Case report by Giampiero Giacomello and Oltion Preka: “In an increasingly technology-dependent world, it is not surprising that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates are in high demand. This state of affairs, however, has made the public overlook the case that not only computing and artificial intelligence are naturally interdisciplinary, but that a huge portion of generated data comes from human–computer interactions, thus they are social in character and nature. Hence, social science practitioners should be in demand too, but this does not seem the case. One of the reasons for such a situation is that political and social science departments worldwide tend to remain in their “comfort zone” and see their disciplines quite traditionally, but by doing so they cut themselves off from many positions today. The authors believed that these conditions should and could be changed and thus in a few years created a specifically tailored course for students in Political Science. This paper examines the experience of the last year of such a program, which, after several tweaks and adjustments, is now fully operational. The results and students’ appreciation are quite remarkable. Hence the authors considered the experience was worth sharing, so that colleagues in social and political science departments may feel encouraged to follow and replicate such an example….(More)”
Sector-Specific (Data-) Access Regimes of Competitors
Paper by Jörg Hoffmann: “The expected economic and social benefits of data access and sharing are enormous. And yet, particularly in the B2B context, data sharing of privately held data between companies has not taken off at efficient scale. This already led to the adoption of sector specific data governance and access regimes. Two of these regimes are enshrined in the PSD2 that introduced an access to account and a data portability rule for specific account information for third party payment providers.
This paper analyses these sector-specific access and portability regimes and identifies regulatory shortcomings that should be addressed and can serve as further guidance for further data access regulation. It first develops regulatory guidelines that build around the multiple regulatory dimensions of data and the potential adverse effects that may be created by too broad data access regimes.
In this regard the paper assesses the role of factual data exclusivity for data driven innovation incentives for undertakings, the role of industrial policy driven market regulation within the principle of a free market economy, the impact of data sharing on consumer sovereignty and choice, and ultimately data induced-distortions of competition. It develops the findings by taking recourse to basic IP and information economics and the EU competition law case law pertaining refusal to supply cases, the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and to current competition policy considerations with regard to the envisioned preventive competition control regime tackling data rich ‘undertakings of paramount importance for competition across markets’ in Germany. This is then followed by an analysis of the PSD2 access and portability regimes in light of the regulatory principles….(More)”.
Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions
Report by the OECD: “Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens’ Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.
This “deliberative wave” has been building since the 1980s, gaining momentum since around 2010. This report has gathered close to 300 representative deliberative practices to explore trends in such processes, identify different models, and analyse the trade-offs among different design choices as well as the benefits and limits of public deliberation.
It includes Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes for Public Decision Making, based on comparative empirical evidence gathered by the OECD and in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics. Finally, the report explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives….(More)”.
EU Company Data: State of the Union 2020
Report by OpenCorporates: “… on access to company data in the EU. It’s completely revised, with more detail on the impact that the lack of access to this critical dataset has – on business, on innovation, on democracy, and society.
The results are still not great however:
- Average score is low
The average score across the EU in terms of access to company data is just 40 out of 100. This is better than the average score 8 years ago, which was just 23 out of 100, but still very low nevertheless. - Some major economies score badly
Some of the EU’s major economies continue to score very badly indeed, with Germany, for example, scoring just 15/100, Italy 10/100, and Spain 0/100. - EU policies undermined
The report identifies 15 areas where the lack of open company data frustrates, impedes or otherwise has a negative impact on EU policy. - Inequalities widened
The report also identifies how inequalities are further widened by poor access to this critical dataset, and how the recovery from COVID-19 will be hampered by it too.
On the plus side, the report also identifies the EU Open Data & PSI Directive passed last year as potentially game changing – but only if it is implemented fully, and there are significant doubts whether this will happen….(More)”
How Crowdsourcing Aided a Push to Preserve the Histories of Nazi Victims
Andrew Curry at the New York Times: “With people around the globe sheltering at home amid the pandemic, an archive of records documenting Nazi atrocities asked for help indexing them. Thousands joined the effort….
As the virus prompted lockdowns across Europe, the director of the Arolsen Archives — the world’s largest devoted to the victims of Nazi persecution — joined millions of others working remotely from home and spending lots more time in front of her computer.
“We thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity,’” said the director, Floriane Azoulay.
Two months later, the archive’s “Every Name Counts” project has attracted thousands of online volunteers to work as amateur archivists, indexing names from the archive’s enormous collection of papers. To date, they have added over 120,000 names, birth dates and prisoner numbers in the database.
“There’s been much more interest than we expected,” Ms. Azoulay said. “The fact that people were locked at home and so many cultural offerings have moved online has played a big role.”
It’s a big job: The Arolsen Archives are the largest collection of their kind in the world, with more than 30 million original documents. They contain information on the wartime experiences of as many as 40 million people, including Jews executed in extermination camps and forced laborers conscripted from across Nazi-occupied Europe.
The documents, which take up 16 miles of shelving, include things like train manifests, delousing records, work detail assignments and execution records…(More)”.
Permanent joint committees in Belgium: involving citizens in parliamentary debate
Article by Elisa Minsart and Vincent Jacquet: “Amidst wide public disillusionment with the institutions of representative democracy, political scientists, campaigners and politicians have intensified efforts to find an effective mechanism to narrow the gap between citizens and those who govern them. One of the most popular remedies in recent years – and one frequently touted as a way to break the Brexit impasse encountered by the UK political class in 2016-19 – is that of citizens’ assemblies. These deliberative forums gather diversified samples of the population, recruited through a process of random selection. Citizens who participate meet experts, deliberate on a specific public issue and make a range of recommendations for policy-making. Citizens’ assemblies are flourishing in many representative democracies – not least in the UK, with the current Climate Assembly UK and Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland. They show that citizens are able to deliberate on complex political issues and to deliver original proposals.
For several years now, some public leaders, scholars and politicians have sought to integrate these democratic innovations into more traditional political structures. Belgium recently made a step in this direction. Each of Belgium’s three regions has its own parliament, with full legislative powers: on 13 November 2019, a proposition was approved to modify how the Parliament of the Brussels Region operates. The reform mandates the establishment of joint deliberative committees, on which members of the public will serve alongside elected representatives. This will enable ordinary people to deliberate with MPs on preselected themes and to formulate recommendations. The details of the process are currently still being drafted and the first commission is expected to launch at the end of 2020. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, drafting and negotiations with other parties have not been interrupted thanks to an online platform and a videoconference facility.
This experience has been inspired by other initiatives organised in Belgium. In 2011, the G1000 initiative brought together more than 700 randomly selected citizens to debate on different topics. This grassroots experiment attracted lots of public attention. In its aftermath, the different parliaments of the country launched their own citizens’ assemblies, designed to tackle specific local issues. Some international experiences also inspired the Brussels Region, in particular the first Irish Constitutional Convention (2012–2014). This assembly was composed of both elected representatives and randomly selected citizens, and led directly to a referendum that approved the legalisation of same-sex marriage. However, the present joint committees go well beyond these initiatives. Whereas both of these predecessors were ad hoc initiatives designed to resolve particular problems, the Brussels committees will be permanent and hosted at the heart of the parliament. Both of these aspects make the new committees a major innovation and entirely different from the predecessors that helped inspire them…(More)”.
UK parliamentary select committees: crowdsourcing for evidence-based policy or grandstanding?
Paper by the The LSE GV314 Group: “In the United Kingdom, the influence of parliamentary select committees on policy depends substantially on the ‘seriousness’ with which they approach the task of gathering and evaluating a wide range of evidence and producing reports and recommendations based on it. However, select committees are often charged with being concerned with ‘political theatre’ and ‘grandstanding’ rather than producing evidence-based policy recommendations. This study, based on a survey of 919 ‘discretionary’ witnesses, including those submitting written and oral evidence, examines the case for arguing that there is political bias and grandstanding in the way select committees go about selecting witnesses, interrogating them and using their evidence to put reports together. While the research finds some evidence of such ‘grandstanding’ it does not appear to be strong enough to suggest that the role of select committees is compromised as a crowdsourcer of evidence….(More)”.
AI governance in the public sector: Three tales from the frontiers of automated decision-making in democratic settings
Paper by Maciej Kuziemski and Gianluca Misuraca: “The rush to understand new socio-economic contexts created by the wide adoption of AI is justified by its far-ranging consequences, spanning almost every walk of life. Yet, the public sector’s predicament is a tragic double bind: its obligations to protect citizens from potential algorithmic harms are at odds with the temptation to increase its own efficiency – or in other words – to govern algorithms, while governing by algorithms. Whether such dual role is even possible, has been a matter of debate, the challenge stemming from algorithms’ intrinsic properties, that make them distinct from other digital solutions, long embraced by the governments, create externalities that rule-based programming lacks.
As the pressures to deploy automated decision making systems in the public sector become prevalent, this paper aims to examine how the use of AI in the public sector in relation to existing data governance regimes and national regulatory practices can be intensifying existing power asymmetries. To this end, investigating the legal and policy instruments associated with the use of AI for strenghtening the immigration process control system in Canada; “optimising” the employment services” in Poland, and personalising the digital service experience in Finland, the paper advocates for the need of a common framework to evaluate the potential impact of the use of AI in the public sector.
In this regard, it discusses the specific effects of automated decision support systems on public services and the growing expectations for governments to play a more prevalent role in the digital society and to ensure that the potential of technology is harnessed, while negative effects are controlled and possibly avoided. This is of particular importance in light of the current COVID-19 emergency crisis where AI and the underpinning regulatory framework of data ecosystems, have become crucial policy issues as more and more innovations are based on large scale data collections from digital devices, and the real-time accessibility of information and services, contact and relationships between institutions and citizens could strengthen – or undermine – trust in governance systems and democracy….(More)”.
Digital Life
Book by Tim Markham: “Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded?
In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at stake amid the constant distractions of our media-saturated world, the way we present ourselves to that world through social media, and the relentless march of data into every aspect of our lives.
A provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, Digital Life offers timely insights into distraction and compassion fatigue, privacy and surveillance, identity and solidarity. It is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of media and communication…(More)”.
BiblioVid
About: “The project BiblioVid was born out the observation that, when confronted to a serious global crisis, like during the COVID-19 pandemics, it is very hard for health professionals to keep in touch with the latest development, results and recommendations on how to manage the situation. Moreover, it is very hard to quickly make the distinction between valid and doubtful information, high- and low-quality data, as these get thrown around into the mediatic maelstrom.
In this context, four friends working at the Grenoble Alpes University Hospital Center, we decided to join forces on two projects, the first one on monitoring and analyzing the most recent literature on COVID-19 and the second one aimed at providing support for health students during the COVID-19 health crisis…
Now this project breached the French boundaries, reaching health professionals in many countries with teams from Belgium and Canada joining-in to help with the development and dissemination of this tool…(More)”.