Democracy and Digital Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ted Piccone in the International Journal on Human Rights: “Democratic governments are facing unique challenges in maximising the upside of digital technology while minimizing its threats to their more open societies. Protecting fair elections, fundamental rights online, and multi-stakeholder approaches to internet governance are three interrelated priorities central to defending strong democracies in an era of rising insecurity, increasing restrictions, and geopolitical competition.

The growing challenges democracies face in managing the complex dimensions of digital technology have become a defining domestic and foreign policy issue with direct implications for human rights and the democratic health of nations. The progressive digitisation of nearly all facets of society and the inherent trans-border nature of the internet raise a host of difficult problems when public and private information online is subject to manipulation, hacking, and theft.

This article addresses digital technology as it relates to three distinct but interrelated subtopics: free and fair elections, human rights, and internet governance. In all three areas, governments and the private sector are struggling to keep up with the positive and negative aspects of the rapid diffusion of digital technology. To address these challenges, democratic governments and legislators, in partnership with civil society and media and technology companies, should urgently lead the way toward devising and implementing rules and best practices for protecting free and fair electoral processes from external manipulation, defending human rights online, and protecting internet governance from restrictive, lowest common denominator approaches. The article concludes by setting out what some of these rules and best practices should be…(More)”.

It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Martin Tisne: “…The proliferation of data in recent decades has led some reformers to a rallying cry: “You own your data!” Eric Posner of the University of Chicago, Eric Weyl of Microsoft Research, and virtual-reality guru Jaron Lanier, among others, argue that data should be treated as a possession. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, says so as well. Facebook now says that you “own all of the contact and information you post on Facebook” and “can control how it is shared.” The Financial Times argues that “a key part of the answer lies in giving consumers ownership of their own personal data.” In a recent speech, Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, agreed, saying, “Companies should recognize that data belongs to users.”

This essay argues that “data ownership” is a flawed, counterproductive way of thinking about data. It not only does not fix existing problems; it creates new ones. Instead, we need a framework that gives people rights to stipulate how their data is used without requiring them to take ownership of it themselves….

The notion of “ownership” is appealing because it suggests giving you power and control over your data. But owning and “renting” out data is a bad analogy. Control over how particular bits of data are used is only one problem among many. The real questions are questions about how data shapes society and individuals. Rachel’s story will show us why data rights are important and how they might work to protect not just Rachel as an individual, but society as a whole.

Tomorrow never knows

To see why data ownership is a flawed concept, first think about this article you’re reading. The very act of opening it on an electronic device created data—an entry in your browser’s history, cookies the website sent to your browser, an entry in the website’s server log to record a visit from your IP address. It’s virtually impossible to do anything online—reading, shopping, or even just going somewhere with an internet-connected phone in your pocket—without leaving a “digital shadow” behind. These shadows cannot be owned—the way you own, say, a bicycle—any more than can the ephemeral patches of shade that follow you around on sunny days.

Your data on its own is not very useful to a marketer or an insurer. Analyzed in conjunction with similar data from thousands of other people, however, it feeds algorithms and bucketizes you (e.g., “heavy smoker with a drink habit” or “healthy runner, always on time”). If an algorithm is unfair—if, for example, it wrongly classifies you as a health risk because it was trained on a skewed data set or simply because you’re an outlier—then letting you “own” your data won’t make it fair. The only way to avoid being affected by the algorithm would be to never, ever give anyone access to your data. But even if you tried to hoard data that pertains to you, corporations and governments with access to large amounts of data about other people could use that data to make inferences about you. Data is not a neutral impression of reality. The creation and consumption of data reflects how power is distributed in society. …(More)”.

Seven design principles for using blockchain for social impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at Apolitical: “2018 will probably be remembered as the bust of the blockchain hype. Yet even as crypto currencies continue to sink in value and popular interest, the potential of using blockchain technologies to achieve social ends remains important to consider but poorly understood.

In 2019, business will continue to explore blockchain for sectors as disparate as finance, agriculture, logistics and healthcare. Policymakers and social innovators should also leverage 2019 to become more sophisticated about blockchain’s real promise, limitations  and current practice.

In a recent report I prepared with Andrew Young, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, we looked at the potential risks and challenges of using blockchain for social change — or “Blockchan.ge.” A number of implementations and platforms are already demonstrating potential social impact.

The technology is now being used to address issues as varied as homelessness in New York City, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and government corruption around the world.

In an illustration of the breadth of current experimentation, Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation recently analysed and mapped nearly 200 organisations and projects trying to create positive social change using blockchain. Likewise, the GovLab is developing a mapping of blockchange implementations across regions and topic areas; it currently contains 60 entries.

All these examples provide impressive — and hopeful — proof of concept. Yet despite the very clear potential of blockchain, there has been little systematic analysis. For what types of social impact is it best suited? Under what conditions is it most likely to lead to real social change? What challenges does blockchain face, what risks does it pose and how should these be confronted and mitigated?

These are just some of the questions our report, which builds its analysis on 10 case studies assembled through original research, seeks to address.

While the report is focused on identity management, it contains a number of lessons and insights that are applicable more generally to the subject of blockchange.

In particular, it contains seven design principles that can guide individuals or organisations considering the use of blockchain for social impact. We call these the Genesis principles, and they are outlined at the end of this article…(More)”.

Legitimacy: Ethnographic and Theoretical Insights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato: “Global in scope, this original and thought-provoking collection applies new theory on legitimacy and legitimation to urban life. An informed reflection on this comparatively new topic in anthropology in relation to morality, action, law, politics and governance is both timely and innovative, especially as worldwide discontent among ordinary people grows.

The ethnographically-based analyses offered here range from banking to neighbourhoods, from poverty to political action at the grassroots. They recognize the growing gap between the rulers and the ruled with particular attention to the morality of what is right as opposed to what is legal. This book is a unique contribution to social theory, fostering discussion across the many boundaries of anthropological and sociological studies….(More)”.

The Future of Government 2030+ : A Citizen Centric Perspective on New Government Models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EU Policy Lab: “The Future of Government scenarios were developed through a bottom-up process on the basis of open dialogue workshops in Europe with about 130 citizens and 25 civil society and think tank representatives. The Joint Research Centre then reviewed these discussions and synthesised them into four scenarios. Together they highlight some of the key uncertainties about the relationships between citizens, governments and business and explore, through the eyes of European citizens, how government will look in the future. The four scenarios are: 

Too Many Secrets? When Should the Intelligence Community be Allowed to Keep Secrets?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ross W. Bellaby in Polity: “In recent years, revelations regarding reports of torture by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the quiet growth of the National Security Agency’s pervasive cyber-surveillance system have brought into doubt the level of trust afforded to the intelligence community. The question of its trustworthiness requires determining how much secrecy it should enjoy and what mechanisms should be employed to detect and prevent future abuse. My argument is not a call for complete transparency, however, as secret intelligence does play an important and ethical role in society. Rather, I argue that existing systems built on a prioritization of democratic assumptions are fundamentally ill-equipped for dealing with the particular challenge of intelligence secrecy. As the necessary circle of secrecy is extended, political actors are insulated from the very public gaze that ensures they are working in line with the political community’s best interests. Therefore, a new framework needs to be developed, one that this article argues should be based on the just war tradition, where the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, and discrimination are able to balance the secrecy that the intelligence community needs in order to detect and prevent threats with the harm that too much or incorrect secrecy can cause to people….(More)”.

The Yellow Vests movement and the urge to update democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paula Forteza at OGP: “…The Yellow Vests movement in France is a complex social movement that points out social injustices from a political system that has excluded voices for decades. The movement shows the negative effects of the lack of participatory mechanisms in our institutional architecture. If the Yellow Vests are protesting in the streets today, it is certainly because an institutional dialogue was not possible, because their claims did not find an official channel of communication to reach the decision makers.

The inception of this movement is also symptomatic of the need to update our democracies. Organized through Facebook groups, the Yellow Vests is a leaderless movement that is challenging the hierarchical and vertical organization of the decision-making process. We need a more horizontal, agile and decentralized democracy to match the way civil society is getting organized on the internet. Social media platforms are not made for political mobilisation, as the rise of fake news, polarisation and foreign intervention have showed. Learning from these social media flaws, we can back an institutional change with the creation of dedicated platforms for political expression that are transparent, accountable and democratically governed.

Our reaction to this crisis needs to match the expectations. It is urgent to revitalise our democracies through a robust and impactful set of participatory initiatives. We have in our hands the future of the social contract and, in a way, the future of our democracy. Some initiatives have emerged in France: citizen questions to the government, legislative consultations, a collaborative space in the Parliament, more than 80 local participatory budgets and dozens of participatory experimentations. We need to scale up many local initiatives and include impactful and continuous participatory mechanisms into the institutional decision-making process. A constitutional reform is expected in France next January – let’s take this opportunity to institutionalize these mechanisms….(More)”.

Implementing Public Policy: Is it possible to escape the ‘Public Policy Futility’ trap?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blogpost by Matt Andrews:

Screen Shot 2018-12-06 at 6.29.15 PM

“Polls suggest that governments across the world face high levels of citizen dissatisfaction, and low levels of citizen trust. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer found, for instance, that only 43% of those surveyed trust Canada’s government. Only 15% of those surveyed trust government in South Africa, and levels are low in other countries too—including Brazil (at 24%), South Korea (28%), the United Kingdom (36%), Australia, Japan, and Malaysia (37%), Germany (38%), Russia (45%), and the United States (47%). Similar surveys find trust in government averaging only 40-45% across member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and suggest that as few as 31% and 32% of Nigerians and Liberians trust government.

There are many reasons why trust in government is deficient in so many countries, and these reasons differ from place to place. One common factor across many contexts, however, is a lack of confidence that governments can or will address key policy challenges faced by citizens.

Studies show that this confidence deficiency stems from citizen observations or experiences with past public policy failures, which promote jaundiced views of their public officials’ capabilities to deliver. Put simply, citizens lose faith in government when they observe government failing to deliver on policy promises, or to ‘get things done’. Incidentally, studies show that public officials also often lose faith in their own capabilities (and those of their organizations) when they observe, experience or participate in repeated policy implementation failures. Put simply, again, these public officials lose confidence in themselves when they repeatedly fail to ‘get things done’.

I call the ‘public policy futility’ trap—where past public policy failure leads to a lack of confidence in the potential of future policy success, which feeds actual public policy failure, which generates more questions of confidence, in a vicious self fulfilling prophecy. I believe that many governments—and public policy practitioners working within governments—are caught in this trap, and just don’t believe that they can muster the kind of public policy responses needed by their citizens.

Along with my colleagues at the Building State Capability (BSC) program, I believe that many policy communities are caught in this trap, to some degree or another. Policymakers in these communities keep coming up with ideas, and political leaders keep making policy promises, but no one really believes the ideas will solve the problems that need solving or produce the outcomes and impacts that citizens need. Policy promises under such circumstances center on doing what policymakers are confident they can actually implement: like producing research and position papers and plans, or allocating inputs toward the problem (in a budget, for instance), or sponsoring visible activities (holding meetings or engaging high profile ‘experts’ for advice), or producing technical outputs (like new organizations, or laws). But they hold back from promising real solutions to real problems, as they know they cannot really implement them (given past political opposition, perhaps, or the experience of seemingly interactable coordination challenges, or cultural pushback, and more)….(More)”.

Innovations In The Fight Against Corruption In Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog Post by Beth Noveck:  “…The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) has published an important, practical and prescriptive report with recommendations for every sector of society from government to individuals on innovative and effective approaches to combatting corruption. While focused on Latin America, the report’s proposals, especially those on the application of new technology in the fight against corruption, are relevant around the world….

IADB Anti-Corruption Report

The recommendations about the use of new technologies, including big data, blockchain and collective intelligence, are drawn from an effort undertaken last year by the Governance Lab at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering to crowdsource such solutions and advice on how to implement them from a hundred global experts. (See the Smarter Crowdsourcing against Corruption report here.)…

Big data, when published as open data, namely in a form that can be re-used without legal or technical restriction and in a machine-readable format that computers can analyze, is another tool in the fight against corruption. With machine readable, big and open data, those outside of government can pinpoint and measure irregularities in government contracting, as Instituto Observ is doing in Brazil.

Opening up judicial data, such as information about case processing times, judges’ and prosecutors’ salaries, information about selection processes, such as CV’s, professional and academic backgrounds, and written and oral exam scores provides activists and reformers with the tools to fight judicial corruption. The Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) (a non-profit advocacy group) in Argentina uses such open justice data in its Concursos Transparentes (Transparent Contests) to fight judicial corruption. Jusbrasil is a private open justice company also using open data to reform the courts in Brazil….(More)”

Harnessing Digital Tools to Revitalize European Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Elisa Lironi: “…Information and communication technology (ICT) can be used to implement more participatory mechanisms and foster democratic processes. Often referred to as e-democracy, there is a large range of very different possibilities for online engagement, including e-initiatives, e-consultations, crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, and e-voting. Many European countries have started exploring ICT’s potential to reach more citizens at a lower cost and to tap into the so-called wisdom of the crowd, as governments attempt to earn citizens’ trust and revitalize European democracy by developing more responsive, transparent, and participatory decisionmaking processes.

For instance, when Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor of Paris in May 2014, one of her priorities was to make the city more collaborative by allowing Parisians to propose policy and develop projects together. In order to build a stronger relationship with the citizens, she immediately started to implement a citywide participatory budgeting project for the whole of Paris, including all types of policy issues. It started as a small pilot, with the city of Paris putting forward fifteen projects that could be funded with up to about 20 million euros and letting citizens vote on which projects to invest in, via ballot box or online. Parisians and local authorities deemed this experiment successful, so Hidalgo decided it was worth taking further, with more ideas and a bigger pot of money. Within two years, the level of participation grew significantly—from 40,000 voters in 2014 to 92,809 in 2016, representing 5 percent of the total urban population. Today, Paris Budget Participatif is an official platform that lets Parisians decide how to spend 5 percent of the investment budget from 2014 to 2020, amounting to around 500 million euros. In addition, the mayor also introduced two e-democracy platforms—Paris Petitions, for e-petitions, and Idée Paris, for e-consultations. Citizens in the French capital now have multiple channels to express their opinions and contribute to the development of their city.

In Latvia, civil society has played a significant role in changing how legislative procedures are organized. ManaBalss (My Voice) is a grassroots NGO that creates tools for better civic participation in decisionmaking processes. Its online platform, ManaBalss.lv, is a public e-participation website that lets Latvian citizens propose, submit, and sign legislative initiatives to improve policies at both the national and municipal level. …

In Finland, the government itself introduced an element of direct democracy into the Finnish political system, through the 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act (CI-Act) that allows citizens to submit initiatives to the parliament. …

Other civic tech NGOs across Europe have been developing and experimenting with a variety of digital tools to reinvigorate democracy. These include initiatives like Science For You (SCiFY) in Greece, Netwerk Democratie in the Netherlands, and the Citizens Foundation in Iceland, which got its start when citizens were asked to crowdsource their constitution in 2010.

Outside of civil society, several private tech companies are developing digital platforms for democratic participation, mainly at the local government level. One example is the Belgian start-up CitizenLab, an online participation platform that has been used by more than seventy-five municipalities around the world. The young founders of CitizenLab have used technology to innovate the democratic process by listening to what politicians need and including a variety of functions, such as crowdsourcing mechanisms, consultation processes, and participatory budgeting. Numerous other European civic tech companies have been working on similar concepts—Cap Collectif in France, Delib in the UK, and Discuto in Austria, to name just a few. Many of these digital tools have proven useful to elected local or national representatives….

While these initiatives are making a real impact on the quality of European democracy, most of the EU’s formal policy focus is on constraining the power of the tech giants rather than positively aiding digital participation….(More)”