The UN’s technocratic answer to the ‘data revolution’
Alternative title: Have bureaucracy, will organize meetings: The UN’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution It started with casual Twitter feed browsing on Sunday and a short exchange of tweets between Zara Rahman and me: @zararah lack of social science/anthro/humanities etc is quite striking; i expect v. narrow debates-gender only adds 2 tunnel vision — Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) August 31, 2014 So I had a closer look at the UN ’ s press release and to be honest, afterwards questions about gender distribution or the ‘North-South’ divide did not seem to be the most pressing ones. While I have absolutely no doubt about the technological and technical expertise of the group members, I wonder why the UN went for the most conservative, most quantitative, most statistics-driven approach to the ‘data revolution’ to fulfill its ambitious goal: The Group is also expected to assess new opportunities linked to innovation, technical progress and the s