Holding Out for Something Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Rebecca Williams on the “Limits of Customer Service and Administrative Burden Frameworks” : “On December 13th, the Biden Administration published an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. The EO promises to improve a slew of government services with the help of technology and rests on a theory of change that these “customer service” improvements will “engender trust,” but does not speak to changing the substance of these public goods, which may be the primary cause of the public’s trust issues, only their delivery. While the EO harkens to democratic principles, it makes no mention of how public input informed why they were prioritizing the delivery of the services mentioned versus other services.

Words are imbued with meaning and connotation and using “customer service” to describe the delivery of public goods has a dark side. It’s not just that the analogy doesn’t logically work — everything that makes “customer service” high quality in the business context is missing from government, there is no competition forcing the government to attract and retain customers — this phrase will not get us there. It’s that this mismatch of power dynamics makes it a dangerous phrase to substitute in. Calling the public “customers” implicitly reduces their participatory power to mere consumers and doesn’t fully embody the government’s duty to serve all its people well.

Michèle Champagne @michhhamI “love how “service design” and “design thinking” consultants have slowly invaded public policy circles, where public servants and policymakers are taught that “design skills“ are mandatory positive thinking, rapid prototyping, and problem solving. Thing is, that‘s solutionism.April 21st 2021“

It’s important in these times of diminished voter rights, rising police surveillance, and prosecution of protestors to protect our democratic rights and be wary of anyone co-opting democratic language for lesser rights. As illustrated by Michèle Champagne’s brilliant tweet (above), asking for feedback after the bulk of the substance has been decided isn’t democratic, it’s providing a very small set of choices and dressing it up as democratic.

Let’s move away from consumer language for public goods to participatory and rights-based language; let’s lead delivery improvement initiatives with public input and place these improvements in the service of larger debates about what collective goods we want to have as a community. For example, if 63% of the population is supportive of healthcare for all, let’s be sure related public service improvements contemplate and serve that substantive expansion; investing in more application infrastructure might make less sense than considering how technology can support the issuance of universal medicare cards or uniform reporting standards. This is a job the Executive Branch could spearhead (the Federal Government takes on pilots projects routinely with input from the public), but it is also one the larger civic tech community should hold in their minds as a possibility…(More)”.

Privacy As/And Civil Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tiffany C. Li: “Decades have passed since the modern American civil rights movement began, but the fight for equality is far from over. Systemic racism, sexism, and discrimination against many marginalized groups is still rampant in our society. Tensions rose to a fever pitch in 2020, with a summer of Black Lives Matters protests, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, leading in to an attempted armed insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Asian-Americans faced rising rates of racism and hate crimes , spurred in part by inflammatory statements from the then-sitting President of the United States. Members of the LGBT community faced attacks on their civil rights during the Trump administration, including a rolling back of protections awarded to transgender individuals.

At the same time, the world faced a deadly pandemic that exposed the inequalities tearing the fabric of our society. The battle for civil rights is clearly not over, and the nation and the world have faced setbacks in the fight for equality, brought out by the pandemic, political pressures, and other factors. Meanwhile, the role of technology is also changing, with new technologies like facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and connected devices, offering new threats and perhaps new hope for civil rights. To understand privacy at our current point in time, we must consider the role of privacy in civil rights—and even, as scholars like Alvaro Bedoya have suggested, privacy itself as a civil right.

This Article is an attempt to expand upon the work of privacy and civil rights scholars in conceptualizing privacy as a civil right and situating this concept within the broader field of privacy studies. This Article builds on the work of scholars who have analyzed critical dimensions of privacy and privacy law, and who have advocated for changes in privacy law that can move our society forward to protect privacy and equality for all…(More)”.

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Innovation in Digital Assets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Factsheet from The White House: “Digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, have seen explosive growth in recent years, surpassing a $3 trillion market cap last November and up from $14 billion just five years prior. Surveys suggest that around 16 percent of adult Americans – approximately 40 million people – have invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrencies. Over 100 countries are exploring or piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), a digital form of a country’s sovereign currency.

The rise in digital assets creates an opportunity to reinforce American leadership in the global financial system and at the technological frontier, but also has substantial implications for consumer protection, financial stability, national security, and climate risk. The United States must maintain technological leadership in this rapidly growing space, supporting innovation while mitigating the risks for consumers, businesses, the broader financial system, and the climate. And, it must play a leading role in international engagement and global governance of digital assets consistent with democratic values and U.S. global competitiveness.

That is why today, President Biden will sign an Executive Order outlining the first ever, whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six key priorities: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation…(More)”

Letters and cards telling people about local police reduce crime

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elicia John & Shawn D. Bushway: “Community policing is often held up as an instrumental part of reforms to make policing less harmful, particularly in low-income communities that have high rates of violence. But building collaborative relationships between communities and police is hard. Writing in Nature, Shah and LaForest describe a large field experiment revealing that giving residents cards and letters with basic information about local police officers can prevent crime. Combining these results with those from Internet-based experiments, the authors attribute the observed reduction in crime to perceived ‘information symmetry’.

Known strangers are individuals whom we’ve never met but still know something about, such as celebrities. We tend to assume, erroneously, that known strangers know as much about us as we do about them. This tendency to see information symmetry when there is none is referred to as a social heuristic — a shortcut in our mental processing…

Collaborating with the New York Police Department, the authors sent letters and cards to residents of 39 public-housing developments, providing information about the developments’ local community police officers, called neighbourhood coordination officers. These flyers included personal details, such as the officers’ favourite food, sports team or superhero. Thirty control developments had neighbourhood coordination officers, but did not receive flyers….

This field experiment provided convincing evidence that a simple intervention can reduce crime. Indeed, in the three months after the intervention, the researchers observed a 5–7% drop in crime in the developments that received the information compared with neighbourhoods that did not. This level of reduction is similar to that of more-aggressive policing policies4. The drop in crime lessened after three months, which the authors suggest is due to the light touch and limited duration of the intervention. Interventions designed to keep officers’ information at the top of residents’ minds (such as flyers sent over a longer period at a greater frequency) might therefore result in longer-term effects.

The authors attribute the reduction in crime to a heightened perception among residents receiving flyers that the officer would find out if they committed a crime. The possibilities of such findings are potentially exciting, because the work implies that a police officer who is perceived as a real person can prevent crime without tactics such as the New York City police department’s ‘stop, question and frisk’ policy, which tended to create animosity between community members and the police….(More)”

The Immaculate Conception of Data: Agribusiness, Activists, and Their Shared Politics of the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by  Kelly Bronson: “Every new tractor now contains built-in sensors that collect data and stream it to cloud-based infrastructure. Seed and chemical companies are using these data, and these agribusinesses are a form of big tech alongside firms like Google and Facebook.

The Immaculate Conception of Data peeks behind the secretive legal agreements surrounding agricultural big data to trace how it is used and with what consequences. Agribusinesses are among the oldest oligopoly corporations in the world, and their concentration gives them an advantage over other food system actors. Kelly Bronson explores what happens when big data get caught up in pre-existing arrangements of power. Her richly ethnographic account details the work of corporate scientists, farmers using the data, and activist “hackers” building open-source data platforms. Actors working in private and public contexts have divergent views on whom new technology is for, how it should be developed, and what kinds of agriculture it should support. Surprisingly, despite their differences, these groups share a way of speaking about data and its value for the future. Bronson calls this the immaculate conception of data, arguing that this phenomenon is a dangerous framework for imagining big data and what it might do for society.

Drawing our attention to agriculture as an important new site for big tech criticism, The Immaculate Conception of Data uniquely bridges science and technology studies, critical data studies, and food studies, bringing to light salient issues related to data justice and a sustainable food system…(More)”.

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Matias Giaccobasso, Brad C. Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Alejandro Zentner: “Do perceptions about how the government spends tax dollars affect the willingness to pay taxes? We designed a field experiment to test this hypothesis in a natural, high-stakes context and via revealed preferences. We measure perceptions about the share of property tax revenues that fund public schools and the share of property taxes that are redistributed to disadvantaged districts. We find that even though information on where tax dollars go is publicly available and easily accessible, taxpayers still have significant misperceptions. We use an information-provision experiment to induce exogenous shocks to these perceptions. Using administrative data on tax appeals, we measure the causal effect of perceived government spending on the willingness to pay taxes. We find that some perceptions about government spending have a significant effect on the probability of filing a tax appeal and in a manner that is consistent with the classical theory of benefit-based taxation. We discuss implications for researchers and policy makers…(More)”.

NIH issues a seismic mandate: share data publicly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Kozlov at Nature: “In January 2023, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data-management plan in their grant applications — and to eventually make their data publicly available.

Researchers who spoke to Nature largely applaud the open-science principles underlying the policy — and the global example it sets. But some have concerns about the logistical challenges that researchers and their institutions will face in complying with it. Namely, they worry that the policy might exacerbate existing inequities in the science-funding landscape and could be a burden for early-career scientists, who do the lion’s share of data collection and are already stretched thin.

Because the vast majority of laboratories and institutions don’t have data managers who organize and curate data, the policy — although well-intentioned — will probably put a heavy burden on trainees and early-career principal investigators, says Lynda Coughlan, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, who has been leading a research team for fewer than two years and is worried about what the policy will mean for her.

Jorgenson says that, although the policy might require researchers to spend extra time organizing their data, it’s an essential part of conducting research, and the potential long-term boost in public trust for science will justify the extra effort…(More)”.

Turning the Principle of Participation into Practice: Empowering Parents to Engage on Data and Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guest Blog by Elizabeth Laird at Responsible Data for Children: “Two years into the pandemic, questions about parental rights in school have taken center stage in public debates, particularly in school board meetings and state houses across the United States. Not surprisingly, this extends to the use of data and technology in schools.

CDT recently released research that found that parental concerns around student privacy and security protection have risen since the spring, growing from 60% in February 2021 to 69% in July 2021. Far from being ambivalent, we also found that parents and students expressed eagerness to play a role in decisions about technology and data but indicate these desires are going unmet. Most parents and students want to be consulted but few have been asked for input: 93% of surveyed parents feel that schools should engage them regarding how student data is collected and used, but only 44% say their school has asked for their input on these issues.

While much of this debate has focused on the United States and similar countries, these issues have global resonance as all families have a stake in how their children are educated. Engaging students and families has always been an important component of primary and secondary education, from involving parents in their children’s individual experiences to systemic decision-making; however, there is significant room for improvement, especially as it relates to the use of education data and technology. Done well, community engagement (aligned with the Participatory principle in the Responsible Data for Children (RD4C) initiative) is a two-way, mutually beneficial partnership between public agencies and community members in which questions and concerns are identified, discussed, and decided jointly. It benefits public agencies by building trust, helping them achieve their mission, and minimizing risks, including community pushback. It helps communities by assisting agencies to better meet community needs and increasing transparency and accountability.

To assist education practitioners in improving their community engagement efforts, CDT recently released guidance that focuses on four important steps…(More)”.

End the State Monopoly on Facts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Adam J. White: “…This Covid-era dynamic has accelerated broader trends toward the consolidation of informational power among a few centralized authorities. And it has further deformed the loose set of institutions and norms that Jonathan Rauch, in a 2018 National Affairs article, identified as Western civilization’s “constitution of knowledge.” This is an arrangement in science, journalism, and the courts in which “any hypothesis can be floated” but “can join reality only insofar as it persuades people after withstanding vigorous questioning and criticism.” The more that Americans delegate the hard work of developing and distributing information to a small number of regulatory institutions, the less capable we all will be of correcting the system’s mistakes — and the more likely the system will be to make mistakes in the first place.

In a 1999 law review article, Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein warned of availability cascades, a process in which activists promote factual assertions and narratives that in a self-reinforcing dynamic become more plausible the more widely available they are, and can eventually overwhelm the public’s perception. The Covid-19 era has been marked by the opposite problem: unavailability cascades, in which media institutions and social media platforms swiftly erase disfavored narratives and dissenting contentions from the marketplace of ideas, making them seem implausible by their near unavailability. Such cascades occur because legacy media and social media platforms have come to rely overwhelmingly, even exclusively, on federal regulatory agencies’ factual assertions and the pronouncements of a small handful of other favored institutions, such as the World Health Organization, as the gold standard of facts. But availability and unavailability cascades, even when intended in good faith to prevent the spread of disinformation among the public, risk misinforming the very people they purport to inform. A more diverse and vibrant ecosystem of informational institutions would disincentivize the platforms’ and media’s reflexive, cascading reactions to dissenting views.

This second problem — the concentration of informational power — exacerbates the first one: how to counterbalance the executive branch’s power after an emergency. In order for Congress, the courts, and other governing institutions to reassert their own constitutional roles after the initial weeks and months of crisis, they (and the public) need credible sources of information outside the administration itself. An informational ecosystem not overweighted so heavily toward administrative agencies, one that benefits more from the independent contributions of experts in universities, think tanks, journalism, and other public and private institutions, would improve the quality of information that it produces. It would also be less susceptible to the reflexively partisan skepticism that has become endemic in the polarization of modern president-centric government…(More)”.

Algorithm vs. Algorithm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cary Coglianese and Alicia Lai: “Critics raise alarm bells about governmental use of digital algorithms, charging that they are too complex, inscrutable, and prone to bias. A realistic assessment of digital algorithms, though, must acknowledge that government is already driven by algorithms of arguably greater complexity and potential for abuse: the algorithms implicit in human decision-making. The human brain operates algorithmically through complex neural networks. And when humans make collective decisions, they operate via algorithms too—those reflected in legislative, judicial, and administrative processes. Yet these human algorithms undeniably fail and are far from transparent.

On an individual level, human decision-making suffers from memory limitations, fatigue, cognitive biases, and racial prejudices, among other problems. On an organizational level, humans succumb to groupthink and free-riding, along with other collective dysfunctionalities. As a result, human decisions will in some cases prove far more problematic than their digital counterparts. Digital algorithms, such as machine learning, can improve governmental performance by facilitating outcomes that are more accurate, timely, and consistent. Still, when deciding whether to deploy digital algorithms to perform tasks currently completed by humans, public officials should proceed with care on a case-by-case basis. They should consider both whether a particular use would satisfy the basic preconditions for successful machine learning and whether it would in fact lead to demonstrable improvements over the status quo. The question about the future of public administration is not whether digital algorithms are perfect. Rather, it is a question about what will work better: human algorithms or digital ones….(More)”.