The challenges of government use of cloud services for public service delivery

by Kristina Irion 24/02/2014

One central concern of those governments that are leading in the public sector’s migration to cloud computing is how to retain unconditional sovereignty over their data.

by Kristina Irion 24/02/2014

Cloud services are not meant to recognise national frontiers, but to thrive on economies of scale and scope globally -- presenting particular challenges to government. Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Ed: You open your recent Policy and Internet article by noting that “the modern treasury of public institutions is where the wealth of public information is stored and processed,” what are the challenges of government use of cloud services? Kristina: The public sector is a very large user of information technology but data handling policies, vendor accreditation and procurement often predate the era of cloud computing. Governments first have to put in place new internal policies to ensure the security and integrity of their information assets residing in the cloud. Through this process governments are discovering that their traditional notions of control are challenged because cloud services are virtual, dynamic, and operate across borders. One central concern of those governments that are leading in the public sector’s migration to cloud computing is how to retain unconditional sovereignty over their data—after all, public sector information embodies the past, the present, and the future of a country. The ability to govern presupposes command and control over government information to the extent necessary to deliver public services, protect citizens’ personal data and to ensure the integrity of the state, among other considerations. One could even assert that in today’s interconnected world national sovereignty is conditional upon adequate data sovereignty. Ed: A basic question: if a country’s health records (in the cloud) temporarily reside on/are processed on commercial servers in a different country: who is liable for the integrity and protection of that data, and under who’s legal scheme? ie can a country actually technically lose sovereignty over its data? Kristina: There is always one line of responsibility flowing from the contract with the cloud service provider. However, when these health records cross borders they are effectively governed under a third country’s jurisdiction where disclosure authorities vis-à-vis the cloud service provider can likely be invoked. In some situations the geographical whereabouts of the public health records is not even that important because certain countries’…

Methods, Politics & Government

How easy is it to research the Chinese web?

by Han-Teng Liao 18/02/2014

The research expectations seem to be that control and intervention by Beijing will be most likely on political and cultural topics, not likely on economic or entertainment ones.

by Han-Teng Liao 18/02/2014

Access to data from the Chinese Web, like other Web data, depends on platform policies, the level of data openness, and the availability of data intermediary and tools. Image of a Chinese Internet cafe by Hal Dick.

Ed: How easy is it to request or scrape data from the “Chinese Web”? And how much of it is under some form of government control? Han-Teng: Access to data from the Chinese Web, like other Web data, depends on the policies of platforms, the level of data openness, and the availability of data intermediary and tools. All these factors have direct impacts on the quality and usability of data. Since there are many forms of government control and intentions, increasingly not just the websites inside mainland China under Chinese jurisdiction, but also the Chinese “soft power” institutions and individuals telling the “Chinese story” or “Chinese dream” (as opposed to “American dreams”), it requires case-by-case research to determine the extent and level of government control and interventions. Based on my own research on Chinese user-generated encyclopaedias and Chinese-language twitter and Weibo, the research expectations seem to be that control and intervention by Beijing will be most likely on political and cultural topics, not likely on economic or entertainment ones. This observation is linked to how various forms of government control and interventions are executed, which often requires massive data and human operations to filter, categorise and produce content that are often based on keywords. It is particularly true for Chinese websites in mainland China (behind the Great Firewall, excluding Hong Kong and Macao), where private website companies execute these day-to-day operations under the directives and memos of various Chinese party and government agencies. Of course there is some extra layer of challenges if researchers try to request content and traffic data from the major Chinese websites for research, especially regarding censorship. Nonetheless, since most Web content data is open, researchers such as Professor Fu in Hong Kong University manage to scrape data sample from Weibo, helping researchers like me to access the data more easily. These openly collected data can then be used to measure potential government control, as has…

Mapping, Methods, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Mapping collective public opinion in the Russian blogosphere

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence.

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

Widely reported as fraudulent, the 2011 Russian Parliamentary elections provoked mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia. Image by Nikolai Vassiliev.

Blogs are becoming increasingly important for agenda setting and formation of collective public opinion on a wide range of issues. In countries like Russia where the Internet is not technically filtered, but where the traditional media is tightly controlled by the state, they may be particularly important. The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and the Russian search engine Yandex, with its blog rating service, serves as an important reference point for Russia’s educated public in its search of authoritative and independent sources of information. The blogosphere is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence. One topic that was particularly salient over the period we studied concerned the Russian Parliamentary elections of December 2011. Widely reported as fraudulent, they provoked immediate and mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia, as well as corresponding activity in the blogosphere. Protesters made effective use of the Internet to organise a movement that demanded cancellation of the parliamentary election results, and the holding of new and fair elections. These protests continued until the following summer, gaining widespread national and international attention. Most of the political and social discussion blogged in Russia is hosted on the blog platform LiveJournal. Some of these bloggers can claim a certain amount of influence; the top thirty bloggers have over 20,000 “friends” each, representing a good circulation for the average Russian newspaper. Part of the blogosphere may thereby resemble the traditional media; the deeper into the long tail of average bloggers, however, the more it functions as more as pure public opinion. This “top list” effect may be particularly important in societies (like Russia’s) where popularity lists exert a visible influence on bloggers’ competitive behaviour and on public perceptions of their significance. Given the influence of these top…

Politics & Government

Technological innovation and disruption was a big theme of the WEF 2014 in Davos: but where was government?

by Helen Margetts 30/01/2014

The World Economic Forum engages business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

by Helen Margetts 30/01/2014

Last week, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the first time that the Oxford Internet Institute has been represented there. Being closeted in a Swiss ski resort with 2,500 of the great, the good and the super-rich provided me with a good chance to see what the global elite are thinking about technological change and its role in ‘The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business’, the stated focus of the WEF Annual Meeting in 2014. What follows are those impressions that relate to public policy and the internet, and reflect only my own experience there. Outside the official programme there are whole hierarchies of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and other events, most of which a newcomer to Davos finds it difficult to discover and some of which require one to be at least a president of a small to medium-sized state—or Matt Damon. There was much talk of hyperconnectivity, spirals of innovation, S-curves and exponential growth of technological diffusion, digitalisation and disruption. As you might expect, the pace of these was emphasised most by those participants from the technology industry. The future of work in the face of leaps forward in robotics was a key theme, drawing on the new book by Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, which is just out in the US. There were several sessions on digital health and the eventual fruition of decades of pilots in telehealth (a banned term now, apparently), as applications based on mobile technologies start to be used more widely. Indeed, all delegates were presented with a ‘Jawbone’ bracelet which tracks the wearer’s exercise and sleep patterns (7,801 steps so far today). And of course there was much talk about the possibilities afforded by big data, if not quite as much as I expected. The University of Oxford was represented in an…

Mapping, Methods, Social Data Science

Edit wars! Measuring and mapping society’s most controversial topics

by taha yasseri 03/12/2013

Although some topics are globally debated, like religion and politics, there are many topics which are controversial only in a single language edition. This reflects the local preferences and importances assigned to topics by different editorial communities.

by taha yasseri 03/12/2013

Ed: How did you construct your quantitative measure of ‘conflict’? Did you go beyond just looking at content flagged by editors as controversial? Taha: Yes we did. Actually, we have shown that controversy measures based on “controversial” flags are not inclusive at all and although they might have high precision, they have very low recall. Instead, we constructed an automated algorithm to locate and quantify the editorial wars taking place on the Wikipedia platform. Our algorithm is based on reversions, i.e. when editors undo each other’s contributions. We focused specifically on mutual reverts between pairs of editors and we assigned a maturity score to each editor, based on the total volume of their previous contributions. While counting the mutual reverts, we used more weight for those ones committed by/on editors with higher maturity scores; as a revert between two experienced editors indicates a more serious problem. We always validated our method and compared it with other methods, using human judgement on a random selection of articles. Ed: Was there any discrepancy between the content deemed controversial by your own quantitative measure, and what the editors themselves had flagged? Taha: We were able to capture all the flagged content, but not all the articles found to be controversial by our method are flagged. And when you check the editorial history of those articles, you soon realise that they are indeed controversial but for some reason have not been flagged. It’s worth mentioning that the flagging process is not very well implemented in smaller language editions of Wikipedia. Even if the controversy is detected and flagged in English Wikipedia, it might not be in the smaller language editions. Our model is of course independent of the size and editorial conventions of different language editions. Ed: Were there any differences in the way conflicts arose/were resolved in the different language versions? Taha: We found the main differences to be the topics of controversial…

Methods, Social Data Science

The physics of social science: using big data for real-time predictive modelling

by taha yasseri 21/11/2013

There are very interesting examples of using big data to make predictions about disease outbreaks, financial moves in the markets, social interactions based on human mobility patterns, election results, etc.

by taha yasseri 21/11/2013

Ed: You are interested in analysis of big data to understand human dynamics; how much work is being done in terms of real-time predictive modelling using these data? Taha: The socially generated transactional data that we call “big data” have been available only very recently; the amount of data we now produce about human activities in a year is comparable to the amount that used to be produced in decades (or centuries). And this is all due to recent advancements in ICTs. Despite the short period of availability of big data, the use of them in different sectors including academia and business has been significant. However, in many cases, the use of big data is limited to monitoring and post hoc analysis of different patterns. Predictive models have been rarely used in combination with big data. Nevertheless, there are very interesting examples of using big data to make predictions about disease outbreaks, financial moves in the markets, social interactions based on human mobility patterns, election results, etc. Ed: What were the advantages of using Wikipedia as a data source for your study—as opposed to Twitter, blogs, Facebook or traditional media, etc.? Taha: Our results have shown that the predictive power of Wikipedia page view and edit data outperforms similar box office-prediction models based on Twitter data. This can partially be explained by considering the different nature of Wikipedia compared to social media sites. Wikipedia is now the number one source of online information, and Wikipedia article page view statistics show how much Internet users have been interested in knowing about a specific movie. And the edit counts—even more importantly—indicate the level of interest of the editors in sharing their knowledge about the movies with others. Both indicators are much stronger than what you could measure on Twitter, which is mainly the reaction of the users after watching or reading about the movie. The cost of participation in Wikipedia’s editorial process…

Social Data Science

Verification of crowd-sourced information: is this ‘crowd wisdom’ or machine wisdom?

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

The problem with computer code is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse.

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

‘Code’ or ‘law’? Image from an Ushahidi development meetup by afropicmusing.

In ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’, Lawrence Lessig (2006) writes that computer code (or what he calls ‘West Coast code’) can have the same regulatory effect as the laws and legal code developed in Washington D.C., so-called ‘East Coast code’. Computer code impacts on a person’s behaviour by virtue of its essentially restrictive architecture: on some websites you must enter a password before you gain access, in other places you can enter unidentified. The problem with computer code, Lessig argues, is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse. For example, fair use provisions in US copyright law enable certain uses of copyrighted works, such as copying for research or teaching purposes. However the architecture of many online publishing systems heavily regulates what one can do with an e-book: how many times it can be transferred to another device, how many times it can be printed, whether it can be moved to a different format—activities that have been unregulated until now, or that are enabled by the law but effectively ‘closed off’ by code. In this case code works to reshape behaviour, upsetting the balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public to access works to support values like education and innovation. Working as an ethnographic researcher for Ushahidi, the non-profit technology company that makes tools for people to crowdsource crisis information, has made me acutely aware of the many ways in which ‘code’ can become ‘law’. During my time at Ushahidi, I studied the practices that people were using to verify reports by people affected by a variety of events—from earthquakes to elections, from floods to bomb blasts. I then compared these processes with those followed by Wikipedians when editing articles about breaking news events. In order to understand how to best design architecture to enable particular behaviour, it becomes important to…

Child Safety, Governance & Security, Interviews

Exploring variation in parental concerns about online safety issues

by David Sutcliffe 14/11/2013

Parents have different and often conflicting views about what’s best for their children. What’s helpful to one group of parents may not actually benefit parents or youth as a whole.

by David Sutcliffe 14/11/2013

Ed: You’ve spent a great deal of time studying the way that children and young people use the Internet, much of which focuses on the positive experiences that result. Why do you think this is so under-represented in public debate? boyd/Hargittai: The public has many myths about young people’s use of technology. This is often perpetuated by media coverage that focuses on the extremes. Salacious negative headlines often capture people’s attention, even if the practices or incidents described are outliers and do not represent the majority’s experiences. While focusing on extremely negative and horrific incidents is a great way to attract attention and get readers, it does a disservice to young people, their parents, and ultimately society as a whole. As researchers, we believe that it’s important to understand the nuances of what people experience when they engage with technology. Thus, we are interested in gaining a better understanding of their everyday practices—both the good and the bad. Our goal is to introduce research that can help contextualise socio-technical practices and provide insight into the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that shape young people’s use of technology. Ed: Your paper suggests we need a more granular understanding of how parental concerns relating to the Internet can vary across different groups. Why is this important? What are the main policy implications of this research? boyd/Hargittai: Parents are often seen as the target of policy interventions. Many lawmakers imagine that they’re designing laws to help empower parents, but when you ask them to explain which parents they are empowering, it becomes clear that there’s an imagined parent that is not always representative of the diverse views and perspectives of all parents. We’re not opposed to laws that enable parents to protect their children, but we’re concerned whenever a class of people, especially a class as large as “parents,” is viewed as homogenous. Parents have different and often conflicting views about what’s best…

Ethics, Governance & Security

Ethical privacy guidelines for mobile connectivity measurements

by Ben Zevenbergen 07/11/2013

Measuring the mobile Internet can expose information about an individual’s location, contact details, and communications metadata.

by Ben Zevenbergen 07/11/2013

Four of the 6.8 billion mobile phones worldwide. Measuring the mobile Internet can expose information about an individual's location, contact details, and communications metadata. Image by Cocoarmani.

Ed: GCHQ / the NSA aside, who collects mobile data and for what purpose? How can you tell if your data are being collected and passed on? Ben: Data collected from mobile phones is used for a wide range of (divergent) purposes. First and foremost, mobile operators need information about mobile phones in real-time to be able to communicate with individual mobile handsets. Apps can also collect all sorts of information, which may be necessary to provide entertainment, location specific services, to conduct network research and many other reasons. Mobile phone users usually consent to the collection of their data by clicking “I agree” or other legally relevant buttons, but this is not always the case. Sometimes data is collected lawfully without consent, for example for the provision of a mobile connectivity service. Other times it is harder to substantiate a relevant legal basis. Many applications keep track of the information that is generated by a mobile phone and it is often not possible to find out how the receiver processes this data. Ed: How are data subjects typically recruited for a mobile research project? And how many subjects might a typical research data set contain? Ben: This depends on the research design; some research projects provide data subjects with a specific app, which they can use to conduct measurements (so called ‘active measurements’). Other apps collect data in the background and, in effect, conduct local surveillance of the mobile phone use (so called passive measurements). Other research uses existing datasets, for example provided by telecom operators, which will generally be de-identified in some way. We purposely do not use the term anonymisation in the report, because much research and several case studies have shown that real anonymisation is very difficult to achieve if the original raw data is collected about individuals. Datasets can be re-identified by techniques such as fingerprinting or by linking them with existing, auxiliary datasets. The size…

Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Five recommendations for maximising the relevance of social science research for public policy-making in the big data era

by Helen Margetts 04/11/2013 1 Comment

How can social scientists help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that social science research remains relevant?

by Helen Margetts 04/11/2013 1 Comment

As I discussed in a previous post on the promises and threats of big data for public policy-making, public policy making has entered a period of dramatic change. Widespread use of digital technologies, the Internet and social media means citizens and governments leave digital traces that can be harvested to generate big data. This increasingly rich data environment poses both promises and threats to policy-makers. So how can social scientists help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that social science research remains relevant? Social scientists have a good record on having policy influence, indeed in the UK better than other academic fields, including medicine, as recent research from the LSE Public Policy group has shown. Big data hold major promise for social science, which should enable us to further extend our record in policy research. We have access to a cornucopia of data of a kind which is more like that traditionally associated with so-called ‘hard’ science. Rather than being dependent on surveys, the traditional data staple of empirical social science, social media such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Search present us with the opportunity to scrape, generate, analyse and archive comparative data of unprecedented quantity. For example, at the OII over the last four years we have been generating a dataset of all petition signing in the UK and US, which contains the joining rate (updated every hour) for the 30,000 petitions created in the last three years. As a political scientist, I am very excited by this kind of data (up to now, we have had big data like this only for voting, and that only at election time), which will allow us to create a complete ecology of petition signing, one of the more popular acts of political participation in the UK. Likewise, we can look at the entire transaction history of online organisations like Wikipedia, or map the link structure of government’s online presence. But…

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