Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Show, Don’t Tell

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas Kohnstamm on Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism for Microsoft Stories: “From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper.

Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” achieved breakout success as an interactive data visualization. It asked readers 25 questions such as “How would you address a group of two or more people?” or “How do you pronounce ‘aunt’?” and then heat-mapped their responses to the most similar regional dialect in the U.S. The interactivity and colorful visuals transmuted survey data into a fun, insightful tour through the contours of contemporary AmericanEnglish.

Visualization no longer just complements a written story. It is the story. In our increasingly data-driven world, visualization is becoming an essential tool for journalists from national papers to blogs with a staff of one.

I recently spent two days discussing the state of data journalism with Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. While he stressed the importance of data visualization for efficient communication and audience engagement, Cairo argued that “Above all else, visualizations — when done right — are a vehicle of clarification and truth.”…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Gun Violence Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Penn Engineering: “Gun violence is often described as an epidemic, but as visible and shocking as shooting incidents are, epidemiologists who study that particular source of mortality have a hard time tracking them. The Centers for Disease Control is prohibited by federal law from conducting gun violence research, so there is little in the way of centralized infrastructure to monitor where, how,when, why and to whom shootings occur.

Chris Callison-Burch, Aravind K.Joshi Term Assistant Professor in Computer and InformationScience, and graduate studentEllie Pavlick are working to solve this problem.

They have developed the GunViolence Database, which combines machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques to produce a national registry of shooting incidents. Callison-Burch and Pavlick’s algorithm scans thousands of articles from local newspaper and television stations,determines which are about gun violence, then asks everyday people to pullout vital statistics from those articles, compiling that information into a unified, open database.

For natural language processing experts like Callison-Burch and Pavlick, the most exciting prospect of this effort is that it is training computer systems to do this kind of analysis automatically. They recently presented their work on that front at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange conference.

The Gun Violence Database project started in 2014, when it became the centerpiece of Callison-Burch’s “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation”class. There, Pavlick developed a series of homework assignments that challenged undergraduates to develop a classifier that could tell whether a given news article was about a shooting incident.

“It allowed us to teach the things we want students to learn about datascience and natural language processing, while giving them the motivation to do a project that could contribute to the greater good,” says Callison-Burch.

The articles students used to train their classifiers were sourced from “TheGun Report,” a daily blog from New York Times reporters that attempted to catalog shootings from around the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Realizing that their algorithmic approach could be scaled up to automate what the Times’ reporters were attempting, the researchers began exploring how such a database could work. They consulted with DouglasWiebe, a Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics andEpidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, to learn more about what kind of information public health researchers needed to better study gun violence on a societal scale.

From there, the researchers enlisted people to annotate the articles their classifier found, connecting with them through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’scrowdsourcing platform, and their own website, http://gun-violence.org/…(More)”

Open Innovation: Practices to Engage Citizens and Effectively Implement Federal Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

United States Government Accountability Office: “Open innovation involves using various tools and approaches to harness the ideas, expertise, and resources of those outside an organization to address an issue or achieve specific goals. GAO found that federal agencies have frequently used five open innovation strategies to collaborate with citizens and external stakeholders, and encourage their participation in agency initiatives.

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GAO identified seven practices that agencies can use to effectively implement initiatives that involve the use of these strategies:

  • Select the strategy appropriate for the purpose of engaging the public and the agency’s capabilities.
  • Clearly define specific goals and performance measures for the initiative.
  • Identify and engage external stakeholders and potential partners.
  • Develop plans for implementing the initiative and recruiting participants.
  • Engage participants and partners while implementing the initiative.
  • Collect and assess relevant data and report results.
  • Sustain communities of interested partners and participants.

Aspects of these practices are illustrated by the 15 open innovation initiatives GAO reviewed at six selected agencies: the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation (DOT); the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

For example:

• With the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, NASA used a challenge and citizen science effort, beginning in 2014, to improve the accuracy of its asteroid detection program and develop an application for citizen scientists.

• Since 2009, DOT’s Federal Highway Administration has used an ideation initiative called Every Day Counts to identify innovations to improve highway project delivery. Teams of federal, state, local, and industry experts then implement the ideas chosen through this process….(More)”

Crowdsourcing investigative journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Convoca in Peru: “…collaborative effort is the essence of Convoca. We are a team of journalists and programmers who work with professionals from different disciplines and generations to expose facts that are hidden by networks of power and affect the life of citizens. We bet on the work in partnership to publish findings of high impact from Peru, where the Amazon survives in almost 60% of the country, in the middle of oil exploitation, minerals and criminal activities such as logging, illegal mining and human trafficking. Fifty percent of social conflicts have as epicenter extractives areas of natural resources where the population and communities with the highest poverty rates live.

Over one year and seven months, Convoca has uncovered facts of public relevance such as the patterns of corruption and secrecy networking with journalists from Latin America and the world. The series of reports with the BRIO platform revealed the cost overruns of highways and public works in Latin American countries in the hands of Brazilian companies financed by the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES), nowadays investigated in the most notorious corruption scandal in the region, ‘Lava Jato’. This research won the 2016 Journalistic Excellence Award granted by the Inter American Press Association (SIP). On a global scale, we dove into 11 million and a half files of the ‘Panama Papers’ with more than a hundred media and organizations led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which allowed to undress the world of tax havens where companies and characters hide their fortune.

Our work on extractive industries ‘Excesses unpunished’ won the most important award of data journalism in the world, the Data Journalism Awards 2016, and is a finalist of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Award which recognized the best of journalism in Latin America. We invite you to be the voice of this effort to keep publishing new reports that allow citizens to make better decisions about their destinies and compel groups of power to come clean about their activities and fulfill their commitments. So join ConBoca: The Power of Citizens Call, our first fundraising campaign alongside our readers. We believe that journalism is a public service….(More)”

From Brexit to Colombia’s No vote: are constitutional democracies in crisis?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation Global: What do Colombia’s recent plebiscite and Brexit have in common? The surface similarities are clear: both referendums produced outcomes that few experts or citizens expected.

And many considered them a blow to core the social values of peace, integration, development and prosperity.

The unanticipated and widely debated results in Colombia and Great Britain – indeed, the very decision to use the mechanism of popular consultation to identify the citizenry’s will – obliges us to reflect on the future of democratic systems.

Both the British and Colombian plebiscites can be understood as the consequence, not the cause, of a crisis in representative democracy that affects not just these two countries but many others around the world.

The nature of democracy

Democracies recognise that only the people have the legitimacy to decide their destiny. But they also acknowledge that identifying the will of a collective isn’t simple: modern democracies are constitutional, which means that decisions made by the people – usually through their representatives – are limited by the content of the national constitution.

Decisions occasionally made by a constitutional assembly or by a supermajority in congress – say, to ban torture – prevent the government from authorising such action, no matter how dramatic the current social circumstance (a terrorist attack, for instance, or war), or how much a national majority favours the measure.

Constitutional rights and the rules of the democratic game cannot be modified by governments or even by a majority of the people. Democratic communities are bound by the deep constitutional commitments they’ve made to respect human rights and the rule of law.

These beliefs may, of course, be threatened by an occasional challenge. A terrorist attack that fills people with fear and resentment may make them forget, momentarily, that yesterday or two centuries ago – when they were mentally and emotionally far from this blinding, overwhelming event – they made the choice never to torture, anticipating that their desire to do so would be motivated by basic human instinct such as survival or vengeance.

That’s what a constitution is for: defining our shared basic values and goals as a nation, external factors be damned.

Decisions like the ones the Colombian and British people were asked to vote on do not represent mere political choices, such as whether to raise the sales tax or expand free trade.

They were much more akin to constitutional decisions that, depending on their outcomes, would usher in a new era in the lives of those nations. Community identity, rights, the rule of law and peace itself were some of the basic and fundamental values at stake.

The problem with plebiscites

There are many ways to make, validate, and build consensus around fundamental constitutional decisions: parliamentary super-majorities in Chile, constitutional assemblies in Argentina, or state legislature approvalin Mexico and the United States.

In some, such as the current Chilean process designed by Michelle Bachelet’s administration, the people themselves are called to deliberate constitutional choices in public forums.

And yet in the Colombian and the British cases, the government chose the riskiest of all known methods for identifying popular constitutional will. In this kind of process, complex questions are put forth in a way that makes it seem quite simple, because they must be answered in a single word: yes or no….

these difficult and deep concerns cannot be decided via a confusing question and a binary response.

Plebiscites are not necessarily democratic for those of us who believe that the justification of democracy as a superior political system superior is not because it counts heads, but because of the deliberative process that precedes decisions.

Thus, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s famous plebscita were not democratic exercises. A democratic exercise only exists when a diverse exchange of perspectives, opinions, and information can take place. The more diverse those inputs, the more legitimate the outcome of the vote.

The plebiscite constitutes the opposite of everything that we hope will happen in constitutional decision-making: the question is designed and imposed by those in power and the probability or suspicion that their formulation is biased is very high.

What’s more, public deliberation about the question may happen, but it’s not a certainty. Are people talking to their neighbours? Are they developing their position and hearing alternative approaches, which is the best way to make an educated decision?…

Constitutional decisions, which is to say the decisions political communities make rarely but carefully over the course of their history – what Bruce Ackerman calls “constitutional moments” – cannot be decided by plebiscite.

The popular will is too elusive for us to fool ourselves into thinking we can capture it with a single question….(More)”

USGS expands sensor network to track monster hurricane

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Rockwell at FCW: “The internet of things is tracking Hurricane Matthew. As the monster storm draws a bead on the south Atlantic coast after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, its impact will be measured by a sensor network deployed by the U.S. Geological Survey.

USGS hurricane response crews are busy installing two kinds of sensors in areas across four states where the agency expects the storm to hit hardest. The information the sensors collect will help with disaster recovery efforts and critical weather forecasts for the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As is the case with most things these days, the storm will be tracked online.

The information collected will be distributed live on the USGS Flood Viewer to help federal and state officials gauge the extent and the storm’s damage as it passes through each area.

FEMA, which tasked USGS with the sensor distribution, is also talking with other federal and state officials further up the Atlantic coastline about whether the equipment is needed there. Recent forecasts call for Matthew to take a sharp easterly turn and head out to sea as it reaches the North Carolina coast.

USGS crews are in installing storm-surge sensors at key sites along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in anticipation of the storm, said Brian McCallum, associate director for data at the USGS South Atlantic Water Science Center.

In all, USGS is deploying more than 300 additional weather and condition sensors, he told FCW in an interview on Oct. 5.

The devices come in two varieties. The first are 280 storm surge sensors, set out in protective steel tubes lashed to piers, bridges and other solid structures in the storm’s projected path. The low-cost devices will provide the highest density of storm data, such as depth and duration of the storm surge, McCallum said. The devices won’t communicate their information in real time, however; McCallum said USGS crews will come in behind the storm to upload the sensor data to the Internet.

The second set of sensors, however, could be thought of as the storm’s “live tweets.” USGS is installing 25 rapid-deployment gauges to augment its existing collection of sensors and fill in gaps along the coast….(More)”

Data Revolutionaries: Routine Administrative Data Can Be Sexy Too

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sebastian Bauhoff at Center for Global Development: “Routine operational data on government programs lack sexiness, and are generally not trendy withData Revolutionaries. But unlike censuses and household surveys, routine administrative data are readily available at low cost, cover key populations and service providers, and are generally at the right level of disaggregation for decision-making on payment and service delivery. Despite their potential utility, these data remain an under-appreciated asset for generating evidence and informing policy—a particularly egregious omission given that developing countries can leapfrog old, inefficient approaches for more modern methods to collect and manage data. Verifying receipt of service via biometric ID and beneficiary fingerprint at the point of service? India’s already doing it.

To better make the case for routine data, two questions need to be answered—what exactly can be learned from these data and how difficult are they to use?

In a paper just published in Health Affairs with collaborators from the World Bank and the Government of India, we probed these questions using claims data from India’s National Health Insurance Program, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). Using the US Medicare program as a comparison, we wondered whether reimbursement claims data that RSBY receives from participating hospitals could be used to study the quality of care provided. The main goal was to see how far we could push on an example dataset of hospital claims from Puri, a district in Orissa state.

Here’s what we learned…(More)”

Evaluating World Bank Support to Budget Analysis and Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Linnea Mills and Clay G. Wescott: “BOOST is a new resource launched in 2010 to facilitate improved quality, classification, and access to budget data and promote effective use for improved government decision making, transparency and accountability. Using the Government’s own data from public expenditure accounts held in the Government’s Financial Management Information System, and benefiting from a consistent methodology, the BOOST data platform makes highly granular fiscal data accessible and ready-for-use. National authorities can significantly enhance fiscal transparency by publishing summary data and analysis or by providing open access to the underlying dataset. This paper addresses four research questions: Did BOOST help improve the quality of expenditure analysis available to government decision makers? Did it help to develop capacity in central finance and selected spending agencies to sustain expenditure analysis? Did it help to improve public access to expenditure analysis anddata? Did it help to increase awareness of the opportunities for BOOST and expenditure analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as countries outside this region where BOOST has been used (Georgia, Haiti and Tunisia).

Evidence has been drawn from various sources. Survey questionnaires were sent to all World Bank task team leaders for Gates Trust Fund supported countries. Completed questionnaires were received from 18 predominantly African countries (Annex 4). These 18 countries constitute the majority but not all of the countries implementing BOOST with financial support from the Trust Fund. Information has also been gathered through a BOOST stakeholder questionnaire targeting government officials, civil society representatives and representatives from parliaments at country level, field visits to Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda, interviews with stakeholders at the Bank and at country level, participation at regional conferences on BOOST in South Africa and Senegal, and document review. Interviews covered participants from some countries that did not complete questionnaires, such as Haiti.

The research will help to inform the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, the administrator of the trust fund on the achievements of the program, and the value of continuing support. It will inform client country Governments, and non-Government actors interested in improved dissemination and analysis of quality public financial data. The research should also be useful for vendors of similar products like OpenGov; and to international scholars and experts working to better understand public expenditure management in developing countries….(More)”