Digitalisation and citizen engagement: comparing participatory budgeting in Rome and Barcelona


Book chapter by Giorgia Mattei, Valentina Santolamazza and Martina Manzo: “The digitalisation of participatory budgeting (PB) is an increasing phenomenon in that digital tools could help achieve greater citizen engagement. However, comparing two similar cases – i.e. Rome and Barcelona – some differences appear during the integration of digital tools into the PB processes. The present study describes how digital tools have positively influenced PB throughout different phases, making communication more transparent, involving a wider audience, empowering people and, consequently, making citizens’ engagement more effective. Nevertheless, the research dwells on the different elements adopted to overcome the digitalisation limits and shows various approaches and results…(More)”.

Data, Privacy Laws and Firm Production: Evidence from the GDPR


Paper by Mert Demirer, Diego J. Jiménez Hernández, Dean Li & Sida Peng: “By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven years of data from a large global cloud-computing provider. Our difference-in-difference estimates indicate that, in response to the GDPR, EU firms decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% relative to comparable US firms, becoming less “data-intensive.” To estimate the costs of the GDPR for firms, we propose and estimate a production function where data and computation serve as inputs to the production of “information.” We find that data and computation are strong complements in production and that firm responses are consistent with the GDPR, representing a 20% increase in the cost of data on average. Variation in the firm-level effects of the GDPR and industry-level exposure to data, however, drives significant heterogeneity in our estimates of the impact of the GDPR on production costs…(More)”

Data Science, AI and Data Philanthropy in Foundations : On the Path to Maturity


Report by Filippo Candela, Sevda Kilicalp, and Daniel Spiers: “This research explores the data-related initiatives currently undertaken by a pool of foundations from across Europe. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has investigated the level of data work within philanthropic foundations, even though the rise of data and its importance has increasingly been recognised in the non-profit sector. Given that this is an inaugural piece of research, the study takes an exploratory approach, prioritising a comprehensive survey of data practices foundations are currently implementing or exploring. The goal was to obtain a snapshot of the current level of maturity and commitment of foundations regarding data-related matters…(More)”

Future-Proofing Transparency: Re-Thinking Public Record Governance For the Age of Big Data


Paper by Beatriz Botero Arcila: “Public records, public deeds, and even open data portals often include personal information that can now be easily accessed online. Yet, for all the recent attention given to informational privacy and data protection, scant literature exists on the governance of personal information that is available in public documents. This Article examines the critical issue of balancing privacy and transparency within public record governance in the age of Big Data.

With Big Data and powerful machine learning algorithms, personal information in public records can easily be used to infer sensitive data about people or aggregated to create a comprehensive personal profile of almost anyone. This information is public and open, however, for many good reasons: ensuring political accountability, facilitating democratic participation, enabling economic transactions, combating illegal activities such as money laundering and terrorism financing, and facilitating. Can the interest in record publicity coexist with the growing ease of deanonymizing and revealing sensitive information about individuals?

This Article addresses this question from a comparative perspective, focusing on US and EU access to information law. The Article shows that the publicity of records was, in the past and not withstanding its presumptive public nature, protected because most people would not trouble themselves to go to public offices to review them, and it was practical impossible to aggregate them to draw extensive profiles about people. Drawing from this insight and contemporary debates on data governance, this Article challenges the binary classification of data as either published or not and proposes a risk-based framework that re-insert that natural friction to public record governance by leveraging techno-legal methods in how information is published and accessed…(More)”.

The global reach of the EU’s approach to digital transformation


Report by the European Parliament’s Think Tank: “The EU’s approach to digital transformation is rooted in protecting fundamental rights, sustainability, ethics and fairness. With this human-centric vision of the digital economy and society, the EU seeks to empower citizens and businesses, regardless of their size. In the EU’s view, the internet should remain open, fair, inclusive and focused on people. Digital technologies should work for citizens and help them to engage in society. Companies should be able to compete on equal terms, and consumers should be confident that their rights are respected. The European Commission has published a number of strategies and action plans recently that outline the EU’s vision for the digital future and set concrete targets for achieving it. The Commission has also proposed several digital regulations, including the artificial intelligence act, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. These regulations are intended to ensure a safe online environment and fair and open digital markets, strengthen Europe’s competitiveness, improve algorithmic transparency and give citizens better control over how they share their personal data. Although some of these regulations have not yet been adopted, and others have been in force for only a short time, they are expected to have impact not only in the EU but also beyond its borders. For instance, several regulations target businesses – regardless of where they are based – that offer services to EU citizens or businesses. In addition, through the phenomenon known as ‘the Brussels effect’, these rules may influence tech business practices and national legislation around the world. The EU is an active participant in developing global digital cooperation and global governance frameworks for specific areas. Various international organisations are developing instruments to ensure that people and businesses can take advantage of artificial intelligence’s benefits and limit negative consequences. In these global negotiations, the EU promotes respect for various fundamental rights and freedoms, as well as compatibility with EU law….(More)”.

The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow


Book by Des Fitzgerald: “Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?

Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today’s green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are – in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory…(More)”.

We could all learn a bit about democracy from Austrian millionaire Marlene Engelhorn


Article by Seána Glennon: “In the coming week, thousands of households across Austria will receive an invitation to participate in a citizens’ assembly with a unique goal: to determine how to spend the €25 million fortune of a 31-year-old heiress, Marlene Engelhorn, who believes that the system that allowed her to inherit such a vast sum of money (tax free) is deeply flawed.

Austria, like many countries across the world, suffers from a wealth gap: a small percentage of the population controls a disproportionate amount of wealth and attendant power.

Engelhorn is not alone in calling out this unfairness; in the US, where wealth inequality has been rising for decades, a small number of the super-rich are actually pushing for higher taxes to support public services.

The Austrian experiment is somewhat unique, however, in seeking to engage ordinary citizens in directly determining how a substantial fortune should be distributed…(More)”.

Power to the standards


Report by Gergana Baeva, Michael Puntschuh and Matthieu Binder: “Standards and norms will be of central importance when it comes to the practical implementation of legal requirements for developed and deployed AI systems.

Using expert interviews, our study “Power to the standards” documents the existing obstacles on the way to the standardization of AI. In addition to practical and technological challenges, questions of democratic policy arise. After all, requirements such as fairness or transparency are often regarded as criteria to be determined by the legislator, meaning that they are only partially susceptible to standardization.

Our study concludes that the targeted and comprehensive participation of civil society actors is particularly necessary in order to compensate for existing participation deficits within the standardization process…(More)”.

Toward a Solid Acceptance of the Decentralized Web of Personal Data: Societal and Technological Convergence


Article by Ana Pop Stefanija et al: “Citizens using common online services such as social media, health tracking, or online shopping effectively hand over control of their personal data to the service providers—often large corporations. The services using and processing personal data are also holding the data. This situation is problematic, as has been recognized for some time: competition and innovation are stifled; data is duplicated; and citizens are in a weak position to enforce legal rights such as access, rectification, or erasure. The approach to address this problem has been to ascertain that citizens can access and update, with every possible service provider, the personal data that providers hold of or about them—the foundational view taken in the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Recently, however, various societal, technological, and regulatory efforts are taking a very different approach, turning things around. The central tenet of this complementary view is that citizens should regain control of their personal data. Once in control, citizens can decide which providers they want to share data with, and if so, exactly which part of their data. Moreover, they can revisit these decisions anytime…(More)”.

Open data ecosystems: what models to co-create service innovations in smart cities?


Paper by Arthur Sarazin: “While smart cities are recently providing open data, how to organise the collective creation of data, knowledge and related products and services produced from this collective resource, still remains to be thought. This paper aims at gathering the literature review on open data ecosystems to tackle the following research question: what models can be imagined to stimulate the collective co-creation of services between smart cities’ stakeholders acting as providers and users of open data? Such issue is currently at stake in many municipalities such as Lisbon which decided to position itself as a platform (O’Reilly, 2010) in the local digital ecosystem. With the implementation of its City Operation Center (COI), Lisbon’s municipality provides an Information Infrastructure (Bowker et al., 2009) to many different types of actors such as telecom companies, municipalities, energy utilities or transport companies. Through this infrastructure, Lisbon encourages such actors to gather, integrate and release heterogeneous datasets and tries to orchestrate synergies among them so data-driven solution to urban problems can emerge (Carvalho and Vale, 2018). The remaining question being: what models for the municipalities such as Lisbon to lean on so as to drive this cutting-edge type of service innovation?…(More)”.