politics & elections

What We Should Mean When We Talk About Citizen Engagement

Curated on November 4, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Gordon in Governing: “…But here’s the problem: The institutional language of engagement has been defined by its measurement. Chief engagement officers in corporations are measuring milliseconds on web pages, and clicks on ads, and not relations among people. This is disproportionately influencing the values of democracy and the responsibility of public institutions to protect them.

Too often, when government talks about engagement, it is talking those things that are measurable, but it is providing mandates to employees imbued with ambiguity. For example, the executive order issued by Mayor Murray in Seattle is a bold directive for the “timely implementation by all City departments of equitable outreach and engagement practices that reaffirm the City’s commitment to inclusive participation.”

This extraordinary mayoral mandate reflects clear democratic values, but it lacks clarity of methods. It reflects a need to use digital technology to enhance process, but it doesn’t explain why. This in no way is meant as a criticism of Seattle’s effort; rather, it is simply meant to illustrate the complexity of engagement in practice. Departments are rewarded for quantifiable efficiency, not relationships. Just because something is called engagement, this fundamental truth won’t change.

Government needs to be much more clear about what it really means when it talks about engagement. In 2015, Living Cities and the Citi Foundation launched the City Accelerator on Public Engagement, which was an effort to source and support effective practices of public engagement in city government. This 18-month project, based on a cohort of five cities throughout the United States, is just now coming to an end. Out of it came several lasting insights, one of which I will share here. City governments are institutions in transition that need to ask why people should care.

After the election, who is going to care about government? How do you get people to care about the services that government provides? How do you get people to care about the health outcomes in their neighborhoods? How do you get people to care about ensuring accessible, high-quality public education?

I want to propose that when government talks about civic engagement, it is really talking about caring. When you care about something, you make a decision to be attentive to that thing. But “caring about” is one end of what I’ll call a spectrum of caring. On the other end, there is “caring for,” when, as described by philosopher Nel Noddings, “what we do depends not upon rules, or at least not wholly on rules — not upon a prior determination of what is fair or equitable — but upon a constellation of conditions that is viewed through both the eyes of the one-caring and the eyes of the cared-for.”

In short, caring-for is relational. When one cares for another, the outcomes of an encounter are not predetermined, but arise through relation….(More)”.

The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age

Curated on November 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, and Tamar Tembeck:

The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age

“Just what is the “participatory condition”? It is the situation in which taking part in something with others has become both environmental and normative. The fact that we have always participated does not mean we have always lived under the participatory condition. What is distinctive about the present is the extent to which the everyday social, economic, cultural, and political activities that comprise simply being in the world have been thematized and organized around the priority of participation.

Structured along four axes investigating the relations between participation and politics, surveillance, openness, and aesthetics, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age comprises fifteen essays that explore the promises, possibilities, and failures of contemporary participatory media practices as related to power, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring uprisings, worker-owned cooperatives for the post-Internet age; paradoxes of participation, media activism, open source projects; participatory civic life; commercial surveillance; contemporary art and design; and education.

This book represents the most comprehensive and transdisciplinary endeavor to date to examine the nature, place, and value of participation in the digital age. Just as in 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard proposed that “the postmodern condition” was characterized by the questioning of historical grand narratives, The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age investigates how participation has become a central preoccupation of our time….(More)”

Big Data Is Not a Monolith

Curated on November 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia and Michael Mattioli: “Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines big data not as an undifferentiated whole but contextually, investigating the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, and politics. Taken together, the chapters reveal a complex set of problems, practices, and policies.

The advent of big data methodologies has challenged the theory-driven approach to scientific knowledge in favor of a data-driven one. Social media platforms and self-tracking tools change the way we see ourselves and others. The collection of data by corporations and government threatens privacy while promoting transparency. Meanwhile, politicians, policy makers, and ethicists are ill-prepared to deal with big data’s ramifications. The contributors look at big data’s effect on individuals as it exerts social control through monitoring, mining, and manipulation; big data and society, examining both its empowering and its constraining effects; big data and science, considering issues of data governance, provenance, reuse, and trust; and big data and organizations, discussing data responsibility, “data harm,” and decision making….(More)”

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on October 31, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ruth Kinna et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Show, Don’t Tell

Curated on October 29, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas Kohnstamm on Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism for Microsoft Stories: “From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper.

Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” achieved breakout success as an interactive data visualization. It asked readers 25 questions such as “How would you address a group of two or more people?” or “How do you pronounce ‘aunt’?” and then heat-mapped their responses to the most similar regional dialect in the U.S. The interactivity and colorful visuals transmuted survey data into a fun, insightful tour through the contours of contemporary AmericanEnglish.

Visualization no longer just complements a written story. It is the story. In our increasingly data-driven world, visualization is becoming an essential tool for journalists from national papers to blogs with a staff of one.

I recently spent two days discussing the state of data journalism with Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. While he stressed the importance of data visualization for efficient communication and audience engagement, Cairo argued that “Above all else, visualizations — when done right — are a vehicle of clarification and truth.”…(More)”

Supporting Collaborative Political Decision Making: An Interactive Policy Process Visualization System

Curated on October 27, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tobias Ruppert et al: “The process of political decision making is often complex and tedious. The policy process consists of multiple steps, most of them are highly iterative. In addition, different stakeholder groups are involved in political decision making and contribute to the process. A series of textual documents accompanies the process. Examples are official documents, discussions, scientific reports, external reviews, newspaper articles, or economic white papers. Experts from the political domain report that this plethora of textual documents often exceeds their ability to keep track of the entire policy process. We present PolicyLine, a visualization system that supports different stakeholder groups in overview-and-detail tasks for large sets of textual documents in the political decision making process. In a longitudinal design study conducted together with domain experts in political decision making, we identified missing analytical functionality on the basis of a problem and domain characterization. In an iterative design phase, we created PolicyLine in close collaboration with the domain experts. Finally, we present the results of three evaluation rounds, and reflect on our collaborative visualization system….(More)”

Could online democracy lead to governance by Trumps and trolls?

Curated on October 24, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Opray in The Guardian: “The first two user tutorials are pretty stock standard but, from there, things escalate dramatically. After mastering How to Sign Up and How to RecoverYour Password, users are apparently ready to advance to lesson number three: How to Create a Democracy.

As it turns out, on DemocracyOS, this is a relatively straightforward matter – not overthrowing the previous regime nor exterminating the last traces of the royal lineage in order to pave the way for a new world order. Instead Argentinian developers Democracia en Red have made it a simple matter of clicking a button to form a group and thrash out the policies voters wish to see enacted.

It is one of a range of digital platforms for direct democracy created by developers and activists to redefine the relationship between citizens and their governments,with the powers that be in Latin American city councils through to European anti-austerity parties making the upgrade to democracy 2.0.

Reshaping how government works is a difficult enough pitch by itself but,beyond that, there’s another challenge facing developers – the online trolls are ready and waiting.

Britain alone this year offered up two examples of what impact trolls could have on online direct democracy – there was the case of “BoatyMcBoatface” famously winning a Natural Environment ResearchCouncil poll to determine the name of a multimillion-pound arctic research vessel, and then there was the more serious case of trolls adding the signatures of thousands of residents of countries such as the Cayman Islands and Vatican City to a formal petition calling for a second Brexit referendum, in order to have the entire document disregarded as an online prank.

In the US presidential election even the politicians are getting in on it,with a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC (political action committee) hiring an army of online commenters to defend the candidate in arguments on social media, while the Republican contender, Donald Trump, is himself engaging in textbook trolling behaviour – whether that’s urging the hacking of Clinton’s emails, revealing the phone number of a Republican rival during the primaries, or unleashing a constant stream of controversial statements as a means of derailing conversations, attracting attention and humiliating his targets.

So what does this mean for digital platforms for direct democracy? By merging the world of the internet with that of politics, will we all end up governed by some fusion of trolls and Trumps promising to build Wally McWallfaces on our borders? And will the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution also usher in a revolution in how democracy functions?…(More)”

Emotional States: Sites and spaces of affective governance

Curated on October 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Eleanor Jupp, Jessica Pykett, and Fiona M. Smith: “What is the political allure, value and currency of emotions within contemporary cultures of governance? What does it mean to govern more humanely? Since the emergence of an emotional turn in human geography over the last decade, the notion that our emotions matter in understanding an array of social practices, spatial formations and aspects of everyday life is no longer seen as controversial. This book brings recent developments in emotional geography into dialogue with social policy concerns and contemporary issues of governance. It sets the intellectual scene for research into the geographical dimensions of the emotionalized states of the citizen, policy maker and public service worker, and highlights new research on the emotional forms of governance which now characterise public life.

An international range of empirical field studies are used to examine issues of regulation, modification, governance and potential manipulation of emotional affects, professional and personal identities and political technologies. Contributors provide analysis of the role of emotional entanglements in policy strategy, policy implementation, service delivery, citizenship and participation as well as considering the emotional nature of the research process itself. It will be of interest to researchers and students within social policy, human geography, politics and related disciplines….(More)”

The Future of Drone Use: Opportunities and Threats from Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Curated on October 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bart Custers: “Given the popularity of drones and the fact that they are easy and cheap to buy, it is generally expected that the ubiquity of drones will significantly increase within the next few years. This raises questions as to what is technologically feasible (now and in the future), what is acceptable from an ethical point of view and what is allowed from a legal point of view. Drone technology is to some extent already available and to some extent still in development. The aim and scope of this book is to map the opportunities and threats associated with the use of drones and to discuss the ethical and legal issues of the use of drones.
This book provides an overview of current drone technologies and applications and of what to expect in the next few years. The question of how to regulate the use of drones in the future is addressed, by considering conditions and contents of future drone legislation and by analyzing issues surrounding privacy and safeguards that can be taken. As such, this book is valuable to scholars in several disciplines, such as law, ethics, sociology, politics and public administration, as well as to practitioners and others who may be confronted with the use of drones in their work, such as professionals working in the military, law enforcement, disaster management and infrastructure management. Individuals and businesses with a specific interest in drone use may also find in the nineteen contributions contained in this volume unexpected perspectives on this new field of research and innovation….(More)”