Paper by Jaeyoon Song, Christoph Riedl and Thomas W. Malone: “Even though many people have found today’s commonly used videoconferencing systems very useful, these systems do not provide support for one of the most important aspects of in-person meetings: the ad hoc, private conversations that happen before, after, and during the breaks of scheduled events—the proverbial hallway conversations. Here we describe our design of a simple system, called Minglr, which supports this kind of interaction by facilitating the efficient matching of conversational partners. We also describe a study of this system’s use at the ACM Collective Intelligence 2020 virtual conference. Analysis of our survey and system log data provides evidence for the usefulness of this capability, showing, for example, that 86% of people who used the system successfully at the conference thought that future virtual conferences should include a tool with similar functionality. We expect similar functionality to be incorporated in other videoconferencing systems and to be useful for many other kinds of business and social meetings, thus increasing the desirability and feasibility of many kinds of remote work and socializing…(More).” See also https://minglr.info/
Politics without Politicians
Nathan Heller at the New Yorker: “Imagine being a citizen of a diverse, wealthy, democratic nation filled with eager leaders. At least once a year—in autumn, say—it is your right and civic duty to go to the polls and vote. Imagine that, in your country, this act is held to be not just an important task but an essential one; the government was designed at every level on the premise of democratic choice. If nobody were to show up to vote on Election Day, the superstructure of the country would fall apart.
So you try to be responsible. You do your best to stay informed. When Election Day arrives, you make the choices that, as far as you can discern, are wisest for your nation. Then the results come with the morning news, and your heart sinks. In one race, the candidate you were most excited about, a reformer who promised to clean up a dysfunctional system, lost to the incumbent, who had an understanding with powerful organizations and ultra-wealthy donors. Another politician, whom you voted into office last time, has failed to deliver on her promises, instead making decisions in lockstep with her party and against the polls. She was reëlected, apparently with her party’s help. There is a notion, in your country, that the democratic structure guarantees a government by the people. And yet, when the votes are tallied, you feel that the process is set up to favor interests other than the people’s own.
What corrective routes are open? One might wish for pure direct democracy—no body of elected representatives, each citizen voting on every significant decision about policies, laws, and acts abroad. But this seems like a nightmare of majoritarian tyranny and procedural madness: How is anyone supposed to haggle about specifics and go through the dialogue that shapes constrained, durable laws? Another option is to focus on influencing the organizations and business interests that seem to shape political outcomes. But that approach, with its lobbyists making backroom deals, goes against the promise of democracy. Campaign-finance reform might clean up abuses. But it would do nothing to insure that a politician who ostensibly represents you will be receptive to hearing and acting on your thoughts….(More)”.
Scaling up Deliberation: Testing the Potential of Mini‐Publics to Enhance the Deliberative Capacity of Citizens
Paper by Jane Suiter, Lala Muradova, John Gastil and David M. Farrell: “This paper tests the possibility of embedding the benefits of minipublic deliberation within a wider voting public. We test whether a statement such as those derived from a Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) can influence voters who did not participate in the pre‐referendum minipublic deliberation. This experiment was implemented in advance of the 2018 Irish referendum on blasphemy, one of a series of social‐moral referendums following the recommendations of a deliberative assembly. This is the first application of a CIR‐style voting aid in a real world minipublic and referendum outside of the US and also the first application to what is principally a moral question. We found that survey respondents exposed to information about the minipublic and its findings significantly increased their policy knowledge. Further, exposing respondents to minipublic statements in favour and against the policy measure increased their empathy for the other side of the policy debate….(More)”.
When Mini-Publics and Maxi-Publics Coincide: Ireland’s National Debate on Abortion
Paper by David Farrell et al: “Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly (CA) of 2016–18 was tasked with making recommendations on abortion. This paper shows that from the outset its members were in large part in favour of the liberalisation of abortion (though a fair proportion were undecided), that over the course of its deliberations the CA as a whole moved in a more liberal direction on the issue, but that its position was largely reflected in the subsequent referendum vote by the population as a whole….(More)”
Going Beyond the Smart City? Implementing Technopolitical Platforms for Urban Democracy in Madrid and Barcelona
Paper by Adrian Smith & Pedro Prieto Martín: “Digital platforms for urban democracy are analyzed in Madrid and Barcelona. These platforms permit citizens to debate urban issues with other citizens; to propose developments, plans, and policies for city authorities; and to influence how city budgets are spent. Contrasting with neoliberal assumptions about Smart Citizenship, the technopolitics discourse underpinning these developments recognizes that the technologies facilitating participation have themselves to be developed democratically. That is, technopolitical platforms are built and operate as open, commons-based processes for learning, reflection, and adaptation. These features prove vital to platform implementation consistent with aspirations for citizen engagement and activism….(More)”.
Policies and Strategies to Promote Grassroots Innovation Workbook
UN-ESCAP: “Grassroots innovation is a modality of inclusive innovation that enables extremely affordable, niche-adapted solutions to local problems, often unaided by public sector or outsiders.
In a context of rising income disparity among the have and have-nots, every effort should be made to convert the ideas and innovations of knowledge-rich but economically poor individuals and communities into viable means of raising income, addressing social needs, and conserving the environment. While grassroots innovation are typically bottom-up initiatives, public policies can also support the emergence, recognition and diffusion of grassroots innovations. The journey of developing a grassroots idea or invention into a viable product or service for commercial or social diffusion requires support from many actors at different stages and levels.
The Honey Bee Network has been leading the grassroots innovation movement in India. In the past three decades, it has strengthened the inclusive innovation ecosystem of the country and has become a global benchmark of frugal, friendly and flexible solutions for men and women farmers, pastoral and artisan households, mechanics, forest dwellers, fishermen etc. This workbook draws on the experience of the Honey Bee Network and discusses experiences, issues and strategies that could also be relevant for other countries….(More)”.
A Time for More Democracy Not Less
Graham Smith at Involve: “As part of the “A democratic response to COVID-19” project, we have been scanning print and social media to get a sense of how arguments for participation and deliberation are resonating in public debates….
Researchers from the Institute for Development Studies point to learning from previous pandemics. Drawing from their experience of working on the ebola epidemic in West Africa, they argue that pandemics are not just technical problems to be solved, but are social in character. They call for more deliberation and participation to ensure that decisions reflect not only the diversity of expert opinion, but also respond to the experiential knowledge of the most vulnerable….
A number of these proposals call for citizens’ assemblies, perhaps to the detriment of other participatory and deliberative processes. The Carnegie Trust offers a broader agenda, reminding us of the pressing contemporary significance of their pre-COVID-19 calls for co-design and co-production.
The Nuffield Council offers some simple guidance to government about how to act:
- Show us (the public) what it is doing and thinking across the range of issues of concern
- Set out the ethical considerations that inform(ed) its judgements
- Explain how it has arrived at decisions (including taking advice from e.g. SAGE, MEAG), and not that it is just ‘following the science’
- Invite a broad range of perspectives into the room, including wider public representation
- Think ahead – consult and engage other civic interests
We have found only a small number of examples of specific initiatives taking a participatory or deliberative approach to bringing in a broader range of voices in response to the pandemic. Our Covid Voices is gathering written statements of the experience of COVID-19 from those with health conditions or disabilities. The thinktank Demos is running a ‘People’s Commission’, inviting stories of lockdown life. It is not only reflections or stories. The Scottish Government invited ideas on how to tackle the virus, receiving and synthesising 4,000 suggestions. The West Midlands Combined Authority has established a citizens’ panel to guide its recovery work. The UK Citizens’ Assembly (and the French Convention) produced recommendations on how commitments to reach net zero carbon emissions need to be central to a post-COVID-19 recovery. We are sure that these examples only touch the surface of activity and that there will be many more initiatives that we are yet to hear about.
Of course, in one area, citizens have already taken matters into their own hands, with the huge growth in mutual-aid groups to ensure people’s emergency needs are met. The New Local Government Network has considered how public authorities could best support and work with such groups, and Danny Kruger MP was invited by the Prime Minister to investigate how to build on this community-level response.
The call for a more participatory and deliberative approach to governance needs to be more than a niche concern. As the Financial Times recognises, we need a “new civic contract” between government and the people….(More)”.
Rethinking citizen engagement for an inclusive energy transition
Urban Futures Studio: “In July 2020, we published our new essay ‘What, How and Who? Designing inclusive interactions in the energy transition’ (Bronsvoort, Hoffman and Hajer, 2020). In this essay, we argue that how the interactions between citizens and governments are shaped and enacted, has a large influence on who gets involved and to what extend people feel heard. To apply this approach to cases, we distinguish between three dimensions of interaction:
- What (the defined object or issue at hand)
- How (the setting and staging of the interaction)
- Who (the target groups and protagonists of the process)
Focusing on the issue of form, we argue that processes for interaction between citizens and governments should be designed in a way that is more future oriented, organized over the long term, in closer proximity to citizens and with attention to the powerful role of ‘in-betweeners’ and ‘in-between’ places such as community houses, where people can meet to deliberate on the wide range of possible futures for their neighbourhood.
Towards a multiplicity of future visions for sustainable cities
The energy transition has major consequences for the way we live, work, move and consume. For such complex transitions, governments need to engage and collaborate with citizens and other stakeholders. Their engagement enriches existing visions on future neighbourhoods, inform local policies and stimulate change. But how do you shape and organize such a participatory process? While governments use a wide range of public participation methods, many researchers have emphasized the limitations of many of these conventional methods with regard to the inclusion of diverse groups of citizens and in bridging discrepancies between government approaches and people’s lived experiences.
Rethinking citizen engagement for an inclusive energy transition
To help rethink citizen engagement, the Urban Futures Studio investigates existing and new approaches to citizen engagement and how they are practised by governments and societal actors. Following our essay research, our next project on citizen engagement includes a study on its relation to experimentation as a novel mode of governance. The goal of this research is to show insights into how citizen engagement manifests itself in the context of experimental governance on the neighbourhood level. By investigating the interactions between citizens, governments and other stakeholders in different types of participatory projects, we aim to gain a better understanding of how citizens are engaged and included in energy transition experiments and how we can improve its level of inclusion.
We use a relational approach of citizen engagement, by which we view participatory processes as collective practices that both shape and are shaped by their ‘matter of concern’, their public and their setting and staging. This view places emphasis on the form and conditions under which the interaction takes place. For example, the initiative of Places of Hope showed that engagement can be organised in diverse ways and can create new collectives….(More)”.
Monitoring Corruption: Can Top-down Monitoring Crowd-Out Grassroots Participation?
Paper by Robert M Gonzalez, Matthew Harvey and Foteini Tzachrista: “Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of grassroots monitoring is mixed. This paper proposes a previously unexplored mechanism that may explain this result. We argue that the presence of credible and effective top-down monitoring alternatives can undermine citizen participation in grassroots monitoring efforts. Building on Olken’s (2009) road-building field experiment in Indonesia; we find a large and robust effect of the participation interventions on missing expenditures in villages without an audit in place. However, this effect vanishes as soon as an audit is simultaneously implemented in the village. We find evidence of crowding-out effects: in government audit villages, individuals are less likely to attend, talk, and actively participate in accountability meetings. They are also significantly less likely to voice general problems, corruption-related problems, and to take serious actions to address these problems. Despite policies promoting joint implementation of top-down and bottom-up interventions, this paper shows that top-down monitoring can undermine rather than complement grassroots efforts….(More)”.
Citizen initiatives facing COVID-19: Due to spontaneous generation or the product of social capital in Mexico City?
UNDP: “Since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Mexico, multiple citizen responses[1] have emerged to tackle its impacts: digital aid platforms such as Frena la Curva (Stop the curve) and México Covid19; groups of makers that design medical and protective equipment; Zapotec indigenous women that teach how to make hand sanitizer at home; public buses that turn into mobile markets; and much more.
There are initiatives that aid 10, 20, 3,000 or more people; initiatives that operate inside a housing unit, a municipality or across the City. Some responses have come from civil society organizations; others from collectives of practitioners or from groups of friends and family; there are even those made out of groups of strangers that the pandemic turned into partners working for the same goal….
Within the plurality of initiatives that have emerged, sometimes, seemingly in a spontaneous way, there is a common denominator: people are reacting in a collaboratively way to the crisis to solve the needs that the pandemic is leaving behind.
Different research studies connect social cohesion and social capital with the response’s capacity of a community in situations of crisis and natural disasters; and with its subsequent recovery. These concepts —derived from sociology— include aspects such as the level of union; relationships and networks; and interaction between people in a community.
This can be seen when, for example, a group of people in a neighborhood gets together to buy groceries for neighbors who have lost their incomes. Also, when a collective of professionals react to the shortages of protective equipment for health workers by creating low-cost prototypes, or when a civil organization collaborates with local authorities to bring water to households that lack access to clean water.
It would seem that a high rate of social capital and social cohesion might ease the rise of the citizen initiatives that aim to tackle the challenges that ensue from the pandemic. These do not come out of nowhere….(More)”.
