Essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Journal of Democracy: “The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The transitions in Southern Europe and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over 110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores every year since then. The year 2014 has not been good for democracy, with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expectations that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degenerated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, similar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the United States and the European Union, which experienced massive economic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies, from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their performance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tunisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many democratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and existing democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for democratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions… (More)”
Open Standards and the Digital Age
Book by Andrew L. Russell: “How did openness become a foundational value for the networks of the twenty-first century? Open Standards and the Digital Age answers this question through an interdisciplinary history of information networks that pays close attention to the politics of standardization. For much of the twentieth century, information networks such as the monopoly Bell System and the American military’s Arpanet were closed systems subject to centralized control. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, engineers in the United States and Europe experimented with design strategies to create new digital networks. In the process, they embraced discourses of “openness” to describe their ideological commitments to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and participatory democracy. The rhetoric of openness has flourished – for example, in movements for open government, open source software, and open access publishing – but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other “open” systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control….(More).”
Manual: Start building digital by default services
UK Government Service Design Manual: “…The service manual is here to help service managers and digital delivery teams across government make services so good that people prefer to use them. It’s made up of two things;
- the Digital by Default Service Standard, a list of criteria that services and teams must meet before they go live
- the Government Service Design Manual, a pool of guidance and advice about how to design and build digital services from teams across government…
Typically, government services are built after long, costly procurement processes.
In this way of working, users are seldom – if ever – consulted about the service they’ll be using. The first time the public might see a service is when it goes live, by which time it’s too late to make any changes when it turns out to be unfit for purpose.
This way of working tends to encourage the creation of overly prescriptive policy, which then forms the basis of the requirements document. Instead, teams need to constantly iterate against user feedback.
This means building and testing in small chunks, working quickly to deliver improvements to a service. Teams will work out how to best meet the needs of users, releasing code regularly and working in an agile way. This new approach allows closer working between policy and delivery teams and as a result, the development of more responsive policy, two aims of the Civil Service Reform plan….
When you’re confident about the basics of service design and the requirement of the standard, you can start exploring the advice and guidance in the manual.
You can explore the manual by phase of delivery, specific roles, or by topic…(More).”
The Next 5 Years in Open Data: 3 Key Trends to Watch
Kevin Merritt (Socrata Inc.) at GovTech: “2014 was a pivotal year in the evolution of open data for one simple and powerful reason – it went mainstream and was widely adopted on just about every continent. Open data is now table stakes. Any government that is not participating in open data is behind its peers…The move toward data-driven government will absolutely accelerate between 2015 and 2020, thanks to three key trends.
1. Comparative Analytics for Government Employees
The first noteworthy trend that will drive open data change in 2015 is that open data technology offerings will deliver first-class benefits to public-sector employees. This means government employees will be able to derive enormous insights from their own data and act on them in a deep, meaningful and analytical way. Until only recently, the primary beneficiaries of open data initiatives were external stakeholders: developers and entrepreneurs; scientists, researchers, analysts, journalists and economists; and ordinary citizens lacking technical training. The open data movement, until now, has ignored an important class of stakeholders – government employees….
2. Increased Global Expansion for Open Data
The second major trend fueling data-driven government is that 2015 will be a year of accelerating adoption of open data internationally.
Right now, for example, open data is being adopted prolifically in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
….
We will continue to see international governments adopt open data in 2015 for a variety of reasons. Northern European governments, for instance, are interested in efficiency and performance right now; Southern European governments, on the other hand, are currently focused on transparency, trust, and credibility. Despite the different motivations, the open data technology solutions are the same. And, looking out beyond 2015, it’s important to note that Southern European governments will also adopt open data to help increase job creation and improve delivery of services.
3. “Open Data” Will Simply Become “Government Data”
The third trend that we’ll see in the arena of open data lies a little further out on the horizon, and it will be surprising. In my opinion, the term “open data” may disappear within a decade; and in its place will simply be the term “government data.”
That’s because virtually all government data will be open data by 2020; and government data will be everywhere it needs to be – available to the public as fast as it’s created, processed and accumulated….(More).”
Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe
in Open Democracy: “…The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts. …
Today, anybody in the world can build a Geiger counter, measure radiation and share the results with others across the world. The technology is free and easy to build at home. It’s based on an open source micro-processor called “Arduino,” and all the instructions required to build the machine are available online. There’s also an online platform to share data and get support in any phase of the process called “Safecast.”
Fast forward to the 86th Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 2014, when Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar for best Foreign Language Film. Many Italians were unhappy with the film’s portrayal of a society wrapped in a beautiful cover made of Italian heritage and landscapes. So a young film producer called Lorenzo Gangarossa had the idea of asking ordinary citizens to contribute to presenting a different image of their country.
The result was “Italy in a Day,” one of the first crowd-sourced films to be released. 44,000 videos were filmed by Italians on the same day, edited together by Gabriele Salvatores, and produced into a film by Ridley Scott. When thousands of Italians were given the chance to co-create a composite image of their country, the resulting picture was the opposite of the one that had been celebrated by film critics and the media.
Based on the same principles of large-scale participation, the INSITE group has developed a robust methodology designed to engage people in assessing the collective impact of social innovation itself. “Emergence by Design” has developed a new set of tools that allow all the participants in a project to monitor and assess questions of impact and effectiveness. It’s called “dynamic evaluation.” … (More).
Insurance company rewards customers for every 10,000 steps
Springwise: “We’ve already seen Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s EatRight rewards scheme use tracking technology to monitor employee’s food shopping habits and Alfa-Bank Alfa-Bank in Russia — which rewards customers for every step they run. Now, Oscar Insurance is providing customers with a free Misfit Flash fitness tracker and encouraging them to reach their recommended 10,000 steps a day – rewarding them with up to USD 240 per year in Amazon vouchers.
The New York-based startup were inspired by the US Surgeon Generals’ recommendation that walking every day can have a real impact on many of the top killers in US — such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Oscar Insurance’s new policy is distinctive amongst similar initiatives in that it aims to encourage regular, gentle exercise with a small reward — USD 1 per day or USD 20 per day in Amazon gift cards — but has no built it financial punishments.
To begin, customers download the companion app which automatically syncs with their free wristband. They are then set a personal daily goal — influenced by their current fitness and sometimes as low as 2000 steps per day. The initial goal gradually increases much like a normal fitness regime. This is the latest addition to Oscar Insurance’s technology driven policies, which also enable the customer to connect with healthcare professionals in their area and allow patients and doctors to track and review their healthcare details….”
Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge
Article by Cem Dilmegani, Bengi Korkmaz, and Martin Lundqvist from McKinsey: “Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of government digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and integration, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.
Indeed, governments around the world are doing their best to meet citizen demand and capture benefits. More than 130 countries have online services. For example, Estonia’s 1.3 million residents can use electronic identification cards to vote, pay taxes, and access more than 160 services online, from unemployment benefits to property registration. Turkey’s Social Aid Information System has consolidated multiple government data sources into one system to provide citizens with better access and faster decisions on its various aid programs. The United Kingdom’s gov.uk site serves as a one-stop information hub for all government departments. Such online services also provide greater access for rural populations, improve quality of life for those with physical infirmities, and offer options for those whose work and lifestyle demands don’t conform to typical daytime office hours.
However, despite all the progress made, most governments are far from capturing the full benefits of digitization. To do so, they need to take their digital transformations deeper, beyond the provision of online services through e-government portals, into the broader business of government itself. That means looking for opportunities to improve productivity, collaboration, scale, process efficiency, and innovation….
While digital transformation in the public sector is particularly challenging, a number of successful government initiatives show that by translating private-sector best practices into the public context it is possible to achieve broader and deeper public-sector digitization. Each of the six most important levers is best described by success stories….(More).”
Businesses dig for treasure in open data
Lindsay Clark in ComputerWeekly: “Open data, a movement which promises access to vast swaths of information held by public bodies, has started getting its hands dirty, or rather its feet.
Before a spade goes in the ground, construction and civil engineering projects face a great unknown: what is down there? In the UK, should someone discover anything of archaeological importance, a project can be halted – sometimes for months – while researchers study the site and remove artefacts….
During an open innovation day hosted by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), open data services and technology firm Democrata proposed analytics could predict the likelihood of unearthing an archaeological find in any given location. This would help developers understand the likely risks to construction and would assist archaeologists in targeting digs more accurately. The idea was inspired by a presentation from the Archaeological Data Service in the UK at the event in June 2014.
The proposal won support from the STFC which, together with IBM, provided a nine-strong development team and access to the Hartree Centre’s supercomputer – a 131,000 core high-performance facility. For natural language processing of historic documents, the system uses two components of IBM’s Watson – the AI service which famously won the US TV quiz show Jeopardy. The system uses SPSS modelling software, the language R for algorithm development and Hadoop data repositories….
The proof of concept draws together data from the University of York’s archaeological data, the Department of the Environment, English Heritage, Scottish Natural Heritage, Ordnance Survey, Forestry Commission, Office for National Statistics, the Land Registry and others….The system analyses sets of indicators of archaeology, including historic population dispersal trends, specific geology, flora and fauna considerations, as well as proximity to a water source, a trail or road, standing stones and other archaeological sites. Earlier studies created a list of 45 indicators which was whittled down to seven for the proof of concept. The team used logistic regression to assess the relationship between input variables and come up with its prediction….”
The Emerging Science of Human-Data Interaction
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The rapidly evolving ecosystems associated with personal data is creating an entirely new field of scientific study, say computer scientists. And this requires a much more powerful ethics-based infrastructure….
Now Richard Mortier at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a few pals say the increasingly complex, invasive and opaque use of data should be a call to arms to change the way we study data, interact with it and control its use. Today, they publish a manifesto describing how a new science of human-data interaction is emerging from this “data ecosystem” and say that it combines disciplines such as computer science, statistics, sociology, psychology and behavioural economics.
They start by pointing out that the long-standing discipline of human-computer interaction research has always focused on computers as devices to be interacted with. But our interaction with the cyber world has become more sophisticated as computing power has become ubiquitous, a phenomenon driven by the Internet but also through mobile devices such as smartphones. Consequently, humans are constantly producing and revealing data in all kinds of different ways.
Mortier and co say there is an important distinction between data that is consciously created and released such as a Facebook profile; observed data such as online shopping behaviour; and inferred data that is created by other organisations about us, such as preferences based on friends’ preferences.
This leads the team to identify three key themes associated with human-data interaction that they believe the communities involved with data should focus on.
The first of these is concerned with making data, and the analytics associated with it, both transparent and comprehensible to ordinary people. Mortier and co describe this as the legibility of data and say that the goal is to ensure that people are clearly aware of the data they are providing, the methods used to draw inferences about it and the implications of this.
Making people aware of the data being collected is straightforward but understanding the implications of this data collection process and the processing that follows is much harder. In particular, this could be in conflict with the intellectual property rights of the companies that do the analytics.
An even more significant factor is that the implications of this processing are not always clear at the time the data is collected. A good example is the way the New York Times tracked down an individual after her seemingly anonymized searches were published by AOL. It is hard to imagine that this individual had any idea that the searches she was making would later allow her identification.
The second theme is concerned with giving people the ability to control and interact with the data relating to them. Mortier and co describe this as “agency”. People must be allowed to opt in or opt out of data collection programs and to correct data if it turns out to be wrong or outdated and so on. That will require simple-to-use data access mechanisms that have yet to be developed
The final theme builds on this to allow people to change their data preferences in future, an idea the team call “negotiability”. Something like this is already coming into force in the European Union where the Court of Justice has recently begun to enforce the “right to be forgotten”, which allows people to remove information from search results under certain circumstances….”
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6159 Human-Data Interaction: The Human Face of the Data-Driven Society
Mini Metro
“Description: Mini Metro is a minimalist subway simulation game about designing efficient subway networks. The player must constantly redesign their line layout to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing city.
History
The prototype for Mini Metro, Mind the Gap, was created at the end of April 2013 during the three-day Ludum Dare 26 Jam. The first pre-alpha build was made public in September 2013. Mini Metro was put up on Steam Greenlight in March 2014 and was greenlit within three weeks. The Early Access release is scheduled for the 11th of August.
Features
- Compelling, constructive, hectic, relaxed gameplay. If that makes sense.
- Three game modes: Commuter for quick scored games, Scenic for stress-free sandbox play, and Rush Hour for the ultimate challenge. (only Commuter is in so far, Scenic will follow soon)
- Three real-world cities to design subways for (London, New York City and Paris), with many more being added before release. Each has a unique colour theme, set of obstacles, and pace.
- Random city growth, so each game plays out differently. A strategy that proved successful last game may not help you in the next.
- Each game’s map is a work of art, built by you in the classic abstract subway style of Harry Beck. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
- Each game’s map is a work of art, built by the player in the classic abstract subway style. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
- Dynamic soundtrack by Disasterpeace.
- Colorblind and night modes.
- Trains!”