DSN Bookmarks: Action Research, AI Ethics, and Social Media Data
By: Michelle Winowatan
Tags: Big Data, Public Good, Data Innovation, Data Stewardship, AI

Welcome to Data Stewards Network (DSN) Bookmarks — a biweekly curation of news, research, and other insights related to the systemic, sustainable, and responsible management of data for public benefit. If you would like to receive our resource curation in your inbox every week, subscribe here. Have an interesting article, report, or initiative worth sharing? Send it to us at datastewards@thegovlab.org

Photo by Yiran Ding on Unsplash

Creating Societal Value through Data Collaboration

Geoff Boeing et al shared a paper at SSRN titled, Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?, which investigates if “technology platforms serve as information equalizers or do they reflect traditional information inequalities that correlate with neighborhood sociodemographics.”

Sushant Kumar shares The many perks of using critical consumer user data for social benefit in LiveMint, advocating for new data stewardship functions to help create public benefits from data and data science tools employed by private firms.

New privacy-protected Facebook data for independent research on social media’s impact on democracy, a piece from Chaya Nayak at Facebook announced new data offerings for academic researchers collaborating with the company.

In Twitter might have a better read on floods than NOAA for The Verge, Justine Calma interviews Frances Moore, lead author of the new study and a professor at the University of California, Davis on how Twitter data can inform flooding response and management.

Ethical AI

In Project Syndicate, Stefaan G. Verhulst and Mona Sloan’s Realizing the Potential of AI Localism argues, “With national innovation strategies focused primarily on achieving dominance in artificial intelligence, the problem of actually regulating AI applications has received less attention. Fortunately, cities and other local jurisdictions are picking up the baton and conducting policy experiments that will yield lessons for everyone.”

Jessica Fjeld et al, at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, published Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in Ethical and Rights- based Approaches to Principles for AI. The authors “analyzed the contents of thirty-six prominent AI principles documents, and in the process, discovered thematic trends that suggest the earliest emergence of sectoral norms.”

Data-Driven Innovation

Stefaan G. Verhulst published Re-imagining “Action Research” as a Tool for Social Innovation and Public Entrepreneurship. Seeking to “provide for what Amar Bhide calls “practical knowledge” at all levels of decision making in a systematic, sustainable, and responsible manner,” the author explains what action research means and what it can offer.

Megumi Kubota and Albert G. Zeufack, at The World Bank published a policy research working paper titled Assessing the Returns on Investment in Data Openness and Transparency. “This paper investigates the potential benefits for a country from investing in data transparency. The paper shows that increased data transparency can bring substantive returns in lower costs of external borrowing. This result is obtained by estimating the impact of public data transparency on sovereign spreads conditional on the country’s level of institutional quality and public and external debt.”

You can also find additional resources related to data stewardship and data collaboration here.