Type: blog post

Crowd-mapping gender equality – a powerful tool for shaping a better city launches in Melbourne

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Kalms at The Conversation: “Inequity in cities has a long history. The importance of social and community planning to meet the challenge of creating people-centred cities looms large. While planners, government and designers have long understood the problem, uncovering the many important marginalised stories is an enormous task.

ion: “Inequity in cities has a long history. The importance of social and community planning to meet the challenge of creating people-centred cities looms large. While planners, government and designers have long understood the problem, uncovering the many important marginalised stories is an enormous task.

Technology – so often bemoaned – has provided an unexpected and powerful primary tool for designers and makers of cities. Crowd-mapping asks the community to anonymously engage and map their experiences using their smartphones and via a web app. The focus of the new Gender Equality Map launched today in two pilot locations in Melbourne is on equality or inequality in their neighbourhood.

How does it work?

Participants can map their experience of equality or inequality in their neighbourhood using locator pins. Author provided

Crowd-mapping generates geolocative data. This is made up of points “dropped” to a precise geographical location. The data can then be analysed and synthesised for insights, tendencies and “hotspots”.

The diversity of its applications shows the adaptability of the method. The digital, community-based method of crowd-mapping has been used across the globe. Under-represented citizens have embraced the opportunity to tell their stories as a way to engage with and change their experience of cities….(More)”

Better “nowcasting” can reveal what weather is about to hit within 500 meters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “Weather forecasting is impressively accurate given how changeable and chaotic Earth’s climate can be. It’s not unusual to get 10-day forecasts with a reasonable level of accuracy.

But there is still much to be done.  One challenge for meteorologists is to improve their “nowcasting,” the ability to forecast weather in the next six hours or so at a spatial resolution of a square kilometer or less.

In areas where the weather can change rapidly, that is difficult. And there is much at stake. Agricultural activity is increasingly dependent on nowcasting, and the safety of many sporting events depends on it too. Then there is the risk that sudden rainfall could lead to flash flooding, a growing problem in many areas because of climate change and urbanization. That has implications for infrastructure, such as sewage management, and for safety, since this kind of flooding can kill.

So meteorologists would dearly love to have a better way to make their nowcasts.

Enter Blandine Bianchi from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a few colleagues, who have developed a method for combining meteorological data from several sources to produce nowcasts with improved accuracy. Their work has the potential to change the utility of this kind of forecasting for everyone from farmers and gardeners to emergency services and sewage engineers.

Current forecasting is limited by the data and the scale on which it is gathered and processed. For example, satellite data has a spatial resolution of 50 to 100 km and allows the tracking and forecasting of large cloud cells over a time scale of six to nine hours. By contrast, radar data is updated every five minutes, with a spatial resolution of about a kilometer, and leads to predictions on the time scale of one to three hours. Another source of data is the microwave links used by telecommunications companies, which are degraded by rainfall….(More)”

The role of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, and collective intelligence in building the future of justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Federico Ast at Thomson Reuters: “Human communities of every era have had to solve the problem of social order. For this, they developed governance and legal systems. They did it with the technologies and systems of belief of their time….

A better justice system may not come from further streamlining existing processes but from fundamentally rethinking them from a first principles perspective.

In the last decade, we have witnessed how collective intelligence could be leveraged to produce an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia, a transport system like Uber, a restaurant rating system like Yelp!, and a hotel system like Airbnb. These companies innovated by crowdsourcing value creation. Instead of having an in-house team of restaurant critics as the Michelin Guide, Yelp! crowdsourced ratings in users.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of Bitcoin (and the underlying blockchain technology) may be seen as the next step in the rise of the collaborative economy. The Bitcoin Network proved that, given the right incentives, anonymous users could cooperate in creating and updating a distributed ledger which could act as a monetary system. A nationless system, inherently global, and native to the Internet Age.

Cryptoeconomics is a new field of study that leverages cryptography, computer science and game theory to build secure distributed systems. It is the science that underlies the incentive system of open distributed ledgers. But its potential goes well beyond cryptocurrencies.

Kleros is a dispute resolution system which relies on cryptoeconomics. It uses a system of incentives based on “focal points”, a concept developed by game theorist Thomas Schelling, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2005. Using a clever mechanism design, it seeks to produce a set of incentives for randomly selected users to adjudicate different types of disputes in a fast, affordable and secure way. Users who adjudicate disputes honestly will make money. Users who try to abuse the system will lose money.

Kleros does not seek to compete with governments or traditional arbitration systems, but provide a new method that will leverage the wisdom of the crowd to resolve many disputes of the global digital economy for which existing methods fall short: e-commerce, crowdfunding and many types of small claims are among the early adopters….(More)”.

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicholas Carr’s blog: “A few years ago, the technology critic Michael Sacasas introduced the term “Borg Complex” to describe the attitude and rhetoric of modern-day utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool. (The Borg is an alien race in Star Trekthat sucks up the minds of other races, telling its victims that “resistance is futile.”) Those afflicted with the complex, Sacasas observed, rely on a a set of largely specious assertions to dismiss concerns about any ill effects of technological progress. The Borgers are quick, for example, to make grandiose claims about the coming benefits of new technologies (remember MOOCs?) while dismissing past cultural achievements with contempt (“I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away”).

To Sacasas’s list of such obfuscating rhetorical devices, I would add the assertion that we are “only at the beginning.” By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s responses to Facebook’s problems over the years, you’ll find that they are all variations on this theme.) Any attempt to put constraints on technologists and technology companies becomes, in this view, a short-sighted and possibly disastrous obstruction of technology’s march toward a brighter future for everyone — what Kelly is still calling the “long boom.” You ain’t seen nothing yet, so stay out of our way and let us work our magic.

In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think. These biases can, in the long run, exert a profound influence over the organization of society and the course of history. “Bias,” it seems to me, is exactly the right word. The media we use to communicate push us to communicate in certain ways, reflecting, among other things, the workings of the underlying technologies and the financial and political interests of the businesses or governments that promulgate the technologies. (For a simple but important example, think of the way personal correspondence has been changed by the shift from letters delivered through the mail to emails delivered via the internet to messages delivered through smartphones.) A bias is an inclination. Its effects are not inevitable, but they can be strong. To temper them requires awareness and, yes, resistance.

For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course….(More)”.

Don’t Believe the Algorithm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hannah Fry at the Wall Street Journal: “The Notting Hill Carnival is Europe’s largest street party. A celebration of black British culture, it attracts up to two million revelers, and thousands of police. At last year’s event, the Metropolitan Police Service of London deployed a new type of detective: a facial-recognition algorithm that searched the crowd for more than 500 people wanted for arrest or barred from attending. Driving around in a van rigged with closed-circuit TVs, the police hoped to catch potentially dangerous criminals and prevent future crimes.

It didn’t go well. Of the 96 people flagged by the algorithm, only one was a correct match. Some errors were obvious, such as the young woman identified as a bald male suspect. In those cases, the police dismissed the match and the carnival-goers never knew they had been flagged. But many were stopped and questioned before being released. And the one “correct” match? At the time of the carnival, the person had already been arrested and questioned, and was no longer wanted.

Given the paltry success rate, you might expect the Metropolitan Police Service to be sheepish about its experiment. On the contrary, Cressida Dick, the highest-ranking police officer in Britain, said she was “completely comfortable” with deploying such technology, arguing that the public expects law enforcement to use cutting-edge systems. For Dick, the appeal of the algorithm overshadowed its lack of efficacy.

She’s not alone. A similar system tested in Wales was correct only 7% of the time: Of 2,470 soccer fans flagged by the algorithm, only 173 were actual matches. The Welsh police defended the technology in a blog post, saying, “Of course no facial recognition system is 100% accurate under all conditions.” Britain’s police force is expanding the use of the technology in the coming months, and other police departments are following suit. The NYPD is said to be seeking access to the full database of drivers’ licenses to assist with its facial-recognition program….(More).

Doing good data science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Loukides, Hilary Mason and DJ Patil at O’Reilly: “(This post is the first in a series on data ethics) The hard thing about being an ethical data scientist isn’t understanding ethics. It’s the junction between ethical ideas and practice. It’s doing good data science.

There has been a lot of healthy discussion about data ethics lately. We want to be clear: that discussion is good, and necessary. But it’s also not the biggest problem we face. We already have good standards for data ethics. The ACM’s code of ethics, which dates back to 1993, is clear, concise, and surprisingly forward-thinking; 25 years later, it’s a great start for anyone thinking about ethics. The American Statistical Association has a good set of ethical guidelines for working with data. So, we’re not working in a vacuum.

And, while there are always exceptions, we believe that most people want to be fair. Data scientists and software developers don’t want to harm the people using their products. There are exceptions, of course; we call them criminals and con artists. Defining “fairness” is difficult, and perhaps impossible, given the many crosscutting layers of “fairness” that we might be concerned with. But we don’t have to solve that problem in advance, and it’s not going to be solved in a simple statement of ethical principles, anyway.

The problem we face is different: how do we put ethical principles into practice? We’re not talking about an abstract commitment to being fair. Ethical principles are worse than useless if we don’t allow them to change our practice, if they don’t have any effect on what we do day-to-day. For data scientists, whether you’re doing classical data analysis or leading-edge AI, that’s a big challenge. We need to understand how to build the software systems that implement fairness. That’s what we mean by doing good data science.

Any code of data ethics will tell you that you shouldn’t collect data from experimental subjects without informed consent. But that code won’t tell you how to implement “informed consent.” Informed consent is easy when you’re interviewing a few dozen people in person for a psychology experiment. Informed consent means something different when someone clicks on an item in an online catalog (hello, Amazon), and ads for that item start following them around ad infinitum. Do you use a pop-up to ask for permission to use their choice in targeted advertising? How many customers would you lose? Informed consent means something yet again when you’re asking someone to fill out a profile for a social site, and you might (or might not) use that data for any number of experimental purposes. Do you pop up a consent form in impenetrable legalese that basically says “we will use your data, but we don’t know for what”? Do you phrase this agreement as an opt-out, and hide it somewhere on the site where nobody will find it?…

To put ethical principles into practice, we need space to be ethical. We need the ability to have conversations about what ethics means, what it will cost, and what solutions to implement. As technologists, we frequently share best practices at conferences, write blog posts, and develop open source technologies—but we rarely discuss problems such as how to obtain informed consent.

There are several facets to this space that we need to think about.

First, we need corporate cultures in which discussions about fairness, about the proper use of data, and about the harm that can be done by inappropriate use of data can be considered. In turn, this means that we can’t rush products out the door without thinking about how they’re used. We can’t allow “internet time” to mean ignoring the consequences. Indeed, computer security has shown us the consequences of ignoring the consequences: many companies that have never taken the time to implement good security practices and safeguards are now paying with damage to their reputations and their finances. We need to do the same when thinking about issues like fairness, accountability, and unintended consequences….(More)”.

Exploring New Labscapes: Converging and Diverging on Social Innovation Labs

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Essay by Marlieke Kieboom:”…The question ‘what is a (social innovation) lab?’ is as old as the lab community itself and seems to return at every (social innovation) lab gathering. It came up at the very first event of its kind (Kennisland’s Lab2: Lab for Labs, Amsterdam 2013) and has been debated at every consequent event ever since under hashtags like #socinnlabs, #sociallabs and #psilabs (see MaRs’s Labs for Systems Change — 2014, Nesta’s Labworks — 2015, EU Policy lab’s Lab Connections — 2016 and ESADE’s Labs for Social Innovation — 2017).

However, the concept has remained roughly the same since we saw the first wave of labs (Helsinki Design Lab, MindLab and Reos’ Change Labs) in the early 2010’s. Social innovation labs are permanent or short term structures/projects/events that use a variety of experimental methods to support collaboration between stakeholders to collectively address social challenges at a systemic level. Stakeholders range from citizens and community action groups to businesses, universities and public administrations. Their specific characteristics (e.g. developing experimental user-led research methods, building innovation capacity building, convening multi-disciplinary teams, working to reach scale) and shapes (public sector innovation labs, social innovations labs, digital service labs, policy labs) are well described in many publications (e.g. Lab Matters, 2014; Labs for Social Innovation, 2017).

As Nesta neatly shows innovation labs are part of a family, or a movement of connected experimental, innovative approaches like service design, behavioural insights, citizen engagement, and so on.

 
Spot the labs (Source: https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/landscape-of-innovation-approaches/)

So why does this question keep coming back? The roots of the confusion and debates may lie in the word ‘social’. The medical, technological, and business sectors know exactly what they aim for in their innovation labs. They are ‘controlled-for’ environments where experimentation leads to developing, testing and scaling futuristic (mostly for profit) products, like self-driving cars, cancer medicines, drug test strips and cultured meat. Some of these products contribute to a more just, equal, sustainable world, while others don’t.

For working on societal issues like climate change, immigration patterns or a drug overdose crisis, lab settings are and should be unmistakably more open and porous. Complex, systemic challenges are impossible to capture between four lab walls, nor should we even try as they arguably arose from isolated, closed, and disconnected socio-economic interactions. Value creation for these type of challenges therefore lies outside closed, competitive, measurable spaces: in forging new collaborations, open-sourcing methodologies, encouraging curious mindsets and diversifying social movements. Consequently social lab outcomes are less measurable and concrete, ranging from reframing existing (socio-cultural) paradigms, to designing new procurement procedures and policies, to delivering new (digital and non-digital) public services. Try to ‘randomize-control-trial’ that!…(More).

AI Nationalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Ian Hogarth: “The central prediction I want to make and defend in this post is that continued rapid progress in machine learning will drive the emergence of a new kind of geopolitics; I have been calling it AI Nationalism. Machine learning is an omni-use technology that will come to touch all sectors and parts of society.

The transformation of both the economy and the military by machine learning will create instability at the national and international level forcing governments to act. AI policy will become the single most important area of government policy. An accelerated arms race will emerge between key countries and we will see increased protectionist state action to support national champions, block takeovers by foreign firms and attract talent. I use the example of Google, DeepMind and the UK as a specific example of this issue.

This arms race will potentially speed up the pace of AI development and shorten the timescale for getting to AGI. Although there will be many common aspects to this techno-nationalist agenda, there will also be important state specific policies. There is a difference between predicting that something will happen and believing this is a good thing. Nationalism is a dangerous path, particular when the international order and international norms will be in flux as a result and in the concluding section I discuss how a period of AI Nationalism might transition to one of global cooperation where AI is treated as a global public good….(More)”.

The GovLab Selected Readings on Blockchain Technologies and the Governance of Extractives

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

Curation by Andrew Young, Anders Pedersen, and Stefaan G. Verhulst

Readings developed together with NRGI, within the context of our joint project on Blockchain technologies and the Governance of Extractives. Thanks to Joyce Zhang and Michelle Winowatan for research support.

We need your help! Please share any additional readings on the use of Blockchain Technologies in the Extractives Sector with blockchange@thegovlab.org.  

Introduction

By providing new ways to securely identify individuals and organizations, and record transactions of various types in a distributed manner, blockchain technologies have been heralded as a new tool to address information asymmetries, establish trust and improve governance – particularly around the extraction of oil, gas and other natural resources. At the same time, blockchain technologies are been experimented with to optimize certain parts of the extractives value chain – potentially decreasing transparency and accountability while making governance harder to implement.

Across the expansive and complex extractives sector, blockchain technologies are believed to have particular potential for improving governance in three key areas:  

  • Beneficial ownership and illicit flows screening: The identity of those who benefit, through ownership, from companies that extract natural resources is often hidden – potentially contributing to tax evasion, challenges to global sanction regimes, corruption and money laundering.
  • Land registration, licensing and contracting transparency: To ensure companies extract resources responsibly and comply with rules and fee requirements, effective governance and a process to determine who has the rights to extract natural resources, under what conditions, and who is entitled to the land is essential.
  • Commodity trading and supply chain transparency: The commodity trading sector is facing substantive challenges in assessing and verifying the authenticity of for example oil trades. Costly time is spent by commodity traders reviewing documentation of often poor quality. The expectation of the sector is firstly to eliminate time spent verifying the authenticity of traded goods and secondly to reduce the risk premium on trades. Transactions from resources and commodities trades are often opaque and secretive, allowing for governments and companies to conceal how much money they receive from trading, and leading to corruption and evasion of taxation.

In the below we provide a selection of the nascent but growing literature on Blockchain Technologies and Extractives across six categories:

Selected Readings 

Blockchain Technologies and Extractives – Promise and Current Potential

Adams, Richard, Beth Kewell, Glenn Parry. “Blockchain for Good? Digital Ledger Technology and Sustainable Development Goals.” Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research. October 27, 2017.

  • This chapter in the Handbook of Sustainability and Social Science Research seeks to reflect and explore the different ways Blockchain for Good (B4G) projects can provide social and environmental benefits under the UN’s Sustainable Goals framework
  • The authors describe the main categories in which blockchain can achieve social impact: mining/consensus algorithms that reward good behavior, benefits linked to currency use in the form of “colored coins,” innovations in supply chain, innovations in government, enabling the sharing economy, and fostering financial inclusion.
  • The chapter concludes that with B4G there is also inevitably “Blockchain for Bad.” There is already critique and failures of DLTs such as the DAO, and more research must be done to identify whether DLTs can provide a more decentralized, egalitarian society, or if they will ultimately be another tool for control and surveillance by organizations and government.

Cullinane, Bernadette, and Randy Wilson. “Transforming the Oil and Gas Industry through Blockchain.” Official Journal of the Australian Institute of Energy News, p 9-10, December 2017.

  • In this article, Cullinane and Wilson explore blockchain’s application in the oil and gas industry “presents a particularly compelling opportunity…due to the high transactional values, associated risks and relentless pressure to reduce costs.”
  • The authors elaborate four areas where blockchain can benefit play a role in transforming the oil and gas industry:
    • Supply chain management
    • Smart contracts
    • Record management
    • Cross-border payments

Da Silva, Filipe M., and Ankita Jaitly. “Blockchain in Natural Resources: Hedging Against Volatile Prices.” Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., 2018.

  • The authors of this white paper assess the readiness of natural resources industries for blockchain technology application, identify areas where blockchain can add value, and outline a strategic plan for its adoption.
  • In particular, they highlight the potential for blockchain in the oil and gas industry to simplify payments, where for example, gas can be delivered directly to consumer homes using a blockchain smart contracting application.

Halford-Thompson, Guy. “Powered by Blockchain: Reinventing Information Management in the Energy Space.” BTL, May 12, 2017.

  • According to Halford-Thompson, “oil and gas companies are exploring blockchain’s promise to revamp inefficient internal processes and achieve significant reductions in operating costs through the automation of record keeping and messaging, the digitization of the supply chain information flow, and the elimination of reconciliation, among many other data management use cases.”
  • The data reconciliation process, for one, is complex and can require significant time for completion. Blockchain technology could not only remove the need for some steps in the information reconciliation process, but also eliminate the need for reconciliation altogether in some instances.

Blockchain Technologies and the Governance of Extractives

(See also: Selected Readings of Blockchain Technologies and its Potential to Transform Governance)

Koeppen, Mark, David Shrier, and Morgan Bazilian. “Is Blockchain’s Future in Oil and Gas Transformative Or Transient?“ Deloitte, 2017.

  • In this report, the authors propose four areas that blockchain can improve for the oil and gas industry, which are:
    • Transparency and compliance: Employment of blockchain is predicted to significantly reduce cost related to compliance, since it securely makes information available to all parties involved in the supply chain.
    • Cyber threats and security: The industry faces constant digital security threat and blockchain provides a solution to address this issue.
    • Mid-volume trading/third party impacts: They argue that the “boundaries between asset classes will blur as cash, energy products and other commodities, from industrial components to apples could all become digital assets trading interoperably.”
    • Smart contract: Since the “sheer size and volume of contracts and transactions to execute capital projects in oil and gas have historically caused significant reconciliation and tracking issues among contractors, sub-contractors, and suppliers,” blockchain-enabled smart contracts could improve the process by executing automatically after all requirements are met, and boosting contract efficiency and protecting each party from volatile pricing.

Mawet, Pierre, and Michael Insogna. “Unlocking the Potential of Blockchain in Oil and Gas Supply Chains.” Accenture Energy Blog, November 21, 2016.

  • The authors propose three ways blockchain technology can boost productivity and efficiency in oil and gas industry:
    • “Greater process efficiency. Smart contracts, for example, can be held in a blockchain transaction with party compliance confirmed through follow-on transactions, reducing third-party supervision and paper-based contracting, thus helping reduce cost and overhead.”
    • “Compliance. Visibility is essential to improve supply chain performance. The immutable record of transactions can aid in product traceability and asset tracking.”
    • “Data transfer from IoT sensors. Blockchain could be used to track the unique history of a device, with the distributed ledger recording data transfer from multiple sensors. Data security in devices could be safeguarded by unique blockchain characteristics.”

Som, Indranil. “Blockchain: Radically Changing the Mining Paradigm.” Digitalist, September 27, 2017.

  • In this article, Som proposes three ways that the blockchain technology can “support leaner organizations and increased security” in the mining industry: improving cybersecurity, increasing transparency through smart contracts, and providing visibility into the supply chain.

Identity: Beneficial Ownership and Illicit Flows

(See also: Selected Readings on Blockchain Technologies and Identity).

de Jong, Julia, Alexander Meyer, and Jeffrey Owens. “Using blockchain for transparent beneficial ownership registers.“ International Tax Review, June 2017.

  • This paper discusses the features of blockchain and distributed ledger technology that can improve collection and distribution of information on beneficial ownership.
  • The FATF and OECD Global Forum regimes have identified a number of common problems related to beneficial ownership information across all jurisdictions, including:
    • “Insufficient accuracy and accessibility of company identification and ownership information;
    • Less rigorous implementation of customer due-diligence (CDD) measures by key gatekeepers such as lawyers, accountants, and trust and company service providers; and
    • Obstacles to information sharing such as data protection and privacy laws, which impede competent authorities from receiving timely access to adequate, accurate and up-to-date information on basic legal and beneficial ownership.”
  • The authors argue that the transparency, immutability, and security offered by blockchain makes it ideally suited for record-keeping, particularly with regards to the ownership of assets. Thus, blockchain can address many of the shortcomings in the current system as identified by the FATF and the OECD.
  • They go on to suggest that a global registry of beneficial ownership using blockchain technology would offer the following benefits:
    • Ensuring real-time accuracy and verification of ownership information
    • Increasing security and control over sensitive personal and commercial information
    • Enhancing audit transparency
    • Creating the potential for globally-linked registries
    • Reducing corruption and fraud, and increasing trust
    • Reducing compliance burden for regulate entities

Herian, Robert. “Trusteeship in a Post-Trust World: Property, Trusts Law and the Blockchain.” The Open University, 2016.

  • This working paper discusses the often overlooked topic of trusteeship and trusts law and the implications of blockchain technology in the space. 
  • “Smart trusts” on the blockchain will distribute trusteeship across a network and, in theory, remove the need for continuous human intervention in trust fund investments thus resolving key issues around accountability and the potential for any breach of trust.
  • Smart trusts can also increase efficiency and security of transactions, which could improve the overall performance of the investment strategy, thereby creating higher returns for beneficiaries.

Karsten, Jack and Darrell M. West (2018): “Venezuela’s “petro” undermines other cryptocurrencies – and international sanctions.” Brookings, Friday, March 9 2018,

  • This article discusses the Venezuelan government’s cryptocurrency, “petro,” which was launched as a solution to the country’s economic crisis and near-worthless currency, “bolívar”
  • Unlike the volatility of other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin, one petro’s price is pegged to the price of one barrel of Venezuelan oil – roughly $60
  • And rather than decentralizing control like most blockchain applications, the petro is subject to arbitrary discount factor adjustment, fluctuating oil prices, and a corrupt government known for manipulating its currency
  • The authors warn the petro will not stabilize the Venezuelan economy since only foreign investors funded the presale, yet (from the White Paper) only Venezuelan citizens can use the cryptocurrency to pay taxes, fees, and other expenses. Rather, they argue, the petro represents an attempt to create foreign capital out of “thin air,” which is not subject to traditional economic sanctions.  

Land Registration, Licensing and Contracting Transparency

Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon. “Blockchain and Property in 2018: At the End of the Beginning.” 2018 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, March 19-23, 2018.

  • This paper claims “blockchain makes sense for real estate” because real estate transactions depend on a number of relationships, processes, and intermediaries that must reconcile all transactions and documents for an action to occur. Blockchain and smart contracts can reduce the time and cost of transactions while ensuring secure and transparent record-keeping systems.
  • The ease, efficiency, and security of transactions can also create an “international market for small real estate” in which individuals who cannot afford an entire plot of land can invest small amounts and receive their portion of rental payments automatically through smart contracts.
  • The authors describe seven prerequisites that land registries must fulfill before blockchain can be introduced successfully: accurate data, digitized records, an identity solution, multi-sig wallets, a private or hybrid blockchain, connectivity and a tech aware population, and a trained professional community
  • To achieve the goal of an efficient and secure property registry, the authors propose an 8-level progressive framework through which registries slowly integrate blockchain due to legal complexity of land administration, resulting inertia of existing processes, and high implementation costs.  
    • Level 0 – No Integration
    • Level 1 – Blockchain Recording
    • Level 2 – Smart Workflow
    • Level 3 – Smart Escrow
    • Level 4 – Blockchain Registry
    • Level 5 – Disaggregated Rights
    • Level 6 – Fractional Rights
    • Level 7 – Peer-to-Peer Transactions
    • Level 8 – Interoperability

Thomas, Rod. “Blockchain’s Incompatibility for Use as a Land Registry: Issues of Definition, Feasibility and Risk.“ European Property Law Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, May 2017.

  • Thomas argues that blockchain, as it is currently understood and defined, is unsuited for the transfer of real property rights because it fails to address the need for independent verification and control.
  • Under a blockchain-based system, coin holders would be in complete control of the recordation of the title interests of their land, and thus, it would be unlikely that they would report competing or contested claims.
  • Since land remains in the public domain, the risk of third party possessory title claims are likely to occur; and over time, these risks will only increase exponentially.
  • A blockchain-based land title represents interlinking and sequential transactions over many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, so given the misinformation that would compound over time, it would be difficult to trust the current title holder has a correctly recorded title
  • The author concludes that supporters of blockchain for land registries frequently overlook a registry’s primary function to provide an independent verification of the provenance of stored data.

Vos, Jacob, Christiaan Lemmen, and Bert Beentjes. “Blockchain-Based Land Registry: Panacea, Illusion or Something In Between?“ 2017 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, March 20-24, 2017.

  • The authors propose that blockchain is best suited for the following steps in land administration:
    • The issuance of titles
    • The archiving of transactions – specifically in countries that do not have a reliable electronic system of transfer of ownership
  • The step in between issuing titles and archiving transactions is the most complex – the registration of the transaction. This step includes complex relationships between the “triple” of land administration: rights (right in rem and/or personal rights), object (spatial unit), and subject (title holder). For the most part, this step is done manually by registrars, and it is questionable whether blockchain technology, in the form of smart contracts, will be able to process these complex transactions.
  • The authors conclude that one should not underestimate the complexity of the legal system related to land administration. The standardization of processes may be the threshold to success of blockchain-based land administration. The authors suggest instead of seeking to eliminate one party from the process, technologists should cooperate with legal and geodetic professionals to create a system of checks and balances to successfully implement blockchain for land administration.  
  • This paper also outlines five blockchain-based land administration projects launched in Ghana, Honduras, Sweden, Georgia, and Cook County, Illinois.

Commodity Trading and Supply Chain Transparency

Ahmed, Shabir. “Leveraging Blockchain to Revolutionise the Mining Industry.” SAP News, February 27, 2018.

  • In this article, Ahmed identifies seven key use cases for blockchain in the mining industry:
    • Automation of ore acquisition and transfer;
    • Automatic registration of mineral rights and IP;
    • Visibility of ore inventory at ports;
    • Automatic cargo hire process;
    • Process and secure large amounts of IoT data;
    • Reconciling amount produced and sent for processing;
    • Automatically execute procurement and other contracts.

Brooks, Michael. “Blockchain and the Fight Against Illicit Financial Flows.” The Policy Corner, February 19, 2018.

  • In this article, Brooks argues that, “Because of the inherent decentralization and immutability of data within blockchains, it offers a unique opportunity to bypass traditional tracking and transparency initiatives that require strong central governance and low levels of corruption. It could, to a significant extent, bypass the persistent issues of authority and corruption by democratizing information around data consensus, rather than official channels and occasional studies based off limited and often manipulated information. Within the framework of a coherent policy initiative that integrates all relevant stakeholders (states, transnational organizations, businesses, NGOs, other monitors and oversight bodies), a international supply chains supported by blockchain would decrease the ease with which resources can be hidden, numbers altered, and trade misinvoiced.”

“Conflict Free Natural Resources.” Global Opportunity Report 2017. Global Opportunity Network, 2017.

  • In this entry from the Global Opportunity Report, and specifically toward the end of ensuring conflict-free natural resources, Blockchain is labeled as “well-suited for tracking objects and transactions, making it possible for virtually anything of value to be traced. This opportunity is about creating transparency and product traceability in supply chains.

“Blockchain for Traceability in Minerals and Metals Supply Chains: Opportunities and Challenges.” RCS Global and ICMM, 2017.

  • This report is based on insights generated during the Materials Stewardship Round Table on the potential of BCTs for tracking and tracing metals and minerals supply chains, which subsequently informed an RCS Global research initiative on the topic.
  • Insight into two key areas is increasingly desired by downstream manufacturing companies from upstream producers of metals and minerals: provenance and production methods
  • In particular, the report offers five key potential advantages of using Blockchain for mineral and metal supply chain activities:
    • “Builds consensus and trust around responsible production standards between downstream and upstream companies.
    • The immutability of and decentralized control over a blockchain system minimizes the risk of fraud.
    • Defined datasets can be made accessible in real time to any third party, including downstream buyers, auditors, investors, etc. but at the same time encrypted so as to share a proof of fact rather than confidential information.
    • A blockchain system can be easily scaled to include other producers and supply chains beyond those initially involved.
    • Cost reduction due to the paperless nature of a blockchain-enabled CoC [Chain of Custody] system, the potential reduction of audits, and reduction in transaction costs.”

Van Bockstael, Steve. “The emergence of conflict-free, ethical, and Fair Trade mineral supply chain certification systems: A brief introduction.” The Extractives Industries and Society, vol. 5, issue 1, January 2018.

  • This introduction to a special section considers the emerging field of “‘conflict-free’, ‘fair’ and ‘transparently sourced and traded’ minerals” in global industry supply chains.
  • Van Bockstael describes three areas of practice aimed at increasing supply chain transparency:
    • “Initiatives that explicitly try to sever the links between mining or minerals trading and armed conflict of the funding thereof.”
    • “Initiatives, limited in number yet growing, that are explicitly linked to the internationally recognized ‘Fair Trade’ movement and whose aim it is to source artisanally mined minerals for the Western jewellry industry.”
    • “Initiatives that aim to provide consumers or consumer-facing industries with more ethical, transparent and fair supply chains (often using those concepts in fuzzy and interchangeable ways) that are not linked to the established Fair Trade movement” – including, among others, initiatives using Blockchain technology “to create tamper-proof supply chains.”

Global Governance, Standards and Disclosure Practices

Lafarre, Anne and Christoph Van der Elst. “Blockchain Technology for Corporate Governance and Shareholder Activism.” European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) – Law Working Paper No. 390/2018, March 8, 2018.

  • This working paper focuses on the potential benefits of leveraging Blockchain during functions involving shareholder and company decision making. Lafarre and Van der Elst argue that “Blockchain technology can lower shareholder voting costs and the organization costs for companies substantially. Moreover, blockchain technology can increase the speed of decision-making, facilitate fast and efficient involvement of shareholders.”
  • The authors argue that in the field of corporate governance, Blockchain offers two important elements: “transparency – via the verifiable way of recording transactions – and trust – via the immutability of these transactions.”
  • Smart contracting, in particular, is seen as a potential avenue for facilitating the ‘agency relationship’ between board members and the shareholders they represent in corporate decision-making processes.

Myung, San Jun. “Blockchain government – a next for of infrastructure for the twenty-first century.” Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, December 2018.

  • This paper argues the idea that Blockchain represents a new form of infrastructure that, given its core consensus mechanism, could replace existing social apparatuses including bureaucracy.
  • Indeed, Myung argues that blockchain and bureaucracy share a number of attributes:
    • “First, both of them are defined by the rules and execute predetermined rules.
    • Second, both of them work as information processing machines for society.
    • Third, both of them work as trust machines for society.”  
  • The piece concludes with five principles for replacing bureaucracy with blockchain for social organization: “1) introducing Blockchain Statute law; 2) transparent disclosure of data and source code; 3) implementing autonomous executing administration; 4) building a governance system based on direct democracy; and 5) making Distributed Autonomous Government (DAG).  

Peters, Gareth and Vishnia, Guy (2016): “Blockchain Architectures for Electronic Exchange Reporting Requirements: EMIR, Dodd Frank, MiFID I/II, MiFIR, REMIT, Reg NMS and T2S.” University College London, August 31, 2016.

  • This paper offers a solution based on blockchain architectures to the regulations of financial exchanges around the world for trade processing and reporting for execution and clearing. In particular, the authors give a detailed overview of EMIR, Dodd Frank, MiFID I/II, MiFIR, REMIT, Reg NMS and T2S.
  • The authors suggest the increasing amount of data from transaction reporting start to be incorporated on a blockchain ledger in order to harness the built-in security and immutability features of the blockchain to support key regulatory features.
  • Specifically, the authors suggest 1) a permissioned blockchain controlled by a regulator or a consortium of market participants for the maintenance of identity data from market participants and 2) blockchain frameworks such as Enigma to be used to facilitate required transparency and reporting aspects related to identities when performing pre- and post-trade reporting as well as for auditing.

“Blockchain Technology and Competition Policy – Issues paper by the Secretariat,” OECD, June 8, 2018.

  • This OECD issues paper poses two key questions about how blockchain technology might increase the relevance of new disclosures practices:
    • “Should competition agencies be given permission to access blockchains? This might enable them to monitor trading prices in real-time, spot suspicious trends, and, when investigating a merger, conduct or market have immediate access to the necessary data without needing to impose burdensome information requests on parties.”
    • “Similarly, easy access to the information on a blockchain for a firm’s owners and head offices would potentially improve the effectiveness of its oversight on its own subsidiaries and foreign holdings. Competition agencies may assume such oversight already exists, but by making it easier and cheaper, a blockchain might make it more effective, which might allow for more effective centralised compliance programmes.”

Michael Pisa and Matt Juden. “Blockchain and Economic Development: Hype vs. Reality.” Center for Global Development Policy Paper, 2017.

  • In this Center for Global Development Policy Paper, the authors examine blockchain’s potential to address four major development challenges: (1) facilitating faster and cheaper international payments, (2) providing a secure digital infrastructure for verifying identity, (3) securing property rights, and (4) making aid disbursement more secure and transparent.
  • The authors conclude that while blockchain may be well suited for certain use cases, the majority of constraints in blockchain-based projects fall outside the scope of technology. Common constraints such as data collection and privacy, governance, and operational resiliency must be addressed before blockchain can be successfully implemented as a solution.

Industry-Specific Case Studies

Chohan, Usman. “Blockchain and the Extractive Industries: Cobalt Case Study,” University of New South Wales, Canberra Discussion Paper Series: Notes on the 21st Century, 2018.

  • In this discussion paper, the author studies the pilot use of blockchain in cobalt mining industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The project tracked the movement of cobalt from artisanal mines through its installation in devices such as smartphones and electric cars.
  • The project records cobalt attributes – weights, dates, times, images, etc. – into the digital ledger to help ensure that cobalt purchases are not contributing to forced child labor or conflict minerals. 

Chohan, Usman. “Blockchain and the Extractive Industries #2: Diamonds Case Study,” University of New South Wales, Canberra Discussion Paper Series: Notes on the 21st Century, 2018.

  • The second case study from Chohan investigates the application of blockchain technology in the extractive industry by studying Anglo-American (AAL) diamond DeBeer’s unit and Everledger’s blockchain projects. 
  • In this study, the author finds that AAL uses blockchain to track gems (carat, color, certificate numbers), starting from extraction and onwards, including when the gems change hands in trade transaction.
  • Like the cobalt pilot, the AAL initiative aims to help avoid supporting conflicts and forced labor, and to improve trading accountability and transparency more generally.

Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society

Curated on Posted on by admin

Blog by Anna Lauren Hoffmann: “…In 2015, a black developer in New York discovered that Google’s algorithmic photo recognition software had tagged pictures of him and his friends as gorillas.

The same year, Facebook auto-suspended Native Americans for using their real names, and in 2016, facial recognition was found to struggle to read black faces.

Software in airport body scanners has flagged transgender bodies as threatsfor years. In 2017, Google Translate took gender-neutral pronouns in Turkish and converted them to gendered pronouns in English — with startlingly biased results.

“Violence” might seem like a dramatic way to talk about these accidents of engineering and the processes of gathering data and using algorithms to interpret it. Yet just like physical violence in the real world, this kind of “data violence” (a term inspired by Dean Spade’s concept of administrative violence) occurs as the result of choices that implicitly and explicitly lead to harmful or even fatal outcomes.

Those choices are built on assumptions and prejudices about people, intimately weaving them into processes and results that reinforce biases and, worse, make them seem natural or given.

Take the experience of being a woman and having to constantly push back against rigid stereotypes and aggressive objectification.

Writer and novelist Kate Zambreno describes these biases as “ghosts,” a violent haunting of our true reality. “A return to these old roles that we play, that we didn’t even originate. All the ghosts of the past. Ghosts that aren’t even our ghosts.”

Structural bias is reinforced by the stereotypes fed to us in novels, films, and a pervasive cultural narrative that shapes the lives of real women every day, Zambreno describes. This extends to data and automated systems that now mediate our lives as well. Our viewing and shopping habits, our health and fitness tracking, our financial information all conspire to create a “data double” of ourselves, produced about us by third parties and standing in for us on data-driven systems and platforms.

These fabrications don’t emerge de novo, disconnected from history or social context. Rather, they often pick up and unwittingly spit out a tangled mess of historical conditions and current realities.

Search engines are a prime example of how data and algorithms can conspire to amplify racist and sexist biases. The academic Safiya Umoja Noble threw these messy entanglements into sharp relief in her book Algorithms of Oppression. Google Search, she explains, has a history of offering up pages of porn for women from particular racial or ethnic groups, and especially black women. Google have also served up ads for criminal background checksalongside search results for African American–sounding names, as former Federal Trade Commission CTO Latanya Sweeney discovered.

“These search engine results for women whose identities are already maligned in the media, such as Black women and girls, only further debase and erode efforts for social, political, and economic recognition and justice,” Noble says.

These kinds of cultural harms go well beyond search results. Sociologist Rena Bivens has shown how the gender categories employed by platforms like Facebook can inflict symbolic violences against transgender and nonbinary users in ways that may never be made obvious to users….(More)”.

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