Handbook edited by B. G. Peters and Guillaume Fontaine: “…The difference between policy design and policy making lies in the degree of encompassing consciousness involved in designing, which includes policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. Consequently there are differences in degrees of consciousness within the same kind of activity, from the simplest expression of “non-design”, which refers to the absence of clear intention or purpose, to “re-design”, which is the most common, incremental way to proceed, to “full design”, which suggests the attempt to control all the process by government or some other controlling actor. There are also differences in kind, from program design (at
the micro-level of intervention) to singular policy design, to meta-design when dealing with complex problems that require cross-sectorial coordination. Eventually, there are different forms or expressions (technical, political, ideological) and different patterns (transfer, innovation, accident or experiment) of policy design.
Unlike other forms of design, such as engineering or architecture, policy design exhibits specific features because of the social nature of policy targeting and modulation, which involves humans as objects and subjects with their values, conflicts, and other characteristics (Peters, 2018, p. 5). Thus, policy design is the attempt to integrate different understandings of a policy problem with different conceptions of the policy instruments to be utilized, and the different values according to which a government assess the outcomes pursued by this policy as expected, satisfactory, acceptable, and so forth. Those three components of design – causation, instruments and values – must then be combined to create a coherent plan for intervention. We will define this fourth component of design as “intervention”, meaning that there must be some strategic sense of how to make the newly designed policy work. This component requires not only an understanding of the specific policy being designed but also how that policy will mesh with the array of policies already operating. Thus, there is the need to think about some “meta-design” issues about coordination and coherence, as well as the usual challenges of implementation…(More)”.
How Smart Tech Tried to Solve the Mental Health Crisis and Only Made It Worse
Article by Emma Bedor Hiland: “Crisis Text Line was supposed to be the exception. Skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, and mental distress over the last decade demanded new, innovative solutions. The non-profit organization was founded in 2013 with the mission of providing free mental health text messaging services and crisis intervention tools. It seemed like the right moment to use technology to make the world a better place. Over the following years, the accolades and praise the platform received reflected its success. But their sterling reputation was tarnished overnight at the beginning of 2022 when Politico published an investigation into the way Crisis Text Line had handled and shared user data. The problem with the organization, however, goes well beyond its alleged mishandling of user information.
Despite Crisis Text Line’s assurance that its platform was anonymous, Politico’s January report showed that the company’s private messaging sessions were not actually anonymous. Data about users, including what they shared with Crisis Text Line’s volunteers, had been provided and sold to an entirely different company called Loris.ai, a tech startup that specializes in artificial intelligence software for human resources and customer service. The report brought to light a troubling relationship between the two organizations. Both had previously been headed by the same CEO, Nancy Lublin. In 2019, however, Lublin had stepped down from Loris, and in 2020 Crisis Text Line’s board ousted her following allegations that she had engaged in workplace racism.
But the troubles that enveloped Crisis Text Line can’t be blamed on one bad apple. Crisis Text Line’s board of directors had approved the relationship between the entities. In the technology and big data sectors, commodification of user data is fundamental to a platform or toolset’s economic survival, and by sharing data with Loris.ai, Crisis Text Line was able to provide needed services. The harsh reality revealed by the Politico report was that even mental healthcare is not immune from commodification, despite the risks of aggregating and sharing information about experiences and topics which continue to be stigmatized.
In the case of the Crisis Text Line-Loris.ai partnership, Loris used the nonprofit’s data to improve its own, for-profit development of machine learning algorithms sold to corporations and governments. Although Crisis Text Line maintains that all of the data shared with Loris was anonymized, the transactional nature of the relationship between the two was still fundamentally an economic one. As the Loris.ai website states, “Crisis Text Line is a Loris shareholder. Our success offers material benefit to CTL, helping this non-profit organization continue its important work. We believe this model is a blueprint for ways for-profit companies can infuse social good into their culture and operations, and for nonprofits to prosper.”…(More)”.
Digital Responsibility
Paper by Matthias Trier et al: “The transformative effects of digital technologies require researchers to understand the long-term consequences of the digital transformation process and to contribute to its design in a responsible way. This important challenge is addressed by the emerging concept of Digital Responsibility (DR). While the concept is increasingly recognized by political and organizational groups, the academic discussion is still not systematically evolving and the core elements of DR are not yet integrated into a coherent structured framework. This article presents a first systematic overview about the relevant levels of DR (personal, corporate and societal), its core principles and the key research themes for business & information systems researchers that relate to important questions of digital responsibility….(More)”.
Should we get rid of the scientific paper?
Article by Stuart Ritchie: “But although the internet has transformed the way we read it, the overall system for how we publish science remains largely unchanged. We still have scientific papers; we still send them off to peer reviewers; we still have editors who give the ultimate thumbs up or down as to whether a paper is published in their journal.
This system comes with big problems. Chief among them is the issue of publication bias: reviewers and editors are more likely to give a scientific paper a good write-up and publish it in their journal if it reports positive or exciting results. So scientists go to great lengths to hype up their studies, lean on their analyses so they produce “better” results, and sometimes even commit fraud in order to impress those all-important gatekeepers. This drastically distorts our view of what really went on.
There are some possible fixes that change the way journals work. Maybe the decision to publish could be made based only on the methodology of a study, rather than on its results (this is already happening to a modest extent in a few journals). Maybe scientists could just publish all their research by default, and journals would curate, rather than decide, which results get out into the world. But maybe we could go a step further, and get rid of scientific papers altogether.
Scientists are obsessed with papers – specifically, with having more papers published under their name, extending the crucial “publications” section of their CV. So it might sound outrageous to suggest we could do without them. But that obsession is the problem. Paradoxically, the sacred status of a published, peer-reviewed paper makes it harder to get the contents of those papers right.
Consider the messy reality of scientific research. Studies almost always throw up weird, unexpected numbers that complicate any simple interpretation. But a traditional paper – word count and all – pretty well forces you to dumb things down. If what you’re working towards is a big, milestone goal of a published paper, the temptation is ever-present to file away a few of the jagged edges of your results, to help “tell a better story”. Many scientists admit, in surveys, to doing just that – making their results into unambiguous, attractive-looking papers, but distorting the science along the way.
And consider corrections. We know that scientific papers regularly contain errors. One algorithm that ran through thousands of psychology papers found that, at worst, more than 50% had one specific statistical error, and more than 15% had an error serious enough to overturn the results. With papers, correcting this kind of mistake is a slog: you have to write in to the journal, get the attention of the busy editor, and get them to issue a new, short paper that formally details the correction. Many scientists who request corrections find themselves stonewalled or otherwise ignored by journals. Imagine the number of errors that litter the scientific literature that haven’t been corrected because to do so is just too much hassle.
Finally, consider data. Back in the day, sharing the raw data that formed the basis of a paper with that paper’s readers was more or less impossible. Now it can be done in a few clicks, by uploading the data to an open repository. And yet, we act as if we live in the world of yesteryear: papers still hardly ever have the data attached, preventing reviewers and readers from seeing the full picture.
The solution to all these problems is the same as the answer to “How do I organise my journals if I don’t use cornflakes boxes?” Use the internet. We can change papers into mini-websites (sometimes called “notebooks”) that openly report the results of a given study. Not only does this give everyone a view of the full process from data to analysis to write-up – the dataset would be appended to the website along with all the statistical code used to analyse it, and anyone could reproduce the full analysis and check they get the same numbers – but any corrections could be made swiftly and efficiently, with the date and time of all updates publicly logged…(More)”.
Towards Public Digital Infrastructure
Report by Katja Bego: “…We already have the technical and governance building blocks at our disposal to make this Public Digital InfrastructureI model a reality. We also have the political momentum on our side through a number of ambitious policy proposals and funding agendas on the European level. The challenge now is to integrate these building blocks into a single cohesive system, and to ensure we put into place the right institutions and rules to ensure the DPI can achieve trust, scale and openness. This approach is made up of three key pillars:
- Generating an ecosystem of healthy, interoperable alternatives:
Public Digital Infrastructure could help us move away from a platform economy, where one actor owns a whole suite of tools and can unilaterally set the rules, towards a protocol-based economy, in which we could see a collaborative ecosystem of smaller, interoperable solutions and applications emerge, built on top of a shared set of rules and open protocols. We could see this as an alternative, parallel infrastructure, made up of open, trustworthy solutions and public goods. Through collaborative interoperability, solutions built on top of the Public Digital Infrastructure would proactively set out to integrate their solutions with other tools built on the framework.
To help this ecosystem thrive, the Commission and other governing bodies (from the local level to the supra-national) would seek to leverage their own market shaping-levers, for example through strengthening rule-setting through procurement, and moving their own solutions on top of the system. The European Commission would further provide the funds for an independent Public Technology Fund, which would support the development of applications on top of the Public Digital Infrastructure, as well as fund public goods to support the wider ecosystem. - Designing governance models fit for purpose: No single centralised entity – public or private – would control the underlying Public Digital Infrastructure model; instead, the system would be governed on the basis of a shared set of rules and protocols for, for example, interoperability, data sharing and online identity management. In this model, civil society, trusted public institutions, academia, and the public-interest technology community would be empowered to collaboratively shape the rules, standards and governance models underpinning this shared logic.
To ensure these decision-making processes remain open and representative, but also geared towards effective decision-making, the European Commission would provide the funding for the establishment of a fully independent Public Digital Infrastructure Agency, tasked with bringing together the community, and providing resources for maintenance and auditing of the PDI’s components.
- Opening up data and identity: Every internet user would be provided with the means to control their own digital identity and personal data online, empowering them to share what they want, with whomever they want, on their own terms. To do this, each user of the Public Digital Infrastructure model would have the right to be issued their own portable online identity and personal data wallet, which would allow them to share and pool data on a case by case, consent-based basis.
Developers of applications and services would be able to tap into the user-generated data commons that would result from this pooling in a way that is accountable and fair, rather than feel compelled to amass their own proprietary data lakes in order to compete. We should not imagine these commons as one single enormous, distributed data lake, but rather as a set of data governance mechanisms, ranging from data commons to trusts, which would be employed and governed depending on the use case and sensitivity and utility of the data at hand. Users would be able to pick and choose which commons to participate in, and solutions would contribute to these commons as a condition of being part of the PDI….(More)”
The Power of Narrative
Essay by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Mallerett: “…The expression “failure of imagination” captures this by describing the expectation that future opportunities and risks will resemble those of the past. Novelist Graham Greene used it in The Power and the Glory, but the 9/11 Commission made it popular by invoking it as the main reason why intelligence agencies had failed to anticipate the “unimaginable” events of that day.
Ever since, the expression has been associated with situations in which strategic thinking and risk management are stuck in unimaginative and reactive thinking. Considering today’s wide and interdependent array of risks, we can’t afford to be unimaginative, even though, as the astrobiologist Caleb Scharf points out, we risk getting imprisoned in a dangerous cognitive lockdown because of the magnitude of the task. “Indeed, we humans do seem to struggle in general when too many new things are thrown at us at once. Especially when those things are outside of our normal purview. Like, well, weird viruses or new climate patterns,” Scharf writes. “In the face of such things, we can simply go into a state of cognitive lockdown, flipping from one small piece of the problem to another and not quite building a cohesive whole.”
Imagination is precisely what is required to escape a state of “cognitive lockdown” and to build a “cohesive whole.” It gives us the capacity to dream up innovative solutions to successfully address the multitude of risks that confront us. For decades now, we’ve been destabilizing the world, having failed to imagine the consequences of our actions on our societies and our biosphere, and the way in which they are connected. Now, following this failure and the stark realization of what it has entailed, we need to do just the opposite: rely on the power of imagination to get us out of the holes we’ve dug ourselves into. It is incumbent upon us to imagine the contours of a more equitable and sustainable world. Imagination being boundless, the variety of social, economic, and political solutions is infinite.
With respect to the assertion that there are things we don’t imagine to be socially or politically possible, a recent book shows that nothing is preordained. We are in fact only bound by the power of our own imaginations. In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow (an anthropologist and an archaeologist) prove this by showing that every imaginable form of social and economic organization has existed from the very beginning of humankind. Over the past 300,000 years, we’ve pursued knowledge, experimentation, happiness, development, freedom, and other human endeavors in myriad different ways. During these times that preceded our modern world, none of the arrangements that we devised to live together exhibited a single point of origin or an invariant pattern. Early societies were peaceful and violent, authoritarian and democratic, patriarchal and matriarchal, slaveholding and abolitionist, some moving between different types of organizations all the time, others not. Antique industrial cities were flourishing at the heart of empires while others existed in the absence of a sovereign entity…(More)”
How to use the Civil Society Foresight report
Report by Dominique Barron, Rachel Coldicutt, Stephanie Pau, Anna Williams: “This report is for anyone making plans for the future. In particular, we hope it will be a useful strategic tool for funders, civil society organisations, and policymakers who are developing strategies for long-term change.
What is it?
A way of looking ahead that makes it easier to see past the overwhelming present and focus on creating longer-term change.
It highlights what is missing now; what is too dominant; and it shows that innovation is something driven by people, not technologies.
How was it created?
The scenarios here were produced through a relational process. (More on that process in our report “A Constellation of Possible Futures”.) Our team brought together thirteen civil society leaders with lived, learned and practice experience; introduced them to some of the “official” futures created by management consultancies, trade bodies and banks (reports that focus on things like retail and transport and financial capital); and we then all participated in a workshop process that took us to 2036 and beyond.
What does it cover?
The concepts explored in this report include the notion of care in a climate-altered world; a sketch of what happens when a nation welcomes migrants at scale; the psychological toll of social division; and the possible outcomes of technological breakdown. The outputs focussed on ways to reduce fear, overcome entrenched barriers, and increase spirituality and belonging.
Importantly, the process never asked for agreement or utopia; instead, it held a space for tension, disagreement, and pragmatism. And it surfaced the strategic knowledge of expertise of people in civil society with a wide range of experience…(More)”.
Regulatory Technology for the 21st Century
White Paper by the World Economic Forum: “Regulation is central to government’s management of complex systems. However, if designed or applied ineffectively, regulation may trigger significant losses, impose unnecessary financial burdens and stifle innovation. Regulatory Technology (RegTech), is the application of new technological solutions to in set, effectuate and meet regulatory requirements. This white paper explores the value of RegTech through a series of case studies and identifies the 7 common success factors that help define best practice deployment of RegTech. It provides government and business with a roadmap to start implementing RegTech without having to upend or rewrite entire regulatory and compliance frameworks to begin the journey…(More)”.
Orientation Failure? Why Directionality Matters in Innovation Policy and Implementation
Blog by Mariam Tabatadze and Benjamin Kumpf: “…In the essay “The Moon and the Ghetto” from 1977, Richard Nelson brought renewed attention to the question of directionality of innovation. He asked why societies that are wealthy and technologically advanced are not able to deal effectively with social problems such as poverty or inequities in education. Nelson believed that politics are only a small part of the problem. The main challenge, according to him, was further advancing scientific and technological breakthroughs.
Since the late seventies, humanity has laid claim to many more significant technological and scientific achievements. However, challenges such as poverty, social inequalities and of course environmental degradation persist. This begs the question: is the main problem a lack of directionality?
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked renewed interest in mission-driven innovation in industrial and socio-economic policy (see below for a framing of missions and mission-oriented innovation). The focus is a continuation of a “normative turn” in national and supranational science, technology and innovation (STI) policies over the last 15 years.
The directionality of STI policies shifted from pursuing predominantly growth and competitiveness-related objectives to addressing societal challenges. It brings together elements of innovation policy – focused on economic growth – and transition policy, which seeks beneficial change for society at large. This is important as we are seeing increasingly more evidence on the negative effects of innovation in countries across the globe, from exacerbated inequalities between places to greater inequalities between income groups…(More)”.
The Food Aid Delivery App
Essay by Trish Bendix: “Between 30 and 40 percent of the US food supply goes to waste each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 80 billion pounds of food end up in landfills annually. This figure takes on a greater significance in the context of another food crisis: food insecurity. More than 10 percent of US households are food insecure, and the nonprofit Feeding America reports that this number will increase due to the economic and unemployment consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The food waste crisis is not new. Wasted, a 2012 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, recorded Americans’ annual food waste at 40 percent. Horrified by the report’s findings, Leah Lizarondo, a food and health advocate who began her career working in consumer-packaged goods and technology, was inspired to find a solution.
“I tried to figure out why this inefficiency was happening—where the failing was in the supply chain,” Lizarondo says. She knew that consumer-facing businesses such as grocery stores and restaurants were the second-biggest culprits of food waste—behind American households. And even though these businesses didn’t intend to waste food, they lacked the logistics, structures, or incentives to redirect the food surplus to people experiencing food insecurity. Furthermore, because most wasted food is perishable, traditional waste methods didn’t work within the food-banking structure.
“It was so cheap to just throw food in a landfill,” Lizarondo comments. “There’s no legislation [in the United States] that prevents us from doing that, unlike other countries.” For example, France banned food waste in 2016, while Norway has stores that sell food past their sell-by dates, and Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have adopted their own regulations, including the latter charging a fee to citizens for each pound of food waste. Currently, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are the only US states with legislation enforcing organic waste bans.
In 2016, Lizarondo launched the nonprofit Food Rescue Hero, a technology platform that redirects food waste to the food insecure in cities across America.
Since its launch, Food Rescue Hero has given more than 68 million pounds of food to people in need. Currently, it operates in 12 cities in the United States and Canada, with more than 22,000 drivers volunteering their time….(More)”.