INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

Democratic Resilience for a Populist Age

Curated on August 9, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Helmut K. Anheier at Project Syndicate: “… many democracies are plagued by serious maladies – such as electoral gerrymandering, voter suppression, fraud and corruption, violations of the rule of law, and threats to judicial independence and press freedom – there is little agreement about which solutions should be pursued.

How to make our democracies more resilient, if not altogether immune, to anti-democratic threats is a central question of our time. …

Democratic resilience demands that citizens do more than bemoan deficiencies and passively await constitutional reform. It requires openness to change and innovation. Such changes may occur incrementally, but their aggregate effect can be immense…

Governments and citizens thus have a rich set of options – such as diversity quotas, automatic voter registration, and online referenda – for addressing democratic deficiencies. Moreover, there are measures that can also help citizens mount a defense of democracy against authoritarian assaults.

To that end, organizations can be created to channel protest and dissent into the democratic process, so that certain voices are not driven to the political fringe. And watchdog groups can oversee deliberative assemblies and co-governance efforts – such as participatory budgeting – to give citizens more direct access to decision-making. At the same time, core governance institutions, like central banks and electoral commissions, should be depoliticized, to prevent their capture by populist opportunists.

When properly applied, these measures can encourage consensus building and thwart special interests. Moreover, such policies can boost public trust and give citizens a greater sense of ownership vis-à-vis their government.

Of course, some political innovations that work in one context may cause real damage in another. Referenda, for example, are easily manipulated by demagogues. Assemblies can become gridlocked, and quotas can restrict voters’ choices. Fixing contemporary democracy will inevitably require experimentation and adaptation.

Still, recent research can help us along the way. The Governance Report 2017 has compiled a diverse list of democratic tools that can be applied in different contexts around the globe – by governments, policymakers, civil-society leaders, and citizens.

In his contribution to the report, German sociologist Claus Offe, Professor Emeritus of the Hertie School and Humboldt University identifies two fundamental priorities for all democracies. The first is to secure all citizens’ basic rights and ability to participate in civic life; the second is to provide a just and open society with opportunities for all citizens. As it happens, these two imperatives are linked: democratic government should be “of,” “by,” and for the people….(More)”.

Digital Decisions Tool

Curated on August 8, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT): “Two years ago, CDT embarked on a project to explore what we call “digital decisions” – the use of algorithms, machine learning, big data, and automation to make decisions that impact individuals and shape society. Industry and government are applying algorithms and automation to problems big and small, from reminding us to leave for the airport to determining eligibility for social services and even detecting deadly diseases. This new era of digital decision-making has created a new challenge: ensuring that decisions made by computers reflect values like equality, democracy, and justice. We want to ensure that big data and automation are used in ways that create better outcomes for everyone, and not in ways that disadvantage minority groups.

The engineers and product managers who design these systems are the first line of defense against unfair, discriminatory, and harmful outcomes. To help mitigate harm at the design level, we have launched the first public version of our digital decisions tool. We created the tool to help developers understand and mitigate unintended bias and ethical pitfalls as they design automated decision-making systems.

About the digital decisions tool

This interactive tool translates principles for fair and ethical automated decision-making into a series of questions that can be addressed during the process of designing and deploying an algorithm. The questions address developers’ choices, such as what data to use to train an algorithm, what factors or features in the data to consider, and how to test the algorithm. They also ask about the systems and checks in place to assess risk and ensure fairness. These questions should provoke thoughtful consideration of the subjective choices that go into building an automated decision-making system and how those choices could result in disparate outcomes and unintended harms.

The tool is informed by extensive research by CDT and others about how algorithms and machine learning work, how they’re used, the potential risks of using them to make important decisions, and the principles that civil society has developed to ensure that digital decisions are fair, ethical, and respect civil rights. Some of this research is summarized on CDT’s Digital Decisions webpage….(More)”.

Rise of the Government Chatbot

Curated on August 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zack Quaintance at Government Technology: “A robot uprising has begun, except instead of overthrowing mankind so as to usher in a bleak yet efficient age of cold judgment and colder steel, this uprising is one of friendly robots (so far).

Which is all an alarming way to say that many state, county and municipal governments across the country have begun to deploy relatively simple chatbots, aimed at helping users get more out of online public services such as a city’s website, pothole reporting and open data. These chatbots have been installed in recent months in a diverse range of places including Kansas City, Mo.; North Charleston, S.C.; and Los Angeles — and by many indications, there is an accompanying wave of civic tech companies that are offering this tech to the public sector.

They range from simple to complex in scope, and most of the jurisdictions currently using them say they are doing so on somewhat of a trial or experimental basis. That’s certainly the case in Kansas City, where the city now has a Facebook chatbot to help users get more out of its open data portal.

“The idea was never to create a final chatbot that was super intelligent and amazing,” said Eric Roche, Kansas City’s chief data officer. “The idea was let’s put together a good effort, and put it out there and see if people find it interesting. If they use it, get some lessons learned and then figure out — either in our city, or with developers, or with people like me in other cities, other chief data officers and such — and talk about the future of this platform.”

Roche developed Kansas City’s chatbot earlier this year by working after hours with Code for Kansas City, the local Code for America brigade — and he did so because since in the four-plus years the city’s open data program has been active, there have been regular concerns that the info available through it was hard to navigate, search and use for average citizens who aren’t data scientists and don’t work for the city (a common issue currently being addressed by many jurisdictions). The idea behind the Facebook chatbot is that Roche can program it with a host of answers to the most prevalent questions, enabling it to both help interested users and save him time for other work….

In North Charleston, S.C., the city has adopted a text-based chatbot, which goes above common 311-style interfaces by allowing users to report potholes or any other lapses in city services they may notice. It also allows them to ask questions, which it subsequently answers by crawling city websites and replying with relevant links, said Ryan Johnson, the city’s public relations coordinator.

North Charleston has done this by partnering with a local tech startup that has deep roots in the area’s local government. The company is called Citibot …

With Citibot, residents can report a pothole at 2 a.m., or they can get info about street signs or trash pickup sent right to their phones.

There are also more complex chatbot technologies taking hold at both the civic and state levels, in Los Angeles and Mississippi, to be exact.

Mississippi’s chatbot is called Missi, and its capabilities are vast and nuanced. Residents can even use it for help submitting online payments. It’s accessible by clicking a small chat icon on the side of the website.

Back in May, Los Angeles rolled out Chip, or City Hall Internet Personality, on the Los Angeles Business Assistance Virtual Network. The chatbot aims to assist visitors by operating as a 24/7 digital assistant for visitors to the site, helping them navigate it and better understand its services by answering their inquiries. It is capable of presenting info from anywhere on the site, and it can even go so far as helping users fill out forms or set up email alerts….(More)”

The Nudging Divide in the Digital Big Data Era

Curated on August 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia M. Puaschunder in the International Robotics & Automation Journal: “Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers.

The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes.

The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges….(More)”

Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?

Curated on August 3, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Susan Nevelow Mart: “…examines the legal bases of the public’s right to access government information, reviews the types of information that have recently been removed from the Internet, and analyzes the rationales given for the removals. She suggests that the concerted use of the Freedom of Information Act by public interest groups and their constituents is a possible method of returning the information to the Internet….(More)”.

Design Thinking for the Greater Good

Curated on August 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Book by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer: “Facing especially wicked problems, social sector organizations are searching for powerful new methods to understand and address them. Design Thinking for the Greater Good goes in depth on both the how of using new tools and the why. As a way to reframe problems, ideate solutions, and iterate toward better answers, design thinking is already well established in the commercial world. Through ten stories of struggles and successes in fields such as health care, education, agriculture, transportation, social services, and security, the authors show how collaborative creativity can shake up even the most entrenched bureaucracies—and provide a practical roadmap for readers to implement these tools.

The design thinkers Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer explore how major agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Transportation and Security Administration in the United States, as well as organizations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, have instituted principles of design thinking. In each case, these groups have used the tools of design thinking to reduce risk, manage change, use resources more effectively, bridge the communication gap between parties, and manage the competing demands of diverse stakeholders. Along the way, they have improved the quality of their products and enhanced the experiences of those they serve. These strategies are accessible to analytical and creative types alike, and their benefits extend throughout an organization. This book will help today’s leaders and thinkers implement these practices in their own pursuit of creative solutions that are both innovative and achievable….(More)”.

Responding to problems: actions are rewarded, regardless of the outcome

Curated on August 2, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Asmus Leth Olsen at Public Management Review: “When faced with a problem, policymakers have a choice of action or inaction. Psychological research shows varying results on how individuals evaluate (in)actions conditional on the subsequent outcome. I replicate, generalize, and extend this research into a public management setting with two independent experiments embedded in a nationally representative sample of Danish citizens (n = 2,007).

Both experiments show that actions are evaluated more positively than inactions – regardless of the outcome. This finding runs contrary to the inaction (or omission) bias but is consistent with evidence on a “norm of action”, in response to poor performance in political–administrative settings….(More)”

Nudges in a post-truth world

Curated on August 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Levy at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events….(More)”.

Rage against the machines: is AI-powered government worth it?

Curated on July 30, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Maëlle Gavet at the WEF: “…the Australian government’s new “data-driven profiling” trial for drug testing welfare recipients, to US law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology and the deployment of proprietary software in sentencing in many US courts … almost by stealth and with remarkably little outcry, technology is transforming the way we are policed, categorized as citizens and, perhaps one day soon, governed. We are only in the earliest stages of so-called algorithmic regulation — intelligent machines deploying big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to regulate human behaviour and enforce laws — but it already has profound implications for the relationship between private citizens and the state….

Some may herald this as democracy rebooted. In my view it represents nothing less than a threat to democracy itself — and deep scepticism should prevail. There are five major problems with bringing algorithms into the policy arena:

Self-reinforcing bias…
Vulnerability to attack…
Who’s calling the shots?…
Are governments up to it?…
Algorithms don’t do nuance….

All the problems notwithstanding, there’s little doubt that AI-powered government of some kind will happen. So, how can we avoid it becoming the stuff of bad science fiction? To begin with, we should leverage AI to explore positive alternatives instead of just applying it to support traditional solutions to society’s perceived problems. Rather than simply finding and sending criminals to jail faster in order to protect the public, how about using AI to figure out the effectiveness of other potential solutions? Offering young adult literacy, numeracy and other skills might well represent a far superior and more cost-effective solution to crime than more aggressive law enforcement. Moreover, AI should always be used at a population level, rather than at the individual level, in order to avoid stigmatizing people on the basis of their history, their genes and where they live. The same goes for the more subtle, yet even more pervasive data-driven targeting by prospective employers, health insurers, credit card companies and mortgage providers. While the commercial imperative for AI-powered categorization is clear, when it targets individuals it amounts to profiling with the inevitable consequence that entire sections of society are locked out of opportunity….(More)”.

Government innovations and the hype cycle

Curated on July 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Danny Buerkli at the Centre for Public Impact: “The Gartner hype cycle tracks how technologies develop from initial conception to productive use. There is much excitement around different methodologies and technologies in the “government innovation” space, but which of these is hyped and which of these is truly productive?

Last year we made some educated guesses and placed ten government innovations along the hype cycle. This year, however, we went for something bigger and better. We created an entirely non-scientific poll and asked respondents to tell us where they thought these same ten government innovations sat on the hype cycle.

The innovations we included were artificial intelligence, blockchain, design thinking, policy labs, behavioural insights, open data, e-government, agile, lean and New Public Management.

Here is what we learned.

For the most part, we’re still in the early days

On average, our respondents don’t think that any of the methods have made it into truly productive use. In fact, for seven out of the ten innovations, the majority of respondents believed that these were indeed still in the “technology trigger” phase.

Assuming that these innovations will steadily make their way along the hype cycle, we should expect a lot more hype (as they enter the “peak of inflated expectations”) and a lot more disappointment (as they descend into the “trough of disillusionment)” going forward. Government innovation advocates should take heed.

Policy Labs are believed to be in “peak of inflated expectations”

This innovation attracted the highest level of disagreement from respondents. While almost two out of five people believe that policy labs are in the “technology trigger” phase, one out of five see them as having already reached the “slope of enlightenment”. On average, however, respondents believe policy labs to be in the “peak of inflated expectations”….

Blockchain is seen as the most nascent government innovation

Our survey respondents rather unanimously believe that blockchain is at the very early stage of the “technology trigger” phase. Given that blockchain is often characterized as a solution in search of a problem, this view may not be surprising. The survey results also indicates that blockchain will have a long way to go before it will be used productively in government, but there are several ways this can be done.