Reimagining Democracy: What if votes were a currency? A crypto-currency?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Opinion piece by Praphul Chandra: “… The first key tenet of this article is that the institution of representative democracy is a severely limited realization of democratic principles. These limitations span three dimensions:

First, citizen representation is extremely limited. The number of individuals whose preference an elected representative is supposed to represent is so large as to be essentially meaningless.

The problem is exacerbated in a rapidly urbanizing world with increasing population densities but without a corresponding increase in the number of representatives. Furthermore, since urban settings often have individuals from very different cultural backgrounds, their preferences are diverse too.

Is it realistic to expect that a single individual would be able to represent the preferences of such large & diverse communities?

Second, elected representatives have limited accountability. The only opportunity that citizens have to hold elected representatives accountable is often years away — ample time for incidents to be forgotten and perceptions to be manipulated. Since human memory over-emphasizes the recent past, elected representatives manipulate perception of their performance by populist measures closer to forthcoming elections.

Third, citizen cognition is not leveraged. The current model where default participation is limited to choosing representatives every few years does not engage the intelligence of citizens in solving the societal challenges we face today. Instead, it treats citizens as consumers offering them a menu card to choose their favourite representative.

To summarize, representative democracy does not scale well. With our societies becoming denser, more interconnected and more complex, the traditional tools of democracy are no longer effective.

Design Choices of Representative Democracy: Consider the following thought experiment: what would happen if we think of votes as a currency? Let’s call such a voting currency — GovCoin. In today’s representative democracy,

(i) GovCoins are in short supply — one citizen gets one GovCoin (vote) every 4–5 years.

(ii) GovCoins (Votes) have a very high negative rate: if you do not use them on election day, they lose all value.

(iii) GovCoins (Votes) are “accepted” by very few people: you can give your GovCoins to only pre-selected “candidates”

These design choices reflect fundamental design choices of representative democracy — they were well suited for the time when they were designed:

Since governance needs continuity and since elections were a costly and time-consuming exercise, citizens elected representatives once every 4–5 years. This also meant that elections had to be coordinated — so participation was coordinated to a particular election day requiring citizens to vote simultaneously.

Since the number of people who were interested in politics as a full-time profession was limited, the choice set of representatives was limited to a few candidates.

Are these design choices valid today? Do we really need citizens physically travelling to polling booths? With today’s technology? Must the choice of citizen participation in governance be binary: either jump in full time or be limited to vote once every 4–5 years? Aren’t there other forms of participation in this spectrum? Is limiting participation the only way to ensure governance continuity?

Rethinking Democracy: What if we reconsider the design choices of democracy? Let’s say we:

(i) increase the supply of GovCoins so that every citizen gets one unit every month;

(ii) relax the negative rate so that even if you do not “use” your GovCoin, you do not lose it i.e. you can accumulate GovCoins and use them at a later time;

(iii) enable you to give your GovCoins to anyone or any public issue / project.

What would be the impact of these design choices?

By increasing the supply of GovCoins, we inject liquidity into the system so that information (about citizens’ preferences & beliefs) can flow more fluidly. This effectively increases the participation potential of citizens in governance. Rather than limiting participation to once every 4–5 years, citizens can participate as much and as often as they want. This is a fundamental change when we consider institutions as information processing systems.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins to anyone, we realize a form of liquid democracy where I can delegate my influence to you — maybe because I trust your judgement and believe that your choice will be beneficial to me as well. In effect, we have changed the default option of participation from ‘opt out’ to ‘opt in’ — every citizen can receive GovCoins from every other citizen. The total GovCoins a citizen holds is a measure of how much influence she holds in democratic decisions. We evolve from a binary system (elected representative or citizen) to a continuous spectrum where your GovCoin ‘wealth’ is measure of your social capital.

By enabling citizens to transfer GovCoins directly to a policy decision, we realize a form of direct democracy where citizens can express their preferences (and the strength of their preferences) on an issue directly rather than relying on a representative to do so.

By allowing citizens to accumulate GovCoins, we allow them to participate when they want. If I feel strongly about an issue, I can spend my GovCoins and influence this decision; If I am indifferent about an issue, I hold on to my GovCoins so that I can have a larger influence in future decisions. A small negative interest rate on GovCoins may still be needed to ensure that (i) citizens do not hoard the currency and (ii) to ensure that net influence of any individual is finite and time bounded.

Realizing Democracy: Given today’s technology landscape, realizing a democracy with new design choices is no longer a pipe dream. The potential to do this is here and now. A key enabling technology is blockchains (or Distributed Ledger Technologies) which allow the creation of new currencies. Implementing votes as a currency opens the door to realizing new forms of democracy….(More)”.

Can Civic Tech Save Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Study by L’Aterlier BNP Paribas: “In the US, only 57% of the total voting population voted during the last American presidential elections. Nowadays, 1.57 million civic organizations encourage the American people to express their concerns to the government and public authorities outside of ballot boxes. The internet has indeed created other ways to mobilize people. And Barack Obama’s presidency (January 2009 – January 2017) made open-government a high priority with three initiatives aimed to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration with the government.

Thus, Civic tech are more and more efficient to improve citizen engagement. But what are the issues, impact and remaining challenges of this new ecosystem? How is technology actually empowering the citizen? You will find answers to these questions (and to many more) in our study!…(More)”.

Why the deliberative democracy framework doesn’t quite work for me

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Peter Levine: “In some ways, I came of age in the field of deliberative democracy. I had an internship at the Kettering Foundation when I was a college sophomore (when the foundation defined itself more purely in deliberative terms than it does today). By that time, I had already taken a philosophy seminar on the great deliberative theorist Jürgen Habermas. In the three decades since then, I’ve served on the boards of Kettering, Everyday Democracy, and AmericaSPEAKS. I wrote a book with “deliberative democracy” in its subtitle and co-edited The Deliberative Democracy Handbook with John Gastil. I was one of many co-founders of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and have served on its steering committee since the last century.

None of these groups is committed to deliberation in a narrow sense (although opinions differ within the field). For me, these are the main limitations of focusing on deliberation as the central topic or unit of analysis:

Deliberative values are worthy ones, but they are not the only worthy ones. My own values would also include personal liberties and nonnegotiable rights, concerns for nature, and virtues of the inner life, such as equanimity and personal development. Stating my values doesn’t substitute for an argument, but it may suffice to make the point that deliberation is not the only good thing, and it’s in tension with other goods. A deliberative democrat will reply that I should discuss my values with other people. And so I should–but that doesn’t mean that the norms intrinsic to deliberation trump all other norms. Nor are fellow citizens the only sources of guidance; introspecting, reading ancient texts, consulting legal precedents, and conducting scientific experiments are helpful, too.

By the same token, deliberative virtues are not the only civic virtues. Deliberation is about discourse–talking and listening–so its virtues are discursive ones: humility and openness, empathy, sincerity, and perhaps eloquence. (The list is contested.) But a good citizen may be hard-working, physically courageous, or aesthetically creative instead of especially good at deliberating. The people who physically built the Athenian agora were as important as the people who exchanged ideas in it.

Deliberation depends on social organization. In order for people to have something that’s worth discussing, they must already make, control, or influence things of value together. That requires social organization, whether in the form of a market, a commons, a voluntary association, a functional network, or a political institution. Discussion rarely precedes these forms, because people can’t and won’t come together in completely amorphous groupings. Discussion is more typically a moment in an ongoing process of governance. Often a small group of founders chooses the rules-in-use that create a group in which deliberation can occur.

Thus we should ask about leadership and rules, not just about deliberation….(More)”.

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Virginia Eubanks: “The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values….(More)”.

Liberal Democracy and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Davison Hunter in The Hedgehog Review: “…while institutions tend to be stable and enduring, even as they evolve, no institution is permanent or indefinitely fixable. The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed. What if the political problems we are rightly worried about are actually symptoms of a deeper problem for which there is no easy or obvious remedy?

These are necessarily historical questions. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and North America were largely products of the Enlightenment project, reflecting all of its highest ideals, contradictions, hopes, and inconsistencies. It underwrote the project of modern liberalism, which, for all of its flaws and failures, can still boast of some of the greatest achievements in human history. As the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, observed, democracy is the political form of the humane ideal.

Yet with the advantage of twenty-first-century hindsight, we can now see that the Enlightenment project has been unraveling for some time, and that what we are witnessing today are likely the political consequences of that unraveling. Any possibility of “fixing” what ails late-modern American democracy has to take the full measure of this transformation in the deep structures of American and Western political culture. While politics can give expression to and defend a particular social order, it cannot direct it. As Michael Oakeshott famously said, “Political activity may have given us Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, but it did not give us the contents of these documents, which came from a stratum of social thought far too deep to be influenced by the actions of politicians.”1

What I am driving at is made clearer by the distinction between the politics of culture and the culture of politics. The politics of culture refers to the contestation of power over cultural issues. This would include the mobilization of parties and rank-and-file support, the organization of leadership, the formation of special-interest coalitions, and the manipulation of public rhetoric on matters reflecting the symbols or ideals at the heart of a group’s collective identity. This is what most people think about when they use the term culture war. In this case, culture war is the accumulation of political conflicts over issues like abortion, gay rights, or federal funding of the humanities and arts. Though culture is implicated at every level, the politics of culture is primarily about politics.

The culture of politics, by contrast, refers to the symbolic environment in which political institutions are embedded and political action occurs. This symbolic environment is constituted by the basic frameworks of implicit meaning that make particular political arrangements understandable or incomprehensible, desirable or reprehensible. These frameworks constitute a culture’s “deep structure.” Absent a deep structure, certain political institutions and practices simply do not make any sense.

This distinction is essential to making sense of our political moment….(More)”.

A Guide to Chicago’s Array of Things Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean Thornton at Data-Smart City Solutions: “The 606, Chicago’s rails-to-trails project that stretches for 4.2 miles on the city’s northwest side, has been popular with residents and visitors ever since its launch last year.  The trail recently added a new art installation, Blue Sky, that will greet visitors over the next five years with an array of lights and colors. Less noticed, but no less important, will be another array on display near the trail: a sensor node from Chicago’s Array of Things initiative.

If you’re a frequent reader of all things civic tech, then you may have already come across the Array of Things (AoT).  Launched in 2016, the project, which consists of a network of sensor boxes mounted on light posts, has now begun collecting a host of real-time data on Chicago’s environmental surroundings and urban activity.   After installing a small number of sensors downtown and elsewhere in 2016, Chicago is now adding additional sensors across the city and the city’s data portal currently lists locations for all of AoT’s active and yet-to-be installed sensors.  This year, data collected from AoT will be accessible online, providing valuable information for researchers, urban planners, and the general public.

AoT’s public engagement campaign has been picking up steam as well, with a recent community event held this fall. As a non-proprietary project, AoT is being implemented as a tool to improve not just urban planning and sustainability efforts, but quality of life for residents and communities. To engage with the public, project leaders have held meetings and workshops to build relationships with residents and identify community priorities. Those priorities, which vary from community to community, could range from monitoring traffic congestion around specific intersections to addressing air quality concerns at local parks and schoolyards.

The AoT project is a leading example of how new technology—and the Internet of Things (IoT) in particular—is transforming efforts for sustainable urban growth and “smart” city planning.  AoT’s truly multi-dimensional character sets it apart from other smart city efforts: complementing environmental sensor data collection, the initiative includes educational programming, community outreach, and R&D opportunities for academics, startups, corporations, and other organizations that could stand to benefit.

Launching a project like AoT, of course, isn’t as simple as installing sensor nodes and flipping on a switch. AoT has been in the works for years, and its recent launch marks a milestone event for its developers, the City of Chicago, and smart city technologies.  AoT has frequently appeared in the press  – yet often, coverage loses sight of the many facets of this unique project. How did AoT get to where it is today?  What is the project’s significance outside of Chicago? What are AoT’s implications for cities? Consider this article as your primer for all things AoT….(More)”.

Civic Technology: Open Data and Citizen Volunteers as a Resource for North Carolina Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by John B. Stephens: “Civic technology is an emergent area of practice where IT experts and citizens without specialized IT skills volunteer their time using government-provided open data to improve government services or otherwise create public benefit. Civic tech, as it is often referred to, draws on longer-standing practices, particularly e-government and civic engagement. It is also a new form of citizen–government co-production, building on the trend of greater government transparency.

This report is designed to help North Carolina local government leaders:

  • Define civic technology practices and describing North Carolina civic tech resources
  • Highlight accomplishments and ongoing projects in civic tech (in North Carolina and beyond)
  • Identify opportunities and challenges for North Carolina local governments in civic tech
  • Provide a set of resources for education and involvement in civic tech….(More)”.

The Participatory Democracy Turn

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Laurence Bherer, Pascale Dufour, and Francoise Montambeault:”Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decision making processes in a variety of sectors around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Over the years, this participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups, as well as by governments. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation are participatory budgeting, citizen councils, public consultations, etc. However, these experiences are sometimes far from the original 1960s’ radical conception of participatory democracy, which had a transformative dimension and aimed to overcome unequal relationships between the state and society and emancipate and empower citizens in their daily lives.

This book addresses four sets of questions: what do participatory practices mean today?; what does it mean to participate for participants, from the perspective of citizenship building?; how the processes created by the participatory turn have affected the way political representation functions?; and does the participatory turn also mean changing relationships and dynamics among civil servants, political representatives, and citizens?

Overall, the contributions in this book illustrate and grasp the complexity of the so-called participatory turn. It shows that the participatory turn now includes several participatory democracy projects, which have different effects on the overall system depending on the principles that they advocate. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Civil Society….(More)”

From #Resistance to #Reimagining governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in Open Democracy: “…There is no doubt that #Resistance (and its associated movements) holds genuine transformative potential. But for the change it brings to be meaningful (and positive), we need to ask the question: What kind of government do we really want?

Working to maintain the status quo or simply returning to, for instance, a pre-Trump reality cannot provide for the change we need to counter the decline in trust, the rise of populism and the complex social, economic and cultural problems we face. We need a clear articulation of alternatives.  Without such an articulation, there is a danger of a certain hollowness and dispersion of energies. The call for #Resistance requires a more concrete –and ultimately more productive – program that is concerned not just with rejecting or tearing down, but with building up new institutions and governance processes. What’s needed, in short, is not simply #Resistance.

Below, I suggest six shifts that can help us reimagine governance for the twenty-first century. Several of these shifts are enabled by recent technological changes (e.g., the advent of big data, blockchain and collective intelligence) as well as other emerging methods such as design thinking, behavioral economics, and agile development.

Some of the shifts I suggest have been experimented with, but they have often been developed in an ad hoc manner without a full understanding of how they could make a more systemic impact. Part of the purpose of this paper is to begin the process of a more systematic enquiry; the following amounts to a preliminary outline or blueprint for reimagined governance for the twenty-first century.

Screen Shot 2017-12-14 at 1.21.29 PM

  • Shift 1: from gatekeeper to platform…
  • Shift 2: from inward to user-and-problem orientation…
  • Shift 3: from closed to open…
  • Shift 4: from deliberation to collaboration and co-creation…
  • Shift 5: from ideology to evidence-based…
  • Shift 6: from centralized to distributed… (More)

Understanding Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Free ebook by Jonny Schneider: “Highly touted methodologies, such as Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking, leave many organizations bamboozled by an unprecedented array of processes, tools, and methods for digital product development. Many teams meet their peril trying to make sense of these options. How do the methods fit together to achieve the right outcome? What’s the best approach for your circumstances?

In this insightful report, Jonny Schneider from ThoughtWorks shows you how to diagnose your situation, understand where you need more insight to move forward, and then choose from a range of tactics that can move your team closer to clarity.

Blindly applying any model, framework, or method seldom delivers the desired result. Agile began as a better answer for delivering software. Lean focuses on product success. And Design Thinking is an approach for exploring opportunities and problems to solve. This report shows you how to evaluate your situation before committing to one, two, or all three of these techniques.

  • Understand how design thinking, the lean movement, and agile software development can make a difference
  • Define your beliefs and assumptions as well as your strategy
  • Diagnose the current condition and explore possible futures
  • Decide what to learn, and how to learn it, through fast research and experimentation
  • Decentralize decisions with purpose-driven, collaborative teams
  • Prioritize and measure value by responding to customer demand…(More)”