Museum of Failure


Museum of Failure is a collection of failed products and services from around the world. The majority of all innovation projects fail and the museum showcases these failures to provide visitors a fascinating learning experience. Every item provides unique insight into the risky business of innovation.

Innovation and progress require an acceptance of failure. The museum aims to stimulate productive discussion about failure and inspire us to take meaningful risks….(More)”.

Innovative Data for Urban Planning: The Opportunities and Challenges of Public-Private Data Partnerships


GSMA Report: “Rapid urbanisation will be one of the most pressing and complex challenges in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) for the next several decades. With cities in Africa and Asia expected to add more than one billion people, urban populations will represent two-thirds of the world population by 2050. This presents LMICs with an interesting opportunity and challenge, where rapid urbanisation can both contribute to economic or poverty growth.

The rapid pace and unequal character of urbanisation in LMICs has meant that not enough data has been generated to support urban planning solutions and the effective provision of urban utility services. Data-sharing partnerships between the public and private sector can bridge this data gap and open up an opportunity for governments to address urbanisation challenges with data-driven decisions. Innovative data sources such as mobile network operator data, remote sensing data, utility services data and other digital services data, can be applied to a range of critical urban planning and service provision use cases.

This report identifies challenges and enablers for public-private data-sharing partnerships (PPPs) that relate to the partnership engagement model, data and technology, regulation and ethics frameworks and evaluation and sustainability….(More)”

From open policy-making to crowd-sourcing: illustrative forms of open government in education


Policy Brief by Muriel Poisson: “As part of its research project on ‘Open government (OG) in education: Learning from experience’, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) has prepared five thematic briefs illustrating various forms of OG as applied to the education field: open government, open budgeting, open contracting, open policy-making and crowd-sourcing, and social auditing. This brief deals specifically with open policy-making and crowd-sourcing….(More)”.

Whose Streets? Our Streets!


Report by Rebecca Williams: “The extent to which “smart city” technology is altering our sense of freedom in public spaces deserves more attention if we want a democratic future. Democracy–the rule of the people–constitutes our collective self-determination and protects us against domination and abuse. Democracy requires safe spaces, or commons, for people to organically and spontaneously convene regardless of their background or position to campaign for their causes, discuss politics, and protest. In these commons, where anyone can take a stand and be noticed is where a notion of collective good can be developed and communicated. Public spaces, like our streets, parks, and squares, have historically played a significant role in the development of democracy. We should fight to preserve the freedoms intrinsic to our public spaces because they make democracy possible.

Last summer, approximately 15 to 26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd making it the largest mass movement in U.S. history. In June, the San Diego Police Department obtained footage of Black Lives Matter protesters from “smart streetlight” cameras, sparking shock and outrage from San Diego community members. These “smart streetlights” were promoted as part of citywide efforts to become a “smart city” to help with traffic control and air quality monitoring. Despite discoverable documentation about the streetlight’s capabilities and data policies on their website, including a data-sharing agreement about how they would share data with the police, the community had no expectation that the streetlights would be surveilling protestors. After media coverage and ongoing advocacy from the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUSTSD) coalition, the City Council, set aside the funding for the streetlights4 until a surveillance technology ordinance was considered and the Mayor ordered the 3,000+ streetlight cameras off. Due to the way power was supplied to the cameras, they remained on, but the city reported it no longer had access to the data it collected. In November, the City Council voted unanimously in favor of a surveillance ordinance and to establish a Privacy Advisory Board.In May, it was revealed that the San Diego Police Department had previously (in 2017) held back materials to Congress’ House Committee on Oversight and Reform about their use facial recognition technology. This story, with its mission creep and mishaps, is representative of a broader set of “smart city” cautionary trends that took place in the last year. These cautionary trends call us to question if our public spaces become places where one fears punishment, how will that affect collective action and political movements?

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many….(More)”

Designing data collaboratives to better understand human mobility and migration in West Africa



“The Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M) is released the report, “Designing Data Collaboratives to Better Understand Human Mobility and Migration in West Africa,” providing findings from a first-of-its-kind rapid co-design and prototyping workshop, or “Studio.” The first BD4M Studio convened over 40 stakeholders in government, international organizations, research, civil society, and the public sector to develop concrete strategies for developing and implementing cross- sectoral data partnerships, or “data collaboratives,” to improve ethical and secure access to data for migration-related policymaking and research in West Africa.

BD4M is an effort spearheaded by the International Organization for Migration’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (IOM GMDAC), European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and The GovLab to accelerate the responsible and ethical use of novel data sources and methodologies—such as social media, mobile phone data, satellite imagery, artificial intelligence—to support migration-related programming and policy on the global, national, and local levels. 

The BD4M Studio was informed by The Migration Domain of The 100 Questions Initiative — a global agenda-setting exercise to define the most impactful questions related to migration that could be answered through data collaboration. Inspired by the outputs of The 100 Questions, Studio participants designed data collaboratives that could produce answers to three key questions: 

  1. How can data be used to estimate current cross-border migration and mobility by sex and age in West Africa?
  2.  How can data be used to assess the current state of diaspora communities and their migration behavior in the region?
  3. How can we use data to better understand the drivers of migration in West Africa?…(More)”

Developing a Responsible and Well-designed Governance Structure for Data Marketplaces


WEF Briefing Paper: “… extracts insights from the discussions with thought leaders and experts to serve as a point of departure for governments and other members of the global community to discuss governance structures and regulatory frameworks for Data Marketplace Service Providers (DMSPs), the primary operators and managers of data exchanges as trusted third parties, in data marketplaces and exchanges in a wide range of jurisdictions. As decision-makers globally develop data marketplace solutions specific to their unique cultural nuances and needs, this paper provides insights into key governance issues to get right and do so with global interoperability and adaptability in mind….(More)”.

Human Rights Are Not A Bug: Upgrading Governance for an Equitable Internet


Report by Niels ten Oever: “COVID-19 showed how essential the Internet is, as people around the globe searched for critical health information, kept up with loved ones and worked remotely. All of this relied on an often unseen Internet infrastructure, consisting of myriad devices, institutions, and standards that kept them connected.

But who governs the patchwork that enables this essential utility? Internet governance organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force develop the technical foundations of the Internet. Their decisions are high stakes, and impact security, access to information, freedom of expression and other human rights. Yet they can only set voluntary norms and protocols for industry behavior, and there is no central authority to ensure that standards are implemented correctly. Further, while Internet governance bodies are open to all sectors, they are dominated by the transnational corporations that own and operate much of the infrastructure. Thus our increasingly digital daily lives are defined by the interests of corporations, not of the public interest….

In this comprehensive, field-setting report published with the support of the Ford Foundation, Niels ten Oever, a postdoctoral researcher in Internet infrastructure at the University of Amsterdam, unpacks and looks at the human consequences of these governance flaws, from speed and access to security and privacy of online information. The report details how these flaws especially impact those who are already subject to surveillance or structural inequities, such as an activist texting meeting times on WhatsApp, or a low-income senior looking for a vaccine appointment….(More)”.

Making life richer, easier and healthier: Robots, their future and the roles for public policy


OECD Paper: “This paper addresses the current and emerging uses and impacts of robots, the mid-term future of robotics and the role of policy. Progress in robotics will help to make life easier, richer and healthier. Wider robot use will help raise labour productivity. As science and engineering progress, robots will become more central to crisis response, from helping combat infectious diseases to maintaining critical infrastructure. Governments can accelerate and orient the development and uptake of socially valuable robots, for instance by: supporting cross-disciplinary R&D, facilitating research commercialisation, helping small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) understand the opportunities for investment in robots, supporting platforms that highlight robot solutions in healthcare and other sectors, embedding robotics engineering in high school curricula, tailoring training for workers with vocational-level mechanical skills, supporting data development useful to robotics, ensuring flexible regulation conducive to innovation, strengthening digital connectivity, and raising awareness of the importance of robotics….(More)

Mapping Africa’s Buildings with Satellite Imagery


Google AI Blog: “An accurate record of building footprints is important for a range of applications, from population estimation and urban planning to humanitarian response and environmental science. After a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, authorities need to estimate how many households have been affected. Ideally there would be up-to-date census information for this, but in practice such records may be out of date or unavailable. Instead, data on the locations and density of buildings can be a valuable alternative source of information.

A good way to collect such data is through satellite imagery, which can map the distribution of buildings across the world, particularly in areas that are isolated or difficult to access. However, detecting buildings with computer vision methods in some environments can be a challenging task. Because satellite imaging involves photographing the earth from several hundred kilometres above the ground, even at high resolution (30–50 cm per pixel), a small building or tent shelter occupies only a few pixels. The task is even more difficult for informal settlements, or rural areas where buildings constructed with natural materials can visually blend into the surroundings. There are also many types of natural and artificial features that can be easily confused with buildings in overhead imagery.

In “Continental-Scale Building Detection from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery”, we address these challenges, using new methods for detecting buildings that work in rural and urban settings across different terrains, such as savannah, desert, and forest, as well as informal settlements and refugee facilities. We use this building detection model to create the Open Buildings dataset, a new open-access data resource containing the locations and footprints of 516 million buildings with coverage across most of the African continent. The dataset will support several practical, scientific and humanitarian applications, ranging from disaster response or population mapping to planning services such as new medical facilities or studying human impact on the natural environment….(More)”.

The social value of data


Working paper by Diane Coyle and Annabel Manley: “Data sets, and the inferences made from them, are generating an increasing amount of value in modern economies. However, this value is typically not well captured in GDP, and in general, the absence of markets for data assets means there is no easy approach to measuring the value of data. Yet given the potential value that can be created from investing in data and making it available, this oversight could lead to underinvestment or too little access to data.

Data has certain economic characteristics that make market-based methods of determining value insufficient to understanding its true potential value to society.

First is its non-rival nature, in that one person or company’s use of a dataset does not affect whether another person or company can also use it.

Second is that datasets often involve externalities. For example, information externalities mean that the presence of one data point will increase the value of all other data points in the dataset. Conversely, loss of privacy would be a negative externality. Therefore, the potential to link two datasets creates complications for valuations as the combined dataset will have a value possibly greater than the sum of its parts. These characteristics mean that private markets will not deliver economically efficient social availability of data, and that market prices will not reflect social value.

The experiment

In our new working paper we test one potential method of determining the social value of a dataset: discrete choice analysis.

Discrete choice analysis is a type of ‘contingent valuation’ method used to elicit individuals’ willingness to pay, a measure of consumer surplus. The method we tested is frequently used in marketing research for pricing strategies, and so there are a number of software tools that will automate the survey design and analysis (we used conjoint.ly). More recently, contingent methods have also been used to value  ‘free’ digital goods, and for a pilot study by the ONS for valuing their own datasets….(More)”.