Governance Level: state & provincial

Room for a View: Democracy as a Deliberative System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Involve: “Democratic reform comes in waves, propelled by technological, economic, political and social developments. There are periods of rapid change, followed by relative quiet.

We are currently in a period of significant political pressure for change to our institutions of democracy and government. With so many changes under discussion it is critically important that those proposing and carrying out reforms understand the impact that different reforms might have.

Most discussions of democratic reform focus on electoral democracy. However, for all their importance in the democratic system, elections rarely reveal what voters think clearly enough for elected representatives to act on them. Changing the electoral system will not alone significantly increase the level of democratic control held by citizens.

Room for a View, by Involve’s director Simon Burall, looks at democratic reform from a broader perspective than that of elections. Drawing on the work of democratic theorists, it uses a deliberative systems approach to examine the state of UK democracy. Rather than focusing exclusively on the extent to which individuals and communities are represented within institutions, it is equally concerned with the range of views present and how they interact.

Adapting the work of the democratic theorist John Dryzek, the report identifies seven components of the UK’s democratic system, describing and analysing the condition of each in turn. Assessing the UK’s democracy though this lens reveals it to be in fragile health. The representation of alternative views and narratives in all of the UK system’s seven components is poor, the components are weakly connected and, despite some positive signs, deliberative capacity is decreasing.

Room for a View suggests that a focus on the key institutions isn’t enough. If the health of UK democracy is to be improved, we need to move away from thinking about the representation of individual voters to thinking about the representation of views, perspectives and narratives. Doing this will fundamentally change the way we approach democratic reform.

Introducing Government as a Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Williams, Jan Gravesen and Trinette Brownhill in Government Executive: “Governments around the world are facing competitive pressures and expectations from their constituents that are prompting them to innovate and dissolve age-old structures. Many governments have introduced a digital strategy in which at least one of the goals is aimed at bringing their organizations closer to citizens and businesses.

To achieve this, ideally IT and data in government would not be constrained by the different functional towers that make up the organization, as is often the case. They would not be constrained by complex, monolithic application design philosophies and lengthy implementation cycles, nor would development be constrained by the assumption that all activity has to be executed by the government itself.

Instead, applications would be created rapidly and cheaply, and modules would be shared as reusable blocks of code and integrated data. It would be relatively straightforward to integrate data from multiple departments to enable a focus on the complex needs of, say, a single parent who is diabetic and a student. Delivery would be facilitated in the manner best required, or preferred, by the citizen. Third parties would also be able to access these modules of code and data to build higher value government services that multiple agencies would then buy into. The code would run on a cloud infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency in which processing resources are used.

GaaP an organized set of ideas and principles that allows organizations to approach these ideals. It allows governments to institute more efficient sharing of IT resources as well as unlock data and functionality via application programming interfaces to allow third parties to build higher value citizen services. In doing so, security plays a crucial role protecting the privacy of constituents and enterprise assets.

We see increasingly well-established examples of GaaP services in many parts of the world. The notion has significantly influenced strategic thinking in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In particular, it has evolved in a deliberate way in the UK’s Government Data Services, building on the Blairite notion of “joined up government”; in Australia’s e-government strategy and its myGov program; and as a significant influencer in Singapore’s entire approach to building its “smarter nation” infrastructure.

Collaborative Government

GaaP assumes a transformational shift in efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, in which agencies move toward a collaborative government and away from today’s siloed approach. That collaboration may be among agencies, but also with other entities (nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, citizens, etc.).

GaaP’s focus on collaboration enables public agencies to move away from their traditional towered approach to IT and increasingly make use of shared and composable services offered by a common – usually a virtualized, cloud-enabled – platform. This leads to more efficient use of development resources, platforms and IT support. We are seeing examples of this already with a group of townships in New York state and also with two large Spanish cities that are embarking on this approach.

While efficient resource and service sharing is central to the idea of GaaP, it is not sufficient. The idea is that GaaP must allow app developers, irrespective of whether they are citizens, private organizations or other public agencies, to develop new value-added services using published government data and APIs. In this sense, the platform becomes a connecting layer between public agencies’ systems and data on the one hand, and private citizens, organizations and other public agencies on the other.

In its most fundamental form, GaaP is able to:

  • Consume data and government services from existing departmental systems.
  • Consume syndicated services from platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service providers in the public marketplace.
  • Securely unlock these data and services and allow third parties –citizens, private organizations or other agencies – to combine services and data into higher-order services or more citizen-centric or business-centric services.

It is the openness, the secure interoperability, and the ability to compose new services on the basis of existing services and data that define the nature of the platform.

The Challenges

At one time, the challenge of creating a GaaP structure would have been technology: Today, it is governance….(More)”

The big cost of using big data in elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael McDonald, Peter Licari and Lia Merivaki in the Washington Post: “In modern campaigns, buzzwords like “microtargeting” and “big data” are often bandied about as essential to victory. These terms refer to the practice of analyzing (or “microtargeting”) millions of voter registration records (“big data”) to predict who will vote and for whom.

If you’ve ever gotten a message from a campaign, there’s a good chance you’ve been microtargeted. Serious campaigns use microtargeting to persuade voters through mailings, phone calls, knocking on doors, and — in our increasingly connected world — social media.

But the big data that fuels such efforts comes at a big price, which can create a serious barrier to entry for candidates and groups seeking to participate in elections — that is, if they are allowed to buy the data at all.

When we asked state election officials about prices and restrictions on who can use their voter registration files, we learned that the rules are unsettlingly arbitrary.

Contrast Arizona and Washington. Arizona sells its statewide voter file for an estimated $32,500, while Washington gives its file away for free. Before jumping to the conclusion that this is a red- state/blue-state thing, consider that Oklahoma gives its file away, too.

A number of states base their prices on a per-record formula, which can massively drive up the price despite the fact that files are often delivered electronically. Alabama sells its records for 1 cent per voter , which yields an approximately $30,000 charge for the lot. Seriously, in this day and age, who prices an electronic database by the record?

Some states will give more data to candidates than to outside groups. Delaware will provide phone numbers to candidates but not to nonprofit organizations doing nonpartisan voter mobilization.

In some states, the voter file is not even available to the general public. States such as South Carolina and Maryland permit access only to residents who are registered voters. States including Kentucky and North Dakota grant access only to campaigns, parties and other political organizations.

We estimate that it would cost roughly $140,000 for an independent presidential campaign or national nonprofit organization to compile a national voter file, and this would not be a one-time cost. Voter lists frequently change as voters are added and deleted.

Guess who most benefits from all the administrative chaos? Political parties and their candidates. Not only are they capable of raising the vast amounts of money needed to purchase the data, but, adding insult to injury, they sometimes don’t even have to. Some states literally bequeath the data to parties at no cost. Alabama goes so far as to give parties a free statewide copy for every election.

Who is hurt by this? Independent candidates and nonprofit organizations that want to run national campaigns but don’t have deep pockets. If someone like Donald Trump launched an independent presidential run, he could buy the necessary data without much difficulty. But a nonprofit focused on mobilizing low-income voters could be stretched thin….(More)”

The deception that lurks in our data-driven world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexis C. Madrigal at Fusion: “…There’s this amazing book called Seeing Like a State, which shows how governments and other big institutions try to reduce the vast complexity of the world into a series of statistics that their leaders use to try to comprehend what’s happening.

The author, James C. Scott, opens the book with an extended anecdote about the Normalbaum. In the second half of the 18th century, Prussian rulers wanted to know how many “natural resources” they had in the tangled woods of the country. So, they started counting. And they came up with these huge tables that would let them calculate how many board-feet of wood they could pull from a given plot of forest. All the rest of the forest, everything it did for the people and the animals and general ecology of the place was discarded from the analysis.

The world proved too unruly. Their data wasn’t perfect.

But the world proved too unruly. Their data wasn’t perfect. So they started creating new forests, the Normalbaum, planting all the trees at the same time, and monoculturing them so that there were no trees in the forest that couldn’t be monetized for wood. “The fact is that forest science and geometry, backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques,” Scott wrote.

normal forrest plan

The spreadsheet became the world! They even planted the trees in rows, like a grid.

German foresters got very scientific with their fertilizer applications and management practices. And the scheme really worked—at least for a hundred years. Pretty much everyone across the world adopted their methods.

Then the forests started dying.

“In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted,” Scott wrote.

The complex ecosystem that underpinned the growth of these trees through generations—all the microbial and inter-species relationships—were torn apart by the rigor of the Normalbaum. The nutrient cycles were broken. Resilience was lost. The hidden underpinnings of the world were revealed only when they were gone. The Germans, like they do, came up with a new word for what happened: Waldsterben, or forest death.

The hidden underpinnings of the world were revealed only when they were gone.

Sometimes, when I look out at our world—at the highest level—in which thin data have come to stand in for huge complex systems of human and biological relationships, I wonder if we’re currently deep in the Normalbaum phase of things, awaiting the moment when Waldsterbensets in.

Take the ad-supported digital media ecosystem. The idea is brilliant: capture data on people all over the web and then use what you know to show them relevant ads, ads they want to see. Not only that, but because it’s all tracked, unlike broadcast or print media, an advertiser can measure what they’re getting more precisely. And certainly the digital advertising market has grown, taking share from most other forms of media. The spreadsheet makes a ton of sense—which is one reason for the growth predictions that underpin the massive valuations of new media companies.

But scratch the surface, like Businessweek recently did, and the problems are obvious. A large percentage of the traffic to many stories and videos consists of software pretending to be human.

“The art is making the fake traffic look real, often by sprucing up websites with just enough content to make them appear authentic,” Businessweek says. “Programmatic ad-buying systems don’t necessarily differentiate between real users and bots, or between websites with fresh, original work, and Potemkin sites camouflaged with stock photos and cut-and-paste articles.”

Of course, that’s not what high-end media players are doing. But the cheap programmatic ads, fueled by fake traffic, drive down the pricesacross the digital media industry, making it harder to support good journalism. Meanwhile, users of many sites are rebelling against the business model by installing ad blockers.

The advertisers and ad-tech firms just wanted to capture user data to show them relevant ads. They just wanted to measure their ads more effectively. But placed into the real-world, the system that grew up around these desires has reshaped the media landscape in unpredictable ways.

We’ve deceived ourselves into thinking data is a camera, but it’s really an engine. Capturing data about something changes the way that something works. Even the mere collection of stats is not a neutral act, but a way of reshaping the thing itself….(More)”

Weak States, Poor Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Angus Deaton in Project Syndicate: “Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans’ various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.

Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine. Certainly, not all of these services are as good as they might be, nor held in equal regard by everyone; but people mostly pay their taxes, and if the way that money is spent offends some, a lively public debate ensues, and regular elections allow people to change priorities.

All of this is so obvious that it hardly needs saying – at least for those who live in rich countries with effective governments. But most of the world’s population does not.

In much of Africa and Asia, states lack the capacity to raise taxes or deliver services. The contract between government and governed – imperfect in rich countries – is often altogether absent in poor countries. The New York cop was little more than impolite (and busy providing a service); in much of the world, police prey on the people they are supposed to protect, shaking them down for money or persecuting them on behalf of powerful patrons.

Even in a middle-income country like India, public schools and public clinics face mass (unpunished) absenteeism. Private doctors give people what (they think) they want – injections, intravenous drips, and antibiotics – but the state does not regulate them, and many practitioners are entirely unqualified.

Throughout the developing world, children die because they are born in the wrong place – not of exotic, incurable diseases, but of the commonplace childhood illnesses that we have known how to treat for almost a century. Without a state that is capable of delivering routine maternal and child health care, these children will continue to die.

Likewise, without government capacity, regulation and enforcement do not work properly, so businesses find it difficult to operate. Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.

The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.

Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity….

One thing that we can do is to agitate for our own governments to stop doing those things that make it harder for poor countries to stop being poor. Reducing aid is one, but so is limiting the arms trade, improving rich-country trade and subsidy policies, providing technical advice that is not tied to aid, and developing better drugs for diseases that do not affect rich people. We cannot help the poor by making their already-weak governments even weaker….(More)”

New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon, Madeleine Gabriel: “Interest in social innovation continues to rise, from governments setting up social innovation ‘labs’ to large corporations developing social innovation strategies. Yet theory lags behind practice, and this hampers our ability to understand social innovation and make the most of its potential. This collection brings together work by leading social innovation researchers globally, exploring the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical chapters and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations. It takes a critical perspective, analyzing potential downsides of social innovation that often remain unexplored or are glossed over, yet concludes with a powerful vision of the potential for social innovation to transform society. It aims to be a valuable resource for students and researchers, as well as policymakers and others supporting and leading social innovation….(More)”

Harnessing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

US State Department Fact Sheet on “U.S. Government Commitments and Collaboration with the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data”: “On September 27, 2015, the member states of the United Nations agreed to a set of Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals) that define a common agenda to achieve inclusive growth, end poverty, and protect the environment by 2030. The Global Goals build on tremendous development gains made over the past decade, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and set actionable steps with measureable indicators to drive progress. The availability and use of high quality data is essential to measuring and achieving the Global Goals. By harnessing the power of technology, mobilizing new and open data sources, and partnering across sectors, we will achieve these goals faster and make their progress more transparent.

Harnessing the data revolution is a critical enabler of the global goals—not only to monitor progress, but also to inclusively engage stakeholders at all levels – local, regional, national, global—to advance evidence-based policies and programs to reach those who need it most. Data can show us where girls are at greatest risk of violence so we can better prevent it; where forests are being destroyed in real-time so we can protect them; and where HIV/AIDS is enduring so we can focus our efforts and finish the fight. Data can catalyze private investment; build modern and inclusive economies; and support transparent and effective investment of resources for social good…..

The Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (Global Data Partnership), launched on the sidelines of the 70th United Nations General Assembly, is mobilizing a range of data producers and users—including governments, companies, civil society, data scientists, and international organizations—to harness the data revolution to achieve and measure the Global Goals. Working together, signatories to the Global Data Partnership will address the barriers to accessing and using development data, delivering outcomes that no single stakeholder can achieve working alone….The United States, through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), is joining a consortium of funders to seed this initiative. The U.S. Government has many initiatives that are harnessing the data revolution for impact domestically and internationally. Highlights of our international efforts are found below:

Health and Gender

• Country Data Collaboratives for Local Impact – PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Corporation(MCC) are partnering to invest $21.8 million in Country Data Collaboratives for Local Impact in sub-Saharan Africa that will use data on HIV/AIDS, global health, gender equality, and economic growth to improve programs and policies. Initially, the Country Data Collaboratives will align with and support the objectives of DREAMS, a PEPFAR, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Girl Effect partnership to reduce new HIV infections among adolescent girls and young women in high-burden areas.

• Measurement and Accountability for Results in Health (MA4Health) Collaborative – USAID is partnering with the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and over 20 other agencies, countries, and civil society organizations to establish the MA4Health Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder partnership focused on reducing fragmentation and better aligning support to country health-system performance and accountability. The Collaborative will provide a vehicle to strengthen country-led health information platforms and accountability systems by improving data and increasing capacity for better decision-making; facilitating greater technical collaboration and joint investments; and developing international standards and tools for better information and accountability. In September 2015, partners agreed to a set of common strategic and operational principles, including a strong focus on 3–4 pathfinder countries where all partners will initially come together to support country-led monitoring and accountability platforms. Global actions will focus on promoting open data, establishing common norms and standards, and monitoring progress on data and accountability for the Global Goals. A more detailed operational plan will be developed through the end of the year, and implementation will start on January 1, 2016.

• Data2X: Closing the Gender Gap – Data2X is a platform for partners to work together to identify innovative sources of data, including “big data,” that can provide an evidence base to guide development policy and investment on gender data. As part of its commitment to Data2X—an initiative of the United Nations Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—PEPFAR and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) are working with partners to sponsor an open data challenge to incentivize the use of gender data to improve gender policy and practice….(More)”

See also: Data matters: the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Speech by UK International Development Secretary Justine Greening at the launch of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data.

Researchers wrestle with a privacy problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Erika Check Hayden at Nature: “The data contained in tax returns, health and welfare records could be a gold mine for scientists — but only if they can protect people’s identities….In 2011, six US economists tackled a question at the heart of education policy: how much does great teaching help children in the long run?

They started with the records of more than 11,500 Tennessee schoolchildren who, as part of an experiment in the 1980s, had been randomly assigned to high- and average-quality teachers between the ages of five and eight. Then they gauged the children’s earnings as adults from federal tax returns filed in the 2000s. The analysis showed that the benefits of a good early education last for decades: each year of better teaching in childhood boosted an individual’s annual earnings by some 3.5% on average. Other data showed the same individuals besting their peers on measures such as university attendance, retirement savings, marriage rates and home ownership.

The economists’ work was widely hailed in education-policy circles, and US President Barack Obama cited it in his 2012 State of the Union address when he called for more investment in teacher training.

But for many social scientists, the most impressive thing was that the authors had been able to examine US federal tax returns: a closely guarded data set that was then available to researchers only with tight restrictions. This has made the study an emblem for both the challenges and the enormous potential power of ‘administrative data’ — information collected during routine provision of services, including tax returns, records of welfare benefits, data on visits to doctors and hospitals, and criminal records. Unlike Internet searches, social-media posts and the rest of the digital trails that people establish in their daily lives, administrative data cover entire populations with minimal self-selection effects: in the US census, for example, everyone sampled is required by law to respond and tell the truth.

This puts administrative data sets at the frontier of social science, says John Friedman, an economist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the lead authors of the education study “They allow researchers to not just get at old questions in a new way,” he says, “but to come at problems that were completely impossible before.”….

But there is also concern that the rush to use these data could pose new threats to citizens’ privacy. “The types of protections that we’re used to thinking about have been based on the twin pillars of anonymity and informed consent, and neither of those hold in this new world,” says Julia Lane, an economist at New York University. In 2013, for instance, researchers showed that they could uncover the identities of supposedly anonymous participants in a genetic study simply by cross-referencing their data with publicly available genealogical information.

Many people are looking for ways to address these concerns without inhibiting research. Suggested solutions include policy measures, such as an international code of conduct for data privacy, and technical methods that allow the use of the data while protecting privacy. Crucially, notes Lane, although preserving privacy sometimes complicates researchers’ lives, it is necessary to uphold the public trust that makes the work possible.

“Difficulty in access is a feature, not a bug,” she says. “It should be hard to get access to data, but it’s very important that such access be made possible.” Many nations collect administrative data on a massive scale, but only a few, notably in northern Europe, have so far made it easy for researchers to use those data.

In Denmark, for instance, every newborn child is assigned a unique identification number that tracks his or her lifelong interactions with the country’s free health-care system and almost every other government service. In 2002, researchers used data gathered through this identification system to retrospectively analyse the vaccination and health status of almost every child born in the country from 1991 to 1998 — 537,000 in all. At the time, it was the largest study ever to disprove the now-debunked link between measles vaccination and autism.

Other countries have begun to catch up. In 2012, for instance, Britain launched the unified UK Data Service to facilitate research access to data from the country’s census and other surveys. A year later, the service added a new Administrative Data Research Network, which has centres in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to provide secure environments for researchers to access anonymized administrative data.

In the United States, the Census Bureau has been expanding its network of Research Data Centers, which currently includes 19 sites around the country at which researchers with the appropriate permissions can access confidential data from the bureau itself, as well as from other agencies. “We’re trying to explore all the available ways that we can expand access to these rich data sets,” says Ron Jarmin, the bureau’s assistant director for research and methodology.

In January, a group of federal agencies, foundations and universities created the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to combine university and government data and measure the impact of research spending on economic outcomes. And in July, the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill to study whether the federal government should provide a central clearing house of statistical administrative data.

Yet vast swathes of administrative data are still inaccessible, says George Alter, director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research based at the University of Michigan, which serves as a data repository for approximately 760 institutions. “Health systems, social-welfare systems, financial transactions, business records — those things are just not available in most cases because of privacy concerns,” says Alter. “This is a big drag on research.”…

Many researchers argue, however, that there are legitimate scientific uses for such data. Jarmin says that the Census Bureau is exploring the use of data from credit-card companies to monitor economic activity. And researchers funded by the US National Science Foundation are studying how to use public Twitter posts to keep track of trends in phenomena such as unemployment.

 

….Computer scientists and cryptographers are experimenting with technological solutions. One, called differential privacy, adds a small amount of distortion to a data set, so that querying the data gives a roughly accurate result without revealing the identity of the individuals involved. The US Census Bureau uses this approach for its OnTheMap project, which tracks workers’ daily commutes. ….In any case, although synthetic data potentially solve the privacy problem, there are some research applications that cannot tolerate any noise in the data. A good example is the work showing the effect of neighbourhood on earning potential3, which was carried out by Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chetty needed to track specific individuals to show that the areas in which children live their early lives correlate with their ability to earn more or less than their parents. In subsequent studies5, Chetty and his colleagues showed that moving children from resource-poor to resource-rich neighbourhoods can boost their earnings in adulthood, proving a causal link.

Secure multiparty computation is a technique that attempts to address this issue by allowing multiple data holders to analyse parts of the total data set, without revealing the underlying data to each other. Only the results of the analyses are shared….(More)”

This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nikhil Sonnad at Quartz: “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself.

Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia, or SEP, has managed to do for two decades.

The internet is an information landfill. Somewhere in it—buried under piles of opinion, speculation, and misinformation—is virtually all of human knowledge. The story of the SEP shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet.  But sorting through the trash is difficult work. Even when you have something you think is valuable, it often turns out to be a cheap knock-off.

The story of how the SEP is run, and how it came to be, shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet—or at least a less trashy corner of it. A place where actual knowledge is sorted into a neat, separate pile instead of being thrown into the landfill. Where the world can go to learn everything that we know to be true. Something that would make humans a lot smarter than the internet we have today.

The impossible trinity of information

The online SEP has humble beginnings. Edward Zalta, a philosopher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, launched it way back in September 1995, with just two entries.

Philosophizing, pre-internet.(Flickr/Erik Drost—CC-BY-2.0)

That makes it positively ancient in internet years. Even Wikipedia is only 14. ….

John Perry, the director of the center, was the one who first suggested a dictionary of philosophical terms. But Zalta had bigger ideas. He and two co-authors later described the challenge in a 2002 paper (pdf, p. 1):

A fundamental problem faced by the general public and the members of an academic discipline in the information age is how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic.

That paper is so old that it mentions “CD-ROMs” in the second sentence. But for all the years that have passed, the basic problem remains unsolved.  The requirements are an “impossible trinity”—like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party. The three requirements the authors list—”authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date”—are to information what the “impossible trinity” is to economics. You can only ever have one or two at once. It is like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party.

Yet if the goal is to share with people what is true, it is extremely important for a resource to have all of these things. It must be trusted. It must not leave anything out. And it must reflect the latest state of knowledge. Unfortunately, all of the other current ways of designing an encyclopedia very badly fail to meet at least one of these requirements.

Where other encyclopedias fall short

Book

Authoritative: √

Comprehensive: X

Up-to-date: X

Printed encyclopedias: still a thing(Princeton University Press)

Printed books are authoritative: Readers trust articles they know have been written and edited by experts. Books also produce a coherent overview of a subject, as the editors consider how each entry fits into the whole. But they become obsolete whenever new research comes out. Nor can a book (or even a set of volumes) be comprehensive, except perhaps for a very narrow discipline; there’s simply too much to print.

Crowdsourcing

Authoritative: X

Comprehensive: X

Up-to-date: √

A crowdsourced online encyclopedia has the virtue of timeliness. Thanks to Wikipedia’s vibrant community of non-experts, its entries on breaking-news events are often updated as they happen. But except perhaps in a few areas in which enough well-informed people care for errors to get weeded out, Wikipedia is not authoritative.  Basic mathematics entries on Wikipedia were a “a hot mess of error, arrogance, obscurity, and nonsense.”  One math professor reviewed basic mathematics entries and found them to be a “a hot mess of error, arrogance, obscurity, and nonsense.” Nor is it comprehensive: Though it has nearly 5 million articles in the English-language version alone, seemingly in every sphere of knowledge, fewer than 10,000 are “A-class” or better, the status awarded to articles considered “essentially complete.”

Speaking of holes, the SEP has a rather detailed entry on the topic of holes, and it rather nicely illustrates one of Wikipedia’s key shortcomings. Holes present a tricky philosophical problem, the SEP entry explains: A hole is nothing, but we refer to it as if it were something. (Achille Varzi, the author of the holes entry, was called upon in the US presidential election in 2000 toweigh in on the existential status of hanging chads.) If you ask Wikipedia for holes it gives you the young-adult novel Holes and the band Hole.

In other words, holes as philosophical notions are too abstract for a crowdsourced venue that favors clean, factual statements like a novel’s plot or a band’s discography. Wikipedia’s bottom-up model could never produce an entry on holes like the SEP’s.

Crowdsourcing + voting

Authoritative: ?

Comprehensive: X

Up-to-date: ?

A variation on the wiki model is question-and-answer sites like Quora (general interest) and StackOverflow (computer programming), on which users can pose questions and write answers. These are slightly more authoritative than Wikipedia, because users also vote answers up or down according to how helpful they find them; and because answers are given by single, specific users, who are encouraged to say why they’re qualified (“I’m a UI designer at Google,” say).

But while there are sometimes ways to check people’s accreditation, it’s largely self-reported and unverified. Moreover, these sites are far from comprehensive. Any given answer is only as complete as its writer decides or is able to make it. And the questions asked and answered tend to reflect the interests of the sites’ users, which in both Quora and StackOverflow’s cases skew heavily male, American, and techie.

Moreover, the sites aren’t up-to-date. While they may respond quickly to new events, answers that become outdated aren’t deleted or changed but stay there, burdening the site with a growing mass of stale information.

The Stanford solution

So is the impossible trinity just that—impossible? Not according to Zalta. He imagined a different model for the SEP: the “dynamic reference work.”

Dynamic reference work

Authoritative: √

Comprehensive: √

Up-to-date: √

To achieve authority, several dozen subject editors—responsible for broad areas like “ancient philosophy” or “formal epistemology”—identify topics in need of coverage, and invite qualified philosophers to write entries on them. If the invitation is accepted, the author sends an outline to the relevant subject editors.

 This is not somebody randomly deciding to answer a question on Quora. “An editor works with the author to get an optimal outline before the author begins to write,” says Susanna Siegel, subject editor for philosophy of mind. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth at this stage.” Editors may also reject entries. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, the SEP’s senior editor, say that this almost never happens. In the rare cases when it does, the reason is usually that an entry is overly biased. In short, this is not somebody randomly deciding to answer a question on Quora.

An executive editorial board—Zalta, Nodelman, and Colin Allen—works to make the SEP comprehensive….(More)”

TurboVote

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“TurboVote is a software platform and an implementation program developed by Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that works to simplify the voting process.

The TurboVote tool is an online service that helps students vote in every election — local, state, and national — by helping them register where they want to vote, and by keeping them engaged with the elections in their local communities.

What does TurboVote give students?

  • helps them register to vote
  • helps them vote by sending election reminders via text and via email – that way they can stay in touch with local elections even from away
  • helps them vote by mail via absentee ballot request forms

What benefits are there for administrators, faculty, and other implementers?
TurboVote makes it possible for colleges and universities to conduct voter engagement efforts efficiently. Students have an array of personalized voting needs, from registration to ballot request requirements to deadlines – and it’s logistically prohibitive for an institution to meet these needs for every student. With TurboVote you can promote and monitor student registration and engagement by encouraging students to complete a short online process. ….(More)”

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