Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Ans Irfan, Ankita Arora, Christopher Jackson and Celina
Valencia: “World Health Organization (WHO) estimates indicate the United States of America has the highest novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) burden in the world, with over 5 million confirmed cases and nearly 165,000 associated deaths as of August 14th, 2020 (WHO 2020). As the COVID-19 mortality and morbidity has disproportionately impacted populations who experience vulnerabilities due to structural issues such as racism (Laurencin and McClinton 2020; Lin II and Money 2020; Martin 2020; Kim et al. 2020), it has become increasingly necessary to take this opportunity and intentionally codify diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in the policymaking process. To encourage and facilitate this, we synthesize existing literature to identify best practices that can not only be used to inform COVID-19-related public policy activities but will also continue to inform inclusive policymaking processes in the future. We identify specific tools for policymakers at all levels of government to better operationalize the DEI framework and enact inclusive, equitable public policies as a result….(More)”.
Paper by LucianaCingolani: “For a number of years scholars have theorized about a change of paradigm in the collaborative practices between governments and citizens as a result of the newly emerged many-to-many forms of connectivity. A vibrant agenda on open government has flourished since, with critical advances on the conceptual front, but much less empirical testing of its propositions.
This article makes use of a recognized typology of co-production initiatives in order to implement a Cox hazards survival analysis of 465 open government platforms from a global sample in 87 countries. Its main findings suggest that government-initiated collaborations have the lowest risk of termination and that citizen-to-government initiatives the highest. They also show that while internationally-exerted pressure for openness favors the genesis of open government platforms, it does not affect their survival chances…(More)”.
Article by Joe Appleton: “…many governments are implementing new and exciting ideas to try and boost citizen engagement and overcome the obstacles that prevent citizen involvement. Here are a few examples of how cities are engaging with citizens in the 21st century.
REVOLUTIONIZING CITY HALL
The city of San Francisco has been working hard to improve resident participation. To help solve city-wide problems, the city created a program called Civic Bridge. Civic Bridge is a platform that can be used to bring together residents and volunteers from the private sector with city staff. This allows city hall to work closely with private sector professionals to solve public challenges.
By enlisting the help of hundreds of otherwise unreachable residents, solutions to city problems such as homelessness, access to healthcare, and other social issues, fast and effective results could be produced.
Civy is another program that has been designed to put city officials directly in touch with residents. Civy is a cloud-based platform that gives citizens a voice, in a confidential environment, that allows citizens to add their thoughts and opinions on citywide projects, helping officials make better-informed decisions.
REMOVING BARRIERS
Physically traveling to a city hall can be an immense barrier to citizen participation. However, some innovative cities are taking steps to bring city hall into resident’s homes. To do this, they are enlisting help from platforms such as CitizenLab. CitizenLab was first launched in 2016, and it has proven itself to be a practical medium for many European cities. The platform boosts citizen engagement by sending data directly to members of the public via a user-friendly mobile interface. Officials can see the results from surveys and questionnaires in real-time, and use the data collected to make decisions based on real citizen insights.
Civocracy is a similar digital platform that has been designed to promote citizen participation, champion collaborative governance projects, and improve city hall efficiency. It focuses on direct communication between residents and officials, giving citizen’s a platform to discuss projects and allow officials to get ideas from the public. This service is currently being used in Amsterdam, Nice, Potsdam, Brussels, Lyon, and many other European cities.
Platforms like these are essential for removing the obstacles that many citizens face when interacting with city governments. As a result, cities can enjoy a more citizen-centric form of smart government.
BOOSTING PARTICIPATION
There’s more to citizen engagement than giving and receiving feedback for ideas and projects. To boost participation, some cities have really embraced 21st century trends.
For example, two cities in the UK (London and Plymouth) have been experimenting with crowdfunding for potential city projects. Proposals for urban projects are listed on popular crowdfunding websites, in an open and transparent manner, allowing residents and investors to directly contribute funds to projects and initiatives that they’re interested in. In some cases, the local authorities will support winning proposals by matching the raised funds.
Crowdfunding can be used as a platform for citizens to show off their own ideas and initiatives, and highlight any potential problems in the community. The service can be used for a wide range of applications, from restoring derelict buildings to installing social health programs.
Allowing citizens to show their approval with their personal funding is one way to boost participation, however, there should be other ways to attract attention and allow citizens to voice their opinions too. Maptionnaire is one such way.
Maptionnaire is an online tool that creates a virtual map of a city, where residents can freely offer their advice, opinions, and feelings about areas of the city or specific projects. Users can simply leave comments that can explicitly inform city officials about their feelings.
This is a great tool that can provide widely representative data about city plans. The platform can also take votes about certain projects and garner fast results. Since it can be accessed remotely, it also allows for citizens to say what they want, without feeling intimidated by a crowd or swayed by popular opinion.
NURTURING IDEAS
Encouraging public feedback is one way to boost participation, but some local authorities are going a step further by directly asking citizens for solutions. By allowing citizens to formulate their own solutions and give them the tools to realize those solutions, interest in city governance can grow exponentially.
For example, Lublin is the first city in Poland to adopt an initiative called the Green Citizen’s Budget. This participatory budget scheme welcomed residents to put forward ideas to improve urban greenery, and allocated a budget of PLN 2 million (450.000 €) and teamed residents up with technical experts to help realize those plans.
Turning to citizens for inspiration is a popular way of generating new ideas and seeing fresh perspectives. The city of Sydney and the New South Wales government in Australia has recently launched an innovative competition that presents an opportunity for citizens to submit daring proposals to solve public space problems….(More)”.
Report from the Digital State Project: “…argues for the critical function of small, agile, digitally enabled and focused networks of leaders to foster strong international cooperation on digital governance issues.
This type of cooperative working, described as ‘digital minilateralism’, has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policies. It is also important as cross-border digital infrastructure and services become increasingly common.
The policy paper, co-authored by Dr. Tanya Filer, who leads the Digital State project, and Dr. Antonio Weiss, affiliated researcher, draws on the example of the Digital Nations, a network of 10 ‘leading digital’ countries, to advance understanding of how digital leaders and policymakers can best develop and use minilateral networks, and of the particular affordances that this approach offers.
Key findings:
- Already beginning to prove effective, digital minilateralism has a role to play in shaping how individual governments learn, adopt and govern the use of new and emerging technologies, and how they create common or aligned policy.
- National governments should recognise and reinforce the strategic value of digital minilaterals without stamping out, through over-bureaucratisation, the qualities of trust, open conversation, and ad-hocness in which their value lies.
- As digital minilateral networks grow and mature, they will need to find mechanisms through which to retain (or adapt) their core principles while scaling across more boundaries.
- To demonstrate their value to the global community, digital multilaterals must feed into formal multilateral conversations and arrangements….(More)”.
Geoff Shullenberger at the New Atlantis: “…The old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings seem to revive the old cyber-utopian dreams.
One day, democracy is irreversibly poisoned by social media, which empowers the radical right, authoritarians, and racist, misogynist trolls. The next day, the very same platforms are giving rise to a thrilling resurgence of grassroots activism. The new net delusion more closely resembles a psychotic delusion in the clinical meaning of the word, in which the sufferer often swings between megalomaniacal fantasies of control and panicked sensations of loss of control.
The shift toward a subtle endorsement of manipulation and propaganda — itself an expression of a desire for control — is a result of the fracture of our information ecosystem. The earlier cyber-utopian consensus overrated the value of information in itself and underrated the importance of narratives that bestow meaning on information. The openness of the media system to an endless stream of new users, channels, and data has overwhelmed shared stable narratives, bringing about what L. M. Sacasas calls “narrative collapse.”
But sustaining ideological projects and achieving political ends still requires narratives to extract some meaning from the noise. In the oversaturated attention economy, the most extreme narratives generally stand out. As a result, open networks, which were supposed to counteract propaganda, have instead caused its proliferation — sometimes top-down and state-directed, sometimes crowdsourced, often both.
This helps to explain why the democratization of information channels has been less inimical to authoritarian governments than was anticipated ten years ago. Much like extremists and conspiracy theorists, states with aggressive propaganda arms offer oversimplified messages to keep bewildered online users from having to navigate a swelling tide of data on their own.
Conversely, legacy media, if it remains committed to some degree of neutrality, offers fewer definitive explanatory frameworks, and its messages are accordingly more likely to get lost in the noise. It should not surprise us that news organizations are actually pivoting toward more overt ideological commitments. Adopting forceful narratives, however well they actually make sense of the world, attracts more eyeballs.
Those who celebrated Twitter and Facebook as vehicles of global liberalization and those who now denounce them as gateways into dangerous extremism (often the same people) have erred in seeing the platforms as causally linked to specific politics, rather than to a particular range of styles of politics. Their deeper mistake, however, is to view freedom and control as opposed, rather than as complementary elements of a system. The expansion of freedom through open networks generates informational chaos that, in turn, feeds a demand for reinvigorated control. We can see the demand for control in the new appeal of extreme, even bizarre views that impose an organizing principle on the chaos.
And we can also see the demand for control in the nostalgia for the old gatekeepers, whose demise was once celebrated. Ironically, the only way for these gatekeepers to stay relevant may be to follow the lead of the authoritarians and activists — to abandon any stance of being neutral and above the fray and instead furnish a cohering narrative of their own….(More)”.
Paper by Peter Drahos: “Regulatory capitalism depends heavily on science, but science faces epi-stemic critiques and crises of research integrity. These critiques and crises are outlined and then located within capitalism’s general tragedy of commodification. Drawing on Marx’s insights into the relationship between science, commodity production, and the machine age, the general tragedy of commodification is outlined. From here, the article shifts to discussing some well-known global public good problems relating to access to medicines and access to knowledge. The roots of these problems can be traced back to the way the institution of science has been bent toward processes of capital accumulation. The evidence we have from the history of science suggests that too often its research agendas have been set by capital and the demands of war-making capitalist states. The final part of the article considers whether the ideal of responsiveness might help us to reformulate the way in which we think about the responsibilities and duties of science. It focuses on human rights, citizen science, and the intellectual commons as potential sources of responsiveness. Responsiveness has been a fertile ideal for law and society theorists when it has come to theory building in law and regulation. It also has something to offer the debates around the crises of science….(More)”.
Issue Brief by Andrew Young: “Understanding how and why group data is collected and what can be done to protect children’s rights…While the data protection field largely focuses on individual data harms, it is a focus that obfuscates and exacerbates the risks of data that could put groups of people at risk, such as the residents of a particular village, rather than individuals.
Though not well-represented in the current responsible data literature and policy domains writ large, the challenges group data poses are immense. Moreover, the unique and amplified group data risks facing children are even less scrutinized and understood.
To achieve Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) and ensure effective and legitimate governance of children’s data, government policymakers, data practitioners, and institutional decision makers need to ensure children’s group data are a core consideration in all relevant policies, procedures, and practices….(More)”. (See also Responsible Data for Children).
Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian at Harvard Business School: “More and more companies are leveraging technological advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and other forms of artificial intelligence to provide relevant and instant recommendations to consumers. From Amazon to Netflix to REX Real Estate, firms are using AI recommenders to enhance the customer experience. AI recommenders are also increasingly used in the public sector to guide people to essential services. For example, the New York City Department of Social Services uses AI to give citizens recommendations on disability benefits, food assistance, and health insurance.
However, simply offering AI assistance won’t necessarily lead to more successful transactions. In fact, there are cases when AI’s suggestions and recommendations are helpful and cases when they might be detrimental. When do consumers trust the word of a machine, and when do they resist it? Our research suggests that the key factor is whether consumers are focused on the functional and practical aspects of a product (its utilitarian value) or focused on the experiential and sensory aspects of a product (its hedonic value).
In an article in the Journal of Marketing — based on data from over 3,000 people who took part in 10 experiments — we provide evidence supporting for what we call a word-of-machine effect: the circumstances in which people prefer AI recommenders to human ones.
The word-of-machine effect.
The word-of-machine effect stems from a widespread belief that AI systems are more competent than humans in dispensing advice when utilitarian qualities are desired and are less competent when the hedonic qualities are desired. Importantly, the word-of-machine effect is based on a lay belief that does not necessarily correspond to the reality. The fact of the matter is humans are not necessarily less competent than AI at assessing and evaluating utilitarian attributes. Vice versa, AI is not necessarily less competent than humans at assessing and evaluating hedonic attributes….(More)”.
Blog by Evan S. Michelson: “The overlapping crises the world has experienced in 2020 make clear that resources from multiple sectors — government, private sector, and philanthropy — need to be deployed at multiple scales to better address societal challenges. In particular, science philanthropy has stepped up, helping to advance COVID-19 vaccine development, identify solutions to climate change, and make the tools of scientific inquiry more widely available.
As I write in my recently published book, Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology (Routledge, 2020), this linkage between science philanthropy and societal responsibility is one that needs to be continually strengthened and advanced as global challenges become more intertwined and as the relationship between science and society becomes more complex. In fact, science philanthropies have an important, yet often overlooked, role in raising the profile of the societal responsibility of research. One way to better understand the role science philanthropies can and should play in society is to draw on the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework, a concept developed by scholars from fields such as science & technology policy and science & technology studies. Depending on its configuration, the RRI framework has roughly three core dimensions: anticipatory research that is forward-looking and in search of new discoveries, deliberative and inclusive approaches that better engage and integrate members of the public with the research process, and the adoption of reflexive and responsive dispositions by funders (along with those conducting research) to ensure that societal and public values are accounted for and integrated at the outset of a research effort.
Philanthropies that fund research can more explicitly consider this perspective — even just a little bit — when making their funding decisions, thereby helping to better infuse whatever support they provide for individuals, institutions, and networks with attention to broader societal concerns. For instance, doing so not only highlights the need for science philanthropies to identify and support high-quality early career researchers who are pursuing new avenues of science and technology research, but it also raises considerations of diversity, equity, and inclusion as equally important decision-making criteria for funding. The RRI framework also suggests that foundations working in science and technology should not only help to bring together networks of individual scholars and their host institutions, but that the horizon of such collaborations should be actively extended to include practitioners, decision-makers, users, and communities affected by such investigations. Philanthropies can take a further step and reflexively apply these perspectives to how they operate, how they set their strategies and grantmaking priorities, or even in how they directly manage scientific research infrastructure, which some philanthropic institutions have even begun to do within their own institutions….(More)”.
Paper by Mara Maretti, Vanessa Russo & Emiliano del Gobbo: “The expression ‘open data’ relates to a system of informative and freely accessible databases that public administrations make generally available online in order to develop an informative network between institutions, enterprises and citizens. On this topic, using the semantic network analysis method, the research aims to investigate the communication structure and the governance of open data in the Twitter conversational environment. In particular, the research questions are: (1) Who are the main actors in the Italian open data infrastructure? (2) What are the main conversation topics online? (3) What are the pros and cons of the development and use (reuse) of open data in Italy? To answer these questions, we went through three research phases: (1) analysing the communication network, we found who are the main influencers; (2) once we found who were the main actors, we analysed the online content in the Twittersphere to detect the semantic areas; (3) then, through an online focus group with the main open data influencers, we explored the characteristics of Italian open data governance. Through the research, it has been shown that: (1) there is an Italian open data governance strategy; (2) the Italian civic hacker community plays an important role as an influencer; but (3) there are weaknesses in governance and in practical reuse….(More)”.