DIGintegrity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A government‘s toolkit to disrupt corruption through data-based technologies.

Blog by Camilo Cetina: “The Lava Jato corruption scandal exposed a number of Brazilian government officers in 2016, including the then president of the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives, and further investigations have implicated other organisations in a way that reveals a worrying phenomenon worldwide: corruption is mutating into complex forms of organized crime.

For corruption networks to thrive and predate public funds, they need to capture government officers. Furthermore, the progressive digitalization of economies and telecommunications increases the potential of corruption networks to operate transnationally, which makes it easier to identify new cooperation mechanisms (for example, mobilizing illicit cash through a church) and accumulate huge profits thanks to transnational operations. This simultaneously increases their ability to reorganize and hide among huge amounts of data underlying the digital platforms used to mobilize money around the world.

However, at the same time, data-based technologies can significantly contribute as a response to the challenges revealed by recent corruption cases such as Lava Jato, Odebrecht, the Panama Papers or the Pandora Papers. The new report DIGIntegrity, the executive summary of which was recently published by CAF — Development Bank of Latin America, highlights how anti-corruption policies can become more effective when they target specific datasets which then are reused through digital platforms to prevent, detect and investigate corruption networks.

The report explains how the growing digitalization accompanied by the globalization of the economy is having a twofold effect on governments’ integrity agendas. On the one hand, globalization and technology provide unprecedented opportunities for corruption to grow, thus facilitating the concealment of illicit flows of money, and hindering jurisdictional capacities for detection and punishment. But, on the other hand, systemic improvements in governance and collective action are being achieved thanks to new technologies that help provide automated services and make public management processes more visible through open data and increasingly public records. There are “integrity dividends” derived from the growing digitization of governments and the increasingly intensive use of data intelligence to prevent corruption….(More).”

Policy Building Blocks, And How We Talk About The Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cathy Gellis: “One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, because policy involves an application of law to technology, and we can’t apply it well when we don’t understand how the law works. (It’s also hard to do well when we don’t understand how the technology works, either, but this post is about the law part so we’ll leave the issues with understanding technology aside for now.)

Even among lawyers, who should have some expertise in understanding the law, people can find themselves at different points along the learning curve in terms of understanding the intricacies and basic mechanics of our legal system. As explained before, law is often so complex that, even as practitioners, lawyers tend to become very specialized and may lose touch with some basic concepts if they do not often encounter them in the course of their careers.

Meanwhile it shouldn’t just be lawyers who understand law anyway. Certainly policymakers, charged with making the law, should have a solid understanding what they are working with. But regular people should too. After all, the point of a democracy is that the people get to decide what their laws should be (or at least be able to charge their representatives to make good ones on their behalf). And people can’t make good choices when they don’t understand how the choices they make fit into the system they are being made for.

Remember that none of these choices are being made in a vacuum; we do not find ourselves today with a completely blank canvas. Instead, we’ve all inherited a legal system that has chugged along for two centuries. We can, of course, choose to change any of it should we so require, but such an exercise would be best served by having a solid grasp on just what it is that we would be changing. Only with that insight can we be sure that any changes we might make would be needed, appropriate, and not themselves likely to cause even more problems than whatever we were trying to fix…(More)”.

Age of uncertainty: the fatal flaw with trying to predict the future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Margaret Hefferna: “Famed for the beauty of his economic models, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman once reflected that “there’s a pretty good case to be made that the stuff that I stressed in the models is a less important story than the things I left out because I couldn’t model them”.

It’s a casually explosive comment, because we use models all the time. Designed to reduce the world’s complexity to a manageable state, business models, economic models, scientific models are tools with which we test out our hypotheses and decisions.

But their simplification and utility is a trap. Because they must leave out so much – otherwise the model would be unwieldy – we’re vulnerable when we mistake them for reality.

Still, the rhetorical power of models is persistent, because they imbue statements about the future with the aura of inevitability. In an age of uncertainty, they seem to promise certainty.

Nor are they as objective as their numbers imply. Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, acknowledged as much. When testifying before Congress about why he had failed to predict the 2008 banking crisis, he called his conceptual model an ideology. “Everyone has one”, he said. “You have to. To exist, you need an ideology”.

His own ideology had assumed unregulated markets to be the safest, something he now saw as “a flaw”. But that flaw – and the economic crisis that followed – inadvertently demonstrated just how easily models give authority to bias and belief.

Taking history as a model presents similar dangers. The belief that history repeats itself is widespread, though rarely shared by professional historians. Mostly, it is our own history that we see being repeated – not anyone else’s.

When the Arab Spring unfolded, the Russians saw Russian history, with the politician Dmitry Medvedev fearing that, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, these demonstrations would prove destabilising for Russia.

Meanwhile, President Obama likened uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt to the Boston Tea Party and the beginning of America’s war for independence, drawing comparison too with the civil rights protest of Rosa Parks. Such analogies blinded both leaders to the dangerous contingencies and complexities of unfolding events….(More)”.

The need to represent: How AI can help counter gender disparity in the news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Sabrina Argoub: “For the first in our new series of JournalismAI Community Workshops, we decided to look at three recent projects that demonstrate how AI can help raise awareness on issues with misrepresentation of women in the news. 

The Political Misogynistic Discourse Monitor is a web application and API that journalists from AzMina, La Nación, CLIP, and DataCrítica developed to uncover hate speech against women on Twitter.

When Women Make Headlines is an analysis by The Pudding of the (mis)representation of women in news headlines, and how it has changed over time. 

In the AIJO project, journalists from eight different organisations worked together to identify and mitigate biases in gender representation in news. 

We invited, Bàrbara Libório of AzMina, Sahiti Sarva of The Pudding, and Delfina Arambillet of La Nación, to walk us through their projects and share insights on what they learned and how they taught the machine to recognise what constitutes bias and hate speech….(More)”.

Crypto’s “Freedom to Transact” May Actually Threaten Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Elizabeth M. Renieris: “What began as a small convoy of truck drivers protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates in late January quickly grew to a large-scale protest blocking nearly $350 million a day in trade and crippling the transport of vital supplies across the US-Canada border for more than three weeks. After struggling to disband the protestors, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time since its passage in 1988, compelling financial institutions to freeze the assets of protesters and urging local cryptocurrency exchanges not to process transactions from 253 bitcoin addresses suspected of supporting their efforts. Cryptocurrency promoters responded with outrage, siding with truckers, and calling Trudeau’s actions authoritarian, even comparing the Canadian prime minister to Hitler.

Days later, Russian President Vladimir Putin plunged the world into geopolitical instability with a full-scale unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine, resulting in mounting civilian causalities and sparking the biggest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Fearing the ramifications of a military response, governments around the world imposed an array of targeted financial sanctions, freezing and seizing the assets of Russian politicians and oligarchs, blocking transactions with Russia’s central bank and removing others from the SWIFT international payments network. Companies, including legacy payment processors Mastercard and Visa and tech platforms Apple Pay and Google Pay, followed with similar measures. However, as with the Canadian truckers, cryptocurrency exchanges have resisted similar steps, even when implored by Ukrainian officials, with one CEO remarking that sanctioning Russian users would “fly in the face of the reason crypto exists” — namely, for the “freedom to transact.”

As recently summarized by one journalist, the freedom to transact is a core tenet of crypto-libertarian ideology whereby “the individual is sovereign, and the state has no authority to limit what a person can do with their assets, digital or otherwise,” and money is magically apolitical. An extension of the same school of thought that elevates economic freedom above all other social, cultural and political interests, the freedom to transact is increasingly invoked by cryptocurrency promoters and right-wing politicians, who share similar ideological leanings, in response to measures by governments and private sector actors to impose political consequences through economic means, including in situations such as the Canadian truckers’ blockade or Russia’s recent assault on Ukraine…(More)”.

“Medical Matchmaking” provides personalized insights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hempstead at Springwise: “Humanity is a collection of unique individuals who represent a complex mixture of medical realities. Yet traditional medicine is based on a ‘law of averages’ – treating patients based on generalisations about the population as a whole. This law of averages can be misleading, and in a world where the average American spends 52 hours looking for health information online each year, generalisations create misunderstandings. Information provided by ‘Dr. Google’ or Facebook is inadequate and doesn’t account for the specific characteristics of each individual.

Israeli startup Alike has come up with a novel multidisciplinary solution to this problem – using health data and machine learning to match people who are alike on a holistic level. The AI’s matchmaking takes into account considerations such as co-morbidities, lifestyle factors, age, and gender.

Patients are then put into contact with an anonymised community of ‘Alikes’ – people who share their exact clinical journey, lifestyle, and interests. Members of this community can share or receive relevant and personalised insights that help them to better manage their conditions.

The new technology is possible due to regulatory changes that make it possible for everyone to gain instant electronic access to their personal health records. The app allows users to automatically create a health profile through a direct connection with their health provider.

Given the sensitive nature of medical information, Alike has put in place stringent privacy controls. The data shared on the app is completely de-identified, which means all personal identifiers are removed. Every user is verified by their healthcare provider, and further measures including data encryption and data fuzzing are employed. This means that patients can benefit from the insights of other patients while maintaining their privacy…(More)”.

Holding Out for Something Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Rebecca Williams on the “Limits of Customer Service and Administrative Burden Frameworks” : “On December 13th, the Biden Administration published an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. The EO promises to improve a slew of government services with the help of technology and rests on a theory of change that these “customer service” improvements will “engender trust,” but does not speak to changing the substance of these public goods, which may be the primary cause of the public’s trust issues, only their delivery. While the EO harkens to democratic principles, it makes no mention of how public input informed why they were prioritizing the delivery of the services mentioned versus other services.

Words are imbued with meaning and connotation and using “customer service” to describe the delivery of public goods has a dark side. It’s not just that the analogy doesn’t logically work — everything that makes “customer service” high quality in the business context is missing from government, there is no competition forcing the government to attract and retain customers — this phrase will not get us there. It’s that this mismatch of power dynamics makes it a dangerous phrase to substitute in. Calling the public “customers” implicitly reduces their participatory power to mere consumers and doesn’t fully embody the government’s duty to serve all its people well.

Michèle Champagne @michhhamI “love how “service design” and “design thinking” consultants have slowly invaded public policy circles, where public servants and policymakers are taught that “design skills“ are mandatory positive thinking, rapid prototyping, and problem solving. Thing is, that‘s solutionism.April 21st 2021“

It’s important in these times of diminished voter rights, rising police surveillance, and prosecution of protestors to protect our democratic rights and be wary of anyone co-opting democratic language for lesser rights. As illustrated by Michèle Champagne’s brilliant tweet (above), asking for feedback after the bulk of the substance has been decided isn’t democratic, it’s providing a very small set of choices and dressing it up as democratic.

Let’s move away from consumer language for public goods to participatory and rights-based language; let’s lead delivery improvement initiatives with public input and place these improvements in the service of larger debates about what collective goods we want to have as a community. For example, if 63% of the population is supportive of healthcare for all, let’s be sure related public service improvements contemplate and serve that substantive expansion; investing in more application infrastructure might make less sense than considering how technology can support the issuance of universal medicare cards or uniform reporting standards. This is a job the Executive Branch could spearhead (the Federal Government takes on pilots projects routinely with input from the public), but it is also one the larger civic tech community should hold in their minds as a possibility…(More)”.

Toward A Periodic Table of Open Data in Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Andrew Zahuranec, Adrienne Schmoeker, Hannah Chafetz and Stefaan G Verhulst: “In 2016, The GovLab studied the impact of open data in countries around the world. Through a series of case studies examining the value of open data across sectors, regions, and types of impact, we developed a framework for understanding the factors and variables that enable or complicate the success of open data initiatives. We called this framework the Periodic Table of Open Impact Factors.

Over the years, this tool has attracted substantial interest from data practitioners around the world. However, given the countless developments since 2016, we knew it needed to be updated and made relevant to our current work on urban innovation and the Third Wave of Open Data.

Last month, the Open Data Policy Lab held a collaborative discussion with our City Incubator participants and Council of Mentors. In a workshop setting with structured brainstorming sessions, we introduced the periodic table to participants and asked how this framework could be applied to city governments. We knew that city government often have fewer resources than other levels of government yet benefit from a potentially stronger connection to constituents being served. How might this Periodic Table of Open Data Elements be different at a city government level? We gathered participant and mentor feedback and worked to revise the table.

Today, to celebrate NYC Open Data Week 2022, the celebration of open data in New York, we are happy to release this refined model with a distinctive focus on developing open data strategies within cities. The Open Data Policy Lab is happy to present the Periodic Table of Open Data in Cities.

The Periodic Table of Open Data in Cities

Separated into five categories — Problem and Demand Definition, Capacity and Culture, Governance and Standards, Partnerships, and Risks and Ethical Pitfalls — this table provides a summary of some of the major issues that open data practitioners can think about as they develop strategies for release and use of open data in the communities they serve. We sought to specifically incorporate the needs of city incubators (as determined by our workshop), but the table can be relevant to a variety of stakeholders.

While descriptions for each of these elements are included below, the Periodic Table of Open Data Elements in Cities is an iterative framework and new elements will be perennially added or adjusted in accordance with emerging practices…(More)”.

How data can help migrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Andrew Young: “…Actors across sectors are experimenting with new data innovations to improve decision-making on migration and fill gaps in official statistics and traditional data sources. Non-traditional data, including privately held information, can complement traditional data sources that are not always timely or sufficient. Innovative uses of data can help us forecast and understand macro-level trends and developments in migration flows and the drivers of these phenomena, such as labour market disruptions. They can also support a better understanding of migrants’ experience, through more demographically-disaggregated information and more insight into “data invisibles” who are not represented in official statistics.

Specifically, new forms of data collaboration are enabling the use of data from telecoms, social media companies and satellite imagery to enhance civil registration procedures for migrants, forecast the effects of sea level rises on migration and nowcast international migration flows, for example. The Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M) was established to accelerate the responsible and ethical use of non-traditional data sources and methods. The BD4M is experimenting with new co-design and prototyping methods to tap into global expertise and advance more responsible and effective data collaboration to support data innovations for migration. The first of these “studios” investigated how to design data collaboration to better understand human mobility and migration in West Africa, including by leveraging non-traditional data.

Actors face persistent challenges in advancing innovative uses of non-traditional data to improve migration policymaking while also providing greater autonomy and agency to migrants at key moments of the data life cycle. It is a task that spans initial data collection, data processing, sharing, analysis and (re)use of data. However, more research and evidence is needed to advance digital self-determination in a way that respectfully empowers data subjects, including migrants.

The recently established International Network on Digital Self Determination (IDSD), an interdisciplinary consortium studying and designing ways to engage in trustworthy data spaces and ensure human centric approaches, is spearheading this work. The IDSD is also promoting and facilitating the use of collaborative studios to convene domain experts and migrants to define strategies that make sure that the data subjects themselves are aware of emerging uses of data that concerns them and are positioned to influence the design and objectives of new data innovations. By tapping into migrants’ perspectives, actors can ensure their data collaboration efforts are aligned with the priorities of their intended beneficiaries and conduct their work with the type of clear social license that is often lacking in the space….(More)”.

How to avoid sharing bad information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Abby Ohlheiser at MIT Technology Review: “The fast-paced online coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday followed a pattern that’s become familiar in other recent crises that have unfolded around the world. Photos, videos, and other information are posted and reshared across platforms much faster than they can be verified.

The result is that falsehoods are mistaken for truth and amplified, even by well-intentioned people. This can help bad actors to terrorize innocent civilians or advance disturbing ideologies, causing real harm.

Disinformation has been a prominent and explicit part of the Russian government’s campaign to justify the invasion. Russia falsely claimed that Ukrainian forces in Donbas, a city in the southeastern part of the country that harbors a large number of pro-Russian separatists, were planning violent attacks, engaging in antagonistic shelling, and committing genocide. Fake videos of those nonexistent attacks became part of a domestic propaganda campaign. (The US government, meanwhile, has been working to debunk and “prebunk” these lies.)

Meanwhile, even people who are not part of such government campaigns may intentionally share bad, misleading, or false information about the invasion to promote ideological narratives, or simply to harvest clicks, with little care about the harm they’re causing. In other cases, honest mistakes made amid the fog of war take off and go viral….

Your attention matters …

First, realize that what you do online makes a difference. “People often think that because they’re not influencers, they’re not politicians, they’re not journalists, that what they do [online] doesn’t matter,” Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, told me in 2020. But it does matter. Sharing dubious information with even a small circle of friends and family can lead to its wider dissemination.

… and so do your angry quote tweets and duets.

While an urgent news story is developing, well-meaning people may quote, tweet, share, or duet with a post on social media to challenge and condemn it. Twitter and Facebook have introduced new rules, moderation tactics, and fact-checking provisions to try to combat misinformation. But interacting with misinformation at all risks amplifying the content you’re trying to minimize, because it signals to the platform that you find it interesting. Instead of engaging with a post you know to be wrong, try flagging it for review by the platform where you saw it.

Stop.

Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert, developed a method for evaluating online information that he calls SIFT: “Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context.” When it comes to news about Ukraine, he says, the emphasis should be on “Stop”—that is, pause before you react to or share what you’re seeing….(More)”.