Tina Nabatchi, Emma Ertinger and Matt Leighninger in Conflict Resolution Quaterly: “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conflict resolution practitioners faced a dilemma: they understood how to design better ADR processes but were often unsure of their authority to offer ADR and were entrenched in systems that made it difficult to use ADR. Today, public participation faces a similar dilemma. We know what good participation looks like, but using better participation is challenging because of legal and systemic impediments. This need not be the case. In this article, we assert that tapping the full potential of public participation requires better designs, better laws, and better systems….(More)”
The Curious Politics of the ‘Nudge’
How do we really feel about policy “nudges”?
Earlier this month, President Obama signed an executive order directing federal agencies to collaborate with the White House’s new Social and Behavioral Sciences Team to use insights from behavioral science research to better serve the American people. For instance, studies show that people are more likely to save for retirement when they are automatically enrolled into a 401(k) retirement saving plan that they can opt out of than when they must actively opt in. The idea behind Mr. Obama’s initiative is that such soft-touch interventions, or “nudges,” can facilitate better decisions without resorting to heavier-handed strategies like mandates, taxes and bans.
The response to the executive order has been generally positive, but some conservatives have been critical, characterizing it as an instance of government overreach. (“President Obama Orders Behavioral Experiments on American Public” ran a headline on the website The Daily Caller.) However, it is worth noting that when a similar “behavioral insights team” was founded by the conservative government of the British prime minister, David Cameron, it met resistance from the political left. (“Brits’ Minds Will Be Controlled Without Us Knowing It” ran a headline in The Guardian.)
Is it possible that partisans from both ends of the political spectrum conflate their feelings about a general-purpose policymethod (such as nudges) with their feelings about a specific policy goal (or about those who endorse that goal)? We think so. In a series of recent experiments that we conducted with Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School, we found evidence for a “partisan nudge bias.”…
we also found that when behavioral policy tools were described without mention of a specific policy application or sponsor, the bias disappeared. In this “blind taste test,” liberals and conservatives were roughly equally accepting of the use of policy nudges.
This last finding is good news, because scientifically grounded, empirically validated behavioral innovations can help policy makers improve government initiatives for the benefit of all Americans, regardless of their political inclinations. “(More)
This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of
Nikhil Sonnad at Quartz: “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself.
Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia, or SEP, has managed to do for two decades.
The internet is an information landfill. Somewhere in it—buried under piles of opinion, speculation, and misinformation—is virtually all of human knowledge. The story of the SEP shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet. But sorting through the trash is difficult work. Even when you have something you think is valuable, it often turns out to be a cheap knock-off.
The story of how the SEP is run, and how it came to be, shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet—or at least a less trashy corner of it. A place where actual knowledge is sorted into a neat, separate pile instead of being thrown into the landfill. Where the world can go to learn everything that we know to be true. Something that would make humans a lot smarter than the internet we have today.
The impossible trinity of information
The online SEP has humble beginnings. Edward Zalta, a philosopher at Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information, launched it way back in September 1995, with just two entries.
Philosophizing, pre-internet.(Flickr/Erik Drost—CC-BY-2.0)
That makes it positively ancient in internet years. Even Wikipedia is only 14. ….
John Perry, the director of the center, was the one who first suggested a dictionary of philosophical terms. But Zalta had bigger ideas. He and two co-authors later described the challenge in a 2002 paper (pdf, p. 1):
A fundamental problem faced by the general public and the members of an academic discipline in the information age is how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic.
That paper is so old that it mentions “CD-ROMs” in the second sentence. But for all the years that have passed, the basic problem remains unsolved. The requirements are an “impossible trinity”—like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party. The three requirements the authors list—”authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date”—are to information what the “impossible trinity” is to economics. You can only ever have one or two at once. It is like having your cake, eating it, and then bringing it to another party.
Yet if the goal is to share with people what is true, it is extremely important for a resource to have all of these things. It must be trusted. It must not leave anything out. And it must reflect the latest state of knowledge. Unfortunately, all of the other current ways of designing an encyclopedia very badly fail to meet at least one of these requirements.
Where other encyclopedias fall short
Book
Authoritative: √
Comprehensive: X
Up-to-date: X
Printed encyclopedias: still a thing(Princeton University Press)
Printed books are authoritative: Readers trust articles they know have been written and edited by experts. Books also produce a coherent overview of a subject, as the editors consider how each entry fits into the whole. But they become obsolete whenever new research comes out. Nor can a book (or even a set of volumes) be comprehensive, except perhaps for a very narrow discipline; there’s simply too much to print.
Crowdsourcing
Authoritative: X
Comprehensive: X
Up-to-date: √
A crowdsourced online encyclopedia has the virtue of timeliness. Thanks to Wikipedia’s vibrant community of non-experts, its entries on breaking-news events are often updated as they happen. But except perhaps in a few areas in which enough well-informed people care for errors to get weeded out, Wikipedia is not authoritative. Basic mathematics entries on Wikipedia were a “a hot mess of error, arrogance, obscurity, and nonsense.” One math professor reviewed basic mathematics entries and found them to be a “a hot mess of error, arrogance, obscurity, and nonsense.” Nor is it comprehensive: Though it has nearly 5 million articles in the English-language version alone, seemingly in every sphere of knowledge, fewer than 10,000 are “A-class” or better, the status awarded to articles considered “essentially complete.”
Speaking of holes, the SEP has a rather detailed entry on the topic of holes, and it rather nicely illustrates one of Wikipedia’s key shortcomings. Holes present a tricky philosophical problem, the SEP entry explains: A hole is nothing, but we refer to it as if it were something. (Achille Varzi, the author of the holes entry, was called upon in the US presidential election in 2000 toweigh in on the existential status of hanging chads.) If you ask Wikipedia for holes it gives you the young-adult novel Holes and the band Hole.
In other words, holes as philosophical notions are too abstract for a crowdsourced venue that favors clean, factual statements like a novel’s plot or a band’s discography. Wikipedia’s bottom-up model could never produce an entry on holes like the SEP’s.
Crowdsourcing + voting
Authoritative: ?
Comprehensive: X
Up-to-date: ?
A variation on the wiki model is question-and-answer sites like Quora (general interest) and StackOverflow (computer programming), on which users can pose questions and write answers. These are slightly more authoritative than Wikipedia, because users also vote answers up or down according to how helpful they find them; and because answers are given by single, specific users, who are encouraged to say why they’re qualified (“I’m a UI designer at Google,” say).
But while there are sometimes ways to check people’s accreditation, it’s largely self-reported and unverified. Moreover, these sites are far from comprehensive. Any given answer is only as complete as its writer decides or is able to make it. And the questions asked and answered tend to reflect the interests of the sites’ users, which in both Quora and StackOverflow’s cases skew heavily male, American, and techie.
Moreover, the sites aren’t up-to-date. While they may respond quickly to new events, answers that become outdated aren’t deleted or changed but stay there, burdening the site with a growing mass of stale information.
The Stanford solution
So is the impossible trinity just that—impossible? Not according to Zalta. He imagined a different model for the SEP: the “dynamic reference work.”
Dynamic reference work
Authoritative: √
Comprehensive: √
Up-to-date: √
To achieve authority, several dozen subject editors—responsible for broad areas like “ancient philosophy” or “formal epistemology”—identify topics in need of coverage, and invite qualified philosophers to write entries on them. If the invitation is accepted, the author sends an outline to the relevant subject editors.
This is not somebody randomly deciding to answer a question on Quora. “An editor works with the author to get an optimal outline before the author begins to write,” says Susanna Siegel, subject editor for philosophy of mind. “Sometimes there is a lot of back and forth at this stage.” Editors may also reject entries. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, the SEP’s senior editor, say that this almost never happens. In the rare cases when it does, the reason is usually that an entry is overly biased. In short, this is not somebody randomly deciding to answer a question on Quora.
An executive editorial board—Zalta, Nodelman, and Colin Allen—works to make the SEP comprehensive….(More)”
TurboVote
“TurboVote is a software platform and an implementation program developed by Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that works to simplify the voting process.
The TurboVote tool is an online service that helps students vote in every election — local, state, and national — by helping them register where they want to vote, and by keeping them engaged with the elections in their local communities.
What does TurboVote give students?
- helps them register to vote
- helps them vote by sending election reminders via text and via email – that way they can stay in touch with local elections even from away
- helps them vote by mail via absentee ballot request forms
What benefits are there for administrators, faculty, and other implementers?
TurboVote makes it possible for colleges and universities to conduct voter engagement efforts efficiently. Students have an array of personalized voting needs, from registration to ballot request requirements to deadlines – and it’s logistically prohibitive for an institution to meet these needs for every student. With TurboVote you can promote and monitor student registration and engagement by encouraging students to complete a short online process. ….(More)”
Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities
Peter Hirshberg at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old. It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies. Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t. I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.
Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!” Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?
Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city. During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.
All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation. Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.
This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself. As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.
Brooklyn is a great example. A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.
New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.
When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.
A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”
Can the crowd deliver more open government?
at GovernmentNews: “…Crowdsourcing and policy making was the subject of a lecture by visiting academic Dr Tanja Aitamurto at Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier this month. Dr Aitamurto wrote “Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making” and led the design and implementation of the Finnish Experiment, a pioneering case study in crowdsourcing policy making.
She spoke about how Scandinavian countries have used crowdsourcing to “tap into the collective intelligence of a large and diverse crowd” in an “open ended knowledge information search process” in an open call for anybody to participate online and complete a task.
It has already been used widely and effectively by companies such as Proctor and Gamble who offer a financial reward for solutions to their R&D problems.
The Finnish government recently used crowdsourcing when it came to reform the country’s Traffic Act following a rash of complaints to the Minister of the Environment about it. The Act, which regulates issues such as off-road traffic, is an emotive issue in Finland where snow mobiles are used six months of the year and many people live in remote areas.
The idea was for people to submit problems and solutions online, covering areas such as safety, noise, environmental protection, the rights of snowmobile owners and landowners’ rights. Everyone could see what was written and could comment on it.
Dr Aitamurto said crowdsourcing had four stages:
• The problem mapping space, where people were asked to outline the issues that needed solving
• An appeal for solutions
• An expert panel evaluated the comments received based on the criteria of: effectiveness, cost efficiency, ease of implementation and fairness. The crowd also had the chance to evaluate and rank solutions online
• The findings were then handed over to the government for the law writing process
Dr Aitamurto said active participation seemed to create a strong sense of empowerment for those involved.
She said some people reported that it was the first time in their lives they felt they were really participating in democracy and influencing decision making in society. They said it felt much more real than voting in an election, which felt alien and remote.
“Participation becomes a channel for advocacy, not just for self-interest but a channel to hear what others are saying and then also to make yourself heard. People expected a compromise at the end,” Dr Aitamurto said.
Being able to participate online was ideal for people who lived remotely and turned crowdsourcing into a democratic innovation which brought citizens closer to policy and decision making between elections.
Other benefits included reaching out to tap into new pools of knowledge, rather than relying on a small group of homogenous experts to solve the problem.
“When we use crowdsourcing we actually extend our knowledge search to multiple, hundreds of thousands of distant neighbourhoods online and that can be the power of crowdsourcing: to find solutions and information that we wouldn’t find otherwise. We find also unexpected information because it’s a self-selecting crowd … people that we might not have in our networks already,” Dr Aitamurto said.
The process can increase transparency as people interact on online platforms and where the government keeps feedback loops going.
Dr Aitamurto is also a pains to highlight what crowdsourcing is not and cannot be, because participants are self-selecting and not statistically representative.
“The crowd doesn’t make decisions, it provides information. It’s not a method or tool for direct democracy and it’s not a public opinion poll either”.
Crowdsourcing has fed into policy in other countries too, for example, during Iceland’s constitutional reform and in the United States where the federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its strategy after a string of natural disasters.
Australian government has been getting in on the act using cloud-based software Citizen Space to gain input into a huge range of topics. While much of it is technically consultation, rather than feeding into actual policy design, it is certainly a step towards more open government.
British company Delib, which is behind the software, bills it as “managing, publicising and archiving all of your organisation’s consultation activity”.
One council who has used Citizens Space is Wyong Shire on the NSW Central Coast. The council has used the consultation hub to elicit ratepayers’ views on a number of topics, including a special rate variation, community precinct forums, strategic plans and planning decisions.
One of Citizen Space’s most valuable features is the section ‘we asked, you said, we did’….(More)”
The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification
New Book by Richard Rottenburg et al: “The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. (More)”
Peacekeepers in the Sky: The Use of Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles for Peacekeeping
“The ICT4Peace Foundation is pleased to release ‘Peacekeepers in the Sky: The Use of Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles for Peacekeeping‘, authored by Helena Puig Larrauri and Patrick Meier.
As recently noted by Hervé Ladsous, the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, the United Nations “cannot continue just using tools of 50 or 100 years ago.” The United Nations Department for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) is thus on course to create a “force for the future” by adopting and making increasing use of new technologies like Unarmed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also referred to as Unmanned Unarmed Aerial Vehicles (UUAVs). These remotely piloted aircraft systems, which are becoming increasingly cheaper, smarter and more robust, aim to provide peacekeeping missions with greater surveillance capabilities and thus more timely and enhanced situational awareness. This is expected to render peacekeeping missions more effective and cost-efficient in terms of keeping the peace and protecting civilians. According to DPKO’s vision, UUAVs “represent a new way of ‘seeing and knowing’ in peacekeeping and can dramatically improve peacekeepers’ access to information.” One strong proponent of UUAVs claims that they are a “major step forward towards much more discriminating use of violence in war and self-defense – a step forward in humanitarian technology.”
Yet the use of UUAVs is complicated by a number of issues related to perceptions, politics, ethics and empowerment. The use of surveillance technologies by the UN may at times be politically unpopular among those UN Member States that fear technologies like UUAVs will inevitably compromise their territorial and political sovereignty. In fact, arguments against the use of UUAVs sometimes resemble arguments against the “Responsibility to Protect” norm adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 as a framework for justifying military intervention as a last resort to protect civilians from mass atrocities. This admittedly narrow set of concerns is not always an issue; they can vary greatly based on the context of a given peacekeeping operation.
Download the full report here.”
On the morals of network research and beyond
Conspicuous Chatter:”…Discussion on ethics have become very popular in computer science lately — and to some extent I am glad about this. However, I think we should dispel three key fallacies.
The first one is that things we do not like (some may brand “immoral”) happen because others do not think of the moral implications of their actions. In fact it is entirely possible that they do and decide to act in a manner we do not like none-the-less. This could be out of conviction: those who built the surveillance equipment, that argue against strong encryption, and also those that do the torture and the killing (harm), may have entirely self-righteous ways of justifying their actions to themselves and others. Others, may simply be doing a good buck — and there are plenty of examples of this in the links above.
The second fallacy is that ethics, and research ethics more specifically, comes down to a “common sense” variant of “do no harm” — and that is that. In fact Ethics, as a philosophical discipline is extremely deep, and there are plenty of entirely legitimate ways to argue that doing harm is perfectly fine. If the authors of the paper were a bit more sophisticated in their philosophy they could, for example have made reference to the “doctrine of double effect” or the nature of free will of those that will bring actual harm to users, and therefore their moral responsibility. It seems that a key immoral aspect of this work was that the authors forgot to write that, confusing section.
Finally, we should dispel in conversations about research ethics, the myth that morality equals legality. The public review mentions “informed consent”, but in fact this is an extremely difficult notion — and legalistically it has been used to justify terrible things. The data protection variant of informed consent allows large internet companies, and telcos, to basically scoop most users’ data because of some small print in lengthy terms and conditions. In fact it should probably be our responsibility to highlight the immorality of this state of affairs, before writing public reviews about the immorality of a hypothetical censorship detection system.
Thus, I would argue, if one is to make an ethical point relating to the values and risks of technology they have to make it in the larger context of how technology is fielded and used, the politics around it, who has power, who makes the money, who does the torturing and the killing, and why. Technology lives within a big moral picture that a research community has a responsibility to comment on. Focusing moral attention on the microcosm of a specific hypothetical use case — just because it is the closest to our research community — misses the point, perpetuating silently a terrible state of moral affairs….(More)”
Using Technology, Building Democracy
Book by Jessica Baldwin-Philippi: “The days of “revolutionary” campaign strategies are gone. The extraordinary has become ordinary, and campaigns at all levels, from the federal to the municipal, have realized the necessity of incorporating digital media technologies into their communications strategies. Still, little is understood about how these practices have been taken up and routinized on a wide scale, or the ways in which the use of these technologies is tied to new norms and understandings of political participation and citizenship in the digital age. The vocabulary that we do possess for speaking about what counts as citizenship in a digital age is limited.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a federal-level election, interviews with communications and digital media consultants, and textual analysis of campaign materials, this book traces the emergence and solidification of campaign strategies that reflect what it means to be a citizen in the digital era. It identifies shifting norms and emerging trends to build new theories of citizenship in contemporary democracy. Baldwin-Philippi argues that these campaign practices foster engaged and skeptical citizens. But, rather than assess the quality or level of participation and citizenship due to the use of technologies, this book delves into the way that digital strategies depict what “good” citizenship ought to be and the goals and values behind the tactics….(More)”