national

White House: "We Want Your Input on Building a More Open Government"

Curated on September 5, 2013May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai at the White House Blog:”…We are proud of this progress, but recognize that there is always more we can do to build a more efficient, effective, and accountable government. In that spirit, the Obama Administration has committed to develop a second National Action Plan on Open Government: “NAP 2.0.”
In order to develop a Plan with the most creative and ambitious solutions, we need all-hands-on-deck. That’s why we are asking for your input on what should be in the NAP 2.0:

How can we better encourage and enable the public to participate in government and increase public integrity? For example, in the first National Action Plan, we required Federal enforcement agencies to make publicly available compliance information easily accessible, downloadable and searchable online – helping the public to hold the government and regulated entities accountable.

What other kinds of government information should be made more available to help inform decisions in your communities or in your lives?
How would you like to be able to interact with Federal agencies making decisions which impact where you live?
How can the Federal government better ensure broad feedback and public participation when considering a new policy?

The American people must be able to trust that their Government is doing everything in its power to stop wasteful practices and earn a high return on every tax dollar that is spent. How can the government better manage public resources?

What suggestions do you have to help the government achieve savings while also improving the way that government operates?
What suggestions do you have to improve transparency in government spending?

The American people deserve a Government that is responsive to their needs, makes information readily accessible, and leverages Federal resources to help foster innovation both in the public and private sector. How can the government more effectively work in collaboration with the public to improve services?

What are your suggestions for ways the government can better serve you when you are seeking information or help in trying to receive benefits?
In the past few years, the government has promoted the use of “grand challenges,” ambitious yet achievable goals to solve problems of national priority, and incentive prizes, where the government identifies challenging problems and provides prizes and awards to the best solutions submitted by the public. Are there areas of public services that you think could be especially benefited by a grand challenge or incentive prize?
What information or data could the government make more accessible to help you start or improve your business?

Please think about these questions and send your thoughts to opengov@ostp.gov by September 23. We will post a summary of your submissions online in the future.”

How Mechanical Turkers Crowdsourced a Huge Lexicon of Links Between Words and Emotion

Curated on September 5, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Physics arXiv Blog: Sentiment analysis on the social web depends on how a person’s state of mind is expressed in words. Now a new database of the links between words and emotions could provide a better foundation for this kind of analysis

One of the buzzphrases associated with the social web is sentiment analysis. This is the ability to determine a person’s opinion or state of mind by analysing the words they post on Twitter, Facebook or some other medium.
Much has been promised with this method—the ability to measure satisfaction with politicians, movies and products; the ability to better manage customer relations; the ability to create dialogue for emotion-aware games; the ability to measure the flow of emotion in novels; and so on.
The idea is to entirely automate this process—to analyse the firehose of words produced by social websites using advanced data mining techniques to gauge sentiment on a vast scale.
But all this depends on how well we understand the emotion and polarity (whether negative or positive) that people associate with each word or combinations of words.
Today, Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa unveil a huge database of words and their associated emotions and polarity, which they have assembled quickly and inexpensively using Amazon’s crowdsourcing Mechanical Turk website. They say this crowdsourcing mechanism makes it possible to increase the size and quality of the database quickly and easily….The result is a comprehensive word-emotion lexicon for over 10,000 words or two-word phrases which they call EmoLex….
The bottom line is that sentiment analysis can only ever be as good as the database on which it relies. With EmoLex, analysts have a new tool for their box of tricks.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1308.6297: Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon

Nonsectarian Welfare Statements

Curated on September 1, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Cass Sunstein: “How can we measure whether national institutions in general, and regulatory institutions in particular, are dysfunctional? A central question is whether they are helping a nation’s citizens to live good lives. A full answer to that question would require a great deal of philosophical work, but it should be possible to achieve an incompletely theorized agreement on a kind of nonsectarian welfarism, emphasizing the importance of five variables: subjective well-being, longevity, health, educational attainment, and per capita income. In principle, it would be valuable to identify the effects of new initiatives (including regulations) on all of these variables. In practice, it is not feasible to do so; assessments of subjective well-being present particular challenges. In their ideal form, Regulatory Impact Statements should be seen as Nonsectarian Welfare Statements, seeking to identify the consequences of regulatory initiatives for various components of welfare. So understood, they provide reasonable measures of regulatory success or failure, and hence a plausible test of dysfunction. There is a pressing need for improved evaluations, including both randomized controlled trials and ex post assessments.”

Twitter’s activist roots: How Twitter’s past shapes its use as a protest tool

Curated on August 29, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Radio Netherlands Worldwide: “Surprised when demonstrators from all over the world took to Twitter as a protest tool? Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, member of Twitter’s founding team, was not. Rather, he sees it as a return to its roots: Inspired by protest coordination tools like TXTMob, and shaped by the values and backgrounds of Twitter’s founders, he believes activist potential was built into the service from the start.

It took a few revolutions before Twitter was taken seriously. Critics claimed that its 140-character limit only provided space for the most trivial thoughts: neat for keeping track of Ashton Kutcher’s lunch choices, but not much else. It made the transition from Silicon Valley toy into Middle East protest tool seem all the more astonishing.
Unless, Twitter co-founder Evan Henshaw-Plath argues, you know the story of how Twitter came to be. Evan Henshaw-Plath was the lead developer at Odeo, the company that started and eventually became Twitter. TXTMob, an activist tool deployed during the 2004 Republican National Convention in the US to coordinate protest efforts via SMS was, says Henshaw-Plath, a direct inspiration for Twitter.
Protest 1.0
In 2004, while Henshaw-Plath was working at Odeo, he and a few other colleagues found a fun side-project in working on TXTMob, an initiative by what he describes as a “group of academic artist/prankster/hacker/makers” that operated under the ostensibly serious moniker of Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). Earlier IAA projects included small graffiti robots on wheels that spray painted slogans on pavements during demonstrations, and a pudgy talking robot with big puppy eyes made to distribute subversive literature to people who ignored less-cute human pamphleteers.
TXTMob was a more serious endeavor than these earlier projects: a tactical protest coordination tool. With TXTMob, users could quickly exchange text messages with large groups of other users about protest locations and police crackdowns….”

The Multistakeholder Model in Global Technology Governance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Curated on August 29, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper by Nanette S. Levinson: “This paper examines two key but often overlooked analytic dimensions related to global technology governance: the roles of culture and cross-cultural communication processes and the broader framework of Multistakeholderism. Each of these dimensions has a growing tradition of research/conceptual frameworks that can inform the analysis of Internet governance and related complex and power-related processes that may be present in a multistakeholder setting. The use of the term ‘multistakeholder’ itself has grown exponentially in discussing Internet governance and related governance domains; yet there are few rigorous studies within Internet governance that treat actual multistakeholder processes, especially from a cross-cultural and comparative perspective.
Using research on cross-cultural communication and related factors (at small group, occupational, organizational, interorganizational or cross- sector, national, regional levels), this paper provides and uses an analytic framework, especially for the 2012 WCIT and 2013 WSIS 10 and World Telecommunications Policy Forum that goes beyond the rhetoric of ‘multistakeholder’ as a term. It includes an examination of variables found to be important in studies from environmental governance, public administration, and private sector partnership domains including trust, absorptive capacity, and power in knowledge transfer processes. “

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

Curated on August 26, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by José Luis Cordeiro: Eric Drexler, popularly known as “the founding father of nanotechnology,” introduced the concept in his seminal 1981 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This paper established fundamental principles of molecular engineering and outlined development paths to advanced nanotechnologies.
He popularized the idea of nanotechnology in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, where he introduced a broad audience to a fundamental technology objective: using machines that work at the molecular scale to structure matter from the bottom up.
He went on to continue his PhD thesis at MIT, under the guidance of AI-pioneer Marvin Minsky, and published it in a modified form as a book in 1992 as Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation.

Drexler’s new book, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, tells the story of nanotechnology from its small beginnings, then moves quickly towards a big future, explaining what it is and what it is not, and enlightening about what we can do with it for the benefit of humanity.
In his pioneering 1986 book, Engines of Creation, he defined nanotechnology as a potential technology with these features: “manufacturing using machinery based on nanoscale devices, and products built with atomic precision.”
In his 2013 sequel, Radical Abundance, Drexler expands on his prior thinking, corrects many of the misconceptions about nanotechnology, and dismisses fears of dystopian futures replete with malevolent nanobots and gray goo…
His new book clearly identifies nanotechnology with atomically precise manufacturing (APM)…Drexler makes many comparisons between the information revolution and what he now calls the “APM revolution.” What the first did with bits, the second will do with atoms: “Image files today will be joined by product files tomorrow. Today one can produce an image of the Mona Lisa without being able to draw a good circle; tomorrow one will be able to produce a display screen without knowing how to manufacture a wire.”
Civilization, he says, is advancing from a world of scarcity toward a world of abundance — indeed, radical abundance.”

Is Online Transparency Just a Feel-Good Sham?

Curated on August 22, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Billy House in the National Journal: “It drew more than a few laughs in Washington. Not long after the White House launched its We the People website in 2011, where citizens could write online petitions and get a response if they garnered enough signatures, someone called for construction of a Star Wars-style Death Star.
With laudable humor, the White House dispatched Paul Shawcross, chief of the Science and Space Branch of the Office of Management and Budget, to explain that the administration “does not support blowing up planets.”
The incident caused a few chuckles, but it also made a more serious point: Years after politicians and government officials began using Internet surveys and online outreach as tools to engage people, the results overall have been questionable….
But skepticism over the value of these programs—and their genuineness—remains strong. Peter Levine, a professor at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, said programs like online petitioning and citizen cosponsoring do not necessarily produce a real, representative voice for the people.
It can be “pretty easy to overwhelm these efforts with deliberate strategic action,” he said, noting that similar petitioning efforts in the European Union often find marijuana legalization as the most popular measure.”

Strengthening Local Capacity for Data-Driven Decisionmaking

Curated on August 20, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

A report by the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP): “A large share of public decisions that shape the fundamental character of American life are made at the local level; for example, decisions about controlling crime, maintaining housing quality, targeting social services, revitalizing low-income neighborhoods, allocating health care, and deploying early childhood programs. Enormous benefits would be gained if a much larger share of these decisions were based on sound data and analysis.
In the mid-1990s, a movement began to address the need for data for local decisionmaking.Civic leaders in several cities funded local groups to start assembling neighborhood and address-level data from multiple local agencies. For the first time, it became possible to track changing neighborhood conditions, using a variety of indicators, year by year between censuses. These new data intermediaries pledged to use their data in practical ways to support policymaking and community building and give priority to the interests of distressed neighborhoods. Their theme was “democratizing data,” which in practice meant making the data accessible to residents and community groups (Sawicki and Craig 1996).

The initial groups that took on this work formed the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) to further develop these capacities and spread them to other cities. By 2012, NNIP partners were established in 37 cities, and similar capacities were in development in a number of others. The Urban Institute (UI) serves as the secretariat for the network. This report documents a strategic planning process undertaken by NNIP in 2012 and early 2013. The network’s leadership and funders re-examined the NNIP model in the context of 15 years of local partner experiences and the dramatic changes in technology and policy approaches that have occurred over that period. The first three sections explain NNIP functions and institutional structures and examine the potential role for NNIP in advancing the community information field in today’s environment.”

Improved Governance? Exploring the Results of Peru's Participatory Budgeting Process

Curated on August 15, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stephanie McNulty for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Aug. 29-Sept. 1, 2013): “Can a nationally mandated participatory budget process change the nature of local governance? Passed in 2003 to mandate participatory budgeting in all districts and regions of Peru, Peru’s National PB Law has garnered international attention from proponents of participatory governance. However, to date, the results of the process have not been widely documented. Presenting data that have been gathered through fieldwork, online databases, and primary documents, this paper explores the results of Peru’s PB after ten years of implementation. The paper finds that results are limited. While there are a significant number of actors engaged in the process, the PB is still dominated by elite actors that do not represent the diversity of the civil society sector in Peru. Participants approve important “pro-poor” projects, but they are not always executed. Finally, two important indicators of governance, sub-national conflict and trust in local institutions, have not improved over time. Until Peruvian politicians make a concerted effort to move beyond politics as usual, results will continue to be limited”