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
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).
Data is Law
Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: The Future is Open: “In his famous essay on the importance of the technological underpinnings of the Internet, Lawrence Lessig described the potential threat if the architecture of cyberspace was built on values that diverged from those we believe are important to the proper functioning of our democracy. The central point of this seminal work seems to grow in importance each day as technology and the Internet become more deeply embedded into our daily lives.
But increasingly, another kind of architecture is becoming central to the way we live and interact with each other – and to the way in which we are governed and how we interact with those that govern us. This architecture is used by governments at the federal, state and local level to share data with the public.
This data – everything from weather data, economic data, education data, crime data, environmental data – is becoming increasingly important for how we view the world around us and our perception of how we are governed. It is quite easy for us to catalog the wide range of personal decisions – some rote, everyday decisions like what to wear based on the weather forecast, and some much more substantial like where to live or where to send our children to school – that are influenced by data collected, maintained or curated by government.
It seems to me that Lessig’s observations from a decade and a half ago about the way in which the underlying architecture of the Internet may affect our democracy can now be applied to data. Ours is the age of data – it pervades every aspect of our lives and influences how we raise our children, how we spend our time and money and who we elect to public office.
But even more fundamental to our democracy, how well our government leaders are performing the job we empower them to do depends on data. How effective is policing in reducing the number of violent crimes? How effective are environmental regulations in reducing dangerous emissions? How well are programs performing to lift people out of poverty and place them in gainful employment? How well are schools educating our children?
These are all questions that we answer – in whole or in part – by looking at data. Data that governments themselves are largely responsible for compiling and publishing….
Having access to open data is no longer an option for participating effectively in our modern democracy, it’s a requirement. Data – to borrow Lessig’s argument – has become law.”
Transparency isn’t what keeps government from working
in the Washington Post: “In 2014, a number of big thinkers made the surprising claim that government openness and transparency are to blame for today’s gridlock. They have it backward: Not only is there no relationship between openness and dysfunction, but more secrecy can only add to that dysfunction.
As transparency advocates, we never take openness for granted. The latest example of the dangers of secrecy was the “cromnibus” bill, with its surprise lifting of campaign finance limits for political parties to an astonishing $3 million per couple per cycle, and its suddenly revealed watering down of Dodd-Frank’s derivatives safeguards. And in parallel to the controversy over the release of the CIA’s torture report, that agency proposed to delete e-mail from nearly all employees and contractors, destroying potential documentary evidence of wrongdoing. Openness doesn’t happen without a struggle…..
Academics, such as Francis Fukuyama, make the case that politicians need privacy and discretion — back-door channels — to get the business of government done. “The obvious solution to this problem would be to roll back some of the would-be democratizing reforms, but no one dares suggest that what the country needs is a bit less participation and transparency,” writes Fukuyama in his newest book. At a time when voter participation is as low as during World War II, it seems strange to call for less participation and democracy. And more secrecy in Congress isn’t going to suddenly create dealmaking. The 2011 congressional “supercommittee” tasked with developing a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction deal operated almost entirely in secret. The problem wasn’t transparency or openness. Instead, as the committee’s Republican co-chairman, Jeb Hensarling, stated, the real problem was “two dramatically competing visions of the role [of] government.” These are the real issues, not openness….
We are not transparency absolutists. Not everything government and Congress do should occur in a fishbowl; that said, there is already plenty of room today for private deliberations. The problem isn’t transparency. It is that the political landscape punishes those who try to work together. And if various accountability measures create procedural challenges, let’s fix them. When it comes to holding government accountable, it is in the nation’s best interest to allow the media, nonprofit groups and the public full access to decision-making.”
An Open Government Index: From Democracy to Efficiency to Innovation
New Report by Lindgren, Tony; Ekenberg, Love; Nouri, Jalal and Hansson, Karin: “Most research in research areas like E-government, E-participation and Open government assume a democratic norm. The concept of Open government, recently promoted by, e.g., The Obama administration and the European Commission is to a large extent based on a general liberal and deliberative ideology emphasizing transparency, participation and collaboration. The concept has also become of interest for states like China and Singapore. In this position paper we outline how to study the concept under different political discourses and suggest an Open government index that can be used to analyze the concept of open government under various settings. (More)”
Democracy makes itself at home online
Geoff Mulgan on the creation of new parties in 2015 at NESTA: “….On its own the Internet is an imperfect tool for making decisions or shaping options. Opening decisions up to large numbers of people doesn’t automatically make decisions better (the ‘wisdom of crowds’). But in the right circumstances the Internet can involve far more people in shaping policy and sharing their expertise.
Hybrid models that combine the openness of the Internet with a continuing role for parliaments, committees and leaders in making decisions and being held to account are showing great promise (something being pursued in Nesta’s D-CENT project in countries like Finland and Iceland, and in our work with Podemos in Spain).
My prediction is that the aftermath of the UK election will see the first Internet-age parties emerge in the UK, our own versions of Podemos or Democracy OS. My hope is that they will help to engage millions of people currently detached from politics, and to provide them with ways to directly influence ideas and decisions. UKIP has tapped into that alienation – but mainly offers a better yesterday rather than a plausible vision of the future. That leaves a gap for new parties that are more at home in the 21st century and can target a much younger age group.
If new parties do spring up, the old ones will have to respond. Before long open primaries, deliberations on the Internet, and crowd-sourced policy processes could become the norm. As that happens politics will become messier and more interesting. Leaders will have to be adept at responding to contradictory currents of opinion, with more conversation and fewer bland speeches. The huge power once wielded by newspaper owners, commentators and editors will almost certainly continue to decline.
The hope, in short, is that democracy could be reenergised…. (More).
Hybrid models that combine the openness of the Internet with a continuing role for parliaments, committees and leaders in making decisions and being held to account are showing great promise (something being pursued in Nesta’s D-CENT project in countries like Finland and Iceland, and in our work with Podemos in Spain).
My prediction is that the aftermath of the UK election will see the first Internet-age parties emerge in the UK, our own versions of Podemos or Democracy OS. My hope is that they will help to engage millions of people currently detached from politics, and to provide them with ways to directly influence ideas and decisions. UKIP has tapped into that alienation – but mainly offers a better yesterday rather than a plausible vision of the future. That leaves a gap for new parties that are more at home in the 21st century and can target a much younger age group.
If new parties do spring up, the old ones will have to respond. Before long open primaries, deliberations on the Internet, and crowd-sourced policy processes could become the norm. As that happens politics will become messier and more interesting. Leaders will have to be adept at responding to contradictory currents of opinion, with more conversation and fewer bland speeches. The huge power once wielded by newspaper owners, commentators and editors will almost certainly continue to decline.
The hope, in short, is that democracy could be reenergised…. (More).
Making Futures – Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy
Book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard: “Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.
These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. (More) “
4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate
at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:
1. Open Data
…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….
2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics
…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.
3. Online Citizen Engagement
…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.
4. Geographic Information Systems
… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”
Open Government and Democracy
New paper by Karin Hansson, Kheira Belkacem, and Love Ekenberg at the Social Sciences Computer Review: “The concept of open government, having been promoted widely in the past 5 years, has promised a broader notion than e-government, as supposed to fundamentally transform governments to become more open and participative and collaborative. Unfortunately, this has not significantly enhanced a set of fundamental problems regarding e-government. One of the problems is that the underlying democratic ideology is rarely clearly expressed. In this paper, we have therefore constructed a framework for the analysis of open government from a democratic perspective, to explore the research foundation of open government and the types of research missing. We have looked closely at the notion of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, focusing on discussions of some fundamental issues regarding democracy and the type of solutions suggested. We have found that despite seemingly good intentions and an extensive rhetoric, there is still an apparent lack of adequate tools in which public deliberation and representation are addressed in any meaningful sense. There are two main important observations herein: (i) the rhetoric in the dominant discourse supports the concept of open government formulated by the Obama administration as transparency, participation, and collaboration, but in practice, the focus is predominantly on transparency and information exchange, while ignoring fundamental democratic issues regarding participation and collaboration, and (ii) the concept of the public is inadequately considered as a homogenous entity rather than a diversified group with different interests, preferences, and abilities.”
Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe
at Open Democracy: “What’s going on in Paris? This year over four thousand Parisians have been consulted on how to allocate twenty million Euros across fifteen projects that aim to improve the quality of life in the French capital.
Anne Hidalgo, who was elected as the Mayor of Paris in April 2014, has introduced a participatory budget process to give citizens an opportunity to decide on the allocation of five per cent of the capital’s investment budget. For the first time in France, a politician is giving citizens some degree of direct control over public expenditure—a sum amounting to 426 million Euros in total between 2014 and 2020.
This is an example of social innovation, but not the pseudo-revolutionary, growth-obsessed, blind-to-power variety that’s constantly hyped by management consultants and public policy think tanks. Instead, people are actively involved in planning their own shared future. They’re entrusted with the responsibility of devising ways to improve life in their communities. And the process is coherent with the purpose: everyone, not just the ‘experts,’ has an opportunity to have their say in an open and transparent online platform.
Participatory budgeting isn’t new, but this kind of public participation in processes of social innovation is a welcome and growing development across Europe. Public institutions need more participation from stakeholders and citizens to do their jobs. 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.
INSITE started with the idea that societies’ love affair with innovation may be misplaced – at least with respect to the way that social innovation is currently conceived and organized. The lion’s share of attention goes to products that make a profit—not processes that enhance the collective good or transform systems, structures and values.
The hype around the “Innovation Society” also obscures the fact that innovation processes bring about cascades of changes that are unpredictable, and may produce toxic side-effects. Just think about the growth of new kinds of financial instruments which exploded in the sub-prime mortgage disaster, triggering the financial and economic crises that have dragged on since 2008. Market-driven cascades of innovation have also contributed to global warming and obesity epidemics in the industrialized world. Not everything that’s innovative is valuable or effective.
As presently constituted, neither governments nor markets are able to control these cascades of innovation. They lack the means and the intelligence to detect unintended consequences and encourage innovation processes to move in positive directions. So how can this ‘boat’ be steered through the ‘storm’ before it crashes on the ‘rocks?’
Since 2008, researchers from INSITE and elsewhere have been trying to address this question by refocusing innovation theory on social questions, power relations and democratic concerns. For INSITE, the “social” in “social innovation” isn’t simply a marker for a target group in society or the social intentions of innovators and entrepreneurs. It stands for something much deeper: giving power back to society to direct innovation processes towards greater prosperity for all. In this conception, social innovation challenges the foundations of the “Innovation Society’s” narrow ideology. It provides an alternative through which engaged citizens can mobilize to construct a socially sustainable future. …more.“