2021 - JRC Week on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards

Composite Indicators

About

The JRC Week on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards is an annual event during which local and international policy makers, academics, think tanks, and practitioners in a wide range of fields learn from best practices and showcase their capacity to inform policies through the use of indicator systems that summarise multidimensional concepts.

This year the JRC Week on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards convened online for the first time. Over the course of four half-days, participants learned about quality-controlled methods for developing and analysing indicator frameworks and the efforts that are needed in terms of data collection, analysis and visualisation of indices and scoreboards. The training offered lessons learnt from the JRC assessments of more than 100 well-known composite indicators and scoreboards.

The Community of Practice meeting focused on sharing knowledge and experiences on data storytelling. We held a behind-the-scenes talk with practitioners from some of the world’s most known indexes as well as award winning data journalists.

Agenda

JRC Week 2021 - Agenda

Meet the team

Invited speakers

Albert Motivans

Equal Measures 2030

Divyanshi Wadhwa

World Bank

John Burn-Murdoch

Financial Times

Marie Segger

The Economist

Michael Green

Social Progress Index
TED Talk

Pamela Duncan

The Guardian

Saamah Abdallah

Happy Planet index

Simon Anholt

Good Country Index
TED Talk

Simon Anholt is a policy advisor, author and researcher who has provided global leadership and innovation in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. His core expertise includes the design and implementation of approaches that track, analyse and influence perceptions and behaviours at the global scale, and developing new approaches for tackling 21st-century global challenges.

Anholt has advised the Heads of State and Heads of Government of 60 countries, helping them engage more ethically, imaginatively and strategically with the international community (including for example Bhutan’s groundbreaking Gross National Happiness initiative and the widely imitated StartUp Chile program). His original work on measuring and managing the images of countries has developed into a global industry. This work has been supported since 2005 by the Anholt-Ipsos Nation Brands Index, a research framework which has accumulated over a billion datapoints.

In 2014, he published the Good Country Index (GCI), a ranking that analyses how much each country on earth contributes to humanity and the planet. Via a custom-built online interface, users can manipulate 28,000 simultaneous variables. The GCI is one of only three external data sources referenced in the United Nations’ 75th Anniversary Report in 2021, and features in the Annual Report of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. Further work is being conducted, in partnership with UNDP, to combine data from the GCI and the Human Development Index.

In 2016, Anholt built the Global Vote, a digital platform that enables anyone anywhere to vote on the elections of other countries: a celebration and a demonstration of global interconnectedness and interdependence. Voters from 186 countries have so far participated in 31 elections.

In 2017, he launched a pilot project to create the first digital nation, with a of 700 million identified citizens. Using an AI-driven deliberation platform and blockchain-based voting, the project proved the viability of an entirely self-governing nation.

In 2018, Anholt created the Good Leader Index, a monthly review of the leaders who are currently doing the best (and worst) job of balancing their domestic and international responsibilities.

In 2019 he announced the Good Generation, a plan for the whole world to agree on a new set of values, virtues and skills that every country on earth will teach its children, so the next generation is empowered to run towards the global challenges instead of running away from them. The Good Generation compact will be crowdsourced via an AI-moderated, natural language online conversation between children, parents and teachers in 200 countries and territories.

He co-presents, with Prof. Nick Cull at the University of Southern California, the podcast People, Places and Power. Anholt is the author of six books on ethical geopolitics, Founding Editor Emeritus of the leading academic journal in the field he created, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, and is a ten-times TEDx speaker. His first TED talk is the all-time most viewed TED talk in the ‘Government’ category with over 12 million views, and is ranked by viewers as the fourth “most inspiring” of all TED talks. His new book, The Good Country Equation, was described by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as “a masterpiece”.

Anholt has a Master’s degree in computational linguistics, anthropology and medieval French and Italian literature from Oxford University. He read International Studies at the UK’s Royal College of Defence Studies and holds an honorary Professorship in Political Science at the University of East Anglia. He served as Vice-Chair of the UK Foreign Office’s Public Diplomacy Board for 9 years, and as a Parliamentarian of the European Cultural Parliament. He is a member of the External Stakeholders Board of the Aurora Alliance of European Universities. In 2009 Professor Anholt was awarded the Nobels Colloquia Prize for Economics by a committee of 10 Nobel economists, and in 2010 the Award for Excellence in Sustainable Development at the 7th Multicultural Forum in Paris.