Here is an image of the beautiful winter we are having in Tampere to accompany the articles and papers I enjoyed reading last week.

Duncan Green published When does Tech → Innovation? Here’s what 178 projects tell us. The blog is about a study of the the results of 178 small grants to tech projects funded under the Making All Voices Count accountability programme over 4.5 years. Fourteen messages emerged from the study. Here are two messages that I found particularly to the point:

• Message 6. Technologies can create new spaces for engagement between citizen and state
• Message 7. Technologies can help to empower citizens and strengthen their agency for engagement

A lot is being written about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and the dangers to our democracies. Here is one article, but there are many more: Facebook: is it time we all deleted our accounts?

An article that I found striking earlier in the week, was published by Wired about the incredible power Facebook has as a media organisation. Inside the two years that shook Facebook-and the world shows how FB is a media company that has yet to wake up to the notion that it is one.

I heard an interesting comment on the BBC World Service in one of the programmes about the Cambridge Analytica saga: our democracies were built about 200 years ago. The new digital technologies are incompatible with that model. We need a new forms of politics and probably of democracy

The World Economic Forum has written this interesting article about how the fourth industrial revolution is changing policy making: How can policy keep pace with the Fourth Industrial Revolution?. In sum: policy making has to become much more experimental, agile, adaptive. Sounds familiar, isn\’t it?

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot has written a courageous article on cancer: I have prostate cancer. But I am happy.