguards, without addressing systemic challenges to AI innovation.

The EU now stands at a crossroads: it can forge ahead with bold, home-grown AI innovation underpinned by robust regulation, or it can loosen its ethical guardrails, only to find itself stripped of both technological autonomy and regulatory sway. While Brussels’s recent deregulatory turn is framed as a much needed competitiveness boost, the real obstacles to Europe’s digital renaissance lie elsewhere: persistent underfunding, siloed markets, and reliance on non-EU infrastructures…(More)”

Federated learning for children’s data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Roy Saurabh: “Across the world, governments are prioritizing the protection of citizens’ data – especially that of children. New laws, dedicated data protection authorities, and digital infrastructure initiatives reflect a growing recognition that data is not just an asset, but a foundation for public trust. 

Yet a major challenge remains: how can governments use sensitive data to improve outcomes – such as in education – without undermining the very privacy protections they are committed to uphold?

One promising answer lies in federated, governance-aware approaches to data use. But realizing this potential requires more than new technology; it demands robust data governance frameworks designed from the outset.

Data governance: The missing link

In many countries, ministries of education, health, and social protection each hold pieces of the puzzle that together could provide a more complete picture of children’s learning and well-being. For example, a child’s school attendance, nutritional status, and family circumstances all shape their ability to thrive, yet these records are kept in separate systems.

Efforts to combine such data often run into legal and technical barriers. Centralized data lakes raise concerns about consent, security, and compliance with privacy laws. In fact, many international standards stress the principle of data minimization – the idea that personal information should not be gathered or combined unnecessarily. 

“In many countries, ministries of education, health, and social protection each hold pieces of the puzzle that together could provide a more complete picture of children’s learning and well-being.”

This is where the right data governance frameworks become essential. Effective governance defines clear rules about how data can be accessed, shared, and used – specifying who has the authority, what purposes are permitted, and how rights are protected. These frameworks make it possible to collaborate with data responsibly, especially when it comes to children…(More)”

How to Break Down Silos and Collaborate Across Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jessica MacLeod: “…To help public sector leaders navigate these cultural barriers, I use a simple but powerful framework: Clarity, Care, and Challenge. It’s built from research, experience, and what I’ve seen actually shift how teams work. You can read more about the framework in my previous article on high-performing teams. Here’s how this framework relates to breaking down silos:

  • Clarity → How We Work:
    Clear priorities, aligned expectations, and a shared understanding of how individual work connects to the bigger picture.
  • Care → How We Relate:
    Trust, psychological safety, and strong collaboration.
  • Challenge → How We Achieve:
    Stretch goals, high standards, and a culture that encourages innovation and growth.

Silos thrive in ambiguity. If no one can see the work, understand the language, or map who owns what, collaboration dies on arrival.

When I work with public sector teams, one of the first things I look for is how visible the work is. Can people across departments explain where things stand on a project today? Or what the context is behind a project? Do they know who’s accountable? Can they locate the latest draft of the work without digging through three email chains?

Often, the answer is no, and it’s not because people aren’t trying. It’s because our systems are optimized for siloed visibility, not shared clarity.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

  • A particular acronym means one thing to IT, another to leadership, and something entirely different to community stakeholders.
  • “Launch” for one team means public announcement. For another, it means testing a feature with a pilot group.
  • Documents live in private folders, on individual desktops, or in tools that don’t talk to each other…(More)”.

The Importance of Co-Designing Questions: 10 Lessons from Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hannah Chafetz and Stefaan Verhulst: “How can a question-based approach to philanthropy enable better learning and deeper evaluation across both sides of the partnership and help make progress towards long-term systemic change? That’s what Siegel Family Endowment (Siegel), a family foundation based in New York City, sought to answer by creating an Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach. 

While many philanthropies continue to follow traditional practices that focus on achieving a set of strategic objectives, Siegel employs an inquiry-driven approach, which focuses on answering questions that can accelerate insights and iteration across the systems they seek to change. By framing their goal as “learning” rather than an “outcome” or “metric,” they aim to generate knowledge that can be shared across the whole field and unlock impact beyond the work on individual grants. 

The Siegel approach centers on co-designing and iteratively refining questions with grantees to address evolving strategic priorities, using rapid iteration and stakeholder engagement to generate insights that inform both grantee efforts and the foundation’s decision-making.

Their approach was piloted in 2020, and refined and operationalized the years that followed. As of 2024, it was applied across the vast majority of their grantmaking portfolio. Laura Maher, Chief of Staff and Director of External Engagement at Siegel Family Endowment, notes: “Before our Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach we spent roughly 90% of our time on the grant writing process and 10% checking in with grantees, and now that’s balancing out more.”

Screenshot 2025 05 08 at 4.29.24 Pm

Image of the Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking Process from the Siegel Family Endowment

Earlier this year, the DATA4Philanthropy team conducted two in-depth discussions with Siegel’s Knowledge and Impact team to discuss their Inquiry-Driven Grantmaking approach and what they learned thus far from applying their new methodology. While the Siegel team notes that there is still much to be learned, there are several takeaways that can be applied to others looking to initiate a questions-led approach. 

Below we provide 10 emerging lessons from these discussions…(More)”.