Paper by Joshua C. Gellers in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics: “To what extent can crowdsourcing help members of civil society overcome the democratic deficit in global environmental governance? In this paper, I evaluate the utility of crowdsourcing as a tool for participatory agenda-setting in the realm of post-2015 sustainable development policy. In particular, I analyze the descriptive representativeness (e.g., the degree to which participation mirrors the demographic attributes of non-state actors comprising global civil society) of participants in two United Nations orchestrated crowdsourcing processes—the MY World survey and e-discussions regarding environmental sustainability. I find that there exists a perceptible demographic imbalance among contributors to the MY World survey and considerable dissonance between the characteristics of participants in the e-discussions and those whose voices were included in the resulting summary report. The results suggest that although crowdsourcing may present an attractive technological approach to expand participation in global governance, ultimately the representativeness of that participation and the legitimacy of policy outputs depend on the manner in which contributions are solicited and filtered by international institutions….(More)”
UN-Habitat Urban Data Portal
Data Driven Journalism: “UN-Habitat has launched a new web portal featuring a wealth of city data based on its repository of research on urban trends.
Launched during the 25th Governing Council, the Urban Data Portal allows users to explore data from 741 cities in 220 countries, and compare these for 103 indicators such as slum prevalence and city prosperity.
Image: A comparison of share in national urban population and average annual rate of urban population change for San Salvador, El Salvador, and Asuncion, Paraguay.
The urban indicators data available are analyzed, compiled and published by UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory, which supports governments, local authorities and civil society organizations to develop urban indicators, data and statistics.
Leveraging GIS technology, the Observatory collects data by taking aerial photographs, zooming into particular areas, and then sending in survey teams to answer any remaining questions about the area’s urban development.
The Portal also contains data collected by national statistics authorities, via household surveys and censuses, with analysis conducted by leading urbanists in UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities and the Global Report on Human Settlements report series.
For the first time, these datasets are available for use under an open licence agreement, and can be downloaded in straightforward database formats like CSV and JSON….(More)
The Wisdom of the Many in Global Governance: An Epistemic-Democratic Defence of Diversity and Inclusion
Paper by Stevenson, H. : “Over the past two decades, a growing body of literature has highlighted moral reasons for taking global democracy seriously. This literature justifies democracy on the grounds of its intrinsic value. But democracy also has instrumental value: the rule of the many is epistemically superior to the rule of one or the rule of the few. This paper draws on the tradition of epistemic democracy to develop an instrumentalist justification for democratizing global governance. The tradition of epistemic democracy is enjoying a renaissance within political theory and popular non-fiction, yet its relevance for international relations remains unexplored. I develop an epistemic-democratic framework for evaluating political institutions, which is constituted by three principles. The likelihood of making correct decisions within institutions of global governance will be greater when (1) human development and capacity for participation is maximised; (2) the internal cognitive diversity of global institutions is maximised; and (3) public opportunities for sharing objective and subjective knowledge are maximised. Applying this framework to global governance produces a better understanding of the nature and extent of the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance, as well as the actions required to address this deficit….(More)”
Mexico City is crowdsourcing its new constitution using Change.org in a democracy experiment
Ana Campoy at Quartz: “Mexico City just launched a massive experiment in digital democracy. It is asking its nearly 9 million residents to help draft a new constitution through social media. The crowdsourcing exercise is unprecedented in Mexico—and pretty much everywhere else.
as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link inSpanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitution drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to GoogleDocs.
The idea, in the words of the mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is to“bestow the constitution project (Spanish) with a democratic,progressive, inclusive, civic and plural character.”
There’s a big catch, however. The constitutional assembly—the body that has the final word on the new city’s basic law—is under no obligation to consider any of the citizen input. And then there are the practical difficulties of collecting and summarizing the myriad of views dispersed throughout one of the world’s largest cities.
That makes Mexico City’s public-consultation experiment a big test for the people’s digital power, one being watched around the world.Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.
Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.
For decades, city officials had fought to get out from under the thumb of the federal government, which had the final word on decisions such as who should be the city’s chief of police. This year, finally, they won a legal change that turns the Distrito Federal (federal district), similar to the US’s District of Columbia, into Ciudad de México (Mexico City), a more autonomous entity, more akin to a state. (Confusingly, it’s just part of the larger urban area also colloquially known as Mexico City, which spills into neighboring states.)
However, trying to retain some control, the Mexican congress decided that only 60% of the delegates to the city’s constitutional assembly would be elected by popular vote. The rest will be assigned by the president, congress, and Mancera, the mayor. Mancera is also the only one who can submit a draft constitution to the assembly.
Mancera’s response was to create a committee of some 30 citizens(Spanish), including politicians, human-rights advocates, journalists,and even a Paralympic gold medalist, to write his draft. He also calledfor the development of mechanisms to gather citizens’ “aspirations,values, and longing for freedom and justice” so they can beincorporated into the final document.
The mechanisms, embedded in an online platform (Spanish) that offersvarious ways to weigh in, were launched at the end of March and willcollect inputs until September 1. The drafting group has until themiddle of that month to file its text with the assembly, which has toapprove the new constitution by the end of January.
An experiment with few precedents
Mexico City didn’t have a lot of examples to draw on, since not a lot ofplaces have experience with crowdsourcing laws. In the US, a few locallawmakers have used Wiki pages and GitHub to draft bills, says MarilynBautista, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who has researched thepractice. Iceland—with a population some 27 times smaller than MexicoCity’s—famously had its citizens contribute to its constitution withinput from social media. The effort failed after the new constitution gotstuck in parliament.
In Mexico City, where many citizens already feel left out, the first bighurdle is to convince them it’s worth participating….
Then comes the task of making sense of the cacophony that will likelyemerge. Some of the input can be very easily organized—the results ofthe survey, for example, are being graphed in real time. But there could be thousands of documents and comments on the Change.org petitionsand the editing platform.
Ideas are grouped into 18 topics, such as direct democracy,transparency and economic rights. They are prioritized based on theamount of support they’ve garnered and how relevant they are, saidBernardo Rivera, an adviser for the city. Drafters get a weekly deliveryof summarized citizen petitions….
The most elaborate part of the system is PubPub, an open publishing platform similar to Google Docs, which is based on a project originally developed by MIT’s Media Lab. The drafters are supposed to post essays on how to address constitutional issues, and potentially, the constitution draft itself, once there is one. Only they—or whoever they authorize—will be able to reword the original document.
User comments and edits are recorded on a side panel, with links to the portion of text they refer to. Another screen records every change, so everyone can track which suggestions have made it into the text. Members of the public can also vote comments up or down, or post their own essays….(More).
The Open Data Barometer (3rd edition)
The Open Data Barometer: “Once the preserve of academics and statisticians, data has become a development cause embraced by everyone from grassroots activists to the UN Secretary-General. There’s now a clear understanding that we need robust data to drive democracy and development — and a lot of it.
Last year, the world agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — seventeen global commitments that set an ambitious agenda to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change by 2030. Recognising that good data is essential to the success of the SDGs, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the International Open Data Charter were launched as the SDGs were unveiled. These alliances mean the “data revolution” now has over 100 champions willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, Africa adopted the African Data Consensus — a roadmap to improving data standards and availability in a region that has notoriously struggled to capture even basic information such as birth registration.
But while much has been made of the need for bigger and better data to power the SDGs, this year’s Barometer follows the lead set by the International Open Data Charter by focusing on how much of this data will be openly available to the public.
Open data is essential to building accountable and effective institutions, and to ensuring public access to information — both goals of SDG 16. It is also essential for meaningful monitoring of progress on all 169 SDG targets. Yet the promise and possibilities offered by opening up data to journalists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, and citizens at large go far beyond even these….
At a glance, here are this year’s key findings on the state of open data around the world:
- Open data is entering the mainstream.The majority of the countries in the survey (55%) now have an open data initiative in place and a national data catalogue providing access to datasets available for re-use. Moreover, new open data initiatives are getting underway or are promised for the near future in a number of countries, including Ecuador, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nepal, Thailand, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. Demand is high: civil society and the tech community are using government data in 93% of countries surveyed, even in countries where that data is not yet fully open.
- Despite this, there’s been little to no progress on the number of truly open datasets around the world.Even with the rapid spread of open government data plans and policies, too much critical data remains locked in government filing cabinets. For example, only two countries publish acceptable detailed open public spending data. Of all 1,380 government datasets surveyed, almost 90% are still closed — roughly the same as in the last edition of the Open Data Barometer (when only 130 out of 1,290 datasets, or 10%, were open). What is more, much of the approximately 10% of data that meets the open definition is of poor quality, making it difficult for potential data users to access, process and work with it effectively.
- “Open-washing” is jeopardising progress. Many governments have advertised their open data policies as a way to burnish their democratic and transparent credentials. But open data, while extremely important, is just one component of a responsive and accountable government. Open data initiatives cannot be effective if not supported by a culture of openness where citizens are encouraged to ask questions and engage, and supported by a legal framework. Disturbingly, in this edition we saw a backslide on freedom of information, transparency, accountability, and privacy indicators in some countries. Until all these factors are in place, open data cannot be a true SDG accelerator.
- Implementation and resourcing are the weakest links.Progress on the Barometer’s implementation and impact indicators has stalled or even gone into reverse in some cases. Open data can result in net savings for the public purse, but getting individual ministries to allocate the budget and staff needed to publish their data is often an uphill battle, and investment in building user capacity (both inside and outside of government) is scarce. Open data is not yet entrenched in law or policy, and the legal frameworks supporting most open data initiatives are weak. This is a symptom of the tendency of governments to view open data as a fad or experiment with little to no long-term strategy behind its implementation. This results in haphazard implementation, weak demand and limited impact.
- The gap between data haves and have-nots needs urgent attention.Twenty-six of the top 30 countries in the ranking are high-income countries. Half of open datasets in our study are found in just the top 10 OECD countries, while almost none are in African countries. As the UN pointed out last year, such gaps could create “a whole new inequality frontier” if allowed to persist. Open data champions in several developing countries have launched fledgling initiatives, but too often those good open data intentions are not adequately resourced, resulting in weak momentum and limited success.
- Governments at the top of the Barometer are being challenged by a new generation of open data adopters. Traditional open data stalwarts such as the USA and UK have seen their rate of progress on open data slow, signalling that new political will and momentum may be needed as more difficult elements of open data are tackled. Fortunately, a new generation of open data adopters, including France, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Korea and the Philippines, are starting to challenge the ranking leaders and are adopting a leadership attitude in their respective regions. The International Open Data Charter could be an important vehicle to sustain and increase momentum in challenger countries, while also stimulating renewed energy in traditional open data leaders….(More)”
Foreign Policy has lost its creativity. Design thinking is the answer.
Elizabeth Radziszewski at The Wilson Quaterly: “Although the landscape of threats has changed in recent years, U.S. strategies bear striking resemblance to the ways policymakers dealt with crises in the past. Whether it involves diplomatic overtures, sanctions, bombing campaigns, or the use of special ops and covert operations, the range of responses suffers from innovation deficit. Even the use of drones, while a new tool of warfare, is still part of the limited categories of responses that focus mainly on whether or not to kill, cooperate, or do nothing. To meet the evolving nature of threats posed by nonstate actors such as ISIS, the United States needs a strategy makeover — a creative lift, so to speak.
Sanctions, diplomacy, bombing campaigns, special ops, covert operations — the range of our foreign policy responses suffers from an innovation deficit.
Enter the business world. Today’s top companies face an increasingly competitive marketplace where innovative approaches to product and service development are a necessity. Just as the market has changed for companies since the forces of globalization and the digital economy took over, so has the security landscape evolved for the world’s leading hegemon. Yet the responses of top businesses to these changes stand in stark contrast to the United States’ stagnant approaches to current national security threats. Many of today’s thriving businesses have embraced design thinking (DT), an innovative process that identifies consumer needs through immersive ethnographic experiences that are melded with creative brainstorming and quick prototyping.
What would happen if U.S. policymakers took cues from the business world and applied DT in policy development? Could the United States prevent the threats from metastasizing with more proactive rather than reactive strategies — by discovering, for example, how ideas from biology, engineering, and other fields could help analysts inject fresh perspective into tired solutions? Put simply, if U.S. policymakers want to succeed in managing future threats, then they need to start thinking more like business innovators who integrate human needs with technology and economic feasibility.
In his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon made the first connection between design and a way of thinking. But it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Stanford scientists began to see the benefits of design practices used by industrial designers as a method for creative thinking. At the core of DT is the idea that solving a challenge requires a deeper understanding of the problem’s true nature and the processes and people involved. This approach contrasts greatly with more standard innovation styles, where a policy solution is developed and then resources are used to fit the solution to the problem. DT reverses the order.
DT encourages divergent thinking, the process of generating many ideas before converging to select the most feasible ones, including making connections between different-yet-related worlds. Finally, the top ideas are quickly prototyped and tested so that early solutions can be modified without investing many resources and risking the biggest obstacle to real innovation: the impulse to try fitting an idea, product, policy to the people, rather of the other way around…
If DT has reenergized the innovative process in the business and nonprofit sector, a systematic application of its methodology could just as well revitalize U.S. national security policies. Innovation in security and foreign policy is often framed around the idea of technological breakthroughs. Thanks toDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense has been credited with such groundbreaking inventions as GPS, the Internet, and stealth fighters — all of which have created rich opportunities to explore new military strategies. Reflecting this infatuation with technology, but with a new edge, is Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an initiative to scout for new technologies, improve outreach to startups, and form deeper relationships between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. The new DIUE effort signals what businesses have already noticed: the need to be more flexible in establishing linkages with people outside of the government in search for new ideas.
Yet because the primary objective of DIUE remains technological prowess, the effort alone is unlikely to drastically improve the management of national security. Technology is not a substitute for an innovative process. When new invention is prized as the sole focus of innovation, it can, paradoxically, paralyze innovation. Once an invention is adopted, it is all too tempting to mold subsequent policy development around emergent technology, even if other solutions could be more appropriate….(More)”
E-Regulation and the Rule of Law: Smart Government, Institutional Information Infrastructures, and Fundamental Values
Rónán Kennedy in Information Polity: “Information and communications technology (ICT) is increasingly used in bureaucratic and regulatory processes. With the development of the ‘Internet of Things’, some researchers speak enthusiastically of the birth of the ‘Smart State’. However, there are few theoretical or critical perspectives on the role of ICT in these routine decision-making processes and the mundane work of government regulation of economic and social activity. This paper therefore makes an important contribution by putting forward a theoretical perspective on smartness in government and developing a values-based framework for the use of ICT as a tool in the internal machinery of government.
It critically reviews the protection of the rule of law in digitized government. As an addition to work on e-government, a new field of study, ‘e-regulation’ is proposed, defined, and critiqued, with particular attention to the difficulties raised by the use of models and simulation. The increasing development of e-regulation could compromise fundamental values by embedding biases, software errors, and mistaken assumptions deeply into government procedures. The article therefore discusses the connections between the ‘Internet of Things’, the development of ‘Ambient Law’, and how the use of ICT in e-regulation can be a support for or an impediment to the operation of the rule of law. It concludes that e-government research should give more attention to the processes of regulation, and that law should be a more central discipline for those engaged in this activity….(More)“
Big data privacy: the datafication of personal information
Jens-Erik Mai in The Information Society: “In the age of big data we need to think differently about privacy. We need to shift our thinking from definitions of privacy (characteristics of privacy) to models of privacy (how privacy works). Moreover, in addition to the existing models of privacy—surveillance model and capture model, we need to also consider a new model —the datafication model presented in this paper, wherein new personal information is deduced by employing predictive analytics on already-gathered data. These three models of privacy supplement each other; they are not competing understandings of privacy. This broadened approach will take our thinking beyond current preoccupation with whether or not individuals’ consent was secured for data collection to privacy issues arising from the development of new information on individuals’ likely behavior through analysis of already collected data – this new information can violate privacy but does not call for consent….(More)”
The Secret in the Information Society
Philosophy & Technology: “Who can still keep a secret in a world in which everyone and everything are connected by technology aimed at charting and cross-referencing people, objects, movements, behaviour, relationships, tastes and preferences? The possibilities to keep a secret have come under severe pressure in the information age. That goes for the individual as well as the state. This development merits attention as secrecy is foundational for individual freedom as well as essential to the functioning of the state. Building on Simmel’s work on secrecy, this paper argues that the individual’s secrets should be saved from the ever-expanding digital transparency. The legitimate function of state secrecy in turn needs rescuing from a culture of secrecy and over-classification that has exploded in recent years. Contrary to popular expectation, the digital revolution adds another layer of secrecy that is increasingly hidden behind the facade of the ‘big usable systems’ we work and play with every day. Our dependence on information systems and their black-boxed algorithmic analytical core leads to a certain degree of Weberian (re) enchantment that may increase the disconnect between the system, user and object….(More)”
The era of development mutants
Guilo Quaggiotto at Nesta: “If you were looking for the cutting edge of the development sector, where would you go these days? You would probably look at startups like Premise who have predicted food trends 25 days faster than national statistics in Brazil, or GiveDirectly who are pushing the boundaries on evidence – from RCTs to new ways of mapping poverty – to fast track the adoption of cash transfers.
Or perhaps you might draw your attention to PetaJakarta who are experimenting with new responses to crises by harnessing human sensor networks. You might be tempted to consider Airbnb’s Disaster Response programme as an indicator of an emerging alternative infrastructure for disaster response (and perhaps raising questions about the political economy of this all).
And could Bitnation’s Refugee Emergency programme in response to the European refugee crisis be the possible precursor of future solutions for transnational issues – among the development sector’s hardest challenges? Are the business models of One Acre Fund, which provides services for smallholder farmers, or Floodtags, which analyses citizen data during floods for water and disaster managers, an indicator of future pathways to scale – that elusive development unicorn?
If you want to look at the future of procuring solutions for the development sector, should you be looking at initiatives like Citymart, which works with municipalities across the world to rethink traditional procurement and unleash the expertise and innovation capabilities of their citizens? By the same token, projects like Pathogen Box, Poverty Stoplight or Patient Innovation point to a brave new world where lead-user innovation and harnessing ‘sticky’ local knowledge becomes the norm, rather than the exception. You would also be forgiven for thinking that social movements across the world are the place to look for signs of future mechanisms for harnessing collective intelligence – Kawal Pamilu’s “citizen experts” self-organising around the Indonesian elections in 2014 is a textbook case study in this department.
The list could go on and on: welcome to the era of development mutants. While established players in the development sector are engrossed in soul-searching and their fitness for purpose is being scrutinised from all quarters, a whole new set of players is emerging, unfettered by legacy and borrowing from a variety of different disciplines. They point to a potentially different future – indeed, many potentially different futures – for the sector…..
But what if we wanted to invert this paradigm? How could we move from denial to fruitful collaboration with the ‘edgeryders’ of the development sector and accelerate its transformation?
Adopting new programming principles
Based on our experience working with development organisations, we believe that partnering with the mutants involves two types of shifts for traditional players: at the programmatic and the operational level. At the programmatic level, our work on the ground led us to articulate the following emerging principles:
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Mapping what people have, not what they need: even though approaches like jugaad and positive deviance have been around for a long time, unfortunately the default starting point for many development projects is still mapping needs, not assets. Inverting this paradigm allows for potentially disruptive project design and partnerships to emerge. (Signs of the future: Patient Innovation, Edgeryders, Community Mirror, Premise)
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Getting ready for multiple futures: When distributed across an organisation and not limited to a centralised function, the discipline of scanning the horizon for emergent solutions that contradict the dominant paradigm can help move beyond the denial phase and develop new interfaces to collaborate with the mutants. Here the link between analysis (to understand not only what is probable, but also what is possible) and action is critical – otherwise this remains purely an academic exercise. (Signs of the future: OpenCare, Improstuctures, Seeds of Good Anthropocene, Museum of the Future)
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Running multiple parallel experiments: According to Dave Snowden, in order to intervene in a complex system “you need multiple parallel experiments and they should be based on different and competing theories/hypotheses”. Unfortunately, many development projects are still based on linear narratives and assumptions such as “if only we run an awareness raising campaign citizens will change their behaviour”. Turning linear narratives into hypotheses to be tested (without becoming religious on a specific approach) opens up the possibility to explore the solution landscape and collaborate with non-obvious partners that bring new approaches to the table. (Signs of the future: Chukua Hakua, GiveDirectly, Finnish PM’s Office of Experiments, Ideas42, Cognitive Edge)
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Embracing obliquity: A deep, granular understanding of local assets and dynamics along with system mapping (see point 5 below) and pairing behavioural experts with development practitioners can help identify entry points for exploring new types of intervention based on obliquity principles. Mutants are often faster in adopting this approach and partnering with them is a way to bypass organisational inertia and explore nonlinear interventions. (Signs of the future: Sardex, social prescriptions, forensic architecture)
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From projects to systems: development organisations genuinely interested in developing new partnerships need to make the shift from the project logic to system investments. This involves, among other things, shifting the focus from providing solutions to helping every actor in the system to develop a higher level of consciousness about the issues they are facing and to take better decisions over time. It also entails partnering with mutants to explore entirely new financial mechanisms. (Signs of the future: Lankelly Chase, Indonesia waste banks, Dark Matter Labs)
Adopting new interfaces for working with the mutants
Harvard Business School professor Carliss Baldwin argued that most bureaucracies these days have a ‘non-contractible’ problem: they don’t know where smart people are, or how to evaluate how good they are. Most importantly, most smart people don’t want to work for them because they find them either too callous, unrewarding or slow (or a combination of all of these)….(More)”