OPSI Case Study: “The Kansas vision for the early childhood system is: All children will have their basic needs met and have equitable access to quality early childhood care and educational opportunities, so they are prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. In 2019, the State of Kansas received a large federal grant (the Preschool Development Grant) to conduct a needs assessment and craft a strategic plan for the early childhood system where all children can thrive. The grant leadership team of state agencies utilized this opportunity to harness the power of Our Tomorrows’ innovative Community Sensemaking Approach to... (More >)
Liberation Technology
Tim Keary at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Human traffickers have forced hundreds of women, children, and men into sexual slavery in Colombia during the past decade. According to Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior and Justice, 686 cases of human trafficking occurred within the country from January 2013 to July 2020. Many of those seized were women, children, and Venezuelan migrants. To combat this crime, Migración Colombia, the nation’s border control agency; the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM); and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched a mobile application called LibertApp last July. Pressing the app’s... (More >)
The Hidden Cost of Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Research
Paper by Antonios Saravanos: “This work shares unexpected findings obtained from the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform as a source of participants for the study of technology adoption. Expressly, of the 564 participants from the United States, 126 (22.34%) failed at least one of three forms of attention check (logic, honesty, and time). We also examined whether characteristics such as gender, age, education, and income affected participant attention. Amongst all characteristics assessed, only prior experience with the technology being studied was found to be related to attentiveness. We conclude this work by reaffirming the need for multiple... (More >)
The Nudge Puzzle: Matching Nudge Interventions to Cybersecurity Decisions
Paper by Verena Zimmermann and Karen Renaud: “Nudging is a promising approach, in terms of influencing people to make advisable choices in a range of domains, including cybersecurity. However, the processes underlying the concept and the nudge’s effectiveness in different contexts, and in the long term, are still poorly understood. Our research thus first reviewed the nudge concept and differentiated it from other interventions before applying it to the cybersecurity area. We then carried out an empirical study to assess the effectiveness of three different nudge-related interventions on four types of cybersecurity-specific decisions. Our study demonstrated that the combination... (More >)
Data for Good: New Tools to Help Small Businesses and Communities During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Blogpost by Laura McGorman and Alex Pompe at Facebook: “Small businesses and people around the world are suffering devastating financial losses due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and public institutions need real time information to help. Today Facebook is launching new datasets and insights to help support economic recovery through our Data for Good program. Researchers estimate that over the next five years, the global economy could suffer over $80 trillion in losses due to COVID-19. Small businesses in particular are being hit hard — our Global State of Small Business Report found that over one in four had... (More >)
Smart urban governance: an alternative to technocratic “smartness”
Paper by Huaxiong Jiang, Stan Geertman & Patrick Witte: “This paper argues for a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance that we call “smart urban governance,” which represents a move away from the technocratic way of governing cities often found in smart cities. A framework on smart urban governance is proposed on the basis of three intertwined key components, namely spatial, institutional, and technological components. To test the applicability of the framework, we conducted an international questionnaire survey on smart city projects. We then identified and discursively analyzed two smart city projects—Smart Nation Singapore and Helsinki Smart City—to... (More >)
Extending the framework of algorithmic regulation. The Uber case
Paper by Florian Eyert, Florian Irgmaier, and Lena Ulbricht: “In this article, we take forward recent initiatives to assess regulation based on contemporary computer technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence. In order to characterize current phenomena of regulation in the digital age, we build on Karen Yeung’s concept of “algorithmic regulation,” extending it by building bridges to the fields of quantification, classification, and evaluation research, as well as to science and technology studies. This allows us to develop a more fine‐grained conceptual framework that analyzes the three components of algorithmic regulation as representation, direction, and intervention and... (More >)
Building Trust for Inter-Organizational Data Sharing: The Case of the MLDE
Paper by Heather McKay, Sara Haviland, and Suzanne Michael: “There is increasing interest in sharing data across agencies and even between states that was once siloed in separate agencies. Driving this is a need to better understand how people experience education and work, and their pathways through each. A data-sharing approach offers many possible advantages, allowing states to leverage pre-existing data systems to conduct increasingly sophisticated and complete analyses. However, information sharing across state organizations presents a series of complex challenges, one of which is the central role trust plays in building successful data-sharing systems. Trust building between organizations... (More >)
Leveraging Telecom Data to Aid Humanitarian Efforts
Data Collaborative Case Study by Michelle Winowatan, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Following the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Flowminder, a data analytics nonprofit, and NCell, a mobile operator in Nepal, formed a data collaborative. Using call detail records (CDR, a type of mobile operator data) provided by NCell, Flowminder estimated the number of people displaced by the earthquake and their location. The result of the analysis was provided to various humanitarian agencies responding to the crisis in Nepal to make humanitarian aid delivery more efficient and targeted. Data Collaboratives Model: Based on our typology of data... (More >)
Improving data access democratizes and diversifies science
Research article by Abhishek Nagaraj, Esther Shears, and Mathijs de Vaan: “Data access is critical to empirical research, but past work on open access is largely restricted to the life sciences and has not directly analyzed the impact of data access restrictions. We analyze the impact of improved data access on the quantity, quality, and diversity of scientific research. We focus on the effects of a shift in the accessibility of satellite imagery data from Landsat, a NASA program that provides valuable remote-sensing data. Our results suggest that improved access to scientific data can lead to a large increase... (More >)
