Paper by Anneke Zuiderwijk, Yu-CheChen and Fadi Salem: “To lay the foundation for the special issue that this research article introduces, we present 1) a systematic review of existing literature on the implications of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public governance and 2) develop a research agenda. First, an assessment based on 26 articles on this topic reveals much exploratory, conceptual, qualitative, and practice-driven research in studies reflecting the increasing complexities of using AI in government – and the resulting implications, opportunities, and risks thereof for public governance. Second, based on both the literature review and the analysis of articles included in this special issue, we propose a research agenda comprising eight process-related recommendations and seven content-related recommendations. Process-wise, future research on the implications of the use of AI for public governance should move towards more public sector-focused, empirical, multidisciplinary, and explanatory research while focusing more on specific forms of AI rather than AI in general. Content-wise, our research agenda calls for the development of solid, multidisciplinary, theoretical foundations for the use of AI for public governance, as well as investigations of effective implementation, engagement, and communication plans for government strategies on AI use in the public sector. Finally, the research agenda calls for research into managing the risks of AI use in the public sector, governance modes possible for AI use in the public sector, performance and impact measurement of AI use in government, and impact evaluation of scaling-up AI usage in the public sector….(More)”.
We know what you did during lockdown
An FT Film written by James Graham: “The Covid-19 pandemic has so scrambled our lives that we have barely blinked when the state has told us how many people can attend a wedding, where we can travel or even whether we should hug each other. This normalisation of the abnormal, during the moral panic of a national healthcare emergency, is the subject of People You May Know, a short film written by the playwright James Graham and commissioned by the Financial Times.
One of Britain’s most inquisitive and versatile playwrights, Graham says he has long been worried about the expansion of the “creeping data state” and has an almost “existential anxiety about privacy on all levels, emotional, philosophical, political, social”. Those concerns were first explored in his play Privacy (2014) in response to the revelations of Edward Snowden, the US security contractor turned whistleblower, who described how “the architecture of oppression” of the surveillance state had been built, if not yet fully utilised.
In his new FT film, Graham investigates how the response to the pandemic has enabled the further intrusion of the data state and what it might mean for us all. “The power of drama is that it allows you to take a few more stepping stones into the imagined future,” he says in a Google Meet interview. …(More) (Film)”
Lobbying in the 21st Century: Transparency, Integrity and Access
OECD Report: “Lobbying, as a way to influence and inform governments, has been part of democracy for at least two centuries, and remains a legitimate tool for influencing public policies. However, it carries risks of undue influence. Lobbying in the 21st century has also become increasingly complex, including new tools for influencing government, such as social media, and a wide range of actors, such as NGOs, think tanks and foreign governments. This report takes stock of the progress that countries have made in implementing the OECD Principles for Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying. It reflects on new challenges and risks related to the many ways special interest groups attempt to influence public policies, and reviews tools adopted by governments to effectively safeguard impartiality and fairness in the public decision-making process….(More)”.
Practical Lessons for Government AI Projects
Paper by Godofredo Jr Ramizo: “Governments around the world are launching projects that embed artificial intelligence (AI) in the delivery of public services. How can government officials navigate the complexities of AI projects and deliver successful outcomes? Using a review of the existing literature and interviews with senior government officials from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore who have worked on Smart City and similar AI-driven projects, this paper demonstrates the diversity of government AI projects and identifies practical lessons that help safeguard public interest. I make two contributions. First, I show that we can classify government AI projects based on their level of importance to government functions and the level of organisational resources available to them. These two dimensions result in four types of AI projects, each with its own risks and appropriate strategies. Second, I propose five general lessons for government AI projects in any field, and outline specific measures appropriate to each of the aforementioned types of AI projects….(More)”.
How to get people to talk to one another again? Citizens’ assemblies
Interview with Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values Emerita at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the author of “Beyond Adversary Democracy.” Her current work revolves around representation, democratic deliberation, and everyday activism:
GAZETTE: How might we get citizens who are so polarized to listen to one another?
MANSBRIDGE: One proven practice is the technique of citizens’ assemblies or deliberative polls. These are groups of citizens drawn randomly, through a democratic lottery, from a particular population. It could be an entire country, a state, a city, or even a neighborhood, from which you bring together a group of citizens to talk about an issue that is of concern to their community. For this technique to be successful, the group has to be random, meaning that you have to have good representation from everyone, not just the white retirees who don’t have much to do and would love to come to this sort of thing. To get a random group, you ought to able to pay the participants because you want to be able to get the poor, the less educated, and people who, for one reason or another, would not give up a weekend otherwise to come together with other citizens to deliberate about some major issue.
GAZETTE: How do we know these assemblies foster civil dialogue?
MANSBRIDGE: Let’s take the deliberative polling organized by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford that I’ve worked with, in informal ways, for a couple of decades. If you look at those gatherings, one important way to get citizens to listen to one another comes from their design, in which they alternate small groups of 12 or so people, randomly drawn from the random selection, with larger assemblies, in which the citizens ask questions to experts. One of the tasks they have in their small group is not only to deliberate about the issues, but to design questions they want to ask the experts. As it happens, the project of asking a common question becomes a task that binds citizens together across the lines of difference….(More)”
The Conference on the Future of Europe—an Experiment in Citizens’ Participation
Stefan Lehne at Carnegie Europe: “If the future of Europe is to be decided at the Conference on the Future of Europe, we should be extremely worried.
Clearly, this has been one of the least fortunate EU projects of recent years. Conceived by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 as a response to the rise of populism, the conference fell victim, first to the pandemic and then to institutional squabbling over who should lead it, resulting in a delay of an entire year.
The setup of the conference emerging from months of institutional infighting is strangely schizophrenic.
On the one hand, it offers a forum for interinstitutional negotiations, where representatives of the European Parliament demanding deeper integration will confront a number of governments staunchly opposed to transferring further powers to the EU.
On the other, the conference provides for an innovative experiment in citizens’ participation. A multilingual interactive website—futureu.europa.eu—offers citizens the opportunity to share and discuss ideas and to organize events. Citizens’ panels made up of randomly selected people from across the EU will discuss various policy areas and feed their findings into the debate of the conference’s plenary….
In the first three weeks 11,000 people participated in the digital platform, sharing more than 2,500 ideas on various aspects of the EU’s work.
A closer look reveals that many of the participants are engaged citizens and activists who use the website as just another format to propagate their demands. The platform thus offers a diverse and colorful discussion forum, but is unlikely to render a representative picture of the views of the average citizen.
This is precisely the objective of the citizens’ panels: an attempt to introduce an element of deliberative democracy into EU politics.
Deliberative assemblies have in recent decades become a prominent feature of democratic life in many countries. They work best at the local level, where participants understand each other well and are already roughly familiar with the issue at stake.
But they have also been employed at the national level, such as the citizens’ assembly preparing the referendum on abortion in Ireland or the citizens’ convention on climate in France.
The European Commission has rich experience, having held more than 1,800 citizens’ consultations, but apart from a single rather symbolic experiment in 2018, a genuine citizens’ panel based on sortition has never been attempted at the European level.
Deliberative democracy is all about initiating an open discussion, carefully weighing the evidence, and thus allowing convergence toward a broadly shared agreement. Given the language barriers and the highly diverse cultural background of European citizens, this is difficult to accomplish at the EU level.
Also, many of subject areas of the conference ranging from climate to economic and social policy are technically complex. It is clear that a great deal of expert advice and time will be necessary to enable citizens to engage in meaningful deliberation on these topics.
Unfortunately, the limited timeframe and the insufficient resources of the conference—financing depends on contributions from the institutions—make it doubtful that the citizens’ panels will be conducted in a sufficiently serious manner.
There is also—as is so often the case with citizens’ assemblies—the crucial question of the follow-up. In the case of the conference, the recommendations of the panels, together with the content of the digital platform and the outcome of events in the member states, will feed into the discussions of the plenary….(More)”
Theories of Change
Book by Karen Wendt: “Today, it has become strikingly obvious that companies no longer operate in an environment where only risk return and volatility describe the business environment. The business has to deal with volatility plus uncertainty, plus complexity and ambiguity (VUCA): that requires new qualities, competencies, frameworks; and it demands a new mind set to deal with the VUCA environment in investment, funding and financing. This book builds on a new megatrend beyond resilience, called anti-fragility. We have had the black swan (financial crisis) and the red swan (COVID) – the Bank for International Settlement is preparing for regenerative capitalism, block chain based analysis of financial streams and is aiming to prevent the “Green Swan” – the climate crisis to lead to the next lockdown. In the light of the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals, what is required, is Theories of Change.
Written by experts working in the fields of sustainable finance, impact investing, development finance, carbon divesting, innovation, scaling finance, impact entrepreneurship, social stock exchanges, alternative currencies, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), ledger technologies, civil action, co-creation, impact management, deep learning and transformation leadership, the book begins by analysing existing Theories of Change frameworks from various disciplines and creating a new integrated model – the meta-framework. In turn, it presents insights on creating and using Theories of Change to redirect investment capital to sustainable companies while implementing the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement. Further, it discusses the perspective of planetary boundaries as defined by the Stockholm Resilience Institute, and investigates various aspects of systems, organizations, entrepreneurship, investment and finance that are closely tied to the mission ingrained in the Theory of Change. As it demonstrates, solutions that ensure the parity of profit, people and planet through dynamic change can effectively address the needs of entrepreneurs and business. By exploring these concepts and their application, the book helps create and shape new markets and opportunities….(More)”.
A review of the evidence on developing and supporting policy and practice networks
Report by Ilona Haslewood: “In recent years, the Carnegie UK Trust has been involved in coordinating, supporting, and participating in a range of different kinds of networks. There are many reasons that people choose to develop networks as an approach to achieving a goal. We were interested in building our understanding of the evidence on the effectiveness of networks as a vehicle for policy and practice change.
In Autumn 2020, we began working with Ilona Haslewood to explore how to define a network, when it is appropriate to use this approach to achieve a particular goal, and what is the role of charitable foundations in supporting the development of networks. These questions, and more, are examined in A review of the evidence on developing and supporting policy and practice networks, which was written by Ilona Haslewood. This review of evidence forms part of a broader exploration of the role of networks, which includes a case study summary of A Better Way….(More)”
Who is “Public” Data Really For?
Jer Thorp at Literary Hub: “Public” is a word that has, in the last decade, become bound tightly to data. Loosely defined, any data that is available in the public domain falls into this category, but the term is most often used to describe data that might serve some kind of civic purpose: census data or environmental data or health data, along with transparency-focused data like government budgets and reports. Often sidled up to “public” is the word “open.” Although the Venn diagram between the two words has ample overlap (public data is often open, and vice versa), the word “open” typically refers to if and how the data is accessible, rather than toward what ends it might be put to use.
Both words—“public” and “open”—invite a question: For whom? Despite the efforts of Mae and Gareth, and Tom Grundner and many others, the internet as it exists is hardly a public space. Many people still find themselves excluded from full participation. Access to anything posted on a city web page or on a .gov domain is restricted by barriers of cost and technical ability. Getting this data can be particularly hard for communities that are already marginalized, and both barriers—financial and technical—can be nearly impassable in places with limited resources and literacies.
Data.gov, the United States’ “open data portal,” lists nearly 250,000 data sets, an apparent bounty of free information. Spend some time on data.gov and other portals, though, and you’ll find out that public data as it exists is messy and often confusing. Many hosted “data sets” are links to URLs that are no longer active. Trying to access data about Native American communities from the American Community Survey on data.gov brought me first to a census site with an unlabeled list of file folders. Downloading a zip file and unpacking it resulted in 64,086 cryptically named text files each containing zero kilobytes of data. As someone who has spent much of the last decade working with these kinds of data, I can tell you that this is not an uncommon experience. All too often, working with public data feels like assembling particularly complicated Ikea furniture with no tools, no instructions, and an unknown number of missing pieces.
Today’s public data serves a particular type of person and a specific type of purpose. Mostly, it supports technically adept entrepreneurs. Civic data initiatives haven’t been shy about this; on data.gov’s impact page you’ll find a kind of hall-of-fame list of companies that are “public data success stories”: Kayak, Trulia, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Realtor.com, Zillow, Zocdoc, AccuWeather, Carfax. All of these corporations have, in some fashion, built profit models around public data, often charging for access to the very information that the state touts as “accessible, discoverable, and usable.”…(More)”.
How do we know that it works? Designing a digital democratic innovation with the help of user-centered design
Paper by Janne Berg et al: ‘Civic technology is used to improve not only policies, but to reinforce politics and has the potential to strengthen democracy. A search for new ways of involving citizens in decision-making processes combined with a growing smartphone penetration rate has generated expectations around smartphones as democratic tools. However, if civic applications do not meet citizens’ expectations and function poorly, they might remain unused and fail to increase interest in public issues. Therefore, there is a need to apply a citizen’s perspective on civic technology.
The aim of this study is to gain knowledge about how citizens’ wishes and needs can be included in the design and evaluation process of a civic application. The study has an explorative approach and uses mixed methods. We analyze which democratic criteria citizens emphasize in a user-centered design process of a civic application by conducting focus groups and interviews. Moreover, a laboratory usability study measures how well two democratic criteria, inclusiveness and publicity, are met in an application. The results show that citizens do emphasize democratic criteria when participating in the design of a civic application. A user-centered design process will increase the likelihood of a usable application and can help fulfill the democratic criteria designers aim for….(More)”