What is a fair exchange for access to public data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog and policy brief by Jeni Tennison: “The most obvious approach to get companies to share value back to the public sector in return for access to data is to charge them. However, there are a number of challenges with a “pay to access” approach: it’s hard to set the right price; it creates access barriers, particularly for cash-poor start-ups; and it creates a public perception that the government is willing to sell their data, and might be tempted to loosen privacy-protecting governance controls in exchange for cash.

Are there other options? The policy brief explores a range of other approaches and assesses these against five goals that a value-sharing framework should ideally meet, to:

  • Encourage use of public data, including by being easy for organisations to understand and administer.
  • Provide a return on investment for the public sector, offsetting at least some of the costs of supporting the NDL infrastructure and minimising administrative costs.
  • Promote equitable innovation and economic growth in the UK, which might mean particularly encouraging smaller, home-grown businesses.
  • Create social value, particularly towards this Government’s other missions, such as achieving Net Zero or unlocking opportunity for all.
  • Build public trust by being easily explainable, avoiding misaligned incentives that encourage the breaking of governance guardrails, and feeling like a fair exchange.

In brief, alternatives to a pay-to-access model that still provide direct financial returns include:

  • Discounts: the public sector could secure discounts on products and services created using public data. However, this could be difficult to administer and enforce.
  • Royalties: taking a percentage of charges for products and services created using public data might be similarly hard to administer and enforce, but applies to more companies.
  • Equity: taking equity in startups can provide long-term returns and align with public investment goals.
  • Levies: targeted taxes on businesses that use public data can provide predictable revenue and encourage data use.
  • General taxation: general taxation can fund data infrastructure, but it may lack the targeted approach and public visibility of other methods.

It’s also useful to consider non-financial conditions that could be put on organisations accessing public data..(More)”.

Activated Citizenship: The Transformative Power of Citizens’ Assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Marjan H. Ehsassi: “To counter pervasive levels of citizen disengagement from political institutions, this book examines democratic innovations that meaningfully engage with citizens to address some of the deficits of Western representative democracies.

Citizens’ assemblies provide one such innovation, offering opportunities for more consistent participation between elections, more meaningful input in government decision making, and more impactful platforms for participation. This cutting-edge book introduces a new definition for an Activated Citizen, along with a methodology to measure civic and political engagement. Relying on a mixed-methods approach and field research conducted in Paris, Brussels, Ottawa, and Petaluma (California), as well as participant observations, over 180 surveys, 61 in-depth interviews and storytelling, the book provides case studies and in-depth analysis of hotbutton topics including climate change, unhoused populations, democratic expression, assisted suicide and euthanasia. Each chapter weaves quantitative results with rich qualitative testimonies from participants, government representatives, and observers. Based on empirical evidence, the book explores the ways in which government-led citizens’ assemblies can promote a more Activated Citizen. To fully realize the transformative potential of deliberative platforms, a final chapter offers a blueprint for impact, outlining concrete measures along with recommendations for the design and implementation of future government-initiated deliberative platforms…(More)”.

Climate Assemblies and the Law: A Research Roadmap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Leslie Anne and Duvic Paoli: “The article is interested in the relationship between citizens’ assemblies on climate change (‘climate assemblies’) and the law. It offers a research roadmap on the legal dimensions of climate assemblies with the view to advancing our knowledge of deliberative climate governance. The article explores six fundamental areas of inquiry on which legal scholarship can offer relevant insights. They relate to: i) understanding the outcomes of climate assemblies; ii) clarifying their role in the public law relationship between individuals and government; iii) gaining insights into the making of climate legislation and other rules; iv) exploring the societal authority of norms; v) illustrating the transnational governance of climate change, including the diffusion of its norms and vi) offering a testing ground for the design of legal systems that are more ecologically and socially just. The aim is to nudge legal scholars into exploring the richness of the questions raised by the emergence of climate assemblies and, in turn, to encourage other social science scholars to reflect on how the legal perspective might contribute to better understanding their object of study…(More)”.

How data can transform government in Latin America and the Caribbean

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by William Maloney, Daniel Rogger, and Christian Schuster: ” Governments across Latin America and the Caribbean are grappling with deep governance challenges that threaten progress and stability, including the need to improve efficiency, accountability and transparency.

Amid these obstacles, however, the region possesses a powerful, often underutilized asset: the administrative data it collects as a part of its everyday operations.

When harnessed effectively using data analytics, this data has the potential to drive transformative change, unlock new opportunities for growth and help address some of the most pressing issues facing the region. It’s time to tap into this potential and use data to chart a path forward. To help governments make the most of the opportunities that this data presents, the World Bank has embarked on a decade-long project to synthesize the latest knowledge on how to measure and improve government performance. We have found that governments already have a lot of the data they need to dramatically improve public services while conserving scarce resources.

But it’s not enough to collect data. It must also be put to good use to improve decision making, design better public policy and strengthen public sector functioning. We call these tools and practices for repurposing government data government analytics…(More)”.

A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Democracy Funders Network: “For too many Americans, the prospect of engaging with lawmakers about the important issues in their lives is either logistically inaccessible, or unsatisfactory in result. Exploring An Innovative Approach to Democratic Governance: A Funder’s Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies, produced by Democracy Funders Network and New America, explores the potential for citizens’ assemblies to transform and strengthen democratic processes in the U.S. The guide offers philanthropists and in-depth look at the potential opportunities and challenges citizens’ assemblies present for building civic power at the local level and fomenting authentic civic engagement within communities.

Citizens’ assemblies belong in the broader field of collaborative governance, an umbrella term for public engagement that shifts governing power and builds trust by bringing together government officials and community members to collaborate on policy outcomes through shared decision-making…(More)”.

AI-Facilitated Collective Judgements

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Manon Revel and Théophile Pénigaud: “This article unpacks the design choices behind longstanding and newly proposed computational frameworks aimed at finding common grounds across collective preferences and examines their potential future impacts, both technically and normatively. It begins by situating AI-assisted preference elicitation within the historical role of opinion polls, emphasizing that preferences are shaped by the decision-making context and are seldom objectively captured. With that caveat in mind, we explore AI-facilitated collective judgment as a discovery tool for fostering reasonable representations of a collective will, sense-making, and agreement-seeking. At the same time, we caution against dangerously misguided uses, such as enabling binding decisions, fostering gradual disempowerment or post-rationalizing political outcomes…(More)”.

These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Karen Yourish et al: “As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.

The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.

In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.

The list is most likely incomplete. More agency memos may exist than those seen by New York Times reporters, and some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it.

All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies. It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration…(More)”

How to Win a War Against Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Abby Smith Rumsey: “How does a democracy work if its citizens do not have a shared sense of reality? Not very well. A country whose people cannot agree on where they stand now will not agree on where they are going. This is where Americans find themselves in 2025, and they did not arrive at this juncture yesterday. The deep divisions that exist have grown over the decades, dating at least to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and are now metastasizing at an alarming rate. These divisions have many causes, from climate change to COVID-19, unchecked migration to growing wealth inequality, and other factors. People who live with chronic division and uncertainty are vulnerable. It may not take much to get them to sign on to a politics of certainty…

Take the United States. By this fractured logic, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means that America once was great, is no longer, but can be restored to its prelapsarian state, when whites sat firmly at the top of the ethnic hierarchy that constitutes the United States. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy and self-identified liberal, is deeply troubled that many liberal democracies across the globe are morphing into illiberal democracies before our very eyes. In “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” he argues that all authoritarian regimes know the value of a unified, if largely mythologized, view of past, present, and future. He wrote his book to warn us that we in the United States are on the cusp of becoming an authoritarian nation or, in Stanley’s account, fascist. By explaining “the mechanisms by which democracy is attacked, the ways myths and lies are used to justify actions such as wars, and scapegoating of groups, we can defend against these attacks, and even reverse the tide.”…

The fabrication of the past is also the subject of Steve Benen’s book “Ministry of Truth. Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.” Benen, a producer on the Rachel Maddow Show, keeps his eye tightly focused on the past decade, still fresh in the minds of readers. His account tracks closely how the Republican Party conducted “a war on the recent past.” He attempts an anatomy of a very unsettling phenomenon: the success of a gaslighting campaign Trump and his supporters perpetrated against the American public and even against fellow Republicans who are not MAGA enough for Trump…(More)”

Artificial intelligence for digital citizen participation: Design principles for a collective intelligence architecture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nicolas Bono Rossello, Anthony Simonofski, and Annick Castiaux: “The challenges posed by digital citizen participation and the amount of data generated by Digital Participation Platforms (DPPs) create an ideal context for the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. However, current AI solutions in DPPs focus mainly on technical challenges, often neglecting their social impact and not fully exploiting AI’s potential to empower citizens. The goal of this paper is thus to investigate how to design digital participation platforms that integrate technical AI solutions while considering the social context in which they are implemented. Using Collective Intelligence as kernel theory, and through a literature review and a focus group, we generate design principles for the development of a socio-technically aware AI architecture. These principles are then validated by experts from the field of AI and citizen participation. The principles suggest optimizing the alignment of AI solutions with project goals, ensuring their structured integration across multiple levels, enhancing transparency, monitoring AI-driven impacts, dynamically allocating AI actions, empowering users, and balancing cognitive disparities. These principles provide a theoretical basis for future AI-driven artifacts, and theories in digital citizen participation…(More)”.

Research Handbook on Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Handbook edited by Edited by Mila Gascó-Hernandez, Aryamala Prasad , J. Ramon Gil-Garcia , and Theresa A. Pardo: “In the past decade, open government has received renewed attention. It has increasingly been acknowledged globally as necessary to enhance democratic governance by building on the pillars of transparency, participation, and collaboration (Gil-Garcia et al., 2020). Transnational multistakeholder initiatives, such as the Open Government Partnership, have fostered the development of open government by raising awareness about the concept and encouraging reforms in member countries. In this respect, many countries at the local, state, and federal levels have implemented open government initiatives in different policy domains and government functions, such as procurement, policing, education, and public budgeting. More recently, the emergence of digital technologies to facilitate innovative and collaborative approaches to open government is setting these new efforts apart from previous ones, designed to strengthen information access and transparency. Building a new shared understanding of open government, how various contexts shape the perceptions of open government by different stakeholders, and the ways in which digital technologies can advance open government is important for both research and practice…

the Handbook is structured into five sections, each dedicated to highlighting important facets of open government. Part I delves into the historical evolution of open government, setting the stage for the rest of the Handbook. In Part II, the Handbook presents research on the core components of open government, offering invaluable insights on transparency, participation, and collaboration. Part III focuses on the application of open government across diverse policy domains. Shifting focus, Part IV discusses open government implementation within different geographical and national contexts. Finally, Part V introduces emerging trends in open government research. As a whole, the Handbook offers a comprehensive view of open government, from its origins to its contemporary progress and future trends…(More)”.