The Rule of History

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Lepore about Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the hold of time in The New Yorker: “…Magna Carta has been taken as foundational to the rule of law, chiefly because in it King John promised that he would stop throwing people into dungeons whenever he wished, a provision that lies behind what is now known as due process of law and is understood not as a promise made by a king but as a right possessed by the people. Due process is a bulwark against injustice, but it wasn’t put in place in 1215; it is a wall built stone by stone, defended, and attacked, year after year. Much of the rest of Magna Carta, weathered by time and for centuries forgotten, has long since crumbled, an abandoned castle, a romantic ruin.

Magna Carta is written in Latin. The King and the barons spoke French. “Par les denz Dieu!” the King liked to swear, invoking the teeth of God. The peasants, who were illiterate, spoke English. Most of the charter concerns feudal financial arrangements (socage, burgage, and scutage), obsolete measures and descriptions of land and of husbandry (wapentakes and wainages), and obscure instruments for the seizure and inheritance of estates (disseisin and mort d’ancestor). “Men who live outside the forest are not henceforth to come before our justices of the forest through the common summonses, unless they are in a plea,” one article begins.

Magna Carta’s importance has often been overstated, and its meaning distorted. “The significance of King John’s promise has been anything but constant,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens aptly wrote, in 1992. It also has a very different legacy in the United States than it does in the United Kingdom, where only four of its original sixty-some provisions are still on the books. In 2012, three New Hampshire Republicans introduced into the state legislature a bill that required that “all members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.” For American originalists, in particular, Magna Carta has a special lastingness. “It is with us every day,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in a speech at a Federalist Society gathering last fall.

Much has been written of the rule of law, less of the rule of history. Magna Carta, an agreement between the King and his barons, was also meant to bind the past to the present, though perhaps not in quite the way it’s turned out. That’s how history always turns out: not the way it was meant to. In preparation for its anniversary, Magna Carta acquired a Twitter username: @MagnaCarta800th….(More)”

Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen: “Crowdsourcing legislation gives ordinary citizens, rather than political and bureaucratic elites, the chance to cooperate to come up with innovative new policies. By increasing popular involvement, representative democracies hope to restock dwindling reserves of political legitimacy. However, it is still not clear how involvement in legislative decision making affects the attitudes of the participants. It is therefore of central concern to establish whether crowdsourcing can actually help restore political legitimacy by creating more positive attitudes toward the political system. This article contributes to this research agenda by examining the developments in attitudes among the users on the Finnish website Avoin Ministeriö (“Open Ministry”) which orchestrates crowdsourcing of legislation by providing online tools for deliberating ideas for citizens’ initiatives. The developments in attitudes are investigated with a two-stage survey of 421 respondents who answered questions concerning political and social attitudes, as well as political activities performed. The results suggest that while crowdsourcing legislation has so far not affected political legitimacy in a positive manner, it has the potential to do so….(More)”

Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities.

A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions. Cities can be more sustainable, while its users save money and time when they are choosing a new home.

Not everyone is eager to read long lists of raw data. Therefore they created appealing user-friendly maps that visualize the statistics. Offering the user fast and accessible information on the neighborhoods that matter to them.

Another cornerstone of PlaceILive is their Life Quality Index: an algorithm that takes aspects like transportation, safety, and affordability into account. Making it possible for people to easily compare the livability of different houses. You can read more on the methodology and sources here.

life quality index press release

In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. When you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know more about by borough, zip code, or address. Using New York as an example, it looks like this….(More)

Eight ways to make government more experimental

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jonathan Breckon et al at NESTA: “When the banners and bunting have been tidied away after the May election, and a new bunch of ministers sit at their Whitehall desks, could they embrace a more experimental approach to government?

Such an approach requires a degree of humility.  Facing up to the fact that we don’t have all the answers for the next five years.  We need to test things out, evaluate new ways of doing things with the best of social science, and grow what works.  And drop policies that fail.

But how best to go about it?  Here are our 8 ways to make it a reality:

  1. Make failure OK. A more benign attitude to risk is central to experimentation.  As a 2003 Cabinet Office review entitled Trying it Out said, a pilot that reveals a policy to be flawed should be ‘viewed as a success rather than a failure, having potentially helped to avert a potentially larger political and/or financial embarrassment’. Pilots are particularly important in fast moving areas such as technology to try promising fresh ideas in real-time. Our ‘Visible Classroom’ pilot tried an innovative approach to teacher CPD developed from technology for television subtitling.
  2. Avoid making policies that are set in stone.  Allowing policy to be more project–based, flexible and time-limited could encourage room for manoeuvre, according to a previous Nesta report State of Uncertainty; Innovation policy through experimentation.  The Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Retention and Advancement pilot scheme to help people back to work was designed to influence the shape of legislation. It allowed for amendments and learning as it was rolled out.  We need more policy experiments like this.
  3. Work with the grain of current policy environment. Experimenters need to be opportunists. We need to be nimble and flexible. Ready to seize windows of opportunity to  experiment. Some services have to be rolled out in stages due to budget constraints. This offers opportunities to try things out before going national. For instance, The Mexican Oportunidades anti-poverty experiments which eventually reached 5.8 million households in all Mexican states, had to be trialled first in a handful of areas. Greater devolution is creating a patchwork of different policy priorities, funding and delivery models – so-called ‘natural experiments’. Let’s seize the opportunity to deliberately test and compare across different jurisdictions. What about a trial of basic income in Northern Ireland, for example, along the lines of recent Finnish proposals, or universal free childcare in Scotland?
  4. Experiments need the most robust and appropriate evaluation methods such as, if appropriate, Randomised Controlled Trials. Other methods, such as qualitative research may be needed to pry open the ‘black box’ of policies – to learn about why and how things are working. Civil servants should use the government trial advice panel as a source of expertise when setting up experiments.
  5. Grow the public debate about the importance of experimentation. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to psychological experiments on their 689,000 users web-users. Approval by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities – is essential, but we can’t just rely on experts. We need a dedicated public understanding of experimentation programmes, perhaps run by Evidence Matters or Ask for Evidence campaigns at Sense about Science. Taking part in an experiment in itself can be a learning opportunity creating  an appetite amongt the public, something we have found from running an RCT with schools.
  6. Create ‘Skunkworks’ institutions. New or improved institutional structures within government can also help with experimentation.   The Behavioural Insights Team, located in Nesta,  operates a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, semi-detached from day-to-day bureaucracy. The nine UK What Works Centres help try things out semi-detached from central power, such as the The Education Endowment Foundation who source innovations widely from across the public and private sectors- including Nesta-  rather than generating ideas exclusively in house or in government.
  7. Find low-cost ways to experiment. People sometimes worry that trials are expensive and complicated.  This does not have to be the case. Experiments to encourage organ donation by the Government Digital Service and Behavioural Insights Team involved an estimated cost of £20,000.  This was because the digital experiments didn’t involve setting up expensive new interventions – just changing messages on  web pages for existing services. Some programmes do, however, need significant funding to evaluate and budgets need to be found for it. A memo from the White House Office for Management and Budget has asked for new Government schemes seeking funding to allocate a proportion of their budgets to ‘randomized controlled trials or carefully designed quasi-experimental techniques’.
  8. Be bold. A criticism of some experiments is that they only deal with the margins of policy and delivery. Government officials and researchers should set up more ambitious experiments on nationally important big-ticket issues, from counter-terrorism to innovation in jobs and housing….(More)

Why Google’s Waze Is Trading User Data With Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Parmy Olson at Forbes: “In Rio de Janeiro most eyes are on the final, nail-biting matches of the World Cup. Over in the command center of the city’s department of transport though, they’re on a different set of screens altogether.

Planners there are watching the aggregated data feeds of thousands of smartphones being walked or driven around a city, thanks to two popular travel apps, Waze and Moovit.

The goal is traffic management, and it involves swapping data for data. More cities are lining up to get access, and while the data the apps are sharing is all anonymous for now, identifying details could get more specific if cities like what they see, and people become more comfortable with being monitored through their smartphones in return for incentives.

Rio is the first city in the world to collect real-time data both from drivers who use the Waze navigation app and pedestrians who use the public-transportation app Moovit, giving it an unprecedented view on thousands of moving points across the sprawling city. Rio is also talking to the popular cycling app Strava to start monitoring how cyclists are moving around the city too.

All three apps are popular, consumer services which, in the last few months, have found a new way to make their crowdsourced data useful to someone other than advertisers. While consumers use Waze and Moovit to get around, both companies are flipping the use case and turning those millions of users into a network of sensors that municipalities can tap into for a better view on traffic and hazards. Local governments can also use these apps as a channel to send alerts.

On an average day in June, Rio’s transport planners could get an aggregated view of 110,000 drivers (half a million over the course of the month), and see nearly 60,000 incidents being reported each day – everything from built-up traffic, to hazards on the road, Waze says. Till now they’ve been relying on road cameras and other basic transport-department information.

What may be especially tantalizing for planners is the super-accurate read Waze gets on exactly where drivers are going, by pinging their phones’ GPS once every second. The app can tell how fast a driver is moving and even get a complete record of their driving history, according to Waze spokesperson Julie Mossler. (UPDATE: Since this story was first published Waze has asked to clarify that it separates users’ names and their 30-day driving info. The driving history is categorized under an alias.)

This passively-tracked GPS data “is not something we share,” she adds. Waze, which Google bought last year for $1.3 billion, can turn the data spigots on and off through its application programing interface (API).

Waze has been sharing user data with Rio since summer 2013 and it just signed up the State of Florida. It says more departments of transport are in the pipeline.

But none of these partnerships are making Waze any money. The app’s currency of choice is data. “It’s a two-way street,” says Mossler. “Literally.”

In return for its user updates, Waze gets real-time information from Rio on highways, from road sensors and even from cameras, while Florida will give the app data on construction projects or city events.

Florida’s department of transport could not be reached for comment, but one of its spokesmen recently told a local news station: “We’re going to share our information, our camera images, all of our information that comes from the sensors on the roadway, and Waze is going to share its data with us.”…

To get Moovit’s data, municipalities download a web interface that gives them an aggregated view of where pedestrians using Moovit are going. In return, the city feeds Moovit’s database with a stream of real-time GPS data for buses and trains, and can issue transport alerts to Moovit’s users. Erez notes the cities aren’t allowed to make “any sort of commercial approach to the users.”

Erez may be saving that for advertisers, an avenue he says he’s still exploring. For now getting data from cities is the bigger priority. It gives Moovit “a competitive advantage,” he says.

Cycling app Strava also recently started sharing its real-time user data as part of a paid-for service called Strava Metro.

Municipalities pay 80 cents a year for every Strava member being tracked. Metro only launched in May, but it already counts the state of Oregon; London, UK; Glasgow, Scotland; Queensland, Austalia and Evanston, Illinois as customers.
….
Privacy advocates will naturally want to keep a wary eye on what data is being fed to cities, and that it doesn’t leak or get somehow misused by City Hall. The data-sharing might not be ubiquitous enough for that to be a problem yet, and it should be noted that any kind of deal making with the public sector can get wrapped up in bureaucracy and take years to get off the ground.

For now Waze says it’s acting for the public good….(More)

Design in policy making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Open Policy Making Blog: “….In recent years, notable policy and business experts have been discussing the value of design and ‘design thinking’ as an approach to improving the way Government delivers services in one form or another for (and with) citizens.  Examples include Roger Martin from Rotman Business School, Christian Bason formerly of Mindlab, Marco Steinberg of Sitra, Hilary Cottam of Participle, and many more who have been promoting the use of design as a tool for service transformation.

So what is design and how is it being applied in government?  This is the question that has been posed this week at the Service Design in Government conference in London.  This week is also the launch of some of the Policy Lab tools in the Policy Toolkit.

The Policy Lab have produced a short introduction to design, service design and design thinking.  It serves to explain how we are defining and using the term design in various ways in a policy context as well as provide practical tools and examples of design being used in policy making.

We tend to spot design when it goes wrong: badly laid out forms, websites we can’t navigate, confusing signage, transport links that don’t join together, queues for services that are in demand. Bad design is a time thief.  We can also spot good design when we see it, but how is it achieved?…(More)”

Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

  • all 28 current members of the European Union ;
  • 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…

The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.

Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:

  • the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
  • the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
  • the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)

31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils  and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.

The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.

Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(More)”

Participatory Democracy’s Emerging Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

, and (The GovLab) at Governing: “As we explore the role of new technologies in changing how government makes policies and delivers services, one form of technology is emerging that has the potential to foster decision-making that’s not only more effective but also more legitimate: platforms for organizing communication by groups across a distance….

Whether the goal is setting an agenda, brainstorming solutions, choosing a path forward and implementing it, or collaborating to assess what works, here are some examples of new tools for participatory democracy:

Agenda-setting and brainstorming: Loomio is an open-source tool designed to make it easy for small to medium-sized groups to make decisions together. Participants can start a discussion on a given topic and invite people into a conversation. As the conversation progresses, anyone can put a proposal to a vote. It is specifically designed to enable consensus-based decision-making.

Google Moderator is a service that uses crowdsourcing to rank user-submitted questions, suggestions and ideas. The tool manages feedback from a large number of people, any of whom who can submit a question or vote up or down on the top questions. The DeLib Dialogue App is a service from the United Kingdom that also allows participants to suggest ideas, refine them via comments and discussions, and rate them to bring the best ideas to the top. And Your Priorities is a service that enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritize ideas.

Voting: Democracy 2.1 and OpaVote are tools that allow people to submit ideas, debate them and then vote on them. Democracy 2.1 offers voters the additional option of casting up to four equally weighted “plus votes” and two “minus votes.” OpaVote is designed to enable elections where voters select a single candidate, employ ranked-choice or approval voting, or use any combination of voting methods.

Drafting: DemocracyOS was designed specifically to enable co-creation of legislation or policy proposals. With the tool, large numbers of users can build proposals, either from scratch or by branching off from existing drafts. Currently in use in several cities, it is designed to get citizen input into a process where final decision-making authority still rests with elected officials or civil servants. For drafting together, Hypothes.is is an annotation tool that can be used to collaboratively annotate documents.

Discussion and Q&A: Stack Exchange enables a community to set up its own free question-and-answer board. It is optimal when a group has frequent, highly granular, factual questions that might be answered by others using the service. ….(More)”

 

The crowd-sourcing web project bringing amateur and professional archaeologists together

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Jackson at Culture 24: “With only limited funds and time, professional archaeologists consistently struggle to protect and interpret the UK’s vast array of archaeological finds and resources. Yet there are huge pools of amateur groups and volunteers who are not only passionate but also skilled and knowledgeable about archaeology in the UK.
Now a new web platform called MicroPasts has been produced in a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and the British Museum to connect institutions and volunteers so that they can create, fund and work on archaeological projects together.
Work by UCL postdoctoral researchers Chiara Bonacchi and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert and British Museum post doc researcher Jennifer Wexler established much of the ground work including the design, implementation and the public engagement aspects of the of the new site.
According to one of the project leaders, Professor Andrew Bevan at UCL, MicroPasts emerged from a desire to harness the expertise (and manpower) of volunteers and to “pull together crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding in a way that hadn’t been tried before”.
Although there are many crowd-sourcing portals online, they are either specific to one project (DigVentures, for example, which conducted the world’s first crowd-funded dig in 2012) or can be used to create almost anything you can imagine (such as Kickstarter).
MicroPasts was also inspired by Crowdcrafting, which encourages citizen science projects and, like MicroPasts, offers a platform for volunteers and researchers with an interest in a particular subject to come together to create and contribute to projects….(More)”