Designing Governance as Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hamed Khaledi: “This research models governance as a collective intelligence process, particularly as a collective design process. The outcome of this process is a solution to a problem. The solution can be a decision, a policy, a product, a financial plan, etc. The quality (value) of the outcome solution reflects the quality (performance) of the process. Using an analytical model, I identify five mediators (channels) through which, different factors and features can affect the quality of the outcome and thus the process. Based on this model, I propose an asymmetric response surface method that introduces factors to the experimental model considering their plausible effects.

As a proof of concept, I implemented a generic collective design process in a web application and measured the effects of several factors on its performance through online experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. They also show that approval voting is significantly superior to plurality voting. Some studies assert that not the design process, but the designers drive the quality of the outcome. However, this study shows that the characteristics of the design process (e.g. voting schemes) as well as the designers (e.g. expertise and gender) can significantly affect the quality of the outcome. Hence, the outcome quality can be used as an indicator of the performance of the process. This enables us to evaluate and compare governance mechanisms objectively free from fairness criteria….(More)”.

The Normative Order of the Internet: A Theory of Rule and Regulation Online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book by Matthias C. Kettemann: “There is order on the internet, but how has this order emerged and what challenges will threaten and shape its future? This study shows how a legitimate order of norms has emerged online, through both national and international legal systems. It establishes the emergence of a normative order of the internet, an order which explains and justifies processes of online rule and regulation. This order integrates norms at three different levels (regional, national, international), of two types (privately and publicly authored), and of different character (from ius cogens to technical standards).

Matthias C. Kettemann assesses their internal coherence, their consonance with other order norms and their consistency with the order’s finality. The normative order of the internet is based on and produces a liquefied system characterized by self-learning normativity. In light of the importance of the socio-communicative online space, this is a book for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary development of the internet….(More)”.

Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Dipayan Ghosh: “Designing a new digital social contact for our technological future…High technology presents a paradox. In just a few decades, it has transformed the world, making almost limitless quantities of information instantly available to billions of people and reshaping businesses, institutions, and even entire economies. But it also has come to rule our lives, addicting many of us to the march of megapixels across electronic screens both large and small.

Despite its undeniable value, technology is exacerbating deep social and political divisions in many societies. Elections influenced by fake news and unscrupulous hidden actors, the cyber-hacking of trusted national institutions, the vacuuming of private information by Silicon Valley behemoths, ongoing threats to vital infrastructure from terrorist groups and even foreign governments—all these concerns are now part of the daily news cycle and are certain to become increasingly serious into the future.

In this new world of endless technology, how can individuals, institutions, and governments harness its positive contributions while protecting each of us, no matter who or where we are?

In this book, a former Facebook public policy adviser who went on to assist President Obama in the White House offers practical ideas for using technology to create an open and accessible world that protects all consumers and civilians. As a computer scientist turned policymaker, Dipayan Ghosh answers the biggest questions about technology facing the world today. Proving clear and understandable explanations for complex issues, Terms of Disservice will guide industry leaders, policymakers, and the general public as we think about how we ensure that the Internet works for everyone, not just Silicon Valley….(More)”.

Going Beyond the Smart City? Implementing Technopolitical Platforms for Urban Democracy in Madrid and Barcelona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Adrian Smith & Pedro Prieto Martín: “Digital platforms for urban democracy are analyzed in Madrid and Barcelona. These platforms permit citizens to debate urban issues with other citizens; to propose developments, plans, and policies for city authorities; and to influence how city budgets are spent. Contrasting with neoliberal assumptions about Smart Citizenship, the technopolitics discourse underpinning these developments recognizes that the technologies facilitating participation have themselves to be developed democratically. That is, technopolitical platforms are built and operate as open, commons-based processes for learning, reflection, and adaptation. These features prove vital to platform implementation consistent with aspirations for citizen engagement and activism….(More)”.

How the Administrative State Got to This Challenging Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Peter Strauss: “This essay has been written to set the context for a future issue of Daedalus, the quarterly of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, addressing the prospects of American administrative law in the Twenty-first Century. It recounts the growth of American government over the centuries since its founding, in response to the profound changes in the technology, economy, and scientific understandings it must deal with, under a Constitution written for the governance of a dispersed agrarian population operating with hand tools in a localized economy. It then suggests profound challenges of the present day facing administrative law’s development: the transition from processes of the paper age to those of the digital age; the steadily growing centralization of decision in an opaque, political presidency, displacing the focused knowledge and expertise of agencies Congress created to pursue particular governmental ends; the thickening, as well, of the political layer within agencies themselves, threatening similar displacements; and the revival in the courts of highly formalized analytic techniques inviting a return to the forms of government those who wrote the Constitution might themselves have imagined. The essay will not be published until months after the November election. While President Trump’s first term in office has sharply illustrated an imbalance in American governance between law and politics and law, reason and unreason, that imbalance is hardly new; it has been growing for decades. There lie the challenges….(More)”

Policies and Strategies to Promote Grassroots Innovation Workbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN-ESCAP: “Grassroots innovation is a modality of inclusive innovation that enables extremely affordable, niche-adapted solutions to local problems, often unaided by public sector or outsiders.

In a context of rising income disparity among the have and have-nots, every effort should be made to convert the ideas and innovations of knowledge-rich but economically poor individuals and communities into viable means of raising income, addressing social needs, and conserving the environment. While grassroots innovation are typically bottom-up initiatives, public policies can also support the emergence, recognition and diffusion of grassroots innovations. The journey of developing a grassroots idea or invention into a viable product or service for commercial or social diffusion requires support from many actors at different stages and levels.

The Honey Bee Network has been leading the grassroots innovation movement in India. In the past three decades, it has strengthened the inclusive innovation ecosystem of the country and has become a global benchmark of frugal, friendly and flexible solutions for men and women farmers, pastoral and artisan households, mechanics, forest dwellers, fishermen etc. This workbook draws on the experience of the Honey Bee Network and discusses experiences, issues and strategies that could also be relevant for other countries….(More)”.

Democratic Innovation in Times of Crisis: Exploring Changes in Social and Political Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin Karlsson, Joachim Åström and Magnus Adenskog: “The Estonian Citizens’ Assembly (ECA) was initiated in late 2012 as a direct consequence of a legitimacy crisis of Estonian political parties and representative institutions. The spark igniting this crisis was the unraveling of a scheme of illegal party financing. The response from governmental institutions took the form of a democratic innovation involving public crowd‐sourcing and deliberative mini‐publics. This study reports on a survey among the participants in the online crowd‐sourcing process of the ECA (n  = 847). The study examines how this democratic innovation influenced participants’ social and political trust as well as the impact of participants’ predispositions and level of satisfaction with the ECA on changes in trust. We find that participants that had positive predispositions and who were satisfied with the ECA were more likely to gain trust. Furthermore, we also find that the participants, in general, became more distrustful of political institutions, while their participation fostered increased social trust. This outcome differs from the intentions of the Estonian institutions which organized the ECA and sheds new light on the role of democratic innovations in the context of legitimacy crises. This is an important step forward in the scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic innovation and trust….(More)”.

A Time for More Democracy Not Less

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graham Smith at Involve: “As part of the “A democratic response to COVID-19” project, we have been scanning print and social media to get a sense of how arguments for participation and deliberation are resonating in public debates….

Researchers from the Institute for Development Studies point to learning from previous pandemics. Drawing from their experience of working on the ebola epidemic in West Africa, they argue that pandemics are not just technical problems to be solved, but are social in character. They call for more deliberation and participation to ensure that decisions reflect not only the diversity of expert opinion, but also respond to the experiential knowledge of the most vulnerable….

A number of these proposals call for citizens’ assemblies, perhaps to the detriment of other participatory and deliberative processes. The Carnegie Trust offers a broader agenda, reminding us of the pressing contemporary significance of their pre-COVID-19 calls for co-design and co-production. 

The Nuffield Council offers some simple guidance to government about how to act:

  • Show us (the public) what it is doing and thinking across the range of issues of concern
  • Set out the ethical considerations that inform(ed) its judgements
  • Explain how it has arrived at decisions (including taking advice from e.g. SAGE, MEAG), and not that it is just ‘following the science’
  • Invite a broad range of perspectives into the room, including wider public representation 
  • Think ahead – consult and engage other civic interests

We have found only a small number of examples of specific initiatives taking a participatory or deliberative approach to bringing in a broader range of voices in response to the pandemic. Our Covid Voices is gathering written statements of the experience of COVID-19 from those with health conditions or disabilities. The thinktank Demos is running a ‘People’s Commission’, inviting stories of lockdown life. It is not only reflections or stories. The Scottish Government invited ideas on how to tackle the virus, receiving and synthesising 4,000 suggestions. The West Midlands Combined Authority has established a citizens’ panel to guide its recovery work. The UK Citizens’ Assembly (and the French Convention) produced recommendations on how commitments to reach net zero carbon emissions need to be central to a post-COVID-19 recovery. We are sure that these examples only touch the surface of activity and that there will be many more initiatives that we are yet to hear about.

Of course, in one area, citizens have already taken matters into their own hands, with the huge growth in mutual-aid groups to ensure people’s emergency needs are met. The New Local Government Network has considered how public authorities could best support and work with such groups, and Danny Kruger MP was invited by the Prime Minister to investigate how to build on this community-level response.

The call for a more participatory and deliberative approach to governance needs to be more than a niche concern. As the Financial Times recognises, we need a “new civic contract” between government and the people….(More)”.

The Shortcomings of Transparency for Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Schudson: “Transparency” has become a widely recognized, even taken for granted, value in contemporary democracies, but this has been true only since the 1970s. For all of the obvious virtues of transparency for democracy, they have not always been recognized or they have been recognized, as in the U.S. Freedom of Information Act of 1966, with significant qualifications. This essay catalogs important shortcomings of transparency for democracy, as when it clashes with national security, personal privacy, and the importance of maintaining the capacity of government officials to talk frankly with one another without fear that half-formulated ideas, thoughts, and proposals will become public. And when government information becomes public, that does not make it equally available to all—publicity is not in itself democratic, as public information (as in open legislative committee hearings) is more readily accessed by empowered groups with lobbyists able to attend and monitor the provision of the information. Transparency is an element in democratic government, but it is by no means a perfect emblem of democracy….(More)”.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West: “Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

What do we mean, exactly, by bullshit and calling bullshit? As a first approximation:

Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Calling bullshit is a performative utterance, a speech act in which one publicly repudiates something objectionable. The scope of targets is broader than bullshit alone. You can call bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call bullshit on lies, treachery, trickery, or injustice.

In this course we will teach you how to spot the former and effectively perform the latter.

While bullshit may reach its apogee in the political domain, this is not a course on political bullshit. Instead, we will focus on bullshit that comes clad in the trappings of scholarly discourse. Traditionally, such highbrow nonsense has come couched in big words and fancy rhetoric, but more and more we see it presented instead in the guise of big data and fancy algorithms — and these quantitative, statistical, and computational forms of bullshit are those that we will be addressing in the present course.

Of course an advertisement is trying to sell you something, but do you know whether the TED talk you watched last night is also bullshit — and if so, can you explain why? Can you see the problem with the latest New York Times or Washington Post article fawning over some startup’s big data analytics? Can you tell when a clinical trial reported in the New England Journal or JAMA is trustworthy, and when it is just a veiled press release for some big pharma company?…(More)”.