Mia Hunt at Global Government Forum: “The New Zealand government has launched a draft ‘algorithm charter’ that sets out how agencies should analyse data in a way that is fair, ethical and transparent. The charter, which is open for public consultation, sets out 10 points that agencies would have to adhere to. These include pledging to explain how significant decisions are informed by algorithms or, where it cannot – for national security reasons, for example – explain the reason; taking into account the perspectives of communities, such as LGBTQI+, Pacific islanders and people with disabilities; and identifying and consulting... (More >)
Democracy Beyond Elections
United Nations Democracy Fund: “newDemocracy and the United Nations Democracy Fund have recently announced a 2-year agreement centred on doing democracy differently. Making democracies more inclusive requires bold and innovative reforms to bring the young, the poor, and minorities into the political system to start to address the crisis of political representation which sees people becoming less and less engaged. newDemocracy has been selected to develop and distribute a handbook on ‘Democracy Beyond Elections’ designed to show how nations at various levels of development can apply the principles of representation and deliberation in ways that are appropriate for their... (More >)
AI script finds bias in movies before production starts
Springwise: “The GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) Spellcheck for Bias analysis tool reviews film and television scripts for equality and diversity. Geena Davis, the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, recently announced a yearlong pilot programme with Walt Disney Studios. The Spellcheck for Bias tool will be used throughout the studio’s development process. Funded by Google, the GD-IQ uses audio-visual processing technologies from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering together with Google’s machine learning capabilities. The tool’s analysis reveals the percentages of representation and dialogue broken down into categories of gender, race,... (More >)
World stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia, warns UN human rights expert
UN Press Release: “A UN human rights expert has expressed concerns about the emergence of the “digital welfare state”, saying that all too often the real motives behind such programs are to slash welfare spending, set up intrusive government surveillance systems and generate profits for private corporate interests. “As humankind moves, perhaps inexorably, towards the digital welfare future it needs to alter course significantly and rapidly to avoid stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia,” the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, says in a report to be presented to the General Assembly on Friday.... (More >)
Data gaps threaten achievement of development goals in Africa
Sara Jerving at Devex: “Data gaps across the African continent threaten to hinder the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s first governance report released on Tuesday. The report, “Agendas 2063 & 2030: Is Africa On Track?“ based on an analysis of the foundation’s Ibrahim index of African governance, found that since the adoption of both of these agendas, the availability of public data in Africa has declined. With data focused on social outcomes, there has been a notable decline in education, population and vital statistics, such as... (More >)
The Nature of Moral Motivation
Edge Interview with Patricia S. Churchland: “Although we have made tremendous progress in understanding many details of the brain, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. What’s relevant to me, as somebody who’s interested in the nature of moral behavior, is how little we understand about the nature of reasoning, or if I may use a different expression, problem solving. I don’t know what reasoning is. For a long time, people seemed to think it was completely separate from emotion, but we know that can’t be true. The nature of problem solving is something that is still very much... (More >)
Data Power: tactics, access and shaping
Introduction to the Data Power Special Issue of Online Information Review by Ysabel Gerrard and Jo Bates : “…The Data Power Conference 2017, and by extension the seven papers in this Special Issue, addressed three questions: How can we reclaim some form of data-based power and autonomy, and advance data-based technological citizenship, while living in regimes of data power?Is it possible to regain agency and mobilise data for the common good? To do so, which theories help to interrogate and make sense of the operations of data power?What kind of design frameworks are needed to build and deploy data-based... (More >)
Future Government 2030+: Policy Implications and Recommendations
European Commission: “This report provides follow-up insights into the policy implications and offers a set of 57 recommendations, organised in nine policy areas. These stem from a process based on interviews with 20 stakeholders. The recommendations include a series of policy options and actions that could be implemented at different levels of governance systems. The Future of Government project started in autumn 2017 as a research project of the Joint Research Centre in collaboration with Directorate General Communication Network and Technologies. It explored how we can rethink the social contract according to the needs of today’s society, what elements... (More >)
The Urban Institute Data Catalog
Data@Urban: “We believe that data make the biggest impact when they are accessible to everyone. Today, we are excited to announce the public launch of the Urban Institute Data Catalog, a place to discover, learn about, and download open data provided by Urban Institute researchers and data scientists. You can find data that reflect the breadth of Urban’s expertise — health, education, the workforce, nonprofits, local government finances, and so much more. Built using open source technology, the catalog holds valuable data and metadata that Urban Institute staff have created, enhanced, cleaned, or otherwise added value to as part... (More >)
Identifying Citizens’ Needs by Combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Collective Intelligence (CI)
Report by Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “Around the world, public leaders are seeking new ways to better understand the needs of their citizens, and subsequently improve governance, and how we solve public problems. The approaches proposed toward changing public engagement tend to focus on leveraging two innovations. The first involves artificial intelligence (AI), which offers unprecedented abilities to quickly process vast quantities of data to deepen insights into public needs. The second is collective intelligence (CI), which provides means for tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd.” Both have strengths and weaknesses, but little is... (More >)
