Europe

Charities Try New Ways to Test Ideas Quickly and Polish Them Later

Curated on March 26, 2014November 28, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “A year ago, a division of TechSoup Global began working on an app to allow donors to buy a hotel room for victims of domestic violence when no other shelter is available. Now that app is a finalist in a competition run by a foundation that combats human trafficking—and a win could mean a grant worth several hundred thousand dollars. The app’s evolution—adding a focus on sex slaves to the initial emphasis on domestic violence—was hardly accidental.
Caravan Studios, the TechSoup division that created the app, has embraced a new management approach popular in Silicon Valley known as “lean start-up.”
The principles, which are increasingly popular among nonprofits, emphasize experimentation over long-term planning and urge groups to get products and services out to clients as early as possible so the organizations can learn from feedback and make changes.
When the app, known as SafeNight, was still early in the design phase, Caravan posted details about the project on its website, including applications for grants that Caravan had not yet received. In lean-start-up lingo, Caravan put out a “minimal viable product” and hoped for feedback that would lead to a better app.
Caravan soon heard from antitrafficking organizations, which were interested in the same kind of service. Caravan eventually teamed up with the Polaris Project and the State of New Jersey, which were working on a similar app, to jointly create an app for the final round of the antitrafficking contest. Humanity United, the foundation sponsoring the contest, plans to award $1.8-million to as many as three winners later this month.
Marnie Webb, CEO of Caravan, which is building an array of apps designed to curb social problems, says lean-start-up principles help Caravan work faster and meet real needs.
“The central idea is that any product that we develop will get better if it lives as much of its life as possible outside of our office,” Ms. Webb says. “If we had kept SafeNight inside and polished it and polished it, it would have been super hard to bring on a partner because we would have invested too much.”….
Nonprofits developing new tech tools are among the biggest users of lean-start-up ideas.
Upwell, an ocean-conservation organization founded in 2011, scans the web for lively ocean-related discussions and then pushes to turn them into full-fledged movements through social-media campaigns.
Lean principles urge groups to steer clear of “vanity metrics,” such as site visits, that may sound impressive but don’t reveal much. Upwell tracks only one number—“social mentions”—the much smaller group of people who actually say something about an issue online.
After identifying a hot topic, Upwell tries to assemble a social-media strategy within 24 hours—what it calls a “minimum viable campaign.”
“We do the least amount of work to get something out the door that will get results and information,” says Rachel Dearborn, Upwell’s campaign director.
Campaigns that don’t catch on are quickly scrapped. But campaigns that do catch on get more time, energy, and money from Upwell.
After Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, a prominent writer on ocean issues and others began pushing the idea that revitalizing the oyster beds near New York City could help protect the shore from future storm surges. Upwell’s “I (Oyster) New York” campaign featured a catchy logo and led to an even bigger spike in attention.

‘Build-Measure-Learn’

Some organizations that could hardly be called start-ups are also using lean principles. GuideStar, the 20-year-old aggregator of financial information about charities, is using the lean approach to develop tools more quickly that meet the needs of its users.
The lean process promotes short “build-measure-learn” cycles, in which a group frequently updates a product or service based on what it hears from its customers.
GuideStar and the Nonprofit Finance Fund have developed a tool called Financial Scan that allows charities to see how they compare with similar groups on various financial measures, such as their mix of earned revenue and grant funds.
When it analyzed who was using the tool, GuideStar found heavy interest from both foundations and accounting firms, says Evan Paul, GuideStar’s senior director of products and marketing.
In the future, he says, GuideStar may create three versions of Financial Scan to meet the distinct interests of charities, foundations, and accountants.
“We want to get more specific about how people are using our data to make decisions so that we can help make those decisions better and faster,” Mr. Paul says….

Lean Start-Up: a Glossary of Terms for a Hot New Management Approach

Build-Measure-Learn

Instead of spending considerable time developing a product or service for a big rollout, organizations should consider using a continuous feedback loop: “build” a program or service, even if it is not fully fleshed out; “measure” how clients are affected; and “learn” by improving the program or going in a new direction. Repeat the cycle.

Minimum Viable Product

An early version of a product or service that may be lacking some features. This approach allows an organization to obtain feedback from clients and quickly determine the usefulness of a product or service and how to improve it.

Get Out of the Building

To determine whether a product or service is needed, talk to clients and share your ideas with them before investing heavily.

A/B Testing

Create two versions of a product or service, show them to different groups, and see which performs best.

Failing Fast

By quickly realizing that a product or service isn’t viable, organizations save time and money and gain valuable information for their next effort.

Pivot

Making a significant change in strategy when the early testing of a minimum viable product shows that the product or service isn’t working or isn’t needed.

Vanity Metrics

Measures that seem to provide a favorable picture but don’t accurately capture the impact of a product. An example might be a tally of website page views. A more meaningful measure—or an “actionable metric,” in the lean lexicon—might be the number of active users of an online service.
Sources: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries; The Ultimate Dictionary of Lean for Social Good, a publication by Lean Impact”

Behavioural economics and public policy

Curated on March 23, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Harford in the Financial Times: “The past decade has been a triumph for behavioural economics, the fashionable cross-breed of psychology and economics. First there was the award in 2002 of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics to a psychologist, Daniel Kahneman – the man who did as much as anything to create the field of behavioural economics. Bestselling books were launched, most notably by Kahneman himself (Thinking, Fast and Slow , 2011) and by his friend Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge (2008). Behavioural economics seems far sexier than the ordinary sort, too: when last year’s Nobel was shared three ways, it was the behavioural economist Robert Shiller who grabbed all the headlines.

Behavioural economics is one of the hottest ideas in public policy. The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) uses the discipline to craft better policies, and in February was part-privatised with a mission to advise governments around the world. The White House announced its own behavioural insights team last summer.

So popular is the field that behavioural economics is now often misapplied as a catch-all term to refer to almost anything that’s cool in popular social science, from the storycraft of Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (2000), to the empirical investigations of Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics (2005).
Yet, as with any success story, the backlash has begun. Critics argue that the field is overhyped, trivial, unreliable, a smokescreen for bad policy, an intellectual dead-end – or possibly all of the above. Is behavioural economics doomed to reflect the limitations of its intellectual parents, psychology and economics? Or can it build on their strengths and offer a powerful set of tools for policy makers and academics alike?…”

The Unwisdom of Crowds  

Curated on March 23, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Applebaum on why people-powered revolutions are overrated in the New Republic: “..Yet a successful street revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive, positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya. Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors. Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917.
The crowd may not even represent the majority. Because a street revolution makes good copy, and because it provides great photographs, we often mistakenly confuse “people power” with democracy itself. In fact, the creation of democratic institutions—courts, legal systems, bills of rights—is a long and tedious process that often doesn’t interest foreign journalists at all. Tunisia’s ratification of a new constitution earlier this year represented the most significant achievement of the Arab Spring to date, but the agonizing negotiations that led up to that moment were hard for outsiders to understand—and not remotely telegenic
Equally, it is a dangerous mistake to imagine that “people power” can ever be a substitute for actual elections. On television, a demonstration can loom larger than it should. In both Thailand and Turkey, an educated middle class has recently taken to the streets to protest against democratically elected leaders who have grown increasingly corrupt and autocratic, but who might well be voted back into office tomorrow. In Venezuela, elections are not fair and the media is not free, but the president is supported by many Venezuelans who still have faith in his far-left rhetoric, however much his policies may be damaging the country. Demonstrations might help bring change in some of these countries, but if the change is to be legitimate—and permanent—the electorate will eventually have to endorse it.
As we often forget, some of the most successful transitions to democracy did not involve crowds at all. Chile became a democracy because its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, decided it would become one. In early 1989, well before mass demonstrations in Prague or Berlin, the leaders of the Polish opposition sat down at a large round table with their former jailers and negotiated their way out of communism. There are no spectacular photographs of these transitions, and many people found them unsatisfying, even unjust. But Chile and Poland remain democracies today, not least because their new leaders came to power without any overt opposition from the old regime.
It would be nice if these kinds of transitions were more common, but not every dictator is willing to smooth the path toward change. For that reason, the post-revolutionary moment is often more important than the revolution itself, for this is when the emotion of the mob has to be channeled rapidly—immediately—into legitimate institutions. Not everybody finds this easy. In the wake of the Egyptian revolution, demonstrators found it difficult to abandon Tahrir Square. “We won’t leave because we have to make sure this country is set on the right path,” one protester said at the time. In fact, he should already have been at home, back in his neighborhood, perhaps creating the grassroots political party that might have given Egyptians a real alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood…”

Statistics and Open Data: Harvesting unused knowledge, empowering citizens and improving public services

Curated on March 21, 2014January 25, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

House of Commons Public Administration Committee (Tenth Report):
“1. Open data is playing an increasingly important role in Government and society. It is data that is accessible to all, free of restrictions on use or redistribution and also digital and machine-readable so that it can be combined with other data, and thereby made more useful. This report looks at how the vast amounts of data generated by central and local Government can be used in open ways to improve accountability, make Government work better and strengthen the economy.

2. In this inquiry, we examined progress against a series of major government policy announcements on open data in recent years, and considered the prospects for further development. We heard of government open data initiatives going back some years, including the decision in 2009 to release some Ordnance Survey (OS) data as open data, and the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) which makes OS data available for free to the public sector. The 2012 Open Data White Paper ‘Unleashing the Potential’ says that transparency through open data is “at the heart” of the Government’s agenda and that opening up would “foster innovation and reform public services”. In 2013 the report of the independently-chaired review by Stephan Shakespeare, Chief Executive of the market research and polling company YouGov, of the use, re-use, funding and regulation of Public Sector Information urged Government to move fast to make use of data. He criticised traditional public service attitudes to data before setting out his vision:

3. This was followed by publication in October 2013 of a National Action Plan which sets out the Government’s view of the economic potential of open data as well as its aspirations for greater transparency.

4. This inquiry is part of our wider programme of work on statistics and their use in Government. A full description of the studies is set out under the heading “Statistics” in the inquiries section of our website, which can be found at www.parliament.uk/pasc. For this inquiry we received 30 pieces of written evidence and took oral evidence from 12 witnesses. We are grateful to all those who have provided evidence and to our Specialist Adviser on statistics, Simon Briscoe, for his assistance with this inquiry.”

Table of Contents:

Summary
1 Introduction
2 Improving accountability through open data
3 Open Data and Economic Growth
4 Improving Government through open data
5 Moving faster to make a reality of open data
6 A strategic approach to open data?
Conclusion
Conclusions and recommendations

After the Protests

Curated on March 20, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekc in the New York Times on why social media is fueling a boom-and-bust cycle of political: “LAST Wednesday, more than 100,000 people showed up in Istanbul for a funeral that turned into a mass demonstration. No formal organization made the call. The news had come from Twitter: Berkin Elvan, 15, had died. He had been hit in the head by a tear-gas canister on his way to buy bread during the Gezi protests last June. During the 269 days he spent in a coma, Berkin’s face had become a symbol of civic resistance shared on social media from Facebook to Instagram, and the response, when his family tweeted “we lost our son” and then a funeral date, was spontaneous.

Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment….

But after all that, in the approaching local elections, the ruling party is expected to retain its dominance.

Compare this with what it took to produce and distribute pamphlets announcing the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, and a few students sneaked into the duplicating room and worked all night to secretly mimeograph 52,000 leaflets to be distributed by hand with the help of 68 African-American political, religious, educational and labor organizations throughout the city. Even mundane tasks like coordinating car pools (in an era before there were spreadsheets) required endless hours of collaborative work.

By the time the United States government was faced with the March on Washington in 1963, the protest amounted to not just 300,000 demonstrators but the committed partnerships and logistics required to get them all there — and to sustain a movement for years against brutally enforced Jim Crow laws. That movement had the capacity to leverage boycotts, strikes and demonstrations to push its cause forward. Recent marches on Washington of similar sizes, including the 50th anniversary march last year, also signaled discontent and a desire for change, but just didn’t pose the same threat to the powers that be.

Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change. That’s one reason the same-sex marriage movement, which uses online and offline visibility as a key strategy, has been so successful, and it’s also why authoritarian governments try to ban social media.

During the Gezi protests, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Twitter and other social media a “menace to society.” More recently, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law greatly increasing the government’s ability to censor online content and expand surveillance, and Mr. Erdogan said he would consider blocking access to Facebook and YouTube. It’s also telling that one of the first moves by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia before annexing Crimea was to shut down the websites of dissidents in Russia.
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.”

The data gold rush

Curated on March 19, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Neelie KROES (European Commission): “Nearly 200 years ago, the industrial revolution saw new networks take over. Not just a new form of transport, the railways connected industries, connected people, energised the economy, transformed society.
Now we stand facing a new industrial revolution: a digital one.
With cloud computing its new engine, big data its new fuel. Transporting the amazing innovations of the internet, and the internet of things. Running on broadband rails: fast, reliable, pervasive.
My dream is that Europe takes its full part. With European industry able to supply, European citizens and businesses able to benefit, European governments able and willing to support. But we must get all those components right.
What does it mean to say we’re in the big data era?
First, it means more data than ever at our disposal. Take all the information of humanity from the dawn of civilisation until 2003 – nowadays that is produced in just two days. We are also acting to have more and more of it become available as open data, for science, for experimentation, for new products and services.
Second, we have ever more ways – not just to collect that data – but to manage it, manipulate it, use it. That is the magic to find value amid the mass of data. The right infrastructure, the right networks, the right computing capacity and, last but not least, the right analysis methods and algorithms help us break through the mountains of rock to find the gold within.
Third, this is not just some niche product for tech-lovers. The impact and difference to people’s lives are huge: in so many fields.
Transforming healthcare, using data to develop new drugs, and save lives. Greener cities with fewer traffic jams, and smarter use of public money.
A business boost: like retailers who communicate smarter with customers, for more personalisation, more productivity, a better bottom line.
No wonder big data is growing 40% a year. No wonder data jobs grow fast. No wonder skills and profiles that didn’t exist a few years ago are now hot property: and we need them all, from data cleaner to data manager to data scientist.
This can make a difference to people’s lives. Wherever you sit in the data ecosystem – never forget that. Never forget that real impact and real potential.
Politicians are starting to get this. The EU’s Presidents and Prime Ministers have recognised the boost to productivity, innovation and better services from big data and cloud computing.
But those technologies need the right environment. We can’t go on struggling with poor quality broadband. With each country trying on its own. With infrastructure and research that are individual and ineffective, separate and subscale. With different laws and practices shackling and shattering the single market. We can’t go on like that.
Nor can we continue in an atmosphere of insecurity and mistrust.
Recent revelations show what is possible online. They show implications for privacy, security, and rights.
You can react in two ways. One is to throw up your hands and surrender. To give up and put big data in the box marked “too difficult”. To turn away from this opportunity, and turn your back on problems that need to be solved, from cancer to climate change. Or – even worse – to simply accept that Europe won’t figure on this mapbut will be reduced to importing the results and products of others.
Alternatively: you can decide that we are going to master big data – and master all its dependencies, requirements and implications, including cloud and other infrastructures, Internet of things technologies as well as privacy and security. And do it on our own terms.
And by the way – privacy and security safeguards do not just have to be about protecting and limiting. Data generates value, and unlocks the door to new opportunities: you don’t need to “protect” people from their own assets. What you need is to empower people, give them control, give them a fair share of that value. Give them rights over their data – and responsibilities too, and the digital tools to exercise them. And ensure that the networks and systems they use are affordable, flexible, resilient, trustworthy, secure.
One thing is clear: the answer to greater security is not just to build walls. Many millennia ago, the Greek people realised that. They realised that you can build walls as high and as strong as you like – it won’t make a difference, not without the right awareness, the right risk management, the right security, at every link in the chain. If only the Trojans had realised that too! The same is true in the digital age: keep our data locked up in Europe, engage in an impossible dream of isolation, and we lose an opportunity; without gaining any security.
But master all these areas, and we would truly have mastered big data. Then we would have showed technology can take account of democratic values; and that a dynamic democracy can cope with technology. Then we would have a boost to benefit every European.
So let’s turn this asset into gold. With the infrastructure to capture and process. Cloud capability that is efficient, affordable, on-demand. Let’s tackle the obstacles, from standards and certification, trust and security, to ownership and copyright. With the right skills, so our workforce can seize this opportunity. With new partnerships, getting all the right players together. And investing in research and innovation. Over the next two years, we are putting 90 million euros on the table for big data and 125 million for the cloud.
I want to respond to this economic imperative. And I want to respond to the call of the European Council – looking at all the aspects relevant to tomorrow’s digital economy.
You can help us build this future. All of you. Helping to bring about the digital data-driven economy of the future. Expanding and depening the ecosystem around data. New players, new intermediaries, new solutions, new jobs, new growth….”

The myth of the keyboard warrior: public participation and 38 Degrees

Curated on March 18, 2014November 28, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

James Dennis in Open Democracy: “A cursory glance at the comment section of the UK’s leading newspapers suggests that democratic engagement is at an all time low; we are generation apathetic. In their annual health check, the Audit of Political Engagement, the Hansard Society paint a bleak picture of participation trends in Britain. Only 41% of those surveyed are committed to voting in the next General Election. Moreover, less than 1% of the population is a member of a political party. However, 38 Degrees, the political activist movement, bucks these downward trends. In the four years since their foundation in 2009, 38 Degrees have amassed a membership of 1.8 million individuals—more than three times the entire combined memberships of all of Britain’s political parties.

The organisation is not without its critics, however. Earlier this week, during a debate in House of Commons on the Care Bill, David T. C. Davies MP cast doubt on the authenticity of the organisation’s ethos, “People. Power. Change”, claiming that:

These people purport to be happy-go-lucky students. They are always on first name terms; Ben and Fred and Rebecca and Sarah and the rest of it. The reality is that it is a hard-nosed left-wing Labour-supporting organisation with links to some very wealthy upper middle-class socialists, despite the pretence that it likes to give out.

Likewise, in a comment piece for The Guardian, Oscar Rickett argued that the form of participation cultivated by 38 Degrees is not beneficial to our civic culture as it encourages fragmented, issue-driven collective action in which “small urges are satisfied with the implication that they are bringing about large change”.
However, given the lack of empirical research undertaken on 38 Degrees, such criticisms are often anecdotal or campaign-specific. So here are just a couple of the significant findings emerging from my ongoing research.

New organisations

38 Degrees bears little resemblance to the organisational models that we’ve become accustomed to. Unlike political parties or traditional pressure groups, 38 Degrees operates on a more level playing field. Members are central to the key decisions that are made before and during a campaign and the staff facilitate these choices. Essentially, the organisation acts as a conduit for its membership, removing the layers of elite-level decision-making that characterised political groups in the twentieth century.
38 Degrees seeks to structure grassroots engagement in two ways. Firstly, the group fuses a vast range of qualitative and quantitative data sources from its membership to guide their campaign decisions and strategy. By using digital media, members are able to express their opinion very quickly on an unprecedented scale. One way in which they do this is through ad-hoc surveys of their members to decide on key strategic decisions, such as their survey regarding the decision to campaign against plans by the NHS to compile a database of medical records for potential use by private firms. In just 24 hours the group had a response from 137,000 of it’s members, with 93 per cent backing their plans to organise a mass opt out.
Secondly, the group offers the platform Campaigns By You, which provides members with the technological opportunities to structure and undertake their own campaigns, retaining complete autonomy over the decision-making process. In both cases, albeit to a differing degree, it is the mass of individual participants that direct the group strategy, with 38 Degrees offering the technological capacity to structure this. 38 Degrees assimilates the fragmented, competing individual voices of its membership, and offers cohesive, collective action.
David Karpf proposes that we consider this phenomenon as characteristic of new type of organisation. These new organisations challenge our traditional understanding of collective action as they are structurally fluid. 38 Degrees relies on central staff to structure the wants and needs of their membership. However, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a regimented hierarchy. Pablo Gerbaudo describes this as ‘soft leadership’ where the central staff act as choreographers, organising and structuring collective action whilst minimising their encroachment on the will of individual members. …
In conclusion, the successes of 38 Degrees, in terms of mobilising public participation, come down to how the organisation maximises the membership’s sense of efficacy, the feeling that each individual member has, or can have, an impact.
By providing influence over the decision-making process, either explicitly or implicitly, members become more than just cheerleaders observing elites from the sidelines; they are active and involved in the planning and execution of public participation.”

Why the wealthiest countries are also the most open with their data

Curated on March 16, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Badger in the Washington Post: “The Oxford Internet Institute this week posted a nice visualization of the state of open data in 70 countries around the world, reflecting the willingness of national governments to release everything from transportation timetables to election results to machine-readable national maps. The tool is based on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index, an admittedly incomplete but telling assessment of who willingly publishes updated, accurate national information on, say, pollutants (Sweden) and who does not (ahem, South Africa).

Tally up the open data scores for these 70 countries, and the picture looks like this, per the Oxford Internet Institute (click on the picture to link through to the larger interactive version):

…With apologies for the tiny, tiny type (and the fact that many countries aren’t listed here at all), a couple of broad trends are apparent. For one, there’s a prominent global “openness divide,” in the words of the Oxford Internet Institute. The high scores mostly come from Europe and North America, the low scores from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Wealth is strongly correlated with “openness” by this measure, whether we look at World Bank income groups or Gross National Income per capita. By the OII’s calculation, wealth accounts for about a third of the variation in these Open Data Index scores.
Perhaps this is an obvious correlation, but the reasons why open data looks like the luxury of rich economies are many, and they point to the reality that poor countries face a lot more obstacles to openness than do places like the United States. For one thing, openness is also closely correlated with Internet penetration. Why open your census results if people don’t have ways to access it (or means to demand it)? It’s no easy task to do this, either.”

The intelligent citizen

Curated on March 15, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John Bell in AlJazeera: “A quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union, is the Western model of government under threat? …. The pressures are coming from several directions.
All states are feeling the pressure from unregulated global flows of capital that create obscene concentrations of wealth, and an inability of the nation-state to respond.Relatedly, citizens either ignore or distrust traditional institutions, and ethnic groups demand greater local autonomy.
A recent Pew survey shows that Americans aged 18-33 mostly identify as political independents and distrust institutions. The classic model is indeed frayed, and new developments have made it feel like very old cloth.
One natural reflex is to assert even greater control, a move suited to the authoritarians, such as China, Russia or General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi‘s Egypt: Strengthen the nation by any means to withstand the pressures. The reality, however, is that all systems, democracies or otherwise, were designed for an industrial age, and the management of an anonymous mass, and cannot cope with globalised economics and the information world of today.
The question remains: What can effectively replace the Western model? The answer may not lie only in the invention of new structures, but in the improvement of a key component found in all: The citizen.
The citizen today is mostly a consumer, focused on the purchase of goods or services, or the insistent consumption of virtual information, often as an ersatz politics. Occasionally, when a threat rises, he or she also becomes a demandeur of absolute security from the state. Indeed, some are using the new technologies for democratic purposes, they are better informed, criticise abuse or corruption, and organise and rally movements.
But, the vast majority is politically disengaged and cynical of political process; many others are too busy trying to survive to even care. A grand apathy has set in, the stage left vacant for a very few extremists, or pied pipers of the old tunes of nationalisms and tribal belonging disguised as leaders. The citizen is either invisible in this circus, an endangered species in the 21st century, or increasingly drawn to dark and polarising forces.
Some see the glass as half full and believe that technology and direct democracy can bridge the gaps. Indeed, the internet provides a plethora of information and a greater sense of empowerment. Lesser-known protests in Bosnia have led to direct democracy plenums, and the Swiss do revert to national referenda. However, whether direct or representative, democracy will still depend on the quality of the citizen, and his or her decisions.
Opinion, dogma and bias
Opinion, dogma and bias remain common political operating system and, as a result, our politics are still an unaffordable game of chance. The optimists may be right, but discussions in social media on issues ranging from Ukraine to gun control reveal more deep bias and the lure of excitement than the pursuit of a constructive answer.
People crave excitement in their politics. Whether it is through asserting their own opinion or in battling others, politics offers a great ground for this high. The cost, however, comes in poor judgment and dangerous decisions. George W. Bush was elected twice, Vladimir Putin has much support, climate change is denied, and an intoxicated Mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, may be re-elected.
Few are willing to admit their role in this state of affairs, but they will gladly see the ill in others. Even fewer, including often myself, will admit that they don’t really know how to think through a challenge, political or otherwise. This may seem absurd, thinking feels as natural as walking, but the formation of political opinion is a complex affair, a flawed duet between our minds and outside input. Media, government propaganda, family, culture, and our own unique set of personal experiences, from traumas to chance meetings, all play into the mix. High states of emotion, “excitement”, also weigh in, making us dumb and easily manipulated….
This step may also be a precursor for another that involves the ordinary person. Today being a citizen involves occasional voting, politics as spectator sport, and, among some, being a watchdog against corruption or street activism. What may be required is more citizens’ participation in local democracy, not just in assemblies or casting votes, but in local management and administration.
This will help people understand the complexities of politics, gain greater responsibility, and mitigate some of the vices of centralisation and representative democracy. It may also harmonise with the information age, where everyone, it seems, wishes to be empowered.
Do people have time in their busy lives? A rotational involvement in local affairs can help solve this, and many might even find the engagement enjoyable. This injection of a real citizen into the mix may improve the future of politics while large institutions continue to hum their tune.
In the end, a citizen who has responsibility for his actions can probably make any structure work, while rejecting any that would endanger his independence and dignity. The rise of a more intelligent and committed citizen may clarify politics, improve liberal democracies, and make populism and authoritarianism less appealing and likely paths.”

Online tools for engaging citizens in the legislative process

Curated on March 14, 2014October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Mandelbaum from OpeningParliament.org: “Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations, and even individual parliamentarians, are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. Some are creating their own tools — often open source, which allows others to use these tools as well — that enable citizens to markup legislation or share ideas on targeted subjects. Others are purchasing and implementing tools developed by private companies to good effect. In several instances, these initiatives are being conducted through collaboration between public institutions and civil society, while many compliment online and offline experiences to help ensure that a broader population of citizens is reached.
The list below provides examples of some of the more prominent efforts to engage citizens in the legislative process.
Brazil
Implementer: Brazilian Chamber of Deputies…
Website: http://edemocracia.camara.gov.br/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament.org Case Study
Estonia
Implementer: Estonian President & Civil Society
Project Name: Rahvakogu (The People’s Assembly)…
Website: http://www.rahvakogu.ee/
Additional Information: Enhancing Estonia’s Democracy Through Rahvakogu
Finland
Implementer: Finnish Parliament
Project Name: Inventing Finland again! (Keksitään Suomi uudelleen!)…
Website: http://www.suomijoukkoistaa.fi/
Additional Information: Democratic Participation and Deliberation in Crowdsourced Legislative Processes: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland
France
Implementer: SmartGov – Démocratie Ouverte…
Website: https://www.parlement-et-citoyens.fr/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament Case Study
Italy
Implementer: Government of Italy
Project Name: Public consultation on constitutional reform…
Website: http://www.partecipa.gov.it/
Spain
Implementer: Basque Parliament…
Website: http://www.adi.parlamentovasco.euskolegebiltzarra.org/es/
Additional Information: Participation in Parliament
United Kingdom
Implementer: Cabinet Office
Project Name: Open Standards Consultation…
Website: http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/
Additional Information: Open Policy Making, Open Standards Consulation; Final Consultation Documents
United States
Implementer: OpenGov Foundation
Project Name: The Madison Project
Tool: The Madison Project“