Re-use of smart city data: The need to acquire a social license through data assemblies
Jan 21, 2021 11:05 am
Written Testimony by Stefaan G. Verhulst before the New York City Council Committee on Technology: “…In crises such as these, calls for the city to harness technology and data to help policy-makers find solutions grow louder and stronger. Many have spoken about accelerating already ongoing work to turn New York into “a smart city” — using digital technology to connect, protect, and improve the lives of its residents. Some of this proposed work could involve the use of sensors to collect data on how people live and work across New York City. Other work could involve expanding the city’s relationships with private organizations through data collaboratives. Data collaboratives, which are central to our work at the GovLab, are a new form of collaboration that extends beyond the conventional public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors exchange their data to create public value. The city already operates one such data collaborative in the form of the NYC Recovery Data Partnership, a partnership that allows New York-based private and civic organizations to provide their data to analysts at city agencies to inform the COVID-19 pandemic response. I have the privilege of serving as an advisor to that initiative.
Data collaboration takes place widely through a variety of institutional, contractual and technical structures and instruments. Borrowing in language and inspiration from the open data movement, the emerging data collaborative movement has proven its value and possible positive impact. Data reuse has the potential to improve disease treatment, identify better ways to source supplies, monitor adherence to non-pharmaceutical restrictions, and provide a range of other public benefits. Whether it is informing decision-making or shaping the development of new tools and techniques, it is clear that data has tremendous potential to mitigate the worst effects of this pandemic.
However, as promising and attractive as reusing data might seem, it is important to keep in mind that there also exist widespread concerns and challenges….
My colleagues and I at The GovLab believe the Data Assembly methodology offers the city a new way forward on the issues under discussion today, as they relate to smart cities. In our view, oversight cannot just be a reactive process of responding to complaints but a proactive one, inviting city residents, data holders, and advocacy groups to the table to determine what is and is not acceptable. Amid rapidly changing circumstances, the city needs ways to collect and synthesize actionable and diverse public input to identify concerns, expectations, and opportunities. We encourage the city to explore assembling mini-publics of its own or, failing that, commission legitimate partners to lead such efforts.
New York faces many challenges in 2021 but I do not doubt the capacity of its people to overcome these struggles. Through people-led innovation and processes, the city can ensure that data re-use conducted as part of the smart city is deemed legitimate and more effective and targeted. It can also support the city in ensuring work across the city is more open, collaborative, and legitimate…(More)”.
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Child Data Citizen
Jan 21, 2021 08:10 am
Book by on “How Tech Companies Are Profiling Us from before Birth…Our families are being turned into data, as the digital traces we leave are shared, sold, and commodified. Children are datafied even before birth, with pregnancy apps and social media postings, and then tracked through childhood with learning apps, smart home devices, and medical records. In Child Data Citizen, Veronica Barassi examines the construction of children into data subjects, describing how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. Children today are the very first generation of citizens to be datafied from before birth, and Barassi points to critical implications for our democratic futures.
Barassi draws on a three-year research project with parents in London and Los Angeles, which included the collection of fifty in-depth interviews, a digital ethnography of “sharenting” activities on social media by eight families over the course of eight months, and a two-year exploration of the datafication of her own family. She complements her ethnographic findings with a platform analysis of four social media platforms, ten health tracking apps, four home hubs, and four educational platforms, investigating the privacy policies, business models, and patent applications that enable the mining of children’s data. Barassi considers the implications of building a society where data traces are made to speak for and about citizens across a lifetime. What should we do when we realize that the narratives that algorithms construct about individuals are inaccurate and biased?…(More)”.
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Rational policymaking during a pandemic
Jan 21, 2021 07:59 am
Perspective by Loïc Berger et al: “Policymaking during a pandemic can be extremely challenging. As COVID-19 is a new disease and its global impacts are unprecedented, decisions are taken in a highly uncertain, complex, and rapidly changing environment. In such a context, in which human lives and the economy are at stake, we argue that using ideas and constructs from modern decision theory, even informally, will make policymaking a more responsible and transparent process….
The COVID-19 pandemic exposes decision problems faced by governments and international organizations. Policymakers are charged with taking actions to protect their population from the disease while lacking reliable information on the virus and its transmission mechanisms and on the effectiveness of possible measures and their (direct and indirect) health and socioeconomic consequences. The rational policy decision would combine the best available scientific evidence—typically provided by expert opinions and modeling studies. However, in an uncertain and rapidly changing environment, the pertinent evidence is highly fluid, making it challenging to produce scientifically grounded predictions of the outcomes of alternative courses of action….(More)”.
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The Rise of Urban Commons
Jan 21, 2021 07:57 am
Blogpost by Alessandra Quarta and Antonio Vercellone: “In the last ten years, the concept of the commons became popular in social studies and political activism and in some countries domestic lawyers have shared the interest for this notion. Even if an (existing or proposed) statutory definition of the commons is still very rare, lawyers get familiar with the concept of the commons through the filter of property law, where such a concept has been quite discredited. In fact, approaching property law, many students of different legal traditions learn the origins of property rights revolving on the “tragedy of the commons”, the “parable” made famous by Garrett Hardin in the late nineteen-sixties. According to this widespread narrative, the impossibility to avoid the over-exploitation of those resources managed through an open-access regime determines the necessity of allocating private property rights. In this classic argument, the commons appear in a negative light: they represent the impossibility for a community to manage shared resources without concentrating all the decision-making powers in the hand of a single owner or of a central government. Moreover, they represent the wasteful inefficiency of the Feudal World.
This vision has dominated social and economic studies until 1998, when Elinor Ostrom published her famous book Governing the commons, offering the results of her research on resources managed by communities in different parts of the world. Ostrom, awarded with the Nobel Prize in 2009, demonstrated that the commons are not necessarily a tragedy and a place of no-law. In fact, local communities generally define principles for their government and sharing in a resilient way avoiding the tragedy to occur. Moreover, Ostrom defined a set of principles for checking if the commons are managed efficiently and can compete with both private and public arrangements of resource management.
Later on, under an institutional perspective, the commons became the tool of contestation of political and economic mainstream dogmas, including the unquestionable efficiency of both the market and private property in the allocation of resources. The research of new tools for managing resources has been carried out in several experimentations that generally occurs at the local and urban level: scholars and practitioners define these experiences as ‘urban commons’….(More)”.
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5 Domains of Government That Are Ripe for Transformation
Jan 21, 2021 07:51 am
Article by William Eggers: “…in a Deloitte report entitled Creating the Government of the Future my colleagues and I identified five principal domains of government activity that are ripe for technological transformation:…
Service delivery: In Estonia, taxpayers can file taxes online simply by approving forms auto-populated with their income data. This ease represents the future of service delivery: focused on the user, automated for no-touch government that serves people without them having to fill out long forms. (Think hospital data of a birth triggering a birth certificate, Social Security card and health-care record for the child and family allowance payment to qualifying parents.)
Services will more and more tailor to such anticipated life events. Ideally, a single login omnichannel experience provides access to tasks as varied as collecting unemployment benefits to registering to run for office. With once-only government, citizens and businesses need only provide their data once, and it’s then shared across departments with appropriate privacy protections.
Operations: Government operations should take a cue from the private sector, where technologies like data analytics and cognitive automation converge to create serious efficiencies. Operations from HR to procurement can combine in an integrated center office, creating insights from shared, analyzed data about what to expect and how to improve. “As-a-service” acquisition allows contractors to provide basic infrastructure, such as cloud services, leading to faster scaling. To transform operations, strike teams of specialists and subject-matter experts meet in digital factories, using agile processes without traditional bureaucracies.
Policy- and decision-making: Evidence-based policymaking can identify what approaches produce the best results. With artificial-intelligence-based scenario analysis, machine learning can test the relationship between factors in systemic problems. Potentially, understanding these relationships could allow policy to be self-correcting. Likewise, increasingly sophisticated statistical models will allow government by simulation — a cheap way to A/B test systems like traffic management, disaster response and city planning. Meanwhile, mass-communication tools enable crowdsourced and distributed policymaking, in which ordinary citizens contribute their expertise.
Regulation and enforcement: The future of this governmental domain is tied to the predictive abilities of AI and analytics. In a form of risk-based regulation, for example, AI can identify factors likely to contribute to a food-borne illness outbreak, helping food inspectors focus energies on restaurants more likely to violate. Modeling systems to identify beneficial behaviors can enable positive enforcement strategies, which reward a business’ focus on the big picture and going beyond the bare minimum. Lastly, countries like New Zealand have experimented with legislation written as software code. The bureaucratic effects of the legislation could be simulated ahead of time.
Talent/workforce: Flexibility will be the hallmark of the future public workforce. NASA and other agencies are trying a talent marketplace model, in which some workers have the ability to move from project to project, even between agencies, based on their documented skills. Talent won’t go to waste in this just-in-time civil service. Such a talent marketplace would cover an open talent spectrum, from freelancers to career employees….(More)”.
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From Journalistic Ethics To Fact-Checking Practices: Defining The Standards Of Content Governance In The Fight Against Disinformation
Jan 21, 2021 07:43 am
Paper by Paolo Cavaliere: “This article claims that the practices undertaken by digital platforms to counter disinformation, under the EU Action Plan against Disinformation and the Code of Practice, mark a shift in the governance of news media content. While professional journalism standards have been used for long, both within and outside the industry, to assess the accuracy of news content and adjudicate on media conduct, the platforms are now resolving to different fact-checking routines to moderate and curate their content.
The article will demonstrate how fact-checking organisations have different working methods than news operators and ultimately understand and assess ‘accuracy’ in different ways. As a result, this new and enhanced role for platforms and fact-checkers as curators of content impacts on how content is distributed to the audience and, thus, on media freedom. Depending on how the fact-checking standards and working routines will consolidate in the near future, however, this trend offers an actual opportunity to improve the quality of news and the right to receive information…(More)”.
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The Hidden Cost of Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for Research
Jan 21, 2021 06:35 am
Paper by Antonios Saravanos: “This work shares unexpected findings obtained from the use of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform as a source of participants for the study of technology adoption. Expressly, of the 564 participants from the United States, 126 (22.34%) failed at least one of three forms of attention check (logic, honesty, and time). We also examined whether characteristics such as gender, age, education, and income affected participant attention. Amongst all characteristics assessed, only prior experience with the technology being studied was found to be related to attentiveness. We conclude this work by reaffirming the need for multiple forms of attention checks to gauge participant attention. Furthermore, we propose that researchers adjust their budgets accordingly to account for the possibility of having to discard responses from participants determined not to be displaying adequate attention….(More)”.
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Sustainable Rescue: data sharing to combat human trafficking
Jan 21, 2021 06:34 am
Interview with Paul Fockens of Sustainable Rescue: “Human trafficking still takes place on a large scale, and still too often under the radar. That does not make it easy for organisations that want to combat human trafficking. Sharing of data between various sorts of organisations, including the government, the police, but also banks play a crucial role in mapping the networks of criminals involved in human trafficking, including their victims. Data sharing contributes to tackling this criminal business not only reactively, but also proactively….Sustainable Rescue tries to make the largely invisible human trafficking visible. Bundling data and therefore knowledge is crucial in this. Paul: “It’s about combining the routes criminals (and their victims) take from A to B, the financial transactions they make, the websites they visit, the hotels where they check in et cetera. All those signs of human trafficking can be found in the data of various types of organisations: the police, municipalities, the Public Prosecution Service, charities such as the Salvation Army, but also banks and insurance institutions. The problem here is that you need to collect all pieces of the puzzle to get clear insights from them. As long as this relevant data is not combined through data sharing, it is a very difficult job to get these insights. In nine out of ten cases, these authorities are not willing and/or allowed to share their data, mainly because of the privacy sensitivity of this data. However, in order to eliminate human trafficking, that data will have to be bundled. Only then analyses can be made about the patterns of a network of human trafficking.”…(More)”.
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Applying behavioural science to the annual electoral canvass in England: Evidence from a large-scale randomised controlled trial
Jan 20, 2021 08:19 pm
Paper by Martin Sweeney, Peter John, Michael Sanders, Hazel Wright and Lucy Makinson: “Local authorities in Great Britain are required to ensure that their electoral registers are as accurate and complete as possible. To this end, Household Enquiry Forms (HEFs) are mailed to all properties annually to collect updated details from residents, and any eligible unregistered residents will subsequently be invited to register to vote. Unfortunately, HEF nonresponse is pervasive and costly. Using insights from behavioural science, we modified letters and envelopes posted to households as part of the annual canvass, and evaluated their effects using a randomised controlled trial across two local authorities in England (N=226,528 properties). We find that modified materials – particularly redesigned envelopes – significantly increase initial response rates and savings. However, we find no effects on voter registration. While certain behavioural interventions can improve the efficiency of the annual canvass, other approaches or interventions may be needed to increase voter registration rates and update voter information….(More)”.
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The Rule of Technology – How Technology Is Used to Disturb Basic Labor Law Protections
Jan 20, 2021 04:52 pm
Paper by Tammy Katsabian: “Much has been written on technology and the law. Leading scholars are occupied with the power dynamics between capital, technology, and the law, along with their implications for society and human rights. Alongside that, various labor law scholars focus on the implications of smart technology on employees’ rights throughout the recruitment and employment periods and on workers’ status and rights in the growing phenomenon of platform-based work. This article aims to contribute to the current scholarship by zooming it out and observing from a bird’s-eye view how certain actors use technology to manipulate and challenge basic legal categories in labor today. This is done by referring to legal, sociological, and internet scholarship on the matter.
The main argument elaborated throughout this article is that digital technology is used to blur and distort many of the basic labor law protections. Because of this, legal categories and rights in the labor field seem to be outdated and need to be adjusted to this new reality.
By providing four detailed examples, the article unpacks how employers, giant high-tech companies, and society use various forms of technology to constantly disturb legal categories in the labor field regarding time, sphere, and relations. In this way, the article demonstrates how social media sites, information communication technologies, and artificial intelligence are used to blur the traditional concepts of privacy, working time and place, the employment contract, and community. This increased blurriness and fragility in labor have created many new difficulties that require new ways of thinking about regulation. Therefore, the article argues that both law and technology have to be modified to cope with the new challenges. Following this, the article proposes three possible ways in which to start considering the regulation of labor in the digital reality: (1) embrace flexibility as part of the legal order and use it as an interpretive tool and not just as an obstacle, (2) broaden the current legal protection and add a procedural layer to the legal rights at stake, and (3) use technology as part of the solution to the dilemmas that technology itself has emphasized. By doing so, this article seeks to enable more accurate thinking on law and regulation in the digital reality, particularly in the labor field, as well as in other fields and contexts….(More)”.
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Improved targeting for mobile phone surveys: A public-private data collaboration
Jan 19, 2021 04:54 pm
Blogpost by Kristen Himelein and Lorna McPherson: “Mobile phone surveys have been rapidly deployed by the World Bank to measure the impact of COVID-19 in nearly 100 countries across the world. Previous posts on this blog have discussed the sampling and implementation challenges associated with these efforts, and coverage errors are an inherent problem to the approach. The survey methodology literature has shown mobile phone survey respondents in the poorest countries are more likely to be male, urban, wealthier, and more highly educated. This bias can stem from phone ownership, as mobile phone surveys are at best representative of mobile phone owners, a group which, particularly in poor countries, may differ from the overall population; or from differential response rates among these owners, with some groups more or less likely to respond to a call from an unknown number. In this post, we share our experiences in trying to improve representativeness and boost sample sizes for the poor in Papua New Guinea (PNG)….(More)”.
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The Nudge Puzzle: Matching Nudge Interventions to Cybersecurity Decisions
Jan 19, 2021 08:04 am
Paper by Verena Zimmermann and Karen Renaud: “Nudging is a promising approach, in terms of influencing people to make advisable choices in a range of domains, including cybersecurity. However, the processes underlying the concept and the nudge’s effectiveness in different contexts, and in the long term, are still poorly understood. Our research thus first reviewed the nudge concept and differentiated it from other interventions before applying it to the cybersecurity area. We then carried out an empirical study to assess the effectiveness of three different nudge-related interventions on four types of cybersecurity-specific decisions. Our study demonstrated that the combination of a simple nudge and information provision, termed a “hybrid nudge,” was at least as, and in some decision contexts even more effective in encouraging secure choices as the simple nudge on its own. This indicates that the inclusion of information when deploying a nudge, thereby increasing the intervention’s transparency, does not necessarily diminish its effectiveness.
A follow-up study explored the educational and long-term impact of our tested nudge interventions to encourage secure choices. The results indicate that the impact of the initial nudges, of all kinds, did not endure. We conclude by discussing our findings and their implications for research and practice….(More)”.
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We need a new era of international data diplomacy
Jan 18, 2021 07:13 pm
Rohinton P. Medhora at the Financial Times: “From contact-tracing apps to telemedicine, digital health innovations that can help tackle coronavirus have been adopted swiftly during the pandemic. Lagging far behind, however, are any investigations of their reliability and the implications for privacy and human rights.
In the wake of this surge in “techno-solutionism”, the world needs a new era of data diplomacy to catch up.
Big data holds great promise in improving health outcomes. But it requires norms and standards to govern collection, storage and use, for which there is no global consensus.
The world broadly comprises four data zones — China, the US, the EU and the remainder. The state-centric China zone, where individuals have no control over their personal data, is often portrayed as the poster child of the long-threatened Orwellian society.A woman scans a QR code of a local app to track personal data for the Covid-19 containment in Zouping in east China’s Shandong province © Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Yet the corporation-centric US zone is also disempowering. The “consent” that users provide to companies is meaningless. Most consumers do not read the endless pages of fine print before “agreeing”, while not consenting means opting out of the digital world and is seldom useful.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation goes furthest in entrenching the rights of EU citizens to safeguard their privacy and provide a measure of control over personal data.
But it is not without drawbacks. Costs of compliance are high, with small and medium-sized companies facing a disproportionately large bill that strengthens the large companies that the regulation was designed to rein in. There are also varying interpretations of the rules by different national data protection authorities.
The rest of the world does not have the capacity to create meaningful data governance. Governments are either de facto observers of others’ rules or stumble along with a non-regime. One-fifth of countries have no data protection and privacy legislation, according to figures from Unctad, the UN’s trade and development agency.
Global diplomacy is needed to bring some harmony in norms and practices between these four zones, but the task is not easy. Data straddles our prosperity, health, commerce, quality of democracy, security and safety.
A starting point could be a technology charter of principles, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It may not be fully applied everywhere, but it could serve as a beacon of hope — particularly for citizens in countries with oppressive regimes — and could guide the drafting of national and subnational legislation.
A second focus should be the equitable taxation of multinational digital platforms that use canny accounting practices to cut their tax bill. While the largest share of users — and one that is growing fast — are in populous poorer parts of the world, the value created from their data goes to richer countries.
This imbalance, coupled with widespread use of tax havens by multinational technology companies, is exacerbating government funding gaps already under pressure because of the pandemic.
A third priority is to revisit statistics. Just as the UN System of National Accounts was introduced in the 1950s, today we need a set of universally accepted definitions and practices to categorise data.
That would allow us to measure and understand the nature of the new data-driven economy. National statistical agencies must be strengthened to gather information and to act as stewards of ever greater quantities of personal data.
Finally, just as the financial crisis of 2007-08 led to the creation of the Financial Stability Forum (a global panel of regulators now called the Financial Stability Board), the Covid-19 crisis is an opportunity to galvanise action through a digital stability board….(More)”
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Government digital services and children: pathways to digital transformation
Jan 18, 2021 04:32 pm
Report by UNICEF and United Nations University (UNU-EGOV): “Digital technologies continue to change the dynamics of our economies and societies and, in so doing, have the potential to alter the character of modern government permanently. The ‘digital revolution’ has come with the promise of improved governance and more inclusive and responsive service delivery and there are now many public websites, digital platforms and applications through which governments inform and assist citizens using information and communication technologies (ICT).
A central tenet of the transition to e-government is the digitization of public health, education, social and identity management services offered by national and local governments. Digitization in these areas is undertaken to expand service access to the public and, in particular, to traditionally underserved groups. The 2020 United Nations E-Government Development Index finds that 80 per cent of 193 United Nations (UN) Member States now offer some digital content or online services for youth, women, older people, persons with disabilities, migrants and/or those living in poverty.
While these services are increasingly common in the 21st century, they have become essential during the global COVID-19 pandemic — not least, for children and families. Amidst the digital transformation of government, technology has an increasing impact on a child’s ability to enjoy the benefits of public health care, education and welfare initiatives, and the COVID-19 pandemic has now brought the potential — and challenges — of digital services for children to the fore of policy planning discussions. As a result of school closures in over 190 countries and the suspension of many vital face-to-face services, more than two-thirds of countries have introduced a national online learning platform for children during the pandemic, leading to a re-examination of the efficacy of these services for continuity of learning.
Despite this, there is surprisingly little systematic exploration of the discourse and practices that ensure that
e-government services can advance and protect the rights of children and young people…(More)”.
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Chief information officers’ perceptions about artificial intelligence
Jan 18, 2021 11:13 am
Article by J. Ignacio Criado et al: “This article presents a study about artificial intelligence (AI) policy based on the perceptions, expectations, and challenges/opportunities given by chief information officers (CIOs). In general, publications about AI in the public sector relies on experiences, cases, ideas, and results from the private sector. Our study stands out from the need of defining a distinctive approach to AI in the public sector, gathering primary (and comparative) data from different countries, and assessing the key role of CIOs to frame federal/national AI policies and strategies. This article reports three research questions, including three dimensions of analysis: (1) perceptions regarding to the concept of AI in the public sector; (2) expectations about the development of AI in the public sector; and, (3) challenges and opportunities of AI in the public sector. This exploratory study presents the results of a survey administered to federal/national ministerial government CIOs in ministries of Mexico and Spain. Our descriptive statistical (and exploratory) analysis provides an overall approach to our dimensions, exploratory answering the research questions of the study. Our data supports the existence of different governance models and policy priorities in different countries. Also, these results might inform research in this same area and will help senior officials to assess the national AI policies actually in process of design and implementation in different national/federal, regional/state, and local/municipal contexts….(More)”.
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Anticipatory innovation governance
Jan 18, 2021 07:38 am
OECD Working Paper: “This working paper introduces the key concepts and features of anticipatory innovation governance– i.e. the structures and mechanisms to allow and promote anticipatory innovation alongside other types of innovation in the public sector. This paper draws on academic literature and OECD work on a range of areas including public sector innovation, foresight, anticipatory governance and emerging technologies. The paper starts outlining an emerging framework to guide policy making in complex and uncertain contexts and sets out some questions for further research in the area of anticipatory innovation governance….(More)”
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Nowcasting Gentrification Using Airbnb Data
Jan 18, 2021 06:23 am
Paper by Shomik Jain, Davide Proserpio, Giovanni Quattrone, and Daniele Quercia: “There is a rumbling debate over the impact of gentrification: presumed gentrifiers have been the target of protests and attacks in some cities, while they have been welcome as generators of new jobs and taxes in others. Census data fails to measure neighborhood change in real-time since it is usually updated every ten years. This work shows that Airbnb data can be used to quantify and track neighborhood changes. Specifically, we consider both structured data (e.g. number of listings, number of reviews, listing information) and unstructured data (e.g. user-generated reviews processed with natural language processing and machine learning algorithms) for three major cities, New York City (US), Los Angeles (US), and Greater London (UK). We find that Airbnb data (especially its unstructured part) appears to nowcast neighborhood gentrification, measured as changes in housing affordability and demographics. Overall, our results suggest that user-generated data from online platforms can be used to create socioeconomic indices to complement traditional measures that are less granular, not in real-time, and more costly to obtain….(More)”.
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Switzerland to Hold Referendum on Covid-19 Lockdown
Jan 17, 2021 10:38 am
James Hookway at the Wall Street Journal: “Switzerland’s system of direct democracy will be put to the test again later this year, this time with a referendum on whether to roll back the government’s powers to impose lockdowns and other measures to slow the Covid-19 pandemic.
The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves.
The idea is to provide citizens a check on the power of the federal government, and it is a throwback to the fiercely independent patchwork of cantons, or districts, that were meshed in the medieval period.
Now, the country is set for a referendum on whether to remove the government’s legal authority to order lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions after campaigners submitted a petition of some 86,000 signatures this week—higher than the 50,000 required—triggering a nationwide vote to repeal last year’s Covid-19 Act….(More)”.
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A Taxonomy for Data Ecosystems
Jan 16, 2021 01:59 pm
Conference paper by Joshua Gelhaar et al: “In the increasingly interconnected business world, economic value is less and less created by one company alone but rather through the combination and enrichment of data by various actors in so-called data ecosystems. The research field around data ecosystems is, however, still in its infancy. With this study, we want to address this issue and contribute to a deeper understanding of data ecosystems. Therefore, we develop a taxonomy for data ecosystems which is grounded both theoretically through the linkage to the scientific knowledge base and empirically through the analyses of data ecosystem use cases. The resulting taxonomy consists of key dimensions and characteristics of data ecosystems and contributes to a better scientific understanding of this concept. Practitioners can use the taxonomy as an instrument to further understand, design and manage the data ecosystems their organizations are involved in….(More)”.
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How COVID-19 Is Accelerating the Shift Toward a Quantified Society
Jan 15, 2021 07:25 pm
Essay by Jesse Hirsh: “The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating global digital transformation and the adoption of digital technologies. It is also enacting a political and cultural shift toward a quantified society: a society in which measurement and predictive modelling dominate (political) decision making, and where surveillance is expansive and pervasive.
While viruses and disease have always been with us, what’s changing is our ability to measure and understand them. This ability comes at a time when globalization (and, by extension, climate change) has transformed the kinds of viruses and diseases we will face.
The knowledge of what can kill us — or is killing us — compels governments and health authorities to both take action in response and gather more data to understand the threat. Like many disasters or other globally impactful events, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the development and implementation of quantification technologies.
Health researchers are now measuring the spread of a virus across the population in ways not previously possible, through the use of a set of data that is ever-growing, especially in countries such as China that have less regard for personal privacy. Canada and the United States are not yet conducting tracking and tracing of infections at a level that would enable containment. This level, however, is due to inadequate staffing rather than insufficient data. Still, the desire for more information remains.
As a result, our ability to measure human health and disease transmission is set to reach new records and capabilities. Through sources ranging from individuals’ use of digital health tools to contact tracing records, health-related data is amassing at a prodigious rate.
What are the impacts or consequences of this dramatic increase in both health data and the perceived value or urgency of that data?…(More)”.
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