Illuminating New Solutions and Programmatic Innovations for Resilient Spaces (INSPIRES)

Through the INSPIRES Cooperative Agreement, DevLab@Penn is involved in a multi-stakeholder, collaborative four-year project to: 1) harness the knowledge offered by machine learning and big data to forecast troubled civic spaces; 2) build and integrate a multi-country (i.e., up to 25 countries this year) bimonthly survey of in-country civil society experts to enrich the big data with local knowledge; 3) return machine learning forecasts on civic spaces and the expert survey results back to local actors in order to help build their resilience; and 4) rely on the forecasting tool to pilot innovative, cross-sectoral, context-driven programmatic interventions that support the creation of new coalitions and initiatives to protect civic space. DevLab@Penn is working to generate a tight feedback loop that runs from big data analytics to locally responsive interventions to evidence for future forecasting and programming.