Big Data, Big Impact? Towards Gender-Sensitive Data Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Data2X: “How can insights drawn from big data sources improve understanding about the lives of women and girls?

This question has underpinned Data2X’s groundbreaking work at the intersection of big data and gender — work that funded ten research projects that examined the potential of big data to fill the global gender data gap.

Big Data, Big Impact? Towards Gender-Sensitive Data Systems summarizes the findings and potential policy implications of the Big Data for Gender pilot projects funded by Data2X, and lays out five cross-cutting messages that emerge from this body of work:

  1. Big data offers unique insights on women and girls.
  2. Gender-sensitive big data is ready to scale and integrate with traditional data.
  3. Identify and correct bias in big datasets.
  4. Protect the privacy of women and girls.
  5. Women and girls must be central to data governance.

This report argues that the time for pilot projects has passed. Data privacy concerns must be addressed; investment in scale up is needed. Big data offers great potential for women and girls, and indeed for all people….(More)”.

Our Futures: By the people, for the people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Laurie Smith and Kathy Peach: “This is a guide to how mass involvement with shaping the future can solve complex problems.

Moving beyond citizen assemblies and traditional public engagement, participatory futures techniques help people to develop a collective image of the future they want, so that we can make better, more informed decisions.

Governments, city leaders, public institutions, funders, and civil society must be at the forefront of this approach, supporting it through funding, strategy and practice.

Our guide contains practical suggestions for how to do this. Examples include:

  • Carrying out publicly-funded, mission-orientated research that is informed by participatory futures exercises.
  • Creating new legislation that requires UK Government departments to use these approaches to inform decision-making and strategies.
  • Embedding these approaches in the Civil Service Competency Framework and equivalent frameworks for local government and charities…(More)”.

Delivery-Driven Policy: Policy designed for the digital age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Code for America: “Policymaking is in a quiet crisis. Too often, government policies do not live up to their intent due to a key disconnect between policymakers and government delivery.

How might the shift to a digital world affect government’s ability to implement policy?

Practicing delivery-driven policymaking means bringing user-centered, iterative, and data-driven practices to bear from the start and throughout. It means getting deep into the weeds of implementation in ways that the policy world has traditionally avoided, iterating both on policy and delivery.

By tightly coupling policy and delivery, governments can use data about how people actually experience government services to narrow the implementation gap and help policies get the outcome they intend….(More)”

Governing Missions in the European Union

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Marianna Mazucatto: “This report, Governing Missions, looks at the ‘how’: how to implement and govern a mission-oriented process so that it unleashes the full creativity and ambition potential of R&I policy-making; and how it crowds-in investments from across Europe in the process. The focus is on 3 key questions:

  • How to engage citizens in codesigning, co-creating, co-implementing
    and co-assessing missions?
  • What are the public sector capabilities and instruments needed to foster a dynamic innovation ecosystem, including the ability of civil servants to welcome experimentation and help governments work outside silos?
  • How can mission-oriented finance and funding leverage and crowd-in other forms of finance, galvanising innovation across actors (public, private and third sector), different manufacturing and service sectors, and across national and transnational levels?…(More)”.

Geolocation Data for Pattern of Life Analysis in Lower-Income Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Eduardo Laguna-Muggenburg, Shreyan Sen and Eric Lewandowski: “Urbanization processes in the developing world are often associated with the creation of informal settlements. These areas frequently have few or no public services exacerbating inequality even in the context of substantial economic growth.

In the past, the high costs of gathering data through traditional surveying methods made it challenging to study how these under-served areas evolve through time and in relation to the metropolitan area to which they belong. However, the advent of mobile phones and smartphones in particular presents an opportunity to generate new insights on these old questions.

In June 2019, Orbital Insight and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Arab States Human Development Report team launched a collaborative pilot program assessing the feasibility of using geolocation data to understand patterns of life among the urban poor in Cairo, Egypt.

The objectives of this collaboration were to assess feasibility (and conditionally pursue preliminary analysis) of geolocation data to create near-real time population density maps, understand where residents of informal settlements tend to work during the day, and to classify universities by percentage of students living in informal settlements.

The report is organized as follows. In Section 2 we describe the data and its limitations. In Section 3 we briefly explain the methodological background. Section 4 summarizes the insights derived from the data for the Egyptian context. Section 5 concludes….(More)”.

The Urban Computing Foundation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The Urban Computing Foundation is a neutral forum for accelerating open source and community development that improves mobility, safety, road infrastructure, traffic congestion and energy consumption in connected cities.

As cities and transportation networks evolve into ever-more complicated systems, urban computing is emerging as an important field to bridge the divide between engineering, visualization, and traditional transportation systems analysis. These advancements are dependent on compatibility among many technologies across different public and private organizations. The Foundation provides the forum to collaborate on a common set of open source tools for developers building autonomous vehicles and smart infrastructure.

The Urban Computing Foundation’s mission is to enable developers, data scientists, visualization specialists and engineers to improve urban environments, human life quality, and city operation systems.build connected urban infrastructure. We do this through an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution, and by providing a framework for long term stewardship by companies and individuals invested in open urban computing’s success….(More)”.

Leveraging Private Data for Public Good: A Descriptive Analysis and Typology of Existing Practices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Young, Michelle Winowatan. and Andrew J. Zahuranec: “To address the challenges of our times, we need both new solutions and new ways to develop those solutions. The responsible use of data will be key toward that end. Since pioneering the concept of “data collaboratives” in 2015, The GovLab has studied and experimented with innovative ways to leverage private-sector data to tackle various societal challenges, such as urban mobility, public health, and climate change.

While we have seen an uptake in normative discussions on how data should be shared, little analysis exists of the actual practice. This paper seeks to address that gap and seeks to answer the following question: What are the variables and models that determine functional access to private sector data for public good? In Leveraging Private Data for Public Good: A Descriptive Analysis and Typology of Existing Practices, we describe the emerging universe of data collaboratives and develop a typology of six practice areas. Our goal is to provide insight into current applications to accelerate the creation of new data collaboratives. The report outlines dozens of examples, as well as a set of recommendations to enable more systematic, sustainable, and responsible data collaboration….(More)”

City Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report and interactive map by CityLab, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the OECD: “New Innovation helps local governments create an ecosystem that promotes experimentation and creativity to improve the public welfare of residents in cities around the world.

City governments are ushering in a new era of local public sector innovation that promotes experimentation and flexibility, and also takes into account the social needs of citizens to manage evolving urban systems. The goal of this report is to understand how municipalities can enhance their ability to use innovation to deliver better results for their residents….

This site identifies and shares how cities around the world are investing in innovation, to ensure they’re constantly assessing and improving how they’re tackling problems and improving the lives of residents. This map is based on an initial survey of cities in OECD and non-OECD countries. The city information reflects data gathered from the city administration at the time of the survey….(More)”

Democratising decisions about technology: a toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The RSA: “As decisions are increasingly automated or made with the help of artificial intelligence, machines are becoming more influential in our lives. These machines are generating a range of predictions, such as the likelihood of a defendant reoffending or the job performance of a candidate based on video interview. In some cases, these predictions could lead to positive outcomes, such as less biased decisions or greater political engagement, but there are also risks that come with ceding power or outsourcing human judgment to a machine.

The RSA’s Forum for Ethical AI ran a citizens’ jury to explore the use of AI in decision-making. We convened participants to grapple with the ethical issues raised by this application of AI under different circumstances and enter into a deliberative dialogue about how companies, organisations, and public institutions should respond.

This report presents a toolkit for organisations seeking to deploy their own ethical processes around the proliferation of AI….(More)”.

Internet of Water

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Water is the essence of life and vital to the well-being of every person, economy, and ecosystem on the planet. But around the globe and here in the United States, water challenges are mounting as climate change, population growth, and other drivers of water stress increase. Many of these challenges are regional in scope and larger than any one organization (or even states), such as the depletion of multi-state aquifers, basin-scale flooding, or the wide-spread accumulation of nutrients leading to dead zones. Much of the infrastructure built to address these problems decades ago, including our data infrastructure, are struggling to meet these challenges. Much of our water data exists in paper formats unique to the organization collecting the data. Often, these organizations existed long before the personal computer was created (1975) or the internet became mainstream (mid 1990’s). As organizations adopted data infrastructure in the late 1990’s, it was with the mindset of “normal infrastructure” at the time. It was built to last for decades, rather than adapt with rapid technological changes. 

New water data infrastructure with new technologies that enable data to flow seamlessly between users and generate information for real-time management are needed to meet our growing water challenges. Decision-makers need accurate, timely data to understand current conditions, identify sustainability problems, illuminate possible solutions, track progress, and adapt along the way. Stakeholders need easy-to-understand metrics of water conditions so they can make sure managers and policymakers protect the environment and the public’s water supplies. The water community needs to continually improve how they manage this complex resource by using data and communicating information to support decision-making. In short, a sustained effort is required to accelerate the development of open data and information systems to support sustainable water resources management. The Internet of Water (IoW) is designed to be just such an effort….(More)”.