Proxies, platforms and power: gender dynamics in African agtech www.briter.co/insights/art...

Wonderful presentation on the rationale (relational ethics), philosophy, and applications of the NOODL license by
Dr Melissa Omino licensingafricandatasets.com

Testing a Faster Way to Document the City Testing a new approach to documenting places using imagery and collective tagging

"In other words, accuracy is generated collectively. The more observations we gather, the stronger and more reliable the data becomes" medium.com/spatial-coll...

What does "strategic" mean? A public sector governance perspective - Devpolicy Blog from the Development Policy Centre Graham Teskey offers a framework for thinking through whether, and how far, to push beyond service delivery toward deeper institutional reform.

[Amen] Being “strategic” is like decentralisation: nobody can possibly disagree devpolicy.org/what-does-st...

"In Uganda, the Ministry of Finance introduced a programmatic budgeting model that requires agencies to submit IT needs collectively. This way the ministry can flag overlapping proposals and promote existing infrastructure as a default option"

Digital Infrastructure Finance ministries must think about digital public infrastructure as they do roads and power grids

"Collectively, without a broad view of digital infrastructure, state capacity diminishes" www.imf.org/en/publicati...

"Browser-playable governance simulations. Each game puts you in a hard seat — Mayor, Advisor, Negotiator. No tutorials. No right answers" abeer1904.github.io/ai-race @changeist.bsky.social

Cities invented democracy—now they have to reinvent it for decarbonisation What we learned mapping 400+ green-democratic innovations across European cities.

Cities tend to innovate most in areas that are politically and administratively least contentious — and avoid innovating where the green transition is most distributive, conflictual, and therefore legitimacy-sensitive rainerkattel.substack.com/p/cities-inv...

Metrics measure what leadership already believes matters. Anecdotes, emerging from the edges of a system, carry anomalies & weak signals that formal monitoring isn't designed to catch. An org whose leaders listen only to structured data is epistemologically impoverished thecynefin.co/the-pattern-...

Startups.RIP - Dead YC Startups, Alive Ideas Research reports, rebuild plans, and technical specs for 1,700+ dead YC startups. Find your next idea in the startup graveyard.

Startups.RIP is "a directory of 5,700+ failed YC startups with post mortems, deep analysis, and rebuild plans so you can revive dead ideas and turn them into new projects" startups.rip

How a mathematician is cracking open Mexico’s powerful drug cartels Rafael Prieto-Curiel explains how his models of organized crime could improve public safety in his home country.

"He and his colleagues had developed a model to help understand the scale of the country’s drug cartels, which revealed that some 175,000 people worked in these organizations, making the cartels the fifth-largest national employer" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Startups.RIP - Dead YC Startups, Alive Ideas Research reports, rebuild plans, and technical specs for 1,700+ dead YC startups. Find your next idea in the startup graveyard.

Startups.RIP is "a directory of 5,700+ failed YC startups with post mortems, deep analysis, and rebuild plans so you can revive dead ideas and turn them into new projects" startups.rip

Destabilising unsustainable systems—the phase-outs, reallocations of space, restrictions, and hard choices—appears as the neglected corner across all democratic modes

Cities invented democracy—now they have to reinvent it for decarbonisation What we learned mapping 400+ green-democratic innovations across European cities.

Cities tend to innovate most in areas that are politically and administratively least contentious — and avoid innovating where the green transition is most distributive, conflictual, and therefore legitimacy-sensitive rainerkattel.substack.com/p/cities-inv...

Metrics measure what leadership already believes matters. Anecdotes, emerging from the edges of a system, carry anomalies & weak signals that formal monitoring isn't designed to catch. An org whose leaders listen only to structured data is epistemologically impoverished thecynefin.co/the-pattern-...

"The underwriters of laissez-faire capitalism are becoming its undertakers" aeon.co/essays/how-d...

AI agents are coming for government. How one big city is letting them in Boston's chief information officer on a pioneering experiment leveraging AI to expand the public's access to government.

"Rather than treating agents as something to block wholesale, or something to embrace without guardrails, Boston is experimenting with a middle path: build a governed, secure, reliable layer that mediates how AI agent systems interact with government resources" www.fastcompany.com/91504876/bos...

Ray of hope? The rise of solar energy in China China’s solar subsidies triggered innovation and learning-by-doing that dramatically lowered global solar costs while generating domestic economic gains large enough to outweigh the subsidy costs, sho...

China shows that green industrial policies, pursued at the domestic level and not requiring multilateral agreements, can be a powerful means of confronting the challenge of climate change that we all face voxdev.org/topic/energy...

Maximillian Ntabo on Why African AI Needs More Builders and Fewer Pitches The African Innovators Series(TAIS): Tech, Data, and AI Changing the Game

This is strong evidence that Africa doesn’t just have AI talent. We have problem-driven innovators. Builders here are designing systems that are grounded in lived realities: unreliable infrastructure, water scarcity, inclusion for people with disabilities reamby.substack.com/p/maximillia...

Cameroonians turn to private solar grids in response to prolonged power cuts In Mile 4 New Council area in Bamenda, North West region of Cameroon, residents have increasingly turned to solar energy to cope with prolonged and unpredictable electricity disruptions.

The expanding adoption of solar reflects practical responses to recurring grid failures and has contributed to decentralized energy access for households in the community globalvoices.org/2026/03/07/s...

From Opaque Discretion to Structured Variation Why a Minimum Digital Kernel Matters for a Diverse State

"The existence of judgment does not justify opacity. The question is not whether discretion exists. It always will. The question is whether discretion is exercised in a form that leaves a trace" digitalstatecraft.substack.com/p/from-opaqu...

The Future Is Collective by Thousand Currents

From Peru to Fiji, six movement leaders whose work is rooted in place, people, and collective change tcurrents.exposure.co/the-future-i...

These skills do not sit neatly inside traditional competency frameworks, but they shape the ability of gov'ts to respond to the moment they are in. The future of public innovation lies in the development of cultures that navigate complexity with intention states-of-change.org/stories/sign...

The Roman-African borderlands and expeditions south of the Sahara. After the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, the Roman Empire came into direct contact with a number of African states with whom it shared a long and open frontier extending from the northwestern tip of the ...

"The historical evidence for Roman expeditions south of the Sahara is thus disappointingly limited and highly speculative" www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-roman-...

Maximillian Ntabo on Why African AI Needs More Builders and Fewer Pitches The African Innovators Series(TAIS): Tech, Data, and AI Changing the Game

This is strong evidence that Africa doesn’t just have AI talent. We have problem-driven innovators. Builders here are designing systems that are grounded in lived realities: unreliable infrastructure, water scarcity, inclusion for people with disabilities reamby.substack.com/p/maximillia...

"Search dati.gov.it for datasets about air quality in Milan, then summarize what each contains — time coverage, license, and best download format" ondata.github.io/ckan-mcp-ser... @tomski.com

"The significance here is not just better record-keeping. It is that the state becomes more capable of learning from its own decisions"

This is why the goal is not to eliminate variation. It is to move from opaque discretion to structured variation. Opaque discretion is difficult to review, easy to manipulate, hard to contest. Structured variation allows institutions to adapt to context while still making public reasoning visible.

From Opaque Discretion to Structured Variation Why a Minimum Digital Kernel Matters for a Diverse State

"The existence of judgment does not justify opacity. The question is not whether discretion exists. It always will. The question is whether discretion is exercised in a form that leaves a trace" digitalstatecraft.substack.com/p/from-opaqu...

Cameroonians turn to private solar grids in response to prolonged power cuts In Mile 4 New Council area in Bamenda, North West region of Cameroon, residents have increasingly turned to solar energy to cope with prolonged and unpredictable electricity disruptions.

The expanding adoption of solar reflects practical responses to recurring grid failures and has contributed to decentralized energy access for households in the community globalvoices.org/2026/03/07/s...