Here at irregular intervals we will publish short summaries of doctoral theses that were written at HIIG. We begin with an abstract of the doctoral thesis «Der Abschreckungseffekt auf die... MORE

The special leave petition against the Delhi High Court’s ruling upholding WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy came up for hearing before a bench of five judges today. This policy is contentious because it allows WhatsApp to share valuable personal information of its users, including phone numbers, contact lists and profile pictures, with its parent company Facebook. […]

UNDG Guidance Note: “This document sets out general guidance on data privacy, data protection and data ethics for the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) concerning the use of big data, collected in real time by private sector entities as part of their business offerings1 , and shared with UNDG members for the purposes of strengthening operational implementation of their programmes to support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.
The Guidance Note is designed to:

With the Draft for an Act improving Law Enforcement on Social Networks (NetzDG), the German government reacts on Hate Speech and Fake News in Social Media. The draft has provoked criticism concerning freedom of speech because it creates incentives for providers to delete contents although they have not been proven illegal. The comments in English language by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz analyse the draft.

This blog is part of the event report series on International Open Data Day 2017. On Saturday 4 March, groups from around the world organised over 300 events to celebrate, promote and spread the use of open data.

Paper by Daxton Stewart: “In the early weeks of the new presidential administration, White House staffers were communicating among themselves and leaking to journalists using apps such as Signal and Confide, which allow users to encrypt messages or to make them vanish after being received. By using these apps, government officials are “going dark” by avoiding detection of their communications in a way that undercuts freedom of information laws.

Handbook edited by David Courpasson and Steven Vallas: “Occupy. Indignados. The Tea Party. The Arab Spring. Anonymous.

Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni in the Journal of Ethics: “This article reviews the reasons scholars hold that driverless cars and many other AI equipped machines must be able to make ethical decisions, and the difficulties this approach faces. It then shows that cars have no moral agency, and that the term ‘autonomous’, commonly applied to these machines, is misleading, and leads to invalid conclusions about the ways these machines can be kept ethical.

Book by Nagy K. Hanna: “This book considers the opportunities and challenges of harnessing digital technologies for improved public services and governance. It focuses on the challenges of applying digital technologies in developing countries, where dramatic results can be realized.

Paper by J. Ojasalo and L. Tähtinen as part of the INTED2017 Proceedings: “The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of participation in collaborative innovation of cities with digital channels, as well as propose a model of digital participation system in an open innovation platform of a

Martí Cuquet, Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo, Hans Lammerant, Rachel Finn, Umair ul Hassan at ArXiv: “This paper presents the risks and opportunities of big data and the potential social benefits it can bri

Meg Miller at Co.Design: “If there’s one issue that this divided nation can agree upon, it’s a common hatred of the federal government’s dizzying, overly complicated tax forms. Show me one person who enjoys digging up last year’s return and embarking on a byzantine quest through tax credits, deductions, exemptions, and withholdings, all for a measly return, and I’ll show you a masochist.

Alexander Fink in AI & Society: “Social service organizations have long used data in their efforts to support people in need for the purposes of advocacy, tracking, and intervention. Increasingly, such organizations are joining forces to provide wrap-around services to clients in order to “move the needle” on intractable social problems. Groups using these strategies, called Collective Impact, develop shared metrics to guide their work, sharing data, finances, infrastructure, and services.

A Programmable City Working Paper by Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Darach Mac Donncha: “Hackathons – quick prototyping events for commercial purposes – have become an important means to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and the start-up economy in smart cities. Smart and entrepreneurial cities have been critiqued with respect to the neoliberalization of governance and statecraft.

Josh Powell at Oxfam Blog: “While development actors are now creating more data than ever, examples of impactful use are anecdotal and scant. Put bluntly, despite this supply-side push for more data, we are far from realizing an evidence-based utopia filled with data-driven decisions.

(Open Access) Book by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett, and Michael Woolcock: “…Governments play a major role in the development process, and constantly introduce reforms and policies to achieve developmental objectives. Many of these interventions have limited impact, however; schools get built but children don’t learn, IT systems are introduced but not used, plans are written but not implemented.

Benjamin Y. Clark, Nicholas Zingale, Joseph Logan in the Journal of Public and NonProfit Affairs: “The hollowing of the state has added new challenges for administrators attending to the competing values of the administration. This article examines how the wisdom of the crowds can be used in a deliberative manner to extract new knowledge through crowdsourcing.

Fred Wilson at AVC: “Mankind has been inventing new ways to organize and govern since we showed up on planet earth. Our history is a gradual evolution of these organization and governance systems. Much of what we are using right now was invented in ancient Greece and perfected in western Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

En el texto publicado en el Diario Financiero, el profesor del Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de Chile y director del Centro de Estudios para el Conflicto y la Cohesión Social (COES), Dante Contreras, explora la relación entre el hacinamiento y la pobreza, además de los nexos de la carencia de un hogar con espacio suficiente para los habitantes con los bajos resultados en indicadores internacionales de educación.

El proceso extraordinario de entrega de la Asignación Universitaria Complementaria Académica Incremental (AUCAI), permitió que más de mil quinientos académicos pudiesen ver reflejado en sus liquidaciones de marzo la asignación respectiva.1571 son los académicos de la U. de Chile que recibieron por primera vez en marzo, en sus respectivos salarios, la Asignación Universitaria Complementaria Académica Incremental (AUCAI), recursos que la U.