Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book edited by Caroline W. Lee, Michael McQuarrie and Edward T. Walker: “Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive policymaking context, we now hold the keys to large-scale democratic revitalization.
Democratizing Inequalities shows that the equation may not be so simple. Modern societies face a variety of structural problems that limit potentials for true democratization, as well as vast inequalities in political action and voice that are not easily resolved by participatory solutions. Popular participation may even reinforce elite power in unexpected ways. Resisting an oversimplified account of participation as empowerment, this collection of essays brings together a diverse range of leading scholars to reveal surprising insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns, and participatory budgeting practices in Brazil, Democratizing Inequalities seeks to refresh our understanding of public participation and trace the reshaping of authority in today’s political environment.”

Can Business And Tech Transform The Way Our Government Works By 2020?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Schiller at Co.Exist: “The rise of open data, crowd-sourcing, predictive analytics, and other big tech trends, aren’t just for companies to contend with. They’re also a challenge for government. New technology gives public agencies the opportunity to develop and deliver services in new ways, track results more accurately, and open up decision-making.
Deloitte’s big new Government 2020 report looks at the trends impacting government and lays out a bunch of ideas for how they can innovate. We picked out a few below. There are more infographics in the slide show.

Consumerization of public services

Deloitte expects entrepreneurs to “develop innovative and radically user-friendly approaches to satisfy unmet consumer demand for better public services.” Startups like Uber or Lyft “reinvigorated transportation.” Now it expects a similar “focus on seamless customer experiences” in education and health care.

Open workforce

Deloitte expects governments to become looser: collections of people doing a job, rather than large hierarchical structures. “Governments [will] expand their talent networks to include ‘partnership talent’ (employees who are parts of joint ventures), ‘borrowed talent’ (employees of contractors), ‘freelance talent’ (independent, individual contractors) and ‘open-source talent,'” the report says.

Outcome based legislation

Just as big data analytics allows companies to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, so it allows governments to measure how well legislation and regulation is working. They can “shift from a concentration on processes to the achievement of specific targets.” And, if the law isn’t working, someone has the data to throw it out….”

Transparency isn’t what keeps government from working

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gary D. Bass, Danielle Brian and Norman Eisen in the Washington Post: “In 2014, a number of big thinkers made the surprising claim that government openness and transparency are to blame for today’s gridlock. They have it backward: Not only is there no relationship between openness and dysfunction, but more secrecy can only add to that dysfunction.

As transparency advocates, we never take openness for granted. The latest example of the dangers of secrecy was the “cromnibus” bill, with its surprise lifting of campaign finance limits for political parties to an astonishing $3 million per couple per cycle, and its suddenly revealed watering down of Dodd-Frank’s derivatives safeguards. And in parallel to the controversy over the release of the CIA’s torture report, that agency proposed to delete e-mail from nearly all employees and contractors, destroying potential documentary evidence of wrongdoing. Openness doesn’t happen without a struggle…..

Academics, such as Francis Fuku­yama, make the case that politicians need privacy and discretion — back-door channels — to get the business of government done. “The obvious solution to this problem would be to roll back some of the would-be democratizing reforms, but no one dares suggest that what the country needs is a bit less participation and transparency,” writes Fukuyama in his newest book. At a time when voter participation is as low as during World War II, it seems strange to call for less participation and democracy. And more secrecy in Congress isn’t going to suddenly create dealmaking. The 2011 congressional “supercommittee” tasked with developing a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction deal operated almost entirely in secret. The problem wasn’t transparency or openness. Instead, as the committee’s Republican co-chairman, Jeb Hensarling, stated, the real problem was “two dramatically competing visions of the role [of] government.” These are the real issues, not openness….
We are not transparency absolutists. Not everything government and Congress do should occur in a fishbowl; that said, there is already plenty of room today for private deliberations. The problem isn’t transparency. It is that the political landscape punishes those who try to work together. And if various accountability measures create procedural challenges, let’s fix them. When it comes to holding government accountable, it is in the nation’s best interest to allow the media, nonprofit groups and the public full access to decision-making.”

Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Nathaniel Tkacz: “Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer….(More).”

Making Futures – Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard: “Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.
These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. (More) “

The openness revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Business is being forced to open up in a host of reporting areas, from tax and government contracts to anti-corruption and sustainability programmes. Campaigners are cock-a-hoop, but continue to demand more. Executives are starting to ask whether the revolution is in danger of going too far.
Three forces are driving change. First, governments are demanding greater corporate accountability in the wake of the global financial crisis. No longer is ending corporate secrecy—the sharp end of which is money-laundering shell companies—an agenda pushed merely by Norway and a few others; it has become a priority for the G20. Second, investigative journalists have piled in. A recent example is the exposure by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of sweetheart tax deals for multinationals in Luxembourg. The third factor is the growing sophistication of NGOs in this sphere, such as Transparency International (TI) and Global Witness. “Twenty years ago our work seemed an impossible dream. Now it’s coming true,” says Ben Elers of TI.
TI recently published its latest study on corporate reporting, which evaluated 124 big publicly listed companies, based on the clarity of their anti-corruption programmes, their corporate holdings and their financial reporting. Four-fifths of them scored less than five out of ten overall, but there were big regional disparities: seven of the ten most open firms were European; eight of the ten most clammed-up were Asian (see table)….“

The Global Open Data Index 2014

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Open Knowledge Foundation: “The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”

Climate Resilience Toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Meeting the challenges of a changing climate

The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit provides scientific tools, information, and expertise to help people manage their climate-related risks and opportunities, and improve their resilience to extreme events. The site is designed to serve interested citizens, communities, businesses, resource managers, planners, and policy leaders at all levels of government.

A climate-smart approach to taking action

In response to the President’s Climate Action Plan and Executive Order to help the nation prepare for climate-related changes and impacts, U.S. federal government agencies gathered resources that can help people take action to build their climate resilience. The impacts of climate change—including higher temperatures, heavier downpours, more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, and floods, and sea level rise—are affecting communities, businesses, and natural resources across the nation.
Now is the time to act. For some, taking a business-as-usual approach has become more risky than taking steps to build their climate resilience. People who recognize they are vulnerable to climate variability and change can work to reduce their vulnerabilities, and find win-win opportunities that simultaneously boost local economies, create new jobs, and improve the health of ecosystems. This is a climate-smart approach—investing in activities that build resilience and capacity while reducing risk.

What’s in the Toolkit? How can it help?

Using plain language, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit helps people face climate problems and find climate opportunities. The site offers:

  • Steps to Resilience—a five-step process you can follow to initiate, plan, and implement projects to become more resilient to climate-related hazards.
  • Taking Action stories—real-world case studies describing climate-related risks and opportunities that communities and businesses face, steps they’re taking to plan and respond, and tools and techniques they’re using to improve resilience.
  • A catalog of freely available Tools for accessing and analyzing climate data, generating visualizations, exploring climate projections, estimating hazards, and engaging stakeholders in resilience-building efforts.
  • Climate Explorer—a visualization tool that offers maps of climate stressors and impacts as well as interactive graphs showing daily observations and long-term averages from thousands of weather stations.
  • Topic narratives that explain how climate variability and change can impact particular regions of the country and sectors of society.
  • Pointers to free, federally developed training courses that can build skills for using climate tools and data.
  • Maps highlighting the locations of centers where federal and state agencies can provide regional climate information.
  • The ability to Search the entire federal government’s climate science domain and filter results according to your interests.”

Five public participation books from 2014 you should take the time to read

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Bang The Table: “Every year dozens of books are published on the subject of community engagement, civic engagement, public engagement or public participation (depending on your fancy). None of us has time to read them all, so how to choose.
I’ve compiled a short and eclectic list here that span the breadth of issues that public participation practitioners and thier public sector managers are likely to be thinking about; legal, organisational culture, bringing joy back into citizen engagement, thoughtful living and thoughtful engagement, and DIY citizenship (and what that means for the public sector).
Blocking Public Participation: The use of strategic litigation to silence political expression
written by Byron M Sheldrick, published by Wilfred Laurier University Press
The blurb…

Strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) involves lawsuits brought by individuals, corporations, groups, or politicians to curtail political activism and expression. An increasingly large part of the political landscape in Canada, they are often launched against those protesting, boycotting, or participating in some form of political activism. A common feature of SLAPPs is that their intention is rarely to win the case or secure a remedy; rather, the suit is brought to create a chill on political expression….
Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy
written by Susan L. Moffit, published by Cambridge University Press
The blurb…
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability….
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
written by Josh A. Lerner, published by MIT
The blurb…

Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision….

What Would Socrates Do?: Self-Examination, Civic Engagement, and the Politics of Philosophy

written by Joel Alden Schlosser, published by Cambridge University Press
The blurb…
Socrates continues to be an extremely influential force to this day; his work is featured prominently in the work of contemporary thinkers ranging from Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, to Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière….
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media
edited by Matt Ratto & Megan Boler, published by MIT
The blurb…
Today, DIY — do-it-yourself — describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt’s “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to re-purpose corporate content (or create new user-generated content) in order to offer political counter-narratives….”

Learn from the losers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Harford in the Financial Times:”Kickended is important. It reminds us that the world is biased in systematic ways…I’m sure I’m not the only person to ponder launching an exciting project on Kickstarter before settling back to count the money. Dean Augustin may have had the same idea back in 2011; he sought $12,000 to produce a documentary about John F Kennedy. Jonathan Reiter’s “BizzFit” looked to raise $35,000 to create an algorithmic matching service for employers and employees. This October, two brothers in Syracuse, New York, launched a Kickstarter campaign in the hope of being paid $400 to film themselves terrifying their neighbours at Halloween. These disparate campaigns have one thing in common: they received not a single penny of support. Not one of these people was able to persuade friends, colleagues or even their parents to kick in so much as a cent.
My inspiration for these tales of Kickstarter failure is Silvio Lorusso, an artist and designer based in Venice. Lorusso’s website, Kickended, searches Kickstarter for all the projects that have received absolutely no funding. (There are plenty: about 10 per cent of Kickstarter projects go nowhere at all, and only 40 per cent raise enough money to hit their funding targets.)
Kickended performs an important service. It reminds us that what we see around us is not representative of the world; it is biased in systematic ways. Normally, when we talk of bias we think of a conscious ideological slant. But many biases are simple and unconscious. I have never read a media report or blog post about a typical, representative Kickstarter campaign – but I heard a lot about the Pebble watch, the Coolest cooler and potato salad. If I didn’t know better, I might form unrealistic expectations about what running a Kickstarter campaign might achieve.
This isn’t just about Kickstarter. Such bias is everywhere. Most of the books people read are bestsellers – but most books are not bestsellers. And most book projects do not become books at all. There’s a similar story to tell about music, films and business ventures in general.
. . .
In 1943, the American statistician Abraham Wald was asked to advise the US air force on how to reinforce their planes. Only a limited weight of armour plating was feasible, and the proposal on the table was to reinforce the wings, the centre of the fuselage, and the tail. Why? Because bombers were returning from missions riddled with bullet holes in those areas.
Wald explained that this would be a mistake. What the air force had discovered was that when planes were hit in the wings, tail or central fuselage, they made it home. Where, asked Wald, were the planes that had been hit in other areas? They never returned. Wald suggested reinforcing the planes wherever the surviving planes had been unscathed instead.
It’s natural to look at life’s winners – often they become winners in the first place because they’re interesting to look at. That’s why Kickended gives us an important lesson. If we don’t look at life’s losers too, we may end up putting our time, money, attention or even armour plating in entirely the wrong place.”