This app is helping mothers in the Brazilian favelas survive the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Daniel Avelar at Open Democracy: “As Brazil faces one of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the world, a smartphone app is helping residents of impoverished areas known as favelas survive the virus threat amid sudden mass unemployment.

So far, the Latin American country has recorded over 115.000 deaths caused by COVID-19. The shutdown of economic activity wiped out 7.8 million jobs, mostly affecting low-skilled informal workers who form the bulk of the population in the favelas. Emergency income distributed by the government is limited to 60% of the minimum wage, so families are struggling to make ends meet.

Many blame president Jair Bolsonaro for the tragedy. Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, has consistently rallied against science-based policies in the management of the pandemic and pushed for an end to stay-at-home orders. A precocious reopening of the economy is likely to increase infection rates and cause more deaths.

In an attempt to stop the looming humanitarian catastrophe, a coalition of activists in the favelas and corporate partners developed an app that is facilitating the distribution of food and emergency income to thousands of women spearheading families. The app has a facial recognition feature that helps volunteers identify and register recipients of aid and prevents fraud.

So far, the Favela Mothers project has distributed the equivalent to US$ 26 million in food parcels and cash allowances to more than 1.1 million families in 5,000 neighborhoods across the country….(More)”.

EU risks being dethroned as world’s lead digital regulator

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marietje Schaake at the Financial Times: “With a series of executive orders, US president Donald Trump has quickly changed the digital regulatory game. His administration has adopted unprecedented sanctions against the Chinese technology group Huawei; next on the list of likely targets is the Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba.

The TikTok takeover saga continues, since the president this month ordered the sale of its US operations within 90 days. The administration’s Clean Network programme also claims to protect privacy by keeping “unsafe” companies out of US cable, cloud and app infrastructure. Engaging with a shared privacy agenda, which the EU has enshrined in law, would be a constructive step.

Instead, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has prioritised warnings about the dangers posed by Huawei to individual EU member states during a recent visit. Yet these unilateral American actions also highlight weaknesses in Europe’s own preparedness and unity on issues of national security in the digital world. Beyond emphasising fundamental rights and economic rules, Europe must move fast if it does not want to see other global actors draw the road maps of regulation.

Recent years have seen the acceleration of national security arguments to restrict market access for global technology companies. Decisions on bans and sanctions tend to rely on the type of executive power that the EU lacks, especially in the national security domain. The bloc has never fully developed a common security policy — and deliberately so. In its white paper on artificial intelligence, the European Commission explicitly omits AI in the military context, and European geopolitical clout remains underused by politicians keen to advance their national postures.

Tensions between the promise of a digital single market and the absence of a common approach to security were revealed in fragmented responses to 5G concerns, as well as foreign acquisitions of strategic tech companies. This ad hoc policy toolbox may well prove inadequate to build the co-ordination needed for a forceful European strategy. The US tussle with TikTok and Huawei should be a lesson to European politicians on their approach to regulating tech.

A confident Europe might argue that concerns about terabytes of the most intimate information being shared with foreign companies were promptly met with the EU’s general data protection regulations. A more critical voice would counter that Europe does not appreciate the risks of integrating Chinese tech into 5G networks, and that its narrow focus on fundamental rights and market regulations in the digital world was always naive.

Either way, now that geopolitics is integrating with tech policy, the EU risks being dethroned as the lead regulator of the digital world. In many ways it is remarkable that a reckoning took this long. For decades, online products and services have evaded restrictions on their reach into global communities. But the long-anticipated collision of geopolitics and technological disruption is finally here. It will do significant collateral damage to the open internet.

The challenge for democracies is to preserve their own core values and interests, along with the benefits of an open, global internet. A series of nationalistic bans and restrictions will not achieve these goals. Instead it will unleash a digital trade war at the expense of internet users worldwide..(More)”.

An algorithm shouldn’t decide a student’s future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hye Jung Han at Politico: “…Education systems across Europe struggled this year with how to determine students’ all-important final grades. But one system, the International Baccalaureate (“IB”) — a high school program that is highly regarded by European universities, and offered by both public and private schools in 152 countries — did something unusual.

Having canceled final exams, which make up the majority of an IB student’s grade, the Geneva-based foundation of the same name hastily built an algorithm that used a student’s coursework scores, predicted grades by teachers and their school’s historical IB results to guess what students might have scored if they had taken their exams in a hypothetical, pandemic-free year. The result of the algorithm became the student’s final grade.

The results were catastrophic. Soon after the grades were released, serious mismatches emerged between expected grades based on a student’s prior performance, and those awarded by the algorithm. Because IB students’ university admissions are contingent upon their final grades, the unexpectedly poor grades generated for some resulted in scholarships and admissions offers being revoked…

The IB had alternatives. Instead, it could have used students’ actual academic performance and graded on a generous curve. It could have incorporated practice test grades, third-party moderation to minimize grading bias and teachers’ broad evaluations of student progress.

It could have engaged with universities on flexibly factoring in final grades into this year’s admissions decisions, as universities contemplate opening their now-virtual classes to more students to replace lost revenue.

It increasingly seems like the greatest potential of the power promised by predictive data lies in the realm of misuse.

For this year’s graduating class, who have already responded with grace and resilience in their final year of school, the automating away of their capacity and potential is an unfair and unwanted preview of the world they are graduating into….(More)”.

‘Telegram revolution’: App helps drive Belarus protests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daria Litvinova at AP News: “Every day, like clockwork, to-do lists for those protesting against Belarus’ authoritarian leader appear in the popular Telegram messaging app. They lay out goals, give times and locations of rallies with business-like precision, and offer spirited encouragement.

“Today will be one more important day in the fight for our freedom. Tectonic shifts are happening on all fronts, so it’s important not to slow down,” a message in one of Telegram’s so-called channels read Tuesday. “Morning. Expanding the strike … 11:00. Supporting the Kupala (theater) … 19:00. Gathering at the Independence Square.”

The app has become an indispensable tool in coordinating the unprecedented mass protests that have rocked Belarus since Aug. 9, when election officials announced President Alexander Lukashenko had won a landslide victory to extend his 26-year rule in a vote widely seen as rigged.

Peaceful protesters who poured into the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities were met with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings from police. The opposition candidate left for Lithuania — under duress, her campaign said — and authorities shut off the internet, leaving Belarusians with almost no access to independent online news outlets or social media and protesters seemingly without a leader.

That’s where Telegram — which often remains available despite internet outages, touts the security of messages shared in the app and has been used in other protest movements — came in. Some of its channels helped scattered rallies to mature into well-coordinated action.

The people who run the channels, which used to offer political news, now post updates, videos and photos of the unfolding turmoil sent in from users, locations of heavy police presence, contacts of human rights activists, and outright calls for new demonstrations — something Belarusian opposition leaders have refrained from doing publicly themselves. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have responded to those calls.

In a matter of days, the channels — NEXTA, NEXTA Live and Belarus of the Brain are the most popular — have become the main method for facilitating the protests, said Franak Viacorka, a Belarusian analyst and non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council….(More)”.

Blame the politicians, not the technology, for A-level fiasco

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Editorial Board at the Financial Times: “The soundtrack of school students marching through Britain’s streets shouting “f*** the algorithm” captured the sense of outrage surrounding the botched awarding of A-level exam grades this year. But the students’ anger towards a disembodied computer algorithm is misplaced. This was a human failure. The algorithm used to “moderate” teacher-assessed grades had no agency and delivered exactly what it was designed to do.

It is politicians and educational officials who are responsible for the government’s latest fiasco and should be the target of students’ criticism….

Sensibly designed, computer algorithms could have been used to moderate teacher assessments in a constructive way. Using past school performance data, they could have highlighted anomalies in the distribution of predicted grades between and within schools. That could have led to a dialogue between Ofqual, the exam regulator, and anomalous schools to come up with more realistic assessments….

There are broader lessons to be drawn from the government’s algo fiasco about the dangers of automated decision-making systems. The inappropriate use of such systems to assess immigration status, policing policies and prison sentencing decisions is a live danger. In the private sector, incomplete and partial data sets can also significantly disadvantage under-represented groups when it comes to hiring decisions and performance measures.

Given the severe erosion of public trust in the government’s use of technology, it might now be advisable to subject all automated decision-making systems to critical scrutiny by independent experts. The Royal Statistical Society and The Alan Turing Institute certainly have the expertise to give a Kitemark of approval or flag concerns.

As ever, technology in itself is neither good nor bad. But it is certainly not neutral. The more we deploy automated decision-making systems, the smarter we must become in considering how best to use them and in scrutinising their outcomes. We often talk about a deficit of trust in our societies. But we should also be aware of the dangers of over-trusting technology. That may be a good essay subject for next year’s philosophy A-level….(More)”.

No more gut-based strategies: Using evidence to solve the digital divide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gregory Rosston and Scott J. Wallsten at the Hill: “COVID-19 has, among other things, brought home the costs of the digital divide. Numerous op-eds have offered solutions, including increasing subsidies to schools, providing eligible low-income people with a $50 per month broadband credit, funding more digital literacy classes and putting WiFi on school buses. A House bill would allocate $80 billion to ideas meant to close the digital divide.

The key missing component of nearly every proposal to solve the connectivity problem is evidence — evidence suggesting the ideas are likely to work and ways to use evidence in the future to evaluate whether they did work. Otherwise, we are likely throwing money away. Understanding what works and what doesn’t requires data collection and research now and in the future….

Consider President Trump’s belief in hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the novel coronavirus based simply on his “gut.” That resulted in the government ordering the drug to be produced, distributed to hospitals, and 63 million doses put into a strategic national stockpile.

The well-meaning folks offering up multi-billion dollar broadband plans probably recognize the foolhardiness of the president’s gut-check approach to guiding virus treatment plans. But so far, policy makers and advocates are promoting their own gut beliefs that their proposals will treat the digital divide. An evidence-free approach is likely to cost billions of dollars more and connect fewer people than an evidence-based approach.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The pandemic did not only lay bare the implications of the digital divide, it also created a laboratory for studying how best to bridge the divide. The most immediate problem was how to help kids without home broadband attend distance learning classes. Schools had no time to formally study different options — it was a race to find anything that might help. As a result, schools incidentally ran thousands of concurrent experiments around the country….(More)”.

Might social intelligence save Latin America from its governments in times of Covid-19?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Thamy Pogrebinschi: “…In such scenarios, it seems relevant to acknowledge the limits of the state to deal with huge and unpredictable challenges and thus the need to resort to civil society. State capacity cannot be built overnight, but social intelligence is an unlimited and permanently available resource. In recent years, digital technology has multiplied what has been long called social intelligence (Dewey) and is now more often known as collective intelligence (Lévy), the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki), or democratic reason (Landemore).

Taken together, these concepts point to the most powerful tool available to governments facing hard problems and unprecedented challenges: the sourcing and sharing of knowledge, information, skills, resources, and data from citizens in order to address social and political problems.

The Covid-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to test the potential of social intelligence as fuel for processes of creative collaboration that may aid governments to reinvent themselves and prepare for the challenges that will remain after the virus is gone. By creative collaboration, I mean a range of forms of communication, action, and connection among citizens themselves, between citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs), and between the latter two and their governments, all with the common aim of addressing problems that affect all and that the state for various reasons cannot (satisfactorily) respond to alone.

While several Latin American countries have been stuck in the Covid-19 crisis with governments unable or unwilling to contain it or to reduce its damages, a substantial number of digital democratic innovations have been advanced by civil society in the past few months. These comprise institutions, processes, and mechanisms that rely on digital citizen participation as a means to address social and political problems – and, more recently, also problems of a humanitarian nature….

Between March 16 and July 1 of this year, at least 400 digital democratic innovations were created across 18 countries in Latin America with the specific aim of handling the Covid-19 crisis and mitigating its impact, according to recent data from the LATINNO project. These innovations are essentially mechanisms and processes in which citizens, with the aid of digital tools, are enabled to address social, political, and humanitarian problems related to the pandemic.

Citizens engage in and contribute to three levels of responses, which are based on information, connection, and action. About one-fourth of these digital democratic innovations clearly rely on crowdsourcing social intelligence.

The great majority of those digital innovations have been developed by CSOs. Around 75% of them have no government involvement at all, which is striking in a region known for implementing state-driven citizen participation as a result of the democratization processes that took place in the late 20th century. Civil society has stepped in in most countries, particularly where government responses were absent (Brazil and Nicaragua), slow (Mexico), insufficient due to lack of economic resources (Argentina) or infrastructure (Peru), or simply inefficient (Chile).

Based on these data from 18 Latin American countries, one can observe that digital democratic innovations address challenges posed by the Covid-19 outbreak in five main ways: first, generating verified information and reliable data; second, geolocating problems, needs, and demands; third, mobilizing resources, skills, and knowledge to address those problems, needs, and demands; fourth, connecting demand (individuals and organizations in need) and supply (individuals and organizations willing to provide whatever is needed); and fifth and finally, implementing and monitoring public policies and actions. In some countries, there is a sixth use that cuts across the other five: assisting vulnerable groups such as the elderly, women, children and youth, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants….(More)”

COVID Data Failures Create Pressure for Public Health System Overhaul

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaiser Health News: “After terrorists slammed a plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, ambulances rushed scores of the injured to community hospitals, but only three of the patients were taken to specialized trauma wards. The reason: The hospitals and ambulances had no real-time information-sharing system.

Nineteen years later, there is still no national data network that enables the health system to respond effectively to disasters and disease outbreaks. Many doctors and nurses must fill out paper forms on COVID-19 cases and available beds and fax them to public health agencies, causing critical delays in care and hampering the effort to track and block the spread of the coronavirus.

There are signs the COVID-19 pandemic has created momentum to modernize the nation’s creaky, fragmented public health data system, in which nearly 3,000 local, state and federal health departments set their own reporting rules and vary greatly in their ability to send and receive data electronically.

Sutter Health and UC Davis Health, along with nearly 30 other provider organizations around the country, recently launched a collaborative effort to speed and improve the sharing of clinical data on individual COVID cases with public health departments.

But even that platform, which contains information about patients’ diagnoses and response to treatments, doesn’t yet include data on the availability of hospital beds, intensive care units or supplies needed for a seamless pandemic response.

The federal government spent nearly $40 billion over the past decade to equip hospitals and physicians’ offices with electronic health record systems for improving treatment of individual patients. But no comparable effort has emerged to build an effective system for quickly moving information on infectious disease from providers to public health agencies.

In March, Congress approved $500 million over 10 years to modernize the public health data infrastructure. But the amount falls far short of what’s needed to update data systems and train staff at local and state health departments, said Brian Dixon, director of public health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis….(More)”.

A need for open public data standards and sharing in light of COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lauren Gardner, Jeremy Ratcliff, Ensheng Dong and Aaron Katz at the Lancet: “The disjointed public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated one clear truth: the value of timely, publicly available data. The John Hopkins University (JHU) Center for Systems Science and Engineering’s COVID-19 dashboard exists to provide this information. What grew from a modest effort to track a novel cause of pneumonia in China quickly became a mainstay symbol of the pandemic, receiving over 1 billion hits per day within weeks of its creation, primarily driven by the general public seeking information on the emerging health crisis. Critically, the data supporting the visualisation were provided in a publicly accessible repository and eagerly adopted by policy makers and the research community for purposes of modelling and planning, as evidenced by the more than 1200 citations in the first 4 months of its publication. 6 months into the pandemic, the JHU COVID-19 dashboard still stands as the authoritative source of global COVID-19 epidemiological data.

Similar commendable efforts to facilitate public understanding of COVID-19 have since been introduced by various academic, industry, and public health entities. These costly and disparate efforts around the world were necessary to fill the gap left by the lack of an established infrastructure for real-time reporting and open data sharing during an ongoing public health crisis…

Although existing systems were in place to achieve such objectives, they were not empowered or equipped to fully meet the public’s expectation for timely open data at an actionable level of spatial resolution. Moving forward, it is imperative that a standardised reporting system for systematically collecting, visualising, and sharing high-quality data on emerging infectious and notifiable diseases in real-time is established. The data should be made available at a spatial and temporal scale that is granular enough to prove useful for planning and modelling purposes. Additionally, a critical component of the proposed system is the democratisation of data; all collected information (observing necessary privacy standards) should be made publicly available immediately upon release, in machine-readable formats, and based on open data standards..(More)”. (See also https://data4covid19.org/)

How Philanthropy Can Help Governments Accelerate a Real Recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Michele Jolin and David Medina: “The cracks and design flaws of our nation’s public systems have been starkly exposed as governments everywhere struggle to respond to health and economic crises that disproportionately devastate Black residents and communities of color. As government leaders respond to the immediate emergencies, they also operate within a legacy of government practices, policies and systems that have played a central role in creating and maintaining racial inequity. 

Philanthropy can play a unique and catalytic role in accelerating a real recovery by helping government leaders make smarter decisions, helping them develop and effectively use the data-and-evidence capacity they need to spotlight and understand root causes of community challenges, especially racial disparities, and increase the impact of government investments that could close racial gaps and accelerate economic opportunity. Philanthropy can uniquely support leaders within government who are best positioned to redesign and reimagine public systems to deliver equity and impact.

We are already seeing that the growing number of governments that have built data-driven “Moneyball” muscles are better positioned both to manage through this crisis and to dismantle racist government practices. While we recognize that data and evidence can sometimes reinforce biases, we also know that government decision-makers who have access to more and better information—and who are trained to navigate the nuance and possible bias in this information—can use data to identify disparate racial outcomes, understand the core problems and target resources to close gaps. Government decision-makers who have the skills to test, learn, and improve government programs can prioritize resource allocation toward programs that both deliver better results and address the complexity of social problems.

Philanthropy can accelerate this public sector transformation by supporting change led by internal government champions who are challenging the status quo. By doing so, philanthropic leaders can increase the impact of the trillions of dollars invested by governments each year. Philanthropies such as Ballmer Group, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Blue Meridian Partners, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Arnold Ventures understand this and are already putting their money where their mouths are. By helping governments make smarter budget and policy decisions, they can ensure that public dollars flow toward solutions that make a meaningful, measurable difference on our biggest challenges, whether it’s increasing economic mobility, reducing racial disparities in health and other outcomes, or addressing racial bias in government systems.

We need other donors to join them in prioritizing this kind of systems change….(More)”.