This City Pilots Web3 Quadratic Funding for Public Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Makoto Takahiro: “The city of Split, Croatia is piloting an innovative new system for deciding how to fund municipal infrastructure projects. Called “quadratic funding,” the mechanism aims to fairly account for both public and private preferences when allocating limited budget resources.

A coalition of organizations including BlockSplit, Funding the Commons, Gitcoin, and the City of Split launched the Municipal Quadratic Funding Initiative in September 2023. The project goals include implementing quadratic funding for prioritizing public spending, utilizing web3 tools to increase transparency and participation, and demonstrating the potential of these technologies to improve legacy processes.

If successful, the model could scale to other towns and cities or inspire additional quadratic funding experiments.

The partners believe that the transparency and configurability of blockchain systems make them well-suited to quadratic funding applications.

Quadratic funding mathematically accounts for the intensity of demand for public goods. Groups can create projects which individuals can support financially. The amount of money ultimately directed to each proposal is based on the square of support received. This means that projects attracting larger numbers of smaller contributions can compete with those receiving fewer large donations.

In this way, quadratic funding aims to reflect both willingness to pay and breadth of support in funding decisions. It attempts to break tendency towards corruption where influential groups lobby for their niche interests. The goal is a fairer allocation suited to the whole community’s preferences.

The initiative will build on open source quadratic funding infrastructure already deployed for other uses like funding public goods on Ethereum. Practical web3 tools can help teadministration manage funding rounds and disburse awards…(More)”.

Designing an instrument for scaling public sector innovations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mirte A R van Hout, Rik B Braams, Paul Meijer, and Albert J Meijer: “Governments worldwide invest in developing and diffusing innovations to deal with wicked problems. While experiments and pilots flourish, governments struggle to successfully scale innovations. Public sector scaling remains understudied, and scholarly suggestions for scaling trajectories are lacking. Following a design approach, this research develops an academically grounded, practice-oriented scaling instrument for planning and reflecting on the scaling of public sector innovations. We design this instrument based on the academic literature, an empirical analysis of three scaling projects at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and six focus groups with practitioners. This research proposes a context-specific and iterative understanding of scaling processes and contributes a typology of scaling barriers and an additional scaling strategy to the literature. The presented instrument increases our academic understanding of scaling and enables teams of policymakers, in cooperation with stakeholders, to plan and reflect on a context-specific scaling pathway for public sector innovations…(More)”.

Digital transformation of public services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Brief by Interreg Europe: “In a world of digital advancements, the public sector must undergo a comprehensive digital transformation to enhance service delivery efficiency, improve governance, foster innovation and increase citizen satisfaction.

The European Union is playing a leading role and has been actively developing policy frameworks for the digitalisation of the public sector. This policy brief provides a general overview of the most relevant initiatives, regulations, and strategies of the European Union, which are shaping Europe’s digital future.

The European Union’s strategy for the digital transformation of public services is centred on enhancing accessibility, efficiency, and user-centricity. This strategy also promotes interoperability among Member States, fostering seamless cross-border interactions. Privacy and security measures are integral to building trust in digital public services, with a focus on data protection and cybersecurity. Ultimately, the goal is to create a cohesive, digitally advanced public service ecosystem throughout the EU, with the active participation of the private sector (GovTech).

This policy brief outlines key policy improvements, good practices and recommendations, stemming from the Interreg Europe projects BEST DIH, BETTER, ENAIBLER, Next2Met, Digital Regions, Digitourism, Inno Provement, ERUDITE, iBuy and Carpe Digem, to inform and guide policymakers to embark upon digital transformation processes successfully, as well as encouraging greater interregional cooperation…(More)”.

Third Millennium Thinking: Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell and Robert MacCoun: “In our deluge of information, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish the revelatory from the contradictory. How do we make health decisions in the face of conflicting medical advice? Does the research cited in that article even show what the authors claim? How can we navigate the next Thanksgiving discussion with our in-laws, who follow completely different experts on the topic of climate change?

In Third Millennium Thinking, a physicist, a psychologist, and a philosopher introduce readers to the tools and frameworks that scientists have developed to keep from fooling themselves, to understand the world, and to make decisions. We can all borrow these trust-building techniques to tackle problems both big and small.

Readers will learn: 

  • How to achieve a ground-level understanding of the facts of the modern world
  • How to chart a course through a profusion of possibilities  
  • How to work together to take on the challenges we face today
  • And much more

Using provocative thought exercises, jargon-free language, and vivid illustrations drawn from history, daily life, and scientists’ insider stories, Third Millennium Thinking offers a novel approach for readers to make sense of the nonsense…(More)”

EBP+: Integrating science into policy evaluation using Evidential Pluralism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Joe Jones, Alexandra Trofimov, Michael Wilde & Jon Williamson: “…While the need to integrate scientific evidence in policymaking is clear, there isn’t a universally accepted framework for doing so in practice. Orthodox evidence-based approaches take Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) as the gold standard of evidence. Others argue that social policy issues require theory-based methods to understand the complexities of policy interventions. These divisions may only further decrease trust in science at this critical time.

EBP+ offers a broader framework within which both orthodox and theory-based methods can sit. EBP+ also provides a systematic account of how to integrate and evaluate these different types of evidence. EBP+ can offer consistency and objectivity in policy evaluation, and could yield a unified approach that increases public trust in scientifically-informed policy…

EBP+ is motivated by Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical theory of causal enquiry that has been developed over the last 15 years. Evidential Pluralism encompasses two key claims. The first, object pluralism, says that establishing that A is a cause of B (e.g., that a policy intervention causes a specific outcome) requires establishing both that A and B are appropriately correlated and that there is some mechanism which links the two and which can account for the extent of the correlation. The second claim, study pluralism, maintains that assessing whether A is a cause of B requires assessing both association studies (studies that repeatedly measure A and B, together with potential confounders, to measure their association) and mechanistic studies (studies of features of the mechanisms linking A to B), where available…(More)”.

A diagrammatic representation of Evidential Pluralism
Evidential Pluralism (© Jon Williamson)

The Power of Noticing What Was Always There

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tali Sharot and Cass R. Sunstein: “Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They get used to dirty air. They stay in abusive relationships. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before.

But what if we could find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don’t try to change?

Now, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor (and presidential advisor) Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate” at the office, in the bedroom, at the store, on social media, and in the voting booth. This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption—to seeing, feeling, and noticing again—is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with—or even just stepping back and imagining change—you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good…(More)”.

The Non-Coherence Theory of Digital Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mart Susi: “…offers a novel non-coherence theory of digital human rights to explain the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, when moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent, impacting core concepts such as transparency, legal certainty and foreseeability. Susi analyses the ‘loss in transposition’ of some core features of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The non-coherence theory is used to explore key human rights theoretical concepts, such as the network society approach, the capabilities approach, transversality, and self-normativity, and it is also applied to e-state and artificial intelligence, challenging the idea of the sameness of rights…(More)”.

Open Government Products (OGP)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “We are an experimental development team that builds technology for the public good. This includes everything from building better apps for citizens to automating the internal operations of public agencies. Our role is to accelerate the digital transformation of the Singapore Government by being a space where it can experiment with new tech practices, including new technologies, management techniques, corporate systems, and even cultural norms. Our end goal is that through our work, Singapore becomes a model of how governments can use technology to improve the public good…(More)”.

The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Olivier Roy: “Are we confronting a new culture—global, online, individualistic? Or is our existing concept of culture in crisis, as explicit, normative systems replace implicit, social values?

Olivier Roy’s new book explains today’s fractures via the extension of individual political and sexual freedoms from the 1960s. For Roy, twentieth-century youth culture disconnected traditional political protest from class, region or ethnicity, fashioning an identity premised on repudiation rather than inheritance of shared history or values. Having spread across generations under neoliberalism and the internet, youth culture is now individualised, ersatz.

Without a shared culture, everything becomes an explicit code of how to speak and act, often online. Identities are now defined by socially fragmenting personal traits, creating affinity-based sub-cultures seeking safe spaces: universities for the left, gated communities and hard borders for the right.

Increased left- and right-wing references to ‘identity’ fail to confront this deeper crisis of culture and community. Our only option, Roy argues, is to restore social bonds at the grassroots or citizenship level…(More)”.

Narratives Online. Shared Stories in Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ruth Page: “Stories are shared by millions of people online every day. They post and re-post interactions as they re-tell and respond to large-scale mediated events. These stories are important as they can bring people together, or polarise them in opposing groups. Narratives Online explores this new genre – the shared story – and uses carefully chosen case-studies to illustrate the complex processes of sharing as they are shaped by four international social media contexts: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Building on discourse analytic research, Ruth Page develops a new framework – ‘Mediated Narrative Analysis’ – to address the large scale, multimodal nature of online narratives, helping researchers interpret the micro- and macro-level politics that are played out in computer-mediated communication…(More)”.