TechPlus+ | Technology & Development Redux
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Better “AI for Good”
Read more: Better “AI for Good”While the dystopian camp perceives digital technologies as a formidable, perhaps even unsurmountable threat to society, those on the other, much more optimistic side do not seem to get tired of repeating its almost countless benefits. The latter camp apparently has the upper hand, at least for now, as its message captures most daily media…
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Best Films – 2020
Read more: Best Films – 2020Bellocchio’s The Traitor was the last film I saw in a theatre. The film was only playing once a day at 1pm, so an early lunch was required. The calendar said it was the last day of February. The very next day, officials identified the first case of COVID-19 in NY. A couple of days…
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Ethics in Ethical AI
Read more: Ethics in Ethical AIGarbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is one of the oldest computer programming commandments. It was first coined in the same decade as AI, the 1950s, thus suggesting the connection between the two goes back to their birth dates. GIGO is particularly relevant to programs that take data – text and graphics included – as primary…
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A Glimpse at Development Economics
Read more: A Glimpse at Development EconomicsICT for Development (ICTD) has been around for over three decades. A multidisciplinary field involving researchers and practitioners from many different areas and backgrounds, ICTD has one clear objective: to deploy new ICTs in society to foster development. The first and most obvious question is how this can happen. The answer is not trivial. Nevertheless,…
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Digital Government in Jamaica
Read more: Digital Government in JamaicaThe last time I visited Jamaica was in the early 2000s. A few years before, we had launched the national node of the old and now defunct Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP). It was labeled JSDNP and did quite a bit of work locally fostering digital technologies and creating and disseminating local content. Unfortunately, JSDNP…
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Evolving COVID-19
Read more: Evolving COVID-19Over six months after its official birth, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand globally, as expected. Long-term lockdowns and other complementary measures have impacted, especially in industrialized countries that, back in June, were leading in cases and deaths. Not that the virus has been tamed, not at all. Rather, it now seems to be more…
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Digital Government Governance Models
Read more: Digital Government Governance ModelsGovernments should fully understand the scope and reach of the various Digital Government (DG) institutional functions described in my previous post and their proper sequencing before they embark on comprehensive digital transformation processes. The policy units’ actual institutional location leading DG processes should result from the analysis of the various functions, not the starting point.…
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Digital Government Revisited – III
Read more: Digital Government Revisited – IIIInstitutions matter, more so for the development and implementation of Digital Government (DG), whose core target is public institutions’ transformation. On the one hand, public institutions should have an array of capacities to ensure public investments in digital technologies are effectively managed from beginning to end. In many low-income countries, such capabilities are exiguous or…
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Digital Government Revisited – II
Read more: Digital Government Revisited – IISince the early 1980s, Governments have taken a bad rap. Menacing fingerpointing from most quarters ended up on a consensus that loudly declared them personas non-gratas. The 2009 Global Financial Crisis started to turn the tide. At the time, governments once again came to the rescue of capitalism, unveiling gigantic financial packages to prevent critical…
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Digital Government Revisited
Read more: Digital Government RevisitedOverview Running on the coattails of electronic commerce, Digital Government (DG) first saw the light of day over 20 years ago. Initially christened as electronic government or e-government, it has since experienced multiple name changes, ranging from e-governance and transformational government to intelligent and smart government. Nowadays, the field seems to be enjoying its run…
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Contentious Politics in the AI Age
Read more: Contentious Politics in the AI AgeInitially touted as revolutionary and progressive in the 1990s, the lightening evolution of digital technologies, running on the coattails of continuous innovation, has been accompanied by the rise of both extreme socio-economic inequalities and loud and widespread populism, nationalism and overt racism. Many countries are undergoing de-democratization processes undergirded by very resilient neoliberalism, while claim-making…
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Covid19: A “Swedish” Model?
Read more: Covid19: A “Swedish” Model?Having been trashed for the last forty years or so, Governments have unexpectedly taken back center stage thanks to the Covid19 pandemic. The virus does not need a passport to travel around the world, nor any tough immigration legislation has managed to prevent it from freely crossing national borders. No country will be spared seems…
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Deadly COVID19
Read more: Deadly COVID19Over a week ago, a mainstream media news outlet published an article (behind a paywall) suggesting that the disease caused by the SARS–CoV-2 virus, COVID19, was not as deadly as initially thought. The article cited the results of a non-peer review study completed by a Stanford-led team seemingly showing that the number of people infected…
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Natural Disasters and Carbon Concentration
Read more: Natural Disasters and Carbon ConcentrationIn 1988, the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) launched the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) with the idea of promoting national and international humanitarian support to countries and regions affected by such events. Having a structured set of global data on the subject can also help policy and decisionmakers develop more…