Book edited by Nathalie Behnke, Jörg Broschek and Jared Sonnicksen: “This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics
On the ethical and political agency of online reputation systems
Paper by Anna Wilson and Stefano De Paoli at First Monday: “Social and socioeconomic interactions and transactions often require trust. In digital spaces, the main approach to facilitating trust has effectively been to try to reduce or even remove the need for it through the implementation of reputation systems. These generate metrics based on digital data such as ratings and reviews submitted by users, interaction histories, and so on, that are intended to label individuals as more or less reliable or trustworthy in a particular interaction context. We undertake
We suggest that conventional approaches to the design of such systems are rooted in a capitalist, competitive paradigm, relying on methodological
The Untapped Potential of Civic Technology
DemocracyLab: “Today’s most significant problems are being addressed primarily by governments, using systems and tools designed hundreds of years ago. From climate change to inequality, the status quo is proving inadequate, and time is running out.
The role of our democratic institutions is analogous to breathing — inhaling citizen input and exhaling government action. The civic technology movement is inventing new ways to gather input, make decisions and execute collective action. The science fiction end state is an enlightened collective intelligence. But in the short term, it’s enough to seek incremental improvements in how citizens are engaged and government services are delivered. This will increase our chances of solving a wide range of problems in communities of all scales.
The match between the government and tech sectors is complementary. Governments and nonprofits are widely perceived as lagging in technological adoption and innovation. The tech sector’s messiah complex has been muted by Cambridge Analytica, but the principles of user-centered design, iterative development, and continuous learning have not lost their value. Small groups of committed technologists can easily test hypotheses about ways to make institutions work better. Trouble is, it’s really hard for them to earn a living doing it.
The Problem for Civic Tech
The unique challenge facing civic tech was noted by Fast Forward, a tech nonprofit accelerator, in a recent report that aptly described the chicken and egg problem plaguing tech nonprofits:
Many foundations will not fund a nonprofit without signs of proven impact. Tech nonprofits are unique. They must build their product before they can prove impact, and they cannot build the tech product without funding.
This is compounded by the fact that government procurement processes are often protracted and purchasers risk averse. Rather than a thousand flowers blooming in learning-rich civic experiments, civic entrepreneurs are typically frustrated and ineffectual, finding that their ideas are difficult to monetize, met with skepticism by government, and starved for capital.
These challenges are described well in the Knight and Rita Allen Foundations’ report Scaling Civic Tech. The report notes the difference between “buyer” revenue that is earned from providing
Evidence vs Democracy: what are we doing to bridge the divide?
Jonathan Breckon, and Anna Hopkins at the Alliance for Useful E
The evidence movement must respond to the ‘politics of distrust’. We cannot carry on regardless. For evidence advocates like us, reaching over the heads of the public to get research into the hands of elite policy-makers is not enough. Let’s be honest and accept that a lot of our work goes on behind closed doors. The UK’s nine What Works Centres only rarely engage with the public – more often with professionals, budget holders or civil servants. The evidence movement needs to democratise.
However, the difficulty is that evidence is hard work. It needs slow-thinking, and at least a passing knowledge of statistics, economics, or science. How on earth can you do all that on Twitter or Facebook?
In a report published today we look at ‘mini-publics’ – an alternative democratic platform to connect citizens with research. Citizens’ Juries, Deliberative Polls, Consensus Conferences and other mini-publics are forums that bring people and evidence together, for constructive, considered debate. Ideally, people work in small groups, that are randomly chosen, and have the chance to interrogate experts in the field in question.
This is not a new idea. The idea of a ‘minipopulus’ was set out by the American political theorist Robert Dahl in the 1970s. Indeed, there is an even older heritage. Athenian classical democracy did for a time select small groups of officials by lot.
It’s also not a utopian idea from the past, as we have found many promising recent examples. For example in the UK, a Citizens’ Assembly on adult social care gave recommendations to two parliamentary Select Committees last year. There are also examples of citizens contributing to our public institutions and agendas by deliberating – through NICE’s Citizens Council or the James Lind Alliance.
We shouldn’t ignore this resistance to the mood of disaffection. Initiatives like the RSA’s Campaign for Deliberative Democracy are making the case for a step-change. To break the political deadlock on Brexit, there has been a call to create a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Stella Creasy MP and others. And there are many hopeful visions of a democratic future from abroad – like the experiments in Canada and Australia. Our report explores many of these international examples.
Citizens can make informed decisions – if we allow them to be citizens. They can understand, debate and interrogate research
MIT Sloan study finds crowdsourcing an effective tool to fight spread of fake news
MIT Sloan Press Release: “Fake news isn’t a new problem, but it’s becoming a greater concern because of social media, where it is easily created and rapidly distributed. A recent study by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. David Rand and Prof. Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina finds there is a possible solution: crowdsourcing. As their research shows that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than outlets that create misinformation, social media platforms could use trust ratings to inform how they promote content.
“There has been a lot of research examining fake news and how it spreads, but this study is among the first to suggest a potential long-term solution, which is cause for measured optimism. If we can decrease the amount of misinformation spreading on social media, we can increase agreement on basic facts across political parties, which will hopefully lead to less political polarization and a greater ability to compromise on how to run the country,” says Rand. “It may also make it harder for individuals to win elections based on false claims.”
He notes that current solutions for fighting misinformation deployed by social media companies haven’t been that effective. For example, partnering with fact-checkers isn’t scalable because they can’t keep up with the rapid creation of false stories. Further, putting warnings on content found to be false can be counterproductive, because it makes misleading stories that didn’t get checked seem more accurate – the “implied truth” effect.
“Our study is good news because we find a scalable solution to this problem, based on the surprisingly good judgment of everyday Americans. Things may not be as hopeless as most coverage of fake news makes you think,” says Rand.
In their study, Rand and Pennycook examined whether crowdsourcing could work as an effective tool in fighting the spread of misinformation. They asked laypeople to rate familiarity with and trust in news sources across three categories: mainstream media outlets, hyper-partisan websites, and websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). The pool of people surveyed was nationally representative across age, gender, ethnicity, and political affiliations. They also asked professional fact-checkers the same questions to compare responses.
They found that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than those that create misinformation and that the trust ratings of the laypeople surveyed closely matched the trust ratings of professional fact-checkers. “Our results show that laypeople are much better than many would have expected at knowing which outlets to trust,” says Rand. “Although there were clear partisan differences, with Republicans distrusting all mainstream outlets (except for Fox News) relative to Democrats, there was a remarkable consensus regarding non-mainstream outlets being untrustworthy.”…(More)”.
Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data
Book edited by David Chandler and Christian Fuchs: “This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars
An electronic version of this book is freely available….(More)
Does good governance foster trust in government? A panel data analysis
Paper by Jonathan Spiteri and Marie Briguglio: “This study examines the relationship between good governance and trust in government. It sets out to test which aspects of good governance, if any, foster strong trust in government. We construct a panel data set drawn from 29 European countries over the period 2004 to 2015. The data set includes measures of government trust, six different dimensions of good governance, as well as variables on GDP growth and income inequality.
We find that freedom of expression and citizen involvement in the democratic process, to be the good governance dimension that has the strongest relationship with government trust, across all specifications of our regression models. We also find that real GDP growth rates have a significant (albeit weaker) relationship with trust in government. Our results suggest that certain elements of good governance foster trust in government over and above that generated by economic success. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of declining levels of public trust in government around the world….(More)”.
China will now officially try to extend its Great Firewall to blockchains
Mike Orcutt at Technology Review: “China’s crackdown on blockchain technology has taken another step: the country’s internet censorship agency has just approved new regulations aimed at blockchain companies.
Hand over the data: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) will require any “entities or nodes” that provide “blockchain information services” to collect users’ real names and national ID or telephone numbers, and allow government officials to access that data.
It will ban companies from using blockchain technology to “produce, duplicate, publish, or disseminate” any content that Chinese law prohibits. Last year, internet users evaded censors by recording the content of two banned articles on the Ethereum blockchain. The rules, first proposed in October, will go into effect next month.
Defeating the purpose? For more than a year, China has been cracking down on cryptocurrency trading and its surrounding industry while also singing the praises of
The democratic potential of civic applications
Paper by Jäske, Maija and Ertiö,
Gradually, Then Suddenly
Technological change happens in much the same way. Small changes accumulate, and suddenly the world is a different place. Throughout my career at O’Reilly Media, we’ve tracked and fostered a lot of “gradually, then suddenly” movements: the World Wide Web, open source software, big data, cloud computing, sensors and ubiquitous computing, and now the pervasive effects of AI and algorithmic systems on society and the economy.
What are some of the things that are in the middle of their “gradually, then suddenly” transition right now? The list is long; here are a few of the areas that are on my mind.
1) AI and algorithms are everywhere
The most important trend for readers of this newsletter to focus on is the development of new kinds of partnership between human and machine. We take for granted that algorithmic systems do much of the work at online sites like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, but we haven’t fully grasped the implications. These systems are hybrids of human and machine. Uber, Lyft, and Amazon Robotics brought this pattern to the physical world, reframing the corporation as a vast, buzzing network of humans both guiding and guided by machines. In these systems, the algorithms decide who gets what and why; they’re changing the fundamentals of market coordination in ways that gradually, then suddenly, will become apparent.
2) The rest of the world is leapfrogging the US
The volume of mobile payments in China is $13 trillion versus the US’s $50 billion, while credit cards never took hold. Already Zipline’s on-demand drones are delivering 20% of all blood supplies in Rwanda and will be coming soon to other countries (including the US). In each case, the lack of existing infrastructure turned out to be an advantage in adopting a radically new model. Expect to see this pattern recur, as incumbents and old thinking hold back the adoption of new models
9) The crisis of faith in government
Ever since Jennifer Pahlka and I began working on the Gov 2.0 Summit back in 2008, we’ve been concerned that if we can’t get