Paper by Emma Ruijer in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and quality barriers of open data usage. Although useful, these issues fail to acknowledge that the meaning of open data also depends on the context and people involved. In this study we analyze open data usage from a... (More >)
Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing
Paper by Martin Mueller and Marcel Salath: “In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams. At the same time, many challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are updated, which means that there is limited reusability for algorithms trained on past data as their performance decreases... (More >)
How the Enlightenment Ends
Henry Kissinger in the Atlantic: “…Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness. Information was stored and systematized in expanding libraries. The Age of Reason originated the thoughts and actions that shaped the contemporary world order. But that order is now in upheaval amid a new, even... (More >)
Data Stewards: Data Leadership to Address the Challenges of the 21st Century
“The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to announce the launch of its Data Stewards website — a new portal for connecting organizations across sectors that seek to promote responsible data leadership that can address the challenges of the 21st century — developed with generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Increasingly, the private sector is collaborating with the public sector and researchers on ways to use private-sector data and analytical expertise for public good. With these new practices of data collaborations come the need to reimagine roles and responsibilities to steer the... (More >)
Behavioral economics from nuts to ‘nudges’
Richard Thaler at ChicagoBoothReview: “…Behavioral economics has come a long way from my initial set of stories. Behavioral economists of the current generation are using all the modern tools of economics, from theory to big data to structural models to neuroscience, and they are applying those tools to most of the domains in which economists practice their craft. This is crucial to making descriptive economics more accurate. As the last section of this lecture highlighted, they are also influencing public-policy makers around the world, with those in the private sector not far behind. Sunstein and I did not invent... (More >)
Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society
Blog by Anna Lauren Hoffmann: “…In 2015, a black developer in New York discovered that Google’s algorithmic photo recognition software had tagged pictures of him and his friends as gorillas. The same year, Facebook auto-suspended Native Americans for using their real names, and in 2016, facial recognition was found to struggle to read black faces. Software in airport body scanners has flagged transgender bodies as threatsfor years. In 2017, Google Translate took gender-neutral pronouns in Turkish and converted them to gendered pronouns in English — with startlingly biased results. “Violence” might seem like a dramatic way to talk about... (More >)
Smarter Crowdsourcing for Anti-Corruption: A Handbook of Innovative Legal, Technical, and Policy Proposals and a Guide to their Implementation
Paper by Noveck, Beth Simone; Koga, Kaitlin; Aceves Garcia, Rafael; Deleanu, Hannah; Cantú-Pedraza, Dinorah: “Corruption presents a fundamental threat to the stability and prosperity of Mexico and combating it demands approaches that are both principled and practical. In 2017, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved project ME-T1351 to support Mexico in its fight against corruption using Open Innovation. Thus, the IDB partnered with the Governance Lab at NYU to support Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Service (Secretaría de la Función Pública) to identify innovative ideas and then turns them into practical implementation plans for the measurement, detection, and prevention of... (More >)
Data Stewards: Data Leadership to Address the Challenges of the 21st Century
The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to announce the launch of its Data Stewards website — a new portal for connecting organizations across sectors that seek to promote responsible data leadership that can address the challenges of the 21st century — developed with generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Increasingly, the private sector is collaborating with the public sector and researchers on ways to use private-sector data and analytical expertise for public good. With these new practices of data collaborations come the need to reimagine roles and responsibilities to steer the... (More >)
Using Blockchain Technology to Create Positive Social Impact
Randall Minas in Healthcare Informatics: “…Healthcare is yet another area where blockchain can make a substantial impact. Blockchain technology could be used to enable the WHO and CDC to better monitor disease outbreaks over time by creating distributed “ledgers” that are both secure and updated hundreds of times per day. Issued in near real-time, these updates would alert healthcare professionals to spikes in local cases almost immediately. Additionally, using blockchain would allow accurate diagnosis and streamline the isolation of clusters of cases as quickly as possible. Providing blocks of real-time disease information—especially in urban areas—would be invaluable. In the... (More >)
Open government – Open for business?
Dieter Zinnbauer at OGP: “Many activities related to opening government have a demonstrated, empirical potential to create business value, foster broader economic opportunities, and promote a business climate for growth and dynamism. What’s more, opening government plays a highly relevant, if not essential, role for economic stewardship and for putting economies on sustainable, inclusive trajectories of good growth. These are the central insights from this scan of the empirical literature on the economic and business dimension of open government. More specifically, opening government is found to have created sizeable business opportunities, innovation impetus, and to a somewhat lesser extent,... (More >)
