Fairer Democracy: Designing a Better Citizens’ Assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press release by The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation: “Last winter, 80 residents of Washington State convened virtually to discuss the best ways for their state to tackle climate change. Their final recommendations were shared with state legislators, who are now considering some of the ideas in their policymaking. But the participants of the Washington Climate Assembly were neither climate experts nor politicians. Instead, they were randomly selected citizens from all walks of life, chosen carefully to reflect a range of demographics and views on climate change.

Such citizens’ assemblies are an increasingly popular way, around the world, of engaging average people in their democracies. But ensuring that participants are truly representative of society at large is a daunting analytical challenge. 

That’s where Bailey Flanigan, a Hertz Fellow and a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, comes in. Flanigan and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard University have developed a new algorithm for selecting the participants in citizens’ assemblies, a process called sortition. The goal of their approach, she says, is to improve the fairness of sortition—and it’s already been published in Nature and used to select participants for dozens of assemblies, including the Washington Climate Assembly….

The researchers have made their algorithm, which they dubbed Panelot, available for public use, and Procaccia said it’s already been used in selecting more than 40 citizens’ assemblies. 

“It’s testament to the potential impact of work in this area that our algorithm has been enthusiastically adopted by so many organizations,” Flanigan said. “A lot of practitioners were using their own algorithms, and the idea that computer scientists can help centralize efforts to make sortition fairer and more transparent has started some exciting conversations.”…(More)”

Global Citizens’ Assemblies: A Bold Idea That Needs Our Support!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Robert G. Eccles: “COP 26 officially kicks off on October 31. The general tone leading up to this is one of hope, mixed with a large dose of understandable skepticism. In a few weeks, we’ll know the outcome in terms of commitments made and not made. For the former, the question will be one of whether they will be met. For the latter, pressure will continue to get them made.

Governments, corporations, and investors all have an essential role to play to achieve a net-zero and more just economy. NGOs also have a role to play in pushing all of them. All of these groups will be represented in Glasgow.

I’m a “glass half full” kind of guy so I’m optimistic about this important event. But I can also do simple math to conclude that the 25,000+ people present is still a very small number compared to the world population. I am also well aware that most of these people will be and, pardon a term from my 60’s youth, from “The Establishment.” Let’s be honest. Even the NGOs are, or certainly the largest and most important ones. Don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need The Establishment (of which I am now an official member) if we are going to achieve our collective goals in the time we have left to make the changes we need.

But we also need new energy and fresh voices that are more representative of the world’s population. For instance, imagine a global governance body that automatically included 50% women, and with proportionate numbers of people from the Global North and South. We can get this from the Global Assembly (GA). The GA is a global citizens’ assembly, it officially launched with this online event on October 5, 2021. With so many other things going on, I suspect it may not get the attention at COP 26 that it deserves. What I’d like to do here is plant the seed, encourage all of you to get involved, and say “Watch this space for more to come.”…(More)”.

A crowdsourced spreadsheet is the latest tool in Chinese tech worker organizing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by JS: “This week, thousands of Chinese tech workers are sharing information about their working schedules in an online spreadsheet. Their goal is to inform each other and new employees about overtime practices at different companies. 

This initiative for work-schedule transparency, titled Working Time, has gone viral. As of Friday—just three days after the project launched—the spreadsheet has already had millions of views and over 6000 entries. The creators also set up group chats on the Tencent-owned messaging platform, QQ, to invite discussion about the project—over 10000 people have joined as participants.

This initiative comes after the explosive 996.ICU campaign which took place in 2019 where hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the country participated in an online effort to demand the end of the 72-hour work week—9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

This year, multiple tech companies—with encouragement from the government—have ended overtime work practices that forced employees to work on Saturdays (or in some cases, alternating Saturdays). This has effectively ended 996, which was illegal to begin with. While an improvement, the data collected from this online spreadsheet shows that most tech workers still work long hours, either “1095” or “11105” (10am to 9pm or 11am to 10pm, 5 days a week). The spreadsheet also shows a non-negligible number of workers still working 6 days week.

Like the 996.ICU campaign, the creators of this spreadsheet are using GitHub to circulate and share info about the project. The first commit was made on Tuesday, October 12th. Only a few days later, the repo has been starred over 9500 times….(More)”.

EU-US Trade and Technology Council: Commission launches consultation platform for stakeholder’s involvement to shape transatlantic cooperation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, the Commission launched an online consultation platform on the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), allowing stakeholders to share their views and provide common proposals on the work ahead.

Following their first meeting in Pittsburgh last month, representatives of the European Union and the United States agreed on the importance of and commitment to consulting closely with diverse stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic on their coordinated approaches to key global technology, economic, and trade issues. It is in this context that the Commission has set up a one-stop-shop on its online “Futurium” platform, to collect input from all interested parties relating to the TTC.

Businesses, think tanks, labour, non-profit and environmental organisations, academics, and other parties that form the civil society at large are invited to contribute, as essential actors to successful EU-US cooperation. The platform is open to everyone after a simple registration. It allows interested parties to have their voice heard in the work of the ten specific TTC Working Groups. Via this website, they can not only feed in their views, but also receive important information and updates on the progress of the different working groups…(More)“.

Solutions to Plastic Pollution: A Conceptual Framework to Tackle a Wicked Problem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Martin Wagner: “There is a broad willingness to act on global plastic pollution as well as a plethora of available technological, governance, and societal solutions. However, this solution space has not been organized in a larger conceptual framework yet. In this essay, I propose such a framework, place the available solutions in it, and use it to explore the value-laden issues that motivate the diverse problem formulations and the preferences for certain solutions by certain actors. To set the scene, I argue that plastic pollution shares the key features of wicked problems, namely, scientific, political, and societal complexity and uncertainty as well as a diversity in the views of actors. To explore the latter, plastic pollution can be framed as a waste, resource, economic, societal, or systemic problem.

Doing so results in different and sometimes conflicting sets of preferred solutions, including improving waste management; recycling and reuse; implementing levies, taxes, and bans as well as ethical consumerism; raising awareness; and a transition to a circular economy. Deciding which of these solutions is desirable is, again, not a purely rational choice. Accordingly, the social deliberations on these solution sets can be organized across four scales of change. At the geographic and time scales, we need to clarify where and when we want to solve the plastic problem. On the scale of responsibility, we need to clarify who is accountable, has the means to make change, and carries the costs. At the magnitude scale, we need to discuss which level of change we desire on a spectrum of status quo to revolution. All these issues are inherently linked to value judgments and worldviews that must, therefore, be part of an open and inclusive debate to facilitate solving the wicked problem of plastic pollution…(More)”.

Digital Technology, Politics, and Policy-Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book by Fabrizio Gilardi: “The rise of digital technology has been the best of times, and also the worst, a roller coaster of hopes and fears: “social media have gone—in the popular imagination at least—from being a way for pro-democratic forces to fight autocrats to being a tool of outside actors who want to attack democracies” (Tucker et al., 2017, 47). The 2016 US presidential election raised fundamental questions regarding the compatibility of the internet with democracy (Persily, 2017). The divergent assessments of the promises and risks of digital technology has to do, in part, with the fact that it has become such a pervasive phenomenon. Whether digital technology is, on balance, a net benefit or harm for democratic processes and institutions depends on which specific aspects we focus on. Moreover, the assessment is not value neutral, because digital technology has become inextricably linked with our politics. As Farrell (2012, 47) argued a few years ago, “[a]s the Internet becomes politically normalized, it will be ever less appropriate to study it in isolation but ever more important to think clearly, and carefully, about its relationship to politics.” Reflecting on this issue requires going beyond the headlines, which tend to focus on the most dramatic concerns and may have a negativity bias common in news reporting in general. The shortage of hard facts in this area, linked to the singular challenges of studying the connection between digital technology and politics, exacerbates the problem.
Since it affects virtually every aspect of politic and policy-making, the nature and effects of digital technology have been studied from many different angles in increasingly fragmented literatures. For example, studies of disinformation and social media usually do not acknowledge research on the usage of artificial intelligence in public administration—for good reasons, because such is the nature of specialized academic research. Similarly, media attention tends to concentrate on the most newsworthy aspects, such as the role of Facebook in elections, without connecting them to other related phenomena. The compartmentalization of academic and public attention in this area is understandable, but it obscures the relationships that exist among the different parts. Moreover, the fact that scholarly and media attention are sometimes out of sync might lead policy-makers to focus on solutions before there is a scientific consensus on the nature and scale of the problems. For example, policy-makers may emphasize curbing “fake news” while there is still no agreement in the research community about its effects on political outcomes…(More)”.

Global citizens’ assembly to be chosen for UN climate talks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Fiona Harvey: “One hundred people from around the world are to take part in a citizens’ assembly to discuss the climate crisis over the next month, before presenting their findings at the UN Cop26 climate summit.

The Global Citizens’ Assembly will be representative of the world’s population, and will invite people chosen by lottery to take part in online discussions that will culminate in November, during the fortnight-long climate talks that open in Glasgow on 31 October.

Funded with nearly $1m, from sources including the Scottish government and the European Climate Foundation, the assembly is supported by the UN and UK and run by a coalition of more than 100 organisations…

A team of international scientists and other experts will explain details of the climate crisis and potential solutions, and members of the assembly will discuss how these might work in practice, seeking to answer the question: “How can humanity address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way?”. The key messages from their discussions will be presented at Cop26 and a report will be published in March.

Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who will act as president of the Cop26 summit, said: “The Global Assembly is a fantastic initiative and was selected for representation in the green zone [of the Cop26 presentation hall] because we recognise just how important its work is and also because we are committed to bringing the voice of global citizens into the heart of Cop26. It creates that vital link between local conversation and a global conference.”…(More)”.

Morocco finds a new source of policy expertise — its own citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Participo: “This spring saw the release of a long-awaited report by the Commission Spéciale sur le modèle de developpement (CSMD), created in 2019 by His Majesty King Mohammed VI….

“Blue ribbon” commissions to tackle thorny issues are nothing new. But the methods employed by Morocco’s CSMD, and the proposals which resulted from them, point the way toward an entirely new approach to governance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Morocco’s new model of development was created through methods of collective intelligence, an emerging science that explores how groups can outperform individuals in learning, decision making, and problem-solving.

It is an ability that has long defined our species, from coordinated bands of hunters on the savannah to the networks of scientists that develop coronavirus vaccines. A complex environment has conditioned humans to pool their knowledge to survive. But collective intelligence doesn’t just happen; for the “wisdom of crowds” to emerge, a group must be organized in the right way, with the right methods and tools….

Beginning in January 2020, the CSMD launched a broad national consultation open to all Moroccan citizens, aimed at harnessing a wide variety of expertise from local communities, government, NGOs, and the private sector.

Its multi-channel approach was designed to reflect four indicators that studies suggest are critical to producing collective intelligence: a diversity of participants and information sources; a critical mass of contributions; a sufficiently rich exchange of information at each “touch point”; and an effective process to synthesize contributions into a coherent whole.

The CSMD created an online platform with opportunities to give quick feedback (“What is one thing you want to change about Morocco?”), as well as more detailed proposals on themes like health care and territorial inequality. A social media campaign reached an estimated 3.2 million citizens, with dozens of “participatory workshops” live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

To seek out the knowledge of those least connected to these channels, the CSMD conducted 30 field visits to struggling urban districts, universities, and remote villages in the High Atlas mountains. These field visits featured learning sessions with social innovators and rencontres citoyennes (“citizen encounters”) where groups of 20 to 30 local residents, balanced by age and gender, shared stories and aspirations….(More)”.

Less complex language, more participation: how consultation documents shape participatory patterns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Simon Fink, Eva Ruffing, Tobias Burst & Sara Katharina Chinnow: “Consultations are thought to increase the legitimacy of policies. However, this reasoning only holds if stakeholders really participate in the consultations. Current scholarship offers three explanations for participation patterns: Institutional rules, policy characteristics, and interest group resources determine participation. This article argues that additionally the linguistic complexity of consultation documents influences participation. Complex language deters potential participants, because it raises the costs of participation. A quantitative analysis of the German consultation of electricity grids lends credibility to the argument: If the description of a power line is simplified between two consultation rounds, the number of contributions mentioning that power line increases. This result contributes to our understanding of unequal participation patterns, and the institutional design of participatory procedures. If we think that legitimacy is enhanced by broad participation, then language of the documents matters….(More)”.

Are citizen juries and assemblies on climate change driving democratic climate policymaking? An exploration of two case studies in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rebecca Wells, Candice Howarth & Lina I. Brand-Correa: “In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes….(More)”.