The Moment for Participatory Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Since the 2016 US presidential election, everyone—including the President and those protesting outside his office—has been talking about bringing the voices of everyday citizens into public life. Several hurdles have prevented the efforts of many groups—including nationwide organizations, civic technologists, social entrepreneurs, policymakers, and advocates championing civic innovation—from reaching and supporting communities that are already engaging citizens in effective ways. These include but are not limited to:

  • The challenge of taking local interventions to national politics
  • Overreliance on data-driven mechanisms versus community-based solutions
  • A lack of definition of political participation beyond elections

Through many disparate efforts runs a persistent question: Where are these citizens? Where, precisely, are people congregating in public life in 2017 America?

One challenge to engaging community residents in civic life beyond simply voting every two or four years is that there is no consensus about what a more robust, participatory model of democracy—one in which people more actively participate in the civic fabric of their community—looks like in the United States. As Harvard Kennedy School Professor Archon Fung noted in an article:

The lack of any background agreement, or even common orientation, on even basic questions about public participation makes the job of those who champion participatory innovation much more difficult. … There would be much more friction and unevenness in elections in the United States if, every two years, supporters of representative democracy had to convince people in every community across the country why voting is desirable and explain how to conduct elections.

For many scholars and practitioners, the answer to where citizens are congregating is a bit of a riddle: Civic life takes place both everywhere and nowhere specific—it is in cities, towns, and communities all across the country, but there is no single center of gravity. That poses challenges for those who wish to mobilize nationwide efforts and who recognize that citizens have finite time. But beneath these challenges, there is also an opportunity to look with fresh eyes on what is already working, and find ways to build on it and bring it to scale.

Below are three models that have the potential to counter these obstacles and scale across communities. It is important to note, however, that unlike getting a product to market, scale in civic engagement does not always mean working on a national level. Efforts should measure civic engagement “return on investment” not just by the number of people reached, but also by the efficacy, equity, and inclusivity of the activity….(More).

What Is an Event?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Robin Wagner-Pacifici: “We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.

What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives….(More)”

Can The Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Coleman: “From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics. If hundreds of millions of people could be the producers as well as receivers of political messages, could that invigorate democracy? If political elites fail to respond to such energy, where will it leave them?

In this short book, internationally renowned scholar of political communication, Stephen Coleman, argues that the best way to strengthen democracy is to re-invent it for the twenty-first century. Governments and global institutions have failed to seize the opportunity to democratise their ways of operating, but online citizens are ahead of them, developing practices that could revolutionise the exercise of political power…(More)”

CrowdCurio: an online crowdsourcing platform to facilitate climate change studies using herbarium specimens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Charles G. Willis et al in New Phytologist: “Phenology is a key aspect of plant success. Recent research has demonstrated that herbarium specimens can provide important information on plant phenology. Massive digitization efforts have the potential to greatly expand herbarium-based phenological research, but also pose a serious challenge regarding efficient data collection.

Here, we introduce CrowdCurio, a crowdsourcing tool for the collection of phenological data from herbarium specimens. We test its utility by having workers collect phenological data (number of flower buds, open flowers and fruits) from specimens of two common New England (USA) species: Chelidonium majus and Vaccinium angustifolium. We assess the reliability of using nonexpert workers (i.e. Amazon Mechanical Turk) against expert workers. We also use these data to estimate the phenological sensitivity to temperature for both species across multiple phenophases.

We found no difference in the data quality of nonexperts and experts. Nonexperts, however, were a more efficient way of collecting more data at lower cost. We also found that phenological sensitivity varied across both species and phenophases.

Our study demonstrates the utility of CrowdCurio as a crowdsourcing tool for the collection of phenological data from herbarium specimens. Furthermore, our results highlight the insight gained from collecting large amounts of phenological data to estimate multiple phenophases…(More)”.

Smart Government: A New Adjective to Government Transformation or a Trick?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos in Understanding Smart Cities: A Tool for Smart Government or an Industrial Trick: “Smart city and smart government appear to share a common scientific interest, since they structure corresponding research and practice terms like the “Web Applications and Smart Cities (AW4City)”, “The Smart Cities and Smart Government Research-Practice (SCSGRP) Consortium” and the “Beyond Bureaucracy”, while calls for mutual scientific tracks, workshops and articles can be located in several conference posts. This chapter analyzes the context of smart government. It performs a literature review on the term, where several conceptualization models are compared and explained. It is cleared that smart government is different to smart city government and to smart city. On the contrary, smart city can be seen as an area of practice for smart government, while smart governance is one of the smart city’s dimensions.

Moreover, the role of government is documented to be changed due to urbanization and technology. Urbanization results to communities, which are larger to nations and the role of local government is more complex compared to the usual national one. Moreover, technology provides governments with tools that has never got before, like the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which changes information collection and process flow, while it enables a direct and continuous connection with the community. Both these two phenomena highlight the government challenges of the forthcoming decades, which governments try to deal with data, process re-engineering, co-decision and service co-production….(More)”

Five hacks for digital democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Simone Noveck in Nature: “…Technology is already changing the way public institutions make decisions. Governments at every level are using ‘big data’ to pinpoint or predict the incidence of crime, heart attack and foodborne illness. Expert networking platforms — online directories of people and their skills, such as NovaGob.org in Spain — are helping to match civil servants who have the relevant expertise with those who need the know-how.

To get beyond conventional democratic models of representation or referendum, and, above all, to improve learning in the civil service, we must build on these pockets of promise and evolve. That requires knowledge of what works and when. But there is a dearth of research on the impact of technology on public institutions. One reason is a lack of suitable research methods. Many academics prefer virtual labs with simulated conditions that are far from realistic. Field experiments have long been used to evaluate the choice between two policies. But much less attention is paid to how public organizations might operate differently with new technologies.

The perfect must not be the enemy of the good. Even when it is impractical to create a control group and run parallel interventions in the same institution, comparisons can yield insights. For instance, one could compare the effect of using citizen commenting on legislative proposals in the Brazilian parliament with similar practices in the Finnish parliament.

Of course, some leaders have little interest in advancing more than their own power. But many more politicians and public servants are keen to use research-based evidence to guide how they use technology to govern in the public interest.

The MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, has started funding a research network — a dozen academics and public servants — to study the possibilities of using new technology to govern more transparently and in partnership with citizens (see www.opening-governance.org). More collaboration among universities and across disciplines is needed. New research platforms — such as the Open Governance Research Exchange, developed by the Governance Lab, the UK-based non-profit mySociety and the World Bank — can offer pathways for sharing research findings and co-creating methodologies….(More)”

Measuring results from open contracting in Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathrin Frauscher, Karolis Granickas and Leigh Manasco at the Open Contracting Partnership: “…Ukraine is one of our Showcase and Learning (S&L) projects, and we’ve already shared several stories about the success of Prozorro. Each S&L project tests specific theories of change and use cases. Through the Prozorro platform, Ukraine is revolutionizing procurement by digitizing the process and unlocking data to make it available to citizens, CSOs, government, and business. The theory of change for this S&L project hypothesizes that transparency and the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, promotion and monitoring of the procurement system, is having an impact on value for money, fairness and integrity.

The reform introduced other innovations, including electronic reverse auctions and a centralized procurement database that integrates with private commercial platforms. We co-created a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plan with our project partners to quantify and measure specific progress and impact indicators, while understanding that it is hard to attribute impacts to distinct aspects of the reform. The indicators featured in this blog are particularly related to our theory of change.

We are at a crucial moment in this S&L project as our first round of comprehensive MEL baseline and progress data are coming in. It’s a good time to reflect on key takeaways and challenges that arose when defining and analyzing these data, and how we are using them to inform the Prozorro reform.

Openness can result in more competition and competition saves money.

One of the benefits of open contracting appears to be improving market opportunity and efficiency. Market opportunity focuses on companies being able to compete for business on a level playing field.

From January 2015 to March 2017, the average number of bids per tender lot rose by 15%, demonstrating an increase in competition. Even more notable, the average number of unique suppliers during that same time grew by 45% for each procuring entity, meaning that agencies are now procuring from more and more diverse suppliers….

High levels of responsiveness can benefit procuring entities.

Those agencies that leverage their opportunities to interact with business and citizens throughout the contracting cycle, by actively responding to questions and complaints via the online platform, tend to conduct procurement more smoothly, without high levels of amendments or cancellations, than those who don’t. Tenders with a 100% response rate to feedback have a 66% success rate, while those with no response, show a 52% success rate. The portal provides procuring entities with the resources needed to address questions and problems, saving time, effort and money throughout the contracting process.

People are beginning to trust the public procurement process and data more.

According to a survey of 300 entrepreneurs conducted by USAID, most respondents believed that Prozorro significantly (27%) or partially (53%) reduces corruption. Additionally, fewer respondents who participated in procurement said they faced corruption when using the new platform (29%) compared to the old system (54%). These numbers only tell a part of the story, as we do not know what those outside of the procurement system think, but they are a necessary first step towards measuring increased levels of trust for the public procurement process. We will continue looking at trust as one of the proxies for health of an open procurement process.

Citizens are actively seeking out procurement information.

Google search hits grew from 680 in the month of January 2015 to more than 191,000 in the month of February 2017 (tracking 43 related keywords). This means the environment is shifting to one where people are recognizing that this data has value; that there is interest and demand for it. Implementing open contracting processes is just one part of what we want to see happen. We also strive to nurture an environment where open contracting data is seen as something that is worthwhile and necessary.

The newly established www.dozorro.org monitoring platform also shows promising results…..

The main one is feedback loops. We see that procuring entities’ responsiveness to general questions results in better quality procurement. We also see that only one out of three claims (request to a procuring entity to amend, cancel or modify a tender in question) is successfully resolved. In addition, there are some good individual examples, such as the ones in Dnypro and Kiev. While we do not know if these numbers and instances are sufficient for an effective institutional response mechanism, we do know that business and citizens have to trust redress mechanisms before using them. We will continue trying to identify the ideal level of institutional response to secure trust and develop better metrics to capture that….(More)”.

USAFacts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“USAFacts is a new data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative and have no political agenda or commercial motive. We provide this information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding it in the future.

We rely exclusively on publicly available government data sources. We don’t make judgments or prescribe specific policies. Whether government money is spent wisely or not, whether our quality of life is improving or getting worse – that’s for you to decide. We hope to spur serious, reasoned, and informed debate on the purpose and functions of government. Such debate is vital to our democracy. We hope that USAFacts will make a modest contribution toward building consensus and finding solutions.

There’s more to USAFacts than this website. We also offer an annual report, a summary report, and a “10-K” modeled on the document public companies submit annually to the SEC for transparency and accountability to their investors…(More).”

Big Data for Achievement of the 2030 Agenda: Data Privacy, Ethics and Protection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UNDG Guidance Note: “This document sets out general guidance on data privacy, data protection and data ethics for the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) concerning the use of big data, collected in real time by private sector entities as part of their business offerings1 , and shared with UNDG members for the purposes of strengthening operational implementation of their programmes to support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.

The Guidance Note is designed to:

• Establish common principles across UNDG to support the operational use of big data for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs);

• Serve as a risk-management tool taking into account fundamental human rights; and

• Set principles for obtaining, retention, use and quality control for data from the private sector. The data revolution was recognized as an enabler of the Sustainable Development Goals, not only to monitor progress but also to inclusively engage stakeholders at all levels to advance evidence-based policies and programmes and to reach the most vulnerable.

The 2030 Agenda asserts that “Quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregates data will be needed to help with the measurement of progress (SGDs) and to ensure that no one is left behind. Such data is key to decision making.” At the same time, there are legitimate concerns regarding risks associated with handling and processing of big data, particularly in light of the current fragmented regulatory landscape and in the absence of a common set of principles on data privacy, ethics and protection. These concerns continue to complicate efforts to develop standardized and scalable approaches to risk management and data access. A coordinated approach is required to ensure the emergence of frameworks for safe and responsible use of big data for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.

The guidance described in this document acknowledges and is based on the UN Guidelines for the Regulation of Computerized Personal Data Files, adopted by the UN General Assembly resolution 45/95, and takes into account both existing international instruments and relevant regulations, rules and policies of UNDG member organizations concerning data privacy and data protection. This Guidance Note is based on standards that have withstood the test of time, reflecting the strength of their core values….(More)”.

Killer Apps: Vanishing Messages, Encrypted Communications, and Challenges to Freedom of Information Laws When Public Officials ‘Go Dark’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daxton Stewart: “In the early weeks of the new presidential administration, White House staffers were communicating among themselves and leaking to journalists using apps such as Signal and Confide, which allow users to encrypt messages or to make them vanish after being received. By using these apps, government officials are “going dark” by avoiding detection of their communications in a way that undercuts freedom of information laws. In this paper, the author explores the challenges presented by encrypted and ephemeral messaging apps when used by government employees, examining three policy approaches – banning use of the apps, enhancing existing archiving and record-keeping practices, or legislatively expanding quasi-government body definitions – as potential ways to manage the threat to open records laws these “killer apps” present….(More)”.