Public Governance and Emerging Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jurgen Goossens, Esther Keymolen, and Antonia Stanojević: “This open access book focuses on public governance’s increasing reliance on emerging digital technologies. ‘Disruptive’ or ‘emerging’ digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, are often portrayed as highly promising, with the potential to transform established societal, economic, or governmental practices. Unsurprisingly, public actors are therefore increasingly experimenting with the application of these emerging digital technologies in public governance.

The first part of the book shows how automatization via algorithmic systems, the networked nature of distributed technologies such as blockchain, and data-driven use of AI in public governance can promote hyper-connectivity and hyper-complexity. This trend and the associated concerns have drawn societal, political, and scholarly attention to regulatory compliance considering the current and potential future uses of emerging technologies. Accordingly, the second part of the book focuses on regulatory compliance and regulatory solutions. It explores the compatibility of technology with existing regulations, existing legal tools that could be innovatively applied for the successful regulation of emerging technologies, and approaches to updating existing legislation or creating new legislation for the regulation of emerging technologies. While socio-ethical considerations on upholding public values in a digital world are at the heart of all chapters, the third part specifically focuses on public values and trust. It advances a conceptual, normative discussion, putting the spotlight on trust and other fundamental public values that should be safeguarded…(More)”

How governments can move beyond bureaucracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Jorrit de Jong: “..Bureaucracy is not so much a system of rules, it is a system of values. It is an organizational form that governs how work gets done in accordance with principles that the sociologist Max Weber first codified: standardization, formalization, expert officialdom, specialization, hierarchy, and accountability. Add those up and you arrive at a system that values the written word; that is siloed because that’s what specialization does; that can sometimes be slow because there is a chain of command and an approval process. Standardization supports the value that it doesn’t matter who you are, who you know, what you look like when you’re applying for a permit, or who is issuing the permit: the case will be evaluated based on its merits. That is a good thing. Bureaucracy is a way to do business in a rational, impersonal, responsible and efficient way, at least in theory…

It becomes a problem when organizations start to violate their own values and lose connection with their purpose. If standardization turns into rigidity, doing justice to extenuating individual circumstances becomes hard. If formalization becomes pointless paper pushing, it defeats the purpose. And if accountability structures favor risk aversion over taking initiative, organizations can’t innovate.

Bureaucratic dysfunction occurs when the system that we’ve created ceases to produce the value that we wanted out of it. But that does not mean we have to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Can we create organizations that have the benefits of accountability, standardization and specialization without the burdens of slowness, rigidity, and silos? My answer is yes. Research we did with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative shows how organizations can improve performance by building capabilities that make them more nimble, responsive, and user-friendly. Cities that leverage data to better understand the communities they serve and measure performance learn and improve faster. Cities that use design thinking to reinvent resident services save time and money. And cities that collaborate across organizational and sector boundaries come up with more effective solutions to urban problems…(More)”

Leveraging large language models for academic conference organization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Yuan Luo et al: “We piloted using Large Language Models (LLMs) for organizing AMIA 2024 Informatics Summit. LLMs were prompt engineered to develop algorithms for reviewer assignments, group presentations into sessions, suggest session titles, and provide one-sentence summaries for presentations. These tools substantially reduced planning time while enhancing the coherence and efficiency of conference organization. Our experience shows the potential of generative AI and LLMs to complement human expertise in academic conference planning…(More)”.

What Autocrats Want From Academics: Servility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Anna Dumont: “Since Trump’s inauguration, the university community has received a good deal of “messaging” from academic leadership. We’ve received emails from our deans and university presidents; we’ve sat in department meetings regarding the “developing situation”; and we’ve seen the occasional official statement or op-ed or comment in the local newspaper. And the unfortunate takeaway from all this is that our leaders’ strategy rests on a disturbing and arbitrary distinction. The public-facing language of the university — mission statements, programming, administrative structures, and so on — has nothing at all to do with the autonomy of our teaching and research, which, they assure us, they hold sacrosanct. Recent concessions — say, the disappearance of the website of the Women’s Center — are concerning, they admit, but ultimately inconsequential to our overall working lives as students and scholars.

History, however, shows that public-facing statements are deeply consequential, and one episode from the 20-year march of Italian fascism strikes me as especially instructive. On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring, as a condition of their employment, every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused.

Today, those who refused are known simply as “I Dodici”: the Twelve. They were a scholar of Middle Eastern languages, an organic chemist, a doctor of forensic medicine, three lawyers, a mathematician, a theologian, a surgeon, a historian of ancient Rome, a philosopher of Kantian ethics, and one art historian. Two, Francesco Ruffini and Edoardo Ruffini Avondo, were father and son. Four were Jewish. All of them were immediately fired…(More)”

2025 Ratings for Digital Participation Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

People-Powered Report: The latest edition of our Digital Participation Tool Ratings evaluates 30 comprehensive tools that have been used to support digital participation all over the world. This year’s ratings offer more information and insights on each tool to help you select a suitable tool for your context and needs. We also researched how AI tools and features fit into the current digital participation landscape. 

For the last four years, People Powered has been committed to providing governments and organizations with digital participation guidance, to enable people leading participatory programs and citizen engagement efforts to effectively select and use digital participation tools by providing guidance and ratings for tools. These ratings are the latest edition of the evaluations first launched in 2022. Further guidance about how to use these tools is available from our Guide to Digital Participation Platforms and Online Training on Digital Participation…(More)”.

Designing New Institutions and Renewing Existing Ones – A Playbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UNDP Report: “The world has long depended on public institutions to solve problems and meet needs — from running schools to building roads, taking care of public health to defense. Today, global challenges like climate change, election security, forced migration, and AI-induced unemployment demand new institutional responses, especially in the Global South.

The bad news? Many institutions now struggle with public distrust, being seen as too wasteful
and inefficient, unresponsive and ineffective, and sometimes corrupt and outdated.
The good news? Fresh methods and models inspired by innovations in government, business, and civil
society are now available that can help us rethink institutions — making them more public results
oriented, agile, transparent, and fit for purpose. And ready for the future…(More)”.

How social media and online communities influence climate change beliefs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by James Rice: “Psychological, social, and political forces all shape beliefs about climate change. Climate scientists bear a responsibility — not only as researchers and educators, but as public communicators — to guard against climate misinformation. This responsibility should be foundational, supported by economists, sociologists, and industry leaders.

While fake news manifests in various forms, not all forms of misinformation are created with the intent to deceive. Regardless of intent, climate misinformation threatens policy integrity. Strengthening environmental communication is thus crucial to counteract ideological divides that distort scientific discourse and weaken public trust.

Political polarisation, misinformation, and the erosion of scientific authority pose challenges demanding rigorous scholarship and proactive public engagement. Climate scientists, policymakers, and climate justice advocates must ensure scientific integrity while recognising that climate science operates in a politically charged landscape. Agnosticism and resignation, rather than resisting climate misinformation, are as dangerous as outright denial of climate science. Combating this extends beyond scientific accuracy. It requires strategic communication, engagement with advocacy groups, and the reinforcement of public trust in environmental expertise…(More)”.

Political Responsibility and Tech Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jude Browne: “Not a day goes by without a new story on the perils of technology: from increasingly clever machines that surpass human capability and comprehension to genetic technologies capable of altering the human genome in ways we cannot predict. How can we respond? What should we do politically? Focusing on the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), and the impact of new reproductive and genetic technologies (Repro-tech), Jude Browne questions who has political responsibility for the structural impacts of these technologies and how we might go about preparing for the far-reaching societal changes they may bring. This thought-provoking book tackles some of the most pressing issues of our time and offers a compelling vision for how we can respond to these challenges in a way that is both politically feasible and socially responsible…(More)”.

Getting the Public on Side: How to Make Reforms Acceptable by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Public acceptability is a crucial condition for the successful implementation of reforms. The challenges raised by the green, digital and demographic transitions call for urgent and ambitious policy action. Despite this, governments often struggle to build sufficiently broad public support for the reforms needed to promote change. Better information and effective public communication have a key role to play. But policymakers cannot get the public to choose the side of reform without a proper understanding of people’s views and how they can help strengthen the policy process.

Perceptual and behavioural data provide an important source of insights on the perceptions, attitudes and preferences that constitute the “demand-side” of reform. The interdisciplinary OECD Expert Group on New Measures of the Public Acceptability of Reforms was set up in 2021 to take stock of these insights and explore their potential for improving policy. This report reflects the outcomes of the Expert Group’s work. It looks at and assesses (i) the available data and what they can tell policymakers about people’s views; (ii) the analytical frameworks through which these data are interpreted; and (iii) the policy tools through which considerations of public acceptability are integrated into the reform process…(More)”.

Should AGI-preppers embrace DOGE?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Henry Farrell: “…AGI-prepping is reshaping our politics. Wildly ambitious claims for AGI have not only shaped America’s grand strategy, but are plausibly among the justifying reasons for DOGE.

After the announcement of DOGE, but before it properly got going, I talked to someone who was not formally affiliated, but was very definitely DOGE adjacent. I put it to this individual that tearing out the decision making capacities of government would not be good for America’s ability to do things in the world. Their response (paraphrased slightly) was: so what? We’ll have AGI by late 2026. And indeed, one of DOGE’s major ambitions, as described in a new article in WIRED, appears to have been to pull as much government information as possible into a large model that could then provide useful information across the totality of government.

The point – which I don’t think is understood nearly widely enough – is that radical institutional revolutions such as DOGE follow naturally from the AGI-prepper framework. If AGI is right around the corner, we don’t need to have a massive federal government apparatus, organizing funding for science via the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Health. After all, in Amodei and Pottinger’s prediction:

By 2027, AI developed by frontier labs will likely be smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields of science and engineering. … It will be able to … complete complex tasks that would take people months or years, such as designing new weapons or curing diseases.

Who needs expensive and cumbersome bureaucratic institutions for organizing funding scientists in a near future where a “country of geniuses [will be] contained in a data center,” ready to solve whatever problems we ask them to? Indeed, if these bottled geniuses are cognitively superior to humans across most or all tasks, why do we need human expertise at all, beyond describing and explaining human wants? From this perspective, most human based institutions are obsolescing assets that need to be ripped out, and DOGE is only the barest of beginnings…(More)”.