Stats Brief by ESCAP: “This Stats Brief gives an overview of big data sources that can be used to produce economic statistics and presents country examples of the use of online price data, scanner data, mobile phone data, Earth Observations, financial transactions data and smart meter data to produce price indices, tourism statistics, poverty estimates, experimental economic statistics during COVID-19 and to monitor public sentiment. The Brief is part of ESCAP’s series on the use of non-traditional data sources for official statistics….(More)”.
Internet Futures: Spotlight on the technologies which may shape the Internet of the future
Report by Ofcom (UK): “Our lives have been profoundly impacted by the Internet and the web – these two inventions have made the world a more connected but complex place. Billions of people are now online, creating an extremely busy ‘global village’ where many services in communication, commerce, education, entertainment and beyond exist. Because of the rapid advancements of the Internet and the expansions in these services, innovations in communications have rolled out on a global scale. In fact, some of the biggest companies in the world today were founded on the Internet solely, so they have played an important role in advocating for improvements. Coupled with a wide range of other factors, such as the diverse pool of different users hence different needs, it is likely that the technology that drives the Internet and the web will continue to develop.
As the UK’s communications regulator, it is important that Ofcom is aware of new types of Internet technology that may affect the future. We will monitor and consider the effects that these developments may have on the communications services we use every day. This helps to ensure that we meet our duties competently and we continue to help people and businesses to get the most out of their services, as well as to protect them from any potential risks.
This report shines a light on the innovative, emerging Internet technologies that could shape our Internet in the future. We have selected a sample of technologies based on the responses we received to our call for inputs, and the discussions we had with thought leaders in both academia and industry. We will however continue to identify other important Internet technologies as they emerge and in sectors beyond those considered in this report…(More)”.
Inclusive SDG Data Partnerships
“Learning report” by Partners for Review (P4R/GIZ), the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), and the International Civil Society Centre: “It brought together National SDG Units, National Statistics Offices, National Human Rights Institutions and civil society organisations from across six countries. The initiative’s purpose is to advance data partnerships for the SDGs and to strengthen multi-actor data ecosystems at the national level. Goal is to meet the SDG data challenge by improving the use of alternative data sources, particularly data produced by civil society and human rights institutions, and complementary to official statistics….(More)”.
The Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator
The GovLab: “Hackathons. Data Jams. Dashboards. Mapping, analyzing, and releasing open data. These are some of the essential first steps in building a data-driven culture in government. Yet, it’s not always easy to get data projects such as these off the ground. Governments often work in difficult situations under constrained resources. They have to manage various stakeholders and constituencies who have to be sold on the value that data can generate in their daily work.
Through the Open Data Policy Lab, The GovLab and Microsoft are providing various resources — such as the Data Stewards Academy, and the Third Wave of Open Data Toolkit — to support this goal. Still, we recognize that more tailored guidance is needed so cities can build new sustainable data infrastructure and launch projects that meet their policy goals.
Today, we’re providing that resource in the form of the Open Data Policy Lab’s City Incubator. A first-of-its-kind program to support data innovations in cities’ success and scale, the City Incubator will give 10 city officials access to the hands-on training and access to mentors to take their ideas to the next level. It will enable cutting edge work on various urban challenges and empower officials to create data collaboratives, data-sharing agreements, and other systems. This work is supported by Microsoft, Mastercard City Possible, Luminate, NYU CUSP and the Public Sector Network.
Our team is launching a call for ten city government intrapreneurs from around the world working on data-driven projects to apply to the City Incubator. Over the course of six months, participants will use start-up innovation and public sector program solving frameworks to develop and launch new data innovations. They will also receive support from a council of mentors from around the world.
Applications are due August 31, with an early application deadline of August 6 for applicants looking for feedback. Applicants are expected to present their idea and include information on the value their proposal will generate, the resources it will use, the partners it will involve, and the risks it might entail alongside other information in the form of a Data Innovation Canvas. Additional information can be found on the website here.”
Financial data unbound: The value of open data for individuals and institutions
Paper by McKinsey Global Institute: “As countries around the world look to ensure rapid recovery once the COVID-19 crisis abates, improved financial services are emerging as a key element to boost growth, raise economic efficiency, and lift productivity. Robust digital financial infrastructure proved its worth during the crisis, helping governments cushion people and businesses from the economic shock of the pandemic. The next frontier is to create an open-data ecosystem for finance.
Already, technological, regulatory, and competitive forces are moving markets toward easier and safer financial data sharing. Open-data initiatives are springing up globally, including the United Kingdom’s Open Banking Implementation Entity, the European Union’s second payment services directive, Australia’s new consumer protection laws, Brazil’s drafting of open data guidelines, and Nigeria’s new Open Technology Foundation (Open Banking Nigeria). In the United States, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau aims to facilitate a consumer-authorized data-sharing market, while the Financial Data Exchange consortium attempts to promote common, interoperable standards for secure access to financial data. Yet, even as many countries put in place stronger digital financial infrastructure and data-sharing mechanisms, COVID-19 has exposed limitations and gaps in their reach, a theme we explored in earlier research.
This discussion paper from the McKinsey Global Institute (download full text in 36-page PDF) looks at the potential value that could be created—and the key issues that will need to be addressed—by the adoption of open data for finance. We focus on four regions: the European Union, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
By open data, we mean the ability to share financial data through a digital ecosystem in a manner that requires limited effort or manipulation. Advantages include more accurate credit risk evaluation and risk-based pricing, improved workforce allocation, better product delivery and customer service, and stronger fraud protection.
Our analysis suggests that the boost to the economy from broad adoption of open-data ecosystems could range from about 1 to 1.5 percent of GDP in 2030 in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to as much as 4 to 5 percent in India. All market participants benefit, be they institutions or consumers—either individuals or micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs)—albeit to varying degrees….(More)”.
The State of Global Emotions
Gallup: “Nobody was alone in feeling more sad, angry, worried or stressed last year. Gallup’s latest Negative Experience Index, which annually tracks these experiences worldwide in more than 100 countries and areas, shows that collectively, the world was feeling the worst it had in 15 years. The index score reached a new high of 32 in 2020.
Line graph. The Negative Experience Index, an annual composite index of stress, anger, worry, sadness and physical pain, continued to rise in 2020, hitting a new record of 32.
Gallup asked adults in 115 countries and areas if they had five specific negative experiences on the day preceding the survey. Four in 10 adults said they had experienced worry (40%) or stress (40%), and just under three in 10 had experienced physical pain (29%) during a lot of the previous day. About one in four or more experienced sadness (27%) or anger (24%).
Already at or near record highs in 2019, experiences of worry, stress, sadness and anger continued to gain steam and set new records in 2020. Worry and sadness each rose one percentage point, anger rose two, and stress rocketed up five. The percentage of adults worldwide who experienced pain was the only index item that declined — dropping two points after holding steady for several years at 31%.
But 2020 officially became the most stressful year in recent history. The five-point jump from 35% in 2019 to 40% in 2020 represents nearly 190 million more people globally who experienced stress during a lot of the previous day.
Line graph. Reported stress worldwide soared to a record 40% in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Worldwide, not everyone was feeling this stress to the same degree. Reported stress ranged from a high of 66% in Peru — which represents a new high for the country — to a low of 13% in Kyrgyzstan, where stress levels have historically been low and stayed low in 2020….(More)”
Turning data into public value: European lessons on unleashing the transformative power of city data
Paper by Anushri Gupta and Luca Mora: “The age of big data and smart city technologies provides city governments with unprecedented potential for data-driven decision making. Committed to constantly developing new urban policy and supporting urban operations, city governments have been using data describing the functioning of urban infrastructure assets and public services for a very long time. However, the widespread diffusion of digital systems has now created a remarkable new window of opportunity.
With many digital solutions being introduced into the built environment to improve the sustainability of urban sociotechnical systems, enormous amounts of data are constantly generated at the city level, and at unprecedented speed. City surveillance cameras, government applications for public services, building automation systems, intelligent transport systems, and smart grids are some examples of digital technologies which are contributing to producing an exhaustive stream of data “that can be harnessed to provide urban intelligence and reshape the practices and processes of public administrations”, creating a fertile environment for innovation and entrepreneurial activity. When attempting to tap into these large streams of city data, however, the opportunity to deliver sustainable value is met with significant sociotechnical challenges, which undermine the capability of urban development actors….(More)”.
Charting the ‘Data for Good’ Landscape
Report by Jake Porway at Data.org: “There is huge potential for data science and AI to play a productive role in advancing social impact. However, the field of “data for good” is not only overshadowed by the public conversations about the risks rampant data misuse can pose to civil society, it is also a fractured and disconnected space. There are a myriad of different interpretations of what it means to “use data for good” or “use AI for good”, which creates duplicate efforts, nonstrategic initiatives, and confusion about what a successfully data-driven social sector could look like. To add to that, funding is scarce for a field that requires expensive tools and skills to do well. These enduring challenges result in work being done at an activity and project level, but do not create a coherent set of building blocks to constitute a strong and healthy field that is capable of solving a new class of systems-level problems.
We are taking one tiny step forward in trying to make a more coherent Data for Good space with a landscape that makes clear what various Data for Good initiatives (and AI for Good initiatives) are trying to achieve, how they do it, and what makes them similar or different from one another. One of the major confusion points in talking about “Data for Good” is that it treats all efforts as similar by the mere fact that they use “data” and seek to do something “good”. This term is so broad as to be practically meaningless; as unhelpful as saying “Wood for Good”. We would laugh at a term as vague as “Wood for Good”, which would lump together activities as different as building houses to burning wood in cook stoves to making paper, combining architecture with carpentry, forestry with fuel. However, we are content to say “Data for Good”, and its related phrases “we need to use our data better” or “we need to be data-driven”, when data is arguably even more general than something like wood.
We are trying to bring clarity to the conversation by going beyond mapping organizations into arbitrary groups, to define the dimensions of what it means to do data for good. By creating an ontology for what Data for Good initiatives seek to achieve, in which sector, and by what means, we can gain a better understanding of the underlying fundamentals of using data for good, as well as creating a landscape of what initiatives are doing.
We hope that this landscape of initiatives will help to bring some more nuance and clarity to the field, as well as identify which initiatives are out there and what purpose they serve. Specifically, we hope this landscape will help:
- Data for Good field practitioners align on a shared language for the outcomes, activities, and aims of the field.
- Purpose-driven organizations who are interested in applying data and computing to their missions better understand what they might need and who they might go to to get it.
- Funders make more strategic decisions about funding in the data/AI space based on activities that align with their interests and the amount of funding already devoted to that area.
- Organizations with Data for Good initiatives can find one another and collaborate based on similarity of mission and activities.
Below you will find a very preliminary landscape map, along with a description of the different kinds of groups in the Data for Good ecosystem and why you might need to engage with them….(More)”.
Repository of Behavioral Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): “How do you keep people from gathering with friends and family during a pandemic? How do you improve school attendance among preschoolers? How do you make sure taxpayers pay their fair share? These are some of the questions researchers seek to solve so countries can continue to grow and prosper. Many issues come down to human behavior and how the right policy tools can nudge people into doing things that will benefit themselves and society. A new repository collects these tools and the lessons learned from behavioral interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, making them available for policymakers across the region and beyond.
For nearly a decade, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has been working with local and national governments in the region to advance knowledge and expertise on individual and collective decision-making. The goal is to address biases that guide people’s behavior in detrimental ways. By designing strategies to correct them, we can help people make wiser choices in areas that range from education and savings to health, tax compliance, and labor markets….
To collect our findings and make the lessons we learned over the years available to policymakers and researchers, we recently created the largest online repository of quantitative behavioral economics field experiments conducted in Latin America and the Caribbean. The repository is aimed specifically at policymakers and is available in Spanish and English….(More)”.
Could Trade Agreements Help Address the Wicked Problem of Cross-Border Disinformation?
Essay by Susan Ariel Aaronson: “Whether produced domestically or internationally, disinformation is a “wicked” problem that has global impacts. Although trade agreements contain measures that address cross-border disinformation, domestically created disinformation remains out of their reach. This paper looks at how policy makers can use trade agreements to mitigate disinformation and spam while implementing financial and trade sanctions against entities and countries that engage in disseminating cross-border disinformation. Developed and developing countries will need to work together to solve this global problem….(More)”.