How smart cities are boosting citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Joe Appleton: “…many governments are implementing new and exciting ideas to try and boost citizen engagement and overcome the obstacles that prevent citizen involvement. Here are a few examples of how cities are engaging with citizens in the 21st century.

REVOLUTIONIZING CITY HALL

The city of San Francisco has been working hard to improve resident participation. To help solve city-wide problems, the city created a program called Civic Bridge. Civic Bridge is a platform that can be used to bring together residents and volunteers from the private sector with city staff. This allows city hall to work closely with private sector professionals to solve public challenges.

By enlisting the help of hundreds of otherwise unreachable residents, solutions to city problems such as homelessness, access to healthcare, and other social issues, fast and effective results could be produced.

Civy is another program that has been designed to put city officials directly in touch with residents. Civy is a cloud-based platform that gives citizens a voice, in a confidential environment, that allows citizens to add their thoughts and opinions on citywide projects, helping officials make better-informed decisions.

REMOVING BARRIERS

Physically traveling to a city hall can be an immense barrier to citizen participation. However, some innovative cities are taking steps to bring city hall into resident’s homes. To do this, they are enlisting help from platforms such as CitizenLab. CitizenLab was first launched in 2016, and it has proven itself to be a practical medium for many European cities. The platform boosts citizen engagement by sending data directly to members of the public via a user-friendly mobile interface. Officials can see the results from surveys and questionnaires in real-time, and use the data collected to make decisions based on real citizen insights.

Civocracy is a similar digital platform that has been designed to promote citizen participation, champion collaborative governance projects, and improve city hall efficiency. It focuses on direct communication between residents and officials, giving citizen’s a platform to discuss projects and allow officials to get ideas from the public. This service is currently being used in Amsterdam, Nice, Potsdam, Brussels, Lyon, and many other European cities.

Platforms like these are essential for removing the obstacles that many citizens face when interacting with city governments. As a result, cities can enjoy a more citizen-centric form of smart government.

BOOSTING PARTICIPATION

There’s more to citizen engagement than giving and receiving feedback for ideas and projects. To boost participation, some cities have really embraced 21st century trends. 

For example, two cities in the UK (London and Plymouth) have been experimenting with crowdfunding for potential city projects. Proposals for urban projects are listed on popular crowdfunding websites, in an open and transparent manner, allowing residents and investors to directly contribute funds to projects and initiatives that they’re interested in. In some cases, the local authorities will support winning proposals by matching the raised funds.

Crowdfunding can be used as a platform for citizens to show off their own ideas and initiatives, and highlight any potential problems in the community. The service can be used for a wide range of applications, from restoring derelict buildings to installing social health programs.

Allowing citizens to show their approval with their personal funding is one way to boost participation, however, there should be other ways to attract attention and allow citizens to voice their opinions too. Maptionnaire is one such way. 

Maptionnaire is an online tool that creates a virtual map of a city, where residents can freely offer their advice, opinions, and feelings about areas of the city or specific projects. Users can simply leave comments that can explicitly inform city officials about their feelings. 

This is a great tool that can provide widely representative data about city plans. The platform can also take votes about certain projects and garner fast results. Since it can be accessed remotely, it also allows for citizens to say what they want, without feeling intimidated by a crowd or swayed by popular opinion.

NURTURING IDEAS

Encouraging public feedback is one way to boost participation, but some local authorities are going a step further by directly asking citizens for solutions. By allowing citizens to formulate their own solutions and give them the tools to realize those solutions, interest in city governance can grow exponentially.

For example, Lublin is the first city in Poland to adopt an initiative called the Green Citizen’s Budget. This participatory budget scheme welcomed residents to put forward ideas to improve urban greenery, and allocated a budget of PLN 2 million (450.000 €) and teamed residents up with technical experts to help realize those plans.

Turning to citizens for inspiration is a popular way of generating new ideas and seeing fresh perspectives. The city of Sydney and the New South Wales government in Australia has recently launched an innovative competition that presents an opportunity for citizens to submit daring proposals to solve public space problems….(More)”.

The New Net Delusion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Shullenberger at the New Atlantis: “…The old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings seem to revive the old cyber-utopian dreams.

One day, democracy is irreversibly poisoned by social media, which empowers the radical right, authoritarians, and racist, misogynist trolls. The next day, the very same platforms are giving rise to a thrilling resurgence of grassroots activism. The new net delusion more closely resembles a psychotic delusion in the clinical meaning of the word, in which the sufferer often swings between megalomaniacal fantasies of control and panicked sensations of loss of control.

The shift toward a subtle endorsement of manipulation and propaganda — itself an expression of a desire for control — is a result of the fracture of our information ecosystem. The earlier cyber-utopian consensus overrated the value of information in itself and underrated the importance of narratives that bestow meaning on information. The openness of the media system to an endless stream of new users, channels, and data has overwhelmed shared stable narratives, bringing about what L. M. Sacasas calls “narrative collapse.”

But sustaining ideological projects and achieving political ends still requires narratives to extract some meaning from the noise. In the oversaturated attention economy, the most extreme narratives generally stand out. As a result, open networks, which were supposed to counteract propaganda, have instead caused its proliferation — sometimes top-down and state-directed, sometimes crowdsourced, often both.

This helps to explain why the democratization of information channels has been less inimical to authoritarian governments than was anticipated ten years ago. Much like extremists and conspiracy theorists, states with aggressive propaganda arms offer oversimplified messages to keep bewildered online users from having to navigate a swelling tide of data on their own.

Conversely, legacy media, if it remains committed to some degree of neutrality, offers fewer definitive explanatory frameworks, and its messages are accordingly more likely to get lost in the noise. It should not surprise us that news organizations are actually pivoting toward more overt ideological commitments. Adopting forceful narratives, however well they actually make sense of the world, attracts more eyeballs.

Those who celebrated Twitter and Facebook as vehicles of global liberalization and those who now denounce them as gateways into dangerous extremism (often the same people) have erred in seeing the platforms as causally linked to specific politics, rather than to a particular range of styles of politics. Their deeper mistake, however, is to view freedom and control as opposed, rather than as complementary elements of a system. The expansion of freedom through open networks generates informational chaos that, in turn, feeds a demand for reinvigorated control. We can see the demand for control in the new appeal of extreme, even bizarre views that impose an organizing principle on the chaos.

And we can also see the demand for control in the nostalgia for the old gatekeepers, whose demise was once celebrated. Ironically, the only way for these gatekeepers to stay relevant may be to follow the lead of the authoritarians and activists — to abandon any stance of being neutral and above the fray and instead furnish a cohering narrative of their own….(More)”.

Responsive Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter Drahos: “Regulatory capitalism depends heavily on science, but science faces epi-stemic critiques and crises of research integrity. These critiques and crises are outlined and then located within capitalism’s general tragedy of commodification. Drawing on Marx’s insights into the relationship between science, commodity production, and the machine age, the general tragedy of commodification is outlined. From here, the article shifts to discussing some well-known global public good problems relating to access to medicines and access to knowledge. The roots of these problems can be traced back to the way the institution of science has been bent toward processes of capital accumulation. The evidence we have from the history of science suggests that too often its research agendas have been set by capital and the demands of war-making capitalist states. The final part of the article considers whether the ideal of responsiveness might help us to reformulate the way in which we think about the responsibilities and duties of science. It focuses on human rights, citizen science, and the intellectual commons as potential sources of responsiveness. Responsiveness has been a fertile ideal for law and society theorists when it has come to theory building in law and regulation. It also has something to offer the debates around the crises of science….(More)”.

Responsible group data for children

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Issue Brief by Andrew Young: “Understanding how and why group data is collected and what can be done to protect children’s rights…While the data protection field largely focuses on individual data harms, it is a focus that obfuscates and exacerbates the risks of data that could put groups of people at risk, such as the residents of a particular village, rather than individuals.

Though not well-represented in the current responsible data literature and policy domains writ large, the challenges group data poses are immense. Moreover, the unique and amplified group data risks facing children are even less scrutinized and understood.

To achieve Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) and ensure effective and legitimate governance of children’s data, government policymakers, data practitioners, and institutional decision makers need to ensure children’s group data are a core consideration in all relevant policies, procedures, and practices….(More)”. (See also Responsible Data for Children).

Cracking the code: Rulemaking for humans and machines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Paper by James Mohun and Alex Roberts: “Rules as Code (RaC) is an exciting concept that rethinks one of the core functions of governments: rulemaking. It proposes that governments create an official version of rules (e.g. laws and regulations) in a machine-consumable form, which allows rules to be understood and actioned by computer systems in a consistent way. More than simply a technocratic solution, RaC represents a transformational shift in how governments create rules, and how third parties consume them. Across the world, public sector teams are exploring the concept and its potential as a response to an increasingly complex operating environment and growing pressures on incumbent rulemaking systems. Cracking the Code is intended to help those working both within and outside of government to understand the potential, limitations and implications of RaC, as well as how it could be applied in a public service context….(More)”.

Which Side of History?: How Technology Is Reshaping Democracy and Our Lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Common Sense: “…collection of essential essays, provocative perspectives, and calls to action that challenge the status quo, and that could—if we are willing to listen—redefine our relationship with technology….The onset of the coronavirus pandemic brought cascading crises and a deeper dependency on technology to keep us connected—but at a cost. We’re using tech for work, education, health care, essential services, and fun. That same technology is spreading misinformation and threatening free and open democracies. It’s widening the gap between rich and poor, taxing our emotional capacities and mental health, and creating social inequities by leaving behind those of us who are underserved and under-connected…(More)”.

Digital Government Initiative in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Compendium, prepared by the Division for Public Institutions and Digital Government (DPIDG) of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA): “…aims to capture emerging trends in digital responses of the United Nations Member States against the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a preliminary analysis of their main features….


The initiatives listed in this compendium were submitted by Member States in response to a call for inputs launched by UN DESA/DPIDG in April/May 2020. The compendium lists selected initiatives according to major categories of action areas. While this publication does not list all initiatives submitted by Member States, the complete list can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/EGOV_COVID19_APPS .

Major groupings of action areas are:

  1. Information sharing
  2. E-participation
  3. E-health
  4. E-business
  5. Contact tracing
  6. Social distancing and virus tracking
  7. Working and learning from home
  8. Digital policy
  9. Partnerships…(More)”.

Institutional Change and Institutional Persistence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daron Acemoglu, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin: “In this essay, we provide a simple conceptual framework to elucidate the forces that lead to institutional persistence and change. Our framework is based on a dynamic game between different groups, who care both about current policies and institutions and future policies, which are themselves determined by current institutional choices, and clarifies the forces that lead to the most extreme form of institutional persistence (“institutional stasis”) and the potential drivers of institutional change. We further study the strategic stability of institutions, which arises when institutions persist because of fear of subsequent, less beneficial changes that would follow initial reforms. More importantly, we emphasize that, despite the popularity of ideas based on institutional stasis in the economics and political science literatures, most institutions are in a constant state of flux, but their trajectory may still be shaped by past institutional choices, thus exhibiting “path-dependent change”, so that initial conditions determine both the subsequent trajectories of institutions and how they respond to shocks. We conclude the essay by discussing how institutions can be designed to bolster stability, the relationship between social mobility and institutions, and the interplay between culture and institutions….(More)”

AI Localism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Today, The GovLab is  excited to launch a new platform which seeks to monitor, analyze and guide how AI is being governed in cities around the world: AI Localism. 

AI Localism refers to the actions taken by local decision-makers to address the use of AI within a city or community.  AI Localism has often emerged because of gaps left by incomplete state, national or global governance frameworks.

“AI Localism offers both immediacy and proximity. Because it is managed within tightly defined geographic regions, it affords policymakers a better understanding of the tradeoffs involved. By calibrating algorithms and AI policies for local conditions, policymakers have a better chance of creating positive feedback loops that will result in greater effectiveness and accountability.”

The initial AI Localism projects include:

The Ethics and Practice of AI Localism at a Time of Covid-19 and Beyond – In collaboration with the TUM School of Governance and University of Melbourne The GovLab will conduct a comparative review of current practices worldwide to gain a better understanding of successful AI Localism in the context of COVID-19 as to inform and guide local leaders and city officials towards best practices.

Responsible AI at the Local Level – Together with the NYU Center Responsible AI, The GovLab will seek to develop an interactive repository and a set of training modules of Responsible AI approaches at the local level. 

Join us as we seek to understand and develop new forms of governance to guide local leaders towards responsible AI implementation or share any effort you are working on to establishing responsible AI at the local level by visiting: http://ailocalism.org

Situating Open Data: Global Trends in Local Contexts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Danny Lämmerhirt, Ana Brandusescu, Natalia Domagala & Patrick Enaholo: “Open data and its effects on society are always woven into infrastructural legacies, social relations, and the political economy. This raises questions about how our understanding and engagement with open data shifts when we focus on its situated use. 

To shed a light on these questions, Situating Open Data provides several empirical accounts of open data practices, the local implementation of global initiatives, and the development of new open data ecosystems. Drawing on case studies in different countries and contexts, the chapters demonstrate the practices and actors involved in open government data initiatives unfolding within different socio-political settings. 

The book proposes three recommendations for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners. First, beyond upskilling through ‘data literacy’ programmes, open data initiatives should be specified through the kinds of data practices and effects they generate. Second, global visions of open data implementation require more studies of the resonances and tensions created in localised initiatives. And third, research into open data ecosystems requires more attention to the histories and legacies of information infrastructures and how these shape who benefits from open data flows. 

As such, this volume departs from the framing of data as a resource to be deployed. Instead, it proposes a prism of different data practices in different contexts through which to study the social relations, capacities, infrastructural histories and power structures affecting open data initiatives. It is hoped that the contributions collected in Situating Open Data will spark critical reflection about the way open data is locally practiced and implemented. The contributions should be of interest to open data researchers, advocates, and those in or advising government administrations designing and rolling out effective open data initiatives….(More)”.