A Vision for Happier Cities


Post by at the Huffington Post:“…Governments such as Bhutan and Venezuela are creating departments of happiness, and in both the US and UK, ‘nudge’ teams have been set up to focus on behavioral psychology. This gets more interesting when we bring in urban planning and neuroscience research, which shows that community aesthetics are a key contributor to our happiness at the same time positive emotions can change our thoughts, and lead to changes in our behaviors.
It was only after moving to New York City that I realized all my experiences… painting, advising executive boards, creative workshops, statistics and writing books about organizational change…gave me a unique set of tools to create the Dept. of Well Being and start a global social impact initiative, which is powered by public art installations entitled Happy Street Signs™.
New York City got the first Happy Street Signs last November. I used my paintings containing positive phrases like “Honk Less Love More” and “New York Loves You” to manufacture 200 government-specification street signs. They were then installed by a team of fifty volunteers around Manhattan and Brooklyn in 90 minutes. Whilst it was unofficial, the objective was to generate smiles for New Yorkers and then survey reactions. We got clipboards out and asked over 600 New Yorkers if they liked the Happy Street Signs and if they wanted more: 92.5 percent of those people said yes!…”

Open Source Governance—A More Ambitious Cousin of Collaborative Governance


New paper by Ani Matei & Sergiu Ioan Irimia in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Open source represents a model generally known for its success in software production. The objective of this article is to establish a new strategic approach of using open source development principles for managing collaborative arrangements between citizens and public administration. The identity of open source governance is developed by highlighting how it is different from its main “competitor”—collaborative governance, and from other two popular concepts—open government and e-democracy. The other sections are designed to answer to public managers regarding why and what to adopt from this governance model for public sector services.”

Francis Fukuyama’s ‘Political Order and Political Decay’


Book Review by David Runciman of  “Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy”, by Francis Fukuyama in the Financial TImes: “It is not often that a 600-page work of political science ends with a cliffhanger. But the first volume of Francis Fukuyama’s epic two-part account of what makes political societies work, published three years ago, left the big question unanswered. That book took the story of political order from prehistoric times to the dawn of modern democracy in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Fukuyama is still best known as the man who announced in 1989 that the birth of liberal democracy represented the end of history: there were simply no better ideas available. But here he hinted that liberal democracies were not immune to the pattern of stagnation and decay that afflicted all other political societies. They too might need to be replaced by something better. So which was it: are our current political arrangements part of the solution, or part of the problem?
Political Order and Political Decay is his answer. He squares the circle by insisting that democratic institutions are only ever one component of political stability. In the wrong circumstances they can be a destabilising force as well. His core argument is that three building blocks are required for a well-ordered society: you need a strong state, the rule of law and democratic accountability. And you need them all together. The arrival of democracy at the end of the 18th century opened up that possibility but by no means guaranteed it. The mere fact of modernity does not solve anything in the domain of politics (which is why Fukuyama is disdainful of the easy mantra that failing states just need to “modernise”).
The explosive growth in industrial capacity and wealth that the world has experienced in the past 200 years has vastly expanded the range of political possibilities available, for better and for worse (just look at the terrifying gap between the world’s best functioning societies – such as Denmark – and the worst – such as the Democratic Republic of Congo). There are now multiple different ways state capacity, legal systems and forms of government can interact with each other, and in an age of globalisation multiple different ways states can interact with each other as well. Modernity has speeded up the process of political development and it has complicated it. It has just not made it any easier. What matters most of all is getting the sequence right. Democracy doesn’t come first. A strong state does. …”

It’s All for Your Own Good


Book Review by Jeremy Waldron of Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein and  Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass R. Sunstein: “…Nudging is about the self-conscious design of choice architecture. Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture, setting up one that when matched with the given heuristic delivers the desirable outcome. That’s what we do when we nudge.
All of this sounds like a marketer’s dream, and I will say something about its abusive possibilities later. But Sunstein and Thaler have in mind that governments might do this in a way that promotes the interests of their citizens. Governments might also encourage businesses and employers to use it in the interests of their customers and employees. The result would be a sort of soft paternalism: paternalism without the constraint; a nudge rather than a shove; doing for people what they would do for themselves if they had more time or greater ability to pick out the better choice….
…allowing dignity to just drop out of the picture is offensive. For by this stage, dignity is not being mentioned at all. Sunstein does acknowledge that people might feel infantilized by being nudged. He says that “people should not be regarded as children; they should be treated with respect.” But saying that is not enough. We actually have to reconcile nudging with a steadfast commitment to self-respect.
Consider the earlier point about heuristics—the rules for behavior that we habitually follow. Nudging doesn’t teach me not to use inappropriate heuristics or to abandon irrational intuitions or outdated rules of thumb. It does not try to educate my choosing, for maybe I am unteachable. Instead it builds on my foibles. It manipulates my sense of the situation so that some heuristic—for example, a lazy feeling that I don’t need to think about saving for retirement—which is in principle inappropriate for the choice that I face, will still, thanks to a nudge, yield the answer that rational reflection would yield. Instead of teaching me to think actively about retirement, it takes advantage of my inertia. Instead of teaching me not to automatically choose the first item on the menu, it moves the objectively desirable items up to first place.
I still use the same defective strategies but now things have been arranged to make that work out better. Nudging takes advantage of my deficiencies in the way one indulges a child. The people doing this (up in Government House) are not exactly using me as a mere means in violation of some Kantian imperative. They are supposed to be doing it for my own good. Still, my choosing is being made a mere means to my ends by somebody else—and I think this is what the concern about dignity is all about….”

Redesigning that first encounter with online government


Nancy Scola in the Washington Post: “Teardowns,” Samuel Hulick calls them, and by that he means his step-by-step dissections of how some of world’s most popular digital services — Gmail, Evernote, Instragram — welcome new users. But the term might give an overly negative sense of what Hulick is up to. The Portland, Ore., user-experience designer highlights both the good and bad in his critiques, and his annotated slideshows, under the banner of UserOnboard, have gained a following among design aficionados.

Now Hulick is partnering with two of those fans, a pair of Code for America fellows, to encourage the public to do the same for, say, the process of applying for food stamps.  It’s called CitizenOnboard.
Using the original UserOnboard is like taking a tour through some of the digital sites you know best — but with an especially design-savvy friend by your side pointing out the kinks. “The user experience,” or UX on these sites, “is often tacked on haphazardly,” says Hulick, who launched UserOnboard in December 2013 and who is also the author of the recent book “The Elements of User Onboarding.” What’s he looking for in a good UX, he says, is something non-designers can spot, too. “If you were the Web site, what tone would you take? How would you guide people through your process?”
Hulick reviews what’s working and what’s not, and adds a bit of sass: Gmail pre-populates its inbox with a few welcome messages: “Preloading some emails is a nice way to deal with the ‘cold start’ problem,” Hulick notes. Evernote nudges new users to check out its blog and other apps: “It’s like a restaurant rolling out the dessert cart while I’m still trying to decide if I even want to eat there.” Instagram’s first backdrop is a photo of someone taking a picture: “I’m learning how to Instagram by osmosis!”….
CitizenOnboard’s pitch is to get the public to do that same work. They suggest starting with state food stamp programs. Hulick tackled his. The onboarding for Oregon’s SNAP service is 118 slides long, but that’s because there is much to address. In one step, applications must, using a drop-down menu, identify how those in their family are related to one another. “It took a while to figure out who should be the relation ‘of’ the other,” Hulick notes in his teardown. “In fact, I’m still not 100% sure I got it right.”…”

OSHA Will Put Workplace Safety Data Online as 'Nudge' to Employers


Josh Eidelson at Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “Starting in January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will require employers to notify the government within 24 hours every time someone loses an eye, suffers an amputation, or gets admitted to the hospital with an injury sustained at work. The agency estimates that tens of thousands of injuries go unreported. “Workplace injuries and fatalities are absolutely preventable,” Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in early September. “These new requirements will help OSHA focus its resources and hold employers accountable for preventing them.”

The rule replaces regulations that require companies to report only incidents that result in three or more hospitalizations—“catastrophes,” in agency parlance. (Workplace deaths will still have to be reported within 8 hours.) OSHA head David Michaels, an assistant secretary in the Department of Labor, announced on Sept. 11 that the injury data will be made public on OSHA’s website.
The site already includes information on worker fatalities and catastrophes….
OSHA is one of several federal agencies taking the name-and-shame approach. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering a plan to begin online posting of first-person narratives culled from consumer complaints about banks, credit card companies, and payday lenders. Other agencies already put recall and complaint information online, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. OSHA’s smaller sibling agency, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, lists on its website workplace incidents like fires that could have harmed someone but didn’t.
The idea is that people increasingly accustomed to looking up product reviews on Amazon.com and restaurant reviews on Yelp might do the same when they choose an employer, car, or credit card company. “Exposing problems early can help other consumers avoid similar problems before they become victims, too,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in July. “The market could react to problems as they occur, not years later.”…”

The measurable me: the influence of self-quantification on the online user's decision-making process


Paper by Mimmi Sjöklint for the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: “The advancement of information technology, online accessibility and wearable computing is fostering a new playground for users to engage with quantified data sets. On one hand, the online user is continuously yet passively exposed to different types of quantified data in online interfaces and mobile apps. On the other hand, the user may actively and knowingly be gathering quantified data through ubiquitous sensory devices, such as wearable technology, e.g. the Jawbone UP and Fitbit. In both instances, the user is exposed to versions of self-quantified measures, namely the aggregation and transformation of personally attributed activity into quantified data. This study approaches the adoption of wearables by looking at active and passive self-quantification online and explores how it may influence and support the user’s cognitive processes and subsequent decision-making process.”

Fighting Inequality in the New Gilded Age


Book Review by K. Sabeel Rahman in the Boston Review:

White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making 
Nicholas Carnes
The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala
Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
Josh Lerner

“In the years since the financial crisis, the realities of rapid economic recovery for some and stagnant wages for most has made increasingly clear that we live in a new Gilded Age: one marked by growing income inequality, decreasing social mobility, and concentrated corporate power. At the same time, we face an increasingly dysfunctional political system, apparently incapable of addressing these fundamental economic challenges.
This is not the first time the country has been caught in this confluence of economic inequality and political dysfunction. The first Gilded Age, in the late nineteenth century, experienced a similar moment of economic upheaval, instability, inequality, rising corporate power, and unresponsive government. These challenges triggered some of the most powerful reform movements in American history: the labor and antitrust movements, the Populist movement of agrarian reformers, and the Progressive movement of urban social and economic reformers. These reformers were not perfect—their record on racial and ethnic inequality is especially glaring—but they were enormously successful in creating new institutions and ideas that reshaped our economy and our politics. In particular, many of them were convinced that to address economic inequality, they had to first democratize politics, creating more robust forms of accountability and popular sovereignty against the influence of economic and political elites….
With his new book, White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy-Making (2013), Nicholas Carnes argues that there is a third, even more important source of elite political influence: the dominance of upper class individuals in the composition of legislatures themselves. Despite the considerable external pressures of donors, constituent preferences, parties, and interest groups, legislators still possess significant discretion, and as a result their personal views about economic policy matter. Legislators of different class backgrounds, Carnes demonstrates, have distinct views on everything from labor to welfare programs and anti-poverty policies, to the very idea of government itself. On unemployment, labor rights, tax policy, and corporate protections, many of the central economic policy issues of our time involve a cleavage between wealthy and working class interests. The underrepresentation of the working class results in an underrepresentation of working class interests, exacerbating income inequality. “Whether our political system listens to one voice or another depends not just on who’s doing the talking or how loud they are,” writes Carnes; “it also depends on who’s doing the listening.”….
In The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala (2013), Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales focus similar questions to those animating Carnes’ account: What institutional contexts enable ordinary citizens—especially poorer ones—to expand their representation in decision-making? What expands their knowledge of issues, their political networks, and their willingness to participate more broadly to advocate for their interests? To gain traction on this question, they undertook the first large-scale study of participatory governance, examining the nation-wide community-managed schools program in Honduras and Guatemala. These programs operated in areas that conventionally might be considered inhospitable to participatory governance: poor, rural districts. These programs engaged parents by giving them management and administrative duties in the daily activities of the school. In both countries, the programs were established to both address pervasive disparities in educational attainment, and to improve the accountability of government officials in delivering basic services to the poor….
In Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics, Lerner takes a practitioners’ look at participatory governance. Lerner is the Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, a non-profit dedicated to adapting participatory budgeting systems and implementing them in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Where Altschuler and Corrales are primarily concerned with the macro-institutional contexts that make participatory governance systems work well, Lerner’s insights revolve around the micro-practices of how to make participation effective at the face-to-face level….
Our recent experience of economic inequality has fueled the rise of a new social science of economic inequality and oligarchy, most recently and famously captured in the debates over Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But we also need a constructive account of what a more responsive and representative democratic politics looks like, and how to achieve it. Reformers coming out of the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century similarly located the roots of economic inequality in political inequality. The era of Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan (the man, before the firm), and of widening income inequality was also the era of dysfunctional machine politics and a conservative Supreme Court that stymied social reform. These challenges fueled reform movements that struggled to restore popular sovereignty and genuine democracy—proposing everything from antitrust restraints on corporate power, to the first campaign finance systems, to new procedures for popular elections of Senators, party primaries, and direct democratic referenda. It was during this period that state and federal governments experimented with antitrust laws, rate regulation, and labor regulation. Many of the economic ideas first developed out of this ferment came to fruition in the New Deal.
Today we see the echoes of this zeal in the debates around campaign finance reform and the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks. But reviving genuine democratic equality to address economic inequality requires a broader view of potential democratizing reforms. Carnes reminds us that the identity of who governs matters as much for class and economic policy as for any other dimension of representation. But Altschuler, Corrales, and Lerner suggest as well the importance of looking outside legislatures. Governing involves more than writing statutes; it is solving disputes, administering social services, implementing directives at the local level. And these are spaces where the prospects for greater political power—especially on the part of economically marginalized groups—may even be greater than at national scale legislatures. The proliferation of open government efforts in the United States—from governmental transparencyto engaging citizens to report potholes—suggests a growing reform interest in creating alternative channels for participation and representation. But too often these efforts are more limited than their rhetoric, focusing more narrowly on making existing policies well known or efficient, rather than empowering participants to challenge and reshape them. These books underscore that genuine democratic reform requires actually empowering ordinary citizens to drive the business of governing.”
 
 
 

The Rise of Data Poverty in America


Report by Daniel Castro for the Center of Data Innovation: “Data-driven innovations offer enormous opportunities to advance important societal goals. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, individuals must have access to high-quality data about themselves and their communities. If certain groups routinely do not have data collected about them, their problems may be overlooked and their communities held back in spite of progress elsewhere. Given this risk, policymakers should begin a concerted effort to address the “data divide”—the social and economic inequalities that may result from a lack of collection or use of data about individuals or communities..”

The Crypto-democracy and the Trustworthy


New Paper by Sebastien Gambs, Samuel Ranellucci, and Alain Tapp: “In the current architecture of the Internet, there is a strong asymmetry in terms of power between the entities that gather and process personal data (e.g., major Internet companies, telecom operators, cloud providers, …) and the individuals from which this personal data is issued. In particular, individuals have no choice but to blindly trust that these entities will respect their privacy and protect their personal data. In this position paper, we address this issue by proposing an utopian crypto-democracy model based on existing scientific achievements from the field of cryptography. More precisely, our main objective is to show that cryptographic primitives, including in particular secure multiparty computation, offer a practical solution to protect privacy while minimizing the trust assumptions. In the crypto-democracy envisioned, individuals do not have to trust a single physical entity with their personal data but rather their data is distributed among several institutions. Together these institutions form a virtual entity called the Trustworthy that is responsible for the storage of this data but which can also compute on it (provided first that all the institutions agree on this). Finally, we also propose a realistic proof-of-concept of the Trustworthy, in which the roles of institutions are played by universities. This proof-of-concept would have an important impact in demonstrating the possibilities offered by the crypto-democracy paradigm.”