Civic Technology for Participatory Cities of the Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Francesca Esses: “As cities continue to expand and demographics diversify, it has become challenging for governments, on a local level, to make informed decisions representative of the local population. Through town hall meetings and public hearings, traditional means of public engagement are no longer sufficient in attaining meaningful citizen input to policy and decision making. These types of engagement methods have come under criticism for their inaccessibility, timelines, and representation of the broader demographic of modern society…

Winston Churchill is famously quoted as saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. History would suggest that pandemics have forced humans to embrace change, described as a ‘portal’ from the old world to the next. COVID-19 has created an unparalleled opportunity to reimagine technology’s role in shaping society. It is anticipated that a surge in technological innovation will materialise from the pandemic and the subsequent economic instability.

Concerning smart cities, the COVID-19 pandemic has been referred to as the “lubricant” for further development in this area. There has been a significant rise in civic tech projects globally as a direct response to the pandemic: organisations such as Code for Japan, Code for Germany, and Code for Pakistan have all launched several projects in response to the virus. We’ve already seen civic tech initiatives across Africa implemented as a direct response to the pandemic; the Civic Tech Innovation Network referenced at least 140 initiatives across the continent.

Civic technologists also created a comprehensive COVID-19 data platform available at global.health, described as the first easy-to-use global repository, enabling open access to real-time data containing over 30 million anonymised cases in over 100 countries. The data curated on the site aims to help epidemiologists monitor the trajectory of the virus and track variants. A list of other corona-focused civic tech initiatives can be found here….

Restrictions put in place due to COVID-19 have positively impacted the earth’s climate, resulting in a pollution reduction, with carbon emissions falling globally. We’ve all seen the images of smog-free skies over the notoriously muggy cities across the world. According to reports, overall carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 7 percent compared to 2019. It’s argued that a more socially conscious and responsible consumer is likely to emerge post-pandemic, with a greater focus on sustainability, responsible living, and carbon footprint….(More)“

Co-Develop: Digital Public Infrastructure for an Equitable Recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A report by The Rockefeller Foundation: “Digital systems that accomplish basic, society-wide functions played a critical role in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, enabling both public health and social protection measures. The pandemic has shown the value of these systems, but it has also revealed how they are non-existent or weak in far too many places.

As we build back better, we have an unprecedented opportunity to build digital public infrastructure that promotes inclusion, human rights, and progress toward global goals. This report outlines an agenda for international cooperation on digital public infrastructure to guide future investments and expansion of this critical tool.

6 Key Areas for International Cooperation on Digital Public Infrastructure

  1. A vision for digital public infrastructure as a whole, backed by practice, research, and evaluation.
  2. A global commons based on digital public goods.
  3. Safeguards for inclusion, trust, competition, security, and privacy.
  4. Tools that use data in digital public infrastructure for public value and private empowerment.
  5. Private and public capacity, particularly in implementing countries.
  6. Silo-busting, built-for-purpose coordinating, funding, and financing….(More)”.

Custodians of the Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tarleton Gillespie on “Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media…Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with “fake news” or livestreamed violence, “content moderators”—who censor or promote user-posted content—have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ban hate speech, and censor pornography can also silence the speech you need to hear.

In this revealing and nuanced exploration, award-winning sociologist and cultural observer Tarleton Gillespie provides an overview of current social media practices and explains the underlying rationales for how, when, and why these policies are enforced. In doing so, Gillespie highlights that content moderation receives too little public scrutiny even as it is shapes social norms and creates consequences for public discourse, cultural production, and the fabric of society. Based on interviews with content moderators, creators, and consumers, this accessible, timely book is a must-read for anyone who’s ever clicked “like” or “retweet.”…(More)”.

World Public Sector Report 2021

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UN-DESA: “Five years after the start of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda, governance issues remain at the forefront. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted even more the importance of national institutions for the achievement of the SDGs. The World Public Sector Report 2021 focuses on three dimensions of institutional change at the national level. First, it documents changes in institutional arrangements for SDG implementation since 2015. Second, it assesses the development, performance, strengths and weaknesses of follow-up and review systems for the SDGs. Third, it examines efforts made by governments and other stakeholders to enhance the capacity of public servants to implement the SDGs. Based on in-depth examination of institutional arrangements for SDG implementation in a sample of 24 countries in all regions, the report aims to draw attention to the institutional dimension of SDG implementation and provide lessons for national policymakers in this regard. The report also takes stock of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national institutions and their implications for delivering on the 2030 Agenda….(More)”.

The U.S. Is Getting a Crash Course in Scientific Uncertainty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Apoorva Mandavilli at the New York Times: “When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.

Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.

At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain. In just the past week, federal health officials said they would begin offering booster shots to all Americans in the coming months. Days earlier, those officials had assured the public that the vaccines were holding strong against the Delta variant of the virus, and that boosters would not be necessary.

As early as Monday, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to formally approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which has already been given to scores of millions of Americans. Some holdouts found it suspicious that the vaccine was not formally approved yet somehow widely dispensed. For them, “emergency authorization” has never seemed quite enough.

Americans are living with science as it unfolds in real time. The process has always been fluid, unpredictable. But rarely has it moved at this speed, leaving citizens to confront research findings as soon as they land at the front door, a stream of deliveries that no one ordered and no one wants.

Is a visit to my ailing parent too dangerous? Do the benefits of in-person schooling outweigh the possibility of physical harm to my child? Will our family gathering turn into a superspreader event?

Living with a capricious enemy has been unsettling even for researchers, public health officials and journalists who are used to the mutable nature of science. They, too, have frequently agonized over the best way to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

But to frustrated Americans unfamiliar with the circuitous and often contentious path to scientific discovery, public health officials have seemed at times to be moving the goal posts and flip-flopping, or misleading, even lying to, the country.

Most of the time, scientists are “edging forward in a very incremental way,” said Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and a co-founder of two popular websites, bioRxiv and medRxiv, where scientists post new research.

“There are blind alleys that people go down, and a lot of the time you kind of don’t know what you don’t know.”

Biology and medicine are particularly demanding fields. Ideas are evaluated for years, sometimes decades, before they are accepted….(More)”.

(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daron Acemoglu et al: “Using large-scale survey data covering more than 110 countries and exploiting within-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves and focusing on immigrants’ exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are consistent with a causal interpretation. We also establish that democracies breed their own support only when they are successful: all of the effects we estimate work through exposure to democracies that are successful in providing economic growth, peace and political stability, and public goods….(More)”.

Technology and Society: Building Our Sociotechnical Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book (Second Edition) edited by Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore: “Technological change does not happen in a vacuum; decisions about which technologies to develop, fund, market, and use engage ideas about values as well as calculations of costs and benefits. In order to influence the development of technology for the better, we must first understand how technology and society are inextricably bound together. These writings—by thinkers ranging from Bruno Latour to Francis Fukuyama—help us do just that, examining how people shape technology and how technology shapes people. This second edition updates the original significantly, offering twenty-one new essays along with fifteen from the first edition.

The book first presents visions of the future that range from technological utopias to cautionary tales and then introduces several major STS theories. It examines human and social values and how they are embedded in technological choices and explores the interesting and subtle complexities of the technology-society relationship. Remedying a gap in earlier theorizing in the field, many of the texts illustrate how race and gender are intertwined with technology. Finally, the book offers a set of readings that focus on the sociotechnical challenges we face today, treating topics that include cybersecurity, geoengineering, and the myth of neutral technology…(More)”.

What – and who – is a city for?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Gabriella Gómez-Mont: “…One of the most important lessons of the pandemic is that cities need to go beyond a logic of economics and efficiency, and instead have public purpose and civics at their core. Of course, economically healthy cities are fundamental, but a shift in priorities is necessary. Until recently, it was easy to think that democracy was on an inevitably progressive arch (if slower than some of us wished). But recent events have shown us that the global reality is more complicated than that.

This shows that there is much work to be done in rethinking civic capital, urban commons and public value, plus the role of the state in this. For starters, on an urban acupuncture level: using small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context; determining what new types of public and civic spaces could be part of the urban repertoire; creating an imaginative symbiosis between physical infrastructure and novel ways of creating social relationships and horizontal ties with different purposes?

If we thought about feminist cities, care cities, playful cities, eco-cities (for example) what new urban forms could we imagine? The built environment can have the capacity to shape community coalitions, to organize social energy in different ways, to become reminders of different urban capacities that support diverse ways of being and belonging, of coming together.

This has historically been the role of places such as libraries, playgrounds, public schools. More recently, we have also seen the creation of food forests, community kitchens, maker spaces. But why has the repertoire of possibilities not been expanded and increased exponentially in recent decades? This is one of the themes I am in the midst of researching (and soon prototyping in several cities such as Helsinki and Da Nang).

In the future, these spaces could be part of a networked civics infrastructure, an infrastructure for the imagination. In the short term, these new types of places to gather could also recognize the importance of community ties. As Noreena Hertz wrote in The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart, we should not underestimate the effects of loneliness: social isolation is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It is also costing taxpayers billions a year.

This, and the crisis of democracy we are living through, makes a good case for the need to reimagine and expand opportunities for participation in collective life.

Can a city offer its citizens different ways of gathering around shared visions or common questions? How is a society prompted to imagine a life together, to jointly explore alternatives and possibilities that can enhance collective well-being?…(More)”.

Why I’m a proud solutionist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Jason Crawford: “Debates about technology and progress are often framed in terms of “optimism” vs. “pessimism.” For instance, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, Max Roser, and the late Hans Rosling have been called the “New Optimists” for their focus on the economic, scientific, and social progress of the last two centuries. Their opponents, such as David Runciman and Jason Hickel, accuse them of being blind to real problems in the world, such as poverty, and to risks of catastrophe, such as nuclear war.

Economic historian Robert Gordon calls himself “the prophet of pessimism.” His book The Rise and Fall of American Growth warned that the days of high economic growth are over for the United States and will not return. Gordon’s opponents include a group he calls the “techno-optimists,” such as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, who have predicted a growth spurt in productivity from information technology.

It’s tempting to choose sides. But while it can be rational to be optimistic or pessimistic on any specific question, these terms are too imprecise to be adopted as a general intellectual identity. Those who identify as optimists can be too quick to dismiss or downplay the problems of technology, while self-styled technology pessimists or progress skeptics can be too reluctant to believe in solutions.

As we look forward to the post-pandemic recovery, once again we’re being tugged between the optimists, who highlight all the diseases that may soon be beaten through new vaccines, and the pessimists, who warn that humanity will never win the evolutionary arms race against microbes. But this represents a false choice. History provides us with powerful examples of people who were brutally honest in identifying a crisis but were equally active in seeking solutions.

At the end of the 19th century, William Crookes—physicist, chemist, and inventor of the Crookes tube (an early type of vacuum tube)—was the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. On September 7, 1898, he used the traditional annual address to the association to issue a dire warning.

The British Isles, he said, were at grave risk of running out of food. His reasoning was simple: the population was growing exponentially, but the amount of land under cultivation could not keep pace. The only way to continue to increase production was to improve crop yields. But the limiting factor on yields was the availability of nitrogen fertilizer, and the sources of nitrogen, such as the rock salts of the Chilean desert and the guano deposits of the Peruvian islands, were running out. His argument was detailed and comprehensive, based on figures for wheat production and land availability from every major European country and colony; he apologized in advance for boring his audience with statistics….(More)”.

Decentralisation: a multidisciplinary perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Balázs Bodó, Jaya Klara Brekke, and Jaap-Henk Hoepman:”Decentralisation as a concept is attracting a lot of interest, not least with the rise of decentralised and distributed techno-social systems like Bitcoin, and distributed ledgers more generally. In this paper, we first define decentralisation as it is implemented for technical architectures and then discuss the technical, social, political and economic ideas that drive the development of decentralised, and in particular, distributed systems. We argue that technical efforts towards decentralisation tend to go hand-in-hand with ambitions for rearranging power dynamics. We caution, however, against simplistic understandings of power in relation to the decentralisation-centralisation spectrum, and argue that in practice, decentralisation might very well be served by and produce centralising effects. The paper then goes on to discuss the critical literature that highlights some of the common assumptions and critiques made about decentralisation and the pros and cons of a decentralised approach. Finally, we propose some of the missing parts to current debates about decentralisation, and argue for a more nuanced and grounded approach to the centralisation/decentralisation dichotomy….(More)”.