Can open-source technologies support open societies?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Victoria Welborn, and George Ingram: “In the 2020 “Roadmap for Digital Cooperation,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres highlighted digital public goods (DPGs) as a key lever in maximizing the full potential of digital technology to accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while also helping overcome some of its persistent challenges. 

The Roadmap rightly pointed to the fact that, as with any new technology, there are risks around digital technologies that might be counterproductive to fostering prosperous, inclusive, and resilient societies. In fact, without intentional action by the global community, digital technologies may more naturally exacerbate exclusion and inequality by undermining trust in critical institutions, allowing consolidation of control and economic value by the powerful, and eroding social norms through breaches of privacy and disinformation campaigns. 

Just as the pandemic has served to highlight the opportunity for digital technologies to reimagine and expand the reach of government service delivery, so too has it surfaced specific risks that are hallmarks of closed societies and authoritarian states—creating new pathways to government surveillance, reinforcing existing socioeconomic inequalities, and enabling the rapid proliferation of disinformation. Why then—in the face of these real risks—focus on the role of digital public goods in development?

As the Roadmap noted, DPGs are “open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs.”[1] There are a number of factors why such products have unique potential to accelerate development efforts, including widely recognized benefits related to more efficient and cost effective implementation of technology-enabled development programming. 

Historically, the use of digital solutions for development in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has been supported by donor investments in sector-specific technology systems, reinforcing existing silos and leaving countries with costly, proprietary software solutions with duplicative functionality and little interoperability across government agencies, much less underpinning private sector innovation. These silos are further codified through the development of sector-specific maturity models and metrics. An effective DPG ecosystem has the potential to enable the reuse and improvement of existing tools, thereby lowering overall cost of deploying technology solutions and increasing efficient implementation.

Beyond this proven reusability of DPGs and the associated cost and deployment efficiencies, do DPGs have even more transformational potential? Increasingly, there is interest in DPGs as drivers of inclusion and products through which to standardize and safeguard rights; these opportunities are less understood and remain unproven. To begin to fill that gap, this paper first examines the unique value proposition of DPGs in supporting open societies by advancing more equitable systems and by codifying rights. The paper then considers the persistent challenges to more fully realizing this opportunity and offers some recommendations for how to address these challenges…(More)”.

Sustaining Open Data as a Digital Common — Design principles for Common Pool Resources applied to Open Data Ecosystems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Johan Linåker, and Per Runeson: “Digital commons is an emerging phenomenon and of increasing importance, as we enter a digital society. Open data is one example that makes up a pivotal input and foundation for many of today’s digital services and applications. Ensuring sustainable provisioning and maintenance of the data, therefore, becomes even more important.

We aim to investigate how such provisioning and maintenance can be collaboratively performed in the community surrounding a common. Specifically, we look at Open Data Ecosystems (ODEs), a type of community of actors, openly sharing and evolving data on a technological platform.

We use Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for Common Pool Resources as a lens to systematically analyze the governance of earlier reported cases of ODEs using a theory-oriented software engineering framework.

We find that, while natural commons must regulate consumption, digital commons such as open data maintained by an ODE must stimulate both use and data provisioning. Governance needs to enable such stimulus while also ensuring that the collective action can still be coordinated and managed within the frame of available maintenance resources of a community. Subtractability is, in this sense, a concern regarding the resources required to maintain the quality and value of the data, rather than the availability of data. Further, we derive empirically-based recommended practices for ODEs based on the design principles by Ostrom for how to design a governance structure in a way that enables a sustainable and collaborative provisioning and maintenance of the data.

ODEs are expected to play a role in data provisioning which democratize the digital society and enables innovation from smaller commercial actors. Our empirically based guidelines intend to support this development…(More).

Does public opinion shape public policy? Effect of citizen dissent on legislative outcomes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nara Park and Jihyun Ham: “In South Korea, the Advance Notice Legislation (ANL) system requires by law that a public announcement be issued on any proposed bill that is likely to affect the fundamental rights, duties, and/or daily life of the general public. By investigating the effects of public dissent submitted via the online ANL system in South Korea, this study attempts to address the critical issue of how to increase citizen participation in the political process and to offer a possible strategy that modern democratic governments can employ in this regard. The findings suggest that citizens will actively participate in the political process to make their voices heard when an appropriate participatory mechanism is available, but they will be more active if the administration encourages citizen participation with various policies and institutions. In other words, formal and informal institutions actively interact to affect the behavior of actors both within and outside the political arena…(More)”.

Designing Data Spaces: The Ecosystem Approach to Competitive Advantage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book edited by Boris Otto, Michael ten Hompel, and Stefan Wrobel: “…provides a comprehensive view on data ecosystems and platform economics from methodical and technological foundations up to reports from practical implementations and applications in various industries.

To this end, the book is structured in four parts: Part I “Foundations and Contexts” provides a general overview about building, running, and governing data spaces and an introduction to the IDS and GAIA-X projects. Part II “Data Space Technologies” subsequently details various implementation aspects of IDS and GAIA-X, including eg data usage control, the usage of blockchain technologies, or semantic data integration and interoperability. Next, Part III describes various “Use Cases and Data Ecosystems” from various application areas such as agriculture, healthcare, industry, energy, and mobility. Part IV eventually offers an overview of several “Solutions and Applications”, eg including products and experiences from companies like Google, SAP, Huawei, T-Systems, Innopay and many more.

Overall, the book provides professionals in industry with an encompassing overview of the technological and economic aspects of data spaces, based on the International Data Spaces and Gaia-X initiatives. It presents implementations and business cases and gives an outlook to future developments. In doing so, it aims at proliferating the vision of a social data market economy based on data spaces which embrace trust and data sovereignty…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book by Jérôme Duberry on “Risks and Promises of AI-Mediated Citizen–Government Relations….What role does artificial intelligence (AI) play in the citizen–government rela-tions? Who is using this technology and for what purpose? How does the use of AI influence power relations in policy-making, and the trust of citizens in democratic institutions? These questions led to the writing of this book. While the early developments of e-democracy and e-participation can be traced back to the end of the 20th century, the growing adoption of smartphones and mobile applications by citizens, and the increased capacity of public adminis-trations to analyze big data, have enabled the emergence of new approaches. Online voting, online opinion polls, online town hall meetings, and online dis-cussion lists of the 1990s and early 2000s have evolved into new generations of policy-making tactics and tools, enabled by the most recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Janssen & Helbig, 2018). Online platforms, advanced simulation websites, and serious gaming tools are progressively used on a larger scale to engage citizens, collect their opinions, and involve them in policy processes…(More)”.

Civic Life of Cities’ Puts Civil Society Organizations in Their Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christof Brandtner and Walter W. Powell: “One of the ironies of social science publishing is that, despite frequent references to “American exceptionalism,” there is rarely a need to justify the United States as a setting in many leading journals. As sociologists and organization scholars, we know that many concepts devised in the US either differ in meaning (e.g., what is scholarly impact) or might not be applicable (e.g., the central role of philanthropy in developing public policies) outside the United States. In fact, there is significant pressure for scholars of such regions as Latin America, East Asia, or Africa to justify their setting and how it generalizes to other areas of interest to scholars of the Global North and West. This summer, we published a series of articles from a co-produced multi-place research project in six cities worldwide in the journal Global Perspectives to bring a new angle to this problem.

Comparative work has been among the most fruitful for testing different social science theories. In the field of civil society research, for instance, scholars have often examined government failure theory—the idea that nonprofits are more plentiful where authorities are unable to serve the full spectrum of needs—by comparing states and nations. The arguably most impactful research project for defining nonprofit organizations was a comparative study of national nonprofit sectors led by Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon in the 1990s. Closer to the ground, the comparative case method has also been generative for understanding persistent performance differences among seemingly similar organizations. Work comparing hospitals by Kate Kellogg, and neighborhoods by Robert Sampson or Eric Klinenberg, provide illuminating examples of the power of comparing sites.

Comparing the civic life of cities

In this spirit, we designed a research project meant to provide a reality check on some now-common understandings of organizational and social dynamics developed in the Global North. In our introductory essay to the special collection titled “Capturing the Civic Life of Cities,” we ask: “In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society?” Our work investigates the civic life of cities, which has seen significant transformations with digitalization and globalization since the 1990s heyday of “big theories” of civil society. These transformations have seriously called into question whether the dynamics of civil society organizations—often developed in the US context—still apply. During our data collection over the past three years, civil society was further shocked by both political upheavals and a global pandemic. Nonetheless, in light of the many examples where civil society organizations have stepped up to meet pressing new needs, we conclude that:

“Civil society organizations are rooted in place through their people, practices, and partnerships. During the storm of the pandemic, these roots may have grown deeper and found new ways of invigorating cities.”…Courtesy of the University of California Press, the special collection of Global Perspectives is openly accessible until the end of July 2022.…(More)”.

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Lorraine Daston: “Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.

Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change—how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines….(More)”.

Corruption Risk Forecast

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Starting with 2015 and building on the work of Alina Mungiu-Pippidi the European Research Centre for Anti-Corruption and State-Building (ERCAS) engaged in the development of a new generation of corruption indicators to fill the gap. This led to the creation of the Index for Public Integrity (IPI) in 2017, of the Corruption Risk Forecast in 2020 and of the T-index (de jure and de facto computer mediated government transparency) in 2021. Also since 2021 a component of the T-index (administrative transparency) is included in the IPI, whose components also offer the basis for the Corruption Risk Forecast.

This generation is different from perception indicators in a few fundamental aspects:

  1. Theory-grounded. Our indicators are unique because they are based on a clear theory- why corruption happens, how do countries that control corruption differ from those that don’t and what specifically is broken and should be fixed. We tested for a large variety of indicators before we decided on these ones.
  2. Specific. Each component is a measurement based on facts of a certain aspect of control of corruption or transparency. Read methodology to follow in detail where the data comes from and how these indicators were selected.
  3. Change sensitive. Except for the T-index components whose monitoring started in 2021 all other components go back in time at least 12 years and can be compared across years in the Trends menu on the Corruption Risk forecast page. No statistical process blurs the difference across years as with perception indicators. For long term trends, we flag what change is significant and what change is not. T-index components will also be comparable across the nest years to come. Furthermore, our indicators are selected to be actionable, so any significant policy intervention which has an impact is captured and reported when we renew the data.
  4. Comparative. You can compare every country we cover with the rest of the world to see exactly where it stands, and against its peers from the region and the income group.
  5. Transparent. Our T-index dataallows you to review and contribute to our work. Use the feedback form on T-index page to send input, and after checking by our team we will upgrade the codes to include your contribution. Use the feedback form on Corruption Risk forecast page to contribute to the forecast…(More)”.

In India, your payment data could become evidence of dissent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nilesh Christopher: “Indian payments firm Razorpay is under fire for seemingly breaching customer privacy. Some have gone on to call the company a “sell out” for sharing users’ payment data with authorities without their consent. But is faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request fair?

On June 19, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking outlet Alt News, was arrested for hurting religious sentiments over a tweet he posted in 2018. Investigating authorities, through legal diktats, have now gained access to payment data of donors supporting Alt News from payments processor Razorpay. (Police are now probing Alt News for accepting foreign donations. Alt News has denied the charge.) 

The data sharing has had a chilling effect. Civil society organization Internet Freedom Foundation, which uses Razorpay for donations, is exploring “additional payment platforms to offer choice and comfort to donors.” Many donors are worried that they might now become targets on account of their contributions. 

This has created a new faultline in the discourse around weaponizing payment data by a state that has gained notoriety for cracking down on critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request is misguided. “I think Razorpay played it by the book,” said Dharmendra Chatur, partner at the law firm Poovayya & Co. “They sort of did what any reasonable person would do in this situation.” 

Under Section 91 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code, police authorities have the power to seek information or documents on the apprehension that a crime has been committed during the course of an inquiry, inspection, or trial. “You either challenge it or you comply. There’s no other option available [for Razorpay]. And who would want to just unnecessarily initiate litigation?” Chatur said…(More)”.

The People Versus The Algorithm: Stakeholders and AI Accountability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jbid Arsenyan and Julia Roloff: “As artificial intelligence (AI) applications are used for a wide range of tasks, the question about who is responsible for detecting and remediating problems caused by AI applications remains disputed. We argue that responsibility attributions proposed by management scholars fail to enable a practical solution as two aspects are overlooked: the difficulty to design a complex algorithm that does not produce adverse outcomes, and the conflict of interest inherited in some AI applications by design as proprietors and users employ the application for different purposes. In this conceptual paper, we argue that effective accountability can only be delivered through solutions that enable stakeholders to employ their collective intelligence effectively in compiling problem reports and analyze problem patterns. This allows stakeholders, including governments, to hold providers of AI applications accountable, and ensure that appropriate corrections are carried out in a timely manner…(More)”.