Essay by Charles Ess at Javnost: “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emerging internet and World Wide Web inspired both popular and scholarly optimism that these new communication technologies would inevitably “democratise”—in local organisations, larger civic and political institutions, and, indeed, the world itself. The especially Habermas- and feminist-inspired notions of deliberative democracy in an electronic public sphere at work here are subsequently challenged, however, by both theoretical and empirical developments such as the Arab Winter and platform imperialism. Nonetheless, a range of other developments—from Edward Snowden to the emergence of virtue ethics and slow tech as increasingly central to the design of ICTs—argue that resistance in the name of democracy and emancipation is not futile….(More)”.
Rights-Based and Tech-Driven: Open Data, Freedom of Information, and the Future of Government Transparency
Beth Noveck at the Yale Human Rights and Development Journal: “Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its data online for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to a collaborative one, centered around using information to solve problems together. This Essay explores the theory and practice of open data in comparison to FOIA and highlights its uses as a tool for advancing human rights, saving lives, and strengthening democracy. Although open data undoubtedly builds upon the fifty-year legal tradition of the right to know about the workings of one’s government, open data does more than advance government accountability. Rather, it is a distinctly twenty-first century governing practice borne out of the potential of big data to help solve society’s biggest problems. Thus, this Essay charts a thoughtful path toward a twenty-first century transparency regime that takes advantage of and blends the strengths of open data’s collaborative and innovation-centric approach and the adversarial and monitorial tactics of freedom of information regimes….(More)”.
Handbook on Participatory Governance
Book edited by Hubert Heinelt: “Can participatory governance really improve the quality of democracy? Concentrating on democracy beyond governmental structures, this Handbook argues that it is a political task to engage individuals at all levels of governance.
The Handbook on Participatory Governance reveals that transforming governance arrangements does in fact enhance democracy and that the democratic quality of participatory governance is crucial. The contributors reflect on the notion of democracy and participatory governance and how they relate to each other. Case studies are presented from regional, national and international levels, to identify how governance can be turned into a participatory form. With chapters reviewing participatory governance’s role alongside power, science and employment relations, innovative ideas for future progress in participatory governance are presented….(More)”.
Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?
Essay by Cass R. Sunstein, as part of a series by Facebook on social media and democracy: “On balance, the question of whether social media platforms are good for democracy is easy. On balance, they are not merely good; they are terrific. For people to govern themselves, they need to have information. They also need to be able to convey it to others. Social media platforms make that tons easier.
There is a subtler point as well. When democracies are functioning properly, people’s sufferings and challenges are not entirely private matters. Social media platforms help us alert one another to a million and one different problems. In the process, the existence of social media can prod citizens to seek solutions.
Consider the remarkable finding, by the economist Amartya Sen, that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections. A central reason is that famines are a product not only of a scarcity of food, but also a nation’s failure to provide solutions. When the press is free, and when leaders are elected, leaders have a strong incentive to help.
Mental illness, chronic pain, loss of employment, vulnerability to crime, drugs in the family – information about all these spread via social media, and they can be reduced with sensible policies. When people can talk to each other, and disclose what they know to public officials, the whole world might change in a hurry.
But celebrations can be awfully boring, so let’s hold the applause. Are automobiles good for transportation? Absolutely, but in the United States alone, over 35,000 people died in crashes in 2016.
Social media platforms are terrific for democracy in many ways, but pretty bad in others. And they remain a work-in-progress, not only because of new entrants, but also because the not-so-new ones (including Facebook) continue to evolve. What John Dewey said about my beloved country is true for social media as well: “The United States are not yet made; they are not a finished fact to be categorically assessed.”
For social media and democracy, the equivalents of car crashes include false reports (“fake news”) and the proliferation of information cocoons — and as a result, an increase in fragmentation, polarization and extremism. If you live in an information cocoon, you will believe many things that are false, and you will fail to learn countless things that are true. That’s awful for democracy. And as we have seen, those with specific interests — including politicians and nations, such as Russia, seeking to disrupt democratic processes — can use social media to promote those interests.
This problem is linked to the phenomenon of group polarization — which takes hold when like-minded people talk to one another and end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. In fact that’s a common outcome. At best, it’s a problem. At worst, it’s dangerous….(More)”.
Is There Something Wrong with Democracy?
After 200 years of expansion, democracy’s growth in the world has stalled. A handful of democracies like Venezuela and Hungary are backsliding into authoritarianism. And even in established Western democracies, voters are losing faith in democratic institutions and norms.
That has left us and scholars who study democracy obsessed with a set of questions. Is this all just a blip, or is democracy in real trouble? Are the oldest and sturdiest democracies, like those of Europe and the United States, really as safe as they seem? And why would people voluntarily dismantle their own democracy from within?
No one knows the answers for sure. But we’re starting to figure them out and it’s not all good news. Here, in the first of what will become a regular series of videos exploring big questions and ideas about the world, we explain what we know about democracy’s troubles, what’s causing them and where it leads….(See VIDEO)”.
Upholding Democracy Amid the Challenges of New Technology
Paper by Eyal Benvenisti at the The European Journal of International Law: “The law on global governance that emerged after the Second World War was grounded in irrefutable trust in international organizations and an assumption that their subjection to legal discipline and judicial review would be unnecessary and, in fact, detrimental to their success. The law that evolved systematically insulated international organizations from internal and external scrutiny and absolved them of any inherent legal obligations – and, to a degree, continues to do so.
Indeed, it was only well after the end of the Cold War that mistrust in global governance began to trickle through into the legal discourse and the realization gradually took hold that the operation of international organizations needed to be subject to the disciplining power of the law. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have sought to identify the conditions under which trust in global bodies can be regained, mainly by borrowing and adapting domestic public law precepts that emphasize accountability through communications with those affected.
Today, although a ‘culture of accountability’ may have taken root, its legal tools are still shaping up and are often contested. More importantly, these communicative tools are ill-equipped to address the new modalities of governance that are based on decision-making by machines using raw data (rather than two-way exchange with stakeholders) as their input.
The new information and communication technologies challenge the foundational premise of the accountability school – that ‘the more communication, the better’ – as voters-turned-users obtain their information from increasingly fragmented and privatized marketplaces of ideas that are manipulated for economic and political gain.
In this article, I describe and analyse how the law has evolved to acknowledge the need for accountability, how it has designed norms for this purpose and continues in this endeavour – yet how the challenges it faces today are leaving its most fundamental assumptions open to question. I argue that, given the growing influence of public and private global governance bodies on our daily lives and the shape of our political communities, the task of the law of global governance is no longer limited to ensuring the accountability of global bodies, but is also to protect human dignity and the very viability of the democratic state….(More)”.
Increasing citizen voice and government responsiveness: what does success really look like, and who decides?
Paper by Vanessa Herringshaw: “Narratives in the field of information and communications technology (ICT) for governance are full of claims, of either enormous success or almost none. But understanding ‘success’ and ‘failure’ depends on how these are framed. Research supported by Making All Voices Count suggests that different actors can seek very different goals from the same ICT-enabled interventions – some stated, some not.
This programme learning report proposes two important dimensions for framing variations in visions of success for ICT-enabled governance interventions: (1) the kind of change in governance systems sought (‘functional’, ‘instrumental’, ‘transformative’ and ‘no change’); and (2) the vision of the ideal citizen–state relationship. It applies this framing to three areas where ICTs are being used, at least on paper, to encourage and channel citizen voice into governance processes, and to improve government responsiveness in return: participatory policy- and strategymaking; participatory budgeting; and citizen feedback to improve service delivery.
In terms of the kind of change in governance systems sought, much of the rhetoric touts the use of ICTs as inherently ‘transformative’. However, findings suggest that it has mostly been deployed in ‘functional’, ‘instrumental’ and ‘no change’ ways. That said, the possibility of ICT-enabled ‘transformative’ change appears somewhat higher when citizens have more direct control over outcomes, and more online and offline processes are mixed and used in ways that foster collective, rather than individualised, inputs, deliberation and answerability.
In terms of the vision of the state–citizen relationship, the findings show great variation in outcomes sought regarding the kinds and levels of participatory democracy, who this should benefit, the ideal size of the state, and the desired stability of actor groups and decision-making structures.
The evidence suggests that the use of ICTs may have the potential to support change, including transformative change, but only when the political goals of key actors are pre-structured to support this. The choice of ICTs does matter to the effectiveness of this support, as does the way in which they are used. But overall, ICTs do not appear to be inherently ‘generative’ of change. They are, rather, ‘reflective’, ‘enabling’ or ‘amplifying’ of existing political agendas and levels of commitment.
The recommendations of this report focus on the need to understand deeply and face the realities of these varying agendas and visions of success at the start of intervention planning, and throughout implementation as they evolve over time. This imperative should remain undiminished, regardless of any rhetoric of the inherently transformative or ‘democratising’ nature of ICTs, and of interventions to strengthen citizen voice and government responsiveness more broadly….(More).
The Assault on Reason
Zia Haider Rahman at the New York Review of Books: “Albert Einstein was awarded a Nobel Prize not for his work on relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Both results, and others of note, were published in 1905, his annus mirabilis. The prize was denied him for well over a decade, with the Nobel Committee maintaining that relativity was yet unproven. Philosophers of science, most notably Karl Popper, have argued that for a theory to be regarded as properly scientific it must be capable of being contradicted by observation. In other words, it must yield falsifiable predictions—predictions that could, in principle, be shown to be wrong. On the basis of his theory, Einstein predicted that starlight was being deflected by the sun by specified degrees. This was a prediction that was, in principle, capable of being wrong and therefore capable of falsifying relativity. The physicist offered signs others could look for that would lend credibility to his theory—or refute it. Evidence eventually came from the work of Arthur Eddington and the arrival of instruments that could make sufficiently fine measurements, though Einstein’s Nobel medal would elude him for two more years because of gathering anti-Semitism in Europe.
Mathematics, so often lumped together with the sciences, actually adheres to an entirely different standard. A mathematical theorem never submits itself to hypothesis testing, never needs an experiment to support its validity. Once described to me as an education in thinking without the encumbrance of facts, mathematics is unlike the sciences in that no empirical finding can ever shift a mathematical theorem by one iota; it is true forever. Mathematical reasoning is a given, something commonly understood and shared by all mathematicians, because mathematical reasoning is, fundamentally, no more than logical reasoning, a thing universally shared. My own study of mathematics has left me with a deep respect for the distinction between relevance and irrelevance in making a reasoned argument.
These are the gold standards of human intellectual progress. Society, however, has to deal with wildly contested facts. We live in a post-truth world, by some accounts, in which facts are willfully bent to serve political ends. If the forty-fifth president is to be believed, Christmas has apparently been restored to the White House. Never mind the contradictory videos of the forty-fourth president and his family celebrating the holiday.
But there is nothing particularly new about this distorting. In his landmark work, Public Opinion, published in 1922, the formidable American journalist, Walter Lippmann reflected on the functions of the press:
That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.… as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.… Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, as United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was fond of saying. None of us is in a position, however, to verify all the facts presented to us. Somewhere, we each draw a line and say on this I will defer to so-and-so or such-and-such. We have only so many hours in the day. Besides, we acknowledge that some matters lie outside our expertise or even our capacity to comprehend. Doctors and lawyers make their livings on such basis.
But it is not merely facts that are under assault in the polarized politics of the US, the UK, and other nations twisting in the winds of what some call populism. There is also a troubling assault on reason….(More)”.
Advanced Design for the Public Sector
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
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)”.