What Mission-Driven Government Means

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mariana Mazzucato & Rainer Kattel: “The COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and wars have alerted governments to the realities of what it takes to tackle massive crises. In extraordinary times, policymakers often rediscover their capacity for bold decision-making. The rapid speed of COVID-19 vaccine development and deployment was a case in point.

But preparing for other challenges requires more sustained efforts in “mission-driven government.” Recalling the successful language and strategies of the Cold War-era moonshot, governments around the world are experimenting with ambitious policy programs and public-private partnerships in pursuit of specific social, economic, and environmental goals. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party’s five-mission campaign platform has kicked off a vibrant debate about whether and how to create a “mission economy.”

Mission-driven government is not about achieving doctrinal adherence to some original set of ideas; it is about identifying the essential components of missions and accepting that different countries might need different approaches. As matters stand, the emerging landscape of public missions is characterized by a re-labeling or repurposing of existing institutions and policies, with more stuttering starts than rapid takeoffs. But that is okay. We should not expect a radical change in policymaking strategies to happen overnight, or even over one electoral cycle.

Particularly in liberal democracies, ambitious change requires engagement across a wide range of constituencies to secure public buy-in, and to ensure that the benefits will be widely shared. The paradox at the heart of mission-driven government is that it pursues ambitious, clearly articulated policy goals through myriad policies and programs based on experimentation.

This embrace of experimentation is what separates today’s missions from the missions of the moonshot era (though it does echo the Roosevelt administration’s experimental approach during the 1930s New Deal). Major societal challenges, such as the urgent need to create more equitable and sustainable food systems, cannot be tackled the same way as a moon landing. Such systems consist of multiple technological dimensions (in the case of food, these include everything from energy to waste management), and involve widespread and often disconnected agents and an array of cultural norms, values, and habits…(More)”.

First EU rulebook to protect media independence and pluralism enters into force

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, the European Media Freedom Act, a new set of unprecedented rules to protect media independence and pluralism, enters into force.

This new legislation provides safeguards against political interference in editorial decisions and against surveillance of journalists. The Act guarantees that media can operate more easily in the internal market and online. Additionally, the regulation also aims to secure the independence and stable funding of public service media, as well as the transparency of both media ownership and allocation of state advertising.

Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, said:

 “For the first time ever, the EU has a law to protect media freedom. The EU recognises that journalists play an essential role for democracy and should be protected. I call on Member States to implement the new rules as soon as possible.”

Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, added:

“Media companies play a vital role in our democracies but are confronted with falling revenues, threats to media freedom and pluralism and a patchwork of different national rules. Thanks to the European Media Freedom Act, media companies will enjoy common safeguards at EU level to guarantee a plurality of voices and be able to better benefit from the opportunities of operating in our single market without any interference, be it private or public.”

Proposed by the Commission in September 2022, this Regulation puts in place several protections for the right to media plurality becoming applicable within 6 months. More details on the timeline for its application are available in this infographic. ..(More)”.

Technology and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Antony J. Blinken: “Today’s revolutions in technology are at the heart of our competition with geopolitical rivals. They pose a real test to our security. And they also represent an engine of historic possibility – for our economies, for our democracies, for our people, for our planet.

Put another way: Security, stability, prosperity – they are no longer solely analog matters.

The test before us is whether we can harness the power of this era of disruption and channel it into greater stability, greater prosperity, greater opportunity.

President Biden is determined not just to pass this “tech test,” but to ace it.

Our ability to design, to develop, to deploy technologies will determine our capacity to shape the tech future. And naturally, operating from a position of strength better positions us to set standards and advance norms around the world.

But our advantage comes not just from our domestic strength.

It comes from our solidarity with the majority of the world that shares our vision for a vibrant, open, and secure technological future, and from an unmatched network of allies and partners with whom we can work in common cause to pass the “tech test.”

We’re committed not to “digital sovereignty” but “digital solidarity.”

On May 6, the State Department unveiled the U.S. International Cyberspace and Digital Strategy, which treats digital solidarity as our North Star. Solidarity informs our approach not only to digital technologies, but to all key foundational technologies.

So what I’d like to do now is share with you five ways that we’re putting this into practice.

First, we’re harnessing technology for the betterment not just of our people and our friends, but of all humanity.

The United States believes emerging and foundational technologies can and should be used to drive development and prosperity, to promote respect for human rights, to solve shared global challenges.

Some of our strategic rivals are working toward a very different goal. They’re using digital technologies and genomic data collection to surveil their people, to repress human rights.

Pretty much everywhere I go, I hear from government officials and citizens alike about their concerns about these dystopian uses of technology. And I also hear an abiding commitment to our affirmative vision and to the embrace of technology as a pathway to modernization and opportunity.

Our job is to use diplomacy to try to grow this consensus even further – to internationalize and institutionalize our vision of “tech for good.”..(More)”.

‘Positive deviance’ and the power of outliers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bloomberg Cities Network: “Groundbreaking solutions in cities are often the result of visionary mayoral leadership. But sometimes certain communities achieve significantly better outcomes than their similarly resourced neighbors—and the underlying reasons may not be immediately obvious to local leaders. Ravi Gurumurthy, CEO of the global innovation foundation Nesta, believes that this variation in quality of life at a hyper-local level is something worth paying a lot more attention to. 

“The fastest way for us to improve people’s lives will be to mine that variation and really understand what is going on,” he says.    

This concept, known as “positive deviance,” describes individuals or communities that achieve remarkable success or exhibit highly effective behaviors despite facing the same constraints as their peers. With a long history of use in international development, positive deviance is now gaining traction among city leaders as a source of solutions to stubborn urban challenges.  

Here’s a closer look at what it’s about, and how it’s already being used to uplift promising approaches in cities. 

What is positive deviance? 

Positive deviance first gained widespread attention because of a remarkable success story in 1990s Vietnam. Much of the country was suffering from a malnutrition crisis, and efforts to design and implement new solutions were coming up short. But aid workers landed on a breakthrough by paying closer attention to children who already appeared larger and healthier than their peers.  

It turned out these children were being fed different diets—leaning more heavily on shrimp and crab, for example, which were widely accessible but less often fed to young people. These children also were being fed more frequently, in smaller meals, throughout the day—an intervention that, again, did not require parents to have more resources so much as to differently use what was universally available.  

When these practices—feeding kids shellfish and making meals smaller and more frequent—were replicated, malnutrition plummeted…(More)”

Digital ethnography: A qualitative approach to digital cultures, spaces, and socialites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Coppélie Cocq and Evelina Liliequist: “This paper introduces principles for the application and challenges of small data ethnography in digital research. It discusses the need to incorporate ethics in every step of the research process. As teachers and researchers within the digital humanities, we argue for the value of a qualitative approach to digital contents, spaces, and phenomena. This article is relevant as a guide for students and researchers whose studies examine digital practices, phenomena, and social communities that occur in, through, or in relation to digital contexts…(More)”. See also: Digital Ethnography Data Innovation Primer.

How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Anna Andersen: “Content design can have real consequences — for democracy, even…

To run for President of Iceland, you need to be an Icelandic citizen, at least 35 years old, and have 1,500 endorsements.

For the first time in Icelandic history, this endorsement process is digital. Instead of collecting all their signatures on paper the old-fashioned way, candidates can now send people to https://island.is/forsetaframbod to submit their endorsement.

This change has, also for the first time in Icelandic history, given the nation a clear window into who is trying to run — and it’s a remarkably large number. To date, 82 people are collecting endorsements, including a comedian, a model, the world’s first double-arm transplant receiver, and my aunt Helga.

Many of these people are seriously vying for president (yep, my aunt Helga), some of them have undoubtedly signed up as a joke (nope, not the comedian), and at least 11 of them accidentally registered and had no idea that they were collecting endorsements for their candidacy.

“I’m definitely not about to run for president, this was just an accident,” one person told a reporter after having a good laugh about it.

“That’s hilarious!” another person said, thanking the reporter for letting them know that they were in the running.

As a content designer, I was intrigued. How could so many people accidentally start a campaign for President of Iceland?

It turns out, the answer largely has to do with content design.Presidential hopefuls were sending people a link to a page where they could be endorsed, but instead of endorsing the candidate, some people accidentally registered to be a candidate…(More)”.

A Literature Review on the Paradoxes of Public Interest in Spatial Planning within Urban Settings with Diverse Stakeholders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Danai Machakaire and Masilonyane Mokhele: “The concept of public interest legitimises the planning profession, provides a foundational principle, and serves as an ethical norm for planners. However, critical discourses highlight the problems of the assumptions underlying the notion of public interest in spatial planning. Using an explorative literature review approach, the article aims to analyse various interpretations and applications of public interest in spatial planning. The literature search process, conducted between August and November 2023, targeted journal articles and books published in English and focused on the online databases of Academic Search Premier, Scopus, and Google Scholar. The final selected literature comprised 71 sources. The literature showed that diverse conceptualisations of public interest complicate the ways spatial planners and authorities incorporate it in planning tools, processes, and products. This article concludes by arguing that the prospects of achieving a single definition of the public interest concept are slim and may not be necessary given the heterogeneous conceptualisation and the multiple operational contexts of public interest. The article recommends the development of context-based analytical frameworks to establish linkages that would lead towards the equitable inclusion of public interest in spatial planning…(More)”.

Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jules Roscoe: “Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has “ruwiki” in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. 

The new articles exclude mentions of “foreign agents,” the Russian government’s designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. Prominent “foreign agents” have included a foundation created by Alexei Navalny, a famed Russian opposition leader who died in prison in February, and Memorial, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of Soviet terror victims, which was liquidated in 2022. The news was first reported by Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian news outlet that relocated to Latvia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was also picked up by Signpost, a publication that follows Wikimedia goings-on.

Both Ruviki articles about these agents include disclaimers about their status as foreign agents. Navalny’s article states he is a “video blogger” known for “involvement in extremist activity or terrorism.” It is worth mentioning that his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, firmly believes he was killed. …(More)”.

First post: A history of online public messaging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeremy Reimer: From BBS to Facebook, here’s how messaging platforms have changed over the years…

People have been leaving public messages since the first artists painted hunting scenes on cave walls. But it was the invention of electricity that forever changed the way we talked to each other. In 1844, the first message was sent via telegraph. Samuel Morse, who created the binary Morse Code decades before electronic computers were even possible, tapped out, “What hath God wrought?” It was a prophetic first post.

World War II accelerated the invention of digital computers, but they were primarily single-use machines, designed to calculate artillery firing tables or solve scientific problems. As computers got more powerful, the idea of time-sharing became attractive. Computers were expensive, and they spent most of their time idle, waiting for a user to enter keystrokes at a terminal. Time-sharing allowed many people to interact with a single computer at the same time…(More)”.

Debugging Tech Journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Timothy B. Lee: “A huge proportion of tech journalism is characterized by scandals, sensationalism, and shoddy research. Can we fix it?

In November, a few days after Sam Altman was fired — and then rehired — as CEO of OpenAI, Reuters reported on a letter that may have played a role in Altman’s ouster. Several staffers reportedly wrote to the board of directors warning about “a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.”

The discovery: an AI system called Q* that can solve grade-school math problems.

“Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development,” the Reuters journalists wrote. Large language models are “good at writing and language translation,” but “conquering the ability to do math — where there is only one right answer — implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence.”

This was a bit of a head-scratcher. Computers have been able to perform arithmetic at superhuman levels for decades. The Q* project was reportedly focused on word problems, which have historically been harder than arithmetic for computers to solve. Still, it’s not obvious that solving them would unlock human-level intelligence.

The Reuters article left readers with a vague impression that Q could be a huge breakthrough in AI — one that might even “threaten humanity.” But it didn’t provide readers with the context to understand what Q actually was — or to evaluate whether feverish speculation about it was justified.

For example, the Reuters article didn’t mention research OpenAI published last May describing a technique for solving math problems by breaking them down into small steps. In a December article, I dug into this and other recent research to help to illuminate what OpenAI is likely working on: a framework that would enable AI systems to search through a large space of possible solutions to a problem…(More)”.