Stefaan Verhulst
Mary Hui at Quartz: “The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances.
Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?
One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.
Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.
“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap….(More)”.
Paper by Emily S. Rempel, Julie Barnett and Hannah Durrant: “This study examines the hidden assumptions around running public-engagement exercises in government. We study an example of public engagement on the ethics of combining and analysing data in national government – often called data science ethics. We study hidden assumptions, drawing on hidden curriculum theories in education research, as it allows us to identify conscious and unconscious underlying processes related to conducting public engagement that may impact results. Through participation in the 2016 Public Dialogue for Data Science Ethics in the UK, four key themes were identified that exposed underlying public engagement norms. First, that organizers had constructed a strong imagined public as neither overly critical nor supportive, which they used to find and engage participants. Second, that official aims of the engagement, such as including publics in developing ethical data regulations, were overshadowed by underlying meta-objectives, such as counteracting public fears. Third, that advisory group members, organizers and publics understood the term ‘engagement’ in varying ways, from creating interest to public inclusion. And finally, that stakeholder interests, particularly government hopes for a positive report, influenced what was written in the final report. Reflection on these underlying mechanisms, such as the development of meta-objectives that seek to benefit government and technical stakeholders rather than publics, suggests that the practice of public engagement can, in fact, shut down opportunities for meaningful public dialogue….(More)”.
Book by Gary Smith and Jay Cordes: “Data science has never had more influence on the world. Large companies are now seeing the benefit of employing data scientists to interpret the vast amounts of data that now exists. However, the field is so new and is evolving so rapidly that the analysis produced can be haphazard at best.
The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science shows us real-world examples of what can go wrong. Written to be an entertaining read, this invaluable guide investigates the all too common mistakes of data scientists – who can be plagued by lazy thinking, whims, hunches, and prejudices – and indicates how they have been at the root of many disasters, including the Great Recession.
Gary Smith and Jay Cordes emphasise how scientific rigor and critical thinking skills are indispensable in this age of Big Data, as machines often find meaningless patterns that can lead to dangerous false conclusions. The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science is loaded with entertaining tales of both successful and misguided approaches to interpreting data, both grand successes and epic failures. These cautionary tales will not only help data scientists be more effective, but also help the public distinguish between good and bad data science….(More)”.
Claire Wardle at Scientific American: “…Online misinformation has been around since the mid-1990s. But in 2016 several events made it broadly clear that darker forces had emerged: automation, microtargeting and coordination were fueling information campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion at scale. Journalists in the Philippines started raising flags as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power, buoyed by intensive Facebook activity. This was followed by unexpected results in the Brexit referendum in June and then the U.S. presidential election in November—all of which sparked researchers to systematically investigate the ways in which information was being used as a weapon.
During the past three years the discussion around the causes of our polluted information ecosystem has focused almost entirely on actions taken (or not taken) by the technology companies. But this fixation is too simplistic. A complex web of societal shifts is making people more susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy. Trust in institutions is falling because of political and economic upheaval, most notably through ever widening income inequality. The effects of climate change are becoming more pronounced. Global migration trends spark concern that communities will change irrevocably. The rise of automation makes people fear for their jobs and their privacy.
Bad actors who want to deepen existing tensions understand these societal trends, designing content that they hope will so anger or excite targeted users that the audience will become the messenger. The goal is that users will use their own social capital to reinforce and give credibility to that original message.
Most of this content is designed not to persuade people in any particular direction but to cause confusion, to overwhelm and to undermine trust in democratic institutions from the electoral system to journalism. And although much is being made about preparing the U.S. electorate for the 2020 election, misleading and conspiratorial content did not begin with the 2016 presidential race, and it will not end after this one. As tools designed to manipulate and amplify content become cheaper and more accessible, it will be even easier to weaponize users as unwitting agents of disinformation….(More)”.
Book by Margaret Doyle and Nick O’Brien: “This book reconnects everyday justice with social rights. It rediscovers human rights in the ‘small places’ of housing, education, health and social care, where administrative justice touches the citizen every day, and in doing so it re-imagines administrative justice and expands its democratic reach. The institutions of everyday justice – ombuds, tribunals and mediation – rarely herald their role in human rights frameworks, and never very loudly. For the most part, human rights and administrative justice are ships that pass in the night. Drawing on design theory, the book proposes to remedy this alienation by replacing current orthodoxies, not least that of ‘user focus’, with more promising design principles of community, network and openness. Thus re-imagined, the future of both administrative justice and social rights is demosprudential, firmly rooted in making response to citizen grievance more democratic and embedding legal change in the broader culture….(More)”.
Swissinfo: “Swiss researchers have found that algorithms that mine large swaths of data can eliminate anonymity in federal court rulings. This could have major ramifications for transparency and privacy protection.
This is the result of a study by the University of Zurich’s Institute of Law, published in the legal journal “Jusletter” and shared by Swiss public television SRF on Monday.
The study relied on a “web scraping technique” or mining of large swaths of data. The researchers created a database of all decisions of the Supreme Court available online from 2000 to 2018 – a total of 122,218 decisions. Additional decisions from the Federal Administrative Court and the Federal Office of Public Health were also added.
Using an algorithm and manual searches for connections between data, the researchers were able to de-anonymise, in other words reveal identities, in 84% of the judgments in less than an hour.
In this specific study, the researchers were able to identify the pharma companies and medicines hidden in the documents of the complaints filed in court.
Study authors say that this could have far-reaching consequences for transparency and privacy. One of the study’s co-authors Kerstin Noëlle Vokinger, professor of law at the University of Zurich explains that, “With today’s technological possibilities, anonymisation is no longer guaranteed in certain areas”. The researchers say the technique could be applied to any publicly available database.
Vokinger added there is a need to balance necessary transparency while safeguarding the personal rights of individuals.
Adrian Lobsiger, the Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner, told SRF that this confirms his view that facts may need to be treated as personal data in the age of technology….(More)”.
Report by Beth Noveck and Rod Glover: “Governments of all political stripes are being buffeted by technological and societal change. There is a pervasive sense globally that governments are not doing as well as they ought to solve our biggest policy problems. Pressure has intensified to provide better services and experiences, and deliver measurable results that improve people’s lives. The failure to meet our most pressing challenges help to explain why in Australia, trust in government is at an all-time low. New technologies, however, bring with them the opportunity to rethink how the public sector in Australia might solve public problems by building a workforce with diverse and innovative skills, especially how to use data and actively reach out beyond the public sector itself.
Commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), this report builds on a pioneering survey of almost 400 public servants in Australia and New Zealand, dozens of interviews with senior practitioners, and original research into how governments around the world are training public officials in innovative practices.
The survey findings show that public servants are eager to embrace skills for innovation but receive inadequate training in them….(More)”
Paper by Sebastian Vith, Achim Oberg, Markus A. Höllerer and Renate E. Meyer: “Recent developments around the sharing economy bring to the fore questions of governability and broader societal benefit—and subsequently the need to explore effective means of public governance, from nurturing, on the one hand, to restriction, on the other. As sharing is a predominately urban phenomenon in modern societies, cities around the globe have become both locus of action and central actor in the debates over the nature and organization of the sharing economy. However, cities vary substantially in the interpretation of potential opportunities and challenges, as well as in their governance responses. Building on a qualitative comparative analysis of 16 leading global cities, our findings reveal four framings of the sharing economy: ‘societal endangerment,’ ‘societal enhancement,’ ‘market disruption,’ and ‘ecological transition.’ Such framings go hand in hand with patterned governance responses: although there is considerable heterogeneity in the combination of public governance strategies, we find specific configurations of framings and public governance strategies. Our work reflects the political and ethical debates on various economic, social, and moral issues related to the sharing economy, and contributes to a better understanding of the field-level institutional arrangements—a prerequisite for examining moral behavior of sharing economy organizations….(More)”.
Inaugural lecture by K.J. Meier: “One of the major questions, perhaps the major question, in the field of public administration is how to reconcile the need for bureaucracy with the democratic process. Bureaucracies after all are not seen as democratic institutions and operate based on hierarchy and expertise rather than popular will (see Mosher 1968). I take a distinctly minority view in the field, seeing bureaucracy not so much as a threat to democracy in existing mature democracies but as a necessary precondition for the existence of democracy in modern society (Meier 1997).
Democracy is a system of governance with high transactions costs that seeks democratic ideals of representation, equity, and fairness with only modest, if any, concern for efficiency. Effective bureaucracies are the institutions that produce the outcomes that build public support for democracy and in a sense generate the surplus that allows democratic processes to survive and flourish. Although bureaucracies may have none of the trappings of democracy internally, their role in contributing to democratic governance means that they should also be considered democratic institutions. Scholars, politicians, and citizens need to be concerned about preserving and protecting bureaucracy just as they seek to preserve and protect our official institutions of democracy.
Within the general theme of bureaucracy and democracy, this lecture will address two major concerns – (1) the failure of politics which severs the crucial link between voters and elected officials and poses major challenges to bureaucrats seeking to administer effective programs, and (2) the subsequent need for bureaucracy to also become an institution that represents the public. Within this concern about bureaucratic representation, the lecture will address how bureaucracies can assess the needs of citizens, and more narrowly how representative bureaucracy can be and is instrumental to the bureaucracy, and finally the limits of symbolic representation within bureaucracies….(More)”.
Book edited by Tony Evans and Peter Hupe: “Actors in public situations are in some ways subject to control while also exercising freedom. Discretion in contemporary societies is increasingly characterized by cross-cutting systems of control as well as by conflicting conceptions of knowledge and expertise. There is also the paradox of the autonomous individual empowered by social media while simultaneously being subject to its algorithms and surveillance. Narrow disciplinary conceptions of discretion—whether they come from law, economics, sociology or politics—are of limited value in understanding the contemporary dynamics of discretion. This chapter describes these phenomena and also seeks to capture the operation of discretion in different settings while examining its role and evaluating its use. It is argued that we need to recognize developing debates within disciplines, cross-fertilization between them and innovative developments at the margins of those disciplines. That enables the conceptualization of the natures, operations and evaluations of discretion as a context-sensitive and dynamic idea….(More)”.