Book by Yascha Mounk: “Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time.
Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be able to integrate in harmony, celebrating their differences without essentializing them. But Mounk shows us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.
It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still characterize the United States and so many other countries around the world, but because we have succeeded in addressing them.
The Great Experiment is that rare book that offers both a profound understanding of an urgent problem and genuine hope for our human capacity to solve it. As Mounk contends, giving up on the prospects of building fair and thriving diverse democracies is simply not an option—and that is why we must strive to realize a more ambitious vision for the future of our societies…(More)”.
Data scientists are using the most annoying feature on your phones to save lives in Ukraine
Article by Bernhard Warner: “In late March, five weeks into Russia’s war on Ukraine, an international team of researchers, aid agency specialists, public health experts, and data nerds gathered on a Zoom call to discuss one of the tragic by-products of the war: the refugee crisis.
The numbers discussedweregrim. The United Nations had just declared Ukraine was facing the biggest humanitarian crisis to hit Europe since World War II as more than 4 million Ukrainians—roughly 10% of the population—had been forced to flee their homes to evade Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deadly and indiscriminate bombing campaign. That total has since swelled to 5.5 million, the UN estimates.
What the aid specialists on the call wanted to figure out was how many Ukrainian refugees still remained in the country (a population known as “internally displaced people”) and how many had crossed borders to seek asylum in the neighboring European Union countries of Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary, or south into Moldova.
Key to an effective humanitarian response of this magnitude is getting accurate and timely data on the flow of displaced people traveling from a Point A danger zone to a Point B safe space. And nobody on the call, which was organized by CrisisReady, an A-team of policy experts and humanitarian emergency responders, had anything close to precise numbers.
But they did have a kind of secret weapon: mobility data.
“The importance of mobility data is often overstated,” Rohini Sampoornam Swaminathan, a crisis specialist at Unicef, told her colleagues on the call. Such anonymized data—pulled from social media feeds, geolocation apps like Google Maps, cell phone towers and the like—may not give the precise picture of what’s happening on the ground in a moment of extreme crisis, “but it’s valuable” as it can fill in points on a map. ”It’s important,” she added, “to get a picture for where people are moving, especially in the first days.”
Ukraine, a nation of relatively tech-savvy social media devotees and mobile phone users, is rich in mobility data, and that’s profoundly shaped the way the world sees and interprets the deadly conflict. The CrisisReady group believes the data has an even higher calling—that it can save lives.
Since the first days of Putin’s bombing campaign, various international teams have been tapping publicly available mobility data to map the refugee crisis and coordinate an effective response. They believe the data can reveal where war-torn Ukrainians are now, and even where they’re heading. In the right hands, the data can provide local authorities the intel they need to get essential aid—medical care, food, and shelter—to the right place at the right time…(More)”
Uncertainty
Book by Sheila Jasanoff: “From climate change to the pandemic, uncertainty looms large over our public and personal lives. It is also the core feature of democratic life: while democratic governance seemingly heightens individual power, it exposes our life chances to the uncertain activity of others. We do not exercise control over those to whom we appeal, and yet we are constantly dependent on their actions for the goods in life we seek.
Sheila Jasanoff opens a forum on uncertainty and democracy in this volume, arguing that ideas around our autonomy, our freedom, and our individual agency, particularly in the United States, obscure our dependence on others in so many ways. To recognize this political emotion is to start to see the transformative potential in uncertainty.
The debate that follows explores the ideas about uncertainty and experts in a democracy, as well its scientific, philosophic, and emotional aspects…(More)”.
How to Make Better Decisions Online
Article by Josh Lerner and Rose Longhurst: “…First, the good news. Digital participation platforms can enable people to learn, debate, and decide together in more inclusive ways. They generally have several core functions that work well: collecting, reviewing, and revising ideas and proposals; voting on proposals; and reporting outcomes. Along the way, people can receive updates, give feedback, share information beyond the platforms, and integrate offline and online discussions. Advanced platform features are increasingly using artificial intelligence, algorithms, and randomization to connect people and ideas in new ways.
These platforms can make it easier to reach more informed decisions that have broader support. They make engagement easier by automating and distributing work— by collecting ideas, for example, and compiling votes. They make decision-making more transparent by documenting and sharing key information and discussions online, in usable formats. And they make participation more accessible by creating easier opportunities for people to engage at times and in places and languages that work for them.
At FundAction, a European community of activists has used one such platform to make decisions about funding priorities and grants. FundAction is a participatory fund that aims “to shift power to make decisions about funding from foundations to those closer to the issue, strengthen collaboration and mutual support among European activists, and build the capacity of activists and the social movements they work with.” The community is spread across many countries in different time zones, so people need to engage asynchronously at times most convenient for them.
The platform that FundAction uses has made it easier for activists to share their work with people outside their thematic or geographic community, which has helped build solidarity and buttressed political education. For example, disability justice activists shared links to their proposed social model of disability on the platform, making it easier for peers and reviewers to learn about the concept and ask questions. The questions and responses are shared transparently with all, saving the activists time as they do not have to repeatedly address the same points. This open format also serves as a reminder that all of us have questions, as well as solutions, to contribute.
People Powered has used a platform to allocate funds at a global level—and also to decide new organizational policies. People Powered is a global hub for participatory democracy that aims “to expand people’s power to make government decisions.” Its community of members from over 35 countries provides direct support for programs such as participatory budgeting and citizens’ assemblies. Members have used the platform to propose and debate funding allocations and policies and then vote to allocate funds to new projects (e.g., mentorship, trainings and a digital participation platform guide and ratings) and approve new policies (e.g., for membership, board elections, inclusion, and accessibility)….(More)”.
Data sharing between humanitarian organisations and donors
Report by Larissa Fast: “This report investigates issues related to data sharing between humanitarian actors and donors, with a focus on two key questions:
- What formal or informal frameworks govern the collection and sharing of disaggregated humanitarian data between humanitarian actors and donors?
- How are these frameworks and the related requirements understood or perceived by humanitarian actors and donors?
Drawing on interviews with donors and humanitarians about data sharing practices and examination of formal documents, the research finds that, overall and perhaps most importantly, references to ‘data’ in the context of humanitarian operations are usually generic and lack a consistent definition or even a shared terminology. Complex regulatory frameworks, variability among donor expectations, both among and within donor governments (e.g., at the country or field/headquarters levels), and among humanitarian experiences of data sharing all complicate the nature and handling of data sharing requests. Both the lack of data literacy and the differing perceptions of operational data management risks exacerbate many issues related to data sharing and create inconsistent practice (see full summary of findings in Table 3).
More specifically, while much formal documentation about data sharing between humanitarians and donors is available in the public domain, few contain explicit policies or clauses on data sharing, instead referring only to financial or compliance data and programme reporting requirements. Additionally, the justifications for sharing disaggregated humanitarian data are framed most often in terms of accountability, compliance, efficiency, and programme design. Most requests for data are linked to monitoring and compliance, as well as requests for data as ‘assurances’. Even so, donors indicated that although they request detailed/disaggregated data, they may not have the time, or human and/or technical capacity to deal with it properly. In general, donor interviewees insisted that no record level data is shared within their governments, but only aggregated or in low or no sensitivity formats….(More)”.
Can Algorithmic Recommendation Systems Be Good For Democracy? (Yes! & Chronological Feeds May Be Bad)
Article by Aviv Ovadya: Algorithmic recommendation systems (also known as recommender systems and recommendation engines) are one of the primary ways that we navigate the deluge of information from products like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and TikTok. We only have a finite amount of time and attention, and recommendation systems help allocate our attention across the zettabytes of data (trillions of gigabytes!) now produced each year.
The (simplistic) “evil recommendation system” story
Recommendation systems in the prominent tech companies stereotypically use what has become referred to as “engagement-based ranking.” They aim to predict which content will lead a user to engage the most—e.g., by interacting with the content or spending more time in the product. This content is ranked higher and is the most likely to be shown to the user. The idea is that this will lead to more time using the company’s product, and thus ultimately more time viewing ads.
While this may be good for business, and is relatively easy to implement, it is likely to be a rather harmful approach—it turns out that this leads people to produce more and more sensationalist and divisive content since that is what leads to the most engagement. This is potentially very dangerous for democratic stability—if things get too divisive, the social contract supporting a democracy can falter, potentially leading to internal warfare. (Caveat: for the sake of brevity, this is a heavily simplified account, and there may be evidence that in some countries this is less of a problem; and many non-ads based companies have similar incentives.)
Is the chronological feed a fix?
The perils of engagement-based ranking have led some advocates, policymakers, and even former tech employees to want to replace recommendation systems with chronological feeds: no more recommendations, just a list of posts in order by time. This appears to make sense at first glance. If recommendation systems place business interests over democratic stability, then it seems important to eliminate them before our democracy collapses!
However, this is where the story gets a bit more complicated. Chronological feeds address some of the problems with engagement-based ranking systems, but they cause many more. To understand why, we need to consider what recommendations systems do to society…(More)”.
To make AI fair, here’s what we must learn to do
Article by Mona Sloane: “…From New York City to California and the European Union, many artificial intelligence (AI) regulations are in the works. The intent is to promote equity, accountability and transparency, and to avoid tragedies similar to the Dutch childcare-benefits scandal.
But these won’t be enough to make AI equitable. There must be practical know-how on how to build AI so that it does not exacerbate social inequality. In my view, that means setting out clear ways for social scientists, affected communities and developers to work together.
Right now, developers who design AI work in different realms from the social scientists who can anticipate what might go wrong. As a sociologist focusing on inequality and technology, I rarely get to have a productive conversation with a technologist, or with my fellow social scientists, that moves beyond flagging problems. When I look through conference proceedings, I see the same: very few projects integrate social needs with engineering innovation.
To spur fruitful collaborations, mandates and approaches need to be designed more effectively. Here are three principles that technologists, social scientists and affected communities can apply together to yield AI applications that are less likely to warp society.
Include lived experience. Vague calls for broader participation in AI systems miss the point. Nearly everyone interacting online — using Zoom or clicking reCAPTCHA boxes — is feeding into AI training data. The goal should be to get input from the most relevant participants.
Otherwise, we risk participation-washing: superficial engagement that perpetuates inequality and exclusion. One example is the EU AI Alliance: an online forum, open to anyone, designed to provide democratic feedback to the European Commission’s appointed expert group on AI. When I joined in 2018, it was an unmoderated echo chamber of mostly men exchanging opinions, not representative of the population of the EU, the AI industry or relevant experts…(More)”
Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty-First Century
Book by Hugo Slim: “War is at a tipping point: we’re passing from the age of industrial warfare to a new era of computerised warfare, and a renewed risk of great-power conflict. Humanitarian response is also evolving fast—‘big aid’ demands more and more money, while aid workers try to digitalise, preparing to meet ever-broader needs in the long, big wars and climate crisis of the future.
This book draws on the founding moment of the modern Red Cross movement—the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a moment of great change in the nature of conflict—to track the big shifts already underway, and still to come, in the wars and war aid of our century. Hugo Slim first surveys the current landscape: the tech, politics, law and strategy of warfare, and the long-term transformations ahead as conflict goes digital. He then explains how civilians both suffer and survive in today’s wars, and how their world is changing. Finally, he critiques today’s humanitarian system, citing the challenges of the 2020s.
Inspired by Henri Dunant’s seminal humanitarian text, Solferino 21 alerts policymakers to the coming shakeup of the military and aid professions, illuminating key priorities for the new century. Humanitarians, he warns, must adapt or fail….(More)”.
Accelerating ethics, empathy, and equity in geographic information science
Paper by T. A. Nelson, F. Goodchild and D. J. Wright: “Science has traditionally been driven by curiosity and followed one goal: the pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Recently, ethics, empathy, and equity, which we term “the 3Es,” are emerging as new drivers of research and disrupting established practices. Drawing on our own field of GIScience (geographic information science), our goal is to use the geographic approach to accelerate the response to the 3Es by identifying priority issues and research needs that, if addressed, will advance ethical, empathic, and equitable GIScience. We also aim to stimulate similar responses in other disciplines. Organized around the 3Es we discuss ethical issues arising from locational privacy and cartographic integrity, how our ability to build knowledge that will lead to empathy can be curbed by data that lack representativeness and by inadvertent inferential error, and how GIScientists can lead toward equity by supporting social justice efforts and democratizing access to spatial science and its tools. We conclude with a call to action and invite all scientists to join in a fundamentally different science that responds to the 3Es and mobilizes for change by engaging in humility, broadening measures of excellences and success, diversifying our networks, and creating pathways to inclusive education. Science united around the 3Es is the right response to this unique moment where society and the planet are facing a vast array of challenges that require knowledge, truth, and action…(More)”
Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge
Book by John Matsusaka: “Propelled by the belief that government has slipped out of the hands of ordinary citizens, a surging wave of populism is destabilizing democracies around the world. As John Matsusaka reveals in Let the People Rule, this belief is based in fact. Over the past century, while democratic governments have become more efficient, they have also become more disconnected from the people they purport to represent. The solution Matsusaka advances is familiar but surprisingly underused: direct democracy, in the form of referendums. While this might seem like a dangerous idea post-Brexit, there is a great deal of evidence that, with careful design and thoughtful implementation, referendums can help bridge the growing gulf between the government and the people.
Drawing on examples from around the world, Matsusaka shows how direct democracy can bring policies back in line with the will of the people (and provide other benefits, like curbing corruption). Taking lessons from failed processes like Brexit, he also describes what issues are best suited to referendums and how they should be designed, and he tackles questions that have long vexed direct democracy: can voters be trusted to choose reasonable policies, and can minority rights survive majority decisions? The result is one of the most comprehensive examinations of direct democracy to date—coupled with concrete, nonpartisan proposals for how countries can make the most of the powerful tools that referendums offer….(More)”.