Americans’ views about privacy, surveillance and data-sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research Center: “In key ways, today’s digitally networked society runs on quid pro quos: People exchange details about themselves and their activities for services and products on the web or apps. Many are willing to accept the deals they are offered in return for sharing insight about their purchases, behaviors and social lives. At times, their personal information is collected by government on the grounds that there are benefits to public safety and security.

A majority of Americans are concerned about this collection and use of their data, according to a new report from Pew Research Center….

Americans vary in their attitudes toward data-sharing in the pursuit of public good. Though many Americans don’t think they benefit much from the collection of their data, and they find that the potential risks of this practice outweigh the benefits, there are some scenarios in which the public is more likely to accept the idea of data-sharing. In line with findings in a 2015 Center survey showing that some Americans are comfortable with trade-offs in sharing data, about half of U.S. adults (49%) say it is acceptable for the government to collect data about all Americans in order to assess potential terrorist threats. That compares with 31% who feel it is unacceptable to collect data about all Americans for that purpose. By contrast, just one-quarter say it is acceptable for smart speaker makers to share users’ audio recordings with law enforcement to help with criminal investigations, versus 49% who find that unacceptable….(More)”.

Decision-making in the Age of the Algorithm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Thea Snow: “Frontline practitioners in the public sector – from social workers to police to custody officers – make important decisions every day about people’s lives. Operating in the context of a sector grappling with how to manage rising demand, coupled with diminishing resources, frontline practitioners are being asked to make very important decisions quickly and with limited information. To do this, public sector organisations are turning to new technologies to support decision-making, in particular, predictive analytics tools, which use machine learning algorithms to discover patterns in data and make predictions.

While many guides exist around ethical AI design, there is little guidance on how to support a productive human-machine interaction in relation to AI. This report aims to fill this gap by focusing on the issue of human-machine interaction. How people are working with tools is significant because, simply put, for predictive analytics tools to be effective, frontline practitioners need to use them well. It encourages public sector organisations to think about how people feel about predictive analytics tools – what they’re fearful of, what they’re excited about, what they don’t understand.

Based on insights drawn from an extensive literature review, interviews with frontline practitioners, and discussions with experts across a range of fields, the guide also identifies three key principles that play a significant role in supporting a constructive human-machine relationship: context, understanding, and agency….(More)”.

76 things you can do to boost civic engagement

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Rebecca Winthrop and Meg Heubeck at Brookings: “It isn’t too complicated. Civic engagement is the glue that holds self-government together. Yet civic participation and engagement has been on the decline for several decades. Therefore, each and every one of us must be as active and involved in our community and country as possible. Self-government is hard work and requires effort. Action is essential to maintaining the foundations of our democracy, no matter which political party happens to be in power.

To be a truly involved citizen, we must reconnect with our founding documents. We must learn and practice the skills of civic participation beginning with voting and moving onto legislating, speaking out, and building coalitions to solve problems on the local, state, and federal levels.

While by no means comprehensive, the “Democracy 76” list below provides specific and practical actions that we all can take to be an involved citizen. The list is broken into five actions that are essential components for engagement. It is expressly free from politics and partisanship and should be undertaken by all Americans—regardless of political perspectives or affiliation….this list has contributed to the call to action of the newly launched Purple Project for Democracy, which has as its central mission to create a more active, engaged American citizenry, ultimately strengthening the very foundations of our democratic form of government. This is certainly something the founding fathers would support….(Full List)”.

Realizing Democracy

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Supplement to Stanford Social Innovation Review that seeks to …”speak to an increasingly shared understanding among policymakers, civil society leaders, and scholars that democracy reform today must address underlying systemic roots of exclusion and inequality. …Articles: 

Fixing Democracy Demands the Building and Aligning of People’s Motivation and Authority to Act

By Hahrie Han

It is often tempting to try to solve problems by looking for policy fixes, new technologies, and informational solutions, instead of addressing underlying power dynamics.

Realizing Democracy Demands Addressing Deeper Structural Roots of Failure and Possibility of Shared Power By K. Sabeel Rahman

As long as it is more profitable to rig the rules than play by them, our better angels are unlikely to thrive. Part of the Winter 2020 issue’s Realizing Democracy supplement funded by the Ford Foundation.

Renewing Democracy Requires the Creation of an Inclusive Collective By Marshall Ganz & Art Reyes III 1 

Community organizers have a significant role in addressing the atrophy of civil goods that has transformed Americans from active citizens into political customers or nonprofit clients.

Building Political Bases to Make Multiracial Democracy Work By Doran Schrantz, Michelle Oyakawa, & Liz McKenna

Powerful organization, rather than efficient mobilization, is the way to re-center people in our political life.

Revitalizing Civic Infrastructure at the State Level Is Necessary for a Healthy Democracy By Alexander Hertel-Fernandez & Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith

Recent research documents only a weak electoral connection between state legislators and their voters. It’s time to break the cycle and restore political power to ordinary citizens over entrenched minorities.

Re-Envisioning the Roles of Prosecutors and Attorneys General to Make the Justice System Work for Everyone By Arisha Hatch & Terri Gerstein

Community organizations nationwide are helping to reimagine the role of law enforcement by pushing prosecutors to embrace a new criminal justice reform agenda and collaborating with attorneys general to protect working people.

Democratizing Economic Power to Break the Cycle of American Inequality By Felicia Wong, K. Sabeel Rahman & Dorian Warren

The sharp and growing imbalance between the wealthy and the rest of Americans dramatically alters how public policy itself is formulated—and what those policies ultimately look like.

New Forms of Worker Organization to Free Democracy From Corporate Clutches By Andrea Dehlendorf & Michelle Miller

To rebalance our democracy and economy, a real system of economic checks and balances must exist to ensure that working people have power in their workplaces.

The Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike Is a Master Class in Using Unions to Secure Progressive Wins By Jane McAlevey

Good strikes force the very consensus building that America needs, and the sooner we reprioritize unions, the sooner we can reclaim democracy.

Democracy and Prosperity Require Uncorrupted Governments With Strong Regulatory Power By Anat R. Admati

When corporate engagement with governments serves narrow interests and money is critical for campaigns and influence, the system causes “corruptive dependencies,” exacerbates inequality, and leads to the perception that our “captured economy” is rigged and unjust.

How Government, the Economy, and Civil Society Can Achieve the Democracy We Need and Deserve By Lisa García Bedolla

Three takeaways to establish the structural and institutional guardrails necessary to creating a serious, concerted, and holistic effort to address issues of power and inequality across civil society, government, and the economy….(More)”.

Government at a Glance 2019

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OECD Report: “Government at a Glance provides reliable, internationally comparative data on government activities and their results in OECD countries. Where possible, it also reports data for Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa. In many public governance areas, it is the only available source of data. It includes input, process, output and outcome indicators as well as contextual information for each country.

The 2019 edition includes input indicators on public finance and employment; while processes include data on institutions, budgeting practices and procedures, human resources management, regulatory government, public procurement and digital government and open data. Outcomes cover core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction) and indicators on access, responsiveness, quality and citizen satisfaction for the education, health and justice sectors.

Governance indicators are especially useful for monitoring and benchmarking governments’ progress in their public sector reforms.Each indicator in the publication is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of graphs and/or charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability….(More)”.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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)”.