Zoom Court Is Changing How Justice Is Served

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Scigliano at The Atlantic: “…Last spring, as COVID‑19 infections surged for the first time, many American courts curtailed their operations. As case backlogs swelled, courts moved online, at a speed that has amazed—and sometimes alarmed—judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. In the past year, U.S. courts have conducted millions of hearings, depositions, arraignments, settlement conferences, and even trials—nearly entirely in civil cases or for minor criminal offenses—over Zoom and other meeting platforms. As of late February, Texas, the state that’s moved online most aggressively, had held 1.1 million remote proceedings.

“Virtual justice” (the preferred, if unsettling, term) is an emergency response to a dire situation. But it is also a vision some judicial innovators had long tried to realize. One leading booster, Michigan Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, told me that going online can make courts not only safer but “more transparent, more accessible, and more convenient.” Witnesses, jurors, and litigants no longer need to miss hours of work and fight traffic. Attorneys with cases in multiple courts can jump from one to another by swiping on their phones.

In July the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators jointly endorsed a set of “Guiding Principles for Post-pandemic Court Technology” with a blunt message: The legal system should “move as many court processes as possible online,” and keep them there after the risk of infection passes. The pandemic, they wrote, “is not the disruption courts wanted, but it is the disruption that courts needed.”

America’s courts are burdened by weighty encrustations of complexity and habit, from black robes and “All rise” to arcane trial procedures. COVID-19 has forced them to improvise and experiment. Now, as a post-pandemic future glimmers, we have a chance to reflect. How much of that experimentation will survive after the crisis abates? Given the stakes involved in the justice system, how much should?…(More)”.

The Paths to Digital Self-Determination – A Foundational Theoretical Framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nydia Remolina and Mark Findlay: “A deluge of data is giving rise to new understandings and experiences of society and economy as our digital footprint grows steadily. Are data subjects able to determine themselves in this data-driven society? The emerging debates about autonomy and communal responsibility in the context of data access or protection, highlight a pressing imperative to re-imagine the ‘self’ in the digital space. Empowerment, autonomy, sovereignty, human centricity, are all terms often associated with the notion of digital self-determination in current policy language. More academics, industry experts, policymakers, regulators are now advocating self-determination in a data-driven world. The attitudes to self-determination range from alienating data as property through to broad considerations of communal access and enrichment. Digital self-determination is a complex notion to be viewed from different perspectives and in unique spaces, re-shaping what we understand as self-determination in the non-digital world. This paper explores the notion of digital self-determination by presenting a foundational theoretical framework based on pre-existent self-determination theories and exploring the implications of the digital society in the determination of the self. Only by better appreciating and critically framing the discussion of digital self-determination, is it possible to engage in trustworthy data spaces, and ensure ethical human-centric approaches when living in a data driven society….(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence in Migration: Its Positive and Negative Implications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Priya Dialani: “Research and development in new technologies for migration management are rapidly increasing. To quote certain migration examples, big data was used to predict population movements in the Mediterranean, AI lie detectors used at the European border, and the recent one is the government of Canada using automated decision-making in immigration and refugee applications. Artificial intelligence in migration is helping countries to manage international migration.

Every corner of the world is encountering an unprecedented number of challenging migration crises. As an increasing number of people are interacting with immigration and refugee determination systems, nations are taking a stab at artificial intelligence. AI in global immigration is helping countries to automate a plethora of decisions that are made almost daily as people want to cross borders and look for new homes.

AI projects in migration management can help in predicting the next migration crisis with better accuracy. Artificial intelligence can predict the movements of people migrating by taking into account different types of data such as WiFi positioning, Google Trends, etc. This data can further help the nations and government to be prepared more efficiently for mass migration. Governments can use AI algorithms to examine huge datasets and look for potential gaps in their reception facilities such as the absence of appropriate places for people or vulnerable unaccompanied children.

Recognizing such gaps can allow the government to alter their reception conditions as well as be prepared to comply with their legal obligations under international human rights law (IHRL).

AI applications can also help in changing the lives of asylum seekers and refugees. AI machine learning and optimized algorithms are helping in improving refugee integration. Annie MOORE (Matching Outcome Optimization for Refugee Empowerment) is one such project that matches refugees to communities where they can find the resources and environment as per their preferences and needs.

Asylum seekers or refugees most of the time lack access to lawyers and legal advice. A UK-based chatbot DoNotPay provides free legal advice to asylum seekers using intelligent algorithms. It also provides personalized legal support, which includes help through the UK asylum application process.

AI tech is not just helpful to the government but also to international organisations taking care of international migration. Some organizations are already leveraging machine learning in association with biometric technology. IOM has introduced the Big Data for Migration Alliance project, which intends to use different technologies in international migration….(More)”.

The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Steven Feldstein: “The world is undergoing a profound set of digital disruptions that are changing the nature of how governments counter dissent and assert control over their countries. While increasing numbers of people rely primarily or exclusively on online platforms, authoritarian regimes have concurrently developed a formidable array of technological capabilities to constrain and repress their citizens.

In The Rise of Digital Repression, Steven Feldstein documents how the emergence of advanced digital tools bring new dimensions to political repression. Presenting new field research from Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, he investigates the goals, motivations, and drivers of these digital tactics. Feldstein further highlights how governments pursue digital strategies based on a range of factors: ongoing levels of repression, political leadership, state capacity, and technological development. The international community, he argues, is already seeing glimpses of what the frontiers of repression look like. For instance, Chinese authorities have brought together mass surveillance, censorship, DNA collection, and artificial intelligence to enforce their directives in Xinjiang. As many of these trends go global, Feldstein shows how this has major implications for democracies and civil society activists around the world.

A compelling synthesis of how anti-democratic leaders harness powerful technology to advance their political objectives, The Rise of Digital Repression concludes by laying out innovative ideas and strategies for civil society and opposition movements to respond to the digital autocratic wave….(More)”.

Public policy for open innovation: Opening up to a new domain for research and practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue by Antonio Bob Santos et al: “Open Innovation (OI) emerged as one of the most important research topics in management and economics literature in the last decades, especially when understanding research and change phenomena (Martin 2012, 2019). The concept, originally advanced by Chesbrough (2003), reflects and articulates changes of the global learning economy emerging from the development of digital technologies, ubiquitous innovation, intellectual labour mobility, and the growth of markets for knowledge resources and processes. More recently, Chesbrough and Bogers (2014: 17) redefined OI as “a distributed innovation process based on purposively managed knowledge flows across organizational boundaries” in which the implied notion of the business model could apply to a multitude of organisations and assume a variety of forms (cf. Caraça et al., 2009; Zott et al., 2011). OI has been analysed in different dimensions, such as inside-out and outside-in knowledge flows, across levels of analysis (not only company level, but also individual and ecosystem level), and from different perspectives (such as regional/territorial and national/international) (Bogers et al., 2017; Dahlander and Gann, 2010; West et al., 2014).

OI is also a hot topic in actual business life, with a growing number of companies adopting a more fluid approach, namely what concerns to the knowledge valorisation and collaborative innovation practices. Research has accordingly also put a lot of attention on corporate aspects of OI with a particular focus on how to leverage external knowledge, management of OI networks, and the role of users and communities in OI (Randhawa et al., 2016; Vanhaverbeke et al., 2014; West and Bogers, 2014). Even though it may constitute an important boundary condition for OI practices, there has been a reasonably limited focus on the role of public policies in OI (Bogers et al., 2018; de Jong et al., 2010; Santos, 2016). Nevertheless, recent studies show that the adoption of OI can be stimulated through the existence of public policies favourable to a context of knowledge sharing, collaborative R&D and innovation, knowledge exploitation and valorisation, mobility and qualification of human resources or supporting innovative ideas (Beck et al., 2020; Masucci et al., 2020; Mina et al. 2014; etc.).

All-in-all, a more elaborate focus on the role of public policy in OI is merited, and this is what this special issue provides. Pro-OI innovation policy can be understood as a general posture and the deployment of a specific set of instruments that seek to keep learning processes distributed and knowledge transfers unhurdled, while ensuring self-intended behaviours do not compromise the expansion of effective opportunities for the broader societal constituents. In this special issue the papers extend the portfolio of insights in a variety of ways.

The papers included in this special issue illustrate the breadth of roles that public policy can play in promoting OI practices and in the possible initiatives and instruments that can be applied to this end. The papers also hint at some of the challenges facing public policy to strengthen OI, e.g. with a view of measuring desired OI activities and effects, dealing with local and contextual factors that affect OI-related outcomes, and selecting and reaching appropriate target-actors (SMEs, business accelerators, public research institutes, universities) and contexts (science parks, clusters, regions)with the potential to engage in OI practices but with little or no current practices to build on. We learn that there is great scope for further research to help policymakers navigate the landscape of possible OI-promoting policies and actions and in supporting the design and implementation of effective public policy for OI….(More)”.

Would you notice if fake news changed your behavior? An experiment on the unconscious effects of disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Zach Bastick: “A growing literature is emerging on the believability and spread of disinformation, such as fake news, over social networks. However, little is known about the degree to which malicious actors can use social media to covertly affect behavior with disinformation. A lab-based randomized controlled experiment was conducted with 233 undergraduate students to investigate the behavioral effects of fake news. It was found that even short (under 5-min) exposure to fake news was able to significantly modify the unconscious behavior of individuals. This paper provides initial evidence that fake news can be used to covertly modify behavior, it argues that current approaches to mitigating fake news, and disinformation in general, are insufficient to protect social media users from this threat, and it highlights the implications of this for democracy. It raises the need for an urgent cross-sectoral effort to investigate, protect against, and mitigate the risks of covert, widespread and decentralized behavior modification over online social networks….(More)”

Learning Policy, Doing Policy: Interactions Between Public Policy Theory, Practice and Teaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by: Trish Mercer, Russell Ayres, Brian Head, and John Wanna: “When it comes to policymaking, public servants have traditionally learned ‘on the job’, with practical experience and tacit knowledge valued over theory-based learning and academic analysis. Yet increasing numbers of public servants are undertaking policy training through postgraduate qualifications and/or through short courses in policy training.

Learning Policy, Doing Policy explores how policy theory is understood by practitioners and how it influences their practice. The book brings together insights from research, teaching and practice on an issue that has so far been understudied. Contributors include Australian and international policy scholars, and current and former practitioners from government agencies. The first part of the book focuses on theorising, teaching and learning about the policymaking process; the second part outlines how current and former practitioners have employed policy process theory in the form of models or frameworks to guide and analyse policymaking in practice; and the final part examines how policy theory insights can assist policy practitioners.

In exploring how policy process theory is developed, taught and taken into policymaking practice, Learning Policy, Doing Policy draws on the expertise of academics and practitioners, and also ‘pracademics’ who often serve as a bridge between the academy and government. It draws on a range of both conceptual and applied examples. Its themes are highly relevant for both individuals and institutions, and reflect trends towards a stronger professional ethos in the Australian Public Service. This book is a timely resource for policy scholars, teaching academics, students and policy practitioners….(More)”

The Case for Open Land-Data Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Hanstad at Project Syndicate: “Last month, a former Zimbabwean cabinet minister was arrested for illegally selling parcels of state land. A few days earlier, a Malaysian court convicted the ex-chairman of a state-owned land development agency of corruption. And in January, the Estonian government collapsed amid allegations of corrupt property dealings. These recent events all turned the spotlight on the growing but neglected threat of land-related corruption.

Such corruption can flourish in countries that are unprepared to manage the heightened demand for land that accompanies economic and population growth. Land governance in these countries – institutions, policies, rules, and records for managing land rights and use – is underdeveloped, which undermines the security of citizens’ land rights and enables covert land grabs by the well connected.

In Ghana, for example, the government keeps land records for only about 2% of currently operating farms; the ownership of the remainder is largely undocumented. In India, these records were, until recently, often kept in disorganized stacks in government offices.

Under such circumstances, corruption becomes relatively easy and lucrative. After all, when recordkeeping is nonexistent or chaotic, who can confidently identify the rightful owner of a parcel of land? As the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and Transparency International put it in a report a decade ago, “where land governance is deficient, high levels of corruption often flourish.” This corruption “is pervasive and without effective means of control.”

Globally, one in five people report having paid a bribe to access land services. In Africa, two out of three people believe the rich are likely to pay bribes or use their connections to grab land. Uncertainty about land rights can also affect housing security – around a billion people worldwide say they expect to be forced from their homes over the next five years.

Inevitably, the marginalized and vulnerable are the worst affected, whether they are widows driven from their homes by speculators or entire communities subjected to forced eviction by developers. Weak land rights and corruption also fuel conflict within communities, such as in Kenya, where political parties promise already-occupied land to supporters in an attempt to win votes.

But there is reason for hope. The ongoing revolution in information and communications technology provides unprecedented opportunities to digitize and open land records. Doing so would clarify the land rights of hundreds of millions of people globally and limit the scope for corrupt practices….(More)”.

Citizen assembly takes on Germany’s climate pledges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Kuebler at Deutsche Welle: “A group of 160 German citizens chosen at random from across the country will launch an experiment in participatory democracy this week, aiming to inspire public debate and get the government to follow through with its pledge to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050.

The Bürgerrat Klima, or Citizen Assembly, will follow the example set in the last few years by countries like Ireland, the United Kingdom and France. The concept, intended to directly involve citizens in the climate decisions that will shape their lives in the coming decades, is seen as a way for people to push for stronger climate policies and political action — though the previous experiments abroad have met with varying degrees of success.

Inspired by a 99-person Citizens’ Assembly, the Irish government adopted a series of reforms in its 2019 climate bill aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 51% before the end of this decade. These included recommendations “to ensure climate change is at the centre of policy-making,” and covered everything from clean tech and power generation to electric vehicles and plans to retrofit older buildings.

But in France, where 150 participants submitted bold proposals that included a ban on domestic flights and making ecocide a crime, lawmakers have been less enthusiastic about taking the measures on board. A new climate and resilience bill, which aims to cut France’s CO2 emissions by 40% over the next decade and is due to be adopted later this year, has incorporated less than half of the group’s ideas. Greenpeace has said the proposed bill would have been “ambitious 15 or 20 years ago.”…(More)”.

Infrastructure Isn’t Really About Roads. It’s About the Society We Want.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Klinenberg in the New York Times: “…Consider civic infrastructure. Many of the critical systems the United States needs to build and sustain a good society are degraded. Discriminatory voting laws, like Georgia’s new legislation, threaten the integrity of the political process. Social media companies like Facebook, by using algorithms that reward political extremism and promote political polarization, distort the discourse in our public sphere. Community organizations that help feed, house and educate low-income Americans are essential for preserving peace and improving living standards, but they have struggled to remain solvent during the pandemic. Mr. Biden’s plan leaves these failings in the civic infrastructure practically untouched.

The neglect of social infrastructure in Mr. Biden’s plan is even more striking, given how critical social infrastructure was to the success of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the last “once in a generation” investment in America. The New Deal was not just about roads and bridges, after all. It also funded the construction or renovation of thousands of gathering places across the country, in suburbs and cities, rural areas and small towns.

What came from these investments? Libraries. Parks. Playgrounds. Piers. Post offices. Swimming pools. Sports fields. Theaters. Museums. Gardens. Forests. Beaches. Lodges. Walkways. Armories. Courthouses. County fairgrounds. Today too many of us take these projects for granted, even as we continue to use them on a huge scale.

Paradoxically, the success of this social infrastructure is also the source of its degradation. Our gathering places are overrun and dilapidated. Parks and playgrounds need updating. Athletic fields need new surfaces. Public libraries have an estimated $26 billion in capital needs, according to the American Library Association, and the costs of safely operating them at full capacity are likely to exceed what states and local governments can afford. None of this, sadly, is explicitly addressed in Mr. Biden’s proposal….(More)”.