Stefaan Verhulst
Rosalyn Old at Nesta: “In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, governments at all levels are having to make decisions to postpone elections and parliamentary sessions, all while working remotely and being under pressure to deliver fast-paced and effective decision-making.
In times of crisis, there can be a tension between the instinct to centralise decision-making for efficiency, sacrificing consultation in the process, and the need to get citizens on board with plans for large-scale changes to everyday life. While such initial reactions are understandable, in the current and next phases we need a different approach – democracy must go on.
Effective use of digital tools can provide a way to keep parliamentary and government processes going in a way that enhances rather than threatens democracy. This is a unique opportunity to experiment with digital methods to address a number of business-as-usual pain points in order to support institutions and citizen engagement in the long term.
Digital tools can help with the spectrum of decision-making
While digital tools can’t give the answers, they can support the practicalities of remote decision-making. Our typology of digital democracy shows how digital tools can be used to harness the wisdom of the crowd in different stages of a process:
A typology of digital democracy
Digital tools can collect information from different sources to provide an overview of the options. To weigh up pros and cons, platforms such as Your Priorities and Consul enable people to contribute arguments. If you need a sense of what is important and to try to find consensus, Pol.is and Loomio may help. To quickly gauge support for different options from stakeholders, platforms such as All Our Ideas enable ranking of a live bank of ideas. If you need to gather questions and needs of citizens, head to platforms like Sli.do or online forms or task management tools like Trello or Asana….(More)”.
Paper by Urs Gasser et al: “Data collection and processing via digital public health technologies are being promoted worldwide by governments and private companies as strategic remedies for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic and loosening lockdown measures. However, the ethical and legal boundaries of deploying digital tools for disease surveillance and control purposes are unclear, and a rapidly evolving debate has emerged globally around the promises and risks of mobilizing digital tools for public health. To help scientists and policymakers navigate technological and ethical uncertainty, we present a typology of the primary digital public health applications currently in use. Namely: proximity and contact tracing, symptom monitoring, quarantine control, and flow modeling. For each, we discuss context-specific risks, cross-sectional issues, and ethical concerns. Finally, in recognition of the need for practical guidance, we propose a navigation aid for policymakers made up of ten steps for the ethical use of digital public health tools….(More)”.
Ashley Labosier at Mercatus Center: “In addressing local challenges, such as budget deficits, aging infrastructure, workforce development, opioid addiction, homelessness, and disaster preparedness, a local government must take into account the needs, preferences, and values of its entire community, not just politically active groups. However, research shows that citizens who participate in council meetings or public hearings rarely reflect the diversity of the community in terms of age, race, or opinion, and traditional public comment periods seldom add substantively to local policy decisions. It is therefore clear that reform of public engagement in local governments is long overdue.
An opportunity for such a reform is emerging out of the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. As local governments cope with the crisis, they should strengthen their relationship with their residents by adopting measures that are inclusive and sensitive to all the constituencies in their jurisdiction.
This work starts by communicating clearly both the measures adopted to combat COVID-19 and the guidelines for citizen compliance and by making sure this information is accessible and disseminated throughout the entire community. During the crisis, building trust with the community will also entail restraining from advancing projects that are not instrumental to crisis management, particularly controversial projects. Diligence and prudence during the crisis should create the opportunity to try and test new forms of dialogue with citizens.
These new forms of engagement should increase the legitimacy and public support for government decisions and cultivate a civic culture where residents no longer see themselves as customers vying for services, but as citizens with ownership in the democratic process and its outcomes. In this brief, I propose ways to integrate digital technology tools into those new forms of public engagement.
Integrating Digital Technologies into Public Engagement
Over the past 15 years a new civic tech industry has emerged to assist local governments with public engagement. Videos and podcasts increase access to guidelines, rules, and procedures published by local governments. Real-time language translation is possible thanks to machine-learning algorithms that are relatively easy to integrate into online help lines. Government web portals increase access to official information, particularly for those with limited mobility or with visual or hearing impairments. These and other digital platforms have the potential to increase citizens’ participation, particularly when the costs—such as transportation or childcare—keep people from attending public meetings.
Indeed, tech solutions have the potential to increase citizen participation. During a decade of working with local governments on technology and public engagement, I have observed technologies that promote inclusiveness in public participation and technologies that simply magnify the voice of groups traditionally engaged in politics. Drawing from this experience, I offer local governments and agencies five recommendations to integrate technology into their public engagement programs….(More)”.
Sue Halpern at the New Yorker: “…Location data are the bread and butter of “ad tech.” They let marketers know you recently shopped for running shoes, are trying to lose weight, and have an abiding affection for kettle corn. Apps on cell phones emit a constant trail of longitude and latitude readings, making it possible to follow consumers through time and space. Location data are often triangulated with other, seemingly innocuous slivers of personal information—so many, in fact, that a number of data brokers claim to have around five thousand data points on almost every American. It’s a lucrative business—by at least one estimate, the data-brokerage industry is worth two hundred billion dollars. Though the data are often anonymized, a number of studies have shown that they can be easily unmasked to reveal identities—names, addresses, phone numbers, and any number of intimacies.
As Buckee knew, public-health surveillance, which serves the community at large, has always bumped up against privacy, which protects the individual. But, in the past, public-health surveillance was typically conducted by contract tracing, with health-care workers privately interviewing individuals to determine their health status and trace their movements. It was labor-intensive, painstaking, memory-dependent work, and, because of that, it was inherently limited in scope and often incomplete or inefficient. (At the start of the pandemic, there were only twenty-two hundred contact tracers in the country.)
Digital technologies, which work at scale, instantly provide detailed information culled from security cameras, license-plate readers, biometric scans, drones, G.P.S. devices, cell-phone towers, Internet searches, and commercial transactions. They can be useful for public-health surveillance in the same way that they facilitate all kinds of spying by governments, businesses, and malign actors. South Korea, which reported its first covid-19 case a month after the United States, has achieved dramatically lower rates of infection and mortality by tracking citizens with the virus via their phones, car G.P.S. systems, credit-card transactions, and public cameras, in addition to a robust disease-testing program. Israel enlisted Shin Bet, its secret police, to repurpose its terrorist-tracking protocols. China programmed government-installed cameras to point at infected people’s doorways to monitor their movements….(More)”.
Paper by Liav Orgad and Wessel Reijers: “The COVID19 crisis has triggered a new wave of digitalization of the lives of citizens. To counter the devastating effects of the virus, states and corporations are experimenting with systems that trace citizens as an integral part of public life. In China, a comprehensive sociotechnical system of citizenship governance has already in force with the implementation of the Social Credit System—a technology-driven project that aims to assess, evaluate, and steer the behavior of Chinese citizens.
After presenting social credit systems in China’s public and private sectors (Part I), the article provides normative standards to distinguish the Chinese system from comparable Western systems (Part II). It then shows the manner in which civic virtue is instrumentalized in China, both in content (“what” it is) and in form (“how” to cultivate it) (Part III), and claims that social credit systems represent a new form of citizenship governance, “cybernetic citizenship,” which implements different conceptions of state power, civic virtue, and human rights (Part V). On the whole, the article demonstrates how the Chinese Social Credit System redefines the institution of citizenship and warns against similar patterns that are mushrooming in the West.
The article makes three contributions: empirically, it presents China’s Social Credit Systems and reveals their data sources, criteria used, rating methods, and attached sanctions and rewards. Comparatively, it shows that, paradoxically, China’s Social Credit System is not fundamentally different than credit systems in Western societies, yet indicates four points of divergence: scope, authority, regulation, and regime. Normatively, it claims that China’s Social Credit System creates a form of cybernetic citizenship governance, which redefines the essence of citizenship….(More)”
Blog by Eddie Copeland: “…how might we think about exploring the Amplify box in the diagram above? I’d suggest three approaches are likely to emerge:
Let’s discuss these in the context of data.
Specific Fixes — A number of urgent data requests have arisen during Covid where it’s been apparent that councils simply don’t have the data they need. One example is how local authorities have needed to distribute business support grants. Many have discovered that while they have good records of local companies on their business rates database, they lack email or bank details for the majority. That makes it incredibly difficult to get payments out promptly. We can and should fix specific issues like this and ensure councils have those details in future.
New Opportunities — A crisis also prompts us to think about how things could be done differently and better. Perhaps the single greatest new opportunity we could aim to realise on a data front would be shifting from static to dynamic (if not real-time) data on a greater range of issues. As public sector staff, from CEOs to front line workers, have sought to respond to the crisis, the limitations of relying on static weekly, monthly or annual figures have been laid bare. As factors such as transport usage, high street activity and use of public spaces become deeply important in understanding the nature of recovery, more dynamic data could make a real difference.
Generic Capabilities — While the first two categories of activity are worth pursuing, I’d argue the single most positive legacy that could come out of a crisis is that we put in place generic capabilities — core foundation stones — that make us better able to respond to whatever comes next. Some of those capabilities will be about what individual councils need to have in place to use data well. However, given that few crises respect local authority boundaries, arguably the most important set of capabilities concern how different organisations can collaborate with data.
Putting in place the foundation stones for data collaboration
For years there has been discussion about the factors that make data collaboration between different public sector bodies hard.
Five stand out.
- Technology — some technologies make it hard to get the data out (e.g. lack of APIs); worse, some suppliers charge councils to access their own data.
- Data standards — the use of different standards, formats and conventions for recording data, and the lack of common identifiers like Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) makes it hard to compare, link or match records.
- Information Governance (IG) — Ensuring that London’s public sector organisations can use data in a way that’s legal, ethical and secure — in short, worthy of citizens’ trust and confidence — is key. Yet councils’ different approaches to IG can make the process take a long time — sometimes months.
- Ways of working — councils’ different processes require and produce different data.
- Lack of skills — when data skills are at a premium, councils understandably need staff with data competencies to work predominantly on internal projects, with little time available for collaboration.
There’s a host of reasons why progress to resolve these barriers has been slow. But perhaps the greatest is the perception that the effort required to address them is greater than the reward of doing so…(More)” –
See also Call For Action here
Paper by Oren Bar-Gill and Omri Ben-Shahar: “Policymakers and scholars – both lawyers and economists – have long been pondering the optimal design of default rules. From the classic works on “mimicking” defaults for contracts and corporations to the modern rush to set “sticky” default rules to promote policies as diverse as organ donations, retirement savings, consumer protection, and data privacy, the optimal design of default rules has featured as a central regulatory challenge. The key element driving the design is opt-out costs—how to minimize them, or alternatively how to raise them to make the default sticky. Much of the literature has focused on “mechanical” opt-out costs—the effort people incur to select a non-default alternative. This focus is too narrow. A more important factor affecting opt-out is information—the knowledge people must acquire to make informed opt-out decisions. But, unlike high mechanical costs, high information costs need not make defaults stickier; they may instead make the defaults “slippery.”
This counterintuitive claim is due to the phenomenon of uninformed opt-out, which we identify and characterize. Indeed, the importance of uninformed opt-out requires a reassessment of the conventional wisdom about Nudge and asymmetric or libertarian paternalism. We also show that different defaults provide different incentives to acquire the information necessary for informed optout. With the ballooning use of default rules as a policy tool, our information-costs theory provides valuable guidance to policymakers….(More)”.
Paper by Sina F. Ardabili et al: “Several outbreak prediction models for COVID-19 are being used by officials around the world to make informed-decisions and enforce relevant control measures. Among the standard models for COVID-19 global pandemic prediction, simple epidemiological and statistical models have received more attention by authorities, and they are popular in the media. Due to a high level of uncertainty and lack of essential data, standard models have shown low accuracy for long-term prediction. Although the literature includes several attempts to address this issue, the essential generalization and robustness abilities of existing models needs to be improved.
This paper presents a comparative analysis of machine learning and soft computing models to predict the COVID-19 outbreak as an alternative to SIR and SEIR models. Among a wide range of machine learning models investigated, two models showed promising results (i.e., multi-layered perceptron, MLP, and adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system, ANFIS). Based on the results reported here, and due to the highly complex nature of the COVID-19 outbreak and variation in its behavior from nation-to-nation, this study suggests machine learning as an effective tool to model the outbreak. This paper provides an initial benchmarking to demonstrate the potential of machine learning for future research. Paper further suggests that real novelty in outbreak prediction can be realized through integrating machine learning and SEIR models….(More)”.
Blogpost by Ania Calderon: “The rapid spread of this disease is exposing fault lines in our political and social balance — most visibly in the lack of protection for the poorest or investment in healthcare systems. It’s also forcing us to think about how we can work across jurisdictions and political contexts to foster better collaboration, build trust in institutions, and save lives.
As we said recently in a call for Open COVID-19 Data, governments need data from other countries to model and flatten the curve, but there is little consistency in how they gather it. Meanwhile, the consequences of different approaches show the balance required in effectively implementing open data policies. For example, Singapore has published detailed personal data about every coronavirus patient, including where they work and live and whether they had contact with others. This helped the city-state keep its infection and death rates extremely low in the early stages of the epidemic, but also led to proportionality concerns as people might be targeted and harmed.
Overall, few governments are publishing the information on which they are basing these huge decisions. This makes it hard to collaborate, scrutinise, and build trust. For example, the models can only be as good as the data that feed them, and we need to understand their limitations. Opening up the data and the source code behind them would give citizens confidence that officials were making decisions in the public’s interest rather than their political ones. It would also foster the international joined-up action needed to meet this challenge. And it would allow non-state actors into the process to plug gaps and deliver and scale effective solutions quickly.
At the same time, legitimate concerns have been raised about how this data is used, both now and in the future.
As we say in our strategy, openness needs to be balanced with both individual and collective data rights, and policies need to account for context.
People may be ok to give up some of their privacy — like having their movements tracked by government smartphone apps — if that can help combat a global health crisis, but that would seem an unthinkable invasion of privacy to many in less exceptional times. We rightly worry how this data might be used later on, and by whom. Which shows that data systems need to be able to respond to changing times, while holding fundamental human rights and civil liberties in check.
As with so many things, this crisis is forcing the world to question orthodoxies around individual and collective data rights and needs. It shines a light on policies and approaches which might help avoid future disasters and build a fairer, healthier, more collaborative society overall….(More)”.
Paper by Mario Schultz and Peter Seele: “Building on an illustrative case of a systemic environmental threat and its multi‐stakeholder response, this paper draws attention to the changing political impacts of corporations in the digital age. Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) theory suggests an expanded sense of politics and corporations, including impacts that may range from voluntary initiatives to overcome governance gaps, to avoiding state regulation via corporate political activity. Considering digitalization as a stimulus, we explore potential responsibilities of corporations toward public goods in contexts with functioning governments. We show that digitalization—in the form of transparency, surveillance, and data‐sharing—offers corporations’ scope for deliberative public participation.
The starry sky beetle infestation endangering public and private goods is thereby used to illustrate the possibility of expanding the political role of corporations in the digital sphere. We offer a contribution by conceptualizing data‐deliberation as a Habermasian variation of PCSR, defined as the (a) voluntary disclosure of corporate data and its transparent, open sharing with the public sector (b) along with the cooperation with governmental institutions on data analytics methods for examining large‐scale datasets (c) thereby complying with existing national and international regulations on data protection, in particular with respect to privacy and personal data….(More)”.