Toolkit to Help Community Leaders Drive Sustainable, Inclusive Growth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: “… is unveiling a groundbreaking suite of tools that will provide local leaders with timely data-driven insights on the current state of and potential for inclusive growth in their communities. The announcement comes as private and public sector leaders gather in Washington for the inaugural Global Inclusive Growth Summit.

For the first time the new Inclusive Growth Toolkit brings together a clear, simple view of social and economic growth in underserved communities across the U.S., at the census-tract level. This was created in response to growing demand from community leaders for more evidence-based insights, to help them steer impact investment dollars to locally-led economic development initiatives, unlock the potential of neighborhoods, and improve quality of life for all.    

The initial design of the toolkit is focused on driving sustainable growth for the 37+ million people living in the 8700+ QOZs throughout the United States. This comprehensive picture reveals that neighborhoods can look very different and may require different types of interventions to achieve successful and sustainable growth.

The Inclusive Growth Toolkit includes:

  • The Inclusive Growth Score – an interactive online map where users can view measures of inclusion and growth and then download a PDF Scorecard for any of the QOZs at census tract level.

A deep-dive analytics consultancy service that provides community leaders with customized insights to inform policy decisions, prospectus development, and impact investor discussions….(More)”.

Data Ownership: Exploring Implications for Data Privacy Rights and Data Valuation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hearing by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs:”…As a result of an increasingly digital economy, more personal information is available to companies than ever before.
Private companies are collecting, processing, analyzing and sharing considerable data on individuals for all kinds of purposes.

There have been many questions about what personal data is being collected, how it is being collected, with whom it is being shared and how it is being used, including in ways that affect individuals’ financial lives.

Given the vast amount of personal information flowing through the economy, individuals need real control over their personal data. This Committee has held a series of data privacy hearings exploring possible
frameworks for facilitating privacy rights to consumers. Nearly all have included references to data as a new currency or commodity.

The next question, then, is who owns it? There has been much debate about the concept of data ownership, the monetary value of personal information and its potential role in data privacy…..The witnesses will be: 

  1. Mr. Jeffrey Ritter Founding Chair, American Bar Association Committee on Cyberspace Law, External Lecturer
  2. Mr. Chad Marlow Senior Advocacy And Policy Counsel American Civil Liberties Union
  3. Mr. Will Rinehart Director Of Technology And Innovation Policy American Action Forum
  4. Ms. Michelle Dennedy Chief Executive Officer DrumWave Inc.

The Public-Data Opportunity: Why Governments Should Share More

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Press Release: “The Lisbon Council launches The Public-Data Opportunity: Why Governments Should Share More, a new discussion paper that looks at the state of play for public-sector data sharing – and calls for better protocols and procedures to deliver data-driven service to all Europeans. The paper analyses the importance of data-sharing between European Union public agencies, identifies the barriers and proposes seven policy recommendations that will help lift them. It builds on the research conducted by the “Understanding Value Co-Creation in Public Services for Transforming European Public Administrations” project, or Co-VAL, a 12-partner research consortium, co-funded by the European Union. And was launched at The 2019 Digital Government Conference convened by the Presidency of the European Council of Finland in Helsinki….(More)”

New Zealand launches draft algorithm charter for government agencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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 with groups or stakeholders with an interest in algorithm development.

Agencies would also have to publish information about how data is collected and stored; use tools and processes to ensure that privacy, ethics, and human rights considerations are integrated as part of algorithm development and procurement; and periodically assess decisions made by algorithms for unintended bias.

They would commit to implementing a “robust” peer-review process, and have to explain clearly who is responsible for automated decisions and what methods exist for challenge or appeal “via a human”….

The charter – which fits on a single page, and is designed to be simple and easily understood – explains that algorithms are a “fundamental element” of data analytics, which supports public services and delivers “new, innovative and well-targeted” policies aims.

The charter begins: “In a world where technology is moving rapidly, and artificial intelligence is on the rise, it’s essential that government has the right safeguards in place when it uses public data for decision-making. The government must ensure that data ethics are embedded in its work, and always keep in mind the people and communities being served by these tools.”

It says Stats NZ, the country’s official data agency, is “committed to transparent and accountable use of operational algorithms and other advanced data analytics techniques that inform decisions significantly impacting on individuals or groups”….(More)”.

Democracy Beyond Elections

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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 economic and educational circumstances. This handbook is now available to read online here, and available for download here….(More)”.

AI script finds bias in movies before production starts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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, LGBTQIA and disability representation. The analysis also highlights non-gender identified speaking characters that could help improve equality and diversity. 

Designed to help identify unconscious bias before it becomes a publicly consumed piece of media, the tool also ranks the sophistication of the characters’ vocabulary and their relative level of power within the story.

The first study of film and television representation using the GD-IQ examined the top 200 grossing, non-animated films of 2014 and 2015. Unsurprisingly, the more diverse and equal a film’s characters were, the more money the film earned. …(More)”.

World stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia, warns UN human rights expert

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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.

The digital welfare state is commonly presented as an altruistic and noble enterprise designed to ensure that citizens benefit from new technologies, experience more efficient government, and enjoy higher levels of well-being. But, Alston said, the digitization of welfare systems has very often been used to promote deep reductions in the overall welfare budget, a narrowing of the beneficiary pool, the elimination of some services, the introduction of demanding and intrusive forms of conditionality, the pursuit of behavioural modification goals, the imposition of stronger sanctions regimes, and a complete reversal of the traditional notion that the state should be accountable to the individual….(More)”.

Data gaps threaten achievement of development goals in Africa

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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 birth and death records, which allow citizens to access public services.

The index, on which the report is based, is the most comprehensive dataset on African governance, drawing on ten years of data of all 54 African nations. An updated index is released every two years….

The main challenge in the production of quality, timely data, according to the report, is a lack of funding and lack of independence of the national statistical offices.

Only one country, Mauritius, had a perfect score in terms of independence of its national statistics office – meaning that its office can collect the data it chooses, publish without approval from other arms of the government, and is sufficiently funded. Fifteen African nations scored zero in terms of the independence of their offices….(More)”.

The Nature of Moral Motivation

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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 in the pioneering stages in neuroscience. It’s a place where neuroscience and psychology can cooperate to get interesting experimental paradigms so that we can attack the question: How is it that, out of all these constraints and factors, a reasonable decision can be made? That’s a tough one. It will require us to find good experimental paradigms and new techniques….(More)”.

Data Power: tactics, access and shaping

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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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3. What kind of design frameworks are needed to build and deploy data-based technologies with values and ethics that are equitable and fair? How can big data be mobilised to improve how we live, beyond notions of efficiency and innovation?

These questions broadly emphasise the reclamation of power, retention of agency and ethics of data-based technologies, and they reflect a broader moment in recent data studies scholarship. While early critical research on “big data” – a term that captures the technologies, analytics and mythologies of increasingly large data sets (Boyd and Crawford, 2012) – could only hypothesise the inequalities and deepened forms discrimination that might emerge as data sets grew in volume, many of those predictions have now become real. The articles in this Special Issue ask pressing questions about data power at a time when we have learned that data are too frequently handled in a way that deepens social inequalities and injustices (amongst others, Eubanks, 2018; Noble, 2018).

The papers in this Special Issue approach discussions of inequality and injustice through three broad lenses: the tactics people use to confront unequal distributions of (data) power; the access to data that are most relevant and essential for particular social groups, coupled with the changing and uncertain legalities of data access; and the shaping of social relations by and through data, whether through the demands placed on app users to disclose more personal information, the use of data to construct cultures of compliance or through the very methodologies commonly used to organise and label information. While these three themes do not exhaustively capture the range of topics addressed in this Special Issue, at the Data Power Conferences, or within the field at large, they represent an emphasis within data studies scholarship on shedding light on the most pressing issues confronting our increasingly datafied world…(More)”.