Europe

Platform tackles extremist views with blockchain technology

Curated on December 4, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “The phrase ‘fake news’, whether used accurately or not, is creating a situation where any voice can claim legitimacy or call reliable sources into question. However, we’ve already covered innovations using either the blockchain or algorithms on Facebook to provide clarity to the situation, and now UK-based Ananas is looking to use cryptocurrency as an incentive for reliable knowledge-sharing.

Ananas is a charitable foundation whose main aim is to align the interests of disparate groups by encouraging knowledge diversity and combining honest discussion with reward. Users will contribute to an open-book platform where subjects and ideas are open to misrepresentation. As well as sharing knowledge, users can be rewarded by earning ‘Anacoins’, an ethereum-based cryptocurrency that can be transferred into other currencies. While users who wish to contribute content will initially have to buy Anacoins, they can earn more by having their comments and sources verified and by demonstrating supportive behavior, via voting from other community members. The company believes this will empower individuals and communities to map their own belief systems and will result in a structured framework of references and resources.

Additionally, users are further rewarded by having the value of the coin increase, as only a limited number of Anacoins will be made. Ananas’s first project is referred to as the ‘living Quran’ — a digital version of the holy text that scholars and community leaders will be able to provide commentary on. The content is available to anyone via a free app, with users able to filter information from certain groups, acting as a ‘map’ of knowledge across different subcultures and viewpoints, with the overall aim to prevent a misrepresentation of ideas and potentially fight extremism and Islamophobia. Anacoins are currently available through the ethical ICO (Initial Coin Offering) platform Chainstarter, with a current value of fifty Anacoins equal to USD 1.00….(More).

Influenzanet: Citizens Among 10 Countries Collaborating to Monitor Influenza in Europe

Curated on December 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Carl E Koppeschaar et al in the Special Issue of JMIR Public Health and Surveillance on Participatory Disease Surveillance: “The wide availability of the Internet and the growth of digital communication technologies have become an important tool for epidemiological studies and health surveillance. Influenzanet is a participatory surveillance system monitoring the incidence of influenza-like illness (ILI) in Europe since 2003. It is based on data provided by volunteers who self-report their symptoms via the Internet throughout the influenza season and currently involves 10 countries.

Objective: In this paper, we describe the Influenzanet system and provide an overview of results from several analyses that have been performed with the collected data, which include participant representativeness analyses, data validation (comparing ILI incidence rates between Influenzanet and sentinel medical practice networks), identification of ILI risk factors, and influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) studies previously published. Additionally, we present new VE analyses for the Netherlands, stratified by age and chronic illness and offer suggestions for further work and considerations on the continuity and sustainability of the participatory system.

Methods: Influenzanet comprises country-specific websites where residents can register to become volunteers to support influenza surveillance and have access to influenza-related information. Participants are recruited through different communication channels. Following registration, volunteers submit an intake questionnaire with their postal code and sociodemographic and medical characteristics, after which they are invited to report their symptoms via a weekly electronic newsletter reminder. Several thousands of participants have been engaged yearly in Influenzanet, with over 36,000 volunteers in the 2015-16 season alone.

Results: In summary, for some traits and in some countries (eg, influenza vaccination rates in the Netherlands), Influenzanet participants were representative of the general population. However, for other traits, they were not (eg, participants underrepresent the youngest and oldest age groups in 7 countries). The incidence of ILI in Influenzanet was found to be closely correlated although quantitatively higher than that obtained by the sentinel medical practice networks. Various risk factors for acquiring an ILI infection were identified. The VE studies performed with Influenzanet data suggest that this surveillance system could develop into a complementary tool to measure the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, eventually in real time.

Conclusions: Results from these analyses illustrate that Influenzanet has developed into a fast and flexible monitoring system that can complement the traditional influenza surveillance performed by sentinel medical practices. The uniformity of Influenzanet allows for direct comparison of ILI rates between countries. It also has the important advantage of yielding individual data, which can be used to identify risk factors. The way in which the Influenzanet system is constructed allows the collection of data that could be extended beyond those of ILI cases to monitor pandemic influenza and other common or emerging diseases….(More)”. (see also https://www.influenzanet.eu/)

The world watches Reykjavik’s digital democracy experiment

Curated on November 24, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Jacobs at the Financial Times: “When Iceland’s banks collapsed and mistrust of politicians soared during the 2008 financial crisis, two programmers thought software could help salvage the country’s democracy. They created Your Priorities, a platform that allows citizens to suggest laws, policies and budget measures, which can then be voted up or down by other users. “

We thought: If we manage somehow to connect regular citizens with government then we create a dialogue that will ultimately result in better decisions,” says Robert Bjarnason, chief executive of Citizens Foundation, the company that created Your Priorities. Mr Bjarnason and his fellow co-founder of Citizens Foundation, Gunnar Grimsson, used the software to create a policy website called Better Reykjavik just before the city’s 2010 elections.

Jon Gnarr, Reykjavik’s then mayor, encouraged people to use the platform to give him policy suggestions and he committed to funding the top 10 ideas each month. Seven years on, Better Reykjavik has some 20,000 users and 769 of their ideas have been approved by the city council. These include increasing financial support for the city’s homeless, converting a former power station into a youth centre, introducing gender-neutral toilets and naming a street after Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

Your Priorities has also been tested in other countries, including Estonia, Australia, Scotland, Wales, Norway and Malta. In Estonia, seven proposals have become law, including one limiting donations from companies to political parties and another that requires the national parliament to debate any proposal with more than 1,000 votes.

The software is part of a global trend for people to seek more influence over their politicians. In Australia, for example, the MiVote app allows people to vote on issues being debated in parliament.

…At times, the portal can become a “crazy sounding board” Mr Svansson concedes. The Reykjavik council has put in quality controls to filter out hare-brained proposals, although Mr Bjarnason says he has had to remove inappropriate content only a handful of times….During Iceland’s parliamentary elections last month, 10 out of 11 political parties published their election pitches on Your Priorities, allowing voters to comment on policies and propose new ones. This interactive manifesto website attracted 22,000 visitors.

Testing the efficacy of platforms such as Your Priorities is perhaps easier in Reykjavik — population 123,000 — than in larger cities. Even so, integrating the site into the council’s policymaking apparatus has been slower than Mr Bjarnason had foreseen. “Everything takes a long time and sometimes it is like you are swimming in syrup,” he says. “Still, it has been a really good experience working with the city.”…(More).

Use of the websites of parliaments to promote citizen deliberation in the process of public decision-making. Comparative study of ten countries

Curated on November 23, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Santiago Giraldo Luquet in Communications and Society: “This study develops a longitudinal research (2010-2015) on 10 countries – 5 European countries (France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy and Spain) and 5 American countries (Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and the USA). The aim is to compare how the parliaments use its official websites in order to promote the political participation process in the citizenship. The study focuses on the deliberation axe (Macintosh, 2004, Hagen, 2000, Vedel, 2003, 2007) and in the way that representative institutions define a digital strategy to create an online public sphere.

Starting with the recognition of Web 2.0 as a debate sphere and as a place of reconfiguration of the traditional –and utopian- Greek Agora, the study adopts the ‘deliberate’ political action axe to evaluate, qualitatively and quantitatively -using a content analysis methodology- the use of the Web 2.0 tools made by the legislative bodies of the analysed countries. The article shows how, which and what parliaments use Web 2.0 tools – integrated in their web page – as a scenario that allows deliberation at the different legislative processes that integrate the examined political systems. Finally, the comparative results show the main differences and similarities between the countries, as well as a tendency to reduce deliberation tools offering by representative institutions in the countries sampled…(More)”.

Deep Mind – Deep Reform

Curated on November 18, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “The core characteristics of modern Western societies are market-based economies, relatively extensive welfare systems and the rule of law presided over by representative democracy. All three of these elements have been subject to sustained critique in recent years….

Like capitalism, democracy, both in principle and practice, has always had its critics. But, again, a number of current factors have combined to increase the volume. Democratic institutions and the politicians who occupy them have become even less trusted and more unpopular than usual, something reflecting both the failure of leadership and policy and a succession of exposes of misbehaviour. Democracies have also generated outcomes – particularly Trump and Brexit – which seem to go beyond the normal swings of party politics into acts of collective self-harm. Finally, the economic performance and comparative effectiveness of Chinese leadership and the capacity of Putin’s Russia to get away with aggression, dishonesty and sabotage has led more people to question whether representative democracy really is the most resilient basis for either political authority or social progress in the 21st century.

This state of disenchantment could be merely unhappy but it is in reality potentially catastrophic. Because, despite all the negativity we direct at the way things are there is as yet in countries like ours no viable or popular alternative to the persistence of these systems in their current form. To coin a phrase ’democracy, welfare state and financialised capitalism; can’t live with them, can’t live without them’. The question then is how do we radically renew the dominant systems of the Western world before their failures and our disillusionment drives us into making even more profound mistakes than the ones we and our leaders have already committed?

4 ways of coordinating human activity

The starting point is surely to think more deeply about this system as a whole. I have written before about an approach which views societies, and systems within those societies, through the prism of three active, and one more passive, ways of coordinating all human activity. The active forms are the hierarchical, the solidaristic and the individualistic. Each of these forms of coordination is complex and ubiquitous and each is reflected in everything from our day to day choices to political ideologies and organisational forms.

In modern societies the primary hierarchical institution is the state. Individualism – albeit a partial form – is most powerfully expressed in the dynamism of market. While solidarity, which is more internally divergent in form, tends to be gauged by reference to social justice, on the one hand, and a shared sense of identity and belonging on the other. Right now we are experiencing a crisis of confidence and legitimacy in all three domains. One sign of this is that the fourth major way of thinking about social change – fatalism – has become ever stronger.

Before exploring responses to our plight it is important to note two important lessons from history. First, when liberal democracies get all three active forms of coordination working together they can achieve major advances in human welfare. This was, for example, the case during the decades of the post war miracle when economic growth and living standards rose, welfare expanded, inequality fell and the state was more confident and trusted. In general, Scandinavian countries have managed to achieve a better balance which is why they nearly always come out top of surveys on social outcomes and citizen wellbeing.

The second lesson is that these periods of healthy balance between state, market and society are the exception not the rule. Thomas Piketty has provided strong evidence that differential returns to labour and capital drive rising inequality which eventually leads to social conflict. Historian Walter Scheidel goes further, arguing that the trend to rising inequality in all societies has only ever been broken by plague, war or bloody revolution.

Politicians and campaigners tend to focus on just one dimension of the system-wide loss of confidence choosing business as their target or the state or, more abstractly, individualism or liberalism. But it is the social system as a whole that needs renewal.

This argument is illustrated by the hard case of technology, the subject of a fascinating and brave lecture at the RSA by Deep Mind’s Mustafa Suleyman. …(More)”.

Lights on the Shadows of Public Procurement: Transparency in government contracting as an antidote to corruption?

Curated on November 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Agnes Czibik, Mihaly Fazekas, Monika Bauhr and Jenny de Fine Licht for Digiwhist: “Transparency is widely promoted as an essential condition for good governance, and as an effective tool against public sector corruption more specifically. Although the empirical evidence on the impact of transparency on corruption is growing, empirical evidence remains mixed. Recent critique holds that a main reason for the lack of robust empirical evidence is that both conceptualization and available measures of government transparency are broad and sometimes imprecise, and that the concepts of transparency are often far removed from the type of information that is relevant to assess government performance.

This paper seeks to develop a more precise conceptualization and measure of transparency that is actionable for the stakeholders of government decisions. The paper uses newly collected data of more than 4 million public procurement contracts between 2006-2015 to investigate the impact of transparency on high-level corruption risks in public procurement across Europe. We find a strong negative impact of overall tender transparency on corruption risks. The results also show that exante transparency, i.e. transparency before the contract is awarded, has a stronger effect on corruption risks than ex-post transparency, i.e. the availability of information after the contract has been awarded to a bidder. This suggest that internal transparency, or transparency first and foremost directed to provide information to the parties involved in the bidding process rather than to outside observers, is the main condition for wider public accountability to emerge. However, the effectiveness of this type of transparency is strengthened in contexts where there is also a wider societal demand for reduced corruption. In sum, our results suggest that transparency can reduce corruption risks if the information is both relevant to inside observers and actionable….(More)”.

Selected Readings on CrowdLaw

Curated on November 14, 2017May 29, 2019 by Gabriella Capone

By Beth Simone Noveck and Gabriella Capone

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 CrowdLaw was published in 2018, and most recently updated on February 13, 2019.

Introduction

The public is beginning to demand — and governments are beginning to provide — new opportunities for the engagement of citizens on an ongoing basis as collaborators in public problem-solving rather than merely as voters. Nowhere is the explosion in citizen participation accelerating more than in the context of lawmaking, where legislators and regulators are turning to new technology to solicit both public opinion and know-how to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the legislative process.

Such participatory lawmaking, known as crowdlaw (also, CrowdLaw), is a tech-enabled approach for the collaborative drafting of legislation, policies or constitutions between governments and citizens. CrowdLaw is an alternative to the traditional method of lawmaking, which is typically done by the political elite — politicians, bureaucrats, and staff — working in legislatures behind closed doors, with little input from the people affected. Instead, this new form of inclusive lawmaking opens the legislative function of government to a broader array of actors.

From Brazil to Iceland to Libya, there is an explosion in new collaborative lawmaking experiments. Despite the growing movement, the field of participatory lawmaking requires further research and experimentation. Given the traditionally deep distrust of groups expressed in the social psychology literature on groupthink, which condemns the presumed tendency of groups to drift to extreme positions, it is not self-evident that crowdlaw practices are better and should be institutionalized. Also, depending on its design, crowdlaw has the potential to accomplish different normative goals, which are often viewed as being at odds, including: improving democratic legitimacy by giving more people a voice in the process, or creating better quality legislation by introducing greater expertise. There is a need to study crowdlaw practices and assess their impact.

To complement our evolving theoretical and empirical research on and case studies of crowdlaw, we have compiled these selected readings on public engagement in lawmaking and policymaking. For reasons of space, we do not include readings on citizen engagement or crowdsourcing and open innovation generally (see GovLab’s Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Opinions and Ideas) but focus, instead, on engagement in these specific institutional contexts.

We invite you to visit Crowd.Law for additional resources, as well as:

CrowdLaw Design Recommendations

CrowdLaw Twitter List

CrowLaw Unconferences:

Annotated Readings

Aitamurto, Tanja – Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide (Paper, 10 pages, 2016)

This paper explores the risks of crowdsourcing for policymaking and the challenges that arise as a result of a severe conflict between the logics of the crowds and the logics of policymaking. Furthermore, he highlights the differences between traditional policymaking, which is done by a small group of experts, and crowdsourced policymaking, which utilizes a large, anonymous crowd with mixed levels of expertise.
“By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice,” and thus how this conflict prevents governments from gathering valuable insights from the crowd’s input. Poblet then addresses how to resolve this conflict and further overcome these challenges.

Atlee, Tom – vTaiwan (Blog series, 5 parts, 2018)

In this five-part blog series, Atlee describes in detail Taiwan’s citizen engagement platform vTaiwan and his takeaways after several months of research.
In order to cover what he deems “an inspiring beginning of a potentially profound evolutionary shift in all aspects of our collective governance,” Atlee divides his findings into the following sections:
- The first post includes a quick introduction and overview of the platform.
- The second delves deeper into its origins, process, and mechanics.
- The third describes two real actions completed by vTaiwan and its associated g0v community.
- The fourth provides a long list of useful sources discovered by Atlee.
- The fifth and final post offers a high-level examination of vTaiwan and makes comments to provide lessons for other governments.

Capone, Gabriella and Beth Simone Noveck – “CrowdLaw”: Online Public Participation in Lawmaking, (Report, 71 pages, 2017)

Capone and Noveck provide recommendations for the thoughtful design of crowdlaw initiatives, a model legislative framework for institutionalizing legislative participation, and a summary of 25 citizen engagement case studies from around the world — all in an effort to acknowledge and promote best crowdlaw practices. The report, written to inform the public engagement strategy of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, can apply to crowdlaw initiatives across different contexts and jurisdictions.
CrowdLaw advocates for engagement opportunities that go beyond citizens suggesting ideas, and inviting integration of participation throughout the legislative life-cycle — from agenda-setting to evaluation of implemented legislation. Additionally, Capone and Noveck highlight the importance of engaging with the recipient public institutions to ensure that participatory actions are useful and desired. Finally, they lay out a research and experimentation agenda for crowdlaw, noting that the increased data capture and sharing, as well as the creation of empirical standards for evaluating initiatives, are integral to the progress and promise of crowdlaw.
The 25 case studies are organized by a six-part taxonomy of: (1) the participatory task requested, (2) the methods employed by the process, (3) the stages of the legislative process, (4) the platforms used, from mobile to in-person meetings, (5) the institutionalization or degree of legal formalization of the initiative, and (6) the mechanisms and metrics for ongoing evaluation of the initiative

Faria, Cristiano Ferri Soares de – The open parliament in the age of the internet: can the people now collaborate with legislatures in lawmaking? (Book, 352 pages, 2013)

Faria explores the concept of participatory parliaments, and how participatory and deliberative democracy can complement existing systems of representative democracy. Currently the first and only full-length book surveying citizen engagement in lawmaking.
As the World Bank’s Tiago Peixoto writes: “This is a text that brings the reader into contact with the main theories and arguments relating to issues of transparency, participation, actors’ strategies, and processes of institutional and technological innovation. […] Cristiano Faria captures the state of the art in electronic democracy experiences in the legislative at the beginning of the 21st century.”
Chapters 4 and 5, deep dive into two case studies: the Chilean Senate’s Virtual Senator project, and the Brazilian House of Representatives e-Democracy project.

Johns, Melissa, and Valentina Saltane (World Bank Global Indicators Group) – Citizen Engagement in Rulemaking: Evidence on Regulatory Practices in 185 Countries (Report, 45 pages, 2016)

This report “presents a new database of indicators measuring the extent to which rulemaking processes are transparent and participatory across 185 countries. […] [It] presents a nses ew global data set on citizen engagement in rulemaking and provides detailed descriptive statistics for the indicators. The paper then provides preliminary analysis on how the level of citizen engagement correlates with other social and economic outcomes. To support this analysis, we developed a composite citizen engagement in rulemaking score around the publication of proposed regulations, consultation on their content and the use of regulatory impact assessments.”
The authors outline the global landscape of regulatory processes and the extent to which citizens are kept privy to regulatory happenings and/or able to participate in them.
Findings include that: “30 of the sampled economies regulators voluntarily publish proposed regulations despite having no formal requirement to do so” and that, “In 98 of the 185 countries surveyed for this paper, ministries and regulatory agencies do not conduct impact assessments of proposed regulations.” Also: “High-income countries tend to perform well on the citizen engagement in rulemaking score.”

Noveck, Beth Simone – The Electronic Revolution in Rulemaking (Journal article, 90 pages, 2004)

Noveck addresses the need for the design of effective practices, beyond the legal procedure that enables participation, in order to fully institutionalize the right to participate in e-rulemaking processes. At the time of writing, e-rulemaking practices failed to “do democracy,” which requires building a community of practice and taking advantage of enabling technology. The work, which focuses on public participation in informal rulemaking processes, explores “how the use of technology in rulemaking can promote more collaborative, less hierarchical, and more sustained forms of participation — in effect, myriad policy juries — where groups deliberate together.”
Noveck looks to reorient on the improvement of participatory practices that exploit new technologies: a design-centered approach as opposed a critique the shortcomings of participation. Technology can be a critical tool in promoting meaningful, deliberative engagement among citizens and government. With this, participation is to be not a procedural right, but a set of technologically-enabled practices enabled by government.

Peña-López, Ismael – decidim.barcelona, Spain. Voice or chatter? Case studies (Report, 54 pages, 2017)

Peña-López analyzes the origins and impact of the opensource decidim.barcelona platform, a component of the city’s broader movement towards participatory democracy. The case is divided into “the institutionalization of the ethos of the 15M Spanish Indignados movement, the context building up to the decidim.barcelona initiative,” and then reviews “its design and philosophy […] in greater detail. […] In the final section, the results of the project are analyzed and the shifts of the initiative in meaning, norms and power, both from the government and the citizen end are discussed.”
A main finding includes that “decidim.barcelona has increased the amount of information in the hands of the citizens, and gathered more citizens around key issues. There has been an increase in participation, with many citizen created proposals being widely supported, legitimated and accepted to be part of the municipality strategic plan. As pluralism has been enhanced without damaging the existing social capital, we can only think that the increase of participation has led to an improvement of democratic processes, especially in bolstering legitimacy around decision making.”

Simon, Julie, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman, and Geoff Mulgan (Nesta) – Digital Democracy: The Tools Transforming Political Engagement (Report, 100 pages, 2017)

Reviews the origins, implementation, and outcomes of 13 case studies representing the best in digital democracy practices that are consistently reviewed. The report then provides six key themes that underpin a “good digital democracy process.” Particularly instructive are the interviews with actors in each of the different projects, and their accounts of what contributed to their project’s successes or failures. The Nesta team also provides insightful analysis as to what contributed to the relative success or failure of the initiatives.

Suteu, Silvia – Constitutional Conventions in the Digital Era: Lessons from Iceland and Ireland (Journal article, 26 pages, 2015)

This piece from the Boston College International & Comparative Law Review “assesses whether the novelty in the means used in modern constitution-making translates further into novelty at a more substantive level, namely, in the quality of the constitution-making process and legitimacy of the end product. Additionally, this Essay analyzes standards of direct democratic engagements, which adequately fit these new developments, with a focus on the cases of Iceland and Ireland.”
It provides four motivations for focusing on constitution-making processes:
- legitimacy: a good process can create a model for future political interactions,
- the correlation between participatory constitution-making and the increased availability of popular involvement mechanisms,
- the breadth of participation is a key factor to ensuring constitutional survival, and
- democratic renewal.
Suteu traces the Icelandic and Irish processes of crowdsourcing their constitutions, the former being known as the first crowdsourced constitution, and the latter being known for its civil society-led We the Citizens initiative which spurred a constitutional convention and the adoption of a citizen assembly in the process.

Bernal, Carlos – How Constitutional Crowd-drafting can enhance Legitimacy in Constitution-Making(Paper, 27 pages, 2018)

Bernal examines the use of online engagement for facilitating citizen participation in constitutional drafting, a process he dubs “Crowddrafting.” Highlighting examples from places such as Kenya, Iceland, and Egypt, he lays out the details the process including key players, methods, actions, and tools.
Bernal poses three stages where citizens can participate in constitutional crowddrafting: foundational, deliberation, and pre-ratification. Citing more examples, he concisely explains how each process works and states their expected outcomes. Although he acknowledges the challenges that it may face, Bernal concludes by proposing that “constitutional crowddrafting is a strategy for strengthening the democratic legitimacy of constitution-making processes by enabling inclusive mechanisms of popular participation of individuals and groups in deliberations, expression of preferences, and decisions related to the content of the constitution.”
He suggests that crowddrafting can increase autonomy, transparency, and equality, and can engage groups or individuals that are often left out of deliberative processes. While it may create potential risks, Bernal explains how to mitigate those risks and achieve the full power of enhanced legitimacy from constitutional crowddrafting.

Finnbogadóttir, Vigdís & Gylfason,Thorvaldur – The New Icelandic Constitution: How did it come about? Where is it? (Book, 2016)

This book, co-authored by a former President of Iceland (also the world’s first democratically directly elected female president) tells the story the crowdsourced Icelandic constitution as a powerful example of participatory democracy.
“In 2010 a nationally elected Constitutional Council met, and four months later a draft constitution was born. On the 20th. of October 2012, The People of Iceland voted to tell their Parliament to ratify it as its new constitution.” Four years later, the book discusses the current state of the Icelandic constitution and explores whether Parliament is respecting the will of the people.

Mitozo, Isabele & Marques, Francisco Paulo Jamil – Context Matters! Looking Beyond Platform Structure to Understand Citizen Deliberation on Brazil’s Portal e‐Democracia (Article, 21 pages, 2019)

This article analyzes the Portal e‐Democracia participatory platform, sponsored by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Since 2009, the online initiative has provided different opportunities for legislators to engage with constituents and representatives through various methods such as surveys, forums, and collaborative wiki tools. Hence, the article examines the participatory behavior of Brazilian citizens during four particular forums hosted on Portal e-Democracia.
The researchers confirmed their hypothesis (i.e., that debates with diverse characteristics can develop even under the same design structures) and also drew several additional conclusions, suggesting that the issue at stake and sociopolitical context of the issue might be more important to characterizing the debate than the structure is.

Alsina, Victòria and Luis Martí, José – The Birth of the CrowdLaw Movement: Tech-Based Citizen Participation, Legitimacy and the Quality of Lawmaking

This paper introduces the idea of CrowdLaw followed by a deep dive into its roots, true meaning, and the inspiration behind its launch.
The authors first distinguish CrowdLaw from other forms of political participation, setting the movement apart from others. They then restate and explain the CrowdLaw Manifesto, a set 12 collaboratively-written principles intended to booster the design, implementation and evaluation of new tech-enabled practices of public engagement in law and policymaking. Finally, the authors conclude by emphasizing the importance of certain qualities that are inherent to the concept of CrowdLaw.

Beth Simone Noveck – Crowdlaw: Collective Intelligence and Lawmaking

In this essay, Noveck provides an all-encompassing and detailed description of the CrowdLaw concept. After establishing the value proposition for CrowdLaw methods, Noveck explores good practices for incorporating them into each stage of the law and policymaking process
Using illustrative examples of successful cases from around the world, Noveck affirms why CrowdLaw should become more widely adopted by highlighting its potential, while simultaneously suggesting how to implement CrowdLaw processes for interested institutions

Open government and citizen participation: an empirical analysis of citizen expectancy towards open government data

Curated on November 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernd W. Wirtz, Jan C. Weyerer, and Michael Rösch in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Citizens are at the heart of open government, and their participation represents a fundamental principle of the latter. Despite their essential role and the great potential benefits open government holds for the public, challenges of use among citizens persist. Previous empirical research has scarcely addressed these issues from a citizen perspective. This study investigates the determinants of open government data use by citizens in Germany. Our results indicate that ease of use, usefulness, as well as transparency, participation and collaboration expectancies significantly determine citizens’ intention to use open government data, which in turn positively affects their word-of-mouth intention. Overall, the findings not only contribute to our understanding of citizen behavior in the context of open government research, especially shedding light on the key aspects of citizens’ usage intention, but also provide implications for both researchers and practitioners.

Points for practitioners

Citizen-based use of open government data (OGD) has multiple facets that practitioners should be aware of. Public administration needs to take account of the important role of accessibility and usability in providing OGD services, with the objective of meeting the major challenge of enabling equal access for all populations via appropriate channels and customization. The content-related preparation of OGD services should seek to enhance transparency, participation and collaboration, raising and shaping respective expectations among citizens. Finally, practitioners should pay particular attention to the opportunities and risks associated with word-of-mouth communication in the context of OGD….(More)”

Crowded Cities

Curated on November 8, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Crowded Cities: “In the Netherlands every year more than 6 billion cigarette filters are tossed onto the street. It’s easy to toss, but it’s not easy to pick them up. Since each filter takes 12 years to degrade we realised it’s time to take action.

Through observation we concluded crows are the smartest around us to reach any spot in the city. What if crows can bring cigarette filters to one of our Crowbars to exchange the filter for food? This is how our adventure started.

The Crowbar

Cigarette filters, you find them in the park next to you in the grass, in dirty ditches and under your shoes. What if we could find a way to collect these butts from all corners of our city and precious parks? With crows, that have become perfectly adapted to city life, we can! By training crows to recognize and pick up cigarette filters we can solve this tenacious problem of city pollution. It is the Crowbar that does the training for us and gives out food as a reward….(More)”.