publications

Open Life Data Framework

Gavin — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 08:30:36 +0000

Report: https://dgen.net/1/OpenLifeDataFramework-2021-11-18.pdf

Official site: https://appg-longevity.org/open-life-data-framework

Vision: To enable consent-based, trust-enhancing and secure sharing of personal ‘health-relevant data’ from the private sector to improve and level up health and wellbeing.

Mission: To create the enabling conditions for public and private sector actors to design and implement a framework that facilitates trustworthy data sharing for public benefit while unlocking innovation to increase healthy life expectancy by 5 years while minimising health inequalities.

Throughout, there is an emphasis on the need for innovation, continuous development and learning balanced with the need to address long-term stability. That focus must be placed to prioritise the delivery of measurable outcomes and to communicate clearly along the journey.

The scope of this work includes data that is generated by the private sector (both commercial and non-profit actors), such as that from apps and digital services.

It does not aim to address public sector data, for example, in electronic health records. To illustrate, we build on classifications in the paper “Privacy protections to encourage the use of health-relevant digital data in a learning health system” and illustrate below.

The Open Life Data Framework was a recommendation in The Health of the Nation. Its rationale was published in the Lancet, Open Life Data to Support Healthy Longevity for All, on the same day the APPG published Levelling Up Health on 9 April 2021.

The specific goals are to:

explore how better use of data and data-enabled technologies could make a positive contribution to the health, wellbeing and life chances of all people equitably.
propose solutions for innovating, scaling up and leveraging these technologies across the private, public and academic sectors.
ensure that digital health infrastructure and innovation support is fairly distributed and resilient, reducing inequalities in co-creation, access and outcomes.
build public trust in the use of data for individual and collective health and social care purposes.

The APPG formed an expert group to define what is needed to establish an open health system, drawing from other models such as the UK Open Banking system and standards to harness data-intensive technologies to extend – and make more equal – the healthy longevity of British citizens across their life course. The Open Life Data working group, comprising 45 experts (see the list here), was chaired by Lord James O’Shaughnessy, former Undersecretary of Health and visiting professor at Imperial College. The report was informed by over 100 contributors and authored by Gavin Starks and Tina Woods, APPG Director and co-author of the Health of the Nation Strategy and Levelling Up Health.

The Open Life Data Framework is supported with funding from the Health Foundation, an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. Their aim is a healthier population, supported by high-quality health care that can be equitably accessed.

Designing the UK’s shared data infrastructure

Gavin — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 09:13:06 +0000

Smart Data: Research on Consent, Liability & Authentication

The government has estimated that the impact of personal data mobility enabled productivity and efficiency is worth approximately £27.8bn. Smart Data could be a key part of the Government’s arsenal in the fight against Covid-19 and climate change.

Up until now the UK has taken a piecemeal approach to unlocking data. This creates data bottlenecks that hinder us from allocating resources better within the home, at work, and across society. Open Banking has pioneered data sharing in the UK and provides a foundation of knowledge and learning for Open Finance and Smart Data. However, Open Banking is underpinned by a complex regulatory structure, faces governance challenges and has not yet resolved its longer-term funding.

Following the publication of BEIS reports about Consent and Liability for Smart Data Initiatives in the UK, Dgen (Faith Reynolds, Sharon Cunliffe, Miles Cheetham, Gavin Starks) held an overview webinar on Wednesday 16th September 2020.

Covering two new publications:

UK Government links: https://gov.uk/government/publications/smart-data-research-on-consent-liability-and-authentication

2020-09 BEIS response: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/915973/smart-data-consultation-response.pdf

How Can We Stop Losing Our Minds?: Producing a Legacy From Development Projects, Not Just a Document

Gavin — Thu, 21 May 2020 10:49:43 +0000

Have you ever run, funded or been part of a development project?

Have you ever gotten to the end of it and felt that, during the process, everyone had learned and grown, and had stories to share?

Have you ever thought, “We should definitely share what we learned”?

And then someone wrote a report. And that was the end of that.

It continues to surprise me that we keep forgetting (or ignoring) the things that we all know: that building on history requires us to listen and learn from others’ experiences. Instead, we like to invent our own new things – and we repeat the same mistakes ad nauseam.

The web has changed our world in ways that we are still only beginning to learn, but development professionals haven’t yet leveraged it to full effect. As a tool we’ve applied it well in some cases, as more people have access to more knowledge than at any time in history. Yet we’ve also applied it poorly: While information retention within our institutions may be going up, our knowledge retention often lags behind. So we see discussions on secure chat channels lead to pivotal decisions, then vanish as if the conversations had never happened.

We still have much to do to adapt our behaviours and cultures to work with these new tools. We need to keep thinking through how we are going to make the most of both human and machine experiences, as they increasingly combine.

These might feel like hard questions, but if we shift the way we approach solving problems together, we might come up with new answers.

DESIGNING FOR SEARCH – AND OPEN ACCESS

Let’s start with a user need. Think of a project you worked on six years ago. You’re trying to solve a similar issue now, but you can’t remember how you did it before. You remember that there was a really good idea, a phrase, a table of data, a use-case or an interview that helped your team to find a solution. But how do you find the thing you remember?

You might, as many people do (whether allowed or not), carry a backup of all the project details around on an old hard drive. You might try and find the old project website, if there was one (which is likely). You might try a funder’s website to see if they have a copy. You might email a colleague who worked with you on the project – you might even call them.

However you frame this, your starting point is to conduct a “search.” But a search for what? The project title? The name of a person or a topic? What if you can’t find it? What if the information you’re looking for is in the notes from a phone call, which were never properly categorized in the first place?

This all leads us to our first design principle: Design for search.

What does this mean? First and foremost it means something very simple: Did you add enough words to your digital files (e.g. in the title) so that when you type words into a search box six years later, you might have a chance of finding it?

In the age of the web, this is harder than it might seem. The average website survives less than three years so we also need to make sure this information can be searched for at all. There’s a huge spectrum: Google isn’t going away anytime soon (probably); your project website will atrophy rapidly (unless funded); Wikipedia may or may not quite fit; Archive.org archives pages more than their context; national libraries have lasted centuries, but may not be as interested in hosting your project files as you might wish.

This drives us to a solution that is culturally different than what most of us are used to. Rather than publishing project details “in your house” (i.e. on your organization’s website, which is usually designed around the hierarchy of the organization, and still reflects its physical structure), you should focus on publishing in “everyone’s house” (i.e. on popular websites with a digital-native structure that reflect all users’ needs, not just those of your organization). You should, therefore, place your content in as many different places as possible to maximise the chance that you, your colleagues, funders, partners — and the rest of us in the development space — can find it.

Our second design principle is: Publish widely under an open license – or at least for open access. By providing context and publishing widely, under open licenses such as Creative Commons, development professionals can create a better return on our collective investment. We can help the machines help us find things. To give one example that’s likely to resonate: How many of you have used Google to get a copy of your own company’s logo?

WHY, WHAT AND WHERE ARE YOU PUBLISHING – AND FOR WHOM?

There’s an essential question that’s deeply linked to enabling others to find, use and build upon your work: Is what you are producing relevant to the people who could potentially use it?

How often have you encountered a summary report that is written for “people” rather than for “you”? On a regular basis, I find myself asking, “Who is this written for – what is their name, role and organization?” If you can’t answer that question, then let’s pause for thought.

Some questions you should answer to define your audience include:

Why are we publishing this — what’s the story?
Start by writing down the essentials. This can involve writing the press release for every project. It’s not that everything should go through PR, but the process of thinking about the story and the specific audience is critical. Who will act upon it and why? In many instances we know that there are likely only 20 people who will read any report in-depth, and maybe 100 who might read an executive summary — so it can be helpful to write the summary first. How will you describe this work to someone verbally in two years? This is a powerful, behaviour-driving question.
What are we publishing?
Is it a document? A PDF? Slides? Images? Data? Code? Algorithms? What’s useful to the user? Why? What format do they (not we) need most?
Where are we publishing?

Certainly, everyone wants to publish on their own websites, but where are your users obtaining their information? Go to where they might find you. The ambition here is, in most cases, not to drive traffic back to your website. You’re not a destination, the content is. If I’m going to find it, it should be in as many relevant places as possible (e.g. blogs, Instagram, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Pinterest, Wikipedia, Archive.org, Github, postcards, books and videos). This isn’t about having a social media strategy to flood people with your content (you do that already). It’s about making sure that when your site is dead and the team is scattered to the wind, you can all find your own work again.

Once you have a sense of your likely readers and their needs and information sources, ask how you can:

Get diverse input when evaluating users’ needs
Define a common language and use it: If you’re using words with various or ambiguous meanings, make sure your intended meaning is clear and consistent
Make outputs available in machine- and human-usable formats
Tell stories to help people learn, including recurring storytelling to prompt recall
Use shared documentation systems and shared tools such as wiki’s, Google documents, Github and Trello – not isolationist “need to know” systems
Work with institutions of accountability to enable longevity of access (e.g. libraries, universities, national archives)

The answers to these questions can help you deliver content that’s likely to reach the people who need it, not just now but for years to come.

CHANGING HOW WE WORK TO BE OPENLY COLLABORATIVE

In my time running the Open Data Institute (ODI), we took extensive measures to foster a culture of open sharing and long-term accessibility of information. I mandated the creation of shared Google documents. The sending of attachments (internally) was banned. The guiding principles of this approach were reflected in this checklist, to be followed with all documents:

Create a document.
Name the document with keywords relevant to a later search (e.g. date, topic, themes, place, hashtag equivalents).
Share it with everyone in the company (organization-wide).
Reduce sharing to a named list if required (e.g. for HR or legal reasons).
Start writing.

This applied to all meetings (internal and external), as well as all operational documents, research, proposals, HR, budget, financial reporting, sales planning and reports, project plans, performance metrics, board reports, compliance reporting, and legal and accounting documents. Instead of each person writing something, then emailing a document, we would schedule short group working sessions to simultaneously edit documents, often while in voice contact to discuss anything unclear. This produced better outcomes, and was also far faster — but only after induction and training, as it takes practice to work so differently.

Once learned, this process was also applied to co-create proposals with clients. The outcome was that the client could input directly to proposal documents, engage in internal Q&As about scope and budget, and shape outputs, timing and costs. This improved the team’s relationships with clients and their trust in the team.

Induction documents and guides were provided for all staff on the process, naming conventions (e.g. dates written in ISO format), how to add keywords to document titles to aid searchability, and security and privacy guidelines. Design for search was a guiding principle.

The power of an open approach to development has many benefits. Done well, it changes the way people collaborate during projects — they are producing a legacy, not a document.

As the ODI Labs team expressed,

“At the Open Data Institute, we build all our technology in the open. This may seem terrifying, but it’s probably one of the most powerful things we do. By using open tools and practices, we communicate better as a team, engage with our community, avoid cutting corners, and at the end of the day, produce better results.”

One cultural imperative is essential to this approach: bravery. It is not possible for any team to share widely, embrace openness – and be open to the potential criticism that this may cause – without total buy-in and support from leadership: from the board-down, and from the practitioners-up. Openness flattens hierarchies, and it can also lead to different emotional responses and power dynamics.

But this only serves to illustrate, again, that the way to stop ourselves from losing our minds is to embrace our humanity, and to acknowledge that we need to work together to join the collective intelligence of humans and machines. The process may seem scary, but it may be one of the most powerful things we can do.

This article was originally published at https://nextbillion.net/producing-legacy-development-projects/

Open Finance — Designing for Cohesion and Interoperability

Gavin — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 20:35:57 +0000

The Financial Conduct Authority set up an Advisory Group on open finance to discuss the potential of extending open banking-like data-sharing to a wider range of financial products.

It has now launched an open consultation: https://www.fca.org.uk/firms/advisory-group-open-finance

Our contribution was in Chairing the Cohesion and Interoperability working group, the summary output of which is embedded below.

Document: Open Finance — Advisory Summary on Cohesion and Interoperability for the FCA

PDF version: download here

Can government stop losing its mind?

Gavin — Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:48 +0000

Can government remember? Is it condemned to repeat mistakes? Or does it remember too much and so see too many reasons why anything new is bound to fail?

Commissioned by Geoff Mulgan, CEO, Nesta, and led by Gavin Starks with Constellation members, ‘Can government stop losing its mind?’ looks at the many ways the government has organised its data and knowledge, and examines examples ranging from the Ministries of Defence and Justice to the BBC and ODI. It shows how research, policy design and tracking can be managed more effectively.

⇥ PDF download

Can_government_stop_losing_its_mind

Commissioned by Nesta

Report – International review & benchmarking of Open Banking

Gavin — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:02 +0000

We have completed our comprehensive International review & benchmarking of Open Banking for the Canadian government, covering:

Australia
Europe
Hong Kong
India
Japan
Mexico
Malaysia
New Zealand
Rwanda
Singapore
USA

Nine countries have moved in the direction of ‘Open’ in banking for individual and small business customers since the UK went live in January 2018. As well, the 28 EU member states are implementing the Regulatory Technical Standards of the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) mandated for September 2019 around data sharing with third parties.

If you are interested in open banking, please email cynthia@dgen.net

Report – Development of UK open banking

Gavin — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:31 +0000

We have completed our review of the development of UK open banking for the Canadian government, tracing its history back to the 2007-2008 financial crisis covering:

Timeline: catalysts to development
Ecosystem
The Evolution of Open Banking in the UK
- Open Government Data
- Open Data Institute (ODI)
- Historic Reviews of the UK Banking Sector
- MiData Initiative
- The UK Fintech Sector
- The UK Banking Sector Post-financial Crisis
- The Open Bank Project in 2010
The Fingleton Report: ‘Data Sharing and Open Data for Banks’
The Treasury Call for Evidence on Open Data Sharing
First Hand Account: Irene Graham, British Bankers Association (BBA)
The Open Banking Working Group (OBWG)
The Open Banking Standard (Standard)
Implementation Pending the CMA Report: Development Group Proposal
CMA: Retail Banking Market Investigation and Remedies
The Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE)
PSD2, GDPR and Open Banking
Open Banking Standard Report
Overview of Approach to Standards
Privacy, Security and Cyber-risk
Customer Consent, Authorisation and Authentication
Liability, Consumer Redress and Dispute Resolution
Cost of Implementation
Financial Stability
Consumer Choice and Acceptance

If you are interested in open banking, please email cynthia@dgen.net

Full text below under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (also open to comment as a Google Doc):

Adventures in acoustic cosmology

Gavin — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 07:00:36 +0000

ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY PRESS RELEASE

RAS PR 17/30 (NAM 13)

3^rd July 2017

A project that explores whether there is a musical equivalent to the curvature of spacetime will be presented on Thursday 6^th July by Gavin Starks at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull.

Starks, who has a background in radio astronomy and electronic music, been working on developing an ‘acoustic cosmology’ for more than 20 years in collaboration with Prof Andy Newsam of Liverpool John Moores University. Their aim is to test whether mathematical relationships that describe cosmology and quantum mechanics can be applied to a sonic universe, or ‘soniverse’.

Starks explains: “If we look at the way that music has evolved from mediaeval plainsong to the algorithms that generate current chart-hits, we can see parallels developing in the way we describe music and descriptions of our perception of the universe. We can now create new types of sound from scratch – electronic sounds that simply couldn’t have existed before. It leads us to think about a digital sound world that we can’t enter, because it physically doesn’t exist. The question is – what next?

“We are starting to develop completely new forms of manipulating the microstructure of sound, as well as the macroenvironment in which we experience it. This raises questions about whether we can create a soniverse based on a set of fundamental equations, in the same way that we can create mathematical models of the universe.”

Starting with a single wavelength ‘sonon’, a fundamental particle in the soniverse equivalent to a photon, Starks has attempted to define its properties and the physics that may apply to it. The project’s initial model of ‘wave-time’ has three independent dimensions: the individual sonon wavelength, instrument time (the duration that an individual instrument plays) and performance time (duration equal to the length of an individual piece).

Some of the relationships explored to date are causal (i.e. the physics is consistent within the soniverse) and some are aesthetic (i.e. they describe a subjective musical construct). Many have direct parallels in the physical universe. For example, the listener in the soniverse is analogous to the observer in quantum mechanics: a sonon is only rendered musical or not when it is heard. A temporal gravity allows the clustering of sonons to create rhythms or musical phrases. Wave-time can be bent by clusters of sonons, in the same way that gravity distorts space-time in the universe.

Starks believes that bringing together cutting-edge science and understanding of musical structure creates the opportunity for discovery: “There’s a long common history between physics and music, for instance people built columns in cathedrals at a height linked to the resonant frequency, even before they understood the nature of pressure dynamics. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon that art and science are treated as different disciplines. By bringing them back together, and creating a common language, we can find different ways of interpreting and thinking about both music and cosmology.”

Newsam adds: “As astronomers, our experience of the universe is essentially visual – images, graphs, and so on. With the soniverse, we hope to create a new way to appreciate the cosmos, using our instinctive grasp of music and tone to explore relationships between different objects and cosmological models.”

Media contacts

NAM press office

Robert Massey, Royal Astronomical Society, rm@ras.org.uk

Anita Heward, Royal Astronomical Society, anitaheward@btinternet.com

Morgan Hollis, Royal Astronomical Society, mh@ras.org.uk

Science contacts

Gavin Starks, Dgen, binarydust.org, gavin@dgen.net, @agentGav

Andy Newsam, Professor of Astronomy Education and Engagement, Director of the National Schools’ Observatory, Liverpool John Moores University, andy@schoolsobservatory.org.uk

Multimedia

Blog post with embedded player, video and more information: http://www.binarydust.org/2017/05/18/listen-to-the-radio-cube-of-the-antennae-galaxies/

This data-cube is based on an optical image of the “Antennae Galaxies” colliding, as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and a radio-image taken by ALMA. Each pixel actually represents a spectrum of frequencies across the electromagnetic radio spectrum

The data-cube works in two ways.

Firstly, the radio frequencies have been transformed into visible colours, so you can see a slice of the cube.
Secondly, the electromagnetic spectrum has been transformed into an acoustic spectrum. Remember light≠sound: the frequency of electromagnetic radiation (‘light’) has been transformed into a frequency of pressure wave (sound).

By clicking the image and moving your cursor around you can “play” a spectrum of the colliding galaxies. Underneath, you can see a visual representation of the frequency spectrum. Spend some time moving slowly around the red(redshifted) areas – there is a surprising richness to the harmonics for such a simple sonification.

Note: the data-cube is 8MB and could take between 20 seconds to several minutes to appear if you are on a slow connection.

Audio

Inspired by the discovery of the first double-pulsar system (ranked as the 6th most important scientific discovery of 2004), and specially written to celebrate the 10th anniversary of RT32 – a reclaimed 32m Radio Telescope in the middle of the Latvian forests (the VIRAC Radio Telescope in Irbene) brought to life over a decade, after being trashed by the Soviet military, as the only radio telescope in the world that is dedicated to both science and art.

The full name of the piece is ds² – series 1 (PSR J0737-3039B) http://www.binarydust.org/2010/01/04/ds2-series-1/

Further information:

Further information on the project can be found at: http://www.binarydust.org/2017/01/27/escape-into-the-multiverse/

Notes for editors

Running from 2 to 7 July, the RAS National Astronomy Meeting 2017 (NAM 2017, http://nam2017.org) takes place this year at the University of Hull. NAM 2017 will bring together around 500 space scientists and astronomers to discuss the latest research in their respective fields. The conference is principally sponsored by the Royal Astronomical Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

T: http://twitter.com/rasnam2017

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS, www.ras.org.uk), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. The RAS organises scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognises outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.

T: https://twitter.com/royalastrosoc

F: https://facebook.com/royalastrosoc

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC, www.stfc.ac.uk) is keeping the UK at the forefront of international science and has a broad science portfolio and works with the academic and industrial communities to share its expertise in materials science, space and ground-based astronomy technologies, laser science, microelectronics, wafer scale manufacturing, particle and nuclear physics, alternative energy production, radio communications and radar.

STFC’s Astronomy and Space Science programme provides support for a wide range of facilities, research groups and individuals in order to investigate some of the highest priority questions in astrophysics, cosmology and solar system science. STFC’s astronomy and space science programme is delivered through grant funding for research activities, and also through support of technical activities at STFC’s UK Astronomy Technology Centre and RAL Space at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. STFC also supports UK astronomy through the international European Southern Observatory.

T: https://twitter.com/stfc_matters