Global Fishing Watch: Pooling Data and Expertise to Combat Illegal Fishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Collaborative Case Study by Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst: “

Global Fishing Watch, originally set up through a collaboration between Oceana, SkyTruth and Google, is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing responsible stewardship of our oceans through increased transparency in fishing activity and scientific research. Using big data processing and machine learning, Global Fishing Watch visualizes, tracks, and shares data about global fishing activity in near-real time and for free via their public map. To date, the platform tracks approximately 65,000 commercial fishing vessels globally. These insights have been used in a number of academic publications, ocean advocacy efforts, and law enforcement activities.

Data Collaborative Model: Based on the typology of data collaborative practice areas, Global Fishing Watch is an example of the data pooling model of data collaboration, specifically a public data pool. Public data pools co-mingle data assets from multiple data holders — including governments and companies — and make those shared assets available on the web. This approach enabled the data stewards and stakeholders involved in Global Fishing Watch to bring together multiple data streams from both public- and private-sector entities in a single location. This single point of access provides the public and relevant authorities with user-friendly access to actionable, previously fragmented data that can drive efforts to address compliance in fisheries and illegal fishing around the world.

Data Stewardship Approach: Global Fishing Watch also provides a clear illustration of the importance of data stewards. For instance, representatives from Google Earth Outreach, one of the data holders, played an important stewardship role in seeking to connect and coordinate with SkyTruth and Oceana, two important nonprofit environmental actors who were working separately prior to this initiative. The brokering of this partnership helped to bring relevant data assets from the public and private sectors to bear in support of institutional efforts to address the stubborn challenge of illegal fishing.

Read the full case study here.”

Copy, Paste, Legislate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Center for Public Integrity: “Do you know if a bill introduced in your statehouse — it might govern who can fix your shattered iPhone screen or whether you can still sue a pedophile priest years later — was actually written by your elected lawmakers? Use this new tool to find out.

Spoiler alert The answer may well be no.

Thousands of pieces of “model legislation” are drafted each year by business organizations and special interest groups and distributed to state lawmakers for introduction. These copycat bills influence policymaking across the nation, state by state, often with little scrutiny. This news application was developed by the Center for Public Integrity, part of a year-long collaboration with USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic to bring the practice into the light….(More)”.

Dollars for Profs: How to Investigate Professors’ Conflicts of Interest

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ProPublica: “When professors moonlight, the income may influence their research and policy views. Although most universities track this outside work, the records have rarely been accessible to the public, potentially obscuring conflicts of interests.

That changed last month when ProPublica launched Dollars for Profs, an interactive database that, for the first time ever, allows you to look up more than 37,000 faculty and staff disclosures from about 20 public universities and the National Institutes of Health.

We believe there are hundreds of stories in this database, and we hope to tell as many as possible. Already, we’ve revealed how the University of California’s weak monitoring of conflicts has allowed faculty members to underreport their outside income, potentially depriving the university of millions of dollars. In addition, using a database of NIH records, we found that health researchers have acknowledged a total of at least $188 million in financial conflicts of interest since 2012.

We hope journalists all over the country will look into the database and find more. Here are tips for local education reporters, college newspaper journalists and anyone else who wants to hold academia accountable on how to dig into the disclosures….(More)”.

Practical Knowledge: Sustaining Massively-Multiplayer Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amar Bhide: “Governments and universities are pouring money into more ‘practical’ research – ‘translational’ medicine and ‘evidence-based’ policies in education, public health and economic development, for instance. But just translating or applying science rarely produces practical advances – and an inflexible adherence to the methods of natural or social scientists can do more harm than good. Instead, I propose a general approach – and specific research topics – to advance practical knowledge and study its distinctive contemporary nature….(More)”

Governing the Plural City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Ash Amin: “….More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and this figure is expected to rise to 70% by 2050. World affairs and city affairs have become deeply enmeshed, and what goes on within cities – their economic productivity, environmental footprint, cultural practices, social wellbeing, and political stability – affects the world at large. They shape the weather and are the weathervane of our times, so getting them right matters. But what this involves and how far it is within reach is by no means clear….

Thus, while the international policy community may confidently call for cities to be made ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ in the way headlined in the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, it tends to underestimate the challenges of achieving traction in a distributed, plural and often hidden force field. A number of pressing questions arise. Should state effort focus on comprehensive master plans and general infrastructures and services, or on strategic risks and vulnerabilities, while coordinating risks? What are the limits and limitations of state action, and how is the balance between the general and the specific or the communal
and sectionalist to be found? What is the relationship between central authority plans and the communities who are to benefit, and how can neighbourhood knowledge and effort be supported amidst policy neglect or corporatist calculation? Is it possible to reconcile strategic and democratic goals in the twenty first-century city of multiple logics, demands and actors?…(More)”.

Missions: A beginner's guide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose: “…The 21st century is becoming increasingly defined by the need to respond to major issues facing society, the environment around us and the possibility of developing a prosperous equal economy. Sometimes referred to as ‘grand challenges’, these include climate change, ageing societies, preventative healthcare, and generating sustainable growth for the benefit of all.

Innovation has not just a rate but also a direction. How that direction is set — not just by the government but by different actors and socio-political forces — is a key aspect of IIPP’s work. But how should we decide which direction? We use the concept of public value as a way to think about which direction innovation and industrial policy takes. Public value is value that is created collectively for a public purpose — this requires citizens to engage in defining purpose, nurturing capabilities and capacities, assess the value created, and ensure that societal value is distributed equitably…(More)”.

Federal Sources of Entrepreneurship Data: A Compendium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Compendium developed by Andrew Reamer: “The E.M. Kauffman Foundation has asked the George Washington Institute of Public Policy (GWIPP) to prepare a compendium of federal sources of data on self-employment, entrepreneurship, and small business development. The Foundation believes that the availability of useful, reliable federal data on these topics would enable robust descriptions and explanations of entrepreneurship trends in the United States and so help guide the development of effective entrepreneurship policies.


Achieving these ends first requires the identification and detailed description of available federal datasets, as provided in this compendium. Its contents include:

  • An overview and discussion of 18 datasets from four federal agencies, organized by two categories and five subcategories.
  • Tables providing information on each dataset, including:
    • scope of coverage of self-employed, entrepreneurs, and businesses;
    • data collection methods (nature of data source, periodicity, sampling frame, sample size);
    • dataset variables (owner characteristics, business characteristics and operations, geographic areas);
    • Data release schedule; and
    • Data access by format (including fixed tables, interactive tools, API, FTP download, public use microdata samples [PUMS], and confidential microdata).

For each dataset, examples of studies, if any, that use the data source to describe and explain trends in entrepreneurship.
The author’s aim is for the compendium to facilitate an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of currently available federal datasets, discussion about how data availability and value can be improved, and implementation of desired improvements…(More)”

Assessing employer intent when AI hiring tools are biased

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Caitlin Chin at Brookings: “When it comes to gender stereotypes in occupational roles, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to either mitigate historical bias or heighten it. In the case of the Word2vec model, AI appears to do both.

Word2vec is a publicly available algorithmic model built on millions of words scraped from online Google News articles, which computer scientists commonly use to analyze word associations. In 2016, Microsoft and Boston University researchers revealed that the model picked up gender stereotypes existing in online news sources—and furthermore, that these biased word associations were overwhelmingly job related. Upon discovering this problem, the researchers neutralized the biased word correlations in their specific algorithm, writing that “in a small way debiased word embeddings can hopefully contribute to reducing gender bias in society.”

Their study draws attention to a broader issue with artificial intelligence: Because algorithms often emulate the training datasets that they are built upon, biased input datasets could generate flawed outputs. Because many contemporary employers utilize predictive algorithms to scan resumes, direct targeted advertising, or even conduct face- or voice-recognition-based interviews, it is crucial to consider whether popular hiring tools might be susceptible to the same cultural biases that the researchers discovered in Word2vec.

In this paper, I discuss how hiring is a multi-layered and opaque process and how it will become more difficult to assess employer intent as recruitment processes move online. Because intent is a critical aspect of employment discrimination law, I ultimately suggest four ways upon which to include it in the discussion surrounding algorithmic bias….(More)”

This report from The Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology (AIET) Initiative is part of “AI and Bias,” a series that explores ways to mitigate possible biases and create a pathway toward greater fairness in AI and emerging technologies.

Civic tech, Data and Demos: exploring the interaction between democracy and technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IAPP: “The French data protection authority, the CNIL, has published a report that explores emerging issues of data protection and freedoms in democracy, technology and citizen participation. The report discusses the emergence of civic technologies and data protection issues associated. The CNIL also uses the report to propose its recommendations for creating “an environment of trust” with civic tech “that allows everyone to exercise their citizenship while respecting their rights and freedoms.” Those recommendations include more implementation of EU General Data Protection Regulation principles and considerations for improved digital communication and participation….(More)”.

Exploring digital government transformation in the EU

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Analysis of the state of the art and review of literature by Gianluca Misuraca et al: “This report presents the… results of the review of literature, based on almost 500 academic and grey literature sources, as well as the analysis of digital government policies in the EU Member States provide a synthetic overview of the main themes and topics of the digital government discourse.

The report depicts the variety of existing conceptualisations and definitions of the digital government phenomenon, measured and expected effects of the application of more disruptive innovations and emerging technologies in government, as well as key drivers and barriers for transforming the public sector. Overall, the literature review shows that many sources appear overly optimistic with regard to the impact of digital government transformation, although the majority of them are based on normative views or expectations, rather than empirically tested insights.

The authors therefore caution that digital government transformation should be researched empirically and with a due differentiation between evidence and hope. In this respect, the report paves the way to in-depth analysis of the effects that can be generated by digital innovation in public sector organisations. A digital transformation that implies the redesign of the tools and methods used in the machinery of government will require in fact a significant change in the institutional frameworks that regulate and help coordinate the governance systems in which such changing processes are implemented…(More)”.