democracy

Advanced Design for the Public Sector

Curated on January 18, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kristofer Kelly-Frere & Jonathan Veale: “…It might surprise some, but it is now common for governments across Canada to employ in-house designers to work on very complex and public issues.

There are design teams giving shape to experiences, services, processes, programs, infrastructure and policies. The Alberta CoLab, the Ontario Digital Service, BC’s Government Digital Experience Division, the Canadian Digital Service, Calgary’s Civic Innovation YYC, and, in partnership with government,MaRS Solutions Lab stand out. The Government of Nova Scotia recently launched the NS CoLab. There are many, many more. Perhaps hundreds.

Design-thinking. Service Design. Systemic Design. Strategic Design. They are part of the same story. Connected by their ability to focus and shape a transformation of some kind. Each is an advanced form of design oriented directly at humanizing legacy systems — massive services built by a culture that increasingly appears out-of-sorts with our world. We don’t need a new design pantheon, we need a unifying force.

We have no shortage of systems that require reform. And no shortage of challenges. Among them, the inability to assemble a common understanding of the problems in the first place, and then a lack of agency over these unwieldy systems. We have fanatics and nativists who believe in simple, regressive and violent solutions. We have a social economy that elevates these marginal voices. We have well-vested interests who benefit from maintaining the status quo and who lack actionable migration paths to new models. The median public may no longer see themselves in liberal democracy. Populism and dogmatism is rampant. The government, in some spheres, is not credible or trusted.

The traditional designer’s niche is narrowing at the same time government itself is becoming fragile. It is already cliche to point out that private wealth and resources allow broad segments of the population to “opt out.” This is quite apparent at the municipal level where privatized sources of security, water, fire protection and even sidewalks effectively produce private shadow governments. Scaling up, the most wealthy may simply purchase residency or citizenship or invest in emerging nation states. Without re-invention this erosion will continue. At the same time artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation are already displacing frontline design and creative work. This is the opportunity: Building systems awareness and agency on the foundations of craft and empathy that are core to human centered design. Time is of the essence. Transitions between one era to the next are historically tumultuous times. Moreover, these changes proceed faster than expected and in unexpected directions….(More).

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

Curated on January 17, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekci in Wired: “…In today’s networked environment, when anyone can broadcast live or post their thoughts to a social network, it would seem that censorship ought to be impossible. This should be the golden age of free speech.

And sure, it is a golden age of free speech—if you can believe your lying eyes….

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.

These tactics usually don’t break any laws or set off any First Amendment alarm bells. But they all serve the same purpose that the old forms of censorship did: They are the best available tools to stop ideas from spreading and gaining purchase. They can also make the big platforms a terrible place to interact with other people.

Even when the big platforms themselves suspend or boot someone off their networks for violating “community standards”—an act that doeslook to many people like old-fashioned censorship—it’s not technically an infringement on free speech, even if it is a display of immense platform power. Anyone in the world can still read what the far-right troll Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet has to say on the internet. What Twitter has denied him, by kicking him off, is attention.

Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?

This is not a call for nostalgia. In the past, marginalized voices had a hard time reaching a mass audience at all. They often never made it past the gatekeepers who put out the evening news, who worked and lived within a few blocks of one another in Manhattan and Washington, DC. The best that dissidents could do, often, was to engineer self-sacrificing public spectacles that those gatekeepers would find hard to ignore—as US civil rights leaders did when they sent schoolchildren out to march on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, drawing out the most naked forms of Southern police brutality for the cameras.

But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing. Today, even the most powerful elites often cannot effectively convene the right swath of the public to counter viral messages. …(More)”.

On democracy

Curated on January 17, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sophie in ‘t Veld (European Parliament) in a Special Issue of Internet Policy Review on Political micro-targeting edited by Balazs Bodo, Natali Helberger and Claes de Vreese: “Democracy is valuable and vulnerable, which is reason enough to remain alert for new developments that can undermine her. In recent months, we have seen enough examples of the growing impact of personal data in campaigns and elections. It is important and urgent for us to publicly debate this development. It is easy to see why we should take action against extremist propaganda of hatemongers aiming to recruit young people for violent acts. But we euphemistically speak of ‘fake news’ when lies, ‘half-truths’, conspiracy theories, and sedition creepily poison public opinion.

The literal meaning of democracy is ‘the power of the people’. ‘Power’ presupposes freedom. Freedom to choose and to decide. Freedom from coercion and pressure. Freedom from manipulation. ‘Power’ also presupposes knowledge. Knowledge of all facts, aspects, and options. And knowing how to balance them against each other. When freedom and knowledge are restricted, there can be no power.

In a democracy, every individual choice influences society as a whole. Therefore, the common interest is served with everyone’s ability to make their choices in complete freedom, and with complete knowledge.

The interests of parties and political candidates who compete for citizen’s votes may differ from that higher interest. They want citizens to see their political advertising, and only theirs, not that of their competitors. Not only do parties and candidates compete for the voter’s favour. They contend for his exclusive time and attention as well.

POLITICAL TARGETING

No laws dictate what kind of information a voter should rely on to be able to make the right consideration. For lamb chops, toothpaste, mortgages or cars, for example, it’s mandatory for producers to mention the origin and properties. This enables consumers to make a responsible decision. Providing false information is illegal. All ingredients, properties, and risks have to be mentioned on the label.

Political communication, however, is protected by freedom of speech. Political parties are allowed to use all kinds of sales tricks.

And, of course, campaigns do their utmost and continuously test the limits of the socially acceptable….(More)”.

Reimagining Democracy: What if votes were a currency? A crypto-currency?

Curated on January 15, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Opinion piece by Praphul Chandra: “… The first key tenet of this article is that the institution of representative democracy is a severely limited realization of democratic principles. These limitations span three dimensions:

First, citizen representation is extremely limited. The number of individuals whose preference an elected representative is supposed to represent is so large as to be essentially meaningless.

The problem is exacerbated in a rapidly urbanizing world with increasing population densities but without a corresponding increase in the number of representatives. Furthermore, since urban settings often have individuals from very different cultural backgrounds, their preferences are diverse too.

Is it realistic to expect that a single individual would be able to represent the preferences of such large & diverse communities?

Second, elected representatives have limited accountability. The only opportunity that citizens have to hold elected representatives accountable is often years away — ample time for incidents to be forgotten and perceptions to be manipulated. Since human memory over-emphasizes the recent past, elected representatives manipulate perception of their performance by populist measures closer to forthcoming elections.

Third, citizen cognition is not leveraged. The current model where default participation is limited to choosing representatives every few years does not engage the intelligence of citizens in solving the societal challenges we face today. Instead, it treats citizens as consumers offering them a menu card to choose their favourite representative.

To summarize, representative democracy does not scale well. With our societies becoming denser, more interconnected and more complex, the traditional tools of democracy are no longer effective.

Design Choices of Representative Democracy: Consider the following thought experiment: what would happen if we think of votes as a currency? Let’s call such a voting currency — GovCoin. In today’s representative democracy,

(i) GovCoins are in short supply — one citizen gets one GovCoin (vote) every 4–5 years.

(ii) GovCoins (Votes) have a very high negative rate: if you do not use them on election day, they lose all value.

(iii) GovCoins (Votes) are “accepted” by very few people: you can give your GovCoins to only pre-selected “candidates”

These design choices reflect fundamental design choices of representative democracy — they were well suited for the time when they were designed:

Since governance needs continuity and since elections were a costly and time-consuming exercise, citizens elected representatives once every 4–5 years. This also meant that elections had to be coordinated — so participation was coordinated to a particular election day requiring citizens to vote simultaneously.

Since the number of people who were interested in politics as a full-time profession was limited, the choice set of representatives was limited to a few candidates.

Are these design choices valid today? Do we really need citizens physically travelling to polling booths? With today’s technology? Must the choice of citizen participation in governance be binary: either jump in full time or be limited to vote once every 4–5 years? Aren’t there other forms of participation in this spectrum? Is limiting participation the only way to ensure governance continuity?

Rethinking Democracy: What if we reconsider the design choices of democracy? Let’s say we:

(i) increase the supply of GovCoins so that every citizen gets one unit every month;

(ii) relax the negative rate so that even if you do not “use” your GovCoin, you do not lose it i.e. you can accumulate GovCoins and use them at a later time;

(iii) enable you to give your GovCoins to anyone or any public issue / project.

What would be the impact of these design choices?

By increasing the supply of GovCoins, we inject liquidity into the system so that information (about citizens’ preferences & beliefs) can flow more fluidly. This effectively increases the participation potential of citizens in governance. Rather than limiting participation to once every 4–5 years, citizens can participate as much and as often as they want. This is a fundamental change when we consider institutions as information processing systems.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins to anyone, we realize a form of liquid democracy where I can delegate my influence to you — maybe because I trust your judgement and believe that your choice will be beneficial to me as well. In effect, we have changed the default option of participation from ‘opt out’ to ‘opt in’ — every citizen can receive GovCoins from every other citizen. The total GovCoins a citizen holds is a measure of how much influence she holds in democratic decisions. We evolve from a binary system (elected representative or citizen) to a continuous spectrum where your GovCoin ‘wealth’ is measure of your social capital.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins directly to a policy decision, we realize a form of direct democracy where citizens can express their preferences (and the strength of their preferences) on an issue directly rather than relying on a representative to do so.

By allowing citizens to accumulate GovCoins, we allow them to participate when they want. If I feel strongly about an issue, I can spend my GovCoins and influence this decision; If I am indifferent about an issue, I hold on to my GovCoins so that I can have a larger influence in future decisions. A small negative interest rate on GovCoins may still be needed to ensure that (i) citizens do not hoard the currency and (ii) to ensure that net influence of any individual is finite and time bounded.

Realizing Democracy: Given today’s technology landscape, realizing a democracy with new design choices is no longer a pipe dream. The potential to do this is here and now. A key enabling technology is blockchains (or Distributed Ledger Technologies) which allow the creation of new currencies. Implementing votes as a currency opens the door to realizing new forms of democracy….(More)”.

Can Civic Tech Save Democracy?

Curated on January 10, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by L’Aterlier BNP Paribas: “In the US, only 57% of the total voting population voted during the last American presidential elections. Nowadays, 1.57 million civic organizations encourage the American people to express their concerns to the government and public authorities outside of ballot boxes. The internet has indeed created other ways to mobilize people. And Barack Obama’s presidency (January 2009 – January 2017) made open-government a high priority with three initiatives aimed to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration with the government.

Thus, Civic tech are more and more efficient to improve citizen engagement. But what are the issues, impact and remaining challenges of this new ecosystem? How is technology actually empowering the citizen? You will find answers to these questions (and to many more) in our study!…(More)”.

Why the deliberative democracy framework doesn’t quite work for me

Curated on January 9, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Peter Levine: “In some ways, I came of age in the field of deliberative democracy. I had an internship at the Kettering Foundation when I was a college sophomore (when the foundation defined itself more purely in deliberative terms than it does today). By that time, I had already taken a philosophy seminar on the great deliberative theorist Jürgen Habermas. In the three decades since then, I’ve served on the boards of Kettering, Everyday Democracy, and AmericaSPEAKS. I wrote a book with “deliberative democracy” in its subtitle and co-edited The Deliberative Democracy Handbook with John Gastil. I was one of many co-founders of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and have served on its steering committee since the last century.

None of these groups is committed to deliberation in a narrow sense (although opinions differ within the field). For me, these are the main limitations of focusing on deliberation as the central topic or unit of analysis:

Deliberative values are worthy ones, but they are not the only worthy ones. My own values would also include personal liberties and nonnegotiable rights, concerns for nature, and virtues of the inner life, such as equanimity and personal development. Stating my values doesn’t substitute for an argument, but it may suffice to make the point that deliberation is not the only good thing, and it’s in tension with other goods. A deliberative democrat will reply that I should discuss my values with other people. And so I should–but that doesn’t mean that the norms intrinsic to deliberation trump all other norms. Nor are fellow citizens the only sources of guidance; introspecting, reading ancient texts, consulting legal precedents, and conducting scientific experiments are helpful, too.

By the same token, deliberative virtues are not the only civic virtues. Deliberation is about discourse–talking and listening–so its virtues are discursive ones: humility and openness, empathy, sincerity, and perhaps eloquence. (The list is contested.) But a good citizen may be hard-working, physically courageous, or aesthetically creative instead of especially good at deliberating. The people who physically built the Athenian agora were as important as the people who exchanged ideas in it.

Deliberation depends on social organization. In order for people to have something that’s worth discussing, they must already make, control, or influence things of value together. That requires social organization, whether in the form of a market, a commons, a voluntary association, a functional network, or a political institution. Discussion rarely precedes these forms, because people can’t and won’t come together in completely amorphous groupings. Discussion is more typically a moment in an ongoing process of governance. Often a small group of founders chooses the rules-in-use that create a group in which deliberation can occur.

Thus we should ask about leadership and rules, not just about deliberation….(More)”.

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Curated on January 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Virginia Eubanks: “The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values….(More)”.

Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

James Davison Hunter in The Hedgehog Review: “…while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?

These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.

Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”1

What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.

The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.

This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment….(More)”.

The Participatory Democracy Turn

Curated on December 17, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Laurence Bherer, Pascale Dufour, and Francoise Montambeault:”Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decision making processes in a variety of sectors around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Over the years, this participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups, as well as by governments. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation are participatory budgeting, citizen councils, public consultations, etc. However, these experiences are sometimes far from the original 1960s’ radical conception of participatory democracy, which had a transformative dimension and aimed to overcome unequal relationships between the state and society and emancipate and empower citizens in their daily lives.

This book addresses four sets of questions: what do participatory practices mean today?; what does it mean to participate for participants, from the perspective of citizenship building?; how the processes created by the participatory turn have affected the way political representation functions?; and does the participatory turn also mean changing relationships and dynamics among civil servants, political representatives, and citizens?

Overall, the contributions in this book illustrate and grasp the complexity of the so-called participatory turn. It shows that the participatory turn now includes several participatory democracy projects, which have different effects on the overall system depending on the principles that they advocate. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Civil Society….(More)”

From #Resistance to #Reimagining governance

Curated on December 14, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in Open Democracy: “…There is no doubt that #Resistance (and its associated movements) holds genuine transformative potential. But for the change it brings to be meaningful (and positive), we need to ask the question: What kind of government do we really want?

Working to maintain the status quo or simply returning to, for instance, a pre-Trump reality cannot provide for the change we need to counter the decline in trust, the rise of populism and the complex social, economic and cultural problems we face. We need a clear articulation of alternatives. Without such an articulation, there is a danger of a certain hollowness and dispersion of energies. The call for #Resistance requires a more concrete –and ultimately more productive – program that is concerned not just with rejecting or tearing down, but with building up new institutions and governance processes. What’s needed, in short, is not simply #Resistance.

Below, I suggest six shifts that can help us reimagine governance for the twenty-first century. Several of these shifts are enabled by recent technological changes (e.g., the advent of big data, blockchain and collective intelligence) as well as other emerging methods such as design thinking, behavioral economics, and agile development.

Some of the shifts I suggest have been experimented with, but they have often been developed in an ad hoc manner without a full understanding of how they could make a more systemic impact. Part of the purpose of this paper is to begin the process of a more systematic enquiry; the following amounts to a preliminary outline or blueprint for reimagined governance for the twenty-first century.

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