What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Peter Levine: “People who want to improve the world must ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Although the specific issues and challenges people face are enormously diverse, they often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think productively about contentious matters), and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.

In What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America’s leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens’ question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his goal is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively wrestle with these problems so that they don’t destabilize movements.

A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? turns from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. And it offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world…(More)”.

Public sector innovation has a “first mile” problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Catarina Tully, and Giulio Quaggiotto: “Even if progress has been uneven, the palette of innovation approaches adopted by the public sector has considerably expanded in the last few years: from new sources of data to behavioural science, from foresight to user-centred design, from digital transformation to system thinking. And yet, the frustration of many innovation champions within the government is palpable. We are all familiar with innovation graveyards and, in our learning journeys, probably contributed to them in spite of all best intentions:

  • Dashboards that look very “smart” and are carefully tended to by few specialists but never used by their intended target audience: decision-makers.
  • Prototypes or experiments that were developed by an innovation unit and meant to be handed over to a line ministry or city department but never were.
  • Beautifully crafted scenarios and horizon scanning reports that last the length of a press conference or a ribbon-cutting event and are quickly put on the shelves after that.

The list could go on and on.

Innovation theatre is a well known malaise (paraphrasing Sean McDonald: “the use of [technology] interventions that make people feel as if a government—and, more often, a specific group of political leaders—is solving a problem, without it doing anything to actually solve that problem.”)

In the current climate, the pressure to “scale” quick-fixes in the face of multiple crises (as opposed to the hard work of addressing root causes, building trust, and structural transformations) is only increasing the appetite for performative theatre. Eventually, public intrapreneurs learn to use the theatre to their advantage: let the photo op with the technology gadget or the “futuristic” scenario take the centre stage so as to create goodwill with the powers that be, while you work quietly in the backstage to do the “right” thing…(More)”.

How to spot AI-generated text

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Melissa Heikkilä: “This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine?

Since it was released in late November, ChatGPT has been used by over a million people. It has the AI community enthralled, and it is clear the internet is increasingly being flooded with AI-generated text. People are using it to come up with jokes, write children’s stories, and craft better emails. 

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s spin-off of its large language model GPT-3, which generates remarkably human-sounding answers to questions that it’s asked. The magic—and danger—of these large language models lies in the illusion of correctness. The sentences they produce look right—they use the right kinds of words in the correct order. But the AI doesn’t know what any of it means. These models work by predicting the most likely next word in a sentence. They haven’t a clue whether something is correct or false, and they confidently present information as true even when it is not. 

In an already polarized, politically fraught online world, these AI tools could further distort the information we consume. If they are rolled out into the real world in real products, the consequences could be devastating. 

We’re in desperate need of ways to differentiate between human- and AI-written text in order to counter potential misuses of the technology, says Irene Solaiman, policy director at AI startup Hugging Face, who used to be an AI researcher at OpenAI and studied AI output detection for the release of GPT-3’s predecessor GPT-2. 

New tools will also be crucial to enforcing bans on AI-generated text and code, like the one recently announced by Stack Overflow, a website where coders can ask for help. ChatGPT can confidently regurgitate answers to software problems, but it’s not foolproof. Getting code wrong can lead to buggy and broken software, which is expensive and potentially chaotic to fix…(More)”.

A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alejandra Manco: “This literature review aims to examine the approach given to open science policy in the different studies. The main findings are that the approach given to open science has different aspects: policy framing and its geopolitical aspects are described as an asymmetries replication and epistemic governance tool. The main geopolitical aspects of open science policies described in the literature are the relations between international, regional, and national policies. There are also different components of open science covered in the literature: open data seems much discussed in the works in the English language, while open access is the main component discussed in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking papers. Finally, the relationship between open science policies and the science policy is framed by highlighting the innovation and transparency that open science can bring into it…(More)”

Explore the first Open Science Indicators dataset

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lauren Cadwallader, Lindsay Morton, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz: “Open Science is on the rise. We can infer as much from the proliferation of Open Access publishing options; the steady upward trend in bioRxiv postings; the periodic rollout of new national, institutional, or funder policies. 

But what do we actually know about the day-to-day realities of Open Science practice? What are the norms? How do they vary across different research subject areas and regions? Are Open Science practices shifting over time? Where might the next opportunity lie and where do barriers to adoption persist? 

To even begin exploring these questions and others like them we need to establish a shared understanding of how we define and measure Open Science practices. We also need to understand the current state of adoption in order to track progress over time. That’s where the Open Science Indicators project comes in. PLOS conceptualized a framework for measuring Open Science practices according to the FAIR principles, and partnered with DataSeer to develop a set of numerical “indicators” linked to specific Open Science characteristics and behaviors observable in published research articles. Our very first dataset, now available for download at Figshare, focuses on three Open Science practices: data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting…(More)”.

Universal Access and Its Asymmetries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Harmeet Sawhney and Hamid R. Ekbia: “Universal access—the idea that certain technologies and services should be extended to all regardless of geography or ability to pay—evokes ideals of democracy and equality that must be reconciled with the realities on the ground. The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of the need for access to high-speed internet service in the United States, but this is just the latest in a long history of debates about what should be made available and to whom. Rural mail delivery, electrification, telephone service, public schooling, and library access each raised the same questions as today’s debates about health care and broadband. What types of services should be universally available? Who benefits from extending these services? And who bears the cost?

Stepping beyond humanitarian arguments to conduct a clear-eyed, diagnostic analysis, this book offers some surprising conclusions. While the conventional approach to universal access looks primarily at the costs to the system and the benefits to individuals, Harmeet Sawhney and Hamid Ekbia provide a holistic perspective that also accounts for costs to individuals and benefits for systems. With a comparative approach across multiple cases, Universal Access and Its Asymmetries is an essential exploration of the history, costs, and benefits of providing universal access to technologies and services. With a fresh perspective, it overturns common assumptions and offers a foundation for making decisions about how to extend service—and how to pay for it…(More)”.

Going Digital to Advance Data Governance for Growth and Well-being

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Data are generated wherever digital technologies are deployed namely, in almost every part of modern life. Using these data can empower individuals, drive innovation, enable new digital products and improve policy making and public service delivery. But as data become more widely used across sectors and applications, the potential for misuse and harm also grows. To advance data governance for growth and well-being, this report advocates a holistic and coherent approach to data governance, domestically and across borders. It examines how data have emerged as a strategic asset, with the ability to transform lives and confer economic advantage. It explains how the unique characteristics of data can pose complex trade-offs and challenge policies that pre-date the data-driven era. This report provides new insights, evidence and analysis and outlines considerations for better data governance policies in the digital age…(More)”.

When do “Nudges” Increase Welfare?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hunt Allcott, Daniel Cohen, William Morrison & Dmitry Taubinsky: “Policymakers are increasingly interested in non-standard policy instruments (NPIs), or “nudges,” such as simplified information disclosure and warning labels. We characterize the welfare effects of NPIs using public finance sufficient statistic approaches, allowing for endogenous prices, market power, and optimal or suboptimal taxes. While many empirical evaluations have focused on whether NPIs increase ostensibly beneficial behaviors on average, we show that this can be a poor guide to welfare. Welfare also depends on whether the NPI reduces the variance of distortions from heterogenous biases and externalities, and the average effect becomes irrelevant with zero pass-through or optimal taxes. We apply our framework to randomized experiments evaluating automotive fuel economy labels and sugary drink health labels. In both experiments, the labels increase ostensibly beneficial behaviors but also may decrease welfare in our model, because they increase the variance of distortions…(More)”.

The Power of Partnership in Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by by Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner and Alex Ingrams: “At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations—Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. At the time, many were concerned that the Open Government Partnership would end up toothless, offering only lip service to vague ideals and misguided cyber-optimism. The Power of Partnership in Open Government offers a close look, and a surprising affirmation, of the Open Government Partnership as an example of a successful transnational multistakeholder initiative that has indeed impacted policy and helped to produce progressive reform.

By 2019 the Open Government Partnership had grown to 78 member countries and 20 subnational governments. Through a variety of methods—document analysis, interviews, process tracing, and quantitative analysis of secondary data—Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner, and Alex Ingrams chart the Open Government Partnership’s effectiveness and evaluate what this reveals about the potential of international reform initiatives in general. Their work calls upon scholars and policymakers to reconsider the role of international institutions and, in doing so, to differentiate between direct and indirect pathways to transnational impact on domestic policy. The more nuanced and complex processes of the indirect pathway, they suggest, have considerable but often overlooked potential to shape policy norms and models, alter resources and opportunities, and forge new linkages and coalitions—in short, to drive the substantial changes that inspire initiatives like the Open Government Partnership…(More)”.

Design-led policy and governance in practice: a global perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marzia Mortati, Louise Mullagh & Scott Schmidt: “Presently, the relationship between policy and design is very much open for debate as to how these two concepts differ, relate, and interact with one another. There exists very little agreement on their relational trajectory with one course, policy design, originating in the policy studies tradition while the other, design for policy, being founded in design studies. The Special Issue has paid particular attention to the upcoming area of research where design disciplines and policy studies are exploring new ways toward convergence. With a focus on design, the authors herein present an array of design methods and approaches through case studies and conceptual papers, using co-design, participatory design and critical service design to work with policymakers in tackling challenging issues and policies. We see designers and policymakers working with communities to boost engagement around the world, with examples from the UK, Latvia, New Zealand, Denmark, Turkey, the UK, Brazil and South Africa. Finally, we offer a few reflections to build further this research area pointing out topics for further research with the hope that these will be relevant for researchers approaching the field or deepening their investigation and for bridging the academic/practice divide between design studies and policy design…(More)”.