Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw: “Peer production describes a unique form of global collaboration that is responsible for creating some of the most vital parts of the internet. Information ecosystem powerhouses like Wikipedia and the Linux operating system were founded on principles of open cooperation, and only exist today due to the contributions of thousands, and in some cases, millions of people. In Peer Production, Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, and Aaron Shaw describe the central role that peer production plays in today’s information environment, and how it is a much broader phenomenon than the handful of famous projects that are now household names.
The book offers three core ideas: peer production functions as a critical mode of collaborative knowledge production; represents a novel type of social collaboration; and has unique advantages over previous forms of collaboration. The authors show that peer production is not just the foundation of the internet as we know it, but also the engine driving the global digital economy to generative AI. Finally, the book also charts the uncertain future of peer production as it confronts new threats and a changing digital landscape…(More)”.
Article by Alicja Gniadzik, Ruth Susana Pasquin, Daniel Köberl and Mateusz Tokarski: “Citizen Assemblies are meant to create opportunities for citizens to contribute to policymaking. The main task envisioned for citizens is to learn, deliberate and develop recommendations, and as such, assembly members rarely contribute to the assembly design, implementation and follow-up. There are a growing number of exceptions – some youth and children assemblies have been co-designed with participants to ensure the process meets the needs of young people, whilst in permanent assemblies, members steer some aspects of the process, selecting the topic, and taking decisions as to how the Assembly should be run, or monitoring follow-up.
In this article we share our insights from working within an Assembly that aimed to both meet young people’s needs and strengthen collective agency. We share our experiences as participants and organiser on the role and contribution of Task Forces to enhancing agency, functionality and relationality of Citizens’ Assemblies.
The Young Citizens Assembly on Pollinators (YCAP) aimed to provide young people across Europe with an opportunity for more direct involvement in EU policymaking on environmental issues. The Assembly gathered 100 young people from across all EU countries, selected by democratic lottery to represent the diversity of the EU youth population. During three in-person weekends and two online sessions, Assembly members learned about the issue and biodiversity governance mechanisms from experts, discussed different perspectives with stakeholders, and exchanged with EU officials on the existing policies…(More)”.
Paper by Hongyi Zou et al: “Urban analytics has developed as an interdisciplinary field to understand and address urban complexity. Despite rapid growth, the field remains fragmented, lacking conceptual clarity and interdisciplinary dialogue. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of 427 publications across relevant disciplines. Information about publication details, publication type, research objectives, research fields, methods, main data and data source, data accessibility, data representativeness, geographical and temporal scopes, ethical concerns and policy implications of each study are extracted and categorised. The following analysis traces the evolution of urban analytics, identifies methodological or thematic paucity in current research, and evaluates whether existing studies have approached urban issues in methodologically sound, ethical, and appropriate ways. The findings reveal persistent challenges in definitional contestation, data “firehose” and flood of bias, interdisciplinarity, fragmentation and uneven integration, as well as institutional and practical limits. This review further identifies emerging directions that integrate theory and practice, support responsible innovation, and promote more actionable insights for urban analytics. It also contributes a conceptual framework and research roadmap for developing responsible, context-aware and practical urban analytics that support equitable and sustainable urban futures…(More)”.
Article by Joseph Donia and Luca Marelli: “In this article, we trace expectations associated with efforts to promote secondary use of health data in Canada and the European Union. In Canada, we focus on initiatives enabling cross-jurisdictional data access in a highly devolved federal system with parallel commitments to Indigenous data sovereignty. In the EU, we focus on the European Health Data Space, a new regulatory regime intended to facilitate access to health data for clinical care, research, policymaking and innovation across 27 member states. Drawing on a comparative analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews across nine EU member states and four Canadian provinces and one territory, we find that despite institutional differences, secondary use in both jurisdictions is characterised by strikingly similar promissory vocabularies. We argue that these expectations are fundamentally ones of scale: They seek to render health data interoperable, comparable and usable to different ends. At the same time, we document shared frictions: between sovereignty and integration; between access and control; and between private assets and public goods. We understand these as spaces where competing valuations of health data are negotiated. We suggest that secondary use logics are progressively reorienting health systems, with implications for public value, equity and political collectives…(More)”.
Article by Jason Koebler: “The Trump administration is using an anti-drug trafficking grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the country to funnel their ongoing collection of automated license plate reader data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, according to public records and court documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The records show the workings of a complex system in which the federal government is using the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA) program to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. In some cases, data that goes to HIDTA is then also shared to a larger program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency called the “National License Plate Reader Program” (NLPRP).
Through HIDTA systems, local license plate data can be accessed by various federal agencies, including those who may not have contracts themselves with the ALPR companies. The program raises significant privacy and transparency concerns; as cities begin to place restrictions on how their Flock data can be used, it represents an end-around for federal law enforcement to access data that it might not normally be able to, and to do so without any obvious oversight body. HIDTA falls under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and it recently won an award from the Trump White House for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”
Many of the documents used in this article were obtained using public records requests by Cris van Pelt, the creator of the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com and its associated investigative blog, Footnote4a. “When local police and private vendors promise community control over surveillance, they obscure a broader agenda. The DEA and ONDCP are already aggregating local data behind the scenes,” van Pelt said. “This bypasses democratic processes entirely. The public has made it clear that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights, even when it is laundered through fragmented systems, private companies, and regional task forces.”..(More)”.
Report by The World Bank: “Digital technologies have significant potential to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, yet many government digital services fail to achieve widespread adoption because they are designed around administrative processes rather than user needs. This report examines how behavioral barriers create a “lost path” for users, resulting in low awareness, poor uptake, high dropout rates, and limited repeat use of digital services. It introduces Behavioral User Journey Mapping (BUJM) and the COM-B Model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, Behavior) as practical tools for identifying and addressing user pain points throughout the service journey. Drawing on case studies from around the world, the report demonstrates how behavioral science can improve service engagement, increase completion rates, and enhance user trust. It concludes with recommendations for user-centered design, iterative testing, inclusive service development, and behavioral performance metrics to help governments successfully close the “last mile” gap in digital government…(More)”.
Handbook by the United Nations Democracy Fund: This handbook is a ‘how-to’ guide for commissioning, designing, and operating citizens’ assemblies to achieve a more informed, substantive, and representative way to make trusted democratic decisions. While there are many ways to consult the community, the focus of this handbook is on deliberative approaches, of which the citizens’ assembly is the best-known model. Citizens’ assemblies combine civic lottery (also known as sortition or selection by lot) with deliberation to bring a diverse group of people across ages, genders, locations, and perspectives together in an environment where they learn, think, discuss, and work toward finding common ground to address a given problem.
An assembly aims to provide commissioning authorities with a set of recommendations that assembly members have agreed to, supported by their reasoning and evidence. This handbook walks you through each step of the journey: identifying when a deliberative approach is appropriate, designing the key features of a process, preparing and running the assembly itself, and understanding how to translate recommendations into action…(More)”.
OECD Report: “People use public administrative services (PAS) frequently, for example when registering a birth, or getting an ID, license or permit. During important life events, like having a baby or moving home, people often use many different PAS. The quality of these services affects people’s lives and their trust in institutions. Serving Citizens 2026 presents an overview of how PAS are organised and delivered in OECD and partner countries. It provides guidance on how governments can make these services more accessible, responsive and proactive for the people who use them.
Key figures
87% of OECD countries have a strategy to improve public administrative services
55% of OECD countries use performance data or user feedback to improve services
Only 20% of common life events are supported by integrated services across different public agencies..(More)”.
Article by Juliana Castro Varón and Dylan Freedman: “Artificial intelligence is changing the world, and the humans in it, in ways we don’t yet understand. People are increasingly worried that if we rely on chatbots for thinking, our brains will become slower and less engaged. Is A.I. making us stupider? Scientists, too, want to know.
A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and the education company McGraw Hill examined a decade of data from a popular online learning tool by McGraw Hill, starting in 2015. Across millions of math sessions by a group that ranged from fifth graders to college students, the researchers compared performance from before 2022, when ChatGPT first came out, with the work that followed its arrival…(More)”
Article by Pew Research: “As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, there is growing interest in using it to stand in for real respondents in public opinion surveys. Put simply: Instead of contacting large numbers of people and asking them what they think, pollsters can ask an AI model to predict how those people would have answered a certain question.
Pew Research Center has long sought to better understand new developments in public opinion research, and we wanted to learn more about how this AI-based polling works. So we ran an experiment. We developed a state-of-the-art process for fielding AI surveys and compared their results with three recent survey waves from our American Trends Panel (ATP) taken by human respondents at roughly the same time.
This experiment taught us that, at this time, AI models are not an adequate replacement for traditional polling on topics of broad public importance. Our AI-generated survey results struggled to accurately reproduce the findings from high-quality public opinion polls in a variety of ways.
Here are some of the main issues we encountered:
Results of AI polls differed – often by quite a lot – from results of human surveys
Across nearly 300 individual survey questions, the estimates produced using our AI respondents differed from their human counterparts by an average of 12 percentage points...(More)”.