Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Governments operate in a context of rising public expectations and complex policy challenges, while also facing a critical window of opportunity to adapt and reform institutions and policies to better respond to these needs. In democracies, a healthy level of trust in public institutions will be critical to the implementation of these reforms.

The third OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions provides comparable actionable evidence on levels and key drivers of trust across 33 OECD countries and 5 OECD accession candidate countries in 2025…

Overall trust levels in national government have stabilised at around 40%, while trust remains higher in the civil service, police and courts…

43% of people across OECD countries have low or no trust in the national government, compared with 40% with high or moderately high trust. As per previous survey waves, there are significant variations across countries and population groups. While there was a small decrease in trust in 2023 compared to 2021, trust levels have since stabilised, and substantially improved in about half of the countries where it had previously declined. In most countries, trust in the police, courts, local government and civil service is higher than in national government…(More)”.

Research project by Audrey Tang and Caroline Emmer De Albuquerque Green: “Governance should feel like a daily capability, not just a periodic vote.

Civic AI is artificial intelligence that answers to the people it affects. Instead of one powerful system built to govern everyone, the idea is to build many small ones that a community can own, inspect, correct, and switch off.

Each of these local stewards has a name — the Kami (knowledge artefact management intelligence): a spirit of place, not a universal governor…

Just heard about Civic AI? Three steps in.

1. Get the idea. Read the Manifesto — the whole argument in Audrey Tang’s own words.
2. Meet the six principles. Skim the 6-Pack below: six plain-language tests for AI a community can actually trust.
3. See it work. “AI Alignment Cannot Be Top-Down” tells how Taiwan answered a wave of AI-enabled scam ads — the framework in the real world.

Prefer to listen? Take the 6-Pack of Care podcast or “Can AI Be Compassionate?” along for a walk. Prefer to watch? Audrey and Caroline introduce the framework in “Reimagining AI Alignment” — a 30-minute fireside chat.

Prefer visuals? Browse all comics — Nicky Case’s illustrated overview and twelve chapter pages…(More)”

Article by Beth Noveck: “For decades, many scholars and policymakers have treated public participation as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be cultivated. This “realist” view, which gained prominence after World War II with the growth of money in politics, treated participation as destabilizing. Many academics even challenged the notion that ordinary Americans have the time, competence, or capacity to participate, writing off the public as incapable.

This skepticism has led institutions to design consultation processes more as exercises in public relations than as genuine attempts to share power. And when we evaluate democratic innovations, it leads us to focus on metrics like participation rates rather than actual policy impact.

Brazil’s experience suggests that participation becomes meaningful only when it is connected to decision-making. What makes this moment different is that artificial intelligence may finally give institutions the capacity to hear, organize, and act on public input at a scale that was previously impossible. 

Unlike earlier Web-based platforms that only expanded the volume of talking, we can use AI to make sense of the collective intelligence of our communities and uncover better ways to connect participation to decisions and action. 

The challenge is no longer getting people to speak. It is building institutions capable of listening.

(Adapted from Reboot: AI and The Race to Save Democracy, Yale University Press, 2026.)…(More)”.

Report by Merici Vinton & Faith Savaiano & Laura Sigelmann: “The book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt states “Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes.”

In every retrospective we hosted, participants bemoaned the lack of a strategy and a longer-term theory of change in their work, or “how”, tied to outcomes. No shared strategy of work and functional purpose across the federal teams – USDS, 18F/TTS, OFCIO, and beyond – led to confusion, competition for limited resources, and a focus on individual team or organizational goals rather than shared agency- or government-wide outcomes. No shared strategy for mission outcomes at the government-wide or agency level meant we heard time and time again during the retros that teams at all levels of government felt like they were missing a chance at making an even greater, deeper impact. In the absence of such shared mission outcomes, digital service teams felt like their participation was the metric for success and their activity was a substitute for long-term progress. This is emblematic of a systemic problem – digital service initiatives operate within silos, compete for limited resources and talent, and often operate at agencies that lack a clear sense of how digital service initiatives contribute to their goals, ultimately diminishing the impact.

The lack of strategy impacted not just the teammates trying to do the work, it also impacted the agencies and stakeholders digital service teams interact with. A strategy defines a set of priorities that is repeatable and accountable, making it easier to partner, delegate, and work fast; it also communicates what you don’t want to work on, transparently outlining priorities. For digital service teams, strategy was absent but should exist at multiple levels. At the highest level, it articulates the theory for how digital services contribute to societal outcomes – how digital and service design improves public health through better access to benefits such as SNAP, or simplified access to healthcare. Strategy also exists at the government-wide level, defining priorities and processes for achieving those outcomes. And at the organizational and functional level, strategy defines the logic model for how diverse teams – including crisis response, modernization, implementation, product building, and operations and maintenance – work together across government. 

And now, at a moment of significant technological change and demands on government, the stakes of having no strategy at each of these levels are higher than ever. Without a clear position on AI, government won’t even get their tactics right — they’ll spend all their time debating tools instead of outcomes. A strategy doesn’t require consensus. It is a signal of what you value, and provides the concrete steps to get what you’re trying to achieve, and why — so that people can ignore it, engage with it, challenge it, or build on it.

Moving forward, the digital service community should be a part of articulating an ambitious, outcomes based strategy at each level for what we want to achieve across the country in the next 5-10-20 years; and to look at defining foundational elements that make a strategy effective: building user-centered government and how to reform our institutions to become modern, responsive organizations…(More)”.

Book edited by Jane E Fountain, Sorin Dan, and Niina Mäntylä: “This book examines the relationship between artificial intelligence and power in government. The growth of AI has drastically altered the political landscape, and the shifting power relationships between actors involved in deploying AI have the potential to radically impact the ways in which this technology is understood, adopted and implemented in government.  

Drawing together scholars from public policy, public management, information technology and law, this volume throws light on the implications that AI poses for existing power relationships between actors involved in the deployment and use of AI in government, and for existing power relationships between the state and citizens. It addresses these issues through three disciplinary perspectives – legal and regulatory studies, public policy and governance, and public management and innovation – in order to fully assess the interplay between AI and power in different governmental settings across the world. Chapters examine a range of themes pertinent to AI and governance, including the exercise of power, liability issues, ethical policymaking, surveillance, and the use of AI tools in public organizations. A concluding chapter maps out future directions for the study of AI and power in government…(More)”.

Assessment by AI Vision by GPTZero: “At the current rate, AI-generated content will dominate every major platform within a decade. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated. GPTZero scans millions of posts daily — identifies the ones that went viral and our model caught as AI-written. See for yourself. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated, via Chrome extension.

• Today, 16.0% of the internet is AI.
• Today, 18.4% of Substack is AI.
• Today, 34.3% of Medium is AI.
• Today, 11.6% of X is AI…(More)”.

Article by J.J. Anselmi: “While some are worse than others, the stories people tell about how data centers invade and disrupt their communities follow the same contours. The tech company and their swarm of contractors are in town before you know it, and they’re already scheming with local leaders. In no uncertain terms, your elected officials have chosen tech billionaires over their own neighbors.

Soon, an army of men with bulldozers are tearing out trees near your home and ripping up fields. Dump trucks careen around town, and the night sky is so polluted with light, you can’t see the stars. A year or so later, the data center is up and running. By then, the high-paying construction jobs have all but disappeared.

After months of digging, you finally have an idea of how much water the data center actually consumes. If you’re lucky, your area isn’t in a drought. You hope things won’t get dire. Meanwhile, the monolith is droning and hissing, wearing you and your neighbors down with constant noise. You hope the water you do have will be drinkable this time next year as you try to adjust to the unnatural heat the data center generates.

The militaristic drive to build the best chatbot and somehow “beat China” knows no bounds, including those of logic. This nightmarish iteration of the extraction economy was made possible by undemocratic processes and a national administration that sold us and our resources out to tech oligarchs. But people in these towns and cities are smarter and tougher than the plutocrats accounted for—and they’re putting up one hell of a fight. Told by people whose communities have been impacted, this is the story of unhinged data center expansion in America…(More)”.

Book by Fenwick McKelvey: “How computer models became fundamental to political practice—from winning elections to global affairs—and how we imagine political futures as a computing problem.

For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenwick McKelvey traces the entwined history of politics and computers from the 1960s to the late 1980s. He shows how programmers, consultants, academics, political scientists, and peace activists all worked—sometimes in tandem, sometimes not—to build simulations to win campaigns, predict coups, forecast the future, and render politics as legible as a spreadsheet.

Drawing on novel archival and historical research, McKelvey recounts the history of efforts to simulate politics by building models of elections, voters, and international relations. Comparing attempts in the United States to simulate domestic electoral politics and international affairs, he reveals the unexamined connections and conflicts between the two projects. His book provides a helpful guide to taking stock of exaggerated claims that AI and technology will fix politics, while presenting the long history of such promised technological fixes…(More)”.

Book by Ahana Datta Fasel: “Even the most elite hackers use common technologies to steal state secrets, which help intelligence agencies to catch them. Are these hackers simply reckless, or do their operations reveal something deeper about their nation-state patrons?

Over a globally interconnected Internet, nations must constantly toe the delicate line of maintaining stability–developing shared tech protocols that they themselves must also break, in order to spy. This is the paradox at the heart of cyber espionage: states need to cooperate if they are to compete. As the US and China vie for strategic advantage through a new form of statecraft in cyber space, an intensifying cat-and-mouse game makes cyber security more difficult, more expensive and more unpredictable for us all.

Full Stack Spies examines the dynamic, interdependent relationships that hackers, cyber defenders, tech giants and nation states forge, leverage and exploit to amass cyber power against a wide range of targets in geopolitics, global trade and finance, the armed forces, and critical infrastructure. But this jostling for cyber dominance makes spying online harder–and, more crucially, undermines long-term trust in cyber space, destabilising the foundations of digital societies..(More)”.

Paper by Geoff Mulgan: “I summarise the perspectives of different disciplines – economics, psychology, computer science, business studies, organisation studies, political science, history, law, international relations, anthropology, design and complexity. In each case I make short suggestions on what would be useful from each, before turning to what a more synthetic approach might look like, in particular using insights from biology and computation to see organisations as living things and addressing the dynamics of ecosystems of organisations which compete and cooperate.

The paper asks of the people working in academic disciplines: how are you engaging with, and learning from, other disciplines? And how could your knowledge be useful to a world that badly needs to reform its public institutions at every level, from the local to the global?…(More)”.