Designing digital democracy: a short guide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan at NESTA: “I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light….

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones…..

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’…..

 

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. …

Clarity on identity and anonymity

…. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation….(More)

Chicago uses new technology to solve this very old urban problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mehboob Jeelani at Fortune: “Chicago has spent 12 years collecting data on resident complaints. Now the city is harnessing that data to control the rat population, stopping infestations before residents spot rats in the first place.

For the past three years, Chicago police have been analyzing 911 calls to better predict crime patterns across the city and, in one case, actually forecasted a shootout minutes before it occurred.

Now, the city government is turning its big data weapons on the city’s rat population.

The city has 12 years of data on the resident complaints, ranging from calls about rodent sitting to graffiti. Those clusters of data lead the engineers to where the rats can potentially breed. The report is shared with the city’s sanitation team, which later cleans up the rat-infested areas.

“We discovered really interesting relationship that led to developing an algorithm about rodent prediction,” says Brenna Berman, Chicago’s chief information officer. “It involved 31 variables related to calls about overflowing trash bins and food poisoning in restaurants.”

The results, Berman says, are 20% more efficient versus the old responsive model.

Governing cities in the 21st century is a difficult task. It needs a political and economic support. In America, it was only in the early 1990s—when young adults started moving from the suburbs back to the cities—that the academic and policy consensus shifted back toward urban centers. Since then, cities are facing an influx of new residents, overwhelming the service providing agencies. To meet that demand amid the recent budget sequestration, cities like New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago are constantly elevating the art of governance through innovative policies.

Due to this new model, in Chicago, you might not even spot a rat. The city’s Department of Innovation and Technology analyzes big chunks of data to an extent where the likelihood of a rodent infestation is thwarted seven days ahead of resident rat-sightings…(More)”

Development Tracker

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

City of Victoria: “Welcome to the new Development Tracker, a tool to help keep you informed on developments happening in your neighbourhood and community.

To get started, click the icon below. You will be directed to a start menu, where you can choose to sort by neighbourhood, or view all current rezoning applications. All applications will have a list of completed and upcoming milestones, as well as plans and other documents to give you more information on what each project is all about….(More)”

Detroit Revitalizes City with 311 App

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at Government Technology: “In the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, blight sieged parts of the city as its populous exited. The fallouts were typical. There was a run of vandalism, thefts, arson and graffiti. Hard times pushed throngs of looters into scores of homes to scavenge for anything that wasn’t bolted down — and often, even for the things that were…. For solutions, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and DWSD’s CIO Dan Rainey partnered with SeeClickFix. The company, based in New Haven, Conn., is known for its mobile platform that’s embedded itself as a conduit between city service departments and citizen non-emergency — or 311 — requests. Duggan saw the platform as an opportune answer to address more than a single issue. Instead, the mayor asked how the app could be integrated throughout the city. Potholes, downed trees, graffiti, missing signage, streetlight outages — the mayor wanted a bundled solution to handle an array of common challenges.

Improve Detroit was his answer. The city app, officially available since April, allows citizens to report problems using photos, location data and by request type. Notifications on progress follow and residents can even pay utility bills through the app. For departments, it’s ingrained into work orders and workflows, while analytics provide data for planning, and filters permit a deep-dive analysis….

improve detroit app

Detroit now sits among many metropolitan cities pioneering such 311 apps. San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago are just a few of them. And there are a host of equally adroit tech providers supplying and supporting the apps — companies like Salesforce, CitySourced, PublicStuff, Fix 311 and others. Some cities have even developed their own apps through their internal IT departments.

What’s unique in Detroit is the city’s ambition to leverage a 311 app against major blight while the city works to demolish more than 20,000 abandoned homes — susceptible to fire, flooding, pest infestations and criminal activity. Beyond this, Lingholm said the initiative doubles as a tool to rejuvenate public trust. Data from the app is fed to the city’s new open data portal, and departments have set goals to ensure responsiveness….(More)

Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Albert Meijer and Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar in International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that smart city governance is not a technological issue: we should study smart city governance as a complex process of institutional change and acknowledge the political nature of appealing visions of socio-technical governance….(More)”

Cops Increasingly Use Social Media to Connect, Crowdsource

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sara E. Wilson at GovTech: “Law enforcement has long used public tip lines and missing persons bulletins to recruit citizens in helping solve crime and increasing public safety. Though the need for police departments to connect with their communities is nothing new, the array of technologies available to do so is growing all the time — as are the ways in which departments use those technologies.

In fact, 81 percent of law enforcement professionals use sites such as Facebook and Twitter on the job. And 25 percent use it daily.

Much of law enforcement is crowdsourced — Amber alerts are pushed to smartphones, seeking response from citizens; officers push wanted information and crime tips to users on Facebook and Twitter in the hopes they can help; and some departments create apps to streamline the information sharing.

Take the Johns Creek, Ga., Police Department, which has deployed a tool that allows additional citizen engagement and crowdsourcing…..Using a mobile app — the SunGard Public Sector P2C Converge app, which is branded specifically for Johns Creek PD as JCPD4Me — the department can more smoothly manage public safety announcements and other social media interactions….

Another tool cops use for communicating with citizens is Nixle, which lets agencies publish alerts, advisories, community information and traffic news. Citizens register for free and receive credible, neighborhood-level public safety information via text message and email in real time.

The Oakland, Calif., Police Department (OPD) uses the platform to engage with citizens — an April 17, 2015 post on Oakland PD’s Nixle Community feed informs readers that the department’s Special Victims Section, which is working to put an end to sex trafficking in the city, arrested five individuals for solicitation of prostitution. Since Jan. 1, 2015, OPD has arrested 70 individuals from 27 cities across the state for solicitation of prostitution.

Nixle allows two-way communication as well — the Tip Watch function allows anonymous tipsters to send information to Oakland PD in three ways (text, phone, Web). Now OPD can issue a passcode to tipsters for two-way, anonymous communication to help gather more information.

On the East Coast, the Peabody, Mass., Police Department has used the My Police Department (MyPD) app by WiredBlue, which lets citizens submit tips and feedback directly to the department, since its creation….

During the high-profile manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, the FBI asked the public for eyewitness photo and video evidence. The response from the public was so overwhelming that the server infrastructure couldn’t handle the massive inflow of data.

This large-scale crowdsourcing and data dilemma inspired a new product: the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR). Developed by CitizenGlobal Inc. and Amazon Web Services, LEEDIR pairs an app with cloud storage to help police use citizens’ smartphones as tools to gather and investigate evidence. Since its creation, the repository was used in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014 to investigate riots in Isla Vista.

Proponents of LEEDIR say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that can come in during a crisis. Critics, however, claim that privacy issues come into play with this kind of policing. …(More)”

Delhi trials participatory budget initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Medha Basu in FutureGov: “The Delhi government is running a participatory budget exercise to involve citizens in deciding priorities for the 2015 Budget.

The city government, which came into office in February, has set aside INR 5 million (US$78,598) for each neighbourhood and residents will decide what this money gets spent on.

The initiative, Janta Ka Budget (meaning ‘People’s Budget’), will be tested in 400 communities across the city, with the first one launched by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal last month.

….

Officials met with residents of the neighbourhood to hear what they would like to see improved in their area. Residents then voted in public meetings to decide the most popular ones.

Officials are expected to come up with cost estimates for the shortlisted projects within a week of the meeting and allocate money from the fund.

In the first session, the shortlisted projects were a library, dispensary, road repairs and CCTV cameras….(More)”

Worldwide accessibility map is crowdsourced by users

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There are a growing number of apps such as Handimap and Blue Badge Style which offer city guides for users in wheelchairs — informing them which venues are accessible and which do not have disabled facilities. AXS Map does the same, but utilizes crowdsourced information to cover a much wider range of places and venues.

AXS Map is a free app, hailing from Canada, which aims to make the world a more accessible place for those with mobility problems. Users can access the platform via smartphone or desktop: they can browse any given area for accessible restaurants, shops, public restrooms or anything else via the searchable map. The database is made up of crowdsourced reviews submitted by the users themselves and includes ratings and information about entryways and restrooms.

The organization also host Mapathons, which aim to get new communities in towns and cities which are not yet covered involved: participants are encouraged to form teams and compete to see who can rate the most venues in a given area. Mapathons have taken place all over the USA and there are upcoming events in New York and Istanbul. Where should the AXS Mappers head next?” (More: AXS Map)

Moving Cities Beyond Performance Measurement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Charitable Trust: “The recent explosion in the availability of data is changing the way Americans make decisions and do business in fields as diverse as sports, public health, shopping, and politics. The business of government is no exception. At the local level, new methods of collecting and analyzing information have varied and far-reaching effects on the ability of leaders to understand and work within their fiscal constraints and meet residents’ needs.

Local governments have used performance measurement—collecting and studying data with the aim of improving operating efficiency and effectiveness—for decades, but today’s cities have access to a wealth of other data. Those on the cutting edge are using these data with new analytical tools in innovative ways that often reach beyond the conventional definition of performance measurement. For example, theNew York City Fire Department compiles information from various city departments about building characteristics—such as construction material, fireproofing, height, date of construction, and last inspection date—to prioritize buildings for inspections.Boston uses a cellphone app, called Street Bump, to help detect potholes using the accelerometers built into cellphones.

What’s new, beyond the sheer volume of data, to help governments improve?

  • Local governments previously examined statistics only within individual departments. Today, they are gleaning new insights by combining data across agencies.
  • Government officials typically reviewed performance statistics only periodically—annually, semiannually, or quarterly. Now they often have access to usable data in real time, allowing them to be more responsive and efficient.
  • In the past, cities primarily used analytics to understand past events. Today, some are exploring predictive analytics, using data to anticipate occurrences and outcomes….(More)”

Data Fusion Heralds City Attractiveness Ranking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The ability of any city to attract visitors is an important metric for town planners, businesses based on tourism, traffic planners, residents, and so on. And there are increasingly varied ways of measuring this thanks to the growing volumes of city-related data generated by with social media, and location-based data.

So it’s only natural that researchers would like to draw these data sets together to see what kind of insight they can get from this form of data fusion.

And so it has turned out thanks to the work of Stanislav Sobolevsky at MIT and a few buddies. These guys have fused three wildly different data sets related to the attractiveness of a city that allows them to rank these places and to understand why people visit them and what they do when they get there.

The work focuses exclusively on cities in Spain using data that is relatively straightforward to gather. The first data set consists of the number of credit and debit card transactions carried out by visitors to cities throughout Spain during 2011. This includes each card’s country of origin, which allows Sobolevsky and co to count only those transactions made by foreign visitors—a total of 17 million anonymized transactions from 8.6 million foreign visitors from 175 different countries.

The second data set consists of over 3.5 million photos and videos taken in Spain and posted to Flickr by people living in other countries. These pictures were taken between 2005 and 2014 by 16,000 visitors from 112 countries.

The last data set consists of around 700,000 geotagged tweets posted in Spain during 2012. These were posted by 16,000 foreign visitors from 112 countries.

Finally, the team defined a city’s attractiveness, at least for the purposes of this study, as the total number of pictures, tweets and card transactions that took place within it……

That’s interesting work that shows how the fusion of big data sets can provide insights into the way people use cities.   It has its limitations of course. The study does not address the reasons why people find cities attractive and what draws them there in the first place. For example, are they there for tourism, for business, or for some other reason. That would require more specialized data.

But it does provide a general picture of attractiveness that could be a start for more detailed analyses. As such, this work is just a small part of a new science of cities based on big data, but one that shows how much is becoming possible with just a little number crunching.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1504.06003 : Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economic and social media activity”