German lawmakers mull creating first citizen assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

APNews: “German lawmakers considered Wednesday whether to create the country’s first “citizen assembly’” to advise parliament on the issue of food and nutrition.

Germany’s three governing parties back the idea of appointing consultative bodies made up of members of the public selected through a lottery system who would discuss specific topics and provide nonbinding feedback to legislators. But opposition parties have rejected the idea, warning that such citizen assemblies risk undermining the primacy of parliament in Germany’s political system.

Baerbel Bas, the speaker of the lower house, or Bundestag, said that she views such bodies as a “bridge between citizens and politicians that can provide a fresh perspective and create new confidence in established institutions.”

“Everyone should be able to have a say,” Bas told daily Passauer Neue Presse. “We want to better reflect the diversity in our society.”

Environmental activists from the group Last Generation have campaigned for the creation of a citizen assembly to address issues surrounding climate change. However, the group argues that proposals drawn up by such a body should at the very least result in bills that lawmakers would then vote on.

Similar efforts to create citizen assemblies have taken place in other European countries such as Spain, Finland, Austria, Britain and Ireland…(More)”.

Advising in an Imperfect World – Expert Reflexivity and the Limits of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Justyna Bandola-Gill, Marlee Tichenor and Sotiria Grek: “Producing and making use of data and metrics in policy making have important limitations – from practical issues with missing or incomplete data to political challenges of navigating both the intended and unintended consequences of implementing monitoring and evaluation programmes. But how do experts producing quantified evidence make sense of these challenges and how do they navigate working in imperfect statistical environments? In our recent study, drawing on over 80 interviews with experts working in key International Organisations, we explored these questions by looking at the concept of expert reflexivity.

We soon discovered that experts working with data and statistics approach reflexivity not only as a thought process but also as an important strategic resource they use to work effectively – to negotiate with different actors and their agendas, build consensus and support diverse groups of stakeholders. What is even more important, reflexivity is a complex and multifaceted process and one that is often not discussed explicitly in expert work. We aimed to capture this diversity by categorising experts’ actions and perceptions into three types of reflexivity: epistemic, care-ful and instrumental. Experts mix and match these different modes, depending on their goals, preferences, strategic goals or even personal characteristics.

Epistemic reflexivity regards the quality of data and measurement and allows for a reflection on how well (or how ineffectively) metrics represent real-life problems. Here, the experts discussed how they negotiate the necessary limits to data and metrics with the awareness of the far-reaching implications of publishing official numbers.  They recognised that data and metrics do not mirror reality and critically reflected on what aspects of measured problems – such as health, poverty or education – get misrepresented in the process of measurement. And sometimes, it actually meant advising against measurement to avoid producing and reproducing uncertainty.

Care-ful reflexivity allows for imbuing quantified practices with values and care for the populations affected by the measurement. Experts positioned themselves as active participants in the process of solving challenges and advocating for disadvantaged groups (and did so via numbers). This type of reflexivity was also mobilised to make sense of the key challenge of expertise, one that would be familiar to anyone advocating for evidence-informed decision-making:  our interviewees acknowledged that the production of numbers very rarely leads to change. The key motivator to keep going despite this, was the duty of care for the populations on whose behalf the numbers spoke. Experts believed that being ‘care-ful’ required them to monitor levels of different forms of inequalities, even if it was just to acknowledge the problem and expose it rather than solve it…(More)”.

DMA: rules for digital gatekeepers to ensure open markets start to apply

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) applies from today. Now that the DMA applies, potential gatekeepers that meet the quantitative thresholds established have until 3 July to notify their core platform services to the Commission. ..

The DMA aims to ensure contestable and fair markets in the digital sector. It defines gatekeepers as those large online platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers, whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus create a bottleneck in the digital economy. To address these issues, the DMA defines a series of specific obligations that gatekeepers will need to respect, including prohibiting them from engaging in certain behaviours in a list of do’s and don’ts. More information is available in the dedicated Q&A…(More)”.

The power of piggybacking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zografia Bika: “An unexpected hit of the first Covid lockdown was Cooking with Nonna, in which people from all over the world were taught how to cook traditional Italian dishes from a grandmother’s house in Palombara Sabina on the outskirts of Rome. The project not only provided unexpected economic success to the legion of grandmothers who were then recruited to the project but valuable jobs for those producing and promoting the videos.

It’s an example of what Oxford University’s Paulo Savaget calls piggybacking, when attempts to improve a region build upon what is already there. For those in the aid community this isn’t new. Indeed the positive deviance approach devised by Jerry and Monique Sternin popularised the notion of building on things that are already working locally rather than trying to impose solutions from afar.

In a time when most projects backed by the two tranches of the UK Government’s levelling up fund have been assessed and approved centrally not locally, it surely bears repeating. It’s an approach that was clear in our own research into how residents of deprived communities can be helped back into employment or entrepreneurship.

At the heart of our research, and at the hearts of local communities, were housing associations that were providing not only the housing needs of those communities, but also a range of additional services that were invaluable to residents. In the process, they were enriching the economies of those communities…(More)”.

Building scenarios for urban mobility in 2030: The combination of cross-impact balance analysis with participatory stakeholder workshops

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sara Tori, Geert te Boveldt, Imre Keseru: “In recent years, scenarios have been increasingly used as a tool for helping decision makers deal with uncertainty, assess risks, enhance policy performance, expand creativity, and stimulate open discussion. In transport, scenario planning is an established method to help solve the mobility challenges of cities. In this paper, we propose a mixed-methods approach that combines cross-impact balance analysis with creative scenario planning workshops. CIB analysis was used to obtain raw scenarios that were enhanced with the output from creative workshops to obtain narratives and visuals to make the scenarios easily communicable. The approach was applied in five cities simultaneously. For each city, we developed three different scenarios for urban mobility by 2030. We found that developing the cross-impact matrix centrally and then adapting it to each city’s local context can significantly reduce the time needed for the analysis. In addition, the methodology employed can easily be adapted to the needs of local stakeholders. As it is a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, it is easily understandable for stakeholders, allowing them to fully participate in the process. The creative outputs in the form of narratives and images have helped to create results that are easy to communicate with the stakeholders…(More)”.

Data property, data governance and Common European Data Spaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Thomas Margoni, Charlotte Ducuing and Luca Schirru: “The Data Act proposal of February 2022 constitutes a central element of a broader and ambitious initiative of the European Commission (EC) to regulate the data economy through the erection of a new general regulatory framework for data and digital markets. The resulting framework may be represented as a model of governance between a pure market-driven model and a fully regulated approach, thereby combining elements that traditionally belong to private law (e.g., property rights, contracts) and public law (e.g., regulatory authorities, limitation of contractual freedom). This article discusses the role of (intellectual) property rights as well as of other forms of rights allocation in data legislation with particular attention to the Data Act proposal. We argue that the proposed Data Act has the potential to play a key role in the way in which data, especially privately held data, may be accessed, used, and shared. Nevertheless, it is only by looking at the whole body of data (and data related) legislation that the broader plan for a data economy can be grasped in its entirety. Additionally, the Data Act proposal may also arguably reveal the elements for a transition from a property-based to a governance-based paradigm in the EU data strategy. Whereas elements of data governance abound, the stickiness of property rights and rhetoric seem however hard to overcome. The resulting regulatory framework, at least for now, is therefore an interesting but not always perfectly coordinated mix of both. Finally, this article suggests that the Data Act Proposal may have missed the chance to properly address the issue of data holders’ power and related information asymmetries, as well as the need for coordination mechanisms…(More)”.

Building Online Public Consultation Knowledge
Graphs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by William Aboucaya, Sonia Guehis and Rafael Angarita: “Online consultation platforms have improved the possibilities for citizens to have an input on public decision making. However, and especially at large scale, identification of the topics discussed and entities evoked has been identified as difficult for both citizens and platform administrators. In this paper, we leverage topic modeling, Named Entity Recognition and Linking and Semantic Textual Similarity to build a knowledge graph representing the different contributions to the République Numérique online citizen consultation in French language. The generated graph links the different proposals to topics identified in the consultation and to relevant DBpedia resources. The model proposed for representation of citizen consultations as knowledge graphs simplifies the retrieval of proposals focused on specific topics or mentioning a given entity. It also allows us to improve contextualization of important words in proposals by linking them to short definitions extracted from Wikipedia…(More)”.

The Citizens’ Panel proposes 23 recommendations for fair and human-centric virtual worlds in the EU

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “From 21 to 23 April, the Commission hosted the closing session of the European Citizens’ Panel on Virtual Months in Brussels, which allowed citizens to make recommendations on values and actions to create attractive and fair European virtual worlds.

These recommendations will support the Commission’s work on virtual worlds and the future of the Internet.

After three weekends of deliberations, the panel, composed of around 150 citizens randomly chosen to represent the diversity of the European population, made 23 recommendations on citizens’ expectations for the future, principles and actions to ensure that virtual worlds in the EU are fair and citizen-friendly. These recommendations are structured around eight values and principles: freedom of choice, sustainability, human-centred, health, education, safety and security, transparency and integration.

This new generation of Citizens’ Panels is a key element of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which aims to encourage citizens’ participation in the European Commission’s policy-making process in certain key areas.

The Commission is currently preparing a new initiative on virtual worlds, which will outline Europe’s vision, in line with European digital rights and principles. The upcoming initiative will focus on how to address societal challenges, foster innovation for businesses and pave the way for a transition to Web 4.0.

In addition to this Citizens’ Panel, the Commission has launched a call for input to allow citizens and stakeholders to share their thoughts on the topic. Contributions can be made until 3 May…(More)”.

How well do the UK government’s ‘areas of research interest’ work as boundary objects to facilitate the use of research in policymaking?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver: “Articulating the research priorities of government is one mechanism for promoting the production of relevant research to inform policy. This study focuses on the Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) produced and published by government departments in the UK. Through a qualitative study consisting of interviews with 25 researchers, civil servants, intermediaries and research funders, the authors explored the role of ARIs. Using the concept of boundary objects, the paper considers the ways in which ARIs are used and how they are supported by boundary practices and boundary workers, including through engagement opportunities. The paper addresses the following questions: What boundaries do ARIs cross, intended and otherwise? What characteristics of ARIs enable or hinder this boundary-crossing? and What resources, skills, work or conditions are required for this boundary-crossing to work well? We see the ARIs being used as a boundary object across multiple boundaries, with implications for the ways in which the ARIs are crafted and shared. In the application of ARIs in the UK policy context, we see a constant interplay between boundary objects, practices and people all operating within the confines of existing systems and processes. For example, understanding what was meant by a particular ARI sometimes involved ‘decoding’ work as part of the academic-policy engagement process. While ARIs have an important role to play they are no magic bullet. Nor do they tell the whole story of governmental research interests. Optimizing the use of research in policy making requires the galvanisation of a range of mechanisms, including ARIs…(More)”.

The Future of Consent: The Coming Revolution in Privacy and Consumer Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Ogilvy: “The future of consent will be determined by how we – as individuals, nations, and a global species – evolve our understanding of what counts as meaningful consent. For consumers and users, the greatest challenge lies in connecting consent to a mechanism of relevant, personal control over their data. For businesses and other organizations, the task will be to recast consent as a driver of positive economic outcomes, rather than an obstacle.

In the coming years of digital privacy innovation, regulation, and increasing market maturity, everyone will need to think more deeply about their relationship with consent. As an initial step, we’ve assembled this snapshot on the current and future state of (meaningful) consent: what it means, what the obstacles are, and which critical changes we need to embrace to evolve…(More)”.