The Decalogue of Policy Making 2.0: Results from Analysis of Case Studies on the Impact of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling


Paper by Sotirios Koussouris, Fenareti Lampathaki, Gianluca Misuraca, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, and Dimitrios Askounis: “Despite the availability of a myriad of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based tools and methodologies for supporting governance and the formulation of policies, including modelling expected impacts, these have proved to be unable to cope with the dire challenges of the contemporary society. In this chapter we present the results of the analysis of a set of promising cases researched in order to understand the possible impact of what we define ‘Policy Making 2.0’, which refers to ‘a set of methodologies and technological solutions aimed at enabling better, timely and participative policy-making’. Based on the analysis of these cases we suggest a bouquet of (mostly ICT-related) practical and research recommendations that are relevant to researchers, practitioners and policy makers in order to guide the introduction and implementation of Policy Making 2.0 initiatives. We argue that this ‘decalogue’ of Policy Making 2.0 could be an operational checklist for future research and policy to further explore the potential of ICT tools for governance and policy modelling, so to make next generation policy making more ‘intelligent’ and hopefully able to solve or anticipate the societal challenges we are (and will be) confronted today and in the future.

Using Crowds for Evaluation Tasks: Validity by Numbers vs. Validity by Expertise


Paper by Christoph Hienerth and Frederik Riar:Developing and commercializing novel ideas is central to innovation processes. As the outcome of such ideas cannot fully be foreseen, the evaluation of them is crucial. With the rise of the internet and ICT, more and new kinds of evaluations are done by crowds. This raises the question whether individuals in crowds possess necessary capabilities to evaluate and whether their outcomes are valid. As empirical insights are not yet available, this paper deals with the examination of evaluation processes and general evaluation components, the discussion of underlying characteristics and mechanism of these components affecting evaluation outcomes (i.e. evaluation validity). We further investigate differences between firm- and crowd-based evaluation using different cases of applications, and develop a theoretical framework towards evaluation validity, i.e. validity by numbers vs. the validity by expertise. The identified factors that influence the validity of evaluations are: (1) the number of evaluation tasks, (2) complexity, (3) expertise, (4) costs, and (5) time to outcome. For each of these factors, hypotheses are developed based on theoretical arguments. We conclude with implications, proposing a model of evaluation validity.”

Rethinking Democracy


Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate: “By many measures, the world has never been more democratic. Virtually every government at least pays lip service to democracy and human rights. Though elections may not be free and fair, massive electoral manipulation is rare and the days when only males, whites, or the rich could vote are long gone. Freedom House’s global surveys show a steady increase from the 1970s in the share of countries that are “free” – a trend that the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of democratization….

A true democracy, one that combines majority rule with respect for minority rights, requires two sets of institutions. First, institutions of representation, such as political parties, parliaments, and electoral systems, are needed to elicit popular preferences and turn them into policy action. Second, democracy requires institutions of restraint, such as an independent judiciary and media, to uphold fundamental rights like freedom of speech and prevent governments from abusing their power. Representation without restraint – elections without the rule of law – is a recipe for the tyranny of the majority.

Democracy in this sense – what many call “liberal democracy” – flourished only after the emergence of the nation-state and the popular upheaval and mobilization produced by the Industrial Revolution. So it should come as no surprise that the crisis of liberal democracy that many of its oldest practitioners currently are experiencing is a reflection of the stress under which the nation-state finds itself….

In developing countries, it is more often the institutions of restraint that are failing. Governments that come to power through the ballot box often become corrupt and power-hungry. They replicate the practices of the elitist regimes they replaced, clamping down on the press and civil liberties and emasculating (or capturing) the judiciary. The result has been called “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism.” Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand are some of the better-known recent examples.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions. And, for many economists, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate them from the “folly of the masses” almost always is the preferred approach.

Effective institutions of restraint do not emerge overnight; and it might seem like those in power would never want to create them. But if there is some likelihood that I will be voted out of office and that the opposition will take over, such institutions will protect me from others’ abuses tomorrow as much as they protect others from my abuses today. So strong prospects for sustained political competition are a key prerequisite for illiberal democracies to turn into liberal ones over time.

Optimists believe that new technologies and modes of governance will resolve all problems and send democracies centered on the nation-state the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Pessimists fear that today’s liberal democracies will be no match for the external challenges mounted by illiberal states like China and Russia, which are guided only by hardnosed realpolitik. Either way, if democracy is to have a future, it will need to be rethought.”

A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning


A new research paper by Pedro Domingos: “Machine learning algorithms can figure out how to perform important tasks by generalizing from examples. This is often feasible and cost-effective where manual programming is not. As more data becomes available, more ambitious problems can be tackled. As a result, machine learning is widely used in computer science and other fields. However, developing successful machine learning applications requires a substantial amount of “black art” that is hard to find in textbooks. This article summarizes twelve key lessons that machine learning researchers and practitioners have learned. These include pitfalls to avoid, important issues to focus on, and answers to common questions.”
 

The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality


New Book by Luciano Florini (Chapter 1 (pdf): “Considers the influence information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having on our world; Describes some of the latest developments in ICTs and their use in a range of fields; Argues that ICTs have become environmental forces that create and transform our realities; Explores the impact of ICTs in a range of areas, from education and scientific research to social interaction, and even war..
Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.
As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an “infosphere”. Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our ‘real’ lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, “onlife”. Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.
“Onlife” defines more and more of our daily activity – the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the ‘e’ in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.”

From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”


IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.
The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man.
Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book, published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book is available in print and ebook formats (Kindle and epub) from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books. The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), may also be downloaded for free as a pdf file from ID3.
One chapter that inspires the book’s title traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as

  • evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements;
  • smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective;
  • the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and
  • new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.

From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond also introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called “Open Mustard Seed,” or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems.
“OMS is an integrated, open source package of programs that lets people collect and share personal information in secure, and transparent and accountable ways, enabling authentic, trusted social and economic relationships to flourish,” said Dr. John H. Clippinger, executive director of ID3, an acronym for the Institute for Institutional Innovation and Data-Driven Design.
“The software builds individual privacy, security and trusted exchange into the very design of the system. In effect, OMS represents a new authentication, privacy and sharing layer for the Internet,” said Clippinger “– a new way to share personal information selectively and securely, without access by unauthorized third parties.”
A two-minute video introducing the capabilities of OMS can be viewed here.”

Big Data and Chicago's Traffic-cam Scandal


Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is microscopic regulation that we invite via the democratic process.
Big data techniques are new in the world. It will take time to know how to feel about them and whether and how they should be legally corralled. For sheer inanity, though, there’s no beating a recent White House report quivering about the alleged menace of “digital redlining,” or the use of big-data marketing tactics in ways that supposedly disadvantage minority groups.
This alarm rests on an extravagant misunderstanding. Redlining was a crude method banks used to avoid losses in bad neighborhoods even at the cost of missing some profitable transactions—exactly the inefficiency big data is meant to improve upon. Failing to lure an eligible customer into a sale, after all, is hardly the goal of any business.
The real danger of the new technologies lies elsewhere, which the White House slightly touches upon in some of its fretting about police surveillance. The danger is microscopic regulation of our daily activities that we will invite on ourselves through the democratic process.
Soon it may be impossible to leave our homes without our movements being tracked by traffic and security cameras able to read license plates, identify faces and pull up data about any individual, from social media postings to credit reports.
Private businesses are just starting to use these techniques to monitor shoppers in front of shelves of goodies. Towns and cities have already embraced such techniques as revenue grabs, encouraged by private contractors peddling automated traffic cameras.
Witness a festering Chicago scandal. This month came federal indictments of a former city bureaucrat, an outside consultant, and the former CEO of Redflex Traffic Systems, the company that operated the city’s traffic cameras until last year….”
 

The wisest choices depend on instinct and careful analysis


John Kay in the Financial Times: “Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s 2003 book on the science of picking baseball teams, was perhaps written to distract himself from his usual work of attacking the financial services industry. Even after downloading the rules of baseball, I still could not fully understand what was going on. But I caught the drift: sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of the records of players, proved a better guide than the accumulated wisdom of experienced coaches.

Another lesson, important for business strategy, was the brevity of the benefits gained by the Oakland A’s, Lewis’s sporting heroes. If the only source of competitive advantage is better quantitative analysis – whether in baseball or quant strategies in the financial sector – such an advantage can be rapidly and accurately imitated.

At the same time, another genre of books proclaims the virtues of instinctive decision-making. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) begins with accounts of how experts could identify the Getty kouros – a statue of naked youth purported to be of ancient Greek provenance and purchased in 1985 for $9m – as fake immediately, even though it had supposedly been authenticated through extended scientific tests.

Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist has for many years monitored the capabilities of experienced practical decision makers – firefighters, nurses and military personnel – who make immediate judgments that are vindicated by the more elaborate assessments possible only with hindsight.
Of course, there is no real inconsistency between the two propositions. The experienced coaches disparaged by sabermetrics enthusiasts were right to believe they knew a lot about spotting baseball talent; they just did not know as much as they thought they did. The art experts and firefighters who made instantaneous, but accurate, judgments were not hearing voices in the air. But no expert can compete with chemical analysis and carbon dating in assessing the age of a work of art.
There are two ways of reconciling expertise with analysis. One takes the worst of both worlds, combining the overconfidence of experience with the naive ignorance of the quant. The resulting bogus rationality seeks to objectivise expertise by fitting it into a template.
It is exemplified in the processes by which interviewers for jobs, and managers who make personnel assessments, are required to complete checklists explaining how they reached their conclusion using prescribed criteria….”

Follow the money: A study of cashtags on Twitter


Paper by Martin Hentschel and Omar Alonso at FirstMonday: “The popularity of Twitter goes beyond trending topics, world events, memes, and popular hashtags. Recently a new way of sharing financial information is taking place in social media under the name of cashtags, stock ticker symbols that are prefixed with a dollar sign. In this paper we present an exploratory analysis of cashtags on Twitter. Specifically, we investigate how widespread cashtags are, what stock symbols are tweeted more often, and which users tweet about cashtags in general. We analyze relationships among cashtags and study hashtags in the context of cashtags. Finally, we compare tweet performance to stock market performance. We conclude that cashtags, in particular in combination with other cashtags or hashtags, can be very useful for analyzing financial information and provide new insights into stocks and companies.”

The Rise of Virtual Advocacy Groups


at Connectivity: “Ever since the launch of MoveOn in 1998, I have been evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of virtual advocacy groups compared to traditional, brick-and-mortar advocacy groups.
I hypothesized that organizing and working mostly online would allow advocates to escape a conundrum that ensnare those that rent pricey office space. As I have observed over the years, many brick-and-mortar groups dilute the effectiveness of their email programs for advocacy by inserting fundraising appeals into their email stream. As they emerged in the wake of MoveOn, virtual advocacy groups offered a new model of nimble organizations that could focus less on fundraising and more on advocacy.
Marketing guru Seth Godin describes this process as flipping the funnel. Like a funnel, he says traditional organizations ask supporters for self-sustaining money as broadly as they can, but mobilize a very small percent of them to do so. For this trickle of funds, they end up alienating many in the process. Much of the money raised, meanwhile, simply goes towards giving its supporters a megaphone to advocate for the organizations’ causes.
Today, most of an advocacy organization’s supporters already have their own megaphone: social media. So instead of alienating so many supporters with fundraising appeals to buy them a megaphone, Godin says advocacy groups should instead ask supporters to use the megaphones they already have on their behalf. Thus, the funnel is flipped into a megaphone and supporters don’t have to become alienated by excessive fundraising appeals.
This concept is central to any effective social media campaign. And with no rent to pay, virtual organizations should be best positioned to take advantage of the strategy.
In practice, virtual advocacy groups pioneered back in the ‘90s by MoveOn have proven to be more efficient purveyors of their members’ messages. And at the organizations I spoke to for this article, shifting work online has created workplaces that live up to their founders’ values, too.
I reached out to Nita Chaudhary and Kat Barr, the co-executive director and chief of staff of UltraViolet, an advocacy group formed to fight sexism and expand women’s rights in the U.S. I spoke to MomsRising executive director Kristin Row-Finkbeiner, whose group takes on critical issues facing women, mothers and families. I also consulted Joan Blades, co-founder of both MoveOn and MomsRising who currently works for a new start-up called Great Work Cultures, which promotes a variety of new workplace organizational models that are more respectful of employee work-life balances. Both Chaudhary and Barr previously worked at MoveOn.
MoveOn, MomsRising and UltraViolet are not merely virtual advocacy groups, but are three of the most successful advocacy groups in the U.S. with many millions of supporters among them….”