New White Paper by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (Australia): “Local government (such as the City of Melbourne) is accountable and responsible for establishment, execution and oversight of strategic objectives and resource management in the metropolis. Faced with a rising population, Council has in place a number of strategic plans to ensure it is able to deliver services that maintain (and ideally improve) the quality of life for its citizens (including residents, workers and visitors). This publication explores participatory sensing (PS) and issues associated with governance in the light of new information gathering capabilities that directly engage citizens in collecting data and providing contextual insight that has the potential to greatly enhance Council operations in managing these environments. Download: Participatory Sensing: Enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement (pdf: 2.3mb)“
Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry
New book by Caroline W. Lee: “Citizen participation has undergone a radical shift since anxieties about “bowling alone” seized the nation in the 1990s. Many pundits and observers have cheered America’s twenty-first century civic renaissance-an explosion of participatory innovations in public life. Invitations to “have your say!” and “join the discussion!” have proliferated. But has the widespread enthusiasm for maximizing citizen democracy led to real change?
In Do-It-Yourself Democracy, sociologist Caroline W. Lee examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. Lee looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. The beneficiaries of new forms of democratic empowerment are not only humble citizens, but also the engagement experts who host the forums. Does it matter if the folks deepening democracy are making money at it? How do they make sense of the contradictions inherent in their roles?
In investigating public engagement practitioners’ everyday anxieties and larger worldviews, we see reflected the strange meaning of power in contemporary institutions. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but Lee argues that they have also been marketed and sold as tools to facilitate cost-cutting, profitability, and other management goals – and that public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment….”
Restoring Confidence in Open, Shared and Personal Data
Report of the UK Digital Government Review: “It is obvious that government needs to be able to use data both to deliver services and to present information to public view. How else would government know which bank account to place a pension payment into, or a citizen know the results of an election or how to contact their elected representatives?
As more and more data is created, preserved and shared in ever-increasing volumes a number of urgent questions are begged: over opportunities and hazards; over the importance of using best-practice techniques, insights and technologies developed in the private sector, academia and elsewhere; over the promises and limitations of openness; and how all this might be articulated and made accessible to the public.
Government has already adopted “open data” (we will discuss this more in the next section) and there are now increasing calls for government to pay more attention to data analytics and so-called “big data” – although the first faltering steps to unlock benefits, here, have often ended in the discovery that using large-scale data is a far more nuanced business than was initially assumed
Debates around government and data have often been extremely high-profile – the NHS care.data [27] debate was raging while this review was in progress – but they are also shrouded in terms that can generate confusion and complexities that are not easily summarized.
In this chapter we will unpick some of these terms and some parts of the debate. This is a detailed and complex area and there is much more that could have been included [28]. This is not an area that can easily be summarized into a simple bullet-pointed list of policies.
Within this report we will use the following terms and definitions, proceeding to a detailed analysis of each in turn:
Type of Data |
Definition [29] |
Examples |
| 1. Open Data | Data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike | Insolvency notices in the London Gazette Government spending information Public transport information Official National Statistics |
| 2. Shared Data | Restricted data provided to restricted organisations or individuals for restricted purposes | National Pupil Database NHS care.data Integrated health and social care Individual census returns |
| 3. Personal Data | Data that relate to a living individual who can be identified from that data. For full legal definition see [30] | Health records Individual tax records Insolvency notices in the London gazette National Pupil Database |
This social productivity will help build future economic productivity; in the meantime it will improve people’s lives and it will enhance our democracy. From our analysis it was clear that there was room for improvement…”
Smart cities: the state-of-the-art and governance challenge
New Paper by Mark Deakin in Triple Helix – A Journal of University-Industry-Government Innovation and Entrepreneurship: “Reflecting on the governance of smart cities, the state-of-the-art this paper advances offers a critique of recent city ranking and future Internet accounts of their development. Armed with these critical insights, it goes on to explain smart cities in terms of the social networks, cultural attributes and environmental capacities, vis-a-vis, vital ecologies of the intellectual capital, wealth creation and standards of participatory governance regulating their development. The Triple Helix model which the paper advances to explain these performances in turn suggests that cities are smart when the ICTs of future Internet developments successfully embed the networks society needs for them to not only generate intellectual capital, or create wealth, but also cultivate the environmental capacity, ecology and vitality of those spaces which the direct democracy of their participatory governance open up, add value to and construct.”
A micro-democratic perspective on crowd-work
New paper by Karin Hansson: “Social media has provided governments with new means to improve efficiency and innovation, by engaging a crowd in the gathering and development of data. These collaborative processes are also described as a way to improve democracy by enabling a more transparent and deliberative democracy where citizens participate more directly in decision processes on different levels. However, the dominant research on the e-democratic field takes a government perspective rather then a citizen perspective. –democracy from the perspective of the individual actor, in a global context, is less developed.
In this paper I therefore develop a model for a democratic process outside the realm of the nation state, in a performative state where inequality is norm and the state is unclear and fluid. In this process e-participation means an ICT supported method to get a diversity of opinions and perspectives rather than one single. This micro perspective on democratic participation online might be useful for development of tools for more democratic online crowds…”
Good data make better cities
Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford at the Boston Globe: “…Federal laws prevent sharing of information among state workers helping the same family. In one state’s public health agency, workers fighting obesity cannot receive information from another official inside the same agency assigned to a program aimed at fighting diabetes. In areas where citizens are worried about environmental justice, sensors collecting air quality information are feared — because they could monitor the movements of people. Cameras that might provide a crucial clue to the identity of a terrorist are similarly feared because they might capture images of innocent bystanders.
In order for the public to develop confidence that data tools work for its betterment, not against it, we have work to do. Leaders need to establish policies covering data access, retention, security, and transparency. Forensic capacity — to look back and see who had access to what for what reason — should be a top priority in the development of any data system. So too should clear consequences for data misuse by government employees.
If we get this right, the payoffs for democracy will be enormous. Data can provide powerful insights into the equity of public services and dramatically increase the effectiveness of social programs. Existing 311 digital systems can become platforms for citizen engagement rather than just channels for complaints. Government services can be graded by citizens and improved in response to a continuous loop of interaction. Cities can search through anonymized data in a huge variety of databases for correlations between particular facts and desired outcomes and then apply that knowledge to drive toward results — what can a city do to reduce rates of obesity and asthma? What bridges are in need of preventative maintenance? And repurposing dollars from ineffective programs and vendors to interventions that work will help cities be safer, cleaner, and more effective.
The digital revolution has finally reached inside the walls of city hall, making this the best time within living memory to be involved in local government. We believe that doing many small things right using data will build trust, making it more likely that citizens will support their city’s need to do big things — including addressing economic dislocation.
Data rules should genuinely protect individuals, not limit our ability to serve them better. When it comes to data, unreasoning fear is our greatest enemy…”
Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level
Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its feasibility, have been swept away by the enthusiasm and the large number of papers that have been sent in….”
Why the World Needs Anonymous
Gabriella Coleman at MIT Technology Review: “Anonymity is under attack, and yet the actions of a ragtag band of hackers, activists, and rabble-rousers reveal how important it remains.
“It’s time to end anonymous comments sections,” implored Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi in the Washington Post this August. In the U.K., a parliamentary committee has even argued for a “cultural shift” against treating pseudonymous comments as trustworthy. This assault is matched by pervasive practices of monitoring and surveillance, channeled through a stunning variety of mechanisms—from CCTV cameras to the constant harvesting of digital data.
But just as anonymity’s value has sunk to a new low in the eyes of some, a protest movement in favor of concealment has appeared. The hacker collective Anonymous is most famous for its controversial crusades against the likes of dictators, corporations, and pseudo-religions like Scientology. But the group is also the embodiment of this new spirit.
Anonymous may strike a reader as unique, but its efforts represent just the latest in experimentation with anonymous speech as a conduit for political expression. Anonymous expression has been foundational to our political culture, characterizing monumental declarations like the Federalist Papers, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly granted anonymous speech First Amendment protection.
The actions of this group are also important because anonymity remains important to us all. Universally enforcing disclosure of real identities online would limit the possibilities for whistle-blowing and voicing unpopular beliefs—processes essential to any vibrant democracy. And just as anonymity can engender disruptive and antisocial behavior such as trolling, it can provide a means of pushing back against increased surveillance.
By performing a role increasingly unavailable to most Internet users as they participate in social networks and other gated communities requiring real names, Anonymous dramatizes the existence of other possibilities. Its members symbolically incarnate struggles against the constant, blanket government surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden and many before him.
As an anthropologist who has spent half a dozen years studying Anonymous, I’ve have had the unique opportunity to witness and experience just how these activists conceive of and enact obfuscation. It is far from being implemented mindlessly. Indeed, there are important ethical lessons that we can draw from their successes and failures.
Often Anonymous activists, or “Anons,” interact online under the cover of pseudo-anonymity. Typically, this takes the form of a persistent nickname, otherwise known as a handle, around which a reputation necessarily accrues. Among the small fraction of law-breaking Anons, pseudo-anonymity is but one among a roster of tactics for achieving operational security. These include both technical solutions, such as encryption and anonymizing software, and cultivation of the restraint necessary to prevent the disclosure of personal information.
The great majority of Anonymous participants are neither hackers nor lawbreakers but must nonetheless remain circumspect in what they reveal about themselves and others. Sometimes, ignorance is the easiest way to ensure protection. A participant who helped build up one of the larger Anonymous accounts erected a self-imposed fortress between herself and the often-private Internet Relay Chat channels where law-breaking Anons cavorted and planned actions. It was a “wall,” as she put it, which she sought never to breach.
During the course of my research, I eschewed anonymity and mitigated risk by erecting the same wall, making sure not to climb over it. But some organizers were more intrepid. Since they associated with lawbreakers or even witnessed planning of illegal activity on IRC, they chose to cloak themselves for self-protection.
Regardless of the reasons for maintaining anonymity, it shaped many of the ethical norms and mores of the group. The source of this ethic is partly indebted to 4chan, a hugely popular, and deeply subversive, image board that enforced the name “Anonymous” for all users, thus hatching the idea’s potential (see “Radical Opacity”)….
See also: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous.
The future of intelligence is distributed – and so is the future of government
Craig Thomler at eGovAU: “…Now we can do much better. Rather than focusing on electing and appointing individual experts – the ‘nodes’ in our governance system, governments need to focus on the network that interconnects citizens, government, business, not-for-profits and other entities.
Rather than limiting decision making to a small core of elected officials (supported by appointed and self-nominated ‘experts’), we need to design decision-making systems which empower broad groups of citizens to self-inform and involve themselves at appropriate steps of decision-making processes.
This isn’t quite direct democracy – where the population weighs in on every issue, but it certainly is a few steps removed from the alienating ‘representative democracy’ that many countries use today.
What this model of governance allows for is far more agile and iterative policy debates, rapid testing and improvement of programs and managed distributed community support – where anyone in a community can offer to help others within a framework which values, supports and rewards their involvement, rather than looks at it with suspicion and places many barriers in the way.
Of course we need the mechanisms designed to support this model of government, and the notion that they will simply evolve out of our existing system is quite naive.
Our current governance structures are evolutionary – based on the principle that better approaches will beat out ineffective and inefficient ones. Both history and animal evolution have shown that inefficient organisms can survive for extremely long times, and can require radical environmental change (such as mass extinction events) for new forms to be successful.
On top of this the evolution of government is particularly slow as there’s far fewer connections between the 200-odd national governments in the world than between the 200+ Watson artificial intelligences in the world.
While every Watson learns what other Watsons learn rapidly, governments have stilted and formal mechanisms for connection that mean that it can take decades – or even longer – for them to recognise successes and failures in others.
In other words, while we have a diverse group of governments all attempting to solve many of the same basic problems, the network effect isn’t working as they are all too inward focused and have focused on developing expertise ‘nodes’ (individuals) rather than expert networks (connections).
This isn’t something that can be fixed by one, or even a group of ten or more governments – thereby leaving humanity in the position of having to repeat the same errors time and time again, approving the same drugs, testing the same welfare systems, trialing the same legal regimes, even when we have examples of their failures and successes we could be learning from.
So therefore the best solution – perhaps the only workable solution for the likely duration of human civilisation on this planet – is to do what some of our forefather did and design new forms of government in a planned way.
Rather than letting governments slowly and haphazardly evolve through trial and error, we should take a leaf out of the book of engineers, and place a concerted effort into designing governance systems that meet human needs.
These systems should involve and nurture strong networks, focusing on the connections rather than the nodes – allowing us to both leverage the full capabilities of society in its own betterment and to rapidly adjust settings when environments and needs change….”
Why Hasn’t ‘Big Data’ Saved Democracy?
Review by Marshall Ganz : “In his new book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet), Personal Democracy Forum founder Micah Sifry asks a very good question: what ever happened to the prediction that a radically cheapened cost of connection would displace traditional political gatekeepers, not only radically opening up politics, but also producing a real shift in the balance of power?
Sifry, an insider, offers an honest assessment of the effects of the new technology on politics, calling out his colleagues courageously in ways that can be useful to outsiders as well. Defining his terms at the outset, he provides us with a helpful roadmap: the “Internet” is “the set of protocols and practices that allow computing and communications devices to connect to each other and share information and the set of cultural behaviors and expectations that this underlying foundation makes possible.” Politics is “everything we can and must do together;” democracy is “a system in which all people participate fully and equally in decisions that affect their lives.”
…
Sifry’s case is persuasive, but incomplete. Although he sees the problem, he locates its sources, and solutions, only in the technology. But what about the people who chose to use technology in the ways they do? Is the agency in the tools, or in those who use them?
One glaringly important question noted but left unaddressed is why new technology seems to have had a far greater impact on progressive politics than on conservative ones. Why is the NRA, for example, indifferent to the new technology, while anti-gun violence groups are almost entirely dependent on it? Are progressives more technologically minded? Do their causes and candidates lend themselves more to digital mobilization? Are they more creative?
That new technology enables the emergence of a professional cadre whose wealth and power depend on control of that technology is nothing new. It happened with television, direct mail fund raising, and early forms of targeting, too. But why, unlike television and direct mail, has the Internet effect has been far more evident on the Left than on the Right?
The fact that Sifry fails to explore this question may be rooted not only in a kind of “technological determinism” but also in a kind of commitment to direct democracy—a belief that “true” democracy requires the ongoing and unmediated expression of a preference by every individual affected by any decision.” This makes it hard for him to recognize good organizing, which is based on the role of leadership in mobilizing, developing and expressing shared preferences through organization, party, or chosen representative….”