Across elections, work, and education, AI is performing more of the reasoning people once had to do themselves. But the institutions built for a world where humans did that reasoning haven't caught up. This week, candidates learned how to influence chatbot answers before voters ever reach a website. Amazon cut another 14,000 jobs while investing heavily in AI. And a Massachusetts school district doubled down on teaching students the rote mathematics AI already performs better than humans. Meanwhile, new global data suggest AI increasingly rewards judgment while automating routine work. Reboot will take some time off in August, so an extra hefty News that Caught Our Eye this week

The debate about AI has focused on misinformation and AI slop, but those are only part of the story. As AI creates both unprecedented information abundance and information compression, we need a new conception of information literacy—one that encompasses how individuals reason, how communities learn together, and how democratic institutions use AI to become better listeners and problem-solvers.

Drawing on desk research conducted between February and May 2026 and learnings from supporting the 2023 – 2025 Kluz Prize for PeaceTech, we identified and curated 100 current and potential use cases of PeaceTech across the conflict cycle and for long-term peacebuilding. 

Making government services easier to use doesn’t start with a website redesign. It starts by talking to residents, choosing the right first project, and creating the conditions for UX to succeed. Lessons from U.S. Digital Response’s three-part InnovateUS series show how agencies can build user-centered services that deliver measurable results.

New research from the AI Risk Explorer SPAR project examines how AI is reshaping conflict through cloud infrastructure, commercial technology companies, and the digital systems that now underpin both military operations and democratic governance.

AI adoption in government is accelerating. The next challenge is making sure it creates public value. InnovateUS’s Fall 2026 Live Learning Series explores how public professionals can move beyond using AI to measuring its impact, governing it responsibly, and ensuring it improves outcomes for the people and communities government serves.

In Part II, we examine the project’s core claim that AI agents could represent citizens in democratic deliberation. We argue that representation requires more than predicting preferences, that democratic participation is essential to civic learning and self-government, and that increasingly capable AI agents risk shifting authority away from citizens and toward algorithms. Democracy depends on people governing together, not on delegating judgment to machines.

A new AI for Impact-engineered public engagement coach is helping public servants turn what they learned about engagement into practical action. Built by The GovLab, the tool guides practitioners through real planning decisions, asks targeted questions about their specific project, and draws on engagement frameworks, case studies, and practitioner expertise to help them design more effective public participation processes.

A new accelerator in Barcelona is exploring what it takes to prepare future leaders to navigate the emerging field of public-interest AI. The experience underscored that moving from principles to practice demands leaders who understand the technical, political, economic, and ethical dimensions of AI. Leaders who are equipped to ensure these technologies serve public goals, protect rights, and respond to the needs of diverse communities.

Beth Simone Noveck and José Marti critique Habermolt, an experimental project that uses AI agents to deliberate and vote on behalf of people. They argue that the project reflects a longstanding strain of democratic theory that views public participation as a problem rather than a resource. At a moment of declining trust and growing institutional challenges, there should be less focus on whether AI can simulate democracy and more on how it can help governments listen, learn, and solve problems with the public. This Essay is Part 1 of 2 by Noveck and Martí.

Beth Simone Noveck spoke to The Herald (Scotland) about the role of AI in education and the need for decision-makers to engage with the technology rather than fear it, ahead of her talk at the Edinburgh Futures Institute's Civic University – Democracy, AI, and the Public Imagination."

What happens when the people working closest to families are forced to confront AI? In this conversation with Elana Banin, journalist Anya Kamenetz reflects on a three-day workshop that brought together service providers, advocates, technologists, policymakers, journalists, and philanthropists to wrestle with that question. The discussion explores why families have been largely absent from AI governance debates, how to shape the trajectory of technological change, and what it would take to build AI with communities rather than for them.

In this interview with Cool Science Radio, Beth Simone Noveck discusses the central argument of her new book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy, that AI is not simply a threat to democracy but a tool that can help make governments more effective, responsive, and participatory. Drawing on examples from around the world, she explores how AI can improve public services, strengthen civic engagement, and rebuild trust in democratic institutions.

AI data centers are arriving in communities long before most public institutions have figured out how to govern them. Drawing on recent analysis, fieldwork, and an InnovateUS workshop, Deborah Stine examines the questions public officials are now confronting around electricity, water, jobs, infrastructure, public trust, and community impact. She argues that AI data centers are far more than technology projects; they are major public policy decisions that will shape how communities experience the AI economy.

Ahead of a timely conversation around the civic role of the university in an age of democratic uncertainty and rapid technological change, Beth Simone Noveck spoke to the Scotsman about how Scotland's universities are uniquely place to reinvent the purpose of higher education.

Public servants are asking for leadership training at the same moment AI is reshaping government work. This reflection on InnovateUS’s Foundations of Leadership workshop series explores why the most important leadership challenges today are often deeply human ones: creating psychological safety, building real teams instead of loose groups, giving honest feedback, understanding strengths, and helping people perform under pressure and uncertainty. Across five sessions, participants wrestled with the gap between knowing what good leadership looks like and consistently practicing it within real organizations.

Mariana Becerra of the Eleanor Crook Foundation went to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center expecting a conversation about AI and geopolitical competition with bipartisan, bicameral members of Congress. She came back convinced that AI is already reshaping how public health systems function, how advocacy operates, and which organizations will have the capacity to influence policy. Drawing on conversations with lawmakers, researchers, and philanthropy leaders, this piece examines the growing gap between where AI governance debates are happening and the resulting consequences.

AI for Impact Fellows Sai Punith Kolla and Swaapnika Chowdary Cherukuru built Public Voice, a lightweight voice-based feedback tool designed to capture concrete examples of how learners apply AI in practice. The piece explores the design challenge behind the tool, why voice responses may produce richer evidence than text surveys, and what it means to measure whether public-sector AI training is translating into real workflow change.

As governments rush to regulate AI, many governance frameworks still overlook what happens when people are harmed. This piece argues that AI governance will be tested by legal systems already struggling to deliver equal access to justice. Drawing on the recent report "A People-Centered Justice Approach to Implementing AI Governance," examples from Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States make the case for bringing courts, legal aid organizations, and justice institutions into the center of AI governance design.

Europe has invested heavily in data infrastructure through initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), yet these frameworks remain largely focused on traditional, sector-specific data. This CEPS R&D Perspective argues that non-traditional data — generated by digital platforms, sensors, mobility systems, and consumption patterns — represents a largely untapped resource for health and well-being research. Drawing on evidence from over 290 studies, the note argues that non-traditional data can enable earlier detection of health risks, reveal nutritional and access inequalities, and link environmental exposure to disease outcomes. Grocery transaction records, wearable devices, satellite imagery, and mobility data have each shown measurable value when responsibly linked with conventional datasets. Realising this potential at scale requires addressing persistent barriers: fragmented access, complex data linkage, fragile public trust, and short-term funding cycles. The paper proposes six integrated policy actions — expanding EOSC's mandate, broadening EHDS to cover health determinants, leveraging Horizon Europe for sustainable data reuse, activating DSA Article 40 for platform data access, professionalising data stewardship, and embedding social licence frameworks in governance structures. Together, these measures would transform Europe's data spaces from compliance infrastructure into genuine decision intelligence for health, well-being, and beyond.

In a new piece for the Rethinking Regulation series, Dane Gambrell examines how San Francisco used a custom AI tool developed with Stanford’s RegLab to scan 16 million words of municipal code and identify hundreds of outdated and duplicative reporting requirements across city government. The effort ultimately produced a 351-page ordinance proposing the deletion or consolidation of 174 mandates. The piece offers a grounded look at how AI can help governments make sprawling bureaucratic systems more legible and manageable.

In an article originally published in The Times (Scottish Edition), Beth Simone Noveck argues that AI’s most important democratic use is helping governments listen. Drawing on examples from Camden and Scotland, the piece explores how AI could help public institutions process large-scale public input, strengthen participation, and rebuild trust at a time when governments face rising demand and declining capacity.

A new WHO discussion paper explores how AI can accelerate research synthesis and keep evidence continuously up to date. Elana Banin welcomes the push to use AI to strengthen the evidence-to-policy pipeline, but argues the more consequential question is whether AI will redefine what counts as evidence in the first place. The harder constraint will ultimately be institutional, as most health workers lack the training and infrastructure to adopt these tools. Government decision-makers must start building the processes to test AI outputs against frontline knowledge and the capacity to make that adoption defensible.

A new entry in our Rethinking Regulation series, this in-depth case study by Dane Gambrell includes an interview with Reeve Bull, who led the state’s regulatory modernization effort. It traces how Virginia used AI to review decades of accumulated rules, cut regulatory requirements by over a third, and make them clearer and more accessible. It shows how governments can pair strong institutional processes with AI to modernize regulation and improve how it works for the public.

Using AI to analyze over 2,400 employee comments, California’s Engaged California team found that the challenge wasn’t the scale of the data, but making sense of complex, layered input without oversimplifying it. Their experience shows why human judgment remains essential, from building taxonomies to catching errors, as results can shift significantly depending on how AI is applied and what people choose to trust and prioritize.

AI governance is expanding fast, but not evenly. A new analysis from MIT and Georgetown’s CSET maps over 1,000 governance documents to show that while policies are proliferating, they cluster around familiar risks and sectors, leaving key gaps across socioeconomic impacts, upstream design, and everyday domains. The result, as relayed by research member Yan Zhu, is a more precise picture of what AI governance actually covers, what it still overlooks, and where policymakers should focus in the future.

Across contexts like India, where author Anirudh Dinesh’s family lives, AI chatbots such as xAI’s Grok are increasingly used not to inform but to generate arguments that reinforce existing political views, creating “generative echo chambers.” Unlike passive social media exposure, users actively prompt AI to validate positions, often producing confident but inaccurate claims that go unchecked. While some research suggests AI can moderate views in neutral dialogue, real-world use skews toward advocacy, compounded by low verification and high trust in outputs. The result is that AI may not just reflect polarization, but actively deepen it, depending on how these systems are designed and used.

Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable argue that the biggest challenge in open data is no longer access, but usability, as official statistics remain difficult to find, interpret, and apply. Drawing on the International Monetary Fund’s StatGPT new research, it shows how artificial intelligence could transform access through natural language interfaces, while warning that accuracy and trust depend on retrieving authoritative data rather than generating answers. The article situates this shift within a broader “Fourth Wave of Open Data,” calling for new data systems and governance approaches that make information truly usable and reliable.

Stefaan Verhulst and Adam Zable argue that the biggest challenge in open data is no longer access, but usability, as official statistics remain difficult to find, interpret, and apply. Drawing on the International Monetary Fund’s StatGPT new research, it shows how artificial intelligence could transform access through natural language interfaces, while warning that accuracy and trust depend on retrieving authoritative data rather than generating answers. The article situates this shift within a broader “Fourth Wave of Open Data,” calling for new data systems and governance approaches that make information truly usable and reliable.

Following the success of a 1,200-person pilot across eight state agencies, New York is scaling InnovateUS' AI training initiative to more than 100,000 state employees, the largest program of its kind in the nation. Read the NYS press release detailing the expansion, which focuses on helping public servants build the skills and knowledge to responsibly use emerging technologies for the public good.

This piece by John Wihbey and Jill Abramson distills lessons from the InnovateUS Amplify workshop series, where public-sector communicators grappled with how AI is reshaping their work amid declining public trust. Across sessions, we learn that AI can accelerate research, synthesis, and storytelling, but it cannot replace judgment, verification, or institutional values. As communicators adopt new tools, the opportunity lies in using AI to strengthen transparency, credibility, and connection with the public, rather than erode them.

Millions of Americans miss out on health and food assistance benefits due to fragmented systems and complex enrollment processes. This piece explores how Link Health, in partnership with the AI for Impact program, is combining AI tools with human navigators to rethink how public benefits are delivered in healthcare settings. It argues that the next frontier is better evidence. States should fund research to compare enrollment approaches, portal design, and navigator support to determine which improve health outcomes and guide smarter public investment.

AI agents are reshaping how systems operate across sectors. This piece argues that the imminent challenge to address is autonomy, including how agents act, interact, and scale in open environments. It outlines a three-part blueprint for governments to build trust infrastructure, prepare for multi-agent risks, and develop the institutional capacity needed to govern an increasingly agentic world.

In what follows we highlight several examples of PeaceTech launched or updated in 2025 and explain how they are being applied before, during, and after a conflict. We conclude with cross-cutting takeaways across these examples.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more integrated into scientific research, shaping how knowledge is produced, how research is conducted, and which questions are formulated and prioritized. Across these readings, AI appears as both a tool that can support speeding up tasks such as data analysis, hypothesis generation, and experiment design, and as a force that is influencing research practices, incentives, and areas of focus. This edition of selected readings show that while AI can increase the speed and scale of research, it also raises questions about how knowledge is developed, how scientific work is evaluated, and how reliance on AI may affect learning, diversity of ideas, and long-term scientific progress.

Dr. Sara Bazoobandi examines how Iran’s doctrine of “knowledge jihad” shaped the development of its digital and AI infrastructure, transforming technology into an instrument of state control. The piece traces how this system, built for surveillance and centralized authority, has also created strategic fragility, offering a cautionary lesson for democracies designing the foundations of AI governance.

Cities often treat nearby universities as occasional partners rather than strategic collaborators. But as artificial intelligence reshapes local economies and public services, that relationship may need to change. Drawing on a new policy brief, The AI Lab Next Door, Neil Kleiman argues that city–university “compacts” can transform transactional ties into intentional partnerships, helping communities harness the growing AI capacity already taking shape on college campuses.

More than 50 practitioners, researchers, and civic technologists from 24 countries reviewed the draft curriculum for Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, providing over 300 comments and suggestions. The feedback highlighted the need for clearer guidance on institutional readiness, trust, inclusion, and the risks and limits of AI in public participation. This post summarizes the key themes that emerged, explains how AI tools were used to synthesize the feedback, and outlines the next steps in developing the course.

InnovateUS and the Center for Civic Futures are launching a new series exploring how AI can help human services agencies reduce administrative burden and improve benefits delivery. Drawing on Robert Asaro-Angelo’s experience as Commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development, this post examines how agencies can use AI to help the public sector improve benefits delivery, reduce administrative burden, and better support both frontline staff and the people they serve.

In this commentary, originally published by InDaily South Australia, Matt Ryan argues that artificial intelligence can help governments deliver more effective, human-centered services, but only if it builds public trust and democratic legitimacy. Drawing on examples from Spain, San Francisco, and the UK, he outlines a path for South Australia to develop “sovereign AI capability.” His proposal focuses on three priorities: participatory AI governance, stronger public-sector AI skills, and reinvesting efficiency gains into public services, ensuring AI improves government while strengthening democracy.

In this conversation with Elana Banin, Lorelei Kelly argues that rebuilding democratic resilience requires redesigning the institutional infrastructure connecting citizens to Congress. Drawing on constitutional history and emerging technologies, she explores how deliberative technology and AI could help revive the First Amendment’s promises of assembly and petition for the digital age.

We are pleased to launch DataStewards.net — dedicated to training and supporting data stewards.

In this interview, B Cavello discusses findings from an Aspen Institute global survey and reflects on what it reveals about the intersection of AI and food systems. Practitioners consistently emphasized institutional capacity, governance, and distributional challenges as central constraints. The conversation explores how AI might support greater transparency, participation, and resilience, and what these insights mean for U.S. state and local policymakers working on food security, land governance, and public-sector capacity.

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as a force that will destroy jobs. In this essay, Seth Harris argues that it can also expand opportunity. By using AI to identify and remove unnecessary college degree requirements in state hiring, governments can reduce barriers to public employment, address racial and class disparities, and fill critical roles more efficiently. Backed by new research underway from the Burnes Center for Social Change, supported by the GitLab Foundation, he outlines how thoughtfully deployed AI can break down barriers and accelerate the shift to skills-based hiring.

A new paper urges universities to resist the uncritical adoption of AI, arguing that existing research integrity standards already prohibit much of what institutions are normalizing. Beth Simone Noveck's diagnosis is sharp: vendor dependency, opacity, and hype are reshaping public institutions from the inside. But for governments, refusal isn’t an option. The real question is not whether to adopt AI, but who controls it and on what terms.

As governments move from AI pilots to workforce-wide access, the hardest questions are practical: What does it cost at scale? Who gets access? How do you log usage and manage risk? How do we pair access with training so it’s safe — and actually useful?Drawing on lessons from New Jersey and Boston, this post outlines how to structure AI deployment using usage-based pricing, cloud infrastructure you control, and training designed to drive real impact.

On 5 February, The Governance Lab and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) convened researchers, policymakers, technologists, funders, and advocates for a joint workshop focused on Building a Research Agenda for Women’s Health Innovation. The workshop marked the next step in the 100 Questions Initiative: shifting from identifying priorities to operationalising and institutionalising them within the European context.

A new paper introducing the UbuntuGuard benchmark questions whether strong results on English-language safety tests consistently translate into responsible use. Built from policies developed by 155 African domain experts across ten languages and six countries, UbuntuGuard's framework assesses whether AI tools comply with the norms that shape services in non-Western contexts. The findings suggest that institutions, wherever they operate, need the capacity to define their own standards before using these tools to improve public-sector outcomes.

Max Stier argues that rebuilding trust in government begins inside agencies by recognizing and elevating the everyday excellence of career civil servants. Drawing on the Partnership for Public Service and federal workforce data, he argues that internal culture, not just external messaging, shapes public confidence. The post explains how AI can cut paperwork, reduce bias, recognize good work in real time, and tailor praise, helping leaders boost morale, reward strong performance, and better serve the public.

As Korea aims to become a top-three global AI power, the government has staked its strategy on “sovereign AI” as both an economic and national security priority. In this reflection, originally published in the Herald Insight Collection, Merve Hickok examines Korea’s multibillion-dollar investment in a national foundation model amid U.S.–China competition and the rise of Open-Source AI, asking whether alternative investments—such as small language models, compute and energy efficiency, and AI governance and evaluation—might better secure Korea’s long-term autonomy and global leadership.

As the AIEP project concludes its first pilot in San Francisco, it offers more than a new AI tool for navigating IEPs. It shows what becomes possible when families, educators, designers, and researchers co-design technology from the ground up. Through a free, open-source tool, a civic AI learning course, a community-centered playbook, and academic research, this work demonstrates a practical model for public-purpose AI rooted in lived experience, shared learning, and accountability. What began as support for parents has grown into a blueprint for building AI with communities, not just for them.

Leaders increasingly believe public engagement matters, but lack the practical know-how to do it well. Beth Simone Noveck and Dane Gambrell examine how institutions use AI and collective intelligence to engage the public at scale. Across countries and levels of government, engagement can move from performative to consequential when institutions build the capacity to design it well. That work now comes together in a new free course, Designing Democratic Engagement for the AI Era, created by InnovateUS, The GovLab, and the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, to help public professionals turn these lessons into practice.

The Observatory of Public Sector AI is a new research initiative of InnovateUS and The GovLab. The Observatory draws on anonymized data from more than 150,000 public servants nationwide. By analyzing how public employees learn, use, and adapt AI at work, the Observatory aims to identify which investments in skills and training strengthen government capacity, improve services, and deliver better outcomes for residents.

This piece examines how the Commonwealth of Virginia is using artificial intelligence to modernize regulatory review, shifting the focus from regulating AI to governing with it. Drawing on recent reforms led by the Virginia Office of Regulatory Management under Governor Glenn Youngkin, the article outlines how AI tools are being applied to analyze regulations, reduce administrative burden, and improve transparency. The "Virginia Model" offers a practical model for other states exploring how AI can strengthen core government functions.

In this InnovateUS Amplify workshop, former Member of Congress Brian Baird and former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson share hard-earned lessons on trust, empathy, and why listening may be the most powerful skill public servants have. Drawing on hundreds of town halls and decades of newsroom leadership, they offer practical guidance for winning back public trust.

U.S. labor law is shaped by thousands of decisions issued each year by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the courts, yet much of this precedent remains difficult for workers, organizers, and even lawyers to access in practice. This piece examines how the NLRB’s fragmented document publication system creates real information barriers for workers and their advocates. A new tool, NLRB Research, uses open-source software and AI to make labor law searchable and and usable, demonstrating how improving access to public legal information can help empower workers to understand and act on their rights.

New Jersey’s Office of Innovation has received a Public Benefit Innovation Fund grant to expand its AI platform with tools that help residents access benefits faster and with fewer errors. In this conversation, Beth Simone Noveck and NJ Chief Innovation Officer Dave Cole discuss how document processing, eligibility matching, feedback analysis, and memo-generation tools are already improving programs such as Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and Summer EBT, and what it takes to deploy AI responsibly within government.

Earlier this year, in collaboration with the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and the Gates-funded Research & Innovation (R&I) project, we added women’s health innovation to the list. Crowdsourcing a list of questions from an expert body of  more than 70 bilinguals, we identified the Top 10 Questions that should guide women’s health research and innovation.  In this article, we describe our methodology--part of a broader effort to create a new science of questions--list and briefly describe the top ten questions, and conclude with a discussion of reoriented priorities that should flow from these questions. 

Conventional Wisdom presents mid-sized economies with two options for accessing advanced AI: rely on American or Chinese systems, or fall behind. Neither choice preserves the technological sovereignty that countries increasingly see as essential. But there is a third path we explore in detail in a recent memo. Collectively, nations outside the US-China duopoly possess substantial computing infrastructure, a majority of the world’s top researchers, and the growing political will to create a third path. The question is whether they can come together to make it work.

The City as Mesh by Geoff Mulgan and Caio Werneck offers a powerful new framework for organizing cities to tackle cross-cutting challenges. This Research Radar examines their new paper and argues for going further: using AI as a coordination layer, treating skills as design choices, and leveraging public engagement as operational intelligence.

This Research Radar examines how California’s Office of Data and Innovation used a rigorous, community-driven approach to translate thousands of survivor contributions from the LA wildfires into a concrete recovery action plan. Combining deliberative design, large-scale digital participation, AI-assisted analysis, and human review, the engagement shows how public institutions can listen at scale, synthesize insight with integrity, and move from data to decisions when it matters most.

In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation, Dr. Beth Simone Noveck argues that Congress’s challenge is too little institutional capacity to use public input. With committee staff and in-house expertise sharply reduced and more than 81 million constituent communications each year, traditional engagement has become costly, slow, and often performative. Drawing on examples from the U.S., Brazil, Germany, among others, she shows how pairing disciplined engagement design with AI tools can help Congress synthesize public input, surface expertise, and strengthen lawmaking at scale.

This analysis by OECD.AI contributors offers a clear, practical blueprint for “public AI.” It maps where power concentrates across the AI tech stack, such as compute, data, and models, and shows how governments can intervene without trying to outspend frontier labs. Its distinctive contribution is a gradient approach that makes AI more public through democratic control, public-interest functions, and open components, paired with three concrete pathways to reduce dependence on corporate oversight and build meaningful public alternatives.

Italy has become the first European country to move beyond implementing the EU AI Act and enact its own sovereignty-driven AI law; one that anchors innovation in public oversight, workers’ rights, human accountability, and sector-specific democratic safeguards. The statute challenges the accelerating, corporate-centric governance model emerging in the U.S., yet it also suffers from limited vision, modest investment, and operational ambiguity. Italy may not win a global race for AI supremacy, but it is trying to redefine the terms of that race by insisting that democratic institutions and not commercial imperatives set the boundaries for how AI enters civic life.

As governments experiment with AI to simulate public opinion, new questions are emerging about who these systems truly represent. This Research Radar examines the Collective Intelligence Project’s Digital Twin Evaluation Framework—a developing method for testing whether AI models can mirror real human opinion patterns—and explores the democratic risks of relying on synthetic publics in policymaking.

In November 2025, global justice leaders met in Madrid for the OECD Roundtable on Equal Access to Justice to examine how systems can adapt to rising demand and rapid technological change. New Jersey’s Public Defender Jennifer Sellitti's experience highlighted that AI can strengthen fairness and access when deployed with clear safeguards and purpose. By building secure tools, improving legal workflows, and shaping statewide standards on transparency and bias, New Jersey is showing how responsible innovation can reinforce trust and improve justice outcomes.

As governments and international bodies race to establish guardrails for AI, most of the global agenda still focuses on managing what AI systems produce—their outputs. This article argues that such an approach is incomplete. The real foundations of safe, rights-respecting, and equitable AI lie upstream in how data is collected, governed, shared, and stewarded. Without integrating mature data governance practices, such as data stewardship and data commons, into AI governance, countries will struggle to protect fundamental rights or ensure that AI’s economic and social benefits are distributed fairly. A future-ready AI governance framework must therefore unite input and output governance into a single, coherent system.

The Trump Administration’s Genesis Mission aims to unify federal supercomputers, datasets, and AI systems into a single national platform for scientific discovery. But as Beth Simone Noveck argues, the plan centralizes unprecedented research power while offering almost no role for universities, communities, or the public, raising urgent questions about access, transparency, and democratic accountability.

AI is already shaping government decisions, but bright-line bans on automated decisions are not enough to manage the complex “middle space” where most automation now operates. Effective governance requires both individual rights — so people can understand and challenge decisions about them — and collective oversight that lets journalists, civil society, and regulators scrutinize systems as a whole. By blending transparency, redress, and sustained human responsibility, governments can harness AI to improve services while safeguarding democratic accountability.

The Solving Public Problems course has helped learners worldwide tackle complex challenges. The course teaches how to leverage technology, data, and collective wisdom in our communities to design powerful solutions to contemporary problems. Now, Beth Simone Noveck is exploring how to remake it for the AI era, using technology to make problem-solving skills easier to learn without losing the human connection at its core. Your input is needed!

AI is reshaping the workplace faster than public policy can keep up, often in ways that expand corporate power, weaken worker rights, and undermine democratic oversight. But across sectors, workers and unions are showing that this trajectory isn’t inevitable. Through collective bargaining, policy advocacy, and new uses of AI for organizing, they’re securing real guardrails on surveillance, algorithmic management, and job displacement. This piece explores how worker power will determine whether AI serves people or replaces them.

AI agents are beginning to make market-shaping decisions. Hadfield and Koh's new study reveals why this shift is significant. Current agents do not reason like economists, do not reflect human preferences, and do not fit into accountability structures. As governments experiment with agents in benefits, procurement, and infrastructure, Elana Banin reflects on the policy challenge of re-designing the rules before agents erode the market foundations on which democratic governance relies.

This essay argues that predictive policing continues to fail not because police departments lack data, but because they are using the wrong kind of data, in the wrong way. Applying low-stakes commercial algorithms to high-stakes decisions can produce dangerous false positives, reinforce biased patterns, and erode public trust in policing. Using examples from Plainfield, NJ, and Chicago, the piece illustrates how predictive systems replicate past police behavior rather than accurately forecasting crime, thereby creating self-reinforcing feedback loops. It contrasts these failures with diagnostic approaches in Oakland and Richmond that utilize data to understand harm, guide outreach, and reduce violence without relying on algorithmic surveillance. The core argument is that policing needs better mirrors, not crystal balls.

Today, we are pleased to share the ranked Top 10 Priority Questions for Women’s Health. These questions reflect a broad global consensus on the areas where innovation, funding, and research can generate the greatest impact, spanning reproductive health, chronic disease, mental health, aging, equity, and the structural barriers that continue to limit women’s access to high-quality care.

The Air Force is quietly auctioning off slices of its bases for private AI data centers. They call it innovation; it looks like privatization. Fifty-year leases, 3,000 acres of military land, and no public say. If this is how we build the future, who’s really in command?

The Agentic State is an ambitious and inspiring blueprint for rebuilding government around AI agents that can act and decide autonomously. It powerfully diagnoses real failures in how the public sector designs, delivers, and manages services. While AI is giving us ways to accelerate change, the prescribed cure may be premature: most of what’s broken in government requires organizational reform, not automation.

The danger isn’t that AI will make us dumber—it’s that governments, companies, and schools won’t make us smarter with it. As policymakers stall and corporations automate, the burden of using AI wisely now falls on us. Like shoppers at the fish counter, we need to learn to read the labels—to know what’s safe, what’s risky, and how to choose well.

As headlines warn of “superintelligent AI” threatening human extinction, a new open letter reignites familiar fears. But beneath the apocalyptic rhetoric lies a deeper problem. The narrative around artificial superintelligence, long embraced by Big Tech, diverts attention from the real and immediate challenges of AI and how our democratic institutions can address them.

After two years of research, the RethinkAI collaborative released Making AI Work for the Public—a comprehensive field review of how U.S. governments adopt AI. Since 2019, over 1,600 AI-related bills have been introduced, but most focus on guardrails, not proactive strategy. Meanwhile, cities are piloting translation tools, engagement platforms, and predictive systems, often led by Chief Information Officers, taking on new strategic roles. The report challenges civic tech’s efficiency-first legacy and proposes a new governance model—ALT: Adapt to anticipate needs, Listen to understand communities, and build Trust through two-way accountability.

As states take center stage in shaping how the U.S. adapts to artificial intelligence, their choices will determine not just whether America keeps pace, but whether it thrives. This summer, Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy convened state AI officers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists for “Shaping the Future of AI: A National Gathering for State AI Leaders.” The two-day working conference focused on building practical, responsible frameworks for public-sector AI implementation. New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter closed the convening with a wide-ranging keynote that called for public AI infrastructure, trust-based governance, and co-creation across sectors. What follows is a summary of her 10 core takeaways.

New York City has thousands of parks, plazas, and public courtyards, but no easy way to find them. Using “vibe coding,” open data, and generative AI, one civic technologist built a map of every public space in the five boroughs. This is the story of NYC Public Space, an app that stitches together fragmented government datasets, AI-generated descriptions, and community-sourced updates to make the city’s public realm more visible and usable. It’s also a case study in how AI can help public interest technologists move faster, build smarter, and turn open data into real public value.

Large Language Models are becoming common tools in the communications toolkit, but not all uses are created equal. In this new post from the AIMES Lab at Northeastern University, John Wihbey and Samantha D’Alonzo offer research-backed guidance on when to use LLMs in the survey pipeline and when to steer clear. The research indicates that AI is a powerful assistant for refining survey questions and testing hypotheses, but a poor substitute for actual human respondents. Drawing on more than 30 academic studies, this piece lays out a practical, hybrid approach to “silicon sampling” that helps practitioners strengthen research integrity without falling for AI’s easy shortcuts.

Today, we release the first version of the Women’s Health Topic Map. The Topic Map is part of 100 Questions initiative under the Gates-funded R&I project, where CEPS and The GovLab  have teamed up to ask: what are the most important questions that could truly advance women’s health innovation?

AI’s biggest breakthroughs were built on public datasets; the next wave should be, too. If governments make data AI-ready and keep access open, we can power tools that explain laws, improve services, and widen participation. In return, companies that train on taxpayer data should give back, through open licenses, benchmarks, and capacity that strengthen public institutions.

In this post, we highlight five recent additions to the repository that exemplify the diversity and innovation of AI Localism. These examples—spanning Reykjavík to Manchester—show how local governments are using distinct mechanisms such as risk-tiered staff guidelines, bright-line safeguards in high-risk domains, procurement nudges, AI-assisted public deliberation, and community literacy roadshows to build more responsive, inclusive, and future-proof approaches to AI.

The New York City subway would never accept an ad for a hitman-for-hire service, or for a pill that claimed to cure depression but wasn’t FDA-approved, or a social network designed exclusively to groom minors. Those would be illegal, unethical—and obviously dangerous. So why is the MTA running a massive ad campaign for friend.com, a product that, if not already illegal, certainly should be?

The concept of digital twins has quickly become the new darling of the smart city world. By 2030, more than 500 cities plan to launch some kind of digital twin platform, often wrapped in dazzling promises: immersive 3D models of entire neighborhoods, holographic maps of traffic flows, real-time dashboards of carbon emissions. These visuals capture headlines and the political imagination. But beneath the glossy graphics lies a harder question: what actually makes a digital twin useful, trustworthy, and sustainable?

Having recently worked directly on a U.S. metropolitan digital twin pilot, we know the answer is not just shiny and sophisticated imagery. A genuine twin is a living ecosystem of different stakeholders and diverse datasets — integrating maps, open government data, IoT sensors, predictive AI models, synthetic data, and mobility data into a single responsive platform. Done right, a digital twin becomes a decision-making sandbox: where planners can simulate how pedestrianizing a street shifts congestion, for example, or how a Category 3 hurricane might inundate vulnerable neighborhoods.

A report on a recent workshop cohosted by RAND, the Stimson Center, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change explores how AI can support more effective policymaking. AI shows promise for automating routine tasks and democratizing access to analysis tools, but there are significant structural barriers to realizing AI's potential in policymaking. To move forward, we need more real-world case studies of AI use in governance and strategic adoption focused on maintaining human oversight and building the skills to deploy these tools responsibly.

Non-Traditional Data (NTD) — data digitally captured, mediated, or observed through instruments such as satellites, social media, mobility apps, and wastewater testing — holds immense potential when re-used responsibly for purposes beyond those for which it was originally collected. If combined with traditional sources and guided by strong governance, NTD can generate entirely new forms of public value — what we call the Third Wave of Open Data.

In this update, we have curated recent advances where researchers and practitioners are using NTD to close monitoring gaps in climate resilience, track migration flows more effectively, support health surveillance, and strengthen urban planning. Their work demonstrates how satellite imagery can provide missing data, how crowdsourced information can enhance equity and resilience, and how AI can extract insights from underused streams.

Join People Powered on September 16 for the release of new guidance based on global case studies for AI for Digital Democracy.

The Center for Public Sector AI has launched a new recognition initiative called The AI 50, which honors people and institutions that are playing important roles in implementing and developing artificial intelligence within government agencies.

Over the last six months, The GovLab’s Open Data Policy Lab has documented use cases of data commons—collectively governed data ecosystems—that provide critical infrastructure for responsible AI development around the world. By generating access to high quality, AI-ready datasets, these initiatives are unlocking new possibilities for solving pressing public challenges. Through our Data Commons for Generative AI Repository, we have identified 60 examples of data commons ranging from cultural and language preservation initiatives to biomedical imaging archives for cancer research. 

We conducted a quantitative analysis of the full repository (60 use cases) with the goal of understanding trends in existing efforts and where additional support is needed. Below we provide a summary of these trends. However, it is important to note that our search for data commons was conducted in English and likely excludes examples from countries where most initiatives are in non-English languages.

Data commons (collaboratively governed data ecosystems) are providing critical infrastructure in the age of AI. When designed responsibly, they can help provide access to high quality, AI-ready datasets for use in the public interest. Yet: What data commons currently exist? Where are they being developed? What data commons are needed most?

Over the last six months, The GovLab’s Open Data Policy Lab (ODPL) has sought to answer these questions by curating and documenting examples of data commons for AI from across the globe. Our Data Commons for Generative AI Repository now contains 60 real-world examples from over 20 countries across 5 continents. 

Global declarations on AI governance abound—but the real test lies in implementation, much of which is unfolding in cities. Yet local initiatives are rarely monitored or shared across jurisdictions. The AI Localism Repository aims to bridge that gap by spotlighting governance mechanisms developed at the city level.

In this post, we highlight six recent additions to the repository that exemplify the diversity and innovation of AI Localism or city-level AI governance.

Artificial intelligence can transform evidence-based policymaking by enabling policymakers to cast a wider net for evidence, synthesize evidence more rapidly, and incorporate better and deeper engagement with communities. However, this transformation also presents significant challenges from bias and transparency concerns to the risk of over-reliance on algorithmic outputs. By understanding the promise and the pitfalls of AI-enabled research tools, while keeping human expertise at the center of the process, we can harness these powerful tools to serve the public interest while preserving the democratic values of transparency, accountability, and inclusive governance.

How are governments and researchers using generative AI to make better use of open data? In what ways can AI help make public information more accessible, interpretable, or actionable? And what new types of public services or research tools are emerging at this intersection?

These are some of the questions explored in our Observatory of Open Data and Generative AI —a growing collection of real-world use cases showing how open data from official sources is being used with generative AI technologies.

Launched last year, the Observatory builds on the findings of our report, "A Fourth Wave of Open Data? Exploring the Spectrum of Scenarios for Open Data and Generative AI.” 

A new Code for America assessment looks at how states are adopting artificial intelligence to support the design, delivery, and evaluation of public services. While most states remain in early development stages, the three leading states distinguished themselves by building comprehensive governance frameworks, investing in workforce training, and establishing dedicated leadership structures to support the responsible and effective use of AI.

Earlier this month, I attended the DeSci.Berlin 2025 Conference at Molecule HQ, where scientists, blockchain developers, and investors gathered to examine how scientific research might evolve in the Web3 environment.

The 2025 Europe edition of the Data for Policy conference, held 12–13 June at Leiden University in The Hague, gathered researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around the theme “Twin Transitions in Data and Policy for a Sustainable and Inclusive Future.” Over two days of presentations and discussion, participants explored how data systems and digital technologies are reshaping governance and what it will take to make them serve climate goals, social equity, and democratic accountability.

New research from the UK Gov shows how AI could make it easier for institutions to do public engagement. A new process called "Consult" combined AI with human oversight to analyze public consultation responses with 76% accuracy in seconds.

How can we build and sustain data commons that balance openness, and trust, while fueling innovation for the public good? Can they ensure that communities and other networks have a say in how their data is used? Can they ensure that public interest organizations can get access to the data they need to meet societal challenges?

In “Data Commons for the Public Good,” the Open Data Policy Lab’s fourth panel on the Fourth Wave of Open Data, Vivienne Ming (Chief Scientist, The Human Trust), Angie Raymond (Director of Data Management and Information Governance, Ostrom Workshop), Heather Coates (Data Steward & Data Librarian,  Indiana University), and Alek Tarkowski (Director of Strategy, Open Future) joined The GovLab’s Stefaan Verhulst to answer these questions. 

Last week, we closed applications for our New Commons Challenge—an open innovation challenge seeking to foster the use of data commons for the development of AI for local decision-making and humanitarian response.

The GovLab and the  Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), with support from The Gates Foundation, are pleased to announce the launch of a new domain within The 100 Questions Initiative: Women’s Health Innovation. The 100 Questions Initiative seeks to identify and prioritize the most pressing, data-actionable questions that can advance evidence-based policy making, and research on societal issues.

This week’s Research Radar highlights The Agentic State, an ambitious whitepaper arguing that AI agents could reshape the core functions of government. It’s a timely vision for public sector transformation —worth reading, debating, and building on.

We are developing "Civic and Democratic AI," an 8-part WhatsApp course that teaches people how to use generative AI to navigate government processes, understand complex documents, and organize for community action. The course aims to provide practical AI skills for civic engagement. We are seeking feedback on the course content. Share your insights and expertise as we roll out this free program to help communities use AI to understand their government, access their rights, and organize for change.

A new white paper from The Institutional Architecture Lab argues that combating AI-generated deepfakes and synthetic content in elections requires purpose-built institutions. The authors propose Electoral Integrity Institutions that would coordinate across government, tech platforms, and civil society to scan, assess, and respond to synthetic content threats. But the paper also provokes a fundamental question: should we design institutions defensively to react to AI threats, or offensively to build better, more participatory and representative elections?

The Trump administration’s January 20 executive order rechristening the US Digital Service as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has effectively hijacked the civic tech movement. While the US Digital Service focused on life-saving and government improvement functions, DOGE has used AI and other advanced technologies to burrow deep into administrative datasets and monopolize control. It’s time to flip the script (again) and break the government’s stranglehold on information. Rather than centralize power, let’s use AI to distribute it.

In our AI revolution, we face a pivotal choice between using these unprecedented cognitive tools to amplify our worst tendencies or solve humanity's greatest challenges. As New Jersey's Chief AI Strategist, I've witnessed firsthand how AI can transform public services, but becoming true "public entrepreneurs" requires more than technology—it demands purpose, partnership, problem definition, and participation to create meaningful change in an increasingly fractured world. Read my effort to offer hope to honors graduates of Kean University facing the collapse of dignity, decency, and due process.

ETH Zurich researchers introduce "Value-Sensitive Citizen Science," a systematic framework combining design principles with citizen science to foster meaningful public participation in AI development. The paper provides a structured approach to embed community values directly into technical systems, critical as AI increasingly shapes societal outcomes.

As artificial intelligence systems become more reliant on data from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), fundamental questions arise about who controls that data and who benefits from its use and reuse. In many cases, the people and communities who generate this data have little say in how it’s used, and few mechanisms for recourse when harms occur.

To address these challenges, The GovLab and Agence Française de Développement (AFD) have partnered on a new project exploring more equitable, participatory approaches to data governance in AI ecosystems. Today, we are pleased to release the outcome of that collaboration: Reimagining Data Governance for AI: Operationalizing Social Licensing for Data Reuse.

President Trump’s weekend firing of the Register of Copyrights spotlights a 113-page bombshell report that brands large-scale AI training as prima-facie infringement. The Copyright Office sides with copyright owners while offering a nuanced analysis and leaving it to the market to sort out. Dive into jargon-free breakdown, political context, and a reality-check on where the Office’s analysis still misses the mark.

The Fourth Wave of Open Data, based around the combination of open data and generative AI, offers significant potential. When put together, open datasets can be made more open and conversational. Systems themselves can be better trained to answer questions.

Last month, the White House's Office of Management and Budget released two memoranda that shift how our government will approach artificial intelligence. There's just one problem: the people tasked with implementing these ambitious directives haven't been prepared for this moment. To take the White House's vision for AI from idea to implementation, public servants need access to training that is tailored to their specific roles, grounded in real-world context, and aligned with the day-to-day realities of public service.

The UAE has announced its "Legislative Intelligence Office," promising to transform lawmaking through AI by integrating legislation, judicial rulings, and public services. While the system could potentially identify contradictions in laws and model policy impacts, serious questions remain about governance transparency, data quality, and accountability. This experiment deserves attention as legislatures worldwide struggle with information overload but we must ask whether efficiency will come at the cost of deliberation and public participation.

Norwegian researchers have created detailed maps of state capacity at the local level using machine learning to combine citizen surveys with geographic data across Africa. Their approach predicts government effectiveness in areas without direct measurements, offering new ways to target democracy interventions where they're most needed. This method could help identify representation gaps in communities, though challenges with data limitations and potential misuse remain.

The White House's new executive order on AI education promises to prepare American students for an AI-driven future through challenges, partnerships, and teacher training. Yet these initiatives come alongside dismantling the Department of Education, cutting education funding, and reducing research grants – creating a fundamental contradiction. For AI education to succeed, we need consistent funding, teacher support, research investment, equity safeguards, and public AI governance – not just corporate partnerships.

The Open Data Policy Lab’s Observatory of Examples of How Open Data and Generative AI Intersect provides real-world use cases of how open data from official sources intersects with generative artificial intelligence (AI), building on insights from our report, A Fourth Wave of Open Data? Exploring the Spectrum of Scenarios for Open Data and Generative AI.

Together with hundreds of families, the Burnes Center for Social Change and Innovate Public Schools are co-designing an AI-powered tool designed to empower families to better understand and engage with their child’s individualized education plan (IEP). This free, open-source platform aims to eliminate key barriers families face when engaging with IEPs, which are often are lengthy and packed with specialized educational jargon, making them challenging to understand. By integrating community perspectives into the heart of the platform's technological design, the project aims to ensure that the AI tool reflects and serves the needs, values, and aspirations of the people who will use it.

Non-Traditional Data (NTD)—digitally captured, mediated, or observed data such as mobile phone records, online transactions, or satellite imagery—is reshaping how we identify, understand, and respond to public interest challenges. As part of the Third Wave of Open Data, these often privately held datasets are being responsibly re-used through new governance models and cross-sector collaboration to generate public value at scale.

This update profiles recent initiatives that push the boundaries of what NTD can do. Together, they highlight the evolving domains where this type of data is helping to surface hidden inequities, improve decision-making, and build more responsive systems.

New Jersey's State AI Task Force used AI to develop more robust recommendations faster and with the benefit of large-scale community engagement. The Task Force used the online engagement tool All Our Ideas to prioritize a set of problems to focus on and used the AI-powered toolkit Policy Synth to conduct large-scale automated web research about the problems and possible solutions. As a result of this eight-week process, New Jersey is implementing free AI skills training for all public servants and developing an AI-powered labor market monitoring system to help workers navigate career trends.

The proliferation and collection of large amounts of citizens’ data has led to the rise of "political machines" – AI systems used in government to make decisions around resource allocation. Political anthropologist Eduardo Albrecht argues that establishing a "Third House" – a new legislative body specifically designed to oversee the deployment and operation of political machines – could enable citizens to meaningfully engage with and oversee the AI tools used by their government.

In the news this week: The Reboot Blog on why state leaders are meeting at Princeton University this June to develop practical frameworks for responsible AI use. A new series with the head of citizen engagement for the Brazilian Senate explores how artificial intelligence could enhance participatory lawmaking. The struggle to shape American AI policy intensifies with the Federation of American Scientists urging the Trump administration to cement US leadership through research investments, while tech companies actively lobby against state AI regulation. Google's Jigsaw upgrades its moderation tools for online communities. Fresh research from Harvard and Wharton reveals AI excels as a team player, while Elon University’s Lee Rainie explores our complex love-hate relationship with emerging technologies. Learn more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

While federal AI policy shifts toward deregulation, my fellow state AI leaders will gather in June with researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists at Princeton University under the auspices of the National Governors Association, the Center for Public Sector AI, the NJ AI Hub, InnovateUS and the Center for Information Technology Policy, to develop practical frameworks for responsible AI implementation in government. The two-day working conference will focus on: expanding equitable access, building public trust, strengthening governance, unlocking data responsibly, and driving innovation aligned with democratic principles.

Brazil's Federal Senate has pioneered four innovative citizen participation mechanisms that transform ordinary Brazilians from occasional voters into active lawmakers, with over 120,000 legislative ideas submitted and 11 million votes cast. Based on interviews with the head of the Brazilian Senate's e-Citizenship office and a leading expert on legislative innovation in Brazil, this series of four posts explores Brazil's current democratic ecosystem and future aspirations for how artificial intelligence could make citizen participation even more impactful.

Many Americans are fearful in important ways about AI – particularly generative AI and large language models (LLMs) – and yet the user base is exploding. New research from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University looks at our love-hate relationship with emerging technologies.

In the news this week: A report from the Center for Democracy & Technology finds that civic tech organizations in Mexico & Taiwan effectively used AI tools to combat AI-driven information in last year’s elections while Cornell’s Frank Pasquale argues that AI poses a threat to democratic processes. Reversing course from the Biden Administration, the Trump administration instructs AI scientists to remove terms like "AI safety" and "fairness" in favor of "reducing ideological bias" and developing tools that “expand America’s global AI position.” Ivy leaguers are flooding Chinese AI company Deep Seek with applications. An NYU study finds that TikTok's algorithm skewed toward promoting Republican content during the 2024 election, and our partners at InnovateUS launch Spanish-language AI workshops. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Constitutional courts remain disconnected from the citizens they ultimately serve, but AI could transform this relationship. By using technology to translate complex legal language into accessible information, create thoughtful digital forums for diverse public input, and develop collaborative mechanisms that allow citizens and experts to contribute directly to judicial decisions, courts can evolve from isolated institutions into centers of meaningful democratic engagement.

The GovLab with the support of the Wellcome Trust Discovery Research team is beginning a new initiative called Social Data 4 Health. The initiative aims to understand how these new forms of social data can transform health-related research in the humanities, social sciences, and public health domains.

"Democracy relies on the exchange of ideas, conversations, and deliberation. This has been true since Athenian democracy and remains crucial today—perhaps more so than ever. However, meaningful deliberation is becoming increasingly difficult." — Professor Michiel Bakker, MIT/DeepMind

In the news this week: Tech groups warn that budget cuts to the National Institute of Standards and Technology could undermine US AI leadership, urging officials to preserve the agency's critical role in standards development. Meanwhile, the Brennan Center reports that while AI didn't massively disrupt 2024 elections, deepfakes and AI-generated disinformation are slowly undermining public trust, creating a landscape where truth becomes increasingly contested. Kenya's Special Envoy highlights how basic infrastructure gaps in internet and energy must be addressed before AI benefits can be equitably distributed worldwide. An Elon University study reveals AI is experiencing one of the fastest technology adoption rates in history, with Hispanic adults (66%) and Black adults (57%) more likely than White adults (47%) to use AI language tools - challenging typical tech adoption patterns. A CDT report shows workers strongly support greater transparency in workplace AI surveillance and limits on productivity monitoring that could harm mental health. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, it is critical to broaden access to diverse and high-quality data to ensure that AI applications can serve all communities equitably. Yet, we are on the brink of a potential “data winter,” where valuable data assets that could drive public good are increasingly locked away or inaccessible.

Data commons — collaboratively governed ecosystems that enable responsible sharing of diverse datasets across sectors — offer a promising solution. By pooling data under clear standards and shared governance, data commons can unlock the potential of AI for public benefit while ensuring that its development reflects the diversity of experiences and needs across society.

To accelerate the creation of data commons, The Open Data Policy, today, releases “A Blueprint to Unlock New Data Commons for AI” — a guide on how to steward data to create data commons that enable public-interest AI use cases.

On February 11, 2025, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and Urban AI co-hosted an official side event of the Paris AI Action Summit, titled "Aligning Urban AI and Global AI Governance." Held in collaboration with Mouvement des Entreprises de France (MEDEF), Open Data France, DemocracyNext, and UN-Habitat, the event brought together policymakers, researchers, and city representatives to discuss how urban AI initiatives can align with broader governance frameworks to ensure responsible and inclusive AI deployment. 

To support continued transparency and accountability in government AI use, the Federation of American Scientists has written a letter urging OMB to maintain its detailed guidance on AI inventories. Signed by 16 organizations, the letter argues that sustained transparency is crucial to ensuring responsible AI governance, fostering public trust, and enabling industry innovation.

In the news this week: Beth Simone Noveck raises concerns about President Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy, arguing the nomination reveals a national AI strategy lacking vision beyond deregulation and failing to address AI's role in government modernization. In the UK, AI assistants are helping to provide customized educational courses for incarcerated individuals, potentially addressing skills shortages and improving job prospects for ex-offenders. Technologist Audrey Tang suggests that humor may be key to better AI governance, exploring how AI can enable citizen participation and deliberation while preserving human-centered public service. Harvard Kennedy’s Ash Center published recommendations for how AI can support pro-democracy movements, calling on the civic tech community to connect AI developers with activists and create ethical guidelines and training for integrating AI into democracy work. Read more in this week’s AI News That Caught Our Eye.

Trump's pick to lead OSTP professed American AI leadership at his confirmation hearing while ignoring the dismantling of the very scientific institutions that sustain it. With no vision beyond deregulation and no defense of research funding, he failed to address—and Senators failed to ask—about the role of AI in modernizing government or the growing influence of Elon Musk in shaping federal AI policy.

McKinsey explores the rise of AI in the workplace while Pew finds that half of workers (52%) say they’re worried about AI at work and Dane Gambrell argues that AI is being used as an excuse for mass layoffs in the federal government. According to OpenAI, California, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York lead in student AI adoption. Governor Newsom announces "Engaged California," an AI-enabled digital democracy initiative that will collect ideas from residents about how the state can support those impacted by the LA wildfires. A paper from The GovLab examines AI's potential to transform evidence-based policymaking. Read more in this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

A workshop series shows how AI tools are helping to transform literacy education. AI tools have a power potential to democratize quality education by providing personalized learning experiences, multilingual support and culturally responsive content, and other resources that would otherwise be unavailable to students.

Join us in-person or online on Thursday, February 27 at 4 p.m. ET for a live conversation. https://rebootdemocracy.ai/events about the "Habermas Machine" and new research from Google Deep Mind showing that AI can help groups find common ground on controversial issues. Their AI system proved more effective than human mediators at generating consensus statements while successfully preserving minority viewpoints. While this research demonstrates AI's potential to make democratic deliberation more efficient and fair and foster consensus building, it also raises questions about whether academic focus on deliberation itself, rather than practical problem-solving, best serves public needs.

With over 70 national elections held in 2024, concerns around genAI’s potential to disrupt democratic integrity were at an all-time high. A new report challenges the assumption that genAI’s impact is solely negative, revealing a more complex landscape where risks coexist with opportunities for democratic innovation.

This week in the headlines: Canada’s Justin Longo writes about governments using AI to deliver multilingual services while Elon Musk is developing a chatbot for the federal government called GSAi in an effort to reduce the federal workforce. Workday and Klarna are laying off workers because of AI. Yet Anthropic finds that more companies use AI to augment rather than replace jobs and a new Rutgers study finds that almost half of Americans trust AI. The week’s biggest AI news: France and Omidyar Network announce Current, a $400M fund to create AI public goods. Read more about this week's AI News That Caught Our Eye.

For Canada and other multilingual societies, advances in machine translation could provide great opportunities to improve service delivery and access to government. At the same time, we need to consider the deeper cultural values of multilingualism, and what could be lost when machines do our speaking for us.

Over the last year, the Open Data Policy Lab (a collaboration between The GovLab and Microsoft) has been exploring how to harness artificial intelligence responsibly and effectively as part of its work on Fourth Wave of Open Data, an approach to data openness that explores intersections between open data from official sources and generative AI.

The way to unlock data responsibly for this fourth wave, we believe, lies with data commons—collaboratively governed data ecosystems designed to pool and provide responsible access to diverse, high-quality datasets across sectors. 

An AEI report argues that AI isn't ready to draft regulations while the EU starts enforcing theirs. OpenAI made progress with AI Agents and New Jersey unveiled its $72M AI Hub at Princeton. Code for America published an “AI Cheat Sheet” for government and Canada explores a Citizens Assembly on AI. Two new studies examined the promises and limitations of using AI to amplify and deepen public engagement in policy making. Read these stories and more in this edition of AI News That Caught Our Eye.

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) currently funds multiyear technology projects to help agencies improve their service delivery. However, many agencies abdicate responsibility for project outcomes to vendors, lacking the internal leadership and project development teams necessary to apply a product model approach focused on user needs, starting small, learning what works, and making adjustments as needed

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) currently funds multiyear technology projects to help agencies improve their service delivery. However, many agencies abdicate responsibility for project outcomes to vendors, lacking the internal leadership and project development teams necessary to apply a product model approach focused on user needs, starting small, learning what works, and making adjustments as needed. 

Join us for a conversation with MIT and Deepmind’s Michael Henry Tessler and Michiel A. Bakker on February 27 at Northeastern University. Tessler and Bakker will unveil their groundbreaking "Habermas Machine," tested with over 5,700 UK participants.

Who participates in digital democracy doesn’t always determine who benefits – what matters is whether and how governments respond. If they don’t respond, or if their response isn’t inclusive, even the broadest participation means little. AI-driven engagement must go beyond scaling participation and deliberation to address this challenge.

Why responsible data stewardship could help addressing today’s pressing environmental challenges resulting from artificial intelligence and other data-related technologies.

Natalie Buda Smith, Director of Digital Strategy at the Library of Congress, presents her team’s work investigating how Congress can use artificial intelligence to enhance its operations. 

In a major shift in U.S. AI policy, President Trump has issued an executive order repealing President Biden's previous AI safety regulations and announced the "Stargate" initiative, a $100 billion program aimed at strengthening U.S. AI infrastructure. Meanwhile, research into smart cities continues to advance, with new studies examining how Big Data analytics and “digital twin” technology could enhance efficiency and autonomy. The AI development landscape saw increased competition this week as Chinese tech company DeepSeek released its new open-source large language model, prompting U.S. companies to reassess their strategies to maintain their lead in the AI development race. Learn about these stories and more in this edition of AI News That Caught Our Eye.

New This Week! The Biden Administration's swan song on AI policy arrived this week with two executive orders - one on AI infrastructure and another on cybersecurity. Meanwhile, New Jersey broke ground with guidance on algorithmic discrimination under state law, and InnovateUS launched a free workshop series exploring AI's role in revolutionizing reading instruction. Read on for these stories and more in our latest roundup.

The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles reveals both the potential and limitations of AI in public safety. Extreme conditions, including high winds, led to the fires. While they might not have been preventable, AI may be able to help us spot fires faster It is worth a closer look at whether we should make a greater investment in AI for fire safety. But this devastating blaze also demonstrates that technology alone is never enough. AI can be a powerful tool, but must be part of a comprehensive approach to protect communities.

AI News This Week: Congressional rules package instructs officials in the U.S. House of Representatives to continue to integrate AI into House operations. A paper co-authored by dozens of researchers, practitioners and technologists lays out a research agenda for further developing the use of large language models to create more deliberative and healthier digital public squares. With the Trump administration poised to reshape Biden’s AI policies, experts discuss the implications for democratic governance. Read these stories and more in this week’s Reboot Democracy news on AI, democracy and governance.

Join us for a Zoom lecture with Natalie Buda Smith and Dr. Beth Simone Noveck exploring AI's role in legislative innovation and democracy.

A new paper lays out a research agenda for further developing the use of large language models to create more deliberative and healthier digital public squares.

This special holiday edition of AI News explores how technology is transforming the festive season! This week in AI News: OpenAI launched “12 Days of OpenAI,” featuring daily updates, demos, and product announcements. Highlights include the o1 reasoning model, ChatGPT Pro business tier, and more. Switzerland’s St. Peter’s Chapel introduced "Deus in machina," an AI Jesus avatar offering biblical advice in 100+ languages. While praised for fostering dialogue among 900 visitors of diverse faiths, critics called it blasphemous. Coca-Cola faced backlash for its AI-generated holiday ads, criticized for technical flaws and “soulless” visuals. Retailers embraced AI for inventory management and hyper-personalized experiences, while many consumers are using AI recommendations to help develop their shopping lists. From AI-powered shopping assistance to multilingual translation to preemptive party monitoring, this edition of AI News looks at how emerging technologies are reshaping how we celebrate, connect, and conduct business during the holiday season.

This Week in AI News: The state of New Jersey is training 10,000 government employees in how to responsibly use AI to deliver better public services. The New Mexico AI Consortium, a collaboration between the state’s leading national laboratories, universities, and colleges, is working to position the state as a leader in AI for national security and workforce development. At the national level, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Testing Risks of AI for National Security (TRAINS) Taskforce is investigating AI’s risks for national security. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s new restrictions on semiconductor exports to China aim to curb technological advancements with military implications, while Poland announced a $240 million AI investment to strengthen its economy and defense. This week's AI news highlights the growing intersection between artificial intelligence, national security, public engagement and public service delivery, as countries and states race to harness AI's potential while managing its risks.

Beth Simone Noveck highlights New Jersey’s AI initiative, training 10,000 state employees to responsibly leverage AI. This workforce-led approach improves services, fosters innovation, and sets a model for other governments.

The report details recommendations that aim to create economic opportunities for residents and businesses, encourage ethical use of AI technologies, promote equitable outcomes, support public and private workforces, and improve government services and the resident experience.

Successful candidates will teach undergraduate and graduate courses and will be working on the advancement of Responsible AI/Democracy at one or more scales, including but not limited to global/diplomatic, national, municipal/local, and grassroots/community, and may have experience with the roles of the public, private, or non-profit sectors in this space. We have a special interest in those examining AI governance in the Global South

It's election day, and as American voters head to the polls, we’ve curated stories focused on the ways in which AI is changing the election landscape. From bolstering transparency to tackling misinformation, welcome to this special election edition of News That Caught Our Eye.

View the full conversation from the October 30, 2024 lecture by Dr. Jeanine Abrams McLean and Kate Gage.

Taiwan's first Digital Minister describes how collective intelligence can be harnessed to strengthen democratic governance and build a collaborative approach to global AI safety.

The Burnes Center for Social Change and The Governance Lab, in collaboration with the Institute for Experiential AI, invite you to the next lecture in our series: Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI, on Wednesday, October 30, at 5 p.m. ET! This upcoming session features Dr. Jeanine Abrams McLean, President of Fair Count, and Kate Gage, a leading expert in the intersection of technology and political innovation.

This Week in AI News: The U.S. Department of Labor introduced a new roadmap designed to ensure AI enhances job quality while safeguarding worker rights. A recent study demonstrated how AI can facilitate common ground in democratic discussions, highlighting its potential to reduce division. In California, a survey revealed diverse public opinions on AI’s impact, with optimism higher among Black and Asian Americans compared to other groups. Meanwhile, Stanford's RegLab created an AI tool to quickly find and remove racial restrictions from millions of property records. From workplace innovation to global governance efforts, this week’s News That Caught Our Eye showcases AI's broadening role in shaping society.

It’s UN General Assembly week and there are lots of stories in this week’s news on international collaboration: The U.S. Department of State is collaborating with eight companies to launch a “Global Inclusivity Initiative on AI”, and Rwanda and Singapore are launching a pioneering AI 'Playbook' for small states. From the OECD and UN's efforts to guide AI governance to the UAE's strategic AI partnerships amid global tensions, this week’s edition of News That Caught Our Eye delves into the pivotal role of AI in shaping global policies, alliances, and governance.

A chatbot can assist policymakers, the public, and researchers in accessing a wide array of existing research, legislative and regulatory documents, case studies, and reports, enabling us to craft policies that are informed by a comprehensive understanding of historical context and current best practices.

Human decisions will drive the deployment of technology in policymaking, for good and ill. Better policymaking should make lives better for humans, which is why we should listen to them.

With a commitment to embracing technology and leveraging constituent data, Congress has a promising opportunity to modernize its operations and rejuvenate democracy, fostering greater engagement and trust in the political process.

In a Q&A with New America, Audrey Tang and Beth Simone Noveck discuss the international landscape of civic participation, and the digital infrastructure we need to support collaborative, inclusive, and democratic communities.

Through this Friday, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is inviting submissions for a spring 2025 symposium focused on how institutions can prepare for the potential impacts of AI on democratic freedoms.

Today, we're excited to announce the launch of the newly updated AI Localism Repository—a curated resource designed to help local governments, researchers, and citizens understand how AI is being governed at the state, city, or community level.

In the news this week: US seizes Russian websites used in bid to influence elections; how AI is transforming farming; and the latest stories about technology companies integrating AI in education. Learn more in this edition of News That Caught Our Eye, our weekly list of stories about AI and democracy.

Under the proposed rules, broadcasters would be required to disclose instances where AI-generated content is used in political advertisements that appear on television and on the radio. 

Our news roundup this week explores how the California AI bill is dividing silicon valley with many tech giants calling it a threat, how police have begun using AI to write incident reports, Colorado county employing AI for emergency communications, and much more. It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

This week’s stories delve into AI's role in policymaking, from reshaping public-interest investment strategies to modernizing Congress to improving economic forecasting. Other stories cover new efforts to use AI to automate scientific discovery and social science experiments. Learn more in this edition of News That Caught Our Eye, our curated list of the latest research and news around AI and democracy.

Our news roundup this week explores how public institutions are using AI to support public defenders in Kentucky, bolster training for public servants in California, and help New York City improve services from transportation to education. Other stories look at what governments need to do to guard against the risks of AI’s applications in the UK’s healthcare system, Spain’s gender violence program, and to rein in election misinformation spread by Twitter's chatbot. Read these stories and more in our latest edition of News That Caught Our Eye.

OpenAI anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade and is dedicating resources to align AI with human values. This move highlights the need to prevent AI from undermining democracy and emphasizes the role of philosophy, social sciences, and public input in shaping AI’s impact. Explore how AI could shape our democratic landscape.

A new resource from the Inter-Parliamentary Union collects AI use cases aimed at lawmaking bodies. While the collection showcases how AI can help parliaments complete existing administrative tasks more efficiently, it could be strengthened by adding ideas for how AI can support lawmakers in conducting large-scale online engagements with constituents, and examples of how legislative research services can leverage AI to improve evidence-gathering and evaluation.

Election officials have the authority and responsibility to ensure voters have access to the best possible tools for making informed decisions. So why isn’t AI part of the equation?

In the news this week: New research insights on how we can better understand and address democratic backsliding, how scientists are using AI to improve weather forecasting and the detection of wildfires, Brazil’s $4 billion plan to build the nation’s AI industry, and much more. It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

The GovLab is supporting New Jersey’s AI Task Force in using the online engagement tool All Our Ideas to ask workers for their opinions on how AI will impact the Garden State’s workforce.

GovLab Fellow Dino Cantu recounts her experience creating The Encuentro Nacional para una Agenda de Seguridad y Justicia which aims to address Mexico's judicial system's deep-rooted issues by facilitating collaborative forums.

This week, The GovLab and the Burnes Center for Social Change published two new resources aimed at leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to tackle pressing public challenges. 

Co-authored with Citizens Foundation, the report describes a novel problem solving method that combines the collective wisdom of human experts and the computational power of AI agents to enhance and scale up public problem-solving processes.

This week’s edition covers OpenAI's efforts to counter foreign influence operations, the role of AI in California’s education and government sectors, and the public’s growing support for AI in government services. Also, Google’s new Overviews feature faces a rocky rollout; media organizations push back. In our 19th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

NEW PAPER: John Wihbey argues that as AI increasingly mediates the information domains that shape public knowledge, it risks producing an "epistemically anachronistic" public sphere, stifling the emergence of new ideas and limiting democratic deliberation. While AI has the potential to enhance our informational ecosystem, he argues, there preserving space for organic human insight and discourse.

Danish researchers conducted a large-scale experiment with 80k people during the country’s general election in 2022. Algorithmic sorters on news websites impacted both the quality, exposure, and diversity of news presented, raising concerns about political agenda-setting.

New Horizon-funded EU research project aims to create more inclusive and participatory democratic deliberation through the use of AI-enabled text simplification. The research showcases the positive potential for using AI to strengthen democracy. In my view, the importance of the work lies in the rejection of outdated and discriminatory notions of "citizen competence" that have deemed the public incapable of effective participation.

EU data privacy experts disagree on ChatGPT, while the VA deploys AI to better support veterans. At the city level, Colorado Springs and San Jose test out new use-cases for AI in improving constituents’ information access. In our 18th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

The Burnes Center’s Jay Kemp announces Bot Beat, an independent podcast tracking the stories of journalists harnessing AI in their reporting. They’ll keep you updated on possibilities & pitfalls for AI in reporting – keying you in on how these emerging tools could affect your work.

Audrey Tang features in TIME, AI continues to eat large amounts of power, and OpenAI and Google step on some toes. In our 17th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

This week, the Senate AI Working Group released a report calling for a wide range of AI investments in AI research to help the United States improve its competitiveness with China.

Healthcare policymakers from HHS to Congress consider responsible AI incorporation into the existing care process. Additionally, the U.S. and China prepare to talk AI concerns in Geneva, the UK makes one of its evaluation tools open-source, and TikTok gets transparent with creators’ AI-generated content. In our 16th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

While OpenAI and Microsoft dive deeper into election and government security work, Congress continues to take a tentative approach to drafting regulations. Furthermore, new grants fund AI research and the EU publishes the final text of its adopted AI Act. In our 15th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

In the Open Data Policy Lab's new report, the team provides a framework and recommendations to support open data providers and other interested parties in making open data “ready” for generative AI.

On April 17, 2024, during AI Week, The GovLab and UrbanAI hosted a webinar on AI localism, titled "Empowering Communities through Digital Self-Determination". The session aimed at investigating how AI governance can be localized to better serve community-specific needs.

Today, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Mike Rounds (R-SD), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) announced the introduction of the AI Grand Challenges Act calling for NSF to create $1 million dollar prize-backed challenge competitions designed to solve public problems with AI.

From national security guidelines to the new AI Grand Challenges Act, highlights of this week’s Rebooting Democracy news include Ohio using AI to streamlining its administrative code and insights into urban cooling efforts in Raleigh. We also delve into legal actions by the ACLU and discussions on AI's future roles in government and the private sector. In our 14th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy. If you have an item that we should include in this news download, or a source we should review for future items, please email me at [email protected].

In my review of Ethan Mollick's "Co-Intelligence," I delight in the author's imaginative conversations with AI personas, reminiscent of invisible childhood friends who inspire creativity. I appreciate Mollick's engaging exploration of AI as a thinking companion. Check out my review of Co-Intelligence.

In a live training for InnovateUS, our partner training program in AI, data and innovation skills for public professionals, best-selling author of thirteen books Steven Johnson introduces NotebookLM, Google's free AI-powered research and writing tool. Johnson explains how NotebookLM's "source-grounding" approach allows users to navigate and explore complex documents or archives of information and discussions uses for government.

From the UAE to Buffalo, New York, this week’s news download on AI, democracy and governance covers the power grid, the copyright office, and data protection, and more. In our 13th edition, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

The Supreme Court of Singapore and Supreme Court of India hold a joint conference on technology, with fascinating speeches on AI and the rule of law. Also, everyone from the federal government to journalists to private organizations tries to figure out how to detect audio deep fakes – and public sector workers struggle to use AI in service delivery. In the 12th edition of our weekly news download, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

As Taiwan’s first-ever Digital Minister, Audrey Tang was asked to write their own job description – and wrote a poem. In this opinion piece, Jay Kemp argues the “job description” is also a guide for using generative AI to enhance digital democracy and heal online deliberation.

MyCareer.NJ.Gov exemplifies the critical role that public entities can play in harnessing AI for public good. As commercial websites and social media platforms proliferate, often spreading misinformation, it is increasingly important for trusted public institutions to provide reliable, data-driven resources. By using AI to empower informed decision-making, New Jersey is setting an example for other states to follow.

AI use-cases in government are all over the news this week — while the UN General Assembly, the Energy Secretary, and researchers explore the positives, Israel and Elon Musk show us the dark side of AI’s potential. Plus, check out some new studies released on generative AI for policy advising, conspiracy unraveling, and issue-based debating. In the 11th edition of our weekly news download, we continue to highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

While there is a great deal of apprehension about AI and its impact on the workforce, public servants who embrace innovation and continuous learning can use the technology to deliver more efficient and effective services that better meet the needs of the residents they serve. Read a transcript of Rick Maher, Seth Harris, and Beth Simone Noveck on this conversation.

White House guidance for the use of AI by federal agencies is out! Also, new pro-democracy tools, the energy transition, and ethicizing the news ecosystem… It’s the 10th (!) edition of our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

This week in the news: generative AI on the Hill, at the campaign front lines, and in higher education! It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

This week in the news: the EU AI Act, India changes its mind (again) and Gemini won’t answer your election questions! It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

This week in the news: the Pulitzers, the State of the Union, and International Women’s Day! It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

The GovLab and the Burnes Center for Social Change developed these recommendations, with the support of Democracy Fund Voice, as a roadmap for philanthropic or government organizations to make urgently-need investments to combat attempts to subvert and cast doubt on the fairness of U.S. elections

To increase civic trust, we need to know what we mean by it and how to measure it, which turns out to be a challenging exercise. Toward that end, The GovLab at New York University and the New York Civic Engagement Commission joined forces to catalogue and identify methodologies to quantify and understand the nuances of civic trust. 

The ability for AI transcription to lay bare how we talk to one another can help us to democratize formal as well as informal conversations, creating new opportunities to reveal biases and bad behavior and, when used well, create incentives for better deliberation. The self-reflection enabled by AI has the potential to revolutionize all forms of group conversation from parliaments to town halls to boardrooms with AI serving as a mirror to our interactions, helping us to instill deliberative processes that are fairer, more inclusive and more productive.

An interesting week in the news: Gemini stumbles, Reddit makes waves, India confronts Google, and Sal Khan confronts his own obsolescence. It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

In this post, I explore how the same government-is-the-problem-not-the-solution narrative about guns has direct parallels to the conversation unfolding about artificial intelligence. To reduce gun violence, advocates need to take on the liberty argument, argues Jonathan Metzl in What We've Become. Similarly, if we want to realize the benefits of AI, we have to address and debunk the increasingly pervasive and pernicious doomerist narrative that is creating a false antinomy between AI risks and AI ethics.

This week in the news: Sora’s launch, gun control deep fakes, and AI updates from Estonia to Singapore. It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

In an year marked by escalating online hate, a presidential election, and the dismantling of online safety teams, the adoption of AI-powered solutions could be pivotal. Can advanced AI provide the nuanced, scalable defense our digital communities desperately need against the tide of extremism and disinformation?

Join us for a book talk with Urs Gasser as he delves into his latest work, "Guardrails." In this talk, Gasser will explore the ways in which societal norms shape our decision-making processes in an era saturated with data and dominated by rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence. 

This week in the news: semiconductor chips, Pakistani elections, and a lot of updates from the federal space. It’s our weekly news download, where we highlight the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

As part of its series on AI and Democracy, the Brennan Center for Justice published a new essay on AI and Congress, covering both the risks and, importantly, illustrating the opportunities to leverage AI to "make legislatures more effective, more representative, more efficient, and more transparent." The time to act is now.

By embracing responsible use of AI and safeguarding security and privacy, Congress has the opportunity both to modernize and speed up its operations but also to deepen its connection with the American people, ensuring that the legislative process becomes more transparent, efficient, and, above all, responsive to the people Congress serves.

A big week in the news! Read further for this week on the stories, research, and innovations that illuminate how AI is impacting governance and democracy.

Week #2 of our weekly news download. We created this resource to highlight the updates, research, and change-making that caught our eye, stories related to ways in which AI is transforming governance and deepening democracy.

Welcome to our weekly news download. We created this resource to highlight the updates, research, and change-making that caught our eye, stories related to ways in which AI is transforming governance and deepening democracy.

POPVOX Foundation, which supports research, innovation and initiatives that promote better and more engaged governance, especially lawmaking, has released a pathbreaking new report on AI and legislatures.

View the full conversation with Vint Cerf, co-creator of the Internet and Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, about the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy. Moderated by John Battelle, Senior Fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change and a Professor of Practice of Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media and Design.

Despite having funded the creation of the Internet, the public sector lagged in its adoption. Now government can lead in the use of artificial intelligence for public good. Because of its power to sort, organize, and summarize vast amounts of data and text, AI has the potential to make government more effective, efficient, and responsive.

AI is making it faster and easier to identify innovative strategies to combat election-related violence and election subversion and strengthen our democracy.

My take on a pioneering and important new study that sheds light on the practical potential and the urgent need to use AI to create more meaningful constituent communication and rebuild trust in Congress. #congress #artificialintelligence #chatbot

On Thursday, November 16, the Burnes Center for Social Change and the GovLab hosted Sir Geoff Mulgan,  Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL), for a thought-provoking lecture on “Combining Human and Machine Intelligence to Enhance Democracy” as part of the "Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI" series. Mulgan discussed the challenges facing contemporary democracies and proposed innovative solutions to steer them into a more responsive and effective future.

Welcome to our end of year 5 x 5 curation of books published in 2023: five books across five domains! 

Every week, the Living Library, and its newsletter The Digest, curate the most up-to-date knowledge on governance and data innovation.  As we bid farewell to 2023, we took a moment to select five books across five domains (5X5).

The Unlocking Literacy project using artificial intelligence to tap our collective intelligence. We are engaging diverse communities to ask why change is so hard, what's working, and how we can increase reading proficiency.

In the rapidly evolving technological landscape of the 21st century, the role of government in serving its citizens is undergoing a profound transformation

At almost 20,000 words, President Biden’s behemoth executive order on AI mandates a laundry list of actions from federal departments and agencies.  While there’s a lot to like here, we have to ask: are we focusing so much on the risks that we are failing to invest in and maximize the potential for AI to do good? 

Are we focusing so much on the risks that we are failing to invest in and maximize the potential for AI to do good

Google.org is providing $2 million in funding to help InnovateUS expand digital skills training to more than 50,000 government workers across at least 15 states.

The term “data collaborative” refers to a new form of collaboration, beyond the public–private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors ,  in particular companies in the private sector, exchange their data to create public value. In this sense, data collaboratives are emerging as a powerful tool to enable data flows and unleash the full potential of data in addressing societal challenges. However, designing and implementing effective data collaboratives can be complex and challenging.

This blog is the first in a series that will be published weekly, dedicated to exploring innovative anticipatory methods for migration policy. Over the coming weeks, we will delve into various aspects of these methods, delving into their value, challenges, taxonomy, and practical applications. 

Join us for the KluzPrize for PeaceTech 2023 on Wednesday, September 20, 2023, from 3:30–7:00 pm—Location: Midtown, New York City. If you want to register, please send us an email to [email protected].

Kluz Ventures proudly launches the Kluz Prize for PeaceTech 2023, an initiative designed to celebrate, recognize, and propel the groundbreaking use of cutting-edge technologies in fostering peace, reducing conflict, and safeguarding human dignity and universal human rights across the globe.

It’s July once again, and, many people in the Northern Hemisphere are seeking a break from the daily grind and seeking for readings to stay up to date and refresh their knowledge.

New research by The GovLab offers recommendations for government in procuring AI. 

Over the course of eight weeks, participants will learn about the ways they can re-use data in a city context to pursue goals in the public’s interest.

Generating access to data for public good remains a significant challenge across the world, including in Africa. As African countries continue to transform digitally, they too must develop new policies to ensure data is managed responsibly.

Generating access to data for public good remains a significant challenge across the world, including in Africa. As African countries continue to transform digitally, they too must develop new policies to ensure data is managed responsibly.

Civic trust is vital for people to engage with the institutions and community around them. Yet, there is no consensus on how to establish it or how to measure it. How can open data better enable and facilitate civic trust? To what extent can an organization measure civic trust through open data?

“A Data Collaborative Case Study: NYC Recovery Data Partnership” is a new report from the Open Data Policy Lab that explores an innovative approach to data collaboration to both describe current practices and provide recommendations to practitioners in the field.

As the year comes to a close, The GovLab’s Data Program is taking a look back at some of the year’s most intriguing books on data, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence curated throughout the year by The Living Library.

As an action-research center, The GovLab's Data Program's goal is to unlock and advance the re-use of data to empower decision-makers...

As 2022 draws to a close, we take this opportunity to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished this year and how we might build on our work in 2023 and beyond. In what follows below, we summarize key activities according to the four pillars of the Third Wave of Open Data.

Today, The GovLab is proud to announce the release of the “PeaceTech Topic Map: A Research Base for an Emerging Field,” an overview of the key themes and challenges of technologies used by and created for peace efforts. 

“AI Localism in Practice: Examining How Cities Govern AI” serves as a primer for policymakers and practitioners to learn about current governance practices and inspire their own work in the field.

How we balance the risks and opportunities of AI is shaping up as one of the defining questions of our era. This article presents ten principles to help systematise our approach to AI Localism. 

Even though scientists, research institutes, and other technology professionals have worked for years on artificial intelligence, such knowledge is primarily concentrated and focused on specialists. The Literacy blog discusses local-level efforts to educate the public.

The Blue Economy is an expansive concept. In the words of the World Bank, it is “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods, and jobs while preserving the health of the ocean ecosystem.” Yet, meaningfully using these resources can require information and insights that organizations often do not have available.

Environment-related data (ERD) encompasses numerous kinds of data across a wide range of sectors. It can best be defined as data related to any element of the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) Framework. If leveraged effectively, this wealth of data could help society establish a sustainable economy, take action against climate change, and support environmental justice - as recognized recently by French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions Michael R. Bloomberg when establishing the Climate Data Steering Committee.

AI must be used responsibly and must strive toward eliminating discrimination and structural biases. The Laws and Policies Blog focuses on a range of local laws and enforcement policies that ensure that the use of AI mitigates the inevitable risks that come with it.

Though researched widely, the use of AI is relatively nascent in practice. The Principles and Rights blog investigates new rules and regulations drafted at a city level to ensure that AI is used responsibly and legitimately.

Looking for a data-driven and data research program recommended beach read? In this special edition, The GovLab releases its summer…

Resources to help public institutions navigate the transition to technology-enabled remote and hybrid work covering performance and change management, communication, trust and organizational culture, administrative and operational aspects, recruitment, onboarding, mental health, professional development, creating ergonomic workspaces, and mitigating security risks.

In February 2021, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its partners launched AI Ethics: Global Perspectives. This free, online course is designed for a global audience with the goal of raising awareness of the societal impacts of AI and associated technologies. A year and a half later, the course has grown to 38 modules, contributed by 40 faculty members representing over 20 countries. Our conversations with faculty members and our experiences with the course modules have yielded a wealth of knowledge about AI ethics. In keeping with the values of openness and transparency that underlie the course, we summarized these insights into ten learnings to share with a broader audience. In what follows, we outline our key lessons from experts around the world.   

In 2021, in support of the US House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, The GovLab organized two online advisory sessions to inform the Committee’s process of developing recommendations on evidence-based lawmaking. The goal of these “Smarter Crowdsourcing” roundtables was to discuss strategies to enable more effective use of evidence by Members and Committees in hearings and other legislative processes in the US Congress.

As members of Congress for a combined nearly 30 years, the two of us, a psychologist from the Pacific Northwest and a lawyer and journalist from Oklahoma, weighed, debated, and voted hundreds of times on energy policy, agriculture subsidies, transportation funding, approval of submarines and jet fighters, foreign assistance programs, tax policies, and the many other issues that come before the federal legislature, almost all of them outside our areas of expertise and experience. Like most members of Congress, we were generalists, well-versed in a few of the things we voted on, but otherwise dependent on the knowledge and advice of others. We staffed our offices with the best researchers we could find, but with so many issues and so few staff members, we were in constant need of more expert input. It generally came from specialized congressional committees and the experts they summoned.

The Governance Lab (The GovLab), an action research center at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with the support of the Knight Foundation, today announced the launch of The #Data4Covid19 Review. Through this initiative, The GovLab will evaluate how select countries used data to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This piece is a supplement to The GovLab’s 2021 Year in Review blog, which provides an overview of some of the major research conducted by…

On September 15, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings hosted a webinar on how artificial intelligence can reduce government fraud. Brookings Vice President and Director of Governance Studies, Darrell West hosted Beth Simone Noveck, director of The GovLab, along with Melissa Koide, CEO and Director of FinReg Lab. 

Transparency is integral to ensuring that cities and states disclose how they use and source AI and algorithms. The Transparency blog looks at informational registries and bans on black box algorithm use to increase transparency and legitimacy of public AI use.

In this blog, the Data Program provides a curation of tools that we’ve developed over the years to enable systematic, sustainable and responsible re-use of data - i.e. data stewardship.

Moderated by Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of The GovLab, Dr. Francis Obare and Dr. Chinwe Ochu discussed the current state of the pandemic in Africa, the use of data in their respective regions, and how data can be used to combat the pandemic. 

ABUJA, NIGERIA—On the 25th of June 2021, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), in collaboration with the College of Medicine of University of Lagos (CMUL) and partners convened the inception meeting of the #Data4COVID19 Challenge in Nigeria.

On Wednesday, April 21st, the coordinators of AI Ethics: Global Perspectives hosted a live panel to discuss and debate topics presented in this month’s course modules. Panelists answered questions such as: What is the role of social media platforms in moderating content online? How can organizations implement ethical AI practices across their work? What are some ethical considerations that must guide the design, deployment and use of social robots in care settings? How can we learn from music and physics to investigate the fundamental "relativity" of AI?

On February 24, 2021, The GovLab, GAIEC, R/AI, IEAI, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering hosted the first panel discussion for AI Ethics: Global Perspectives, to accompany the release of four new modules in the month of February and enable deeper dialogue on the issues surfaced in each.

On February 22nd, the leaders in five cities in Africa - Accra (Ghana), Bahir Dar (Ethiopia), Kampala (Uganda), Kano (Nigeria), and Mutare (Zimbabwe) - announced the 12 winners to the Africa Multi-City Challenge. These cities with support of the United Nations Development Programme and The Governance Lab (our organization) turned to their collective citizens for help in tackling three big challenges: improving waste generation and management, building urban resilience in slums and informal settlements, and growing and supporting their informal economies. Those winners, selected from almost 300 detailed and practical proposals for solving these problems, such as the “Zero Bola Project,” which seeks to eliminate waste dumps in Kano over a span of five years, using engineered landfills designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50%.

BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, February 23, 2021 – Today, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering released a report, “The Power of Virtual Communities,” which examines the role online groups play in creating opportunities for people to build new kinds of meaningful communities they often could not form in real space. 

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, February 3, 2021 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab), NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Global AI Ethics Consortium (GAIEC), Center for Responsible AI @ NYU (R/AI), and Technical University of Munich (TUM) Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) jointly launched a free, online course, AI Ethics: Global Perspectives, on February 1, 2021.

Featuring practical advice from global changemakers, the 12-part course, “Solving Public Problems,” gives everyone the tools to take a mission-driven project from idea to implementation.

Age is not an impediment to helping improve your community. High school students make up two of the ten citizen teams selected to participate in the Multi-City Challenge Mexico 2020 (MCC), an initiative where citizens and the governments of Hermosillo, Reynosa, San Nicolás, San Pedro, and Torreón are co-creating solutions to address urban challenges. The students were selected among 237 proposals received to solve the ten urban problems of the participating municipalities.

Today, the Open Data Policy Lab is excited to announce a first ever online executive course on Data Stewardship: Developing a Data Reuse Strategy for Solving Public Problems to give leaders in the public sector, private sector, and civil institutions the skills they need to address today’s challenges with data.

Remote deliberations with three “mini-publics” featuring data holders and policymakers, representatives of civic rights and advocacy organizations, and New Yorkers from across the five boroughs yielded actionable recommendations to guide the data-driven response to COVID-19 and other emerging threats.

The GovLab and AFD are now welcoming scholars, practitioners, and interested parties in the innovation, technology, and development space to provide feedback on a semi-finalized version of the position paper, Emerging Uses of Technology for Development: A New Intelligence Paradigm. 

If data is the new oil, why isn’t it flowing? For almost two decades, data management in fields such as government, healthcare, finance, and research has aspired to achieve a state of data liquidity, in which data can be reused where and when it is needed.

In this edition, to recognize and honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we have updated our previous curation of literature on Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS)—the principle that Indigenous peoples should be able to control the data collected by and about them, to determine how and by whom it is accessed, stored, and used. These pieces discuss data practices and methodologies that reflect Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, cultures, and worldviews. 

The Governance Lab (The GovLab), an action research center at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, announced the creation of The Data Assembly. Beginning in New York City, the effort will explore how communities perceive the risks and benefits of data re-use for COVID-19. 

Today, The GovLab is  excited to launch a new platform which seeks to monitor, analyze and guide how AI is being governed in cities around the world: AI Localism. AI Localism refers to the actions taken by local decision-makers to address the use of AI within a city or community.

Adolescence is a unique stage of life. The brain undergoes rapid development; individuals face new experiences, relationships, and environments. These events can be exciting, but they can also be a source of instability and hardship.

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, June 24, 2020 — The Governance Lab (The GovLab), an action research center at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, announced the creation of The Data Assembly....

The piece is supplemented by a crowdsourced listing of Data-Driven Efforts to Address Racial Inequality. NOTES The GovLab developed this living reflection document with diverse input from our network to help identify the opportunities, risks, challenges, and lessons about the use of data to make racial inequalities more visible and the ways it may be […]

By Sam DeJohn, Anirudh Dinesh, and Dane Gambrell As COVID-19 changes how we work, governments everywhere are experimenting with new ways to adapt and continue legislative operations under current physical restrictions. From city councils to state legislatures and national parliaments, more public servants are embracing and advocating for the use of new technologies to convene, deliberate, and […]

The belief that we are living in a data age—one characterized by unprecedented amounts of data, with unprecedented potential—has  become mainstream. We regularly read phrases such as “data is the most valuable commodity in the global economy” or that data provides decision-makers with an “ever-swelling flood of information.” Without doubt, there is truth in such […]

The Atlas of Inequality is a research initiative led by scientists at the MIT Media Lab and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It is a project within the larger Human Dynamics research initiative at the MIT Media Lab...

This week, as part of the Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C), the GovLab and UNICEF launched a new case study series to provide insights on promising practice as well as barriers to realizing responsible data for children. Drawing upon field-based research and established good practice, RD4C aims to highlight and support responsible handling of […]

This blog post was written by Kathryn Kohn and originally appeared in the Federation of American Scientists blog on March 18, 2020. Today, the Federation of American Scientists, The Governance Lab at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, and the State of New Jersey Office of Innovation launched a free interactive tool to help answer the public’s questions on COVID-19 virus in English […]

Today, in response to the growing human tragedy caused by the spread of COVID-19, concerned individuals and organizations from around the world launched a call for action aimed at rapidly bolstering society’s ability to leverage data to respond to the current and future pandemics.  Read and sign the Call for Action here.  In particular, seven […]

New Yorkers face many problems in their daily lives. Whether it’s public health or public transit, residents have many concerns about the place they call home. The question many policymakers face, then, is how to identify the most urgent issues for the public in an open, participatory manner and mobilize the resources needed to solve […]

By Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young, and Michelle Winowatan This article was originally published in Data & Policy, the peer-reviewed, open access venue dedicated to the potential of data science to address important policy challenges. As data grows increasingly prevalent in our economy, it is increasingly clear, too, that tremendous societal value can be […]

Brooklyn, New York, February 27, 2020 — Today, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University Tandon School of Engineering has opened the call for Mexican municipalities to apply to participate in its Multi-City Challenge 2020, a program that aims to solve urban problems by partnering with the people most affected by these problems […]

This press release was originally published on on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In Inaugural Issue, Pioneers Look at the Development and Future of Digital Democracy New York, NY, February 25, 2020 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced the inaugural issue of Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV), a new interdisciplinary open access journal on […]

BROOKLYN, New York, February 11, 2020 — The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Bertelsmann Foundation have partnered to launch the “Future of Work” domain of The 100 Questions Initiative, an effort to identify the most important societal questions for which greater access to data and data science methods […]

In late 2019, The GovLab and UNICEF launched Responsible Data for Children (RD4C), an initiative providing guidance, tools, and leadership to support the responsible handling of data for and about children. We shared the first outputs from the initiative in November, including an annotated collection of Selected Readings on RD4C, a report synthesizing lessons learned […]

The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to announce the launch of CrowdLaw for Congress (congress.crowd.law) — a free, online course and resource kit including training videos, case studies and a “playbook” of practical strategies showcasing how and why legislatures are using technology to engage the public in lawmaking The initiative, […]

The GovLab at NYU Tandon, the European Commission, and the International Organisation on Migration launch public online voting for 100 Questions Initiative CAIRO, Monday, January 20, 2020 — The Governance Lab at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and its partners released the most pressing questions on migration that could be answered leveraging data […]

To impeach or not to impeach a President stirs people’s passions but it is also a highly complex legal issue. What the Founding Fathers would have made of Donald Trump’s soliciting of help from a foreign government is a question challenging enough to have driven the House Judiciary Committee to seek testimony from four specialists […]

BROOKLYN, New York, December 10, 2019 — The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University Tandon School of Engineering announced the re-launch of the Multi-City Challenge program, an effort to help cities and their residents collaboratively design solutions to urgent public problems. The initiative, supported by the Tinker Foundation, and in collaboration with Consejo […]

By Beth Simone Noveck This article was originally published in Communications of the ACM. Science and technology have progressed exponentially, making it possible for humans to live longer, healthier, more creative lives. The explosion of Internet and mobile phone technologies have increased trade, literacy, and mobility.11 At the same time, life expectancy for the poor has […]

This article was originally published  on November 25, 2019 in Data & Policy, the peer-reviewed, open access venue dedicated to the potential of data science to address important policy challenges, by Andrew J. Zahuranec and Stefaan Verhulst Over his accomplished career, Jean-Claude Burgelman has served as a pioneer in identifying societal and technological trends that have the potential to transform […]

Thirty years ago today, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is now the most widely ratified treaty in the world. The world has achieved enormous progress in achieving the treaty’s goals, but new threats have emerged. Today’s children are quantified to an unprecedented degree. In our […]

By Matt Ryan, Senior Fellow, The GovLab Beth Simone Noveck, Director, The GovLab Peter Baeck, Head of the Center for Collective Intelligence Design, Nesta Around the globe there is increasing recognition that the traditional ways of solving public problems are insufficient for the challenges of the 21st century.  Political leaders, policy makers and service providers at […]

By Andrew J. Zahuranec, Michelle Winowatan, and Stefaan Verhulst Five years ago, the United Nations General Assembly made achieving gender equality a Sustainable Development Goal, a global priority to achieve by 2030. Today, with only a decade remaining, the need for high-quality data to measure progress is more important than ever. The lack of gender-disaggregated […]

By Marta Poblet — Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, Pompeu Casanovas — La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel — Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain   In May 1989, Tim Berners-Lee shared a paper with colleagues at CERN that proposed “hypertext” as a solution to address the problem of “information loss.” As he […]

Around the world, public leaders are seeking new ways to better understand the needs of their citizens, and subsequently improve governance, and how we solve public problems. The approaches proposed toward changing public engagement tend to focus on leveraging two innovations.

This article was written by Stefaan G. Verhulst, co-founder of The GovLab, for Apolitical.  “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the questions, and only five minutes finding the answers,” is a famous aphorism attributed to Albert Einstein. Behind this quote is an important insight about human […]

This article was written by Beth Simone Noveck and Rod Glover, Professor and Director, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University. It was originally published on The Conversation. Around the world, the most informed and effective public servants are changing the way they develop policy and services. Australian public servants are eager to do the same, but their […]

This article was written by Maria Katsonis, Research Editor, The Mandarin. It was originally published on The Mandarin on August 20, 2019. There is a pervasive sense that governments are not doing as well as they should to solve our biggest policy problems. This failure to meet our most pressing challenges with yesterday’s public sector toolkit is […]

This article was written by Beth Simone Noveck and Jason Williams-Bellamy. This is the second in a series by the Governance Lab on training 21st century public sector leaders

When Brooklyn’s future leaders want to figure out how to grow the local economy, they won’t need to rely on intuition. Instead, they can turn to insights generated from “circular data.” Data about how pedestrians move through public spaces. Data about when and where Brooklyn’s streets become choked with traffic. Data about how others use the spaces around them.

By Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Young, and Andrew J. Zahuranec When Brooklyn’s future leaders want to figure out how to grow the local economy, they won’t need to rely on intuition. Instead, they can turn to insights generated from “circular data.” Data about how pedestrians move through public spaces. Data about when and where Brooklyn’s streets 

Yesterday, February 28, 2019, dozens of civic leaders, civil servants, and students gathered at New York University’s new building in downtown Madrid to hear leaders from Spain’s largest municipalities discuss the social and equitable challenges created by the housing market pressures in their respective cities. The GovLab Madrid and NYU Madrid co-hosted the event, titled […]

Yesterday on February 12, 2019, The GovLab’s Co-founder and Chief Research & Development Officer, Stefaan Verhulst, appeared before the New York City Council Committee on Technology to testify on the value of properly leveraging and sharing data to tackle the multitude of 21st century problems. The full content of Verhulst’s testimony follows below, and can […]

New Online Toolkit Allows City Policymakers to Leverage Their Most Valuable Asset Today, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and the Bertelsmann Foundation launched a new website to accompany an initiative that helps city governments innovate, address public challenges, and improve people’s lives. The People-Led Innovation toolkit provides […]

2018 will probably be remembered as the bust of the blockchain hype. Yet even as crypto currencies continue to sink in value and popular interest, the potential of using blockchain technologies to achieve social ends remains important to consider but poorly understood. In 2019, business will continue to explore blockchain for sectors as disparate as […]

Reposted from Forbes, December 9, 2018 Today is International Anti-Corruption Day, an annual commemoration of passage of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption fifteen years ago. In honor of the occasion, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has published an important, practical and prescriptive report with recommendations for every sector of society from government to individuals on innovative and effective approaches to […]

By Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew J. Zahuranec Four Shifts and Innovations in Sharing and Leveraging Private Assets and Expertise for the Public Good For years, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have promised to help governments do more for less. Yet, the discussion and experimentation surrounding PPPs often focus on outdated models and narratives, and the field of […]

Data Collaboratives are a new form of collaboration, beyond the public-private partnership model, in which participants from different sectors — including private companies, research institutions, and government agencies — can exchange data to help solve public problems. They range from the use of telecom data to inform urban planning to intelligence products illuminating economic trends developed with proprietary financial […]

By Vishala Pariag and Kajol Char. This article originally appeared on Politics for Tomorrow. On July 12th 2018, the GovLab and Politics for Tomorrow convened a global online conference, which marked the first in a series of now-quarterly online meetings. The purpose of these conferences is to examine the current state of public innovation training. Hosted by Professor Beth […]

Organization Completes Fifth Year of Service and Looks to Expand Reach, Impact This press release was originally posted by the NYU Tandon School of Engineering on September 26, 2018. BROOKLYN, New York, September 26, 2018 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering announced the formation of a Global Advisory […]

Exciting events are happening in the world of open data. This week, the GovLab is in Buenos Aires for several surrounding the International Open Data Conference (IODC). These events will serve as a showcase for all the advances and innovations that the field has made. Third Open Data Research Symposium Activities kicked off on September 25th with the 3rd […]

By Alexandra Shaw, Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index: Open Data 2018” provides an update to our previous Open Data installments: The GovLab Index: Open Data, (Updated and Expanded of 2013, The GovLab Index: Open Data […]

Public trust in the government remains near historic lows. Only 18% of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right.  The lack of trust extends to democracy as well as government: another study finds that one-quarter of millennials say that “choosing leaders through free elections is unimportant.” With the rise […]

Data Stewards: a new Role and Responsibility for an AI and Data Age This article by Stefaan Verhulst originally appeared in Medium on September 19, 2018. As data grows increasingly prevalent in our economy and society, it is increasingly clear, too, that tremendous value can be derived from reusing and combining previously separate data sets. Of […]

Designed for interested public officials, technologists, politicians and researchers, the CrowdLaw Communiqué features curated news…

Written by Vishala Pariag and Kajol Char In the latest edition of the GovLab’s Ideas Lunch series, Jeni Tennison, the CEO of the Open Data Institute, spoke about data and data portability as a source of innovation for public services. Tech-giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have been in the news recently over several […]

This article was originally published in Apolitical on July 27, 2018. Available online here. While many pay lip service to the aspiration of government of, for and with the people, few understand how participation can produce more than criticism and complaint. We live in a world beset with ever more complex urban and global challenges, […]

The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is pleased to host Jeni Tennison, CEO of the Open Data Institute, for its next Ideas Lunch, where she will discuss how data portability has been regulated in the United Kingdom and Europe, and what governments, businesses and people need to do to strike the balance […]

Today, the GovLab is pleased to share three resources examining how private data sources, when leveraged responsibly and collaboratively, can provide insights for addressing the challenges and opportunities of migration. As it stands, the UN estimates that about 258 million people across the globe live in a country other than the one in which they were born, […]

By Kezia Paladina, Alexandra Shaw, Michelle Winowatan, Stefaan Verhulst, and Andrew Young As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. Special […]

On March 13-17, 2018 The GovLab brought together two dozen crowdlaw experts from around the world to collaborate on developing new ways to include more and more diverse opinions and expertise at every stage of the law- and policy-making process. The convening was held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s famed Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy. This post […]

  Open Data Day Today marks the return of Open Data Day, a worldwide moment to showcase, share and celebrate the many advances we’ve made in open data — and to look ahead to inroads and innovations on the horizon. In celebration of this annual occasion, The GovLab has compiled its open data resources in […]

Originally published in Forbes on February 20, 2018. Read the article here. A review of Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, Matthew J. Salganik, Princeton University Press, 2017. 445 pp. The Promise of Research for Business Popular consumer web platforms use online controlled experiments known as A/B tests to compare the effect […]

The Open Governance Research eXchange (OGRX) began with a few ideas and a few key partners seeking to develop answers and solutions to an important question: How to make  governance innovation more evidence based by making key findings on what works and why more accessible? An ever-changing landscape not only requires innovation in how we […]

By Tracey Gyateng and Beth Simone Noveck. Posted originally in SSIR on January 24, 2018 Last November, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017 (HR 4174), and it looks slated to pass the Senate this year. In an era known for the absence of legislative consensus, this bipartisan bill […]

More and more people live in urban settings. At the same time, and often resulting from the growing urban population, cities worldwide are increasingly confronted with complex environmental, social, and economic shocks and stresses. When seeking to develop adequate and sustainable responses to these challenges, cities are realizing that traditional methods and existing resources often […]

By Michelle Winowatan, Andrew Young, and Stefaan Verhulst As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. This selection of readings is […]

New (Open Access) Book by Francois van Schalkwyk, Stefaan Verhulst, Gustavo Magalhaes, Juan Pane & Johanna Walker (eds): “The Social Dynamics of Open Data is a collection of peer reviewed papers presented at the 2nd Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS) held in Madrid, Spain, on 5 October 2016. Research is critical to developing a more rigorous and fine-combed […]

Cross-posted from Nature (vol 551) Nov 30, 2017 Beth Simone Noveck reviews Geoff Mulgan’s new book, Big Mind: How collective intelligence can change our world Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 14, Dana Lewis got used to hassle: using a portable glucose monitor to measure her blood sugar levels, and then calculating […]

Updated on February 13, 2019 Introduction The public is beginning to demand — and governments are beginning to provide — new opportunities for the engagement of citizens on an ongoing basis as collaborators in public problem-solving rather than merely as voters. Nowhere is the explosion in citizen participation accelerating more than in the context of lawmaking, […]

By Beth Noveck, Gabriella Capone and Victoria Alsina Re-Imagining Lawmaking With rates of trust in government at all-time lows, the legitimacy and effectiveness of traditional representative models of lawmaking, typically dominated by political party agendas and conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind largely closed doors, are called into question. But technology offers the […]

Yesterday, we launched in Washington DC our latest (open access) book on “Open Data in Developing Economies: Toward Building an Evidence Base on What Works and How“. Publisher African Minds “Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact […]

Introduction Recently, Pablo Soto Bravo, Madrid City Council Member, computer programmer and the city’s lead for public engagement, spoke at an event in New York on “Restoring Trust in Government” on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly. “Why should we trust government,” he asked, adding “the people don’t trust governments…they’re right not to […]

The GovLab is pleased to announce the launch of a new initiative seeking to assess the potential of blockchain technologies for social change, or “Blockchange.” With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, we will seek to: Map Blockchange practices as it relates to providing trusted digital identity, including an assessment of enabling challenges and risks; Identify […]

By Hannah Pierce and Stefaan Verhulst As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore and curate […]

This article was also published at this link on medium.com. On September 13th 2017, the GovLab hosted an online conference with participants representing six public institutions from around the world to learn about how they are using what we call “the technologies of expertise,” including expert and social networks and other “people analytics” software, to […]

BROOKLYN, New York – Today, The Governance Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering published a new report detailing how social media data and analytical expertise can solve pressing public problems. “The Potential of Social Media Intelligence to Improve People’s Lives: Social Media Data for Good,” developed with support from Facebook, Inc., also outlines […]

Finally, we highlight valuable directions for further research and experimentation in crowdlaw.

The GovLab and FBK Launch OD200 Italy, the First and Only Comprehensive Mapping of Open Data Use in Italy Are companies embracing the use of open government data? How, why and what data is being leveraged? To answer these questions, the GovLab started a project three years ago, Open Data 500, to map and assess — […]

Over the past eight weeks, The GovLab, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and Mexico’s Secretariat of the Civil Service (Secretaría de la Función Pública, or SFP), held a series of online conferences to generate new, actionable ideas in the fight against corruption in Mexico. Using The GovLab’s Smarter Crowdsourcing method, a collaborative […]

Innovative Action-Research Center Expands Communications Team to Amplify Its Work in Open Data and Open Governance The Governance Lab is pleased to announce that Timi Lewis has joined as Director of Communications. Timi will lead public relations, social media, digital media, and external engagement for the action-research center based at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. […]

New Report Provides Framework to Understand Evidence and Improve Future Open Data Initiatives; Expands Insights and Practices Gathered from 12 Case Studies of Developing Economies; Identifies 27 Success Factors in a Unique Periodic Table of Open Data; and Offers Recommendations BROOKLYN, New York –Today, The Governance Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering has […]

By Hannah Pierce and Audrie Pirkl Please find below the next installment in The GovLab Index series inspired by the Harper’s Index. Following the 2017 Collective Intelligence Conference, this installment highlights outcomes, impacts and trends related to efforts to tap into collective intelligence toward solving public problems. We begin with a selection of statistics across […]

By Natalia Adler (UNICEF) and Stefaan G. Verhulst (GovLab) How do you tackle the world’s most complex socio-economic problems at a time of big data? It is widely recognized today that using data can greatly improve decision-making, optimize operations, and lead to new insights to address increasingly complex problems such as migration, obesity, urbanization, climate […]

by Iryna Susha and Stefaan G. Verhulst Last week the CUNY College of Staten Island, NY welcomed participants in the Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o). This year’s dg.o conference hosted a keynote plenary panel titled “Data Collaboratives: How to Create Value from Data for Public Problem Solving?” The panel brought together academics […]

“Introducing the Smarter Crowdsourcing Against Corruption Initiative,” reposted from The Smarter Crowdsourcing Blog by Dinorah Cantu and Beth Simone Noveck The GovLab: “To identify and implement innovative approaches for fighting corruption, we at The Governance Lab (GovLab) are partnering with Mexico’s Secretaría de la Función Pública (Secretariat of the Civil Service) and the Inter-American Development Bank… […]

By Prianka Srinivasan, Robert Montano, Andrew Young, and Stefaan G. Verhulst As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the […]

Stefaan Verhulst (et al) in the Conversation: “In January 2015, heavy rains triggered unprecedented floods in Malawi. Over the next five weeks, the floods displaced more than 230,000 people and damaged over 64,000 hectares of land. Almost half the country was labelled a “disaster zone” by Malawi’s government. And as the humanitarian crisis unfolded, relief […]

By Thilo Klein (OECD- Paris21) and Stefaan Verhulst (The GovLab) Executive Summary: “New data sources from the private sector have enormous potential to complement and enhance official statistics by, for example, providing more timely data and developing new areas for analysis. The increasing number of research projects using this data underlines its potential. However, progress to […]

Saturday March 4, 2017 marks the 7th annual International Open Data Day — an event in which participants across the globe will “create local events that will use open data in their communities” with the idea of demonstrating its positive value. Over 322 events are currently planned across all 6 continents. This year’s event highlights four areas […]

Different countries have different models to govern and administer their open data activities.Ana Brandusescu, Danny Lämmerhirt and Stefaan Verhulst call for a systematic and comparative investigation of the different governance models for open data policy and publication. (cross posted from Open Knowledge International Blog) The Challenge An important value proposition behind open data involves increased […]

  The Governance Lab (the GovLab) is excited to announce the search for a talented communications professional to play a central role in helping translate and make relevant the various activities of the GovLab to a diverse and broad audience of practitioners, policy makers, academics, and the general public. Based at the NYU Tandon School […]

By Prianka Srinivasan, Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore […]

See Press Release Recent years have seen exponential growth in the amount of data being generated and stored around the world. There is increasing recognition that this data can play a key role in solving some of the most difficult public problems we face. However, much of the potentially useful data is currently privately held and […]

Curated by Robert Montano, Prianka Srinivasan, Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young It’s the season of predictions. As we usher in the new year, what will 2017 or 2070 be like? In our on-going attempt to identify the signal in the noise, we reviewed many annual forecasts and selected some of the most relevant to governance innovation. […]

Today, the GovLab is opening for peer review the remaining draft case studies from the Open Data for Developing Economies project, a collaboration with USAID, FHI 360’s Mobile Solutions Technical Assistance and Research (mSTAR) and the Web Foundation. The seven case studies being made available today follow the opening of the project’s final report and […]

The Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX) is a platform that seeks to identify, collect and share curated insights on new ways of solving public problems. It was created last year by the GovLab, World Bank Digital Engagement Evaluation Team and mySociety. Today, while more than 3000 representatives from more than 70 countries are gathering in Paris […]

Continuing the GovLab’s practice of seeking broad input on our work prior to formal publication, we are today opening the first batch of case studies from the Open Data for Developing Economies project for peer review. These case studies were developed in collaboration with USAID, FHI 360’s Mobile Solutions Technical Assistance and Research (mSTAR) and […]

Much of our work at the GovLab is premised on the idea that expertise is diffused throughout society, and when demands are matched by often-untapped expertise outcomes can be improved. It’s with that hypothesis in mind that we look to open the peer review process of our research, rather than relying on a ‘usual suspect’ […]

Reposted from IODC2016 (Spanish version) – by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Danny Lämmerhirt Key take-aways from the Measurement Action Track at IODC 2016 During the IODC 2016, the “Action Track: Measurement and Increasing Impact” sought to review the need and role of research for (scaling) open data practice and policy. The track was informed by the […]

By Robert Montano and Prianka Srinivasan Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index: Open Data” provides an update on our previous Open Data installment, and highlights global trends in Open Data and the release of public sector information. Previous installments of the Index include […]

Key Findings from Detailed Case Studies Around the World By Stefaan Verhulst, and Andrew Young Publisher: O’Reilly Released: September 2016 Open data has spurred economic innovation, social transformation, and fresh forms of political and government accountability in recent years, but few people understand how open data works. This comprehensive 459-page report, developed with support from Omidyar […]

On August 31st, twenty-four experts from ten countries joined two dozen public officials from four Latin American countries in the first of six two-hour online conversations. In this first session, we focused on identifying novel strategies that governments can use to understand what different groups within the population do and do not understand about Zika. […]

By Luis Loria  “People who think about social change in traditional political terms cannot begin to imagine the changes that lie ahead. Conventional reformers cast their programs in terms of national policies, or in terms of laws and central planning. But in the end, what will shape the future is a creative potential that inheres […]

Blog by Dan Chenok and Haynes Cooney initially posted here : “When a new Administration takes office in January 2017, a new set of leaders will drive the nation’s innovation agenda. These leaders can build on significant progress from previous administrations, overcome continued challenges in modernizing technology infrastructure, enact flexible policies and regulations, and build innovation leadership and […]

According to the World Health Organization, vectors, those living organisms that transmit diseases between humans or from animals to humans, such as mosquitos, account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases, causing more than 1 million deaths annually. Although than 2.5 billion people in over 100 countries are at risk of contracting Dengue alone, […]

REGISTER NOW On October 5th, researchers from around the world will gather in Madrid, Spain for the 2nd annual Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS). Registration for this year’s ODRS is now open. A pre-event for this year’s International Open Data Conference (IODC), ODRS will provide an opportunity to reflect critically on the findings of their completed research and […]

(Reposted from NYU Tandon School of Engineering’ Blog) Tandon’s Governance Lab partners with the United States Department of Agriculture to teach kids data science skills by doing projects to benefit Agriculture, Food Safety, and More For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted […]

By Andrew Young, Stefaan Verhulst, and Juliet McMurren This edition of the GovLab Selected Readings was developed as part of the Open Data for Developing Economies research project (in collaboration with WebFoundation, USAID and fhi360). Special thanks to Maurice McNaughton, Francois van Schalkwyk, Fernando Perini, Michael Canares and David Opoku for their input on an early draft. Please contact 

The goal of the Data Driven Criminal Justice Projects Coaching Program, supported by a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and organized by The GovLab, is to support the work of public entrepreneurs trying to improve people’s lives. The twenty teams and individuals participating are among those who are fighting to improve the […]

Repost from Jun 13, 2016 With a dramatic rise in the numbers in prison, there is bipartisan support – and a major White House push — for improving public safety while reducing incarceration and making our criminal justice system fairer. A key tool in the movement for criminal justice reform is the ability to use data […]

Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions […]

Recent years have witnessed something of a sea-change in the way humanitarian organizations consider and use data. Growing awareness of the potential of data has led to new enthusiasm and new, innovative applications that seek to respond to and mitigate crises in fresh ways. At the same time, it has become apparent that the potential […]

Reposted from NYU Tandon School of Engineering The School’s GovLab Is Helping Stakeholders Address Recidivism, Bail, Juveniles, and More With more than 2 million people incarcerated in the nation’s prisons – a marked increase over previous decades – there is bipartisan support for improving public safety while reducing incarceration and making the criminal justice system […]

The GovLab, Pivotal and the 21st Century Democracy and Technology Meetup recently hosted a talk by Jen Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer, on deploying simpler, more effective government services for everyone. Pahlka shared insights gained from her time leading efforts to improve government services […]

As far as labor revolutions go, crowdsourcing may not seem like such a groundbreaking concept. But according to Michael Bernstein, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, crowdsourcing and computation have the potential to revolutionize the way we work and share skills. Bernstein visited the GovLab this month as part of our Ideas Lunch […]

The 2016 Open Data Research Symposium (#ODRS16) is crowd-sourcing questions that if answered could radically increase our understanding of open data On October 5th, researchers from around the world will come together at the 2nd Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS) a pre-event to the International Open Data Conference in Madrid, Spain. Similar to last year’s […]

With a dramatic rise in the numbers in prison, there is bipartisan support – and a major White House push — for improving public safety while reducing incarceration and making our criminal justice system fairer. A key tool in the movement for criminal justice reform is the ability to use data to understand where problems […]

By Neil Britto, David Sangokoya, Iryna Susha, Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In […]

Launched in April, the Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX) seeks to improve the evidence base on how to change the way we solve problems and make decisions by curating and making accessible a diversity of findings on innovations in governance. We are delighted to share some recent updates: CONTENT: The site has since expanded substantially […]

As public problems grow in complexity and increasingly require new insights, decision-makers both inside and outside government have begun exploring ways to be more data-driven and collaborative. Several of society’s greatest challenges—from addressing climate change to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—require greater access to data, ability to analyze particular kinds of datasets, and collaboration between […]

Which companies are using Open Data, and how are they related? The GovLab Embarks to Expand Open Data 500 Study in Collaboration with Graduate Business School of Columbia University Two years ago the GovLab developed the first-ever census of open data companies in the US: the Open Data 500. Today, in collaboration with the Graduate […]

Guest Post by Julian Carver Julian Carver was the acting Chief Information Officer at the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA) until June 2012. From March 2013 – April 2015 he led the Canterbury Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Programme at Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), a $5m investment in a set of tech projects to support the […]

Next Monday, May 23rd, governments, non-profit organizations and citizen groups will gather in Istanbul at the first World Humanitarian Summit. A range of important issues will be on the agenda, not least of which the refugee crisis confronting the Middle East and Europe. Also on the agenda will be an issue of growing importance and […]

Today,  The GovLab, in collaboration with founding partners mySociety and the World Bank’s Digital Engagement Evaluation Team are launching the Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX), a new platform for sharing research and findings on innovations in governance. From crowdsourcing to nudges to open data to participatory budgeting, more open and innovative ways to tackle society’s […]

We are pleased to announce that the second Open Data Research Symposium (#ODRS16) will be held on October 5, 2016 prior to the International Open Data Conference 2016 in Madrid, Spain. Call for Abstracts Deadline: May 30, 2016 As open data becomes entrenched in the policy mainstream, there is an ongoing need to delve deeper into the […]

By Prianka Srinivasan and Stefaan G. Verhulst * As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore […]

GovLab is thrilled to announce the newest member to the Open Data Global Network: Canada. Canada joins an international network of researchers, open data organizations and government agencies from the U.S., Mexico, Italy, Korea and Australia that seek to understand how open data is used by businesses to create new lines of activities or jobs […]

Key Findings of the Open Data Impact Case Studies By Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young Today, in “Open Data Impact: When Demand and Supply Meet,” the GovLab and Omidyar Network release key findings about the social, economic, cultural and political impact of open data. The findings are based on 19 detailed case studies of open […]

As debates continue over strategies for reforming the U.S. criminal justice system, experts across the public sector, academia and business convened for the 11th annual John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This year’s symposium took place on February 25th-26th and hosted prestigious journalism fellows who explored the […]

In the latest edition of The GovLab’s Ideas Lunch series, Dr. Hollie Russon Gilman, the author of Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America, explained the concept of Participatory Budgeting (PB), its advantages and various different examples of its implementation in the United States and around the world. She also discussed the rising […]

On January 27th, Kit Lykketoft, the Deputy Director of MindLab and a visiting scholar at Parsons the New School for Design – DESIS Lab, visited The GovLab to share insights about the design and evolution of a public sector innovation lab. MindLab was the one of the first public sector innovation labs in the world. […]

By Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst Two years ago, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance was launched to build an empirical foundation and fundamental understanding of how the redesign of democratic institutions influences effectiveness and legitimacy in governance, to the end of improving people’s lives. Much has changed since. Interest in open government has increased […]

Guest post by Neil Reilly, GovLab Academy Coaching Programs Alumnus. Project: an online, wiki-based, encyclopedia of public policy concepts from which policymakers can find ideas. How it Works: individual, genericized policy concepts receive their own, user-contributed entries that cover issues like: What is the policy? What are its tradeoffs? Who are its supporters and opponents? […]

Proponents of open data have long argued that the release of government information to the public could result in meaningful impact for citizens. To date, though, little evidence has demonstrated the real-world impacts of open data. Indeed, the field has lacked a taxonomy or framework to help measure and assess the effects of the broad […]

(Cross-posted from The World Bank) Consortium members Mounting anecdotal evidence supports the case for open government. Sixty-nine national governments and counting have signed on as participants in the Open Government Partnership, committing to rethinking the way they engage with citizens, while civil society organizations (CSOs) are increasingly demanding and building mechanisms for this shift.Yet even […]

On World Food Day in October 2015, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), announced that it would “explore the future challenges and the latest thinking and techniques on openness that will assist the organization in moving beyond dialogue towards sustainable stakeholder interaction.”[1] The initiative from the advisory body mandated to perform risk assessment, provide scientific […]

New repository of case studies documents the impact of open data globally odimpact.org Despite global commitments to and increasing enthusiasm for open data, little is actually known about its use and impact. What kinds of social and economic transformation has open data brought about, and what is its future potential? How—and under what circumstances—has it […]

Joint OECD – PARIS21 Workshop – “Access to New Data Sources for Statistics: Business Models for Private-Public Partnerships” On December 18th 2015, the Data Governance Project (DGP)[1] was part of an OECD/Paris21 event organized in Paris on the use of new data sources for official statistics. Leiden’s DGP lead Jos Berens presented the decision flow tool, […]

For the WSIS community to be effective in meeting its ambitious goals adopted last week, it will have to become more evidence-based and innovative. By Lea Kaspar & Stefaan G. Verhulst (cross-posted from Medium) At the beginning of the new millennium — before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter — Kofi Annan, then Secretary General […]

Data as the 21st-century color palette At the most recent GovLab Ideas Lunch, R. Luke DuBois shared his work and perception on data and arts in the GovLab offices. DuBois holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance. He has collaborated on […]

In September 2015, The Honorable Malcolm Turnbull was elected Prime Minister of Australia.  In the following months, several important open data initiatives have been initiated from the Public Data Branch of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. As well, new programs are being designed based as evidence from the results of Australia’s Open Data 500 […]

Crossposted from New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network: In New Brunswick the economy is shrinking, the population is dwindling, rural communities are disappearing, literacy rates are dismal, obesity rates are above the national average, and our social housing stock needs to be revitalized. We know that we need to do things differently, to think differently about […]

Coauthored by Maria Hermosilla This post is third in series of four “reports from the field” on #crowdlaw On September 24th, The GovLab held its third online global conference on Crowd Law. The goal of these peer-to-peer learning events are to deepen the collective understanding of what works, connect practitioners across the world and accelerate […]

Today, The GovLab is pleased to join our partner, the National Information Society Agency (NIA), in announcing the official launch of Open Data 500 Korea, a study of the open data ecosystem in South Korea. Korea is the newest member of the Open Data 500 Global Network, an international network of organizations and government agencies that study the […]

Co-authored by Julia Root This post is second in a series of four “reports from the field” on #crowdlaw First blog On September 24,The GovLab hosted it’s third online global conference on #CrowdLaw. This event is designed specifically for field practitioners and advocates to share experiences and connect with others who share similar goals but […]

  Is there a place where you can find examples of best practices in broadband deployment? How would you share your expertise and work that may impact the further evolution of the Internet? Who can you talk to about crypto currencies? How would you find out what regional organizations are giving guidance on the development […]

Yesterday, the NYU Tandon School of Engineering hosted Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet” and the Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google for a discussion on “The Coming Age of the Internet of Things.” Cerf’s keynote discussion focused particularly on the need for citizens to gain greater understanding and control of how […]

As internet and technology are increasingly spreading all over the world, new and exciting ways to democratize government acts are developed. Co-creation of policies and citizen engagement became a part of the strategy of many governments in the digital era. In last weekend’s NYC Big Apps challenge dozens of teams suggested innovative and disruptive ways […]

Help assess open data’s impacts across the world. Collaborate and share your knowledge by reviewing one or more case studies By Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst   Context:  Recent years have witnessed considerable enthusiasm over open data. Several studies have documented its potential to spur economic innovation and social transformation, and to usher in fresh […]

Co-authored by Julia Root On September 24th, The GovLab held its third online global conference on #CrowdLaw. Practitioners from 16 countries discussed the challenges and lessons learned when crowdsourcing legislation and constitutions. The session including lightning talks by practitioners with projects from Austria, Brazil, Chile, Finland, United States, Morocco, Libya and Spain and then a […]

The City of Quito, Ecuador needs help to prepare for the likely eruption of the Cotopaxi Volcano situated 30 miles from Quito. Cotopaxi is currently spewing ash (latest images here). The last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and it is believed that another one is now inevitable. If it erupts, some communities will have less than […]

The Data Governance Project Jos Berens (Centre for Innovation, Leiden University) and Stefaan G. Verhulst (GovLab) Over the last few months we have noticed increased discussion and activity around “data collaboratives” in which participants from different sectors — including private companies, research institutions, and government agencies — exchange data to help solve public problems. Efforts […]

On Thursday, September 24th from 9:30am – 11:30am EDT, The GovLab will host its third online gathering of CrowdLaw practitioners from around the world. This third installment in an ongoing series on the evolution of CrowdLaw — crowdsourced legislative and regulatory lawmaking — aims to enable participants to share their experiences and learn from one […]

The GovLab is excited to participate this week in ConDatos, the largest open data event in South America, and one of the largest in the world. Given our interest in the reinvention of governance for the 21st century, open data is quite naturally at the core of our research. At ConDatos, GovLab’s co-founder and chief […]

Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. Previous installments of the Index include Prizes and Challenges, Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions. “The GovLab Index: Crime and Criminal Data” provides information about the type of crime and criminal […]

During the GovLab’s most recent Ideas Lunch, Mark Latonero, Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute, spoke about the numerous tensions that result from data collection in human rights issues, emphasizing both its potential for good and the dilemmas it provokes. In the past decade, a growing group of innovators began finding solutions in […]

Latest Column of Beth Simone Noveck (The GovLab) in Governing: “In 2005, California instituted a pilot program called ReadyReturn in which 50,000 taxpayers received an already-completed state tax return. The state compiled the returns based on data it already had from employers and banks. A survey of ReadyReturn participants found that 90 percent said they […]

Today the Department of Communications of the Australian Government issued early findings of the first stage of their Open Data 500 study. The Government has released 65 use cases that document the new and innovate ways Australian organisations are using open government data. In partnership with GovLab and along with other members of  OD500 Global Network, which include the U.S., Mexico, Italy […]

At the end of July, the GovLab Academy finished delivering in Washington, DC, two sessions of the US Department of Agriculture’s first Open Data Summer Camp for middle and high school students. The experience was, by all accounts, highly successful. After each 2-week program, both students and parents reported that we were able to build […]

By: Arnaud Sahuguet, John Krauss, Luis Palacios and David Sangokoya  This is an excerpt from the special issue on urban informatics, published in the December 2014 issue of the Data Engineering bulletin produced by IEEE Computer Society.  You can find the article in its entirety at the following link: http://sites.computer.org/debull/A14dec/issue1.htm. Sixty percent of the world population will live in […]

TVs, touchscreens, and smartphones are now almost ubiquitous in homes. Many young children are watching, listening to, or interacting with two to three hours of screen media per day. Far from portending the death of reading, however, in the latest installment of the Ideas Lunch series at the Governance Lab, Michael Levine, Founding Executive Director of […]

Last week, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance, GovLab and Nesta hosted a public forum on data-driven and collaborative solutions to public problems. In addition to giving members of the Research Network – including GovLab’s Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan Verhulst, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Geoff Mulgan – an opportunity to share some of […]

By Beth Simone Noveck and Andrew Young Reposted from the UK Cabinet Office Open Policymaking Blog. Increasingly “experimentalism is no longer confined to formal scientific labs,” writes Charles Leadbetter. “It has become an organising method for social policy, startup businesses, venture capitalists, tech companies and the creative arts.” In order to improve how we govern, […]

Mapping the users of open data in Italy Today we are launching Open Data 200 Italy, the first ever attempt to map the emerging open data ecosystem in Italy.  In the spirit of being open and collaborative, we call upon everyone to help create this map. If you are an Italian Open Data user, please […]

We are pleased to announce that the NETmundial Solutions Map is now open for anyone to add content! Like Open Street Map and Wikipedia, the Map is a crowdsourced initiative — in this case, one that provides a comprehensive platform of ever-refreshed, curated information about global actors, solutions, and resources that is built by the […]

Written by Beth Noveck and Irene Tello Arista [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQbt0fYyroA[/youtube] (Here is a link to the transcript of the talk) In India and around the world, thousands of primarily poor people die every day from tuberculosis. There has been no new TB treatment developed in forty years and resistance to existing drugs is increasing. Because TB […]

By: Joel Natividad Having been in the Open Data space since 2011, the civictech company I co-founded – Ontodia, have been through a lot of ups and downs. And we’ve learned a lot of things the hard way – first and foremost, that ironically, technology is the last thing being considered when it comes to […]

By Lee Rainie, Director Internet, Science, and Technology Research, Pew Research Center Cross-posted from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance Blog Government reformers and advocates believe that two contemporary phenomena hold the potential to change how people engage with governments at all levels and how they are served by public agencies. The first is data. […]

Finding out how open data is making a difference around the world The GovLab is pleased to announce the launch of a new project –  Open Data Impact Studies – a series of international case studies sponsored by Omidyar Network and to be developed this summer. These impact studies are designed to help us better understand […]

The Governance Lab is an action-oriented research center based in Brooklyn, New York that works to improve people’s lives and communities by deploying data and technology to change how we govern. We work on high-impact, multi-disciplinary projects with partners in city, state, and national governments, as well as with other public interest organizations and research […]

(compiled by David Sangokoya, Shruti Sannon, Alexandra Clare and Stefaan Verhulst) As part of its core mission, the GovLab has been engaged in a series of ongoing efforts to build awareness and gather evidence about the value, use, and impact of open data around the world – including the GovLab’s Open Data 500. The GovLab […]

Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index: Open Data” provides an update on our previous Open Data installment, and highlights global trends in Open Data and the release of public sector information. Previous installments of the Index include Prizes and Challenges, Measuring Impact with […]

This week members of the GovLab team will participate in the Third International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Ottawa, Canada on May 28th and 29th. As a “think and do tank” focused on how to govern better using new technology, GovLab looks at how data, and especially the policy of opening data for free reuse, […]

Jos Berens (Centre for Innovation, Leiden University) and Stefaan G. Verhulst (GovLab) As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In […]

On July 9th through 12th, the the growing international network of labs, units and i-teams innovating governance and public services around the worlds will convene for LabWorks 2015. The fourth-annual conference will be hosted by Nesta in association with Bloomberg Philanthropies and with support from partners the GovLab, MindLab, and Mars Solutions Lab LabWorks 2015 comprises three distinct elements […]

Today, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance released its core research agenda, Toward a Research Agenda on Opening Governance. The agenda describes the Network’s two core focus areas – data-driven governance and collaborative governance – and describes the major questions and actions that the Network and the field at large should consider in […]

New Medium Blog by Stefaan Verhulst and David Sangokoya, both at The GovLab: “In late July 2014, a sick passenger from Liberia traveled to Nigeria and brought the Ebola virus to Lagos, Africa’s largest city, with a population of 21 million. In response, government agencies, universities and hospitals collaborated with private telecommunications companies and healthcare organizations […]

Majorities hope that more transparency and data sharing by government will help journalists cover government and make officials more accountable, but very few think that government agencies are doing a great job of providing useful data, according to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By: Laura E. Patterson Like many Millennials, I’ve always had an interest in creating a project that I believed could change the world in some small way. After graduation from undergrad, I accidentally ended up building a career in education, a field that I had an interest in, but I had always seen as a […]

Piotr Szpunar, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, shared his ongoing research on the topic of Internet radicalization during a GovLab Ideas Lunch in March . The issues addressed during the talk relate to the GovLab’s broader work on Internet governance and identifying strategies for a more effective Internet governance […]

How safe are MMR vaccines, really? Will the highway next to my house increase my risk of asthma? How much of climate change is attributable to human activity? All of these questions have major implications for key public policy decisions, and for citizens to answer them confidently, they need to be able to receive and […]

Cross-posted from the Intersector Project. This post is part of The Intersector Project podcast series featuring interviews with practitioners and supporters of intersector collaboration. We were thrilled last week to have the opportunity to to talk with Alan Kantrow of The Governance Lab at NYU. GovLab works to enable institutions and individuals to work more collaboratively […]

The GovLab recently hosted an Ideas Lunch featuring Julia Lane, an Institute Fellow and Senior Managing Economist at the American Institutes for Research.  Lane spoke with us about the importance of measuring the results of public investment in research and development, and the many possibilities afforded by leveraging big data in this arena.  The GovLab […]

At the end of the first session of the Academy’s Coaching Program on Citizen Science, Francois Grey recommended that all participants read Tim Berners-Lee’s Information Management: A Proposal, the foundational document of the World Wide Web. When asked why, he noted there was real value in seeing the future through the eyes of someone who is about to make […]

Small data are the digital traces that individuals generate as a byproduct of daily activities, such as sending e-mail or exercising with fitness trackers. [source: Workshop on Small Data Experimentation, call for papers] In this post, we advocate for the need to standardize metadata about small data and build tools to create, manage, process and […]

Please find below the latest installment in the GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index: Prizes and Challenges” highlights recent findings about two key techniques in shifting innovation from institutions to the general public: Prize-Induced Contests – using monetary rewards to incentivize individuals and other entities to develop solutions to public problems; […]

Over the past few months, we have posted regularly on progress made in creating an Internet Governance map called the NETmundial Solutions Map,  a tool that seeks to provide an overview what solutions – such as laws and standards – exist to address what Internet Goverance issue – such as IPv6 or on-line child pornography […]

Arnaud Sahuguet (The GovLab) and David Sangokoya ( The GovLab) at Medium: “The value, impact and promise of making data publicly accessible have driven citizens, government agencies and businesses to embrace open data as a way to increase efficiency, promote transparency and maximize utility…..While the rise of the open data movement has led to numerous […]

Whenever you go to a doctor’s office in the United States you are asked to fill in a form and give your consent to the medical treatment that you need. Informed consent is the “process by which the treating health care provider discloses appropriate information to a competent patient so that the patient may make […]

From March 4-8, Brooklyn Tech Triangle will host its annual Tech Triangle U conference – “a week-long series of events to connect the tech, creative, and academic communities in the Brooklyn Tech Triangle.” This year’s focus is on “Intersections” and the ways in which technology is affecting traditional industries and real world issues. Andrew Young, […]

The Federal District Court for the Northern District of California ruled this week that the IRS must turn over the original, machine-readable versions of nine tax returns filed with the IRS to Plaintiff PublicResource.org. (Disclosure: I filed affidavits in the case on behalf of PublicResource and its demand to make these returns available). By law, non-profit tax […]

As governments and other institutions increasingly come to recognize Joy’s Law – “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” – many efforts to solve big problems are being posed to the public rather than being exclusively addressed within institutional borders. Two of the central techniques for shifting the […]

Please find below the latest installment of the GovLab Index on Internet Governance, inspired by the Harper’s Index. “Internet Governance — Access (Infrastructure)” is part of a series of Indexes that focus on the five main areas within Internet Governance: access, content, code, trust, and trade. This edition focuses on infrastructural aspects of Internet access […]

Over the last few months we have sought to understand, through one-on-one user interviews and an on-line survey, how individuals search for and find information related to Internet governance issues. The insights gained through these efforts are meant to support the design of a NETmundial Solutions Map prototype. We shared our findings from the interviews earlier […]

How to quickly, yet systematically, become smart about a topic when seeking solutions to public problems? What questions to answer that can help assess the problem and solutions space better? How to identify rapidly the stakeholders that matter? Today, the GovLab released a new resource seeking to enable problem-solvers to design agile and creative responses to public […]

At the latest installment the Ideas Lunch series, the GovLab hosted Dr. Jean-Claude Burgelman, the Head of Unit C2, DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission. The talk centered on the changing academic and scientific research market, in the Web 2.0 era. He also provided some of his thoughts on his most recent project […]

The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) just released our paper on “Innovations in Global Governance: Towards a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem.” It is part of a series of research papers supporting the Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG). The GCIG was established in January 2014 “to articulate and advance a strategic vision for the […]

The Berkman Center’s Internet Monitor project has just released its 2014 annual report highlighting the most compelling events, trends and debates to data, internet and society over the past year. The Internet Monitor features an interactive year in review of major internet-related events as well as a collection of short contributions from researchers and thinkers […]

The  NETmundial Initiative was launched on 6 November 2014, as a multistakeholder initiative to energize bottom-up, collaborative solutions in a distributed Internet governance ecosystem. Within the context of the Initiative, the GovLab, in close collaboration with ICANN, is facilitating and coordinating the creation of a new tool called the “NETmundial Solutions Map” – an effort […]

Over the past few years, policy innovators have made an effort to move past traditional top-down policymaking and rethink how to improve public services by applying principles of design thinking. At the latest GovLab Ideas Lunch, Chelsea Mauldin, executive director of the Public Policy Lab, shared her experience using collaborative design strategies to tackle major […]

Cross-posted from the Sunlight Foundation. In 2009, Larry Lessig published a headline-grabbing piecein the New Republic entitled “Against Transparency,” arguing that the “naked transparency movement” might inspire disgust in, rather than reform of, our political system. In their recent Brookings Institution paper, “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong,” Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norm Eisen […]

As part of the ongoing NETmundial initiative to generate a distributed model of Internet governance, it was decided to create a “Solutions Map” that would map problems and solutions, visualize gaps across issues and actors, and more generally enable a distributed Internet governance framework. Towards this end, the GovLab (NYU) recently conducted several interviews with […]

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Civic Innovation: Cities and Civic […]

In its latest installment of the Ideas Lunch series, the GovLab hosted Dr. Lucy Kimbell, a visiting Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Fellow at the UK-based Policy Lab, an experimental policy innovation center within the Open Policy Making team of the UK Cabinet Office. At the Policy Lab, Dr. Kimbell is exploring how the […]

Reprinted from my monthly column in Governing: With complex, seemingly intractable problems such as inequality, climate change and affordable access to health care plaguing contemporary society, traditional institutions such as government agencies and nonprofit organizations often lack strategies for tackling them effectively and legitimately. For this reason, this year the MacArthur Foundation launched its Research Network […]

More years ago than I care to recall, I studied at Christ Church College. At that point, I came to the University of Oxford to study allied cultural policy after World War II. I was interested in the ways that each of the different post-war powers used the media of their day, ranging from film […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: ICANN, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have launched the NETmundial Initiative, whose purpose is to “provide an open, generative, and collaborative space, inviting permission-less innovation to build and deliver distributed Internet governance enablers and solutions”.

On October 30, 2014, lead researcher, Gustavo Magalhaes and co-author Laura Manley presented their research paper “Business Models for Open Government Data” at the 8th Annual International Conferences on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV) in Guimarães, Portugal. This year, the conference focused on the Rise of Data Post-2015: Empowered Citizens, Accountable Institutions. The […]

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance was launched in 2014 to study and develop the blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions to the end of improving people’s lives. It is part of MacArthur’s efforts to establish interdisciplinary research networks – “research institutions without walls” – on topics related primarily to human and community development. On October […]

At the GovLab we are big proponents of evidence-based decision making. However, if the evidence is insufficient, or if it is applied incorrectly, these decisions can have very harming effects. In the US, African Americans represent 13% of the population yet represent 37% of the prison population. Sixty percent (60%) of black male high school dropouts […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is currently holding its Plenipotentiary Meeting in Busan, South Korea. See the live webcast here. The ITU meeting will be held from October 20 – November 7; topics of significance include ITU’s role in Internet governance and cybersecurity, ITU’s constitution and transparency, and the selection of a new Secretary-General for the ITU.

An expert system approach to knowledge management and expertise sharing Generally speaking, crowdsourcing is the process in which an individual, an institution, or an organization proposes to another group of individuals the voluntary undertaking of a participative online activity. Through crowdsourcing governments and organizations have effectively leveraged the collective intelligence of online communities to serve […]

Guest post by Namrata Mehta, Director, Innovation, Center for Knowledge Societies Based in New Delhi, the Civic Innovation Lab envisions an approach to civic innovation that brings together user-centered systems design, open and crowd sourced data technology, citizen participation and start-up entrepreneurship. In March this year, at the Design Public conclave, we brought together various experts from […]

Open government data is free, public data available to all. It’s a resource with great potential economic and social value. At the GovLab, we’ve been studying the ways that businesses and organizations are using data as a driver for innovation. Our Open Data 500 study now profiles more than 500 US based companies that build […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: The Global Network of Interdisciplinary Internet & Society Research Centers (NoC) this week held the Evolution of the Internet Governance Ecosystem event (the Torino Symposium), bringing together academics to “examin[e] existing and potential models of distributed and collaborative governance with the goal of informing the evolution of – and current debate around – the Internet governance ecosystem in light of the NETmundial Roadmap and the work of various forums, panels, and committees”.

In early September we started teaching the semester-long course “Solving Public Problems with Technology.”  You can view the course syllabus here – http://govlab.github.io/academy-courses/Solving-Public-Problems-Fall-2014/ and its curated readings and videos, including original materials created for the program by: Alph Bingham, Founder of Innocentive talking about how to frame a problem Giff Constable, CEO of NEO Software […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: 16 European member states have issued a joint declaration calling on European officials to adopt a legislative package reforming personal data protection by 2015; The bipartisan Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act (LEADS Act) introduced last week proposes that if the U.S. government wanted to access non-U.S. citizens’ data stored overseas, it “would have to follow the legal process of the nation where the servers reside”.

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: The International Telecommunications Unions (ITU)’s Plenipotentiary Conference is fast approaching (October 20 – November 7, 2014). This is a key event in which ITU Member States decide on the future role of the organization –including the ITU’s remit regarding Internet governance; The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has received a record 3 million comments in response to its Open Internet ruling (regulating net neutrality and “paid prioritization”).

(cross-posted at the UN Global Pulse Blog) When it comes to data, we are living in the Cambrian Age. About ninety percent of the data that exists today has been generated within the last two years. We create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis—equivalent to a “new Google every four days.” All […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: The 9th annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) took place in Istanbul, Turkey this week; The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is focusing on reducing anti-competition policies this week in what is viewed as a significant position statement with regards to net neutrality debates; The U.S. Congress will deliberate on two privacy bills when Congress resumes on September 8: The USA FREEDOM Act –currently holding widespread support- and CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) –a bill that is currently very controversial.

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: This week the NETmundial Initiative launched at the World Economic Forum in Geneva. The Initiative is intended to “contribute to the broader international effort to advance multistakeholder Internet governance on the basis of the NETmundial principles”; The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) begins next week (September 2 – 5). The 2014 IGF will focus on many topics, including the IANA Stewardship Transition, the purpose and goals of the NETmundial Initiative, and issues such as privacy, security, access, and Internet technologies.

Social issues often remain hidden until brought to light by events such as the Ferguson, MO protests. When this happens, the media will employ the use of visualizations to help people understand how policy affects these issues. Throughout the past couple of weeks, a lot of media outlets have been outputting data visualizations, maps  and graphics in order […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: The ninth annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will take place from September 2 – 5, 2014; ICANN has released a proposed revision to its Bylaws that would require a two-thirds majority vote for the ICANN Board to reject Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) advice.

The GovLab’s mission is to improve people’s lives by changing how we govern. GovLab believes in rewarding dedicated students who support this mission and who have a demonstrated interest in and commitment to studying, testing and promoting open governance innovations to the betterment of our public institutions––through paid positions and opportunities in the field in […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: Several articles this week discuss the possibility of “fundamentally redesigning the Internet”. This is in response to continuous incidents of Internet technologies used for purposes that were originally unintended and potentially harmful to Internet users; ICANN has released a draft organizational structure for its “Strengthening ICANN Governance and Accountability track” (the “accountability update”). The proposed structure has been criticized for lacking transparency in its development and for the “Board-appointed advisors” which are part of the proposed structure.

Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by the Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index on Internet Governance — Access” is the first in a series of Indexes that focus on the five main areas within Internet Governance: access, code, content, trust, and trade. This edition highlights events and public sentiment […]

In March the White House launched the Climate Data Initiative, which it described as “an ambitious new effort bringing together extensive open government data” with other resources “to develop data-driven planning and resilience tools for local communities.” With increasing climate risk from drought, floods, and extreme weather events, the initiative is designed to harness one […]

Highlights from this week’s Internet governance SCAN: A U.S. federal judge has ruled that Microsoft must give U.S. law enforcement access to data it holds overseas in Ireland; A new proposal by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) articulates principles for an enhanced ICANN accountability framework.