Can Blockchain Bring Voting Online?


Ben Miller at Government Technology: “Hash chains are not a new concept in cryptography. They are, essentially, a long chain of data connected by values called hashes that prove the connection of each part to the next. By stringing all these pieces together and representing them in small values, then, one can represent a large amount of information without doing much. Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer for Microsoft Research and director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, gives the rough analogy of taking a picture of a person, then taking another picture of that person holding the first picture, and so on. Loss of resolution aside, each picture would contain all the images from the previous pictures.

It’s only recently that people have found a way to extend the idea to commonplace applications. That happened with the advent of bitcoin, a digital “cryptocurrency” that has attained real-world value and become a popular exchange medium for ransomware attacks. The bitcoin community operates using a specific type of hash chain called a blockchain. It works by asking a group of users to solve complex problems as a sort of proof that bitcoin transactions took place, in exchange for a reward.

“Academics who have been looking at this for years, when they saw bitcoin, they said, ‘This can’t work, this has too many problems,’” Benaloh said. “It surprised everybody that this seems to work and to hold.”

But the blockchain concept is by no means limited to money. It’s simply a public ledger, a bulletin board meant to ensure accuracy based on the fact that everyone can see it — and what’s been done to it — at all times. It could be used to keep property records, or to provide an audit trail for how a product got from factory to buyer.

Or perhaps it could be used to prove the veracity and accuracy of digital votes in an election.

It is a potential solution to the problem of cybersecurity in online elections because the foundation of blockchain is the audit trail: If anybody tampered with votes, it would be easy to see and prove.

And in fact, blockchain elections have already been run in the U.S. — just not in the big leagues. Voatz, a Massachusetts-based startup that has struck up a partnership with one of the few companies in the country that actually builds voting systems, has used a blockchain paradigm to run elections for colleges, school boards, unions and other nonprofit and quasi-governmental groups. Perhaps its most high-profile endeavor was authenticating delegate badges at the 2016 Massachusetts Democratic Convention….

Rivest and Benaloh both talk about another online voting solution with much more enthusiasm. And much in the spirit of academia, the technology’s name is pragmatic rather than sleek and buzzworthy: end-to-end verifiable Internet voting (E2E-VIV).

It’s not too far off from blockchain in spirit, but it relies on a centralized approach instead of a decentralized one. Votes are sent from remote electronic devices to the election authority, most likely the secretary of state for the state the person is voting in, and posted online in an encrypted format. The person voting can use her decryption key to check that her vote was recorded accurately.

But there are no validating peers, no chain of blocks stretching back to the first vote….(More)”.

Paraguay’s transparency alchemists


Story by the Open Contracting Partnership: “….The “Cocido de oro” scandal is seen as part of a well-organized and well-informed youth movement that has sprung up in Paraguay in recent years. An equally dramatic controversyinvolving alleged corruption and unfair staff appointments at one of the country’s top public universities led to the resignation of the Chancellor and other senior staff in September 2015. Mostly high school and university students, they are no longer willing to tolerate the waste and corruption in public spending — a hangover from 35 years of authoritarian rule. They expect their government to be more open and accountable, and public decision-making processes to be more inclusive and democratic.

Thanks to government initiatives that have sought to give citizens greater access to information about public institutions, these students, along with investigative journalists and other civil society groups, are starting to engage actively in civic affairs. And they are data-savvy, basing recommendations on empirical evidence about government policies and processes, how they are implemented, and whether they are working.

Leading the pack is the country’s public procurement office, which runs a portal that ranks among the most open government data sources in the world. Together with information about budgets, public bodies’ payrolls, and other government data, this is helping Paraguayans to tackle some of the biggest long-standing problems faced by the government, like graft, overpricing, nepotism and influence-peddling….

The government recognizes there’s still a long way to go in their quest to open up public data. Few institutions have opened their databases or publish their data on an open data portal, and use of the data that has been published is still limited, according to a report on the country’s third OGP Action Plan. Priority data sets aren’t accessible in ways that meet the needs of civil society, the report adds.

And yet, the tremors of a tectonic shift in transparency and accountability in Paraguay are already being felt. In a short time, armed with access to information, citizens have started engaging with how public money is and should be spent.

The government is now doubling down on its strategy of fostering public participation, using cutting-edge technology to increase citizens’ access to data about their state institutions. Health, education, and municipal-level government, and procurement spending across these areas are being prioritized….(More).

Cross-sector Collaboration in Data Science for Social Good: Opportunities, Challenges, and Open Questions Raised by Working with Academic Researchers


Paper by presented by Anissa Tanweer and Brittany Fiore-Gartland at the Data Science for Social Good Conference: “Recent years have seen growing support for attempts to solve complex social problems through the use of increasingly available, increasingly combinable, and increasingly computable digital data. Sometimes referred to as “data science for social good” (DSSG), these efforts are not concentrated in the hands of any one sector of society. Rather, we see DSSG emerging as an inherently multi-sector and collaborative phenomenon, with key participants hailing from governments, nonprofit organizations, technology companies, and institutions of higher education. Based on three years of participant observation in a university-hosted DSSG program, in this paper we highlight academic contributions to multi-sector DSSG collaborations, including expertise, labor, ethics, experimentation, and neutrality. After articulating both the opportunities and challenges that accompany those contributions, we pose some key open questions that demand attention from participants in DSSG programs and projects. Given the emergent nature of the DSSG phenomenon, it is our contention that how these questions come to be answered will have profound implications for the way society is organized and governed….(More)”.

The Digital Social Innovation Manifesto


ChiC: “The unprecedented hyper connectivity enabled by digital technologies and the Internet are rapidly changing the opportunities we have to address some of the society’s biggest challenges: environmental preservation, reducing inequalities, fostering inclusion and putting in place sustainable economic models.
However, to make the most of these opportunities we need to move away from the current centralization of power by a small number of large tech companies and enable a much broader group of people and organisations to develop and share innovative digital solutions.

Across Europe, a growing movement of people is exploring opportunities for Digital Social Innovation (DSI), developing bottom-up solutions leveraging on participation, collaboration, decentralization, openness, and multi-disciplinarity. However, it is still at a relatively small scale, because of the little public and private investment in DSI, the limited experience in large-scale take-up of collective solutions, and the relative lack of skills of DSI actors (civil society) compared to commercial companies.

This Manifesto aims at fostering civic participation into democratic and social processes, increasing societal resilience and mutual trust as core element of the Digital Society. It provides recommendations for policy makers, to drive the development of the European Digital Single Market to fulfill first and foremost societal and sustainability challenges (rather than short-lived economic interests), with the help and engagement of all citizens.

This Manifesto reflects the views of a broad community of innovators, catalyzed by the coordination action ChiC, which is funded by the European Commission, within the context of the CAPS initiative. As such, it is open to incorporating incoming views and opinions from other stakeholders and it does not intend to promote the specific commercial interests of actors of any kind….(More)”

UN Opens New Office to Monitor AI Development and Predict Possible Threats


Interesting Engineering: “The United Nations has created a new office in the Netherlands dedicated to the monitoring and research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The new office will collect information about the way in which AI is impacting the world. Researchers will have a particular focus on the way AI relates to global security but will also monitor the effects of job loss from AI and automation.

Irakli Beridze, a UN senior strategic adviser will head the office. They have described the new office saying, “A number of UN organisations operate projects involving robots and AI, such as the group of experts studying the role of autonomous military robots in the realm of conventional weapons. These are temporary measures. Ours is the first permanent UN office on this subject. We are looking at the risks as well as the advantages.”….He suggests that the speed of AI technology development is of primary concern. He explains, “This can make for instability if society does not adapt quickly enough. One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this, we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”…(More).

Ethical Guidelines for Applying Predictive Tools Within Human Services


MetroLab Network: “Predictive analytical tools are already being put to work within human service agencies to help make vital decisions about when and how to intervene in the lives of families and communities. The sector may not be entirely comfortable with this trend, but it should not be surprised. Predictive models are in wide use within the justice and education sectors and, more to the point, they work: risk assessment is fundamental to what social services do, and these tools can help agencies respond more quickly to prevent harm, to create more personalized interventions, and allocate scarce public resources to where they can do the most good.

There is also a strong case that predictive risk models (PRM) can reduce bias in decision-making. Designing a predictive model forces more explicit conversations about how agencies think about different risk factors and how they propose to guard against disadvantaging certain demographic or socioeconomic groups. And the standard that agencies are trying to improve upon is not perfect equity—it is the status quo, which is neither transparent nor uniformly fair. Risk scores do not eliminate the possibility of personal or institutional prejudice but they can make it more apparent by providing a common reference point.

That the use of predictive analytics in social services can reduce bias is not to say that it will. Careless or unskilled development of these predictive tools could worsen disparities among clients receiving social services. Child and civil rights advocates rightly worry about the potential for “net widening”—drawing more people in for unnecessary scrutiny by the government. They worry that rather than improving services for vulnerable clients, these models will replicate the biases in existing public data sources and expose them to greater trauma. Bad models scale just as quickly as good ones, and even the best of them can be misused.

The stakes here are real: for children and families that interact with these social systems and for the reputation of the agencies that turn to these tools. What, then, should a public leader know about risk modeling, and what lessons does it offer about how to think about data science, data stewardship, and the public interest?…(More)”.

The Potential of Social Media Intelligence to Improve People’s Lives: Social Media Data for Good


New report by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young: “The twenty-first century will be challenging on many fronts. From historically catastrophic natural disasters resulting from climate change to inequality to refugee and terrorism crises, it is clear that we need not only new solutions, but new insights and methods of arriving at solutions. Data, and the intelligence gained from it through advances in data science, is increasingly being seen as part of the answer. This report explores the premise that data—and in particular the vast stores of data and the unique analytical expertise held by social media companies—may indeed provide for a new type of intelligence that could help develop solutions to today’s challenges.

Social Media Data Report

In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different sectors exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals….(More)”

Polish activists turn to digital democracy


 in the Financial Times: “Opponents of the Polish government have mounted a series of protests on issues ranging from reform of the judiciary to an attempt to ban abortion. In February, they staged yet another, less public but intensely emotive, battle — to save the country’s trees.

At the beginning of the year, a new law allowed property owners to cut trees on their land without official permission. As a result, hundreds of trees disappeared from the centres of Polish cities as more valuable treeless plots were sold off to developers. In parallel, the government authorised extensive logging of the ancient forest in Bialowieza, a Unesco world heritage site.

“People reacted very emotionally to these practices,” says Wojciech Sanko, a co-ordinator at Code for Poland, a programme run by ePanstwo (eState), the country’s biggest non-governmental organisation in this field.

The group aims to deploy new technology tools designed to explain local and national policies, and to make it easier for citizens to take part in public life. As no one controlled the tree-cutting, for example, Mr Sanko thought technology could at least help to monitor it. First, he wanted to set up a simple digital map of trees cut in Warsaw. But as the controversial liberalisation of tree-cutting was reversed, the NGO together with local activists decided to work on another project — to map trees still standing, along with data about species and their absorption of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.

The group has also started to create an app for activists in Bialowieza forest: an open-source map that will gather all documentation from civic patrols monitoring the site, and will indicate the exact places of logging.

A trend towards recruiting technology for civic projects has been slowly gathering pace in a country that is hard to describe as socially-engaged: only 59 per cent of Poles say they have done volunteer work for the community, according to a 2016 survey by the Centre of Public Opinion Research.

Election turnout barely surpasses 50 per cent. Yet since the election of the rightwing Law and Justice government in 2015, which has introduced rapid and controversial reforms across all domains of public life, citizens have started to take a closer look at politicians and their actions.

In addition to the tree map, Code for Poland has developed a website that aggregates public data, such as tax spending or air pollution.

Mr Sanko underlines, however, that Code for Poland is much more about local communities than national politics. Many of the group’s projects are small scale, ranging from a mobile app for an animal shelter in Gdansk and a tool that shows people where they can take their garbage.

Piotr Micula, board member of Miasto Jest Nasze (The City is Ours), an urban movement in Warsaw, says that increasing access to data is fuelling the development of civic tech. “Even as a small organisation, we try to use big data and visualise it,” he says….(More)”.

Voice or chatter? Making ICTs work for transformative citizen engagement


Research Report Summary by Making All Voices Count: “What are the conditions in democratic governance that make information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated citizen engagement transformative? While substantial scholarship exists on the role of the Internet and digital technologies in triggering moments of political disruption and cascading upheavals, academic interest in the sort of deep change that transforms institutional cultures of democratic governance, occurring in ‘slow time’, has been relatively muted.

This study attempts to fill this gap. It is inspired by the idea of participation in everyday democracy and seeks to explore how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can promote democratic governance and amplify citizen voice.

ICT-mediated citizen engagement is defined by this study as comprising digitally-mediated information outreach, dialogue, consultation, collaboration and decision-making, initiated either by government or by citizens, towards greater government accountability and responsiveness.

The study involved empirical explorations of citizen engagement initiatives in eight sites – two in Asia (India and Philippines), one in Africa (South Africa), three in South America (Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay) and two in Europe (Netherlands and Spain).

This summary of the larger Research Report presents recommendations for how public policies and programmes can promote ICTs for citizen engagement and transformative citizenship.  In doing so it provides an overview of the discussion the authors undertake on three inter-related dimensions, namely:

  • calibrating digitally mediated citizen participation as a measure of political empowerment and equality
  • designing techno-public spaces as bastions of inclusive democracy
  • ensuring that the rule of law upholds democratic principles in digitally mediated governance…(More. Full research report)

Saving the Soul of the Smart City


Joshua J. Yates at The Hedgehog Review: “…We, too, stand on the cusp of a revolutionary new urban form: “the smart city.” That form emerges from a new wave of intensive urbanization and the proliferating uses of information technology to “optimize” the city’s functioning. It takes shape not uniformly or seamlessly but in fits and starts—in a handful of places all at once, incrementally in others. As was the case with the commuter suburb before it, a potent combination of institutional interests, technological innovations, and cultural appetites fuels the smart city’s rise. But this fact only raises the stakes, demanding that we look as hard at the coming of the smart city as Whyte, Jacobs, and their colleagues looked at the suburban efflorescence….

We can begin taking a hard look at the smart city paradigm by examining its organizing concept: optimization. This term is ubiquitous in discussions about smart cities, and it provides a key to understanding the cultural reasoning behind this new urban form and what that reasoning might be committing us to, morally and civically, over the long run.

By definition, optimization simply means the act of making the most of a process, situation, or resource. It is maximizing potential in light of given circumstances. Facing situations of fiscal austerity, as many of them are, cities are drawn to optimization in their quest to economize. This much is easy to understand. But it is optimization in a more triumphant, maximizing register that underwrites the unquestioning optimism of boosters of the smart city and its potential. For instance, here is how Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley “accelerator” that created Airbnb, recently announced that it was getting into the smart city business: “We want to study building new, better cities. The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don’t provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success. A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities….

Narrowing the horizon of living to one overriding register of value, a regime of optimization stamps out the broad, diverse array of conditions that make human life vital. It turns out that some of the things most necessary for human thriving cannot be optimized, and are greatly harmed to the extent that we try. Conviviality, family, friendship, serendipity, play, dependency, trust, calling, and yes, even happiness: These are just a few of the things that make life meaningful and which wither in the soil of optimization. Some of these qualities, as Jane Jacobs reminds us, are able to grow and blossom organically only from the self-organizing everyday forms of human contact that generate spontaneously from vibrant public places and street life. “The ballet of the good city sidewalk,” Jacobs famously wrote, “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.” Such emergence, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, can come only “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”

Some, Jacobs and Arendt would agree, can come only through the civic friction that physical proximity and cultural particularity generate, and which can lead to genuine dialogue with our neighbors. But some, the philosopher Charles Taylor would remind us, come ultimately through the cultivation of the skills and virtues that power our commitments to working for the good of one another, even possibly at the expense of our own convenience and comforts. If the smart city is to contribute to a thriving human ecology oriented toward truth, justice, and goodness as well as prosperity, beauty, and sustainability, we stand in urgent need of a deep ethical and political turn that will help us cultivate the unoptimizable things for the purposes of making the city not just smart, but wise….(More)”.