10 Examples of Successful African e-Government Digital Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wayan Vota: “African countries are implementing a diverse range of e-Government services, aiming to improve service delivery, enhance efficiency, and promote transparency. For example, common e-Government services in African countries include:

  • Online Government Portals: African countries are increasingly offering online services such as e-taxation, e-payment, and e-billing through online government portals, which allow citizens to access public services more efficiently and provide governments with prompt feedback on service quality.
  • Digital Identity Initiatives: Many African countries are working on digital identity initiatives to improve service delivery, including the introduction of national IDs with biometric data components to generate documents and provide services automatically, reducing paperwork and enhancing efficiency.
  • G2G, G2B, and G2C Activities: e-Government services to different groups, like Government-to-Government (G2G), Government-to-Business (G2B), and Government-to-Citizen (G2C) focuses on activities such as electoral processes, staff payroll payments, healthcare management systems, support for small businesses, and transparent procurement procedures…

Successful eGovernment initiatives in African countries have significantly improved government services and citizen engagement. These examples are part of a broader trend in Africa towards leveraging digital technologies to improve governance and public administration, with many countries making significant implementation progress…(More)”.

The New Knowledge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov: “From the global geopolitical arena to the smart city, control over knowledge—particularly over data and intellectual property—has become a key battleground for the exercise of economic and political power. For companies and governments alike, control over knowledge—what scholar Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure—has become a goal unto itself.

The rising dominance of the knowledge structure is leading to a massive redistribution of power, including from individuals to companies and states. Strong intellectual property rights have concentrated economic benefits in a smaller number of hands, while the “internet of things” is reshaping basic notions of property, ownership, and control. In the scramble to create and control data and intellectual property, governments and companies alike are engaging in ever-more surveillance.

The New Knowledge is a guide to and analysis of these changes, and of the emerging phenomenon of the knowledge-driven society. It highlights how the pursuit of the control over knowledge has become its own ideology, with its own set of experts drawn from those with the ability to collect and manipulate digital data. Haggart and Tusikov propose a workable path forward—knowledge decommodification—to ensure that our new knowledge is not treated simply as a commodity to be bought and sold, but as a way to meet the needs of the individuals and communities that create this knowledge in the first place…(More)”.

Integrating Participatory Budgeting and Institutionalized Citizens’ Assemblies: A Community-Driven Perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nick Vlahos: “There is a growing excitement in the democracy field about the potential of citizen’s assemblies (CAs), a practice that brings together groups of residents selected by lottery to deliberate on public policy issues. There is longitudinal evidence to suggest that deliberative mini-publics such as those who meet in CAs can be transformative when it comes to adding more nuance to public opinion on complex and potentially polarizing issues.

But there are two common critiques of CAs. The first is that they are not connected to centers of power (with very few notable exceptions) and don’t have authority to make binding decisions. The second is that they are often disconnected from the broader public, and indeed often claim to be making their own, new “publics” instead of engaging with existing ones.

In this article I propose that proponents of CAs could benefit from the thirty-year history of another democratic innovation—participatory budgeting (PB). There are nearly 12,000 recorded instances of PB to draw learnings from. I see value in both innovations (and have advocated and written about both) and would be interested to see some sort of experimentation that combines PB and CAs, from a decentralized, bottom-up, community-driven approach.

We can and should think about grassroots ways to scale and connect people across geography using combinations of democratic innovations, which along the way builds up (local) civic infrastructure by drawing from existing civic capital (resident-led groups, non-profits, service providers, social movements/mobilization etc.)…(More)”.

Introducing RegBox: using serious games in regulatory development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit by UK Policy Lab: “…enabling policymakers to convene stakeholders and work together to make decisions affecting regulation, using serious games. The toolkit will consist of game patterns for different use cases, a collection of case studies, guidance, and a set of tools to help policymakers to decide which approach to take. Work on RegBox is still in progress but in the spirit of being open and iterative we wanted to share and communicate it early. Our overarching challenge question is:  

How can we provide engaging and participatory tools that help policymakers to develop and test regulations and make effective decisions? …  

Policy Lab has worked on a range of projects that intersect with regulation and we’ve noticed a growing demand for more anticipatory and participatory approaches in this area. Regulators are having to respond to emerging technologies which are disrupting markets and posing new risks to individuals and institutions. Additionally, the government has just launched the Smarter Regulation programme, which is encouraging officials to use regulations only where necessary, and ensure their use is proportionate and future-proof. Because a change in regulation can have significant effects on businesses, organisations, and individuals it is important to understand the potential effects before deciding. We hypothesise that serious games can be used to understand regulatory challenges and stress-test solutions at pace..(More)”.

Representative Bodies in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by POPVOX: “The report tracks current developments in the U.S. Congress and internationally, while assessing the prospects for future innovations. The report also serves as a primer for those in Congress on AI technologies and methods in an effort to promote responsible use and adoption. POPVOX endorses a considered, step-wise strategy for AI experimentation, underscoring the importance of capacity building, data stewardship, ethical frameworks, and insights gleaned from global precedents of AI in parliamentary functions. This ensures AI solutions are crafted with human discernment and supervision at their core.

Legislatures worldwide are progressively embracing AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision to refine the precision, efficiency, and, to a small extent, the participatory aspects of their operations. The advent of generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, which excel in interpreting and organizing textual data, marks a transformative shift for the legislative process, inherently a task of converting rules into language.

While nations such as Brazil, India, Italy, and Estonia lead with applications ranging from the transcription and translation of parliamentary proceedings to enhanced bill drafting and sophisticated legislative record searches, the U.S. Congress is prudently venturing into the realm of Generative AI. The House and Senate have initiated AI working groups and secured licenses for platforms like ChatGPT. They have also issued guidance on responsible use…(More)”.

Experts in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Donald F. Kettl: “From Caligula and the time of ancient Rome to the present, governments have relied on experts to manage public programs. But with that expertise has come power, and that power has long proven difficult to hold accountable. The tension between experts in the bureaucracy and the policy goals of elected officials, however, remains a point of often bitter tension. President Donald Trump labeled these experts as a ‘deep state’ seeking to resist the policies he believed he was elected to pursue—and he developed a policy scheme to make it far easier to fire experts he deemed insufficiently loyal. The age-old battles between expertise and accountability have come to a sharp point, and resolving these tensions requires a fresh look at the rule of law to shape the role of experts in governance…(More)”.

Facts over fiction: Why we must protect evidence-based knowledge if we value democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Feringa and Paul Nurse: “Central to human progress are three interconnected pillars. The first is pursuit of knowledge, a major component of which is the expansion of the frontiers of learning and understanding – something often achieved through science, driven by the innate curiosity of scientists.

The second pillar of progress is the need for stable democracies where people and ideas can mix freely. It is this free exchange of diverse perspectives that fuels the democratic process, ensuring policies are shaped by a multitude of voices and evidence, leading to informed decision-making that benefits all of society.

Such freedom of speech and expression also serves as the bedrock for scientific inquiry, allowing researchers to challenge prevailing notions without fear, fostering discovery, applications and innovation.

The third pillar is a fact-based worldview. While political parties might disagree on policy, for democracy to work well all of them should support and protect a perspective that is grounded in reliable facts, which are needed to generate reliable policies that can drive human progress….(More)”.

Tackling Today’s Data Dichotomy: Unveiling the Paradox of Abundant Supply and Restricted Access in the Quest for Social Equity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst: “…One of the ironies of this moment, however, is that an era of unprecedented supply is simultaneously an era of constricted access to data. Much of the data we generate is privately “owned,” hidden away in private or public sector silos, or otherwise inaccessible to those who are most likely to benefit from it or generate valuable insights. These restrictions on access are grafted onto existing socioeconomic inequalities, driven by broader patterns of exclusion and marginalization, and also exacerbating them. Critically, restricted or unequal access to data does not only harm individuals: it causes untold public harm by limiting the potential of data to address social ills. It also limits attempts to improve the output of AI both in terms of bias and trustworthiness.

In this paper, we outline two potential approaches that could help address—or at least mitigate—the harms: social licensing and a greater role for data stewards. While not comprehensive solutions, we believe that these represent two of the most promising avenues to introduce greater efficiencies into how data is used (and reused), and thus lead to more targeted, responsive, and responsible policymaking…(page 22-25)”.

Digital Self-Determination

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Website and Resource by the International Network on Digital Self Determination: “Digital Self-Determination seeks to empower individuals and communities to decide how their data is managed in ways that benefit themselves and society. Translating this principle into practice requires a multi-faceted examination from diverse perspectives and in distinct contexts.

Our network connects different actors from around the world to consider how to apply Digital Self-Determination in real-life settings to inform both theory and practice.

Our main objectives are the following:

  • Inform policy development;
  • Accelerate the creation of new DSD processes and technologies;
  • Estabilish new professions that can help implement DSD (such as data stewards);
  • Contribute to the regulatory and policy debate;
  • Raise awareness and build bridges between the public and private sector and data subjects…(More)”.

Debate and Decide: Innovative Participatory Governance in South Australia 2010–2018

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Matt D. Ryan: “This article provides an account of how innovative participatory governance unfolded in South Australia between 2010 and 2018. In doing so it explores how an ‘interactive’ political leadership style, which scholarship argues is needed in contemporary democracy, played out in practice. Under the leadership of Premier Jay Weatherill this approach to governing, known as ‘debate and decide’, became regarded as one of the most successful examples of democratic innovation globally. Using an archival and media method of analysis the article finds evidence of the successful application of an interactive political leadership style, but one that was so woven into competitive politics that it was abandoned after a change in government in March 2018. To help sustain interactive political leadership styles the article argues for research into how a broader base of politicians perceives the benefits and risks of innovative participatory governance. It also argues for a focus on developing politicians’ collaborative leadership capabilities. However, the article concludes by asking: if political competition is built into our system of government, are we be better off leveraging it, rather than resisting it, in the pursuit of democratic reform?…(More)”.