Values at Play in Digital Games


New book by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum: “All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation—as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed—may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games.
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.”

Just how well has the 'nudge unit' done?


Broadcast at BBC News:Nudging – concept of changing people’s behaviour without recourse to the law but to psychology – has been one of the big policy ideas of the last few years
The coalition government set up a “nudge unit”, officially called the Behavioural Insights Team, in 2010. But just how successful has it been?
David Halpern, who heads the unit, told the Today programme’s Evan Davis that it has enjoyed a wide range of successes. He said that by adding the line “‘most people pay their tax on time’ to a letter you get a significant increase in the number of people who pay their tax on time and you get a reduction in complaints.
“It turns out it’s a nicer way, to encourage people than to threaten them.”
But Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told the programme that he did not “object against nudging per se but against the philosophy underlying it, namely that basically that people are born more or less stupid.”
There is, he said, a real alternative to nudging, that of educating people to become “risk-savvy citizens: to invest in to making people competent”.
 

America in Decay


Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Affairs:”… Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour”, as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.
In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the US Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.
But Madisonian democracy frequently fails to perform as advertised. Elite insiders typically have superior access to power and information, which they use to protect their interests. Ordinary voters will not get angry at a corrupt politician if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place. Cognitive rigidities or beliefs may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own interests. For example, in the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealthy, despite the fact that such tax cuts will arguably deprive them of important government services.
Furthermore, different groups have different abilities to organize to defend their interests. Sugar producers and corn growers are geographically concentrated and focused on the prices of their products, unlike ordinary consumers or taxpayers, who are dispersed and for whom the prices of these commodities are only a small part of their budgets. Given institutional rules that often favor special interests (such as the fact that Florida and Iowa, where sugar and corn are grown, are electoral swing states), those groups develop an outsized influence over agricultural and trade policy. Similarly, middle-class groups are usually much more willing and able to defend their interests, such as the preservation of the home mortgage tax deduction, than are the poor. This makes such universal entitlements as Social Security or health insurance much easier to defend politically than programs targeting the poor only.
Finally, liberal democracy is almost universally associated with market economies, which tend to produce winners and losers and amplify what James Madison termed the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth and occurs under conditions of equal access to the economic system. It becomes highly problematic, however, when the economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do so by bribing a legislator or a bureaucrat, that is, on a transactional basis, or, what is more damaging, by changing the institutional rules to favor themselves — for example, by closing off competition in markets they already dominate, tilting the playing field ever more steeply in their favor.
Political decay thus occurs when institutions fail to adapt to changing external circumstances, either out of intellectual rigidities or because of the power of incumbent elites to protect their positions and block change. Decay can afflict any type of political system, authoritarian or democratic. And while democratic political systems theoretically have self-correcting mechanisms that allow them to reform, they also open themselves up to decay by legitimating the activities of powerful interest groups that can block needed change.
This is precisely what has been happening in the United States in recent decades, as many of its political institutions have become increasingly dysfunctional. A combination of intellectual rigidity and the power of entrenched political actors is preventing those institutions from being reformed. And there is no guarantee that the situation will change much without a major shock to the political order….”

Government opens up: 10k active government users on GitHub


GitHub: “In the summer of 2009, The New York Senate was the first government organization to post code to GitHub, and that fall, Washington DC quickly followed suit. By 2011, cities like Miami, Chicago, and New York; Australian, Canadian, and British government initiatives like Gov.uk; and US Federal agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, General Services Administration, NASA, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were all coding in the open as they began to reimagine government for the 21st century.
Fast forward to just last year: The White House Open Data Policy is published as a collaborative, living document, San Francisco laws are now forkable, and government agencies are accepting pull requests from every day developers.
This is all part of a larger trend towards government adopting open source practices and workflows — a trend that spans not only software, but data, and policy as well — and the movement shows no signs of slowing, with government usage on GitHub nearly tripling in the past year, to exceed 10,000 active government users today.

How government uses GitHub

When government works in the open, it acknowledges the idea that government is the world’s largest and longest-running open source project. Open data efforts, efforts like the City of Philadelphia’s open flu shot spec, release machine-readable data in open, immediately consumable formats, inviting feedback (and corrections) from the general public, and fundamentally exposing who made what change when, a necessary check on democracy.
Unlike the private sector, however, where open sourcing the “secret sauce” may hurt the bottom line, with government, we’re all on the same team. With the exception of say, football, Illinois and Wisconsin don’t compete with one another, nor are the types of challenges they face unique. Shared code prevents reinventing the wheel and helps taxpayer dollars go further, with efforts like the White House’s recently released Digital Services Playbook, an effort which invites every day citizens to play a role in making government better, one commit at a time.
However, not all government code is open source. We see that adopting these open source workflows for open collaboration within an agency (or with outside contractors) similarly breaks down bureaucratic walls, and gives like-minded teams the opportunity to work together on common challenges.

Government Today

It’s hard to believe that what started with a single repository just five years ago, has blossomed into a movement where today, more than 10,000 government employees use GitHub to collaborate on code, data, and policy each day….
You can learn more about GitHub in government at government.github.com, and if you’re a government employee, be sure to join our semi-private peer group to learn best practices for collaborating on software, data, and policy in the open.”

The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams


Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging.  Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement.  This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams.  Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve.  Perhaps there can be different models.  For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services.  Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown.  There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government.    Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis.  For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”

In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors


Wall Street Journal: “Behavioral scientists look for environmental ‘nudges’ to influence how people act. Pelle Guldborg Hansen, a behavioral scientist, is trying to figure out how to board passengers on a plane with less fuss.
The goal is to make plane-boarding more efficient by coaxing passengers to want to be more orderly, not by telling them they must. It is one of many projects in which Dr. Hansen seeks to encourage people, when faced with options, to make better choices. Among these: prompting people to properly dispose of cigarette butts outside of bars and clubs and inducing hospital workers to use hand sanitizers.
Dr. Hansen, 37 years old, is director of the Initiative for Science, Society & Policy, a collaboration of the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. The concept behind his work is known commonly as a nudge, dubbed such because of the popular 2008 book of the same name by U.S. academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that examined how people make decisions.
At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds.
Thirty-five minutes before a flight departed, the team got into position. Andreas Rathmann Jensen stood in one corner, then moved to another, so he could survey the entire gate area. He mapped where people were sitting and where they placed their bags. This behavior can vary depending, for example, if people are flying alone, with a partner or in a group.
Johannes Schuldt-Jensen circulated among the rows and counted how many bags were blocking seats and how many seats were empty as boarding time approached. He wore headphones, though he wasn’t listening to music, because people seem less suspicious of behavior when a person has headphones on, he says. Another researcher, Kasper Hulgaard, counted how many people were standing versus sitting.
The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side….”

Complexity, Governance, and Networks: Perspectives from Public Administration


Paper by Naim Kapucu: “Complex public policy problems require a productive collaboration among different actors from multiple sectors. Networks are widely applied as a public management tool and strategy. This warrants a deeper analysis of networks and network management in public administration. There is a strong interest in both in practice and theory of networks in public administration. This requires an analysis of complex networks within public governance settings. In this this essay I briefly discuss research streams on complex networks, network governance, and current research challenges in public administration.”

Time for 21st century democracy


Martin Smith and Dave Richards at Policy Network (UK): “…The way that the world has changed is leading to a clash between two contrasting cultures.   Traditional, top down, elite models of democracy and accountability are no longer sustainable in an age of a digitally more open-society. As the recent Hansard Society Report into PMQs clearly reveals, the people see politicians as out of touch and remote.   What we need are two major changes. One is the recognition by institutions that they are now making decisions in an open world.  That even if they make decisions in private (which in certain cases they clearly have to) they should recognise that at some point those decisions may need to be justified.  Therefore every decision should be made on the basis that if it were open it would be deemed as legitimate.
The second is the development of bottom up accountability – we have to develop mechanisms where accountability is not mediated through institutions (as is the case with parliamentary accountability).  In its conclusion, the Hansard Society report proposes new technology could be used to allow citizens rather than MPs to ask questions at Prime Minister’s question time.  This is one of many forms of citizen led accountability that could reinforce the openness of decision making.
New technology creates the opportunity to move away from 19th century democracy.  Technology can be used to change the way decisions are made, how citizens are involved and how institutions are held to account.  This is already happening with social groups using social media, on-line petitions and mobile technologies as part of their campaigns.  However, this process needs to be formalised (such as in the Hansard Society’s suggestion for citizen’s questions).  There is also a need for more user friendly ways of analysing big data around government performance.  Big data creates many new ways in which decisions can be opened up and critically reviewed.  We also need much more explicit policies of leak and whistleblowing so that those who do reveal the inner workings of governments are not criminalised….”
Fundamentally, the real change is about treating citizens as grown-ups recognising that they can be privy to the details of the policy-making process.  There is a great irony in the playground behaviour of Prime Minister’s question time and the patronising attitudes of political elites towards voters (which tends to infantilise citizens as not to have the expertise to fully participate).  The most important change is that institutions start to act as if they are operating in an open society where they are directly accountable and hence are in a position to start regaining the trust of the people.   The closed world of institutions is no longer viable in a digital age.

Quantifying the Interoperability of Open Government Datasets


Paper by Pieter Colpaert, Mathias Van Compernolle, Laurens De Vocht, Anastasia Dimou, Miel Vander Sande, Peter Mechant, Ruben Verborgh, and Erik Mannens, to be published in Computer: “Open Governments use the Web as a global dataspace for datasets. It is in the interest of these governments to be interoperable with other governments worldwide, yet there is currently no way to identify relevant datasets to be interoperable with and there is no way to measure the interoperability itself. In this article we discuss the possibility of comparing identifiers used within various datasets as a way to measure semantic interoperability. We introduce three metrics to express the interoperability between two datasets: the identifier interoperability, the relevance and the number of conflicts. The metrics are calculated from a list of statements which indicate for each pair of identifiers in the system whether they identify the same concept or not. While a lot of effort is needed to collect these statements, the return is high: not only relevant datasets are identified, also machine-readable feedback is provided to the data maintainer.”

The Myth of Everybody


at Medium: “What is the difference between “with” and “for”? “With” implies togetherness, a network: a larger group, possibly, a messier group, but a group (meaning 2 people+) nonetheless. Acting “with” others implies certain degrees of collaboration, collective action, coordination, and even unity. You run a three-legged race with your partner (or you’re going to fall). When you use the word “with” it means that, however many people are involved, whatever their individual roles, they’re acting as one — or at least, towards a shared goal.

By contrast, when we use the word “for” we center on the experience of individuals in a relationship, with one unit acting on behalf of or doing something to another. (“For another.”) In the “for” universe, there’s usually a receiver and a giver. There can be many people involved or few, but there are almost always actors and those acted upon. In a democracy like ours, where we have government of, by, and for the people, we understand that when we vote for an elected representative, they are then empowered to speak and act for us. To govern for us….but with our consent.

Representative democracy in action.

At least, that’s the way it’s described in textbooks. In reality, however, governance is awash with intermediaries: companies, contractors, public/private partnerships, lobbyists, NGOs, think tanks — organizations of people, formal and informal, that support, distribute, and sometimes do the work of our government for our government and for us. This (very simplified overview of our) system of proxies isn’t necessarily good or bad; it’s just the way we’ve structured things to work in the US.

Why? Well, because we govern in a “for” system. Because there are so many of us and our lives are interconnected. Because we balance majority rule with minority rights. Because of all the reasons you learned in social studies class (if you went to a US public high school) and because this is the way most of us believes society has to work.

But there are other ways.

— Take your hand off the “COMMUNIST” alarm. I’m talking about the “civic” revolution.

In the last 6 or so years, as the buzz around “Gov2.0” waned, obsession with “civic”-ness waxed. What “civic” means exactly, well, we’re all still figuring that out. Sure, there are official definitions that relate “civic” to all things local…and overlapping understandings of “civics” that lend the air of government involvement…but with increasing interest from folks in the tech and innovation sectors (and funders), the word has taken on new shape. Today, “civic” is the center of a Venn Diagram encircling notions commonly associated with “society,” “community,” “governance,” and public commons (or goods). The sheen of social impact, social responsibility, and “community-ness” — that’s what terms of art like “civic innovation,” “civic engagement,” “civic decisions,” “civic participation”, and “civic tech” are all trying to describe.

To be clear, it’s not that this intersection of societal something hasn’t been outlined before: language like “social” (see “social innovation”) and civil (see “civil society”) has been used to describe similar concepts for decades. “Civic” is just the newest coat of paint, its popularity driven in part by interest from NGOs, start-ups, digital strategists, and governing bodies attempting to bring new flavor and energy to long-standing questions, like

How can we make democracy work? What can we do to make the systems in place work better? And what do we need to change to make systems work better for everybody?…”