Citizen Needs – To Be Considered

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Franzisca Maas, Sara Wolf, Anna Hohm and Jörn Hurtienne outlining “Requirements for Local Civic Participation Tools. In this paper, we argue for and present an empirical study of putting citizens into focus during the early stages of designing tools for civic participation in a mid-sized German town. Drawing on Contextual and Participatory Design, we involved 105 participants by conducting interviews, using Photovoice and participating in a local neighbourhood meeting.

Together with citizens, we built an Affinity Diagram, consolidated the data and identified key insights. As a result, we present and discuss different participation identities such as Motivated Activists, Convenience Participants or Companions and a collection of citizen needs for local civic participation, e. g., personal contact is irreplaceable for motivation, trust and mutual understanding, and some citizens preferred to “stumble across” information rather than actively searching for it. We use existing participation tools to demonstrate how individual needs could be addressed. Finally, we apply our insights to an example in our local context. We conclude that if we want to build digital tools that go beyond tokenistic, top-down ways of civic participation and that treat citizens as one homogeneous group, citizens need to be part of the design process right from the start. Supplemental material can be retrieved from https://osf.io/rxd7h/….(More)”

Participatory data stewardship

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Ada Lovelace Institute: “Well-managed data can support organisations, researchers, governments and corporations to conduct lifesaving health research, reduce environmental harms and produce societal value for individuals and communities. But these benefits are often overshadowed by harms, as current practices in data collection, storage, sharing and use have led to high-profile misuses of personal data, data breaches and sharing scandals.

These range from the backlash to Care.Data, to the response to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s collection and use of data for political advertising. These cumulative scandals have resulted in ‘tenuous’ public trust in data sharing, which entrenches public concern about data and impedes its use in the public interest. To reverse this trend, what is needed is increased legitimacy, and increased trustworthiness, of data and AI use.

This report proposes a ‘framework for participatory data stewardship’, which rejects practices of data collection, storage, sharing and use in ways that are opaque or seek to manipulate people, in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and – in some instances – govern their own data.

As a critical component of good data governance, it proposes data stewardship as the responsible use, collection and management of data in a participatory and rights-preserving way, informed by values and engaging with questions of fairness.

Drawing extensively from Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of citizen participation’ and its more recent adaptation into a spectrum, this new framework is based on an analysis of over 100 case studies of different methods of participatory data stewardship. It demonstrates ways that people can gain increasing levels of control and agency over their data – from being informed about what is happening to data about themselves, through to being empowered to take responsibility for exercising and actively managing decisions about data governance….(More)”.

Kansas City expands civic engagement with data stories, virtual ‘lunch-and-learns’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ryan Johnston at Statescoop: “…The city is currently running a series of virtual “lunch-and-learns,” as well as publishing data-driven “stories” using Socrata software to improve civic engagement, said Kate Bender, a senior management analyst in the city’s data division.

The work is especially important in reaching residents that aren’t equipped with digital literacy or data analysis skills, Bender said. The free lunch-and-learns — managed under the new Office of Citizen Engagement — teaches residents how to use digital tools like the city’s open data portal and 311 mobile app.

New data stories, meanwhile, published on the city’s open data portal, allow residents to see the context behind raw data around COVID-19, 311 requests or city hiring practices that they might not otherwise be able to parse themselves. They’re both part of an effort to reach residents that aren’t already plugged in to the city’s digital channels, Bender said.

“Knowing that we have more digital options and we have good engagement, how can we open up residents’ exposure to other things, and specifically tools, that we make available, that we put on our website or that we tweet about?” Bender said. “Unless you’re already pretty engaged, you might not know or think to download the city’s 311 app, or you might have heard of open data, but not really know how it pertains to you. So that was our concept.”

Bender’s office, DataKC, has “always been pretty closely aligned in working with 311 and advising on citizen engagement,” Bender said. But when COVID-19 hit and people could no longer gather in-person for citizen engagement events, like the city’s “Community Engagement University,” a free, 8-week, in-person program that taught residents about how various city agencies work, Bender and her team decided to take the education component virtual….(More)”.

Looking to the future? Including children, young people and future generations in deliberations on climate action: Ireland’s Citizens’Assembly 2016–2018

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Clodagh Harris: “The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and future generations were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. This may have been beneficial in terms of impact, but it came at the expense of input legitimacy and potentially intergenerational justice. Referring to international developments, it suggests how these groups may be included through enclave deliberation, institutional innovations, design experiments and future-oriented practice…(More)”

Do Voters Trust Deliberative Minipublics? Examining the Origins and Impact of Legitimacy Perceptions for the Citizens’ Initiative Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kristinn Már & John Gastil: “Deliberative theorists argue that democracies face an increasing legitimacy crisis for lack of effective representation and robust decision-making processes. To address this problem, democratic reformers designed minipublics, such as Citizens Juries, Citizens Assemblies, and Deliberative Polls. Little is known, however, about who trusts minipublics and why. We use survey experiments to explore whether minipublics in three US states were able to influence the electorate’s policy knowledge and voting choices and whether such influences hinged on legitimacy. On average, respondents were uncertain or tilted towards distrust of these minipublics. We found higher levels of trust among people of color compared to Whites, poor compared to rich, and young compared to old. Specific information about minipublic design features did not boost their perceived legitimacy. In fact, one result suggests that awareness of balanced partisan testimony decreased trust. Finally, results show that minipublics can sway voters and improve knowledge, above and beyond the effects of a conventional voter pamphlet, but these effects were largely independent of minipublic trust….(More)”

Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund: “…llustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media—Twitter and Facebook in particular—has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great distances divide members of the same community.
 
Including a range of international indigenous voices from the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Africa, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bridging Indigenous studies, media studies, and social justice studies. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism…(More)”.

Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton: “Participatory Budgeting continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative democratic program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often adapt PB’s basic program design to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. This book develops six “PB types” to account for the wide variation in how PB programs function as well as the outcomes they produce. To illustrate the similar patterns across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs; chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America. By organizing the chapters regionally, it becomes clear that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions, but similar programs within each region. A key empirical finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being but, too often, researchers do not have any evidence tying PB to significant social or political change….(More)”.

Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Flanigan et al in Nature: “Globally, there has been a recent surge in ‘citizens’ assemblies’1, which are a form of civic participation in which a panel of randomly selected constituents contributes to questions of policy. The random process for selecting this panel should satisfy two properties. First, it must produce a panel that is representative of the population. Second, in the spirit of democratic equality, individuals would ideally be selected to serve on this panel with equal probability. However, in practice these desiderata are in tension owing to differential participation rates across subpopulations Here we apply ideas from fair division to develop selection algorithms that satisfy the two desiderata simultaneously to the greatest possible extent: our selection algorithms choose representative panels while selecting individuals with probabilities as close to equal as mathematically possible, for many metrics of ‘closeness to equality’. Our implementation of one such algorithm has already been used to select more than 40 citizens’ assemblies around the world. As we demonstrate using data from ten citizens’ assemblies, adopting our algorithm over a benchmark representing the previous state of the art leads to substantially fairer selection probabilities. By contributing a fairer, more principled and deployable algorithm, our work puts the practice of sortition on firmer foundations. Moreover, our work establishes citizens’ assemblies as a domain in which insights from the field of fair division can lead to high-impact applications….(More)”

How to predict citizen engagement in urban innovation projects?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blogpost by Julien Carbonnell: “Citizen engagement in decision-making has proven to be a key factor for success in a smart city project and a must-have of contemporary democratic regimes. While inhabitants are all daily internet users, they widely inform themselves about their political electives’ achievements during the mandate, interact with each other on social networks, and by word-of-mouth on messaging apps or phone calls to form an opinion.

Unfortunately, most of the smart cities’ rankings lack resources to evaluate the citizen engagement dynamic around the urban innovations deployed. Indeed this data can’t be found on official open data portals, focused instead on cities’ infrastructure and quality of life. These include the number of metro stations, the length of bike lanes, air pollution, and tap water quality. Some of them also include field investigation such as the amount of investment in this or that urban area and communication dynamics about a new smart city project.

If this kind of formal information provides a good overview of the official state of development of a city, it does not give any insight from the inhabitants themselves and sounds out the street vibes of a city.

So, I’ve been working on filling this gap for the last 3 years and share in Democracy Studio all the elements of my method and tools built for conducting such analysis. To do so, I have notably been collecting inhabitants’ participation in a survey study in three case study cities: Taipei (Taiwan), Tel Aviv (Israel), and Tallinn (Estonia). I collected 366 answers by contacting inhabitants randomly online (Facebook groups, direct messages on LinkedIn, and through messaging apps) and in-person, in events related to my field of interest (Smart-City and Urban Innovation Startups). The resulting variables have been integrated into machine learning models, which finally performed a very satisfying prediction of the citizen engagement in my case studies….(More)”.

Foreign Policy by Canadians: a unique national experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blogpost by James Fishkin: “…Foreign Policy by Canadians was a national field experiment (with a control group that was not invited to deliberate, but which answered the same questions before and after.) The participants and the control group matched up almost perfectly before deliberation, but after deliberation, the participants had reached their considered judgments (while the control group had hardly changed at all). YouGov recruited and surveyed an excellent sample of deliberators, nationally representative in demographics and attitudes (as judged by comparison to the control groups). The project was an attempt to use social science to give an informed and representative input to policy. It was particularly challenging in that foreign policy is an area where most of the public is less engaged and informed even than it is on domestic issues (outside of times of war or severe international crises). Hence, we would argue that Deliberative Polling is particularly appropriate as a form of public input on these topics.

This project was also distinctive in some other ways. First, all the small group discussions by the 444 nationally representative deliberators were conducted via our new video based automated moderator platform. Developed here at Stanford with Professor Ashish Goel and “Crowdsourced Democracy Team” in Management Science and Engineering, it facilitates many small groups of ten or so to self-moderate their discussions. It controls access to the queue for the microphone (limiting each contribution to 45 seconds), it orchestrates the discussion to move from one policy proposal to the next on the list, it periodically asks the participants if they have covered both the arguments in favor and against the proposal, it intervenes if people are being uncivil (a rare occurrence in these dialogues) and it guides the group into formulating its questions for the plenary session experts. This was only the second national application of the online platform (the first was in Chile this past year) and it was the first as a controlled experiment.

A second distinctive aspect of Foreign Policy by Canadians is that the agenda was formulated in both a top-down and a bottom-up manner. While a distinguished advisory group offered input on what topics were worth exploring and on the balance and accuracy of the materials, those materials were also vetted by chapters of the Canadian International Council in different parts of the country. Those meetings deliberated about how the draft materials could be improved. What was left out? Were the most important arguments on either side presented? The meetings of CIC chapters agreed on recommendations for revision and those recommendations were reflected in the final documents and proposals for discussion. I think this is “deliberative crowdsourcing” because the groups had to agree on their most important recommendations based on shared discussion. These meetings were also conducted with our automated deliberation platform….(More)”.