With only ten years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), development organizations rapidly need to innovate their approach to decision making and problem solving. New lessons and understandings, born from emerging uses of technology, can enable these innovations. This...

We live, as we are so often told, in an era of data abundance. Yet we also live during a period marked by tremendous inequities and asymmetries when it comes to data access. These contradictory phenomena represent one of the great paradoxes of our times, reflective of more general socio-economic...

In this paper, we explore new and traditional approaches to measuring population density, and ways in which density information has frequently been used by humanitarian, private-sector and government actors to advance a range of private and public goals. We explain how new innovations are...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend the way people move, work, and gather, governments, businesses, and public health researchers have looked increasingly at mobility data to support pandemic response. This data, assets that describe human location and movement, generally has been...

The Data Assembly is an initiative from The GovLab supported by the Henry Luce Foundation to solicit diverse, actionable public input on data re-use for crisis response in the United States. The initiative began in the summer of 2020 with an initial focus on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic...