Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: “Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens’ Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

This “deliberative wave” has been building since the 1980s, gaining momentum since around 2010. This report has gathered close to 300 representative deliberative practices to explore trends in such processes, identify different models, and analyse the trade-offs among different design choices as well as the benefits and limits of public deliberation.

It includes Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes for Public Decision Making, based on comparative empirical evidence gathered by the OECD and in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics. Finally, the report explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives….(More)”.

Using Algorithms to Address Trade-Offs Inherent in Predicting Recidivism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jennifer L. Skeem and Christopher Lowenkamp: “Although risk assessment has increasingly been used as a tool to help reform the criminal justice system, some stakeholders are adamantly opposed to using algorithms. The principal concern is that any benefits achieved by safely reducing rates of incarceration will be offset by costs to racial justice claimed to be inherent in the algorithms themselves. But fairness tradeoffs are inherent to the task of predicting recidivism, whether the prediction is made by an algorithm or human.

Based on a matched sample of 67,784 Black and White federal supervisees assessed with the Post Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA), we compare how three alternative strategies for “debiasing” algorithms affect these tradeoffs, using arrest for a violent crime as the criterion. These candidate algorithms all strongly predict violent re-offending (AUCs=.71-72), but vary in their association with race (r= .00-.21) and shift tradeoffs between balance in positive predictive value and false positive rates. Providing algorithms with access to race (rather than omitting race or ‘blinding’ its effects) can maximize calibration and minimize imbalanced error rates. Implications for policymakers with value preferences for efficiency vs. equity are discussed…(More)”.

EU Company Data: State of the Union 2020

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by OpenCorporates: “… on access to company data in the EU. It’s completely revised, with more detail on the impact that the lack of access to this critical dataset has – on business, on innovation, on democracy, and society.

The results are still not great however:

  • Average score is low
    The average score across the EU in terms of access to company data is just 40 out of 100. This is better than the average score 8 years ago, which was just 23 out of 100, but still very low nevertheless.
  • Some major economies score badly
    Some of the EU’s major economies continue to score very badly indeed, with Germany, for example, scoring just 15/100, Italy 10/100, and Spain 0/100.
  • EU policies undermined
    The report identifies 15 areas where the lack of open company data frustrates, impedes or otherwise has a negative impact on EU policy.
  • Inequalities widened
    The report also identifies how inequalities are further widened by poor access to this critical dataset, and how the recovery from COVID-19 will be hampered by it too.

On the plus side, the report also identifies the EU Open Data & PSI Directive passed last year as potentially game changing – but only if it is implemented fully, and there are significant doubts whether this will happen….(More)”

Technical Excellence and Scale

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cory Doctorow at EFF: “In America, we hope that businesses will grow by inventing amazing things that people love – rather than through deep-pocketed catch-and-kill programs in which every competitor is bought and tamed before it can grow to become a threat. We want vibrant, competitive, innovative markets where companies vie to create the best products. Growth solely through merger-and-acquisition helps create a world in which new firms compete to be bought up and absorbed into the dominant players, and customers who grow dissatisfied with a product or service and switch to a “rival” find that they’re still patronizing the same company—just another division.

To put it bluntly: we want companies that are good at making things as well as buying things.

This isn’t the whole story, though.

Small companies with successful products can become victims of their own success. As they are overwhelmed by eager new customers, they are strained beyond their technical and financial limits – for example, they may be unable to buy server hardware fast enough, and unable to lash that hardware together in efficient ways that let them scale up to meet demand.

When we look at the once small, once beloved companies that are now mere divisions of large, widely mistrusted ones—Instagram and Facebook; YouTube and Google; Skype and Microsoft; DarkSkies and Apple—we can’t help but notice that they are running at unimaginable scale, and moreover, they’re running incredibly well.

These services were once plagued with outages, buffering delays, overcapacity errors, slowdowns, and a host of other evils of scale. Today, they run so well that outages are newsworthy events.

There’s a reason for that: big tech companies are really good at being big. Whatever you think of Amazon, you can’t dispute that it gets a lot of parcels from A to B with remarkably few bobbles. Google’s search results arrive in milliseconds, Instagram photos load as fast as you can scroll them, and even Skype is far more reliable than in the pre-Microsoft days. These services have far more users than they ever did as independents, and yet, they are performing better than they did in those early days.

Can we really say that this is merely “buying things” and not also “making things?” Isn’t this innovation? Isn’t this technical accomplishment? It is. Does that mean big = innovative? It does not….(More)”.

Individualism During Crises: Big Data Analytics of Collective Actions amid COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bo Bian et al: “Collective actions, such as charitable crowdfunding and social distancing, are useful for alleviating the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, engagements in these actions across the U.S. are “consistently inconsistent” and are frequently linked to individualism in the press. We present the first evidence on how individualism shapes online and offline collective actions during a crisis through big data analytics. Following economic historical studies, we leverage GIS techniques to construct a U.S. county-level individualism measure that traces the time each county spent on the American frontier between 1790 and 1890. We then use high-dimensional fixed-effect models, text mining, geo-distributed big data computing and a novel identification strategy based on migrations to analyze GoFundMe fundraising activities as well as county- and individual-level social distancing compliance.

Our analysis uncovers several insights. First, higher individualism reduces both online donations and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. An interquartile increase in individualism reduces COVID-related charitable campaigns and funding by 48% and offsets the effect of state lockdown orders on social distancing by 41%. Second, government interventions, such as stimulus checks, can potentially mitigate the negative effect of individualism on charitable crowdfunding. Third, the individualism effect may be partly driven by a failure to internalize the externality of collective actions: we find stronger results in counties where social distancing generates higher externalities (those with higher population densities or more seniors). Our research is the first to uncover the potential downsides of individualism during crises. It also highlights the importance of big data-driven, culture-aware policymaking….(More)”.

Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


Yuval Levin at The New Atlantis: “he Covid-19 pandemic has tested our society in countless ways. From the health system to the school system, the economy, government, and family life, we have confronted some enormous and unfamiliar challenges. But many of these stresses are united by the need to constantly adapt to new information and evidence and accept that any knowledge we might have is only provisional. This demands a kind of humble restraint — on the part of public health experts, political leaders, and the public at large — that our society now finds very hard to muster.

The virus is novel, so our understanding of what responding to it might require of us has had to be built on the fly. But the polarized culture war that pervades so much of our national life has made this kind of learning very difficult. Views developed in response to provisional assessments of incomplete evidence quickly rigidify as they are transformed into tribal markers and then cultural weapons. Soon there are left-wing and right-wing views on whether to wear masks, whether particular drugs are effective, or how to think about social distancing.

New evidence is taken as an assault on these tribal commitments, and policy adjustments in response are seen as forms of surrender to the enemy. Every new piece of information gets filtered through partisan sieves, implicitly examined to see whose interest it serves, and then embraced or rejected on that basis. We all do this. You’re probably doing it right now — skimming quickly to the end of this piece to see if I’m criticizing you or only those other people who behave so irresponsibly….(More)”.

Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jennifer Forestal: “Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line.

In this article, I use the work of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill their role as a public realm….(More)”.

Libraries Supporting Open Government: Areas for Engagement and Lessons Learned

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by IFLA: “This report explores the roles libraries play in different countries’ Open Government Partnership Action Plans. Within the OGP framework, states and civil society actors work together to set out commitments for reforms, implement and review the impacts in recurring two-year cycles.

In different countries’ OGP commitments over the years, libraries and library associations assisted other agencies with the implementation of their commitments, or lead their own initiatives. Offering venues for civic engagement, helping develop tools and platforms for easier access to government records, providing valuable cultural Open Data and more – libraries can play a versatile role in supporting and enabling Open Government.

The report outlines the Open Government policy areas that libraries have been engaged in, the roles they took up to help deliver on OGP commitments, and some of the key ways to maximise the impact of library interventions, drawing on the lessons from earlier OGP cycles….(More)”.

Characterizing Disinformation Risk to Open Data in the Post-Truth Era

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Adrienne Colborne and Michael Smit: “Curated, labeled, high-quality data is a valuable commodity for tasks such as business analytics and machine learning. Open data is a common source of such data—for example, retail analytics draws on open demographic data, and weather forecast systems draw on open atmospheric and ocean data. Open data is released openly by governments to achieve various objectives, such as transparency, informing citizen engagement, or supporting private enterprise.

Critical examination of ongoing social changes, including the post-truth phenomenon, suggests the quality, integrity, and authenticity of open data may be at risk. We introduce this risk through various lenses, describe some of the types of risk we expect using a threat model approach, identify approaches to mitigate each risk, and present real-world examples of cases where the risk has already caused harm. As an initial assessment of awareness of this disinformation risk, we compare our analysis to perspectives captured during open data stakeholder consultations in Canada…(More)”.

Democracies contain epidemics most effectively

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Many people would look at the covid-19 pandemic and conclude that democracies are bad at tackling infectious diseases. America and the eu had months to prepare after China sounded the alarm in January. Both have subsequently suffered more than 300 confirmed deaths per 1m people. China’s Communist Party reports an official death rate that is 99% lower, and has trumpeted its apparent success in containing the outbreak domestically.

Yet most data suggest that political freedom can be a tonic against disease. The Economist has analysed epidemics from 1960 to 2019. Though these outbreaks varied in contagiousness and lethality, a clear correlation emerged. Among countries with similar wealth, the lowest death rates tend to be in places where most people can vote in free and fair elections. Other definitions of democracy give similar results.

We cannot replicate this analysis for covid-19 yet, as it is still spreading at different rates around the world. Western democracies were hit early, in big cities with large flows of people from abroad. Daily deaths are now declining in these places but rising in developing countries, which tend to be less connected and more autocratic….

One consistent measure that is available in most countries, but not China, is Google’s index of mobility via smartphone apps. Researchers at Oxford University reckon that, after adjusting for a country’s wealth and other characteristics, democracies saw a 35% larger reduction in movement in response to lockdown policies. The drop in New Zealand, for example, was twice that in autocratic Bahrain.

People who praise China for its handling of covid-19 would do better to look at Taiwan, a neighbouring democracy. China wasted valuable time in December by intimidating doctors who warned of a lethal virus. Taiwan swiftly launched tracing measures in January—and has suffered only seven deaths…(More)”.