The role and power of re-patterning in systems change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Griffith University Yunus Centre: “In simple terms, patterns are interconnected behaviours, relationships and structures that together make up a picture of what ‘common practice’ looks like and how it is ultimately experienced by people interacting with and in a system.

If we take Public Services in the twenty-first century here are some examples.

Public Service organisations have most often been formed around concepts such as universal access, service delivery, social safety nets, and public provision of critical infrastructure. Built into these elements are patterns, like:

Patterns of relationships: based on objectivity, universalism, professional relationships.

Patterns of resourcing: focused on rationing, efficiency, programmatic resource flows.

Patterns of power: centred on professional expertise, needs assessments, deserving access to spaces and services.

On the surface, these are not necessarily negative and there have doubtless been many successes enabling broad access to services and infrastructure.

It’s also true though that there remain many who have not benefited, who have missed out on access or opportunity, and who have actually been harmed by and within the system.

What is needed is a foundation for public systems that moves away from goals of access to more and better servicing of communities, and towards goals around learning how we can promote patterns of thriving, aspiration, success and ‘wellbeing’…(More)”.

A graphic that shows an organic shape much like mycelium representing how everyday behaviours, mindsets, structures, practices, interactions, values are interconnected and fractal. It shows how we only SEE a tiny bit of this on the surface but most of it is invisible.
The organic patterns of systems. The Yunus Centre Griffith and Auckland Co-Design Lab 2022

Society 5.0, Digital Transformation and Disasters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Sakiko Kanbara, Rajib Shaw, Naonori Kato, Hiroyuki Miyazaki, and Akira Morita: “This book presents the evolution of the science technology paradigm in Japan and analyzes the critical community and local governance issues from the perspectives of the changing risk landscape, Society 5.0, and digital transformation. It also provides suggestions for the future development of a resilient society and community, by drawing lessons from other countries.Advancements in science technology in recent decades in Japan and the world might have increased our capacity to tackle the adverse human consequences of various kinds of disasters and environmental issues. However, the accompanied and interlinking phenomena of urbanization, climate change, rural to urban migration, population decreases, and aged population have posed new challenges, especially in the small, medium-sized cities, and in rural areas of Japan. This is also enhanced by the risk of cascading, complex and systemic risk, which is defining a new normal as “living with uncertainties”.
Society 5.0 is defined as “A human-centered society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space.” Society 5.0 was proposed in the 5th Science and Technology Basic Plan as a future society that Japan should aspire to. Society 5.0 achieves a high degree of convergence between cyberspace (virtual space) and physical space (real space), compared with the past information society (Society 4.0) that people would access a cloud service (databases) in cyberspace via the Internet and search for, retrieve, and analyze information or data…(More)”.

Philanthropy to Protect US Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lukas Haynes: “…Given the threat of election subversion, philanthropists who care about democracy across the political spectrum must now deploy donations as effectively as they can. In their seminal book, Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy, Paul Brest and Hal Harvey argue that generating “alternative solutions” to hard problems “requires creativity or innovation akin to that of a scientist or engineer—creativity that is goal-oriented, that aims to come up with pragmatic solutions to a problem.”

In seeking the most effective solutions, Brest and Harvey do not find that nonpartisan, charitable efforts are the only legitimate form of strategic giving. Instead, they encourage donors to identify clear problem-solving goals, sound strategy, and clarity about risk tolerance.

Given the concerted attack on democratic norms by political candidates, there is no more effective alternative at hand than using political donations to defeat those candidates. If it is not already part of donors’ philanthropic toolkit to protect democracy, it needs to be and soon.

Once Big Lie-promoting candidates win and take power over elections, it will be too late to repeal their authority, especially in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. Should they successfully subvert a national presidential election in a deeply polarized nation, the United States will have crossed an undemocratic Rubicon no well-intentioned American wants to witness. So what are the most effective ways for political donors to respond to this perilous moment?…(More)”.

The Haves and the Have Nots: Civic Technologies and the Pathways to Government Responsiveness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Mellon, Tiago C. Peixoto and Fredrik M. Sjoberg: “As civic life has moved online scholars have questioned whether this will exacerbate political inequalities due to differences in access to technology. However, this concern typically assumes that unequal participation inevitably leads to unequal outcomes: if online participants are unrepresentative of the population, then participation outcomes will benefit groups who participate and disadvantage those who do not. This paper combines the results from eight previous studies on civic technology platforms. It conducts new analysis to trace inequality throughout the participation chain, from (1) the existing digital divide, to (2) the profile of participants, to (3) the types of demands made through the platform, and, finally, to (4) policy outcomes.
The paper examines four civic technology models: online voting for participatory budgeting in Brazil, online local problem reporting in the United Kingdom, crowdsourced constitution drafting in Iceland, and online petitioning across 132 countries. In every case, the assumed links in the participation chain broke down because of the platform’s institutional features and the surrounding political process.
These results show that understanding how inequality is created requires examination of all stages of participation, as well as the resulting policy response. The assumption that inequalities in participation will always lead to the same inequalities in outcomes is not borne out in practice…(More)”.

Big Tech Goes to War

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christine H. Fox and Emelia S. Probasco: “Even before he made a bid to buy Twitter, Elon Musk was an avid user of the site. It is a reason Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov took to the social media platform to prod the SpaceX CEO to activate Starlink, a SpaceX division that provides satellite internet, to help his country in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion. “While you try to colonize Mars—Russia try [sic] to occupy Ukraine!” Fedorov wrote on February 26. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations.”

“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” Musk tweeted that same day. This was a coup for Ukraine: it facilitated Ukrainian communications in the conflict. Starlink later helped fend off Russian jamming attacks against its service to Ukraine with a quick and relatively simple code update. Now, however, Musk has gone back and forth on whether the company will continue funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war.

The tensions and uncertainty Musk is injecting into the war effort demonstrate the challenges that can emerge when companies play a key role in military conflict. Technology companies ranging from Microsoft to Silicon Valley start-ups have provided cyberdefense, surveillance, and reconnaissance services—not by direction of a government contract or even as a part of a government plan but instead through the independent decision-making of individual companies. These companies’ efforts have rightly garnered respect and recognition; their involvement, after all, were often pro bono and could have provoked Russian attacks on their networks, or even their people, in retaliation…(More)”.

How Do You Prove a Secret?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Sheon Han: “Imagine you had some useful knowledge — maybe a secret recipe, or the key to a cipher. Could you prove to a friend that you had that knowledge, without revealing anything about it? Computer scientists proved over 30 years ago that you could, if you used what’s called a zero-knowledge proof.

For a simple way to understand this idea, let’s suppose you want to show your friend that you know how to get through a maze, without divulging any details about the path. You could simply traverse the maze within a time limit, while your friend was forbidden from watching. (The time limit is necessary because given enough time, anyone can eventually find their way out through trial and error.) Your friend would know you could do it, but they wouldn’t know how.

Zero-knowledge proofs are helpful to cryptographers, who work with secret information, but also to researchers of computational complexity, which deals with classifying the difficulty of different problems. “A lot of modern cryptography relies on complexity assumptions — on the assumption that certain problems are hard to solve, so there has always been some connections between the two worlds,” said Claude Crépeau, a computer scientist at McGill University. “But [these] proofs have created a whole world of connection.”

Zero-knowledge proofs belong to a category known as interactive proofs, so to learn how the former work, it helps to understand the latter. First described in a 1985 paper by the computer scientists Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff, interactive proofs work like an interrogation: Over a series of messages, one party (the prover) tries to convince the other (the verifier) that a given statement is true. An interactive proof must satisfy two properties. First, a true statement will always eventually convince an honest verifier. Second, if the given statement is false, no prover — even one pretending to possess certain knowledge — can convince the verifier, except with negligibly small probability…(More)”

Addressing ethical gaps in ‘Technology for Good’: Foregrounding care and capabilities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alison B. Powell et al: “This paper identifies and addresses persistent gaps in the consideration of ethical practice in ‘technology for good’ development contexts. Its main contribution is to model an integrative approach using multiple ethical frameworks to analyse and understand the everyday nature of ethical practice, including in professional practice among ‘technology for good’ start-ups. The paper identifies inherent paradoxes in the ‘technology for good’ sector as well as ethical gaps related to (1) the sometimes-misplaced assignment of virtuousness to an individual; (2) difficulties in understanding social constraints on ethical action; and (3) the often unaccounted for mismatch between ethical intentions and outcomes in everyday practice, including in professional work associated with an ‘ethical turn’ in technology. These gaps persist even in contexts where ethics are foregrounded as matters of concern. To address the gaps, the paper suggests systemic, rather than individualized, considerations of care and capability applied to innovation settings, in combination with considerations of virtue and consequence. This paper advocates for addressing these challenges holistically in order to generate renewed capacity for change at a systemic level…(More)”.

Simple Writing Pays Off (Literally)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bill Birchard: “When SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt championed “plain English” writing in the 1990s, he argued that simpler financial disclosures would help investors make more informed decisions. Since then, we’ve also learned that it can help companies make more money. 

Researchers have confirmed that if you write simply and directly in disclosures like 10-Ks you can attract more investors, cut the cost of debt and equity, and even save money and time on audits.  

A landmark experiment by Kristina Rennekamp, an accounting professor at Cornell, documented some of the consequences of poor corporate writing. Working with readers of corporate press releases, she showed that companies stand to lose readers owing to lousy “processing fluency” of their documents. “Processing fluency” is a measure of readability used by psychologists and neuroscientists. 

Rennekamp asked people in an experiment to evaluate two versions of financial press releases. One was the actual release, from a soft drink company. The other was an edit using simple language advocated by the SEC’s Plain English Handbook. The handbook, essentially a guide to better fluency, contains principles that now serve as a standard by which researchers measure readability. 

Published under Levitt, the handbook clarified the requirements of Rule 421, which, starting in 1998, required all prospectuses (and in 2008 all mutual fund summary prospectuses) to adhere to the handbook’s principles. Among them: Use short sentences. Stick to active voice. Seek concrete words. Shun boilerplate. Minimize jargon. And avoid multiple negatives. 

Rennekamp’s experiment, using the so-called Fog Index, a measure of readability based on handbook standards, provided evidence that companies would do better at hooking readers if they simply made their writing easier to read. “Processing fluency from a more readable disclosure,” she wrote in 2012 after measuring the greater trust readers put in well-written releases, “acts as a heuristic cue and increases investors’ beliefs that they can rely on the information in the disclosure…(More)”.

Nudging the Nudger: A Field Experiment on the Effect of Performance Feedback to Service Agents on Increasing Organ Donor Registrations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Julian House, Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis & Nina Mazar: “We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving nearly 700 customer-service representatives (CSRs) in a Canadian government service agency to study whether providing CSRs with performance feedback with or without peer comparison affected their subsequent organ donor registration rates. Despite having no tie to remuneration or promotion, the provision of individual performance feedback three times over one year resulted in a 25% increase in daily signups, compared to otherwise similar encouragement and reminders. Adding benchmark information that compared CSRs performance to average and top peer performance did not further enhance this effect. Registrations increased more among CSRs whose performance was already above average, and there was no negative effect on lower-performing CSRs. A post-intervention survey showed that CSRs found the information included in the treatments helpful and encouraging. However, performance feedback without benchmark information increased perceived pressure to perform…(More)”.

New Horizons in Digital Anthropology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UNESCO and the LiiV Center: “Digitisation, social networks, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse are changing what it means to be human. Humans and technology are now in a dynamic and reciprocal relationship. However, while society has invested trillions in building and tracking digital platforms and personal data, we’ve invested a shockingly small amount in understanding the values, social dynamics, identities, and biases of digital communities.

We can’t address transformations in one without understanding the impacts on the other. Handling growing global challenges such as the spread of misinformation, the rise of social and political polarisation, the mental health crisis, the expansion of digital surveillance, and growing digital inequalities depends on our ability to gain deeper insights into the relationship between people and digital technologies, and to see and understand people, cultures and communities online. The world depends heavily on economics and data science when it comes to understanding digital impacts, but these sciences alone don’t tell the whole story. Economic models are built for scale but struggle with depth. Furthermore, experience shows us that over-reliance on one-dimensional approaches magnifies social biases and ethical blind spots.

Digital Anthropology focuses on this intersection between technology and humans, examining the quantitative and qualitative, using big data and thick data, the virtual and real. While innovation in digital anthropology has started, the field needs more investment and global awareness of its unique and untapped potential to humanise decision-making for leaders across the public and private sectors.

This publication, developed in partnership between UNESCO and the LiiV Center, maps the landscape of innovation in digital anthropology as an approach to ensure a better understanding of how human communities and societies interact and are shaped by technologies and, knowing this, how policies can be rendered more ethical and inclusive.

Briefly, the research found that innovation in digital anthropology is in a state of transition and is perceived differently across sectors and regions. In the span of just a couple of decades, innovation has come from doing anthropology digitally and doing the digital anthropologically, two movements that give life to space where creation happens within the blurry lines among disciplines, fuelled by increasingly fluid movement between academia and the private sector.

The innovation space in-between these trends seem to be where the most exciting and forward-thinking digital innovations are occurring, like novel blended algorithms or computational and techno-anthropology, and opens opportunities to educate a new breed of digitally and anthropologically skilled professionals…(More)”.