Liquid democracy uses blockchain to fix politics, and now you can vote for it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Danny Crichton at TechCrunch: “…Confidence in Congress remains pitifully low, driven by perceived low ethical standards and an increasing awareness that politics is bought by the highest bidder.

Now, a group of technologists and blockchain enthusiasts are asking whether a new approach could reform the system, bringing citizens closer to their representatives and holding congressmen accountable to their voters in a public, verifiable way. And if you live in western San Francisco, you can actually vote to put this system into office.

The concept is known as liquid democracy, and it’s a solid choice for fixing a broken system. The idea is that every person should have the right to give feedback on a policy issue or a piece of new legislation, but often people don’t have the time to do so. Using a liquid democracy platform, however, that voter can select a personal representative who has the authority to be a proxy for their vote. That proxy can be changed at will as a voter’s interests change.

Here is where the magic happens. Those proxies can themselves proxy their votes to other people, creating a directed network graph, ideally connecting every voter to politicians and all publicly verified on a blockchain. While there may be 700,000 people in a congressional district, potentially only a few hundred of a few thousand “super proxies” would need to be deeply engaged in the system for better representation to take place.

David Ernst is a leader of the liquid democracy movement and now a candidate for California Assembly District 19, which centers on the western half of San Francisco. He is ardently committed to the concept, and despite its novelty, believes that this is the path forward for improving governance….

Following college (which he began at age 16) and a few startup jobs, Ernst began working as CTO of a startup called Numerai, a crypto-backed decentralized hedge fund that allows data scientists to earn money when they solve data challenges. “The idea was that we can include many more people to participate in the system who weren’t able to before,” Ernst explained. That’s when it hit him that the decentralized nature of blockchain could allow for more participation in politics, fusing his two passions.

Ernst followed the campaign of the Flux Party in Australia in 2016, which is trying to implement what it calls “issue-based direct democracy” in that country’s legislature. “That was when something clicked,” he said. A congressman for example could commit to voting the calculated liquid democracy position, and “We could elect these sort of remote-controlled politicians as a way to graft this new system onto the old system.”

He built a platform called United.vote to handle the logistics of selecting personal representatives and voting on issues. More importantly, the app then tracks how those votes compare to the votes of congressmen and provides a scorecard….(More)”.

No One Owns Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lothar Determann: “Businesses, policy makers, and scholars are calling for property rights in data. They currently focus particularly on the vast amounts of data generated by connected cars, industrial machines, artificial intelligence, toys and other devices on the Internet of Things (IoT). This data is personal to numerous parties who are associated with a connected device, for example, the driver of a connected car, its owner and passengers, as well as other traffic participants. Manufacturers, dealers, independent providers of auto parts and services, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies and many others are also interested in this data. Various parties are actively staking their claims to data on the Internet of Things, as they are mining data, the fuel of the digital economy.

Stakeholders in digital markets often frame claims, negotiations and controversies regarding data access as one of ownership. Businesses regularly assert and demand that they own data. Individual data subjects also assume that they own data about themselves. Policy makers and scholars focus on how to redistribute ownership rights to data. Yet, upon closer review, it is very questionable whether data is—or should be—subject to any property rights. This article unambiguously answers the question in the negative, both with respect to existing law and future lawmaking, in the United States as in the European Union, jurisdictions with notably divergent attitudes to privacy, property and individual freedoms….

The article begins with a brief review of the current landscape of the Internet of Things notes explosive growth of data pools generated by connected devices, artificial intelligence, big data analytics tools and other information technologies. Part 1 lays the foundation for examining concrete current legal and policy challenges in the remainder of the article. Part 2 supplies conceptual differentiation and definitions with respect to “data” and “information” as the subject of rights and interests. Distinctions and definitional clarity serve as the basis for examining the purposes and reach of existing property laws in Part 3, including real property, personal property and intellectual property laws. Part 4 analyzes the effect of data-related laws that do not grant property rights. Part 5 examines how the interests of the various stakeholders are protected or impaired by the current framework of data-related laws to identify potential gaps that could warrant additional property rights. Part 6 examines policy considerations for and against property rights in data. Part 7 concludes that no one owns data and no one should own data….(More)”.

Open data sharing and the Global South—Who benefits?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Serwadda et al in Science: “A growing number of government agencies, funding organizations, and publishers are endorsing the call for increased data sharing, especially in biomedical research, many with an ultimate goal of open data. Open data is among the least restrictive forms of data sharing, in contrast to managed access mechanisms, which typically have terms of use and in some cases oversight by the data generators themselves. But despite an ethically sound rationale and growing support for open data sharing in many parts of the world, concerns remain, particularly among researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia and the Middle East that comprise the Global South. Drawing on our perspective as researchers and ethicists working in the Global South, we see opportunities to improve community engagement, raise awareness, and build capacity, all toward improving research and data sharing involving researchers in LMICs…African scientists have expressed concern that open data compromises national ownership and reopens the gates for “parachute-research” (i.e., Northern researchers absconding with data to their home countries). Other LMIC researchers have articulated fears over free-riding scientists using the data collected by others for their own career advancement …(More)”

The Rise of Virtual Citizenship

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Bridle in The Atlantic: “In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold….“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Hannah Arendt called citizenship “the right to have rights.” Like any other right, it can be bestowed and withheld by those in power, but in its newer forms it can also be bought, traded, and rewritten. Virtual citizenship is a commodity that can be acquired through the purchase of real estate or financial investments, subscribed to via an online service, or assembled by peer-to-peer digital networks. And as these options become available, they’re also used, like so many technologies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.

In a world that increasingly operates online, geography and physical infrastructure still remain crucial to control and management. Undersea fiber-optic cables trace the legacy of imperial trading routes. Google and Facebook erect data centers in Scandinavia and the Pacific Northwest, close to cheap hydroelectric power and natural cooling. The trade in citizenship itself often manifests locally as architecture. From luxury apartments in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean to data centers in Europe and refugee settlements in the Middle East, a scattered geography of buildings brings a different reality into focus: one in which political decisions and national laws transform physical space into virtual territory…(More)”.

Just and Unjust Leaks: When to Spill Secrets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Walzer at Foreign Affairs: “All governments, all political parties, and all politicians keep secrets and tell lies. Some lie more than others, and those differences are important, but the practice is general. And some lies and secrets may be justified, whereas others may not. Citizens, therefore, need to know the difference between just and unjust secrets and between just and unjust deception before they can decide when it may be justifiable for someone to reveal the secrets or expose the lies—when leaking confidential information, releasing classified documents, or blowing the whistle on misconduct may be in the public interest or, better, in the interest of democratic government.

Revealing official secrets and lies involves a form of moral risk-taking: whistleblowers may act out of a sense of duty or conscience, but the morality of their actions can be judged only by their fellow citizens, and only after the fact. This is often a difficult judgment to make—and has probably become more difficult in the Trump era.

LIES AND DAMNED LIES

A quick word about language: “leaker” and “whistleblower” are overlapping terms, but they aren’t synonyms. A leaker, in this context, anonymously reveals information that might embarrass officials or open up the government’s internal workings to unwanted public scrutiny. In Washington, good reporters cultivate sources inside every presidential administration and every Congress and hope for leaks. A whistleblower reveals what she believes to be immoral or illegal official conduct to her bureaucratic superiors or to the public. Certain sorts of whistle-blowing, relating chiefly to mismanagement and corruption, are protected by law; leakers are not protected, nor are whistleblowers who reveal state secrets…(More)”.

Facebook’s next project: American inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Scola at Politico: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is quietly cracking open his company’s vast trove of user data for a study on economic inequality in the U.S. — the latest sign of his efforts to reckon with divisions in American society that the social network is accused of making worse.

The study, which hasn’t previously been reported, is mining the social connections among Facebook’s American users to shed light on the growing income disparity in the U.S., where the top 1 percent of households is said to control 40 percent of the country’s wealth. Facebook is an incomparably rich source of information for that kind of research: By one estimate, about three of five American adults use the social network….

Facebook confirmed the broad contours of its partnership with Chetty but declined to elaborate on the substance of the study. Chetty, in a brief interview following a January speech in Washington, said he and his collaborators — who include researchers from Stanford and New York University — have been working on the inequality study for at least six months.

“We’re using social networks, and measuring interactions there, to understand the role of social capital much better than we’ve been able to,” he said.

Researchers say they see Facebook’s enormous cache of data as a remarkable resource, offering an unprecedentedly detailed and sweeping look at American society. That store of information contains both details that a user might tell Facebook — their age, hometown, schooling, family relationships — and insights that the company has picked up along the way, such as the interest groups they’ve joined and geographic distribution of who they call a “friend.”

It’s all the more significant, researchers say, when you consider that Facebook’s user base — about 239 million monthly users in the U.S. and Canada at last count — cuts across just about every demographic group.

And all that information, say researchers, lets them take guesses about users’ wealth. Facebook itself recently patented a way of figuring out someone’s socioeconomic status using factors ranging from their stated hobbies to how many internet-connected devices they own.

A Facebook spokesman addressed the potential privacy implications of the study’s access to user data, saying, “We conduct research at Facebook responsibly, which includes making sure we protect people’s information.” The spokesman added that Facebook follows an “enhanced” review process for research projects, adopted in 2014 after a controversy over a study that manipulated some people’s news feeds to see if it made them happier or sadder.

According to a Stanford University source familiar with Chetty’s study, the Facebook account data used in the research has been stripped of any details that could be used to identify users. The source added that academics involved in the study have gone through security screenings that include background checks, and can access the Facebook data only in secure facilities….(More)”.

When citizens set the budget: lessons from ancient Greece

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in The Conversation: “Today elected representatives take the tough decisions about public finances behind closed doors. In doing so, democratic politicians rely on the advice of financial bureaucrats, who, often, cater to the political needs of the elected government. Politicians rarely ask voters what they think of budget options. They are no better at explaining the reasons for a budget. Explanations are usually no more than vacuous phrases, such as “jobs and growth” or “on the move”. They never explain the difficult trade-offs that go into a budget nor their overall financial reasoning.

This reluctance to explain public finances was all too evident during the global financial crisis.

In Australia, Britain and France, centre-left governments borrowed huge sums in order to maintain private demand and, in one case, to support private banks. In each country these policies helped a lot to minimise the crisis’s human costs.

Yet, in the elections that followed the centre-left politicians that had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate robust discussion about public finances. Without a justification for their generally good policies each of these government was defeated by centre-right opponents.

In most democracies there is the same underlying problem: elected representatives do not believe that voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

For decades, we, independently, have studied democracy today and in the ancient past. We have learned that this assumption is dead wrong. There are more and more examples of how involving ordinary voters results in better budgets.

In 1989, councils in poor Brazilian towns began to involve residents in setting budgets. This participatory budgeting soon spread throughout South America. It has now been successfully tried in Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, the United States, Poland and Australia, and some pilot projects were set up in France too. Participatory budgeting is based on the clear principle that those who will be most affected by a tough budget should be involved in setting it.

In spite of such successful democratic experiments, elected representatives still shy away from involving ordinary voters in setting budgets. This is very different from what happened in ancient Athens 2,500 years ago….

In Athenian democracy ordinary citizens actually set the budget. This ancient Greek state had a solid budget, in spite of, or, we would say, because of the involvement of the citizens in taking tough budget decisions….(More)”.

The Social Media Threat to Society and Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
George Soros at Project Syndicate: “It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. And there is a real chance that, once lost, those who grow up in the digital age – in which the power to command and shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies – will have difficulty regaining it.

The current moment in world history is a painful one. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish his own mafia-style state but cannot, because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it….

The rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant American Internet platform companies is contributing mightily to the US government’s impotence. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown ever more powerful, they have become obstacles to innovation, and have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware…

Social media companies’ true customers are their advertisers. But a new business model is gradually emerging, based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep more of the benefits that they would otherwise have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further, but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market economy.

Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention, directing it toward their own commercial purposes, and deliberately engineering addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents.

There is a similarity between Internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook customers to the point that they gamble away all of their money, even money they don’t have.

Something similar – and potentially irreversible – is happening to human attention in our digital age. This is not a matter of mere distraction or addiction; social media companies are actually inducing people to surrender their autonomy. And this power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. Once lost, those who grow up in the digital age may have difficulty regaining it.

This would have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential election.

There is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon: an alliance between authoritarian states and large, data-rich IT monopolies, bringing together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with already-developed systems of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined….(More)”.

Smarter New York City: How City Agencies Innovate

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Book edited by André Corrêa d’Almeida: “Innovation is often presented as being in the exclusive domain of the private sector. Yet despite widespread perceptions of public-sector inefficiency, government agencies have much to teach us about how technological and social advances occur. Improving governance at the municipal level is critical to the future of the twenty-first-century city, from environmental sustainability to education, economic development, public health, and beyond. In this age of acceleration and massive migration of people into cities around the world, this book explains how innovation from within city agencies and administrations makes urban systems smarter and shapes life in New York City.
Using a series of case studies, Smarter New York City describes the drivers and constraints behind urban innovation, including leadership and organization; networks and interagency collaboration; institutional context; technology and real-time data collection; responsiveness and decision making; and results and impact. Cases include residential organic-waste collection, an NYPD program that identifies the sound of gunshots in real time, and the Vision Zero attempt to end traffic casualties, among others. Challenging the usefulness of a tech-centric view of urban innovation, Smarter New York City brings together a multidisciplinary and integrated perspective to imagine new possibilities from within city agencies, with practical lessons for city officials, urban planners, policy makers, civil society, and potential private-sector partners….(More)”.

Small Data for Big Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Liz Luckett at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “As an investor in data-driven companies, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather—a baker, a small business owner, and, I now realize, a pioneering data scientist. Without much more than pencil, paper, and extraordinarily deep knowledge of his customers in Washington Heights, Manhattan, he bought, sold, and managed inventory while also managing risk. His community was poor, but his business prospered. This was not because of what we celebrate today as the power and predictive promise of big data, but rather because of what I call small data: nuanced market insights that come through regular and trusted interactions.

Big data takes into account volumes of information from largely electronic sources—such as credit cards, pay stubs, test scores—and segments people into groups. As a result, people participating in the formalized economy benefit from big data. But people who are paid in cash and have no recognized accolades, such as higher education, are left out. Small data captures those insights to address this market failure. My grandfather, for example, had critical customer information he carefully gathered over the years: who could pay now, who needed a few days more, and which tabs to close. If he had access to a big data algorithm, it likely would have told him all his clients were unlikely to repay him, based on the fact that they were low income (vs. high income) and low education level (vs. college degree). Today, I worry that in our enthusiasm for big data and aggregated predictions, we often lose the critical insights we can gain from small data, because we don’t collect it. In the process, we are missing vital opportunities to both make money and create economic empowerment.

We won’t solve this problem of big data by returning to my grandfather’s shop floor. What we need is more and better data—a small data movement to supply vital missing links in marketplaces and supply chains the world over. What are the proxies that allow large companies to discern whom among the low income are good customers in the absence of a shopkeeper? At The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund (TSEF), we are profitably investing in a new breed of data company: enterprises that are intentionally and responsibly serving low-income communities, and generating new and unique insights about the behavior of individuals in the process. The value of the small data they collect is becoming increasingly useful to other partners, including corporations who are willing to pay for it. It is a kind of dual market opportunity that for the first time makes it economically advantageous for these companies to reach the poor. We are betting on small data to transform opportunities and quality of life for the underserved, tap into markets that were once seen as too risky or too costly to reach, and earn significant returns for investors….(More)”.