New York University Law Review Paper by Elizabeth G. Porter and Kathryn A. Watts: “Federal rulemaking has traditionally been understood as a text-bound, technocratic process. However, as this Article is the first to uncover, rulemaking stakeholders — including agencies, the President and members of the public — are now deploying politically tinged visuals to push their agendas at every stage of high-stakes, often virulently controversial, rulemakings. Rarely do these visual contributions appear in the official rulemaking record, which remains defined by dense text, lengthy cost-benefit analyses, and expert reports. Perhaps as a result, scholars have overlooked the phenomenon we identify here: the emergence of a visual rulemaking universe that is splashing images, GIFs, and videos across social media channels. While this new universe, which we call “visual rulemaking,” might appear to be wholly distinct from the textual rulemaking universe on which administrative law has long focused, the two are not in fact distinct. Visual politics are seeping into the technocracy.
This Article argues that visual rulemaking is a good thing. It furthers fundamental regulatory values, including transparency and political accountability. It may also facilitate participation by more diverse stakeholders — not merely regulatory insiders who are well-equipped to navigate dense text. Yet we recognize that visual rulemaking poses risks. Visual appeals may undermine the expert-driven foundation of the regulatory state, and some uses may threaten or outright violate key legal doctrines, including the Administrative Procedure Act and longstanding prohibitions on agency lobbying and propaganda. Nonetheless, we conclude that administrative law theory and doctrine ultimately can and should welcome this robust new visual rulemaking culture….(More)”
Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Last week, I decided to take a gaggle of kids for an end-of-school-year lunch in a New York neighbourhood that I did not know well. I duly began looking for a suitable restaurant. A decade ago, I would have done that by turning to a restaurant guide. In the world I grew up in, it was normal to seek advice from the “experts”.
But in Manhattan last week, it did not occur to me to consult Fodor’s. Instead, I typed what I needed into my cellphone, scrolled through a long list of online restaurant recommendations, including comments from people who had eaten in them — and picked one.
Yes, it was a leap of faith; those restaurant reviews might have been fake. But there were enough voices for me to feel able to trust the wisdom of the cyber crowds — and, as it happened, our lunch choice was very good.
This is a trivial example of a much bigger change that is under way, and one that has some thought-provoking implications in the wake of the Brexit vote. Before the referendum, British citizens were subjected to a blitz of advice about the potential costs of Brexit from “experts”: economists, central bankers, the International Monetary Fund and world leaders, among others. Indeed, the central strategy of the government (and other “Remainers”) appeared to revolve around wheeling out these experts, with their solemn speeches and statistics….
I suspect that it indicates something else: that citizens of the cyber world no longer have much faith in anything that experts say, not just in the political sphere but in numerous others too. At a time when we increasingly rely on crowd-sourced advice rather than official experts to choose a restaurant, healthcare and holidays, it seems strange to expect voters to listen to official experts when it comes to politics.
In our everyday lives, we are moving from a system based around vertical axes of trust, where we trust people who seem to have more authority than we do, to one predicated on horizontal axes of trust: we take advice from our peer group.
You can see this clearly if you look at the surveys conducted by groups such as the Pew Research Center. These show that faith in institutions such as the government, big business and the media has crumbled in recent years; indeed, almost the only institution in the US that has bucked the trend is the military.
What is even more interesting to look at, however, are the areas where trust remains high. In an annual survey conducted by the Edelman public relations firm, people in 20 countries are asked who they trust. They show rising confidence in the “a person like me” category, and surprisingly high trust in digital technology. We live in a world where we increasingly trust our Facebook friends and the Twitter crowd more than we do the IMF or the prime minister.
In some senses, this is good news. Relying on horizontal axes of trust should mean more democracy and empowerment for ordinary citizens. But the problem of this new world is that people can fall prey to social fads and tribalism — or groupthink…..
Either way, nobody is going to put this genie back into the bottle. So we all need to think about what creates the bonds of “trust” in today’s world. And recognise that the 20th-century model of politics, with its reverence for experts and fixed parties, may eventually seem as outdated as restaurant guides. We live in volatile time…(More)”
Clive Thompson at the Smithsonian magazine: “As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization.
In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so razor close that broadcasters pored over electoral college maps—which they typically colored red and blue. What’s more, they talked about those shadings. NBC’s Tim Russert wondered aloud how George Bush would “get those remaining 61 electoral red states, if you will,” and that language became lodged in the popular imagination. America became divided into two colors—data spun into pure metaphor. Now Americans even talk routinely about “purple” states, a mental visualization of political information.
We live in an age of data visualization. Go to any news website and you’ll see graphics charting support for the presidential candidates; open your iPhone and the Health app will generate personalized graphs showing how active you’ve been this week, month or year. Sites publish charts showing how the climate is changing, how schools are segregating, how much housework mothers do versus fathers. And newspapers are increasingly finding that readers love “dataviz”: In 2013, the New York Times’ most-read story for the entire year was a visualization of regional accents across the United States. It makes sense. We live in an age of Big Data. If we’re going to understand our complex world, one powerful way is to graph it.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve discovered the pleasures of making information into pictures. Over a hundred years ago, scientists and thinkers found themselves drowning in their own flood of data—and to help understand it, they invented the very idea of infographics.
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The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is—a representation of geographic information—and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually. The British polymath Joseph Priestley produced a “Chart of Biography,” plotting the lives of about 2,000 historical figures on a timeline. A picture, he argued, conveyed the information “with more exactness, and in much less time, than it [would take] by reading.”
Still, data visualization was rare because data was rare. That began to change rapidly in the early 19th century, because countries began to collect—and publish—reams of information about their weather, economic activity and population. “For the first time, you could deal with important social issues with hard facts, if you could find a way to analyze it,” says Michael Friendly, a professor of psychology at York University who studies the history of data visualization. “The age of data really began.”
An early innovator was the Scottish inventor and economist William Playfair. As a teenager he apprenticed to James Watt, the Scottish inventor who perfected the steam engine. Playfair was tasked with drawing up patents, which required him to develop excellent drafting and picture-drawing skills. After he left Watt’s lab, Playfair became interested in economics and convinced that he could use his facility for illustration to make data come alive.
“An average political economist would have certainly been able to produce a table for publication, but not necessarily a graph,” notes Ian Spence, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who’s writing a biography of Playfair. Playfair, who understood both data and art, was perfectly positioned to create this new discipline.
In one famous chart, he plotted the price of wheat in the United Kingdom against the cost of labor. People often complained about the high cost of wheat and thought wages were driving the price up. Playfair’s chart showed this wasn’t true: Wages were rising much more slowly than the cost of the product.
Playfair’s trade-balance time-series chart, published in his Commercial and Political Atlas, 1786 (Wikipedia)
“He wanted to discover,” Spence notes. “He wanted to find regularities or points of change.” Playfair’s illustrations often look amazingly modern: In one, he drew pie charts—his invention, too—and lines that compared the size of various country’s populations against their tax revenues. Once again, the chart produced a new, crisp analysis: The British paid far higher taxes than citizens of other nations.
Neurology was not yet a robust science, but Playfair seemed to intuit some of its principles. He suspected the brain processed images more readily than words: A picture really was worth a thousand words. “He said things that sound almost like a 20th-century vision researcher,” Spence adds. Data, Playfair wrote, should “speak to the eyes”—because they were “the best judge of proportion, being able to estimate it with more quickness and accuracy than any other of our organs.” A really good data visualization, he argued, “produces form and shape to a number of separate ideas, which are otherwise abstract and unconnected.”
Soon, intellectuals across Europe were using data visualization to grapple with the travails of urbanization, such as crime and disease….(More)”
Burak Arikan at Medium: “Big data is the term used to define the perpetual and massive data gathered by corporations and governments on consumers and citizens. When the subject of data is not necessarily individuals but governments and companies themselves, we can call it civic data, and when systematically generated in large amounts, civic big data. Increasingly, a new generation of initiatives are generating and organizing structured data on particular societal issues from human rights violations, to auditing government budgets, from labor crimes to climate justice.
These civic data initiatives diverge from the traditional civil society organizations in their outcomes,that they don’t just publish their research as reports, but also open it to the public as a database.Civic data initiatives are quite different in their data work than international non-governmental organizations such as UN, OECD, World Bank and other similar bodies. Such organizations track social, economical, political conditions of countries and concentrate upon producing general statistical data, whereas civic data initiatives aim to produce actionable data on issues that impact individuals directly. The change in the GDP value of a country is useless for people struggling for free transportation in their city. Incarceration rate of a country does not help the struggle of the imprisoned journalists. Corruption indicators may serve as a parameter in a country’s credit score, but does not help to resolve monopolization created with public procurement. Carbon emission statistics do not prevent the energy deals between corrupt governments that destroy the nature in their region.
Needless to say, civic data initiatives also differ from governmental institutions, which are reluctant to share any more that they are legally obligated to. Many governments in the world simply dump scanned hardcopies of documents on official websites instead of releasing machine-readable data, which prevents systematic auditing of government activities.Civic data initiatives, on the other hand, make it a priority to structure and release their data in formats that are both accessible and queryable.
Civic data initiatives also deviate from general purpose information commons such as Wikipedia. Because they consistently engage with problems, closely watch a particular societal issue, make frequent updates,even record from the field to generate and organize highly granular data about the matter….
Several civic data initiatives generate data on variety of issues at different geographies, scopes, and scales. The non-exhaustive list below have information on founders, data sources, and financial support. It is sorted according to each initiative’s founding year. Please send your suggestions to contact at graphcommons.com. See more detailed information and updates on the spreadsheet of civic data initiatives.
Open Secrets tracks data about the money flow in the US government, so it becomes more accessible for journalists, researchers, and advocates.Founded as a non-profit in 1983 by Center for Responsive Politics, gets support from variety of institutions.
PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. Uses on-the-record interviews as its data source. Founded in 2007 as a non-profit organization by Tampa Bay Times. Supported by Democracy Fund, Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, FordFoundation, Knight Foundation, Craigslist Charitable Fund, and the CollinsCenter for Public Policy…..
La Fabrique de La loi (The Law Factory) maps issues of local-regional socio-economic development, public investments, and ecology in France.Started in 2014, the project builds a database by tracking bills from government sources, provides a search engine as well as an API. The partners of the project are CEE Sciences Po, médialab Sciences Po, RegardsCitoyens, and Density Design.
Mapping Media Freedom identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout European Union member states,candidates for entry and neighbouring countries. Initiated by Index onCensorship and European Commission in 2004, the project…(More)”
Paper by Jean-Christophe Plantin: “The release of the Google Maps API in 2005 spurred a trend of mapping mashups, adding cartography to online participatory culture. This article will present how the affordances of these “platforms” give shape to the online participation of concerned citizens willing to access information during an environmental crisis. Based on the analysis of the radiation mashups created after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, this article will highlight two types of online participation. First, participation as data extraction, where concerned actors either monitored data using Geiger counters or extracted and republished data from official websites. Second, participation as data aggregation, where maps were used to display and compare radiation measurements from official or crowdsourced venues. The conclusion will highlight the necessity to study how online platforms assign a place and temporality to online participation….(More)”
Research Briefing by Matt Leighninger: “Around the world, people are asking how we can make democracy work in new and better ways. We are frustrated by political systems in which voting is the only legitimate political act, concerned that many republics don’t have the strength or appeal to withstand authoritarian figures, and disillusioned by the inability of many countries to address the fundamental challenges of health, education and economic development.
We can no longer assume that the countries of the global North have ‘advanced’ democracies, and that the nations of the global South simply need to catch up. Citizens of these older democracies have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions; Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other valuable democratic innovations have emerged. The stage is set for a more equitable, global conversation about what we mean by democracy.
How can we adjust our democratic formulas so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the parts of this equation may come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organisations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as ‘civic technology’ or ‘civic tech’, these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts, and help neighbours remain connected. If we want to create democracies in which citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, we should be asking a number of questions about civic tech, including:
How can online tools best support new forms of democracy?
What are the examples of how this has happened?
What are some variables to consider in comparing these examples?
How can we learn from each other as we move forward?
This background note has been developed to help democratic innovators explore these questions and examine how their work can provide answers….(More)”
Motherboard: “In May, Manu Sporny became the 10,000th “e-Resident” of Estonia. Sporny, the founder and CEO of a digital payments and identity company located in the United States, has never set foot in Estonia. However, he heard about the country’s e-Residency program and decided it would be an obvious choice for his company’s European headquarters.
People like Sporny are why Estonia launched a digital residency program in December 2014. The program allows anyone in the world to apply for a digital identity, which will let them: establish and run a location independent business online, get easier access to EU markets, open a bank account and conduct e-banking, use international payment service providers, declare taxes, and sign all relevant documents and contracts remotely…..
One of the most essential components of a functioning digital society is a secure digital identity. The state and the private sector need to know who is accessing these online services. Likewise, users need to feel secure that their identity is protected.
Estonia found the solution to this problem. In 2002, we started issuing residents a mandatory ID-card with a chip that empowers them to categorically identify themselves and verify legal transactions and documents through a digital signature. A digital signature has been legally equivalent to a handwritten one throughout the European Union—not just in Estonia—since 1999.
With this new digital identity system, the state could serve not only areas with a low population, but also the entire Estonian diaspora. Estonians anywhere in the world could maintain a connection to their homeland via e-services, contribute to the legislative process, and even participate in elections. Once the government realized that it could scale this service worldwide, it seemed logical to offer its e-services to those without physical residency in Estonia. This meant the Estonian country suddenly had value as a service in addition to a place to live.
What does “Country as a Service” mean?
With the rise of a global internet, we’ve seen more skilled workers and businesspeople offering their services across nations, regardless of their physical location. A survey by Intuit estimates that this number will reach 40 percent in the US alone by 2020.
These entrepreneurs and skilled artisans are ultimately looking for the simplest way to create and maintain a legal, global identity as an outlet for their global offerings.
They look to other countries, not because they are looking for a tax haven, but because they have been prevented from incorporating and maintaining a business, due to barriers from their own government.
The most important thing for these entrepreneurs is that the creation and upkeep of the company is easy and hassle-free. It is also important that, despite being incorporated in a different nation, they remain honest taxpayers within their country of physical residence.
This is exactly what Estonia offers—a location-independent, hassle-free and fully-digital economic and financial environment where entrepreneurs can run their own company globally….
When an e-Resident establishes a company, it means that the company will likely start using the services offered by other Estonian companies (like creating a bank account, partnering with a payment service provider, seeking assistance from accountants, auditors and lawyers). As more clients are created for Estonian companies, their growth potential increases, along with the growth potential of the Estonian economy.
Eventually, there will be more residents outside borders than inside them
If states fail to redesign and simplify the machinery of bureaucracy and make it location-independent, there will be an opportunity for countries that can offer such services across borders.
Estonia has learned that it’s incredibly important in a small state to serve primarily small and micro businesses. In order to sustain a nation on this, we must automate and digitize processes to scale. Estonia’s model, for instance, is location-independent, making it simple to scale successfully. We hope to acquire at least 10 million digital residents (e-Residents) in a way that is mutually beneficial by the nation-states where these people are tax residents….(More)”
Erin Reilly at Strategy + Business: “…In theory, new technological advances such as big data and machine learning, combined with more direct access to audience sentiment, behaviors, and preferences via social media and over-the-top delivery channels, give the entertainment and media industry unprecedented insight into what the audience actually wants. But as a professional in the television industry put it, “We’re drowning in data and starving for insights.” Just as my data trail didn’t trace an accurate picture of my true interest in soccer, no data set can quantify all that consumers are as humans. At USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, our research has led us to an approach that blends data collection with a deep understanding of the social and cultural context in which the data is created. This can be a powerful practice for helping researchers understand the behavior of fans — fans of sports, brands, celebrities, and shows.
A Model for Understanding Fans
Marketers and creatives often see audiences and customers as passive assemblies of listeners or spectators. But we believe it’s more useful to view them as active participants. The best analogy may be fans. Broadly characterized, fans have a continued connection with the property they are passionate about. Some are willing to declare their affinity through engagement, some have an eagerness to learn more about their passion, and some want to connect with others who share their interests. Fans are emotionally linked to the object of their passion, and experience their passion through their own subjective lenses. We all start out as audience members. But sometimes, when the combination of factors aligns in just the right way, we become engaged as fans.
For businesses, the key to building this engagement and solidifying the relationship is understanding the different types of fan motivations in different contexts, and learning how to turn the data gathered about them into actionable insights. Even if Jane Smith and her best friend are fans of the same show, the same team, or the same brand, they’re likely passionate for different reasons. For example, some viewers may watch the ABC melodrama Scandal because they’re fashionistas and can’t wait to see the newest wardrobe of star Kerry Washington; others may do so because they’re obsessed with politics and want to see how the newly introduced Donald Trump–like character will behave. And those differences mean fans will respond in varied ways to different situations and content.
Though traditional demographics may give us basic information about who fans are and where they’re located, current methods of understanding and measuring engagement are missing the answers to two essential questions: (1) Why is a fan motivated? and (2) What triggers the fan’s behavior? Our Innovation Lab research group is developing a new model called Leveraging Engagement, which can be used as a framework when designing media strategy….(More)”
Pressrelease: “The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) today released a policy brief on the Internet of Things (IoT) in state government. The paper focuses on the different ways state governments are using IoT now and in the future and the policy considerations involved.
“In NASCIO’s 2015 State CIO Survey, we asked state CIOs to what extent IoT was on their agenda. Just over half said they were in informal discussions, however only one in five had moved to the formal discussion phase. We believe IoT needs to be a formal part of each state’s policy considerations,” explained NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson.
The paper encourages state CIOs to make IoT part of the enterprise architecture discussions on asset management and risk assessment and to develop an IoT roadmap.
“Cities and municipalities have been working toward the designation of ‘smart city’ for a while now,” said Darryl Ackley, cabinet secretary for the New Mexico Department of Information Technology and NASCIO president. “While states provide different services than cities, we are seeing a lot of activity around IoT to improve citizen services and we see great potential for growth. The more organized and methodical states can be about implementing IoT, the more successful and useful the outcomes.”
Federico Guerrini in Forbes: “French people, like the citizens of many other countries, have little confidence in their government or in their members of parliament.
A recent study by the Center for Political Research of the University of Science-Po(CEVIPOF) in Paris, shows that while residents still trust, in part, their local officials, only 37% of them on average feel the same for those belonging to theNational Assembly, the Senate or the executive.
Three years before, when asked in another poll about of what sprung to mind first when thinking of politics, their first answer was “disgust”.
With this sort of background, it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of activists have decided to try and find new ways to boost political participation, using crowdsourcing, smartphone applications and online platforms to look for candidates outside of the usual circles.
There are several civic tech initiatives in place in France right now. One of the most fascinating is called LaPrimaire.org.
It’s an online platform whose main aim is to organize an open primary election,select a suitable candidate, and allow him to run for President in the 2017elections.
Launched in April by Thibauld Favre and David Guez, an engineer and a lawyer by trade, both with no connection to the political establishment, it has attracted so far 164 self-proposed candidates and some 26,000 voters. Anyone can be elected, as long as they live in France, do not belong to any political party and have a clean criminal record.
A different class of possible candidates, also present on the website, is composed by the so-called “citoyens plébiscités”, VIPs, politician or celebrities that backers of LaPrimaire.org think should run for president. In both cases, in order to qualify for the nextphase of the selection, these people have to secure the vote of at least 500 supporters by July 14….(More)”
