Article in the Next City: “Since 2009, the San Francisco-based non-profit Code for America has embedded its budding techies in one-year fellowships with city halls around the country. The goal: To build apps that make city governments run more effectively and bolster engagement between citizens and civil servants. But even Code founder Jennifer Pahlka — who hatched the idea for her organization over beers in Flagstaff, Ariz. and will soon take a year off herself to serve as a White House chief technology officer — admits that apps alone can’t solve the world’s problems. That might explain why the group’s mission is in flux, with hard questions and new projects pushing the increasingly high-profile group into its own 2.0 moment. Journalist Nancy Scola goes inside the Code for America universe, talking to believers and skeptics alike to find out how the organization is evolving and what that means for the future of the civic tech movement and cities at large.
E-petition systems and political participation: About institutional challenges and democratic opportunities
New paper by Knud Böhle and Ulrich Riehm in First Monday: “The implementation of e–petition systems holds the promise to increase the participative and deliberative potential of petitions. The most ambitious e–petition systems allow for electronic submission, make publicly available the petition text, related documents and the final decision, allow supporting a petition by electronically co–signing it, and provide electronic discussion forums. Based on a comprehensive survey (2010/2011) of parliamentary petition bodies at the national level covering the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) plus Norway and Switzerland, the state of public e–petitioning in the EU is presented, and the relevance of e–petition systems as a means of political participation is discussed….
The most interesting finding is that some petition systems — by leveraging the potential of the Internet — further the involvement of the public considerably. This happens in two ways: first by nudging e–petition systems in the direction of lightweight instruments of direct democracy and second by making the institution itself more open, transparent, accountable, effective, and responsive through the involvement of the public. Both development paths might also lead to expectations that eventually cannot be complied with by the petition body without more substantial transformations of the institution. This or that might happen. Empirically, we ain’t seen almost nothing yet.”
Introducing the 21st-Century City Hall
GovTech: “Here are five platforms that are helping redefine civic engagement.
Neighborland: A new way to rally residents
If you’ve ever tried drumming up support for a neighborhood project, you know firsthand how difficult the effort can be. From diverse work schedules to just plain indifference, capturing a community’s attention and rallying residents on an issue can seem impossible at times. Neighborland was created to make that task easier.
The online social engagement platform helps citizens and public officials connect on ideas and plans for a community. After creating a profile on Neighborland, users can post questions or ideas using words and pictures. The posts can be categorized by topic, and users can suggest related actions such as fundraisers and meetings….
Textizen: An easier way to give opinions
Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, struggled to collect feedback from parents. To simplify the process, the district deployed Textizen, which makes sharing comments and responding to survey questions as easy as sending a text message….
Voterheads: Early warning on important issues
It’s a scenario every local government is likely familiar with: There’s a council meeting and while decisions are being made on behalf of everyone in the area, only a small percentage of the population participates in the process. But once a decision is made, citizens complain about the result….Voterheads, a free online engagement platform that alerts citizens via email when their city, county or school board is discussing a topic that they’re interested in. Using a sliding scale, users indicate their degree of opposition or support of a topic like taxes, at which point the system decides if or how quickly that person should be notified about an upcoming public meeting….
Community PlanIt: A game with real-world results
Eric Gordon, an Emerson College professor, creates games and other digital tools that energize civic participation. He runs the university’s Engagement Game Lab and develops programs to make community planning fun and interactive for citizens.
One of his creations is Community PlanIt, an online game that solicits comments from residents about their neighborhoods. City administrators analyze the feedback to make more informed choices about community development….
Open Town Hall: Letting cooler heads prevail
Democracy is a messy process. James Madison said that faction and discord are “sown in the nature of man,” and have “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” Winston Churchill once noted, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”…Peak Democracy’s Open Town Hall moves the public meeting process online, acknowledging some 21st-century realities and offering a few other advantages too….Open Town Hall requires registration, and the topics are presented by the jurisdiction. Rather than restricting input, said Cohen, it broadens the appeal of participation and brings in many more moderate views. Open Town Hall also requires a geocoded address so that input on an issue can be evaluated based on its location. The names and locations view can be turned on or off, depending on the issue and the jurisdiction’s wishes….
3 Platforms to Watch
Placehood.org: Billed as a “virtual place to discuss real places that you want to see transformed,” Placehood connects citizens, developers and city planners. The goal is to repurpose or improve underutilized properties, while letting users comment about a place, post improvement ideas, add images and gather support.
Outline.com: This platform visualizes a public policy’s impact on the state or local economy by simulation. Outline lets citizens perform what-if analyses on budgets and policies and provide feedback to the government. The simulator is being piloted in Massachusetts, and the company hopes to grow the number of users this summer.
PlaceSpeak: Launched in Canada, the online community consultation website connects citizens with local issues. Users’ addresses are verified, allowing the government or organization to specify areas where it would like to get feedback from or generate ideas about.”
Brazilian Students Dig for Corruption (Video)
New York Times Video: “Student protesters at a public university in Rio de Janeiro are teaching each other how to expose data about the city’s transport system.”
Brazilian Students Dig for Corruption
Student protesters at a public university in Rio de Janeiro are teaching each other how to expose data about the city’s transport system.
Big ideas can be bad ideas – even in the age of the thinktank
Mark Mazower, who teaches history at Columbia University, in the Guardian: “First there was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. More recently, we had Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: for years, it seems, big ideas have been heading our way across the Atlantic. It is hard to think of many similarly catchy slogans that have gone the other way of late – Tony Giddens’ notion of “the third way” may be one.
Some people think that is a problem. They are worried that Britain has been failing to produce big ideas that policymakers can use. They want to convert academic ideas into policy relevance and shake up the bureaucrats. Phillip Blond, who recently wrote a controversial article in Chatham House’s magazine, is one of them. Francis Maude is another: he wants politicians to be able to appoint senior civil servants so that fresh thinking can enter Whitehall…
And are big ideas the kind of ideas worth having anyway? They age badly for one thing and quickly look shopworn. Moreover, it’s hard to think of many scholars whose best work has been directed explicitly towards such a goal. …The tendency in recent government policy here to demand demonstrable policy relevance or public “impact” from academics shows how far this mindset has spread. It may or may not produce some policy product. But what it will do is jeopardise British universities’ ability to do what they have done so well for so long: world-class research. These days both government and business demand value for money when they fund academia, and this makes it harder and more vital to insist that there are many ways to demonstrate the value of ideas, not just policy relevance.”
Experiments in Democracy
Jeremy Rozansky, assistant editor of National Affairs in The New Atlantis: ” In his debut book Uncontrolled, entrepreneur and policy analyst Jim Manzi argues that social scientists and policymakers should instead adopt the “experimental method.” The essential tool of this method is the randomized field trial (RFT), a technique that already informs many of our successful private enterprises. Perhaps the best known example of RFTs — one that Manzi uses to illustrate the concept — is the kind of clinical trial performed to test new medicines, wherein researchers “undertake a painstaking series of replicated controlled experiments to measure the effects of various interventions under various conditions,” as he puts it.
The central argument of Uncontrolled is that RFTs should be adopted more widely by businesses as well as government. The book is helpful and holds much wisdom — although the approach he recommends is ultimately just another streetlamp in the night, casting a pale light that tapers off after a few yards. Much still lies beyond its glow….
The econometric method now dominates the social sciences because it helps to cope with the problem of high causal density. It begins with a large data set: economic records, election results, surveys, and other similar big pools of data. Then the social scientist uses statistical techniques to model the interactions of sundry independent variables (causes) and a dependent variable (the effect). But for this method to work properly, social scientists must know all the causally important variables beforehand, because a hidden conditional could easily yield a false positive.
The experimental method, which Manzi prefers, offers a different way of coping with high causal density: sidestepping the problem of isolating exact causes. To sort out whether a given treatment or policy works, a scientist or social scientist can try it out on a random section of a population, and compare the results to a different section of the population where the treatment or policy was not implemented. So while econometric models aim to identify which particular variables are responsible for different results, RFTs have more modest aims, as they do not seek to identify every hidden conditional. By using the RFT approach, we may not know precisely why we achieved a desired effect, since we do not model all possible variables. But we can gain some ability to know that we will achieve a desired effect, at least under certain conditions.
Strictly speaking, even a randomized field trial only tells us with certainty that some exact technique worked with some specific population on some specific date in the past when conducted by some specific experimenters. We cannot know whether a given treatment or policy will work again under the same conditions at a later date, much less on a different population, much less still on the population as a whole. But scientists must always be cautious about moving from particular results to general conclusions; this is why experiments need to be replicated. And the more we do replicate them, the more information we can gain from those particular results, and the more reliably they can build toward teaching us which treatments or policies might work or (more often) which probably won’t. The result is that the RFT approach is very well suited to the business of government, since policymakers usually only need to know whether a given policy will work — whether it will produce a desired outcome.”
Is Cybertopianism Really Such a Bad Thing?
Ethan Zuckerman in Slate: “As the historian and technology scholar Langdon Winner suggests, “The arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order.” Technologies that connect individuals to one another—like the airplane, the telegraph, and the radio—appear particularly powerful at helping us imagine a smaller, more connected world. Seen through this lens, the Internet’s underlying architecture—it is no more and no less than a network that connects networks—and the sheer amount written about it in the past decade guaranteed that the network would be placed at the center of visions for a world made better through connection. These visions are so abundant that they’ve even spawned a neologism: “cyberutopianism.”
The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naïvely overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies. Curiously, the commonly used term for an opposite stance, a belief that Internet technologies are weakening society, coarsening discourse, and hastening conflict is described with a less weighted term: “cyberskepticism.” Whether or not either of these terms adequately serves us in this debate, we should consider cyberutopianism’s appeal, and its merits….
If we reject the notion that technology makes certain changes inevitable, but accept that the aspirations of the “cyberutopians” are worthy ones, we are left with a challenge: How do we rewire the tools we’ve built to maximize our impact on an interconnected world? Accepting the shortcomings of the systems we’ve built as inevitable and unchangeable is lazy. As Benjamin Disraeli observed in Vivian Grey, “Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.” And, as Rheingold suggests, believing that people can use technology to build a world that’s more just, fair, and inclusive isn’t merely defensible. It’s practically a moral imperative.
Excerpted from Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman.”
Why Are We Signing Our Emails With “Thank You?”
Krystal D’Costa on Anthropology in Practice in Scientific American: “These types of linguistic structures are known as “politeness formulae.” … These patterns of responses are deeply nuanced and reflect the nature of the relationship between participants: degree of intimacy, relative status, and length of contact or expected duration of separation all influence how these interactions are carried out.
In the age of texting, these practices may seem antiquated, but the need for those sorts of rituals remains important, particularly in electronic communication where tone is hard to read. We end our communiques with “talk later,” “talk 2 u tomorrow,” or even simply “bye.” “Thanks” and “Thank you” have worked their way into this portion of the formula particularly in emails. More traditional valedictions have been replaced with “Thank you” so subtly that it’s now a common sign-off in this medium. But what does it mean? And why is it more acceptable than “Sincerely” or “Yours truly”?
It is in part be a reflection of our times. Email offers a speedier means of contact than an actual letter (and in some cases, a telephone), but that speed also means we’re sending more messages through this medium both for personal and professional reasons, and reading and responding to these messages requires a commitment of time. So it’s more important that the sender recognize the burden that they’ve placed on the recipient. In a time when letters took time to write, send, and respond to, it was important for the sender to attest to her reliability. Responses and actions were not so easy to take back. “Sincerely” and “Yours truly” which were meant to build trust between communicants. Credibility was an important determinant of whether a response would be issues. Today, as the web enables stranger to contact each other with little effort, credibility is less of a factor in determining responses (SPAM mail aside) when weighed against time.”
Technocracy within Representative Democracy
Christina Ribbhagen’s new paper on “Technocracy within Representative Democracy: Technocratic Reasoning and Justification among Bureaucrats and Politicians”: ” How can you possibly have ‘Technocracy within Representative Democracy’, as suggested in the title of this thesis? Shouldn’t the correct title be ‘Technocracy or Representative Democracy’, the sceptic might ask? Well, if technocracy is strictly defined, as rule by an elite of (technical) experts, the sceptic obviously has a point. Democracy means rule by the people (demos) and not rule by (technical) experts. However, in tune with Laird (1990; see also Fischer 2000), I argue that merely establishing the absence of a simple technocratic ruling class is only half the story; instead a more subtle interpretation of technocracy is needed.
Laird (1990, p. 51) continues his story by stating that: ‘The problem of technocracy is the problem of power relations and how those relations are affected by the importance of esoteric knowledge in modern society. The idea that such knowledge is important is correct. The idea that it is important because it leads to the rise of a technically skilled ruling class is mistaken. The crucial issue is not who gains power but who loses it. Technocracy is not the rise of experts, it is the decline of citizens’. Or as formulated by Fischer (2000), ‘One of the most important contemporary functions of technocratic politics, it can be argued, rests not so much on its ascent to power (in the traditional sense of the term) as on the fact that its growing influence shields the elites from political pressure from below’. The crucial issue for the definition of technocracy then is not who governs, rather it lies in the mode of politics. As argued by Fischer (2000), too often writers have dismissed the technocratic thesis on the grounds that experts remain subordinate to top-level economic and political elites. A consequence of this, he continues, is that this argument ‘overlooks the less visible discursive politics of technocratic expertise. Not only does the argument fail to appreciate the way this technical, instrumental mode of inquiry has come to shape our thinking about public problems, but it neglects the ways these modes of thought have become implicitly embedded in our institutional discourses and practices’ (p. 17). Thus, technocracy here should not be understood as ‘rule by experts’, but rather ‘government by technique’ focusing on the procedures and content of politics, suggesting that technocratic reasoning and justification has gained ground and dominates the making of public policy (Boswell, 2009; Fischer, 1990; Meynaud, 1969; Radaelli, 1999b;). To be sure, indirectly this will have consequences as to who will win or lose power. A policy issue or process that is technocratically framed is likely to disempower those lacking information and expertise within the area (Fischer, 1990; Laird, 19903), while supplying those with information and expertise with a ‘technocratic key’ (Uhrwing, 2001) leading to the door of political power.”
Is Civic Hacking The Future Of Democracy And Job Creation?
Anthony Wing Kosner in Forbes: “The hacker method is code first, ask permission later. This is great for getting things done quickly, but it sidesteps the gnarly issues of how citizen contributions actually get deployed within government agencies. There are all kinds of projects that can just get done and deployed using resources in the public domain, but civic hacking aims to get more directly involved in government.
For organizations on the receiving end of civic code, there are many questions as well. How do you test and implement the code? How will the code get maintained? What happens if there are unintended consequences of how public data is used? Jawitz hismelf is working on the idea of “civic startups,” as a way of both creating jobs around these efforts and in developing the specific infrastructure required to harvest civic efforts and turn them into working programs—and in some cases, new businesses….
I think that we are only beginning to explore the ways to merge the creative anarchy of hacker culture with the careful regulation of civic concerns. In a sense, this is the dialectic between entropy and inertia that play itself out in technologies of all kinds. But the fact that it is difficult is an indication that there is real work here to engage with, real problems to solve. Hack on!”