Stefaan Verhulst

Danilo Freire at the Political Methodologist: “Peer review is an essential part of the modern scientific process. Sending manuscripts for others to scrutinize is such a widespread practice in academia that its importance cannot be overstated. Since the late eighteenth century, when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society pioneered editorial review,¹ virtually every scholarly outlet has adopted some sort of pre-publication assessment of received works. Although the specifics may vary, the procedure has remained largely the same since its inception: submit, receive anonymous criticism, revise, restart the process if required. A recent survey of APSA members indicates that political scientists overwhelmingly believe in the value of peer review (95%) and the vast majority of them (80%) think peer review is a useful tool to keep themselves up to date with cutting-edge research (Djupe 2015, 349). But do these figures suggest that journal editors can rest upon their laurels and leave the system as it is?

Not quite. A number of studies have been written about the shortcomings of peer review. The system has been criticised for being too slow (Ware 2008), conservative (Eisenhart 2002), inconsistent (Smith 2006; Hojat, Gonnella, and Caelleigh 2003), nepotist (Sandström and Hällsten 2008), biased against women (Wold and Wennerås 1997), affiliation (Peters and Ceci 1982), nationality (Ernst and Kienbacher 1991) and language (Ross et al. 2006). These complaints have fostered interesting academic debates (e.g. Meadows 1998; Weller 2001), but thus far the literature offers little practical advice on how to tackle peer review problems. One often overlooked aspect in these discussions is how to provide incentives for reviewers to write well-balanced reports. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for reviewers to feel that their work is burdensome and not properly acknowledged. Further, due to the anonymous nature of the reviewing process itself, it is impossible to give the referee proper credit for a constructive report. On the other hand, the reviewers’ right to full anonymity may lead to sub-optimal outcomes as referees can rarely be held accountable for being judgmental (Fabiato 1994).

…

Open peer review (henceforth OPR) is largely in line with this trend towards a more transparent political science. Several definitions of OPR have been suggested, including more radical ones such as allowing anyone to write pre-publication reviews (crowdsourcing) or by fully replacing peer review with post-publication comments (Ford 2013). However, I believe that by adopting a narrow definition of OPR – only asking referees to sign their reports – we can better accommodate positive aspects of traditional peer review, such as author blinding, into an open framework. Hence, in this text OPR is understood as a reviewing method where both referee information and their reports are disclosed to the public, while the authors’ identities are not known to the reviewers before manuscript publication.

How exactly would OPR increase transparency in political science? As noted by a number of articles on the topic, OPR creates incentives for referees to write insightful reports, or at least it has no adverse impact over the quality of reviews (DeCoursey 2006; Godlee 2002; Groves 2010; Pöschl 2012; Shanahan and Olsen 2014). In a study that used randomized trials to assess the effect of OPR in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Walsh et al. (2000) show that “signed reviews were of higher quality, were more courteous and took longer to complete than unsigned reviews.” Similar results were reported by McNutt et al. (1990, 1374), who affirm that “editors graded signers as more constructive and courteous […], [and] authors graded signers as fairer.” In the same vein, Kowalczuk et al. (2013) measured the difference in review quality in BMC Microbiology and BMC Infectious Diseases and stated that signers received higher ratings for their feedback on methods and for the amount of evidence they mobilised to substantiate their decisions. Van Rooyen and her colleagues ((1999; 2010)) also ran two randomized studies on the subject, and although they did not find a major difference in perceived quality of both types of review, they reported that reviewers in the treatment group also took significantly more time to evaluate the manuscripts in comparison with the control group. They also note authors broadly favored the open system against closed peer review.

Another advantage of OPR is that it offers a clear way for referees to highlight their specialized knowledge. When reviews are signed, referees are able to receive credit for their important, yet virtually unsung, academic contributions. Instead of just having a rather vague “service to profession” section in their CVs, referees can precise information about the topics they are knowledgeable about and which sort of advice they are giving to prospective authors. Moreover, reports assigned a DOI number can be shared as any other piece of scholarly work, which leads to an increase in the body of knowledge of our discipline and a higher number of citations to referees. In this sense, signed reviews can also be useful for universities and funding bodies. It is an additional method to assess the expert knowledge of a prospective candidate. As supervising skills are somewhat difficult to measure, signed reviews are a good proxy for an applicant’s teaching abilities.

OPR provides background to manuscripts at the time of publication (Ford 2015; Lipworth et al. 2011). It is not uncommon for a manuscript to take months, or even years, to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. In the meantime, the text usually undergoes several major revisions, but readers rarely, if ever, see this trial-and-error approach in action. With public reviews, everyone would be able to track the changes made in the original manuscript and understand how the referees improved the text before its final version. Hence, OPR makes the scientific exchange clear, provides useful background information to manuscripts and fosters post-publication discussions by the readership at large.

Signed and public reviews are also important pedagogical tools. OPR gives a rare glimpse of how academic research is actually conducted, making explicit the usual need for multiple iterations between the authors and the editors before an article appears in print. Furthermore, OPR can fill some of the gap in peer-review training for graduate students. OPR allows junior scholars to compare different review styles, understand what the current empirical or theoretical puzzles of their discipline are, and engage in post-publication discussions about topics in which they are interested (Ford 2015; Lipworth et al. 2011)….(More)”

Book edited by Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane: “Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effectiveness in managing service demand and reducing carbon emissions, developing greater social interaction and community networks, providing new services around health and social care etc. Smart urbanism is being represented as the response to almost every facet of the contemporary urban question.

This book explores this common conception of the problematic of smart urbanism and critically address what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed – and contested; where is this happening both within and between cities; and, with what sorts of social and material consequences. The aim of the book is to identify and convene a currently fragmented and disconnected group of researchers, commentators, developers and users from both within and outside the mainstream SU discourse, including several of those that adopt a more critical perspective, to assess ‘what’ problems of the city smartness can address

The volume provides the first internationally comparative assessment of SU in cities of the global north and south, critically evaluates whether current visions of SU are able to achieve their potential; and then identifies alternative trajectories for SU that hold radical promise for reshaping cities….(More)”

Dan Adams at the Boston Globe: “Earlier this year, Hopkinton resident Chris Bullock was deciding how to vote on a tax increase that would fund a new school. He wanted to know how much the town spent on education, and how that compared to other nearby towns — reasonable questions that any engaged voter might ask.

But the information was surprisingly hard to find. Charts buried in the town’s 230-page annual report were inscrutable, the money scattered across various funds labeled with jargon. Even after piecing together a few figures, Bullock had no way to make sense of them. Was his town spending a lot or only a little on education?
That frustrating exercise was the genesis of ClearGov , a startup founded by Bullock that takes towns’ raw financial data and turns them into visually appealing online infographics, along with comparisons to similar towns nearby.

For residents, Bullock said, ClearGov aims to make local governments more approachable, transparent, and accountable.

And for officials, the software should help them parse voluminous budget spreadsheets to better compare their finances to those of nearby towns.

The site also encourages officials to answer questions posted on the site by residents and annotate their numbers with plain-English explanations of the policies behindthem….

Easton is one of five Massachusetts municipalities — along with Athol, Northfield, Oxford, and Warwick — to sign up for new paid service, inking a $1,500 deal with ClearGov in September that runs through June 2016, according to town officials.

The town’s ClearGov page gives a snapshot of its population and median home values and incomes, plus graphs of Easton’s debt load and rainy day reserve fund. There’s also a detailed, per-capita breakdown of where Easton’s revenues come from…(More).

Alexander Howard at Huffington Post: “Winners of the latest version of New York City’s BigApps Challenge, announced Thursday, show how tough lessons from the first generation of city apps contests are now helping to creating civic value and community.

New York’s experience will help demonstrate to mayors around the world how to get the most social impact and economic value from government data: Start with the civic problem you want to target, then find the data, partners and community to make the changes….

The evolution brings civic apps contests a long way from the Washington, D.C., local government’s “Apps for Democracy” contest in 2008, which hinted at the promise of opening up data for public benefit, but failed to deliver meaningful long-term social change or services.

Below are this year’s BigApps winners for affordable housing, zero waste, connecting cities, and civic engagement, each of which will receive $25,000, and two judge’s choice winners, each of which will receive $10,000.

• JustFix.nyc is focused on helping tenants get their apartments fixed.
• Treasures will give New Yorkers a mobile tool to share and search for reusable objects around the city.
• Benefit Kitchen will give low-income families a tool to learn about their publicbenefits.
• CityCharge, which stretches the definition for an app, plans to install solar-powered charging stations in public places. (In Massachusetts, solar-powered benches are already on Cambridge streets.)
• Issue Voter gives people a tool to track what’s happening in Congress and weigh in on issues that matter to them. (The app’s developers will now customize it for New York.)
• Addicaid is focused on helping people struggling with substance abuse enter recovery and stay sober.

….Winning BigApps doesn’t mean that a given idea will work out in the long term. Some past winners of New York’s contest, including Embark,HealthyOut, Ontodia and Poncho, have endured. Many others have not — as is the case for many startups.

When asked about the longer-term sustainability issues that have plagued apps developed in these kinds of contests, Springer emphasized the endurance of apps like Hopscotch, which helps kids learn how to code, and HeatSeak, which is being installed in buildings across the city. ….(More)

Alex Davies at Wired: “IN THE NEXT 30 years, the American population will rise by 70 million people. This being the future, those people will love ordering stuff online even more than people do now, which will prompt a 45 percent rise in freight volume. The nation’s roads, already crumbling because Congress likes bickering more than legislating, will be home to 65 percent more trucks.

That’s just one of the ways a report, released earlier this year by the US Department of Transportation, says a growing population will strain an already overloaded highway system. Eager to avert some of these problems and get people thinking about the mobility of tomorrow, today the DOT is launching the Smart City Challenge, a contest that invites American cities to take advantage of new technologies that could change how we move.

Open data, smart gadgets, autonomous vehicles, and connected cars are among the tech already revolutionizing the road, while companies ranging from Apple and Google to Uber and Lyft promise to revolutionize how people and goods get around. The city that offers the most compelling plan gets $50 million to begin making it happen.

The challenge represents a new way of working for the DOT, one tailored to a rapidly changing world….(More)” See also >www.transportation.gov/smartcity<.

Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work….(More)”

Tim Harford: “In 1737, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire astonished the great scientists of London by solving the most pressing technological problem of the day: how to determine the longitude of a ship at sea. The conventional wisdom was that some kind of astronomical method would be needed. Other inventors suggested crackpot schemes that involved casting magic spells or ringing the world with a circle of outposts that would mark the time with cannon fire.

John Harrison’s solution — simple in principle, fiendishly hard to execute — was to build an accurate clock, one that despite fluctuating temperatures and rolling ocean swells, could show the time at Greenwich while anywhere in the world. Harrison and countless other creative minds were focused on the longitude problem by a £20,000 prize for the person who solved it, several million pounds in today’s money.

Why was the prize necessary? Because ideas are hard to develop and easy to imitate. Harrison’s clocks could, with effort, have been reverse engineered. An astronomical method for finding longitude could have been copied with ease. Inventing something new is for suckers; smart people sit back and rip off the idea later. One way to give non-suckers an incentive to research new ideas, then, is an innovation prize — that is, a substantial cash reward for solving a well-defined problem. (Retrospective awards such as the Nobel Prize are different.)

For decades after Harrison’s triumph, prizes were a well-established approach to the problem of encouraging innovation. Then they fell out of favour, with policymakers instead encouraging innovation with a mix of upfront research grants and patent protection. Now, however, prizes are making a comeback. The most eye-catching examples have been in the private sector: the $1m Netflix prize for improved personalisation of film recommendations or the $10m Ansari X prize for private space flight. Last year Nesta, a UK-based charity for the promotion of innovation, launched a “new longitude prize” of £10m for an improved test for bacterial infections, marking the anniversary of the original prize’s founding in 1714.

But the big money potential is in the public sector. In 2007, several governments (and the Gates Foundation) promised a $1.5bn prize for a vaccine for pneumococcal meningitis. The prize, called an “advanced market commitment”, is structured as a dose-by-dose subsidy rather than one giant cheque. It is being paid out and millions of children have already been vaccinated. Much bigger commitments are possible: before US senator Bernie Sanders began his run for the presidency, he introduced two Senate bills that would have provided almost $100bn a year as medical innovation prizes.

But why are innovation prizes attractive, when the existing system of grants and patents seems to have served us reasonably well so far?…(More)”

Paper by Marko M. Skoric et al: “This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement….(More)”

Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.

The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.

His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.

The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.

There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.

As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.

The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.

The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..

Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)