Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lily L. Tsai and Alex Pentland: “Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups. Discussions about community issues could take place among small numbers of people with similar concerns. As coordination across larger distances evolved, the costs of travel required representatives from each clan or smaller group to participate in deliberations and decision-making involving multiple local communities. Divergence in the interests of representatives and their constituents opened up opportunities for corruption and elite capture.

Technologies now enable very large numbers of people to communicate, coordinate, and make collective decisions on the same platform. We have new opportunities for digitally enabled civic participation and direct democracy that scale for both the smallest and largest groups of people. Quantitative experiments, sometimes including tens of millions of individuals, have examined inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. Their findings suggest that large networks of nonexperts can make practical, productive decisions and engage in collective action under certain (1) conditions. (2) These conditions include shared knowledge among individuals and communities with similar concerns, and information about their recent actions and outcomes…(More)”

Design Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ilaria Mariani et al: “This open access book examines how the adoption of Design Thinking (DT) can support public organisations in overcoming some of the current barriers in e-participation. Scholars have discussed the adoption of technology to strengthen public engagement through e-participation, streamline and enhance the relationship between government and society, and improve accessibility and effectiveness. However, barriers persist, necessitating further research in this area. By analysing e-participation barriers emerging from the literature and aligning them with notions in the DT literature, this book identifies five core DT practices to enhance e-participation: (i) Meaning creation and sense-making, (ii) Publics formation, (iii) Co-production, (iv) Experimentation and prototyping, and (v) Changing organisational culture. As a result, this book provides insights into enhancing tech-aided public engagement and promoting inclusivity for translating citizen input into tangible service implementations. The book triangulates qualitative analysis of relevant literature in the fields of e-participation and DT with knowledge from European projects experimenting with public participation activities implying experimentation with digital tools. This research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical frameworks and practical application, ultimately contributing to more effective e-participation and digital public services…(More)”.

Navigating Generative AI in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the IBM Center for The Business of Government: “Generative AI refers to algorithms that can create realistic content such as images, text, music, and videos by learning from existing data patterns. Generative AI does more than just create content, it also serves as a user-friendly interface for other AI tools, making complex results easy to understand and use. Generative AI transforms analysis and prediction results into personalized formats, improving explainability by converting complicated data into understandable content. As Generative AI evolves, it plays an active role in collaborative processes, functioning as a vital collaborator by offering strengths that complement human abilities.

Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize government agencies by enhancing efficiency, improving decision making, and delivering better services to citizens, while maintaining agility and scalability. However, in order to implement generative AI solutions effectively, government agencies must address key questions—such as what problems AI can solve, data governance frameworks, and scaling strategies, to ensure a thoughtful and effective AI strategy. By exploring generic use cases, agencies can better understand the transformative potential of generative AI and align it with their unique needs and ethical considerations.

This report, which distills perspectives from two expert roundtable of leaders in Australia, presents 11 strategic pathways for integrating generative AI in government. The strategies include ensuring coherent and ethical AI implementation, developing adaptive AI governance models, investing in a robust data infrastructure, and providing comprehensive training for employees. Encouraging innovation and prioritizing public engagement and transparency are also essential to harnessing the full potential of AI…(More)”

What’s the Value of Privacy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brief by New America: “On a day-to-day basis, people make decisions about what information to share and what information to keep to themselves—guided by an inner privacy compass. Privacy is a concept that is both evocative and broad, often possessing different meanings for different people. The term eludes a common, static definition, though it is now inextricably linked to technology and a growing sense that individuals do not have control over their personal information. If privacy still, at its core, encompasses “the right to be left alone,” then that right is increasingly difficult to exercise in the modern era. 

The inability to meaningfully choose privacy is not an accident—in fact, it’s often by design. Society runs on data. Whether it is data about people’s personal attributes, preferences, or actions, all that data can be linked together, becoming greater than the sum of its parts. If data is now the world’s most valuable resource, then the companies that are making record profits off that data are highly incentivized to keep accessing it and obfuscating the externalities of data sharing. In brief, data use and privacy are “economically significant.” 

And yet, despite the pervasive nature of data collection, much of the public lacks a nuanced understanding of the true costs and benefits of sharing their data—for themselves and for society as a whole. People who have made billions by collecting and re-selling individual user data will continue to claim that it has little value. And yet, there are legitimate reasons why data should be shared—without a clear understanding of an issue, it is impossible to address it…(More)”.

New data laws unveiled to improve public services and boost UK economy by £10 billion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(UK) Press Release: “A new Bill which will harness the enormous power of data to boost the UK economy by £10 billion, and free up millions of police and NHS staff hours has been introduced to Parliament today (Wednesday 23rd October).

The Data Use and Access Bill will unlock the secure and effective use of data for the public interest, without adding pressures to the country’s finances. The measures will be central to delivering three of the five Missions to rebuild Britain, set out by the Prime Minister:

  • kickstarting economic growth
  • taking back our streets
  • and building an NHS fit for the future

Some of its key measures include cutting down on bureaucracy for our police officers, so that they can focus on tackling crime rather than being bogged down by admin, freeing up 1.5 million hours of their time a year. It will also make patients’ data easily transferable across the NHS so that frontline staff can make better informed decisions for patients more quickly, freeing up 140,000 hours of NHS staff time every year, speeding up care and improving patients’ health outcomes.

The better use of data under measures in the Bill will also simplify important tasks such as renting a flat and starting work with trusted ways to verify your identity online, or enabling electronic registration of births and deaths, so that people and businesses can get on with their lives without unnecessary admin.

Vital safeguards will remain in place to track and monitor how personal data is used, giving peace of mind to patients and victims of crime. IT systems in the NHS operate to the highest standards of security and all organisations have governance arrangements in place to ensure the safe, legal storage and use of data…(More)”

Make it make sense: the challenge of data analysis in global deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Iñaki Goñi: “From climate change to emerging technologies to economic justice to space, global and transnational deliberation is on the rise. Global deliberative processes aim to bring citizen-centred governance to issues that no single nation can resolve alone. Running deliberative processes at this scale poses a unique set of challenges. How to select participants, make the forums accountable, impactful, fairly designed, and aware of power imbalances, are all crucial and open questions….

Massifying participation will be key to invigorating global deliberation. Assemblies will have a better chance of being seen as legitimate, fair, and publicly supported if they involve thousands or even millions of diverse participants. This raises an operational challenge: how to systematise political ideas from many people across the globe.

In a centralised global assembly, anything from 50 to 500 citizens from various countries engage in a single deliberation and produce recommendations or political actions by crossing languages and cultures. In a distributed assembly, multiple gatherings are convened locally that share a common but flexible methodology, allowing participants to discuss a common issue applied both to local and global contexts. Either way, a global deliberation process demands the organisation and synthesis of possibly thousands of ideas from diverse languages and cultures around the world.

How could we ever make sense of all that data to systematise citizens’ ideas and recommendations? Most people turn their heads to computational methods to help reduce complexity and identify patterns. First up, one technique for analysing text amounts to little more than simple counting, through which we can produce something like a frequency table or a wordcloud…(More)”.

Open government data and self-efficacy: The empirical evidence of micro foundation via survey experiments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kuang-Ting Tai, Pallavi Awasthi, and Ivan P. Lee: “Research on the potential impacts of government openness and open government data is not new. However, empirical evidence regarding the micro-level impact, which can validate macro-level theories, has been particularly limited. Grounded in social cognitive theory, this study contributes to the literature by empirically examining how the dissemination of government information in an open data format can influence individuals’ perceptions of self-efficacy, a key predictor of public participation. Based on two rounds of online survey experiments conducted in the U.S., the findings reveal that exposure to open government data is associated with decreased perceived self-efficacy, resulting in lower confidence in participating in public affairs. This result, while contrary to optimistic assumptions, aligns with some other empirical studies and highlights the need to reconsider the format for disseminating government information. The policy implications suggest further calibration of open data applications to target professional and skilled individuals. This study underscores the importance of experiment replication and theory development as key components of future research agendas…(More)”.

The Critical Role of Questions in Building Resilient Democracies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Hannah Chafetz, and Alex Fischer: “Asking questions in new and participatory ways can complement advancements in data science and AI while enabling more inclusive and more adaptive democracies…

Yet a crisis, as the saying goes, always contains kernels of opportunity. Buried within our current dilemma—indeed, within one of the underlying causes of it—is a potential solution. Democracies are resilient and adaptive, not static. And importantly, data and artificial intelligence (AI), if implemented responsibly, can contribute to making them more resilient. Technologies such as AI-supported digital public squares and crowd-sourcing are examples of how generative AI and large language models can improve community connectivity, societal health, and public services. Communities can leverage these tools for democratic participation and democratizing information. Through this period of technological transition, policy makers and communities are imagining how digital technologies can better engage our collective intelligence…

Achieving this requires new tools and approaches, specifically the collective process of asking better questions.

Formulated inclusively, questions help establish shared priorities and impart focus, efficiency, and equity to public policy. For instance, school systems can identify indicators and patterns of experiences, such as low attendance rates, that signal a student is at risk of not completing school. However, they rarely ask the positive outlier question of what enables some at-risk students to overcome challenges and finish school. Is it a good teacher relationship, an after-school program, the support of a family member, or a combination of these and other factors? Asking outlier (and orphan, or overlooked and neglected) questions can help refocus programs and guide policies toward areas with the highest potential for impact.

Not asking the right questions can also have adverse effects. For example, many city governments have not asked whether and how people of different genders, in different age groups, or with different physical mobility needs experience local public transportation systems. Creating the necessary infrastructure for people with a variety of needs to travel safely and efficiently increases health and well-being. Questions like whether sidewalks are big enough for strollers and whether there is sufficient public transport near schools can help spotlight areas for improvement, and show where age- or gender-disaggregated data is needed most…(More)”.

G7 Toolkit for Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolkit by OECD: “…a comprehensive guide designed to help policymakers and public sector leaders translate principles for safe, secure, and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) into actionable policies. AI can help improve the efficiency of internal operations, the effectiveness of policymaking, the responsiveness of public services, and overall transparency and accountability. Recognising both the opportunities and risks posed by AI, this toolkit provides practical insights, shares good practices for the use of AI in and by the public sector, integrates ethical considerations, and provides an overview of G7 trends. It further showcases public sector AI use cases, detailing their benefits, as well as the implementation challenges faced by G7 members, together with the emerging policy responses to guide and coordinate the development, deployment, and use of AI in the public sector. The toolkit finally highlights key stages and factors characterising the journey of public sector AI solutions…(More)”

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Henry Tessler et al: “We asked whether an AI system based on large language models (LLMs) could successfully capture the underlying shared perspectives of a group of human discussants by writing a “group statement” that the discussants would collectively endorse. Inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, we designed the “Habermas Machine” to iteratively generate group statements that were based on the personal opinions and critiques from individual users, with the goal of maximizing group approval ratings. Through successive rounds of human data collection, we used supervised fine-tuning and reward modeling to progressively enhance the Habermas Machine’s ability to capture shared perspectives. To evaluate the efficacy of AI-mediated deliberation, we conducted a series of experiments with over 5000 participants from the United Kingdom. These experiments investigated the impact of AI mediation on finding common ground, how the views of discussants changed across the process, the balance between minority and majority perspectives in group statements, and potential biases present in those statements. Lastly, we used the Habermas Machine for a virtual citizens’ assembly, assessing its ability to support deliberation on controversial issues within a demographically representative sample of UK residents…(More)”.