Where is Our Polis In the 21st Century?


Hollie Russon Gilman: “If you could improve the relationship between citizens and the state, how would you do it? It’s likely that your answer would be different from mine and still different from the next five people I ask. Because rules and structures of government are constantly changing and the tools people use to communicate shift with newly available technologies, this relationship must continue to evolve…

Multiple factors shape the quality of democracy, such as the safety of free speech and reliability of public transit or secure long-term planning. Democracy, at least the glorified ancient ideal some like to lay claim to as our founding heritage, also involves the creation of a polis — specifically, a place where man is freed from the burdens of household goods, most famously articulated by Plato in The Republic.

We can’t mistake an ideal for the reality — Plato’s polis was highly constrained and available only to the most privileged of Greek men within a social system that also sanctioned slavery. However, the ideal of the polis  — a place to experience democratic virtues — also holds at least theoretical promise and compelling possibilities for real change to the current state of American democracy.

We need what this ideal has to offer, because the social contract as we know it today can feel more like a series of alienating, disconnected obligations than what it could and should be: an enabler of civic creativity or power. Our current social contract does not come with a polis — or, to put it another way, room to imagine new ways of thinking.

Why is this a problem? Because in order to truly harness civic innovation, we need to embrace deeper ways of thinking about democracy.

What would a deeper democracy look like? Harvard political theorist Robert Unger describes “deepened democracy” in his recent book Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative as a system in which citizens “must be able to see themselves and one another as individuals capable of escaping their confined roles.” One promising way citizens can perform new roles in a “deeper democracy” is by working with public institutions, and amongst themselves, to influence policymaking.

We need tools to empower these citizens use their work to fashion a polis for the 21st century. One particularly promising innovation is Participatory Budgeting (often shortened to “PB”), which is a process whereby citizens make spending decisions on a defined public budget and operate as active participants in public decision-making like allocating local funds in their neighborhood. The Brazilian Workers’ Party first attempted PB in 1989, where its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation….

Why is PB so effective as a civic engagement tool? PB is especially powerful because it engages citizens with complex political issues on the local level, where they live. PB’s strength as an intervention in our social contract lies in municipal budgets as the scale at which citizens can be experts. In other words, people who live day to day in communities know best what resources those communities need to solve problems, be successful, and thrive.

Many of our governance decisions face the dual challenges of integrating individual-level participation efforts with the scale of contemporary national U.S. politics. Part of PB’s power may be breaking down complex decisions into their manageable parts. This strategy could be applied beyond budgets to a range of decision-making such as climate adaption or addressing food deserts.

PB represents one of the best tools in a broader toolkit designed to re-engage citizens in governance, but it’s far from the only one. Look around your very block, community, and city. Examples of places that could operate as a 21st-century polis range from traditional community anchor institutions engaging in new ways to the application of digital tools for civic ends. Citizenvestor is a civic crowd-funding site that works online and with traditional brick-and-mortar organizations. In Mount Rainer, MD, Community Forklift — a “nonprofit reuse center for home improvement supplies” (or, you might say, a library for tools) — and a local bike share engage a large group of residents.

Civic and social innovation is built from the exchange of resources between government institutions and community networks. Ideally, through coming together to talk, debate, and engage in the public sphere, people can flex their civic muscle and transform their lives. The fabric of communities is woven with the threads of deeply engaged and dedicated residents. A challenge of our current moment in history is to reconcile these passions with the mechanisms, and sometimes the technologies, necessary to improve public life.

Can this all add up to a wholesale civic revolution? Time will tell. At a minimum, it suggests the potential of community networks (analog and digital) to be leveraged for a stronger, more resilience and responsive 21st century polis….(More)”

The Royal Statistical Society Data Manifesto


ePSiplatform: “A Data Manifesto released by the Royal Statistical Society describes ten recommendations that focus on how the next UK government can improve data for policymaking, democracy and for prosperity…..the Society calls for official statistics to be at the heart of policy debate and recommends that the Office for National Statistics and the wider Government Statistical Service be given adequate resources, as well as calling for greater investment in research, science and innovation.
The document shows that the Society is broadly supportive of the open data agenda; in particular the opening up of government data and giving citizens greater access to quality local data.
It calls for greater data sharing between government departments for statistics and research purposes and believes the private sector should be encouraged to share data with researchers for the same purpose. It also calls for an end to pre-release access to official statistics….Download the Data Manifesto in PDF format.”

‘Open Up’ Digital Democracy Commission’s Report published


UK Parliament: “The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy has published its report ‘Open Up’. The report recommends how Parliament can use digital technology to help it to be more transparent, inclusive, and better able to engage the public with democracy.

The Commission’s report is the culmination of a year’s worth of events and meetings, talking to people across the UK face to face and via digital means, about how to use digital technology to improve parliamentary democracy.
The Commission held well over one hundred informal meetings and over twenty roundtable discussions across the country. The Commission spoke to a wide range of people, including people from the tech industry, young people, voluntary organisations, adults with learning difficulties, academics, people with visual and hearing impediments, civil servants, marketing and public relations experts. It received thousands of tweets and more than 150 longer written contributions. Full details of who has helped us over the past year are included in the report….(More)”.

Open Data Is Finally Making A Dent In Cities


Brooks Rainwater at Co-Exist: “As with a range of leading issues, cities are at the vanguard of this shifting environment. Through increased measurement, analysis, and engagement, open data will further solidify the centrality of cities.
In the Chicago, the voice of the mayor counts for a lot. And Mayor Emmanuel has been at the forefront in supporting and encouraging open data in the city, resulting in a strong open government community. The city has more than 600 datasets online, and has seen millions of page views on its data portal. The public benefits have accrued widely with civic initiatives like Chicagolobbyists.org, as well as with a myriad of other open data led endeavors.
Transparency is one of the great promises of open data. Petitioning the government is a fundamental tenet of democracy and many government relations’ professionals perform this task brilliantly. At the same time that transparency is good for the city, it’s good for citizens and democracy. Through the advent of Chicagolobbyists.org, anyone can now see how many lobbyists are in the city, how much they are spending, who they are talking to, and when it is happening.
Throughout the country, we are seeing data driven sites and apps like this that engage citizens, enhance services, and provide a rich understanding of government operations In Austin, a grassroots movement has formed with advocacy organization Open Austin. Through hackathons and other opportunities, citizens are getting involved, services are improving, and businesses are being built.
Data can even find your dog, reducing the number of stray animals being sheltered, with StrayMapper.com. The site has a simple map-based web portal where you can type in whether you are missing a dog or cat, when you lost them, and where. That information is then plugged into the data being collected by the city on stray animals. This project, developed by a Code for America brigade team, helps the city improve its rate of returning pets to owners.
It’s not only animals that get lost or at least can’t find the best way home. I’ve found myself in that situation too. Thanks to Ridescout, incubated in Washington, D.C., at 1776, I have been able to easily find the best way home. Through the use of open data available from both cities and the Department of Transportation, Ridescout created an app that is an intuitive mobility tool. By showing me all of the available options from transit to ridesharing to my own two feet, it frequently helps me get from place to place in the city. It looks like it wasn’t just me that found this app to be handy; Daimler recently acquired Ridescout as the auto giant continues its own expansion into the data driven mobility space.”

Would Athenian-style democracy work in the UK today?


Paul Cartledge at the BBC, in the context of BBC Democracy Day: “…The -kratia component of demo-kratia was derived from kratos, which meant unambiguously and unambivalently power or strength. Demos, the other component, meant “people” – but which people, precisely?
At one extreme it could be taken to mean all the people – that is, all the politically empowered people, the adult male citizenry as a whole. At the other ideological pole, it referred to only a section of the citizen people, the largest, namely the majority of poor citizens – those who had to work for a living and might be in greater or less penury.
Against these masses were counterposed the elite citizens – the (more or less) wealthy Few. For them, and it may well have been they who coined the word demokratia, the demos in the class sense meant the great unwashed, the stupid, ignorant, uneducated majority.
So, depending where you stood on the social spectrum, demokratia was either Abe Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. This complicates, at least, any thought-experiment such as the one I’m about to conduct here.
However, what really stands in the way is a more symbolic than pragmatic objection – education, education, education.
For all that we have a formal and universally compulsory educational system, we are not educated either formally or informally to be citizens in the strong, active and participatory senses. The ancient Athenians lacked any sort of formal educational system whatsoever – though somehow or other most of them learned to read and write and count.
On the other hand, what they did possess in spades was an abundance of communal institutions, both formal and informal, both peaceful and warlike, both sacred and secular, whereby ideas of democratic citizenship could be disseminated, inculcated, internalised, and above all practised universally.
Annual, monthly and daily religious festivals. Annual drama festivals that were also themselves religious. Multiple experiences of direct participation in politics at both the local (village, parish, ward) and the “national” levels. And fighting as and for the Athenians both on land and at sea, against enemies both Greek and non-Greek (especially Persian).
Formal Athenian democratic politics, moreover, drew no such modern distinctions between the executive, legislative and judicial branches or functions of government as are enshrined in modern democratic constitutions. One ruled, as a democratic citizen, in all relevant branches equally. A trial for alleged impiety was properly speaking a political trial, as Socrates discovered to his cost.
In short, ancient Athenian democracy was very far from our liberal democracy. I don’t think I need to bang on about its conscientious exclusion of the female half of the citizenry, or its basis in a radical form of dehumanised personal slavery.
So why should we even think of wanting to apply any lesson or precedent drawn from it to our democracy today or in the future? One very good reason is the so-called “democratic deficit”, the attenuation or etiolation of what it means to be, or function fully as, a democratic citizen….(More)”

Is Transparency a Recipe for Innovation?


Paper by Dr. Bastiaan Heemsbergen:Innovation is a key driver in organizational sustainability, and yes, openness and transparency are a recipe for innovation. But, according to Tapscott and Williams, “when it comes to innovation, competitive advantage and organizational success, ‘openness’ is rarely the first word one would use to describe companies and other societal organizations like government agencies or medical institutions. For many, words like ‘insular,’ ‘bureaucratic,’ ‘hierarchical,’ ‘secretive’ and ‘closed’ come to mind instead.”1 And yet a few months ago, The Tesla Model S just became the world’s first open-source car. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motor Vehicles, shared all the patents on Tesla’s electric car technology, allowing anyone — including competitors — to use them without fear of litigation. Elon wrote in his post “Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.”2
In the public sector, terms such as open government, citizen sourcing, and wiki government are also akin to the notion of open innovation and transparency. As Hilgers and Ihl report, “a good example of this approach is the success of the Future Melbourne program, a Wiki and blog-based approach to shaping the future urban landscape of Australia’s second largest city. The program allowed citizens to directly edit and comment on the plans for the future development of the city. It attracted more than 30,000 individuals, who submitted hundreds of comments and suggestions (futuremelbourne.com.au). Basically, problems concerning design and creativity, future strategy and local culture, and even questions of management and service innovation can be broadcasted on such web-platforms.”3 The authors suggest that there are three dimensions to applying the concept of open innovation to the public sector: citizen ideation and innovation (tapping knowledge and creativity), collaborative administration (user generated new tasks and processes), and collaborative democracy (improve public participation in the policy process)….(More)”.

VoXup


Nesta: “Does your street feel safe? Would you like to change something in your neighbourhood? Is there enough for young people to do?
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….

Now VoXup is being used by Camden Council to engage with residents about its spending plans.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”

‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.

Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?


Essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Journal of Democracy: “The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The transitions in Southern Europe and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over 110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores every year since then. The year 2014 has not been good for democracy, with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expectations that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degenerated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, similar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the United States and the European Union, which experienced massive economic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies, from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their performance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tunisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many democratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and existing democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for democratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions… (More)”

Open Standards and the Digital Age


Book by Andrew L. Russell: “How did openness become a foundational value for the networks of the twenty-first century? Open Standards and the Digital Age answers this question through an interdisciplinary history of information networks that pays close attention to the politics of standardization. For much of the twentieth century, information networks such as the monopoly Bell System and the American military’s Arpanet were closed systems subject to centralized control. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, engineers in the United States and Europe experimented with design strategies to create new digital networks. In the process, they embraced discourses of “openness” to describe their ideological commitments to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and participatory democracy. The rhetoric of openness has flourished – for example, in movements for open government, open source software, and open access publishing – but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other “open” systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control….(More).”

Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe


David Lane and Filippo Addarii in Open Democracy: “…The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts. …
Today, anybody in the world can build a Geiger counter, measure radiation and share the results with others across the world. The technology is free and easy to build at home. It’s based on an open source micro-processor called “Arduino,” and all the instructions required to build the machine are available online. There’s also an online platform to share data and get support in any phase of the process called “Safecast.”
Fast forward to the 86th Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 2014, when Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar for best Foreign Language Film. Many Italians were unhappy with the film’s portrayal of a society wrapped in a beautiful cover made of Italian heritage and landscapes. So a young film producer called Lorenzo Gangarossa had the idea of asking ordinary citizens to contribute to presenting a different image of their country.
The result was “Italy in a Day,” one of the first crowd-sourced films to be released. 44,000 videos were filmed by Italians on the same day, edited together by Gabriele Salvatores, and produced into a film by Ridley Scott. When thousands of Italians were given the chance to co-create a composite image of their country, the resulting picture was the opposite of the one that had been celebrated by film critics and the media.
Based on the same principles of large-scale participation, the INSITE group has developed a robust methodology designed to engage people in assessing the collective impact of social innovation itself. “Emergence by Design” has developed a new set of tools that allow all the participants in a project to monitor and assess questions of impact and effectiveness. It’s called “dynamic evaluation.” … (More).