GovTech: a new driver of citizen participation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Digital Future Society: “At a time when public trust in institutions is low, governments worldwide are seeking new ways to involve citizens in policymaking. But does technology help or hinder when it comes to participation?

GovTech refers to an emerging public innovation ecosystem in which startups and SMEs provide tech-based products and services to public sector clients.

In this third Digital Future Society report, discover the challenges and opportunities of applying GovTech to transform government-citizen relationships.

The report features 4 in-depth case studies of tech-based participation tools that show how a thriving GovTech ecosystem can facilitate collective problem solving and drive citizen participation at all levels of government….(More)”.

Toolkit to Help Community Leaders Drive Sustainable, Inclusive Growth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth: “… is unveiling a groundbreaking suite of tools that will provide local leaders with timely data-driven insights on the current state of and potential for inclusive growth in their communities. The announcement comes as private and public sector leaders gather in Washington for the inaugural Global Inclusive Growth Summit.

For the first time the new Inclusive Growth Toolkit brings together a clear, simple view of social and economic growth in underserved communities across the U.S., at the census-tract level. This was created in response to growing demand from community leaders for more evidence-based insights, to help them steer impact investment dollars to locally-led economic development initiatives, unlock the potential of neighborhoods, and improve quality of life for all.    

The initial design of the toolkit is focused on driving sustainable growth for the 37+ million people living in the 8700+ QOZs throughout the United States. This comprehensive picture reveals that neighborhoods can look very different and may require different types of interventions to achieve successful and sustainable growth.

The Inclusive Growth Toolkit includes:

  • The Inclusive Growth Score – an interactive online map where users can view measures of inclusion and growth and then download a PDF Scorecard for any of the QOZs at census tract level.

A deep-dive analytics consultancy service that provides community leaders with customized insights to inform policy decisions, prospectus development, and impact investor discussions….(More)”.

Rethinking Encryption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jim Baker at Lawfare: “…Public safety officials should continue to highlight instances where they find that encryption hinders their ability to effectively and efficiently protect society so that the public and lawmakers understand the trade-offs they are allowing. To do this, the Justice Department should, for example, file an annual public report describing, as best it can, the continuing nature and scope of the going dark problem. If necessary, it can also file a classified annual report with the appropriate congressional committees.

But, for the reasons discussed above, public safety officials should also become among the strongest supporters of widely available strong encryption.

I know full well that this approach will be a bitter pill for some in law enforcement and other public safety fields to swallow, and many people will reject it outright. It may make some of my former colleagues angry at me. I expect that some will say that I’m simply joining others who have left the government and switched sides on encryption to curry favor with the tech sector in order to get a job. That is wrong. My dim views about cybersecurity risks, China and Huawei are essentially the same as those that I held while in government. I also think that my overall approach on encryption today—as well as my frustration with Congress—is generally consistent with the approach I had while I was in government.

I have long said—as I do here—that encryption poses real challenges for public safety officials; that any proposed technical solution must properly balance all of the competing equities; and that (absent an unlikely definitive judicial ruling as a result of litigation) Congress must change the law to resolve the issue. What has changed is my acceptance of, or perhaps resignation to, the fact that Congress is unlikely to act, as well as my assessment that the relevant cybersecurity risks to society have grown disproportionately over the years when compared with other risks….(More)”.

The Next Step for Human-Centered Design in Global Public Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tracy Johnson, Jaspal S. Sandhu & Nikki Tyler at SSIR : “How do we select the right design partner?” “Where can I find evidence that design really works?” “Can design have any impact beyond products?” These are real questions that we’ve been asked by our public health colleagues who have been exposed to human-centered design. This deeper curiosity indicates a shift in the conversation around human-centered design, compared with common perceptions as recently as five years ago.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in organizations that use human-centered design for innovation and improvement in health care. However, there have been challenges in determining how to best integrate design into current ways of working. Unfortunately, these challenges have been met with an all-or-nothing response.

In reality, anyone thinking of applying design concepts must first decide how deeply they want design to be integrated into a project. The DesignforHealth community—launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Center for Innovation and Impact at USAID—defines three types of design integration: spark, ingredient, or end-to-end.

As a spark, design can be the catalyst for teams to work creatively and unlock innovation.

Design can be an ingredient that helps improve an existing product. Using design end-to-end in the development process can address a complex concept such as social vulnerability.

As the field of design in health matures, the next phase will require support for “design consumers.” These are non-designers who take part in a design approach, whether as an inspiring spark, a key ingredient in an established process, or an end-to-end approach.

Here are three important considerations that will help design consumers make the critical decisions that are needed before embarking on their next design journey….(More)”.

Democracy Beyond Elections

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United Nations Democracy Fund: “newDemocracy and the United Nations Democracy Fund have recently announced a 2-year agreement centred on doing democracy differently. Making democracies more inclusive requires bold and innovative reforms to bring the young, the poor, and minorities into the political system to start to address the crisis of political representation which sees people becoming less and less engaged.

newDemocracy has been selected to develop and distribute a handbook on ‘Democracy Beyond Elections’ designed to show how nations at various levels of development can apply the principles of representation and deliberation in ways that are appropriate for their economic and educational circumstances. This handbook is now available to read online here, and available for download here….(More)”.

Private Law, Nudging and Behavioural Economic Analysis: The Mandated-Choice Model

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Antonios Karampatzos: “Offering a fresh perspective on “nudging”, this book uses legal paternalism to explore how legal systems may promote good policies without ignoring personal autonomy.

It suggests that the dilemma between inefficient opt-in rules and autonomy restricting opt-out schemes fails to realistically capture the span of options available to the policy maker. There is a third path, namely the ‘mandated-choice model’. The book is dedicated to presenting this model and exploring its great potential. Contract law, consumer protection, products safety and regulatory problems such as organ donation or excessive borrowing are the setting for the discussion. Familiarising the reader with a hot debate on paternalism, behavioural economics and private law, this book takes a further step and links this behavioural law and economics discussion with philosophical considerations to shed a light on modern challenges, such as organ donation or consumers protection, by adopting an openly interdisciplinary approach….(More)”.

Computers have an unlikely origin story: the 1890 census

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lindsey Roberts at FastCompany: “The U.S. Constitution requires that a population count be conducted at the beginning of every decade.

This census has always been charged with political significance and continues to be. That’s clear from the controversy over the conduct of the upcoming 2020 census.

But it’s less widely known how important the census has been in developing the U.S. computer industry, a story that I tell in my new book, Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans Through History....

The only use of the census clearly specified in the Constitution is to allocate seats in the House of Representatives. More populous states get more seats.

A minimalist interpretation of the census mission would require reporting only the overall population of each state. But the census has never confined itself to this.

A complicating factor emerged right at the beginning, with the Constitution’s distinction between “free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons.” This was the Founding Fathers’ infamous mealy-mouthed compromise between those states with a large number of enslaved persons and those states where relatively few lived.

The first census, in 1790, also made nonconstitutionally mandated distinctions by age and sex. In subsequent decades, many other personal attributes were probed as well: occupational status, marital status, educational status, place of birth, and so on….

John Shaw Billings, a physician assigned to assist the Census Office with compiling health statistics, had closely observed the immense tabulation efforts required to deal with the raw data of 1880. He expressed his concerns to a young mechanical engineer assisting with the census, Herman Hollerith, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Mines.

On September 23, 1884, the U.S. Patent Office recorded a submission from the 24-year-old Hollerith, titled “Art of Compiling Statistics.”

By progressively improving the ideas of this initial submission, Hollerith would decisively win an 1889 competition to improve the processing of the 1890 census.

The technological solutions devised by Hollerith involved a suite of mechanical and electrical devices….After his census success, Hollerith went into business selling this technology. The company he founded would, after he retired, become International Business Machines—IBM. IBM led the way in perfecting card technology for recording and tabulating large sets of data for a variety of purposes….(More)”

AI script finds bias in movies before production starts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “The GD-IQ (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient) Spellcheck for Bias analysis tool reviews film and television scripts for equality and diversity. Geena Davis, the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, recently announced a yearlong pilot programme with Walt Disney Studios. The Spellcheck for Bias tool will be used throughout the studio’s development process.

Funded by Google, the GD-IQ uses audio-visual processing technologies from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering together with Google’s machine learning capabilities. 

The tool’s analysis reveals the percentages of representation and dialogue broken down into categories of gender, race, LGBTQIA and disability representation. The analysis also highlights non-gender identified speaking characters that could help improve equality and diversity. 

Designed to help identify unconscious bias before it becomes a publicly consumed piece of media, the tool also ranks the sophistication of the characters’ vocabulary and their relative level of power within the story.

The first study of film and television representation using the GD-IQ examined the top 200 grossing, non-animated films of 2014 and 2015. Unsurprisingly, the more diverse and equal a film’s characters were, the more money the film earned. …(More)”.

World stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia, warns UN human rights expert

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UN Press Release: “A UN human rights expert has expressed concerns about the emergence of the “digital welfare state”, saying that all too often the real motives behind such programs are to slash welfare spending, set up intrusive government surveillance systems and generate profits for private corporate interests.

“As humankind moves, perhaps inexorably, towards the digital welfare future it needs to alter course significantly and rapidly to avoid stumbling zombie-like into a digital welfare dystopia,” the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, says in a report to be presented to the General Assembly on Friday.

The digital welfare state is commonly presented as an altruistic and noble enterprise designed to ensure that citizens benefit from new technologies, experience more efficient government, and enjoy higher levels of well-being. But, Alston said, the digitization of welfare systems has very often been used to promote deep reductions in the overall welfare budget, a narrowing of the beneficiary pool, the elimination of some services, the introduction of demanding and intrusive forms of conditionality, the pursuit of behavioural modification goals, the imposition of stronger sanctions regimes, and a complete reversal of the traditional notion that the state should be accountable to the individual….(More)”.

The Nature of Moral Motivation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edge Interview with Patricia S. Churchland: “Although we have made tremendous progress in understanding many details of the brain, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. What’s relevant to me, as somebody who’s interested in the nature of moral behavior, is how little we understand about the nature of reasoning, or if I may use a different expression, problem solving. I don’t know what reasoning is. For a long time, people seemed to think it was completely separate from emotion, but we know that can’t be true.

The nature of problem solving is something that is still very much in the pioneering stages in neuroscience. It’s a place where neuroscience and psychology can cooperate to get interesting experimental paradigms so that we can attack the question: How is it that, out of all these constraints and factors, a reasonable decision can be made? That’s a tough one. It will require us to find good experimental paradigms and new techniques….(More)”.