Reclaiming Participatory Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Adrian Bua and Sonia Bussu: “…offers empirical and theoretical perspectives on how the relationship between social movements and state institutions is emerging and developing through new modes of participatory governance.

One of the most interesting political developments of the past decade has been the adoption by social movements of strategies seeking to change political institutions through participatory governance. These strategies have flourished in a variety of contexts, from anti-austerity and pro-social justice protests in Spain, to movements demanding climate transition and race equality in the UK and the USA, to constitutional reforms in Belgium and Iceland. The chief ambition and challenge of these new forms of participatory governance is to institutionalise the prefigurative politics and social justice values that inspired them in the first place, by mobilising the bureaucracy to respond to their claims for reforms and rights. The authors of this volume assess how participatory governance is being transformed and explore the impact of such changes, providing timely critical reflections on: the constraints imposed by cultural, economic and political power relations on these new empowered participatory spaces; the potential of this new “wave” of participatory democracy to reimagine the relationship between citizens and traditional institutions towards more radical democratic renewal; where and how these new democratisation efforts sit within the representative state; and how tensions between the different demands of lay citizens, organised civil society and public officials are being managed….(More)”.

Your Data Is Diminishing Your Freedom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by David Marchese: “It’s no secret — even if it hasn’t yet been clearly or widely articulated — that our lives and our data are increasingly intertwined, almost indistinguishable. To be able to function in modern society is to submit to demands for ID numbers, for financial information, for filling out digital fields and drop-down boxes with our demographic details. Such submission, in all senses of the word, can push our lives in very particular and often troubling directions. It’s only recently, though, that I’ve seen someone try to work through the deeper implications of what happens when our data — and the formats it’s required to fit — become an inextricable part of our existence, like a new limb or organ to which we must adapt. ‘‘I don’t want to claim we are only data and nothing but data,’’ says Colin Koopman, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the author of ‘‘How We Became Our Data.’’ ‘‘My claim is you are your data, too.’’ Which at the very least means we should be thinking about this transformation beyond the most obvious data-security concerns. ‘‘We’re strikingly lackadaisical,’’ says Koopman, who is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ‘‘Data Equals,’’ ‘‘about how much attention we give to: What are these data showing? What assumptions are built into configuring data in a given way? What inequalities are baked into these data systems? We need to be doing more work on this.’’

Can you explain more what it means to say that we have become our data? Because a natural reaction to that might be, well, no, I’m my mind, I’m my body, I’m not numbers in a database — even if I understand that those numbers in that database have real bearing on my life. The claim that we are data can also be taken as a claim that we live our lives through our data in addition to living our lives through our bodies, through our minds, through whatever else. I like to take a historical perspective on this. If you wind the clock back a couple hundred years or go to certain communities, the pushback wouldn’t be, ‘‘I’m my body,’’ the pushback would be, ‘‘I’m my soul.’’ We have these evolving perceptions of our self. I don’t want to deny anybody that, yeah, you are your soul. My claim is that your data has become something that is increasingly inescapable and certainly inescapable in the sense of being obligatory for your average person living out their life. There’s so much of our lives that are woven through or made possible by various data points that we accumulate around ourselves — and that’s interesting and concerning. It now becomes possible to say: ‘‘These data points are essential to who I am. I need to tend to them, and I feel overwhelmed by them. I feel like it’s being manipulated beyond my control.’’ A lot of people have that relationship to their credit score, for example. It’s both very important to them and very mysterious…(More)”.

The Law of AI for Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Orly Lobel: “Legal policy and scholarship are increasingly focused on regulating technology to safeguard against risks and harms, neglecting the ways in which the law should direct the use of new technology, and in particular artificial intelligence (AI), for positive purposes. This article pivots the debates about automation, finding that the focus on AI wrongs is descriptively inaccurate, undermining a balanced analysis of the benefits, potential, and risks involved in digital technology. Further, the focus on AI wrongs is normatively and prescriptively flawed, narrowing and distorting the law reforms currently dominating tech policy debates. The law-of-AI-wrongs focuses on reactive and defensive solutions to potential problems while obscuring the need to proactively direct and govern increasingly automated and datafied markets and societies. Analyzing a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report, the Biden administration’s 2022 AI Bill of Rights and American and European legislative reform efforts, including the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022, the Data Privacy and Protection Act of 2022, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the new draft EU AI Act, the article finds that governments are developing regulatory strategies that almost exclusively address the risks of AI while paying short shrift to its benefits. The policy focus on risks of digital technology is pervaded by logical fallacies and faulty assumptions, failing to evaluate AI in comparison to human decision-making and the status quo. The article presents a shift from the prevailing absolutist approach to one of comparative cost-benefit. The role of public policy should be to oversee digital advancements, verify capabilities, and scale and build public trust in the most promising technologies.

A more balanced regulatory approach to AI also illuminates tensions between current AI policies. Because AI requires better, more representative data, the right to privacy can conflict with the right to fair, unbiased, and accurate algorithmic decision-making. This article argues that the dominant policy frameworks regulating AI risks—emphasizing the right to human decision-making (human-in-the-loop) and the right to privacy (data minimization)—must be complemented with new corollary rights and duties: a right to automated decision-making (human-out-of-the-loop) and a right to complete and connected datasets (data maximization). Moreover, a shift to proactive governance of AI reveals the necessity for behavioral research on how to establish not only trustworthy AI, but also human rationality and trust in AI. Ironically, many of the legal protections currently proposed conflict with existing behavioral insights on human-machine trust. The article presents a blueprint for policymakers to engage in the deliberate study of how irrational aversion to automation can be mitigated through education, private-public governance, and smart policy design…(More)”

Contextualizing Datafication in Peru: Insights from a Citizen Data Literacy Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Katherine Reilly and Marieliv Flores: The pilot data literacy project Son Mis Datos showed volunteers how to leverage Peru’s national data protection law to request access to personal data held by Peruvian companies, and then it showed them how to audit corporate data use based on the results. While this intervention had a positive impact on data literacy, by basing it on a universalist conception of datafication, our work inadvertently reproduced the dominant data paradigm we hoped to challenge. This paper offers a retrospective analysis of Son Mis Datos, and explores the gap between van Dijck’s widely cited theory of datafication, and the reality of our participants’ experiences with datafication and digital transformation on the ground in Peru. On this basis, we suggest an alternative definition of datafication more appropriate to critical scholarship as the transformation of social relations around the uptake of personal data in the coordination of transactions, and propose an alternative approach to data literacy interventions that begins with the experiences of data subjects…(More)”.

Models and experts: urgent questions about how we inform decisions and public policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog and book by Erica Thompson: “Mathematical models are here to stay. Whether they are determining supply chain vulnerabilities, demonstrating regulatory compliance, or informing policies for a zero-carbon future, quantitative models are at the heart of modern societies. And as computers become more powerful and more readily accessible, artificial intelligence and machine learning models are also being applied in many new areas.

Given that, we urgently need to understand how best to use and work with models to make good and responsible decisions. Statistician George Box was quite right to point out that “all models are wrong”. They are necessarily simplifications of the messy reality we want to get to grips with. But many quantitative methods for working with models basically assume that the model is right, or at least that it can accurately estimate the range of plausible outcomes.

If the model is not quite perfect, we can expect some of its outputs to be wrong (not just inaccurate). In that case, the information that is offered as decision support could be misleading. We have two options here. We could remain in what I call model land and just expect to have to say “what a shame, we made the wrong decision” occasionally. In some circumstances that might be a reasonable answer, but if we are making decisions about critical infrastructure or selling a product that might be unsafe to millions of people, then we have both a legal and ethical responsibility to do better, to get out of model land and understand how relevant our model results are for the real world.

So what’s the second option? You won’t be surprised to know that it isn’t easy. In my new book, I consider some of the implications of working with imperfect models and the kinds of strategies that we need to adopt to make best use of the information they contain. One theme that I explore is the need to understand the role of expert judgement in constructing, calibrating, evaluating, and using models, and the way that that expert judgement might be shaped by our social context.

Experts make models – and that’s a very good thing, because who would want to rely on a model created by a non-expert? But their expertise is often limited, and it comes from a particular background and set of experiences. Indeed, you can often find equally qualified experts who will disagree about the right assumptions to make when constructing a model and who give different advice about how to achieve the stated aims. Then the decision-maker – probably a non-expert – will be in the difficult position of trying to adjudicate between different models from different experts, weighing up their relative credibility…(More)”.

Mapping Diversity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Mapping Diversity is a platform for discovering key facts about diversity and representation in street names across Europe, and to spark a debate about who is missing from our urban spaces.

We looked at the names of 145,933 streets across 30 major European cities, located in 17 different countries. More than 90% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to white men. Where did all the other inhabitants of Europe end up? The lack of diversity in toponymy speaks volumes about our past and contributes to shaping Europe’s present and future…(More)”.

Principles for effective beneficial ownership disclosure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Ownership: “The Open Ownership Principles (OO Principles) are a framework for considering the elements that influence whether the implementation of reforms to improve the transparency of the beneficial ownership of corporate vehicles will lead to effective beneficial ownership disclosure, that is, it generates high-quality and reliable data, maximising usability for users.

The OO Principles are intended to support governments implementing effective beneficial ownership transparency reforms and guide international institutions, civil society, and private sector actors in understanding and supporting reforms. They are a tool to identify and separate issues affecting implementation, and they provide a framework for assessing and improving existing disclosure regimes. If implemented together, the OO Principles enable disclosure systems to generate actionable and usable data across the widest range of policy applications of beneficial ownership data.

The nine principles are interdependent, but can be broadly grouped by the three main ways they improve data. The Definition, Coverage, and Detail principles enable data disclosure and collection. The Central register, Access, and Structured data principles facilitate data storage and auditability. Finally, the Verification, Up-to-date and historical records, and Sanctions and enforcement principles improve data quality and reliability….Download January 2023 version (translated versions are forthcoming)”

Decidim: why digital tools for democracy need to be developed democratically

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Adrian Smith and Pedro Prieto Martín: “On Wednesday 18 January 2023, a pan-European citizen jury voted Barcelona the first European Capital of Democracy. Barcelona has a rich history of official and citizen initiatives in political and economic democracy. One received a special mention from the jurors. That initiative is Decidim.

Decidim is a digital platform for citizen participation. Through it, citizens can propose, comment, debate, and vote on urban developments, decide how to spend city budgets, and design and contribute to local strategies and plans.

Launched in 2016, more than 400 organisations around the world have since used the platform. What makes Decidim stand out, according to our research, is developer commitment to democratising technology development itself and embedding it within struggles for democracy offline and online. Decidim holds important lessons at a time when the monopolisation of social media by corporate power presents democrats with so many challenges…(More)”.

The Sensitive Politics Of Information For Digital States

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Federica Carugati, Cyanne E. Loyle and Jessica Steinberg: “In 2020, Vice revealed that the U.S. military had signed a contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that created a product called Locate X, which collects location data from users across a variety of digital applications. Some of these apps are seemingly innocuous: one for following storms, a Muslim dating app and a level for DIY home repair. Less innocuously, these reports indicate that the U.S. government is outsourcing some of its counterterrorism and counterinsurgency information-gathering activities to a private company.

While states have always collected information about citizens and their activities, advances in digital technologies — including new kinds of data and infrastructure — have fundamentally altered their ability to access, gather and analyze information. Bargaining with and relying on non-state actors like private companies creates tradeoffs between a state’s effectiveness and legitimacy. Those tradeoffs might be unacceptable to citizens, undermining our very understanding of what states do and how we should interact with them …(More)”

Whole of government innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Geoff Mulgan: ‘Whole of government’ approaches – that aim to mobilise and align many ministries and agencies around a common challenge – have a long history. There have been notable examples during major wars, and around attempts to digitize societies, to cut energy use and to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper has been prepared as part of a European Commission programme which I’m chairing looking at ‘whole of government innovation’ and working with national governments to help them better align their actions.

My paper – linked below – looks at the lessons of history. It outlines the many tools governments can use to achieve cross-cutting goals, linking R&D to law, regulation and procurement, and collaborating with business, universities and civil society. It argues that it is unwise to rely only on committees and boards. It shows how these choices link to innovation strategy and funding, including the relevance of half a century of experiment with moon-shots and missions.

The paper describes how the organisational challenges vary depending on the nature of the task; why governments need to avoid common technology or ‘STI trap’, of focusing only on hardware and not on social arrangements or business models; why constellations and flotillas of coordination are usually more realistic than true ‘whole of government approaches; the importance of mobilising hearts and minds as well as money and command.

Finally, it addresses the relevance of different approaches to current tasks such as the achievement of a net zero economy and society. The paper is shared as a working document – I’m keen to find new examples and approaches…(More)”.