Stefaan Verhulst

Iran’s Civic Tech Sector

Curated on January 3, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Leah Hunter at Forbes: “This is the story of Firuzeh Mahmoudi, founder of United4Iran and Irancubator, the first civic tech-focused startup incubator in Iran. She is also a creator of civil justice apps and a businessperson. Her business? Creating social good in a country she loves.

“Our mission is to improve civil liberties in Iran, and we do that in three ways,” says Mahmoudi, 45, who spent four years working for the United Nations in countries across the world as an international project coordinator before becoming a founder….

Mahmoudi realized that there wasn’t anyone focused on apps made for civic engagement inside Iran, so she built a team to create Irancubator. She works with 30 consultants and partners in the Iranian-American community. She also has a staff of 10 in her San Francisco Bay Area office—most of whom are Iranian, and were still in the country until 2009. “I really worked hard in bringing in resilient people…people who are smart, creative, kind. It’s so important to be kind. How you do the work, and how you show up, is that critical. If you try to make the world a better place, you’d better be nice. If you want to make the government be nicer, you’d better be nice, too.”

She and her team, based in the San Francisco Bay Area are creating apps like the Iran Prison Atlas – a database of all the country’s political prisoners, the judges who sentenced them and the prisons where they’re held. “We believe how these people are treated is a litmus test for our country,” Mahmoudi explains.

They are building an app women can use to track their ovulation cycles and periods. It also acts as a Trojan horse; as you dig deeper, it includes all sorts of information on women’s rights, including how to have equal rights in a marriage. (In Iran, divorce rights for women—as well as the right to equal custody of their children afterward—require a document signed before the wedding ceremony.) “This one’s not specifically targeting the richer women who are living in Northern Tehran. It’s an app that aims to engage people who live in rural areas, or not be as well-off or educated or perhaps more conservative or religious,” Mahmoudi explains. “Once you get in the app, you realize there are other parts. They include information on one’s rights as a woman in a marriage. Or basic concepts that may be completely foreign to them. Like maybe say, “Hey, do you know there’s a concept called ‘marital rape’? Even if someone’s your husband, they can’t treat you this way.”…

Right now, Irancubator is building a dozen apps. The first is launching in late January. Named RadiTo, this app works similarly to YouTube, but for radio instead of TV, allowing people in Iran to broadcast channels about the topics they care about. Someone can create a channel about LGBT rights or about children and education in their language. “Whatever they want—they can have a secure, safe platform to broadcast their message,” Mahmoudi explains.

From an operational perspective, this isn’t easy. Mahmoudi and her staff aren’t just building a startup. They’re operating from the other side of the world, working for users with whom they cannot directly communicate. “Any startup is challenging and has so many hurdles. For us, it’s another level, working with so many security challenges,” says Mahmoudi….

The biggest challenge of all: they cannot go back to Iran. “The Islamic Republic coined me as an anti-revolutionary fugitive in one of their articles,” Mahmoudi says. “Half of my staff are refugees who got out.”…(More).

Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?

Curated on January 3, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?

Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.

The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.

Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.

The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..

….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…

…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….

…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”

Results of early Open Government Partnership initiatives

Curated on January 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Open Government Partnership: “The search for these stories ended with finding seven very different reform initiatives in different regions and covering a broad range of open government topics.

In Costa Rica, we learn about how the government is using its participation in OGP to restart a process halted for 23 years to create a consultation mechanism that will allow indigenous groups to participate in all policy making decisions that affect them, and the results of the dialogue leading to an improvement in the delivery of public services.

The Chilean story documents how a 10-year campaign to regulate influence peddling was given a boost by an explicit commitment included in the first Chilean action plan to introduce legislation to regulate lobbying – a commitment since fulfilled. The resulting Lobbying Act sheds new light on the relationship between officials and influence groups and is beginning to democratize access to authorities.

Italy’s OpenCoesione and its spin-off initiatives show how top-down open data initiatives on public spending can be combined with bottom-up, data-driven monitoring to promote accountability and public participation in the policy-making process, including promoting civic engagement amongst school students.

The Tanzanian case study tells the story of how the “How Do I?” – or “Nifanyeje?” – website is making information on basic public services available to citizens and cutting down transaction times and costs, but it also highlights the need to still reach the last mile in a country where Internet penetration remains low.

Indonesia’s initiative to create a One Map portal with official base maps for the country, part of a much larger initiative of synchronizing various maps for the country that when completed could help resolve land-related conflicts and address illegal deforestation, shows technical progress and some improvements in inter-agency cooperation.

In Macedonia, we learn how opening up data on air quality has acted as an engine for civic activism and about short and medium-term policy options being implemented and explored by the relevant authorities as a result.

Finally, the case from Israel shows how collaboration between civil society and champions within the Parliament is helping make data on the state budget accessible to citizens, journalists, and the parliamentarians themselves.

Each story demonstrates measurable progress and the added value of the collaboration between government and civil society that is at the very heart of OGP. The stories also show the immense importance of political will, bureaucratic buy-in, adequate resourcing, and demand-side calls for accountability in ensuring that the reforms take root and continue into the future, so that their impact can be felt by a broader range of citizens. In that sense, the last chapter for each story is still to be written. In a majority of the cases, these commitments’ inclusion in the OGP National Action Plans gave prominence and momentum to the envisioned reforms, helping them along. We hope to be able to continue to track these reforms in the years to come….(More)”.

Open or Closed? Open Licensing of Real-Time Public Sector Transit Data

Curated on January 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Teresa Scassa and Alexandra Diebel in Journal of e-Democracy: “This paper explores how real-time data are made available as “open data” using municipal transit data as a case study. Many transit authorities in North America and elsewhere have installed technology to gather GPS data in real-time from transit vehicles. These data are in high demand in app developer communities because of their use in communicating predicted, rather than scheduled, transit vehicle arrival times. While many municipalities have chosen to treat real-time GPS data as “open data,” the particular nature of real-time GPS data requires a different mode of access for developers than what is needed for static data files. This, in turn, has created a conflict between the “openness” of the underlying data and the sometimes restrictive terms of use which govern access to the real-time data through transit authority Application Program Interfaces (APIs). This paper explores the implications of these terms of use and considers whether real-time data require a separate standard for openness. While the focus is on the transit data context, the lessons from this area will have broader implications, particularly for open real-time data in the emerging smart cities environment….(More)”

The melting down of government: A multidecade perspective

Curated on January 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bert A. Rockman in the Special 30th Anniversary Issue of Governance: “The editors of Governance have asked me to assess the extent and nature of change in the governing process since the origins of the journal 30 years ago. This is an engaging task but a difficult one. It is difficult because trend lines rarely have a definitive beginning point—or at least if similar tendencies are seen across national boundaries, they rarely begin at the same time. It is also difficult because states and nations have different traditions and may be more or less willing to accept lessons from elsewhere. As well, national entities and even regional ones may react differently to similar problems. Old Europe, as Donald Rumsfeld the former U.S. Defense Secretary once disparagingly referred to the more democratically stable and prosperous countries of Western Europe, still seems more likely to adhere to globalization, freedom of movement across national borders, and at least some tolerance of immigration than has been the case in the Eastern and Central parts of the continent or, for that matter, in the United States.

Because it is so difficult to see uniformities across all states, I shall concentrate my attention on the case of the United States with which I am most familiar while recognizing that all developed states have been facing challenges to their industrial base and all have been facing complicated problems of labor displacement through technology and absorption of immigrant populations in the midst of diminished economic growth and modest recovery from the financial crisis of 2008. To put it simply, there have been greater challenges and fewer financial and political resources.

I see four very different tendencies at work in the process of governing and the limitations that they may impose on government. Thinking of these in terms of a series of concentric circles and moving in succession from those with the broadest radius (sociopolitical) to those with the narrowest (machinery and fiscal capabilities of government), I will characterize them accordingly as (a) the confidence in government problem; (b) the frozen political alignment problem—or as it is known in the United States, political polarization; (c) the cult of efficiency in government and also private enterprise, which has resulted in substantial outsourcing and privatization; and (d) public austerity that, among other things, has altered the balance of power between governmental authority and powerful business and nonprofit organizations. I cannot be certain that these elements interact with one another. How they do and if they do is a matter for some further endeavor….(More)”

The legal macroscope: Experimenting with visual legal analytics

Curated on January 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicola Lettieri, Antonio Altamura and Delfina Malandrino at InfoVis: “This work presents Knowlex, a web application designed for visualization, exploration, and analysis of legal documents coming from different sources. Understanding the legal framework relating to a given issue often requires the analysis of complex legal corpora. When a legal professional or a citizen tries to understand how a given phenomenon is disciplined, his attention cannot be limited to a single source of law but has to be directed on the bigger picture resulting from all the legal sources related to the theme under investigation. Knowlex exploits data visualization to support this activity by means of interactive maps making sense out of heterogeneous documents (norms, case law, legal literature, etc.).

Starting from a legislative measure (what we define as Root) given as input by the user, the application implements two visual analytics functionalities aiming to offer new insights on the legal corpus under investigation. The first one is an interactive node graph depicting relations and properties of the documents. The second one is a zoomable treemap showing the topics, the evolution, and the dimension of the legal literature settled over the years around the norm of interest. The article gives an overview of the research so far conducted presenting the results of a preliminary evaluation study aiming at evaluating the effectiveness of visualization in supporting legal activities as well as the effectiveness of Knowlex, the usability of the proposed system, and the overall user satisfaction when interacting with its applications…(More)”.

Measuring the quality of democracy

Curated on January 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Brigitte Geissel, Marianne Kneuer, and Hans-Joachim Lauth of Special Issue of the International Political Science Review on Measuring the Quality of Democracy: “Within the last couple of years, scholarly interest in measuring democracy experienced a shift. While ‘classical’ indices like Polity or Freedom House aim at capturing the variety of regimes types – mostly in nuanced scale from democracies to autocracies – more recent approaches are taking a closer look at those democracies that are regarded as consolidated. Examples are the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, 2012), the Democracy Barometer (Bühlmann et al., 2013), and the Varieties of Democracy Project (Coppedge et al., 2011). Measuring the quality of consolidated democracies is a young yet very dynamic field of research, with the number of indices growing considerably. Today, more than a dozen different measurements claim to evaluate the quality of democracy. However, there is no consensus about underlying models of democracy, concepts, variables, yardsticks and methods. This research field is still in its fledgling stages (e.g. Munck, 2016).

This Special Issue has a conceptual orientation that seeks to structure as well as to broaden the research agenda by introducing hitherto neglected, yet, in our view, crucial aspects. It therefore does not intend to supplement the methodological debate that accompanies the research area of democracy measurement ever since its emergence. The guiding idea is rather to offer a fresh look, with conceptual contributions clarifying current debates and challenging existing conceptualizations. Hence, these objectives cannot be reached at one stroke with one single edition, but the articles provide crucial steps and substantial progress in the direction of developing an overarching framework for the quality of democracy research.

Before providing detail, we want to clarify our understanding of measuring the quality of democracy, which seems diffuse at times. Measuring democracy pursues two aims, firstly, to classify whether a regime is a democracy and, secondly, if it is, to determine the degree of democracy (Lauth, 2004). The second task requires analyzing whether empirical findings meet the standard defined in the respective definitions of democracy. If the results conform to this standard, the democracy is assessed as of high quality. If the definition of democracy involves only a low standard, then differences among established democracies can hardly be identified. In other words, gradations of democratic quality cannot be detected. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a standard that enables gradations. Given this demanding task, the current conceptual controversies are not surprising.

A central issue which runs like a thread through the debate on measuring the quality of democracy constitutes the question of which definition of democracy to identify as the basis….(More)”.

Big Data and the Paradox of Diversity

Curated on January 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernhard Rieder at Digital Culture & Society: “This paper develops a critique of Big Data and associated analytical techniques by focusing not on errors – skewed or imperfect datasets, false positives, underrepresentation, and so forth – but on data mining that works. After a quick framing of these practices as interested readings of reality, I address the question of how data analytics and, in particular, machine learning reveal and operate on the structured and unequal character of contemporary societies, installing “economic morality” (Allen 2012) as the central guiding principle. Rather than critiquing the methods behind Big Data, I inquire into the way these methods make the many differences in decentred, non-traditional societies knowable and, as a consequence, ready for profitable distinction and decision-making. The objective, in short, is to add to our understanding of the “profound ideological role at the intersection of sociality, research, and commerce” (van Dijck 2014: 201) the collection and analysis of large quantities of multifarious data have come to play. Such an understanding needs to embed Big Data in a larger, more fundamental critique of the societal context it operates in….(More)”.

Getting Smart on Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Transport Authorities from Emerging Data Sources

Curated on December 30, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Urban Transport Group: “Transformative technological changes are shaping the world and unleashing unprecedented volumes of data. Transport is a key generator of emerging data and also stands to be a significant beneficiary of new products, services, insights and ways of working that accompany this. Emerging data will mean transport users will become far more fully informed about their travel choices whilst at the same time transform the ability of transport authorities to plan and manage transport networks and services more efficiently and effectively.The purpose of this report is to outline key challenges and opportunities from the perspective of city region transport authorities, and to articulate a case for action.

Why are we doing this? Emerging data is a rapidly changing area. It is clear from the actions of some early movers that value can be created by using this data (see case studies throughout the report). However, at present, the transport community does not fully understand the challenges and opportunities that emerging data present. Therefore, this report seeks to identify some of these unknowns and communicate the case for action in this area to our member organisations and beyond….(More)”.