SalesForce Marketing Cloud: “San Francisco is one of the most diverse cities in the world and home to some of the most tech-savvy and innovative people in the world. …The city currently monitors 33 Facebook accounts, 39 Twitter accounts and 16 YouTube accounts – each is tracked by their respective department. This allows for a wide breadth of two-way conversation on regional issues. Employees are also taking steps to increase their social monitoring with a focus on public safety. High-tech people expect a high-tech government and the City of San Francisco is delivering this in spades.
Check out the video below to learn more about the amazing work the City and County of San Francisco are doing with social engagement.”
New Visions in Citizen Science
New Report by Anne Bowser and Lea Shanley for the Commons Lab within Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson Center, with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: “Citizen science is one form of open innovation, a paradigm where organizations solicit the efforts of external contributors with unique perspectives who generate new knowledge and technology, or otherwise bolster organizational resources. Recent executive branch policies encourage and support open innovation in the federal government. The President’s 2009 Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government charged agencies with taking specific action to support transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Similarly, the Obama Administration’s 2013 Memorandum on Open Data Policy—Managing Information as an Asset instructs agencies to support these principles by sharing government data sets. The Preview Report for the Second Open Government National Action Plan, released October 31, 2013, specifically states that the United States will commit to “harness the ingenuity of the public by enabling, accelerating, and scaling the use of open innovation methods such as incentive prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science within the Federal Government.”
This report showcases seventeen case studies that offer a mosaic view of federally-sponsored citizen science and open innovation projects, from in-the-field data collection to online games for collective problem-solving. Its goal is not to provide line-by-line instructions for agencies attempting to create or expand projects of their own; each agency has a unique mission with distinct challenges that inform project designs. Rather, it offers a sampling of different models that support public contribution, potential challenges, and positive impacts that projects can have on scientific literacy, research, management, and public policy.
Some case studies represent traditional but well-executed projects that illustrate how citizen science functions at its best, by contributing to robust scientific research. Other projects, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s International Space Apps Challenge, evolve from these traditional models, demonstrating how open innovation can address agency-specific challenges in new and compelling ways. Through this progression, the evolution of citizen science begins to take shape, and the full possibilities of open innovation begin to emerge.”
Inside Avaaz – can online activism really change the world?
The Guardian: “With 30 million members, Avaaz is an organisation with ambitions to save us all through technology. Carole Cadwalladr meets its founder Ricken Patel to find out what it has achieved…But then, this is the reality of 21st century protest: it’s a beauty parade. A competition for the thing that we all seem to have less of: attention. The TV cameras do show up, though, and a young Rohingya woman from Burma’s Muslim minority gives moving interviews to journalists about the terrible human rights abuses her family have endured. And a dozen or so mostly fresh-faced young people show up to offer their support. The protest has been organised by Avaaz, an online activist organisation, and these are Avaazers. They may have just signed an online petition, or “liked” a cause on Facebook, or donated to a campaign – to save Europe’s bees from pesticides, or to defend Masai land rights in Tanzania, or to “stand by” Edward Snowden. And, depending on who you believe, they’re either inventing a new type of 21st-century protest or they’re a bunch of idle slacktivists who are about as likely to start a revolution as they are to renounce their iPhones and give up Facebook.
In just six years, Avaaz – which means “voice” in various languages – has become a global pressure group to be reckoned with. It’s a new kind of activism that isn’t issue-led, it’s issues-led. It’s human rights abuses in Burma, or it’s the Syrian civil war, or it’s threats against the Great Barrier Reef or it’s homophobia in Costa Rica. It’s whatever its supporters, guided by the Avaaz team, choose to click on most this month. And if you hadn’t heard of Avaaz before, it’s probably only a matter of time….
“We’re like a laboratory for virality. For every campaign we test perhaps 20 different versions of it to see what people want.” It tweaks and it tweaks and it tweaks, changing the wording, pictures, call for action, and only then does it send it out on public release. Sam Barratt, Avaaz’s head of press, shows me the previous versions of its email about the Burma campaign. “Changing the meme at the top, or the photograph, massively affects the number of clicks. Eighteen versions were tested. People think we just chuck it out there, but there’s a huge amount of data sophistry into how we design the campaigns.” And, just as Amazon and Google try to predict our behaviour, and adjust their offerings based on our past preferences, so does Avaaz. It uses algorithms to detect things we perhaps don’t even know about ourselves.
“It’s a tremendously evolving science, internet engagement,” says Patel. “But we develop a picture of someone from their previous engagements with us. So, for example, we can see that a certain set of people, based on their previous behaviour, might be interested in starting a campaign, and another set won’t be, but may be interested in signing something. We can tailor it to the individual.”
Everything is viral now, says Patel, “from financial crises to health epidemics to ideas”. And learning the lessons of that and of how to garner attention from some of the most attention-deficient people on the planet – young people with electronic devices – has been Avaaz’s masterstroke….
A crisistunity is another Avaaz-ism. “Though I think we originally got it from The Simpsons,” says Patel. “It’s a mixture of crisis and opportunity. We’re at this extraordinary moment in history. We have the power to wipe out our species. But at the same time, we’ve had tremendous progress in the past 30 years. We have more than halved global poverty. We’ve radically increased the status of women. There are tremendous reasons for hope and optimism.”
There is something very Avaazian about the crisistunity, I come to think, in that it’s borrowed something slick and witty from popular culture and re-purposed it for something which used to be called the Greater Good. And then given it a thick dollop of added earnestness.”
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
Clay Shirky: “This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on….
Given examples of technological success from commercial firms, a common response is that the government has special constraints, and thus cannot develop projects piecemeal, test with citizens, or learn from its mistakes in public. I was up at the Kennedy School a month after the launch, talking about technical leadership and Healthcare.gov, when one of the audience members made just this point, proposing that the difficult launch was unavoidable, because the government simply couldn’t have tested bits of the project over time.
That observation illustrates the gulf between planning and reality in political circles. It is hard for policy people to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one.
At launch, on October 1, only a tiny fraction of potential users could actually try the service. They generated concrete errors. Those errors were handed to a team whose job was to improve the site, already public but only partially working. The resulting improvements are incremental, and put in place over a period of months. That is a phased rollout, just one conducted in the worst possible way.
The vision of “technology” as something you can buy according to a plan, then have delivered as if it were coming off a truck, flatters and relieves managers who have no idea and no interest in how this stuff works, but it’s also a breeding ground for disaster. The mismatch between technical competence and executive authority is at least as bad in government now as it was in media companies in the 1990s, but with much more at stake…
Now, and from now on, government will interact with its citizens via the internet, in increasingly important ways. This is a non-partisan issue; whichever party is in the White House will build and launch new forms of public service online. Unfortunately for us, the last new technology the government adopted for interacting with citizens was the fax; our senior political figures have little habit of talking to their own technically adept employees.
If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the tradeoff between features, quality, and time?
When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to delay or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.
Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.
Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.”
Citizen participation in municipal budgeting: Origins, practices, impact
Leighton Walter Kille: “Citizen participation in governance is generally limited to the ballot box in the United States: If you don’t like what the last year’s crop of politicians is up to, throw them out of office next year. Residents almost never have a say on budget decisions beyond holding protests at press conferences or picketing city hall. Appointed community boards are found in New York and other municipalities, but their roles are strictly advisory. Still, more participation can lead to greater perceptions of procedural fairness and support for government, some research has shown.
For residents of other countries, more options exist. A practice known as “participatory budgeting” (PB) allows citizens to determine how some government funds are used. As detailed in a 2010 study by political scientist Yves Sintomer of the University of Paris and others, “Learning from the South: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide,” it was first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the late 1980s. Residents took part in local and citywide assemblies to help establish spending priorities for a select portion of the city’s spending budget. Larger issues such as taxation, debt service and pensions were specifically excluded. (A 2003 study from the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University goes deep into the specifics of the Brazilian experience.)
Since this beginning, participatory budgeting has spread to hundreds of other cities around the world, Sintomer and his team state: “There are between 511 and 920 participatory budgets in Latin America: more than the half of the participatory budgets in the world, where we can count between 795 and 1,469 experiences.” The range of numbers is an indication of how widely definition of participatory budgeting varies. Interest in the United States has been growing, with a number of New York council districts using the technique, as well as Chicago and Vallejo, California.
A 2013 paper in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, “The Struggle for a Voice: Tensions between Associations and Citizens in Participatory Budgeting,” notes that “the heterogeneous nature of the existing experiments calls into question even the possibility of defining [participatory budgeting].” Similarly, in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation dedicated to the issue, the authors note that “there is no standardized set of ‘best practices’ that governments are adopting, but there are a broader set of principles that are adapted by local governments to meet local circumstances.” Writing in the issue, Brian Wampler of Boise State University, states that there are four main principles: active citizen participation; increased citizen authority; improved governmental transparency; and reallocation of resources to improve social justice.
A 2013 study in the American Review of Public Administration, “Citizen Input in the Budget Process: When Does It Matter Most?” examines the impact of public participation on organizational effectiveness. The researchers, Hai (David) Guo and Milena I. Neshkova of Florida International University, used survey data from state departments of transportation to examine the effectiveness of citizen input at four different stages of the budgeting process: information sharing, budget discussion, budget decision and program assessment.
The findings of the study include:
- Citizen participation is positively correlated with higher organizational performance. “In general if a state DOT adopts more citizen input strategies in the budget process, it achieves better outcomes. In other words, other things held equal, more citizen participation in the budget process is associated with fewer poor-quality roads and less fatalities on state highways.”
- In terms of road condition, citizen participation makes a difference at all but the budget discussion stage.
- Overall, citizen input matters most at the information-sharing and program-assessment stages. Consequently, “public managers should seek public input at these stages not only because it is normatively desirable but also for the very practical reasons of achieving better performance. When conveyed at the information-sharing stage, citizens’ preferences can be taken into account by decision makers and incorporated into the budget priorities.”
White House Unveils Big Data Projects, Round Two
Information Week: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Networking and Information Technology R&D program (NITRD) on Tuesday introduced a slew of new big-data collaboration projects aimed at stimulating private-sector interest in federal data. The initiatives, announced at the White House-sponsored “Data to Knowledge to Action” event, are targeted at fields as varied as medical research, geointelligence, economics, and linguistics.
The new projects are a continuation of the Obama Administration’s Big Data Initiative, announced in March 2012, when the first round of big-data projects was presented.
Thomas Kalil, OSTP’s deputy director for technology and innovation, said that “dozens of new partnerships — more than 90 organizations,” are pursuing these new collaborative projects, including many of the best-known American technology, pharmaceutical, and research companies.
Among the initiatives, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NASA have set up the NASA Earth eXchange, or NEX, a collaborative network to provide space-based data about our planet to researchers in Earth science. AWS will host much of NASA’s Earth-observation data as an AWS Public Data Set, making it possible, for instance, to crowdsource research projects.
An estimated 4.4 million jobs are being created between now and 2015 to support big-data projects. Employers, educational institutions, and government agencies are working to build the educational infrastructure to provide students with the skills they need to fill those jobs.
To help train new workers, IBM, for instance, has created a new assessment tool that gives university students feedback on their readiness for number-crunching careers in both the public and private sector. Eight universities that have a big data and analytics curriculum — Fordham, George Washington, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Northwestern, Ohio State, Southern Methodist, and the University of Virginia — will receive the assessment tool.
OSTP is organizing an initiative to create a “weather service” for pandemics, Kalil said, a way to use big data to identify and predict pandemics as early as possible in order to plan and prepare for — and hopefully mitigate — their effects.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, is undertaking its ” Big Data to Knowledge” (BD2K) initiative to develop a range of standards, tools, software, and other approaches to make use of massive amounts of data being generated by the health and medical research community….”
See also:
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: Progress by Federal Agencies: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: New Announcements: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Press Release: Data to Knowledge to Action Event
13 ways to unlock the potential of open government
The Guardian: “Nine experts offer their thoughts on making open data initiatives work for all citizens…
Tiago Peixoto, open government specialist, The World Bank, Washington DC, US. @participatory
Open data is an enabler – not a guarantee – of good participation: Participation implies creating legitimate channels of communication between citizens and governments, and opening up data does not create that channel. We need to consider which structures enable us to know about citizens’ needs and preferences.
Both governments and civil society are responsible for connecting governments to the people: If we assume institutional or regulatory reforms are needed, then clearly governments (at both the legislative and executive level) should take a big part of the responsibility. After that, it is civil society’s role (and individual citizens) to further promote and strengthen those institutions….
Ben Taylor, open data consultant, Twaweza, UK and Tanzania. @mtega
We need to put people before data: The OGP Summit raised some interesting questions on open data and open government in developing countries. In a particular session discussing how to harness data to drive citizens engagement, the consensus was that this was the wrong way around. It should instead be reversed, putting the real, everyday needs of citizens first, and then asking how can we use data to help meet these.
Open government is not all about technology: Often people assume that open government means technology, but I think that’s wrong. For me, open government is a simple idea: it’s about making the nuts and bolts of how government works visible to citizens. Even open data isn’t always just about technology, for example postings on noticeboards and in newspapers are also valuable. Technology has a lot to offer, but it has limitations as well…
Juan M Casanueva, director, SocialTIC, Mexico City, Mexico. @jm_casanueva
Closed working cultures stifle open government initiatives: It is interesting to think about why governments struggle to open up. While closed systems tend to foster corruption and other perverse practices, most government officials also follow a pre-established closed culture that has become ingrained in their working practices. There are sometimes few incentives and high risks for government officials that want to make career in the public service and some also lack capacities to handle technology and citizen involvement. It is very interesting to see government officials that overcome these challenges actually benefiting politically for doing innovative citizen-centered actions. Unfortunately, that is too much of a risk at higher levels of government.
NGOs in Mexico are leading the way with access to information and citizen involvement: Sonora Ciudana recently opened the state’s health payroll and approached the public staff so that they could compare what they earn with the state expense reports. Pacto por Juarez has created grassroots transparency and accountability schools and even have a bus tour that goes around the city explaining the city’s budget and how it is being spent….”
Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley
Evgeny Morozov in Frankfurter Allgemeine: “In short, it’s okay to hate Silicon Valley – we just need to do it for the right reasons. Below are three of them – but this is hardly an exhaustive list….
Reason number one: Silicon Valley firms are building what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our lives. We are promised more freedom, more openness, more mobility; we are told we can roam wherever and whenever we want. But the kind of emancipation that we actually get is fake emancipation; it’s the emancipation of a just-released criminal wearing an ankle bracelet.
Yes, a self-driving car could make our commute less dreadful. But a self-driving car operated by Google would not just be a self-driving car: it would be a shrine to surveillance – on wheels! It would track everywhere we go. It might even prevent us from going to certain places if we our mood – measured through facial expression analysis – suggests that we are too angry or tired or emotional. Yes, there are exceptions – at times, GPS does feel liberating – but the trend is clear: every new Google sensor in that car would introduce a new lever of control. That lever doesn’t even have to be exercised to produce changes in our behavior – our knowledge of its presence will suffice….
Reason number two: Silicon Valley has destroyed our ability to imagine other models for running and organizing our communication infrastructure. Forget about models that aren’t based on advertising and that do not contribute to the centralization of data on private servers located in America. To suggest that we need to look into other – perhaps, even publicly-provided alternatives –is to risk being accused of wanting to “break the Internet.” We have succumbed to what the Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger calls “the dictatorship of no alternatives”: we are asked to accept that Gmail is the best and only possible way to do email, and that Facebook is the best and only possible way to do social networking.
But consider just how weird our current arrangement is. Imagine I told you that the post office could run on a different, innovation-friendly business model. Forget stamps. They cost money – and why pay money when there’s a way to send letters for free? Just think about the world-changing potential: the poor kids in Africa can finally reach you with their pleas for more laptops! So, instead of stamps, we would switch to an advertising-backed system: we’d open every letter that you send, scan its contents, insert a relevant ad, seal it, and then forward it to the recipient.
Sounds crazy? It does….
Reason number three: the simplistic epistemology of Silicon Valley has become a model that other institutions are beginning to emulate. The trouble with Silicon Valley is not just that it enables the NSA –it also encourages, even emboldens them. It inspires the NSA to keep searching for connections in a world of meaningless links, to record every click, to ensure that no interaction goes unnoticed, undocumented and unanalyzed. Like Silicon Valley, NSA assumes that everything is interconnected: if we can’t yet link two pieces of data, it’s because we haven’t looked deep enough – or we need a third piece of data, to be collected in the future, to make sense of it all.
There’s something delusional about this practice – and I don’t use “delusional” metaphorically. For the Italian philosopher Remo Bodei, delusion does not stem from too little psychic activity, as some psychoanalytic theories would have it, but, rather, from too much of it. Delirium, he notes, is “the incapacity to filter an enormous quantity of data.” While a sane, rational person “has learned that ignorance is vaster than knowledge and that one must resist the temptation to find more coherence than can currently be achieved,” the man suffering from delusion cannot stop finding coherence among inherently incoherent phenomena. He generalizes too much, which results in what Bodei calls “hyper-inclusion.”
“Hyper-inclusion” is exactly what plagues America’s military-industrial complex today….”
How to Promote Civic Engagement in Public Issues
Utne: “With collaborative consumption, access is valued above ownership and “mine” becomes “ours,” allowing everyone’s needs to be met with minimal waste. Sharing is Good (New Society Publishers, 2013) by Beth Buczynski is your roadmap to this new and exciting economic paradigm. In this excerpt from chapter six, “What to Share,” learn how to create civic engagement in your community and find solutions to public issues.
“Participatory government is the idea that all members of a population should be able to make meaningful contributions to decision-making. For too long, we’ve been content to vote, or not, hoping that elected officials will actually keep their promise to act in the best interest of the people. The power of the Internet now makes it much easier for all levels of government to become transparent, sharing data and engaging the public in a dialogue that leads to more creative and efficient solutions. Here are a few resources that promote civic engagement in one’s own governance.
Neighborland—People who live and work in a neighborhood know what services, infrastructure, and businesses their community needs, whether it’s a local grocery store, cafe with WiFi, bike lanes, or a recreational center. Neighborland offers residents a friendly and engaging tool to voice their needs and connect with like-minded people to make change happen.
ParticipatoryBudgeting—The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) is a non-profit organization that helps communities decide how to spend public money, primarily in the United States and Canada. This organization works directly with governments and non-profits to develop participatory budgeting processes in which local people directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It’s their goal to include those who are normally left out of these types of discussions and decisions, namely the public! PBP offers many different opportunities for participation, from joining or starting a participatory budget movement in your own town, to volunteering, jobs, and internships. This isn’t a typical collaborative consumption service, but rather an invaluable resource for people who would like to see more transparency and community involvement when local government spends public monies.
OpenGovernment—A free, open-source public resource website for government transparency and civic engagement at the state and local levels. The site is a non-partisan joint project of two 501(c)3 non-profit organizations: the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation; OpenGovernment is independent from any government entity, candidate, or political party. The ultimate mission of OpenGovernment is to ensure that all three branches (executive, legislative, and judicial) at every level of US government (federal, state, city, local) comply with the principles of open government data.
YourView—YourView aspires to give Australians a stronger democratic voice. It has the unique ambition to present what people really think about major public issues—and giving that collective wisdom a role in the national political discourse.”
Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Opinions and Ideas
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of crowdsourcing was originally published in 2013.
As technological advances give individuals greater ability to share their opinions and ideas with the world, citizens are increasingly expecting government to consult with them and factor their input into the policy-making process. Moving away from the representative democracy system created in a less connected time, e-petitions; participatory budgeting (PB), a collaborative, community-based system for budget allocation; open innovation initiatives; and Liquid Democracy, a hybrid of direct and indirect democracy, are allowing citizens to make their voices heard between trips to the ballot box.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Eirikur Bergmann — Reconstituting Iceland — Constitutional Reform Caught in a New Critical Order in the Wake of Crisis — a paper exploring the history and of Iceland’s “Crowdsourced Constitution.”
- Oliver Gassmann, Ellen Enkel and Henry Chesbrough — The Future of Open Innovation — a paper discussing opportunities and trends related to open innovation.
- Hollie Russon Gilman — The Participatory Turn: Participatory Budgeting Comes to America — a dissertation focused on both the recent history of international PB efforts and the largely untapped potential for PB in the United States.
- Alexa Kasdan and Lindsay Cattell — New Report on NYC Participatory Budgeting — a research and evaluation report on the 2011 PB process undertaken in New York City.
- Kai Masser — Participatory Budgeting as Its Critics See It — a critical look at PB drawing on lessons learned from a German pilot initiative.
- OECD — Citizens as Partners: Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-making — this policy report examines the use of crowdsourcing in OECD countries to act as a new form of representation and participation.
- Angel Tchorbadjiiski — Liquid Democracy — a thesis on the potential benefits of and challenges to the wider use of Liquid Democracy.
Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Bergmann, Eirikur. “Reconstituting Iceland – Constitutional Reform Caught in a New Critical Order in the Wake of Crisis.” in Academia.edu, (presented at the Political Legitimacy and the Paradox of Regulation, Leiden University, 2013). http://bit.ly/1aaTVYP.
- This paper explores the tumultuous history of Iceland’s “Crowdsourced Constitution.” The since-abandoned document was built upon three principles: distribution of power, transparency and responsibility.
- Even prior to the draft being dismantled through political processes, Bergmann argues that an overenthusiastic public viewed the constitution as a stronger example of citizen participation than it really was: “Perhaps with the delusion of distance the international media was branding the production as the world’s first ‘crowdsourced’ constitution, drafted by the interested public in clear view for the world to follow…This was however never a realistic description of the drafting. Despite this extraordinary open access, the Council was not able to systematically plough through all the extensive input as [it] only had four months to complete the task.”
- Bergmann’s paper illustrates the transition Iceland’s constitution has undertaken in recent years: moving form a paradigmatic example of crowdsourcing opinions to a demonstration of the challenges inherent in bringing more voices into a realm dominated by bureaucracy and political concerns.
Gassmann, Oliver, Ellen Enkel, and Henry Chesbrough. “The Future of Open Innovation.” R&D Management 40, no. 3 (2010): 213– 221. http://bit.ly/1bk4YeN.
- In this paper – an introduction to a special issue on the topic – Gassmann, Enkel and Chesbrough discuss the evolving trends in open innovation. They define the concept, referencing previous work by Chesbrough et al., as “…the purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”
- In addition to examining the existing literature for the field, the authors identify nine trends that they believe will define the future of open innovation for businesses, many of which can also be applied to governing insitutions:
- Industry penetration: from pioneers to mainstream
- R&D intensity: from high to low tech
- Size: from large firms to SMEs
- Processes: from stage gate to probe-and-learn
- Structure: from standalone to alliances
- Universities: from ivory towers to knowledge brokers Processes: from amateurs to professionals
- Content: from products to services
- Intellectual property: from protection to a tradable good
Gilman, Hollie Russon. “The Participatory Turn: Participatory Budgeting Comes to America.” Harvard University, 2012. https://bit.ly/2BhaeVv.
- In this dissertation, Gilman argues that participatory budgeting (PB) produces better outcomes than the status quo budget process in New York, while also transforming how those who participate understand themselves as citizens, constituents, Council members, civil society leaders and community stakeholders.
- The dissertation also highlights challenges to participation drawing from experience and lessons learned from PB’s inception in Porto Alege, Brazil in 1989. While recognizing a diversity of challenges, Gilman ultimately argues that, “PB provides a viable and informative democratic innovation for strengthening civic engagement within the United States that can be streamlined and adopted to scale.”
Kasdan, Alexa, and Cattell, Lindsay. “New Report on NYC Participatory Budgeting.” Practical Visionaries. Accessed October 21, 2013. https://bit.ly/2Ek8bTu.
- This research and evaluation report is the result of surveys, in-depth interviews and observations collected at key points during the 2011 participatory budgeting (PB) process in New York City, in which “[o]ver 2,000 community members were the ones to propose capital project ideas in neighborhood assemblies and town hall meetings.”
- The PBNYC project progressed through six main steps:
- First Round of Neighborhood Assemblies
- Delegate Orientations
- Delegate Meetings
- Second Round of Neighborhood Assemblies
- Voting
- Evaluation, Implementation & Monitoring
- The authors also discuss the varied roles and responsibilities for the divers stakeholders involved in the process:
- Community Stakeholders
- Budget Delegates
- District Committees
- City-wide Steering Committee Council Member Offices
Masser, Kai. “Participatory Budgeting as Its Critics See It.” Burgerhaushalt, April 30, 2013. http://bit.ly/1dppSxW.
- This report is a critique of the participatory budgeting (PB) process, focusing on lessons learned from the outcomes of a pilot initiative in Germany.
- The reports focuses on three main criticisms leveled against PB:
- Participatory Budgeting can be a time consuming process that is barely comprehensive to the people it seeks to engage, as a result there is need for information about the budget, and a strong willingness to participate in preparing it.
- Differences in the social structure of the participants inevitably affect the outcome – the process must be designed to avoid low participation or over-representation of one group.
- PB cannot be sustained over a prolonged period and should therefore focus on one aspect of the budgeting process. The article points to outcomes that show that citizens may find it considerably more attractive to make proposals on how to spend money than on how to save it, which may not always result in the best outcomes.
OECD. “Citizens as Partners: Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-making.” The IT Law Wiki. http://bit.ly/1aIGquc.
- This OECD policy report features discussion on the concept of crowdsourcing as a new form or representation and public participation in OECD countries, with the understanding that it creates avenues for citizens to participate in public policy-making within the overall framework of representative democracy.
- The report provides a wealth of comparative information on measures adopted in OECD countries to strengthen citizens’ access to information, to enhance consultation and encourage their active participation in policy-making.
Tchorbadjiiski, Angel. “Liquid Democracy.” Rheinisch-Westf alische Technische Hochschule Aachen Informatik 4 ComSy, 2012. http://bit.ly/1eOsbIH.
- This thesis presents discusses how Liquid Democracy (LD) makes it for citizens participating in an election to “either take part directly or delegate [their] own voting rights to a representative/expert. This way the voters are not limited to taking one decision for legislative period as opposed to indirect (representative) democracy, but are able to actively and continuously take part in the decision-making process.”
- Tchorbadjiiski argues that, “LD provides great flexibility. You do not have to decide yourself on the program of a political party, which only suits some aspects of your opinion.” Through LD, “all voters can choose between direct and indirect democracy creating a hybrid government form suiting their own views.”
- In addition to describing the potential benefits of Liquid Democracy, Tchorbadjiiski focuses on the challenge of maintaining privacy and security in such a system. He proposes a platform that “allows for secure and anonymous voting in such a way that it is not possible, even for the system operator, to find out the identity of a voter or to prevent certain voters (for example minority groups) from casting a ballot.”