Is the Government More Entrepreneurial Than You Think?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Freakonomics Radio (Podcast): We all know the standard story: our economy would be more dynamic if only the government would get out of the way. The economist Mariana Mazzucato says we’ve got that story backward. She argues that the government, by funding so much early-stage research, is hugely responsible for big successes in tech, pharma, energy, and more. But the government also does a terrible job in claiming credit — and, more important, getting a return on its investment….

Quote:

MAZZUCATO: “…And I’ve been thinking about this especially around the big data and the kind of new questions around privacy with Facebook, etc. Instead of having a situation where all the data basically gets captured, which is citizens’ data, by companies which then, in some way, we have to pay into in terms of accessing these great new services — whether they’re free or not, we’re still indirectly paying. We should have the data in some sort of public repository because it’s citizens’ data. The technology itself was funded by the citizens. What would Uber be without GPS, publicly financed? What would Google be without the Internet, publicly financed? So, the tech was financed from the state, the citizens; it’s their data. Why not completely reverse the current relationship and have that data in a public repository which companies actually have to pay into to get access to it under certain strict conditions which could be set by an independent advisory council?… (More)”

Pick your poison: How a crowdsourcing app helped identify and reduce food poisoning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Papas at LATimes: “At some point in life, almost everyone will have experienced the debilitating effects of a foodborne illness. Whether an under-cooked chicken kebab, an E. coli infested salad or some toxic fish, a good day can quickly become a loathsome frenzy of vomiting and diarrhoea caused by poorly prepared or poorly kept food.

Since 2009, the website iwaspoisoned.com has allowed victims of food-poisoning victims to help others avoid such an ordeal by crowd-sourcing food illnesses on one easy-to-use, consumer-led platform.

Whereas previously a consumer struck down by food poisoning may have been limited to complaining to the offending food outlet, IWasPosioned allows users to submit detailed reports of food-poisoning incidents – including symptoms, location and space to describe the exact effects and duration of the incident. The information is then transferred in real time to public health organisations and food industry groups, who  use the data to flag potentially dangerous foodborne illness before a serious outbreak occurs.

In the United States alone, where food safety standards are among the highest in the world, there are still 48 million cases of food poisoning per year. From those cases, 128,000 result in hospitalisation and 3,000 in death, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Association.

Back in 2008 the site’s founder, Patrick Quade, himself fell foul to food poisoning after eating a BLT from a New York deli which caused him to be violently ill. Concerned by the lack of options for reporting such incidents, he set up the novel crowdsourcing platform, which also aims at improving transparency in the food monitoring industry.

The emergence of IWasPoisoned is part of the wider trend of consumers taking revenge against companies via digital platforms, which spans various industries. In the case of IWasPoisoned, reports of foodborne illness have seriously tarnished the reputations of several major food retailers….(More)”.

Citizen Innovations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Introduction by Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan and Bertrand Bocquet of Special Issue of Technology and Innovation (French) : “The last half century has seen considerable development of institutional interfaces participating in the “great standardization” of science and innovation systems. The limitations of this model appeared for many economic, political or cultural reasons. Strong developments appear within the context of a deliberative democracy that impacts scientific and technical institutions and production, and therefore the nature and the policies of innovation. The question about this part of a “technical democracy”
is whether there will be a long-term movement. We dedicate this issue to citizen participatory innovations, more or less related to technical and scientific questions. It highlights various scales and focal points of “social and citizen innovation”, domains based on examples of ongoing transformations…. (More)
Table of Contents:

Constitutional Democracy and Technology in the age of Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul Nemitz at Royal Society Philosophical Transactions: “Given the foreseeable pervasiveness of Artificial Intelligence in modern societies, it is legitimate and necessary to ask the question how this new technology must be shaped to support the maintenance and strengthening of constitutional democracy.

This paper first describes the four core elements of today’s digital power concentration, which need to be seen in cumulation and which, seen together, are both a threat to democracy and to functioning markets. It then recalls the experience with the lawless internet and the relationship between technology and the law as it has developed in the internet economy and the experience with GDPR before it moves on to the key question for AI in democracy, namely which of the challenges of AI can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics, and which challenges of AI need to be addressed by rules which are enforceable and encompass the legitimacy of democratic process, thus laws.

The paper closes with a call for a new culture of incorporating the principles of Democracy, Rule of law and Human Rights by design in AI and a three level technological impact assessment for new technologies like AI as a practical way forward for this purpose….(More).

Technology Run Amok: Crisis Management in the Digital Age

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Book by Ian I. Mitroff: “The recent data controversy with Facebook highlights the tech industry as a whole was utterly unprepared for the backlash it faced as a result of its business model of selling user data to third parties. Despite the predominant role that technology plays in all of our lives, the controversy also revealed that many tech companies are reactive, rather than proactive, in addressing crises.

This book examines society’s failure to manage technology and its resulting negative consequences. Mitroff argues that the “technological mindset” is responsible for society’s unbridled obsession with technology and unless confronted, will cause one tech crisis after another. This trans-disciplinary text, edgy in its approach, will appeal to academics, students, and practitioners through its discussion of the modern technological crisis…(More)”.

How Smart Should a City Be? Toronto Is Finding Out

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bliss at CityLab: “A data-driven “neighborhood of the future” masterminded by a Google corporate sibling, the Quayside project could be a milestone in digital-age city-building. But after a year of scandal in Silicon Valley, questions about privacy and security remain…

Quayside was billed as “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up,” according to Sidewalk Labs’ vision plan, which won the RFP to develop this waterfront parcel. The startup’s pitch married “digital infrastructure” with an utopian promise: to make life easier, cheaper, and happier for Torontonians.

Everything from pedestrian traffic and energy use to the fill-height of a public trash bin and the occupancy of an apartment building could be counted, geo-tagged, and put to use by a wifi-connected “digital layer” undergirding the neighborhood’s physical elements. It would sense movement, gather data, and send information back to a centralized map of the neighborhood. “With heightened ability to measure the neighborhood comes better ways to manage it,” stated the winning document. “Sidewalk expects Quayside to become the most measurable community in the world.”

“Smart cities are largely an invention of the private sector—an effort to create a market within government,” Wylie wrote in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper in December 2017. “The business opportunities are clear. The risks inherent to residents, less so.” A month later, at a Toronto City Council meeting, Wylie gave a deputation asking officials to “ensure that the data and data infrastructure of this project are the property of the city of Toronto and its residents.”

In this case, the unwary Trojans would be Waterfront Toronto, the nonprofit corporation appointed by three levels of Canadian government to own, manage, and build on the Port Lands, 800 largely undeveloped acres between downtown and Lake Ontario. When Waterfront Toronto gave Sidewalk Labs a green light for Quayside in October, the startup committed $50 million to a one-year consultation, which was recently extended by several months. The plan is to submit a final “Master Innovation and Development Plan” by the end of this year.

That somewhat Orwellian vision of city management had privacy advocates and academics concerned from the the start. Bianca Wylie, the co-founder of the technology advocacy group Tech Reset Canada, has been perhaps the most outspoken of the project’s local critics. For the last year, she’s spoken up at public fora, written pointed op-edsand Medium posts, and warned city officials of what she sees as the “Trojan horse” of smart city marketing: private companies that stride into town promising better urban governance, but are really there to sell software and monetize citizen data.

But there has been no guarantee about who would own the data at the core of its proposal—much of which would ostensibly be gathered in public space. Also unresolved is the question of whether this data could be sold. With little transparency about what that means from the company or its partner, some Torontonians are wondering what Waterfront Toronto—and by extension, the public—is giving away….(More)”.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The political origins of transparency reform: insights from the Italian case

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Fabrizio Di Mascio,  Alessandro Natalini and Federica Cacciatore: This research contributes to the expanding literature on the determinants of government transparency. It uncovers the dynamics of transparency in the Italian case, which shows an interesting reform trajectory: until the late 1980s no transparency provisions existed; since then, provisions have dramatically increased under the impulse of changing patterns of political competition.

The analysis of the Italian case highlights that electoral uncertainty for incumbents is a double-edged sword for institutional reform: on the one hand, it incentivizes the adoption of ever-growing transparency provisions; on the other, it jeopardizes the implementation capacity of public agencies by leading to severe administrative burdens….(More)”.

Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoë Corbyn at The Observer: “The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?...What is the decentralised web? 
It is supposed to be like the web you know but without relying on centralised operators. In the early days of the world wide web, which came into existence in 1989, you connected directly with your friends through desktop computers that talked to each other. But from the early 2000s, with the advent of Web 2.0, we began to communicate with each other and share information through centralised services provided by big companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. It is now on Facebook’s platform, in its so called “walled garden”, that you talk to your friends. “Our laptops have become just screens. They cannot do anything useful without the cloud,” says Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Blockstack, a platform for building decentralised apps. The DWeb is about re-decentralising things – so we aren’t reliant on these intermediaries to connect us. Instead users keep control of their data and connect and interact and exchange messages directly with others in their network.

Why do we need an alternative? 
With the current web, all that user data concentrated in the hands of a few creates risk that our data will be hacked. It also makes it easier for governments to conduct surveillance and impose censorship. And if any of these centralised entities shuts down, your data and connections are lost. Then there are privacy concerns stemming from the business models of many of the companies, which use the private information we provide freely to target us with ads. “The services are kind of creepy in how much they know about you,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. The DWeb, say proponents, is about giving people a choice: the same services, but decentralised and not creepy. It promises control and privacy, and things can’t all of a sudden disappear because someone decides they should. On the DWeb, it would be harder for the Chinese government to block a site it didn’t like, because the information can come from other places.

How does the DWeb work that is different? 

There are two big differences in how the DWeb works compared to the world wide web, explains Matt Zumwalt, the programme manager at Protocol Labs, which builds systems and tools for the DWeb. First, there is this peer-to-peer connectivity, where your computer not only requests services but provides them. Second, how information is stored and retrieved is different. Currently we use http and https links to identify information on the web. Those links point to content by its location, telling our computers to find and retrieve things from those locations using the http protocol. By contrast, DWeb protocols use links that identify information based on its content – what it is rather than where it is. This content-addressed approach makes it possible for websites and files to be stored and passed around in many ways from computer to computer rather than always relying on a single server as the one conduit for exchanging information. “[In the traditional web] we are pointing to this location and pretending [the information] exists in only one place,” says Zumwalt. “And from this comes this whole monopolisation that has followed… because whoever controls the location controls access to the information.”…(More)”.

Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real

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Book edited by Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen: “After half a century of neoliberalism, a new radical, practice-based ideology is making its way from the margins: commonism, with an o in the middle. It is based on the values of sharing, common (intellectual) ownership and new social co-operations. Commoners assert that social relationships can replace money (contract) relationships. They advocate solidarity and they trust in peer-to-peer relationships to develop new ways of production.

Commonism maps those new ideological thoughts. How do they work and, especially, what is their aesthetics? How do they shape the reality of our living together? Is there another, more just future imaginable through the commons? What strategies and what aesthetics do commoners adopt? This book explores this new political belief system, alternating between theoretical analysis, wild artistic speculation, inspiring art examples, almost empirical observations and critical reflection….(More)”.