Reweaving the social fabric after the crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andy Haldane at the Financial Times: “Yet one source of capital, as in past pandemics, is bucking these trends: social capital. This typically refers to the network of relationships across communities that support and strengthen societies. From surveys, we know that people greatly value these networks, even though social capital itself is rarely assigned a monetary value.

The social distancing policies enacted across the world to curb the spread of Covid-19 might have been expected to weaken social networks and damage social capital. In fact, the opposite has happened. People have maintained physical distance while pursuing social togetherness. Existing networks have been strengthened and new ones ­created, often digitally. Even as other capital has crumbled, the stock of social capital has risen, acting as a counter­cyclical stabiliser across communities. We see this daily on our doorsteps through small acts of neighbourly kindness.

We see it in the activities of community groups, charities and philanthropic movements, whose work has risen in importance and prominence. And we see it too in the vastly increased numbers of people volunteering to help. Before the crisis struck, the global volunteer corps numbered a staggering 1bn people. Since then, more people than ever have signed up for civic service, including 750,000 volunteers who are supporting the UK National Health Service. They are the often-invisible army helping fight this invisible enemy.

This same pattern appeared during past periods of societal stress, from pandemics to wars. Then, as now, faith and community groups provided the glue bonding societies together. During the 19th century, the societal stresses arising from the Industrial Revolution — homelessness, family separation, loneliness — were the catalyst for the emergence of the charitable sector.

The economic and social progress that followed the Industrial Revolution came courtesy of a three-way partnership among the private, public and social sectors. The private sector provided the innovative spark; the state provided insurance to the incomes, jobs and health of citizens; and the social sector provided the support network to cope with disruption to lives and livelihoods. Back then, social capital (every bit as much as human, financial and physical capital) provided the foundations on which capitalism was built….(More)”.

The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Erica Chenoweth, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Jeremy Pressman, Felipe G Santos and Jay Ulfelder at The Guardian: “Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world was experiencing unprecedented levels of mass mobilization. The decade from 2010 to 2019 saw more mass movements demanding radical change around the world than in any period since World War II. Since the pandemic struck, however, street mobilization – mass demonstrations, rallies, protests, and sit-ins – has largely ground to an abrupt halt in places as diverse as India, Lebanon, Chile, Hong Kong, Iraq, Algeria, and the United States.

The near cessation of street protests does not mean that people power has dissipated. We have been collecting data on the various methods that people have used to express solidarity or adapted to press for change in the midst of this crisis. In just several weeks’ time, we’ve identified nearly 100 distinct methods of nonviolent action that include physical, virtual and hybrid actions – and we’re still counting. Far from condemning social movements to obsolescence, the pandemic – and governments’ responses to it – are spawning new tools, new strategies, and new motivation to push for change.

In terms of new tools, all across the world, people have turned to methods like car caravans, cacerolazos (collectively banging pots and pans inside the home), and walkouts from workplaces with health and safety challenges to voice personal concerns, make political claims, and express social solidarity. Activists have developed alternative institutions such as coordinated mask-sewing, community mutual aid pods, and crowdsourced emergency funds. Communities have placed teddy bears in their front windows for children to find during scavenger hunts, authors have posted live-streamed readings, and musicians have performed from their balconies and rooftops. Technologists are experimenting with drones adapted to deliver supplies, disinfect common areas, check individual temperatures, and monitor high-risk areas. And, of course, many movements are moving their activities online, with digital rallies, teach–ins, and information-sharing.

Such activities have had important impacts. Perhaps the most immediate and life-saving efforts have been those where movements have begun to coordinate and distribute critical resources to people in need. Local mutual aid pods, like those in Massachusetts, have emerged to highlight urgent needs and provide for crowdsourced and volunteer rapid response. Pop-up food banks, reclaiming vacant housing, crowdsourced hardship funds, free online medical-consultation clinics, mass donations of surgical masks, gloves, gowns, goggles and sanitizer, and making masks at home are all methods that people have developed in the past several weeks. Most people have made these items by hand. Others have even used 3D printers to make urgently-needed medical supplies. These actions of movements and communities have already saved countless lives….(More)”.

How can digital tools support deliberation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Claudia Chwalisz at the OECD: “As part of our work on Innovative Citizen Participation, we’ve launched a series of articles to open a discussion and gather evidence on the use of digital tools and practices in representative deliberative processes. ….The current context is obliging policy makers and practitioners to think outside the box and adapt to the inability of physical deliberation. How can digital tools allow planned or ongoing processes like Citizens’ Assemblies to continue, ensuring that policy makers can still garner informed citizen recommendations to inform their decision making? New experiments are getting underway, and the evidence gathered could also be applied to other situations when face-to-face is not possible or more difficult like international processes or any situation that prevents physical gathering.

This series will cover the core phases that a representative deliberative process should follow, as established in the forthcoming OECD report: learning, deliberation, decision making, and collective recommendations. Due to the different nature of conducting a process online, we will additionally consider a phase required before learning: skills training. The articles will explore the use of digital tools at each phase, covering questions about the appropriate tools, methods, evidence, and limitations.

They will also consider how the use of certain digital tools could enhance good practice principles such as impact, transparency, and evaluation:

  • Impact: Digital tools can help participants and the public to better monitor the status of the proposed recommendations and the impact they had on final decision- making. A parallel can be drawn with the extensive use of this methodology by the United Nations for the monitoring and evaluation of the impact of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
  • Transparency: Digital tools can facilitate transparency across the process. The use of collaborative tools allows for transparency regarding who wrote the final outcome of the process (ability to trace the contributors of the document and the different versions). By publishing the code and the algorithms applied for the random selection (sortition) process and the data or statistics used for the stratification could give total transparency on how participants are selected.
  • Evaluation: Data collection and analysis can help researchers and policy makers assess the process (for e.g., deliberation quality, participant surveys, opinion evolution). Publishing this data in a structured and open format can allow for a broader evaluation and contribute to research. Over the course of the next year, the OECD will be preparing evaluation guidelines in accordance with the good practice principles to enable comparative data analysis.

The series will also consider how the use of emerging technologies and digital tools could complement face-to-face processes, for instance:

  • Artificial intelligence (AI) and text-based technologies (i.e. natural language processing, NLP): Could the use of AI-based tools enrich deliberative processes? For example: mapping opinion clusters, consensus building, analysis of massive inputs from external participants in the early stage of stakeholder input. Could NLP allow for simultaneous translation to other languages, feelings analysis, and automated transcription? These possibilities already exist, but raise more pertinent questions around reliability and user experience. How could they be connected to human analysis, discussion, and decision making?
  • Virtual/Augmented reality: Could the development of these emerging technologies allow participants to be immersed in virtual environments and thereby simulate face-to-face deliberation or experiences that enable and build empathy with possible futures or others’ lived experiences?…(More)”.

Developing better Civic Services through Crowdsourcing: The Twitter Case Study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Srushti Wadekar, Kunal Thapar, Komal Barge, Rahul Singh, Devanshu Mishra and Sabah Mohammed: “Civic technology is a fast-developing segment that holds huge potential for a new generation of startups. A recent survey report on civic technology noted that the sector saw $430 million in investment in just the last two years. It’s not just a new market ripe with opportunity it’s crucial to our democracy. Crowdsourcing has proven to be an effective supplementary mechanism for public engagement in city government in order to use mutual knowledge in online communities to address such issues as a means of engaging people in urban design. Government needs new alternatives — alternatives of modern, superior tools and services that are offered at reasonable rates.

An effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables wide participation. Response to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is very crucial for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a society. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms. In this research, we are trying to introduce a crowdsourcing platform, which will be helpful to people who are facing problems in their everyday practice because of the government services. This platform will gather the information from the trending twitter tweets for last month or so and try to identify which challenges public is confronting. Twitter for crowdsourcing as it is a simple social platform for questions and for the people who see the tweet to get an instant answer. These problems will be analyzed based on their significance which then will be made open to public for its solutions. The findings demonstrate how crowdsourcing tends to boost community engagement, enhances citizens ‘ views of their town and thus tends us find ways to enhance the city’s competitiveness, which faces some serious problems. Using of topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm helped get categorized civic technology topics which was then validated by simple classification algorithm. While working on this research, we encountered some issues regarding to the tools that were available which we have discussed in the ‘Counter arguments’ section….(More)”.

Citizen input matters in the fight against COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Britt Lake at FeedbackLabs: “When the Ebola crisis hit West Africa in 2015, one of the first responses was to build large field hospitals to treat the rapidly growing number of Ebola patients. As Paul Richards explains, “These were seen as the safest option. But they were shunned by families, because so few patients came out alive.” Aid workers vocally opposed local customs like burial rituals that contributed to the spread of the virus, which caused tension with communities. Ebola-affected communities insisted that some of their methods had proven effective in lowering case numbers before outside help arrived. When government and aid agencies came in and delivered their own messages, locals felt that their expertise had been ignored. Distrust spread, as did a sense that the response pitted local knowledge against global experts. And the virus continued to spread. 

The same is true now. Today there are more than 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide. The virus has spread to every country and territory in the world, leaving virtually no one unaffected. The pandemic is exacerbating inequities in employment, education, access to healthcare and food, and workers’ rights even as it raises new challenges. Everyone is looking for answers to address their needs and anxieties while also collectively realizing that this pandemic and our responses to it will irrevocably shape the future.

It would be easy for us in the public sector to turn inwards for solutions on how to respond effectively to the pandemic and its aftermath. It’s comfortable to focus on perspectives from our own teams when we feel a heightened sense of urgency, and decisions must be made on a dime. However, it would be a mistake not to consider input from the communities we serve – alongside expert knowledge – when determining how we support them through this crisis. 

COVID-19 affects everyone on earth, and it won’t be possible to craft equitable responses that meet people’s needs around the globe unless we listen to what would work best to address those challenges and support homegrown solutions that are already working. Effective communication of public health information, for instance, is central to controlling the spread of COVID-19. By listening to communities, we can better understand what communication methods work for them and can do a better job getting those messages across in a way that resonates with diverse communities. And to face the looming economic crisis that COVID-19 is precipitating, we will need to engage in real dialogue with people about their priorities and the way they want to see society rebuilt….(More)”.

Deliberative Mini-Publics as a Response to Populist Democratic Backsliding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Oran Doyle and Rachael Walsh: “Populisms come in different forms, but all involve a political rhetoric that invokes the will of a unitary people to combat perceived constraints, whether economic, legal, or technocratic. In this chapter, our focus is democratic backsliding aided by populist rhetoric. Some have suggested deliberative democracy as a means to combat this form of populism. Deliberative democracy encourages and facilitates both consultation and contestation, emphasizing plurality of voices, the legitimacy of disagreement, and the imperative of reasoned persuasion. Its participatory and inclusive character has the potential to undermine the credibility of populists’ claims to speak for a unitary people. Ireland has been widely referenced in constitutionalism’s deliberative turn, given its recent integration of deliberative mini-publics into the constitutional amendment process.

Reviewing the Irish experience, we suggest that deliberative mini-publics are unlikely to reverse democratic backsliding. Populist rhetoric is fueled by the very measures intended to combat democratic backsliding: enhanced constitutional constraints merely illustrate how the will of the people is being thwarted. The virtues of Ireland’s experiment in deliberative democracy — citizen participation, integration with representative democracy, deliberation, balanced information, expertise — have all been criticized in ways that are at least consistent with populist narratives. The failure of such narratives to take hold in Ireland, we suggest, may be due to a political system that is already resistant to populist rhetoric, as well as a tradition of participatory constitutionalism. The experiment with deliberative mini-publics may have strengthened Ireland’s constitutional culture by reinforcing anti-populist features. But it cannot be assumed that this experience would be replicated in larger countries polarized along political, ethnic, or religious lines….(More)”.

COVID-19 is creating a democratic deficit – here’s how to reduce it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matt Ryan: “As parliaments around the country move to scale down operations and defer sittings as part of containing COVID-19 people are beginning to ring the accountability alarm bells….

The good news is that we can learn from those parliaments and politicians around the world who have already been trialling new ways of working that go beyond traditional sittings. Leveraging simple and widely available technologies, they are involving more people with more diverse backgrounds in their processes with less reliance on those people being physically present.

Select Committees in the UK Parliament, for example, have used online “evidence checks” to scrutinise the basis for policy. These one-month exercises use targeted outreach and social media strategies to invite comments from knowledgeable stakeholders and members of the public about the rigour of evidence on which a government department’s policy is based. Evidence for departmental policy is summarised in a two-page document and comments publicly displayed in a web forum that resembles a readers’ comments section in an online news article.

In Taiwan, a participatory governance process pioneered by civic rights activists at the behest of a government minister combines large-scale online participation with smaller in-person gatherings to build a “rough consensus” on legislative proposals related to the digital economy before they are introduced. Known as vTaiwan, the process has led to 26 pieces of national legislation dealing with issues such as Uber, telemedicine and online alcohol sales, and has involved 200,000 people.

The government of Mexico City has raised the stakes even higher, involving more than 400,000 people in a process to draft a new constitution. It included a novel partnership between Change.org and the city mayor that enabled residents to create petition-backed proposals which, once they reached a certain threshold of support, bound the mayor to include them in the draft he submitted to a special constitutional assembly.

Processes like these can also offer relief for politicians and parliamentary officials managing the strain of examining an ever-increasing number of issues of greater complexity with limited personnel and budget. Evidence checks provide access to a wider pool of experts who can bolster existing research capacity. vTaiwan helps to find workable ways forward in industries being rapidly transformed by digital technologies. By “crowdsourcing” the city’s constitution, Mexico City’s mayor retained the trust of residents while undertaking reform at a grand scale….(More)”.

Why resilience to online disinformation varies between countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edda Humprecht at the Democratic Audit: “The massive spread of online disinformation, understood as content intentionally produced to mislead others, has been widely discussed in the context of the UK Brexit referendum and the US general election in 2016. However, in many other countries online disinformation seems to be less prevalent. It seems certain countries are better equipped to face the problems of the digital era, demonstrating a resilience to manipulation attempts. In other words, citizens in these countries are better able to adapt to overcome challenges such as the massive spread of online disinformation and their exposure to it. So, do structural conditions render countries more or less resilient towards online disinformation?

As a first step to answering this question, in new research with Frank Esser and Peter Van Aelst, we identified the structural conditions that are theoretically linked to resilience to online disinformation, which relate to different political, media and economic environments. To test these expectations, we then identified quantifiable indicators for these theoretical conditions, which allowed us to measure their significance for 18 Western democracies. A cluster analysis then yielded three country groups: one group with high resilience to online disinformation (including the Northern European countries) and two country groups with low resilience (including Southern European countries and the US).

Conditions for resilience: political, media and economic environments

In polarised political environments, citizens are confronted with different deviating representations of reality and therefore it becomes increasingly difficult for them to distinguish between false and correct information. Thus, societal polarisation is likely to decrease resilience to online disinformation. Moreover, research has shown that both populism and partisan disinformation share a binary Manichaeanworldview, comprising anti-elitism, mistrust of expert knowledge and a belief in conspiracy theories. As a consequence of these combined influences, citizens can obtain inaccurate perceptions of reality. Thus, in environments with high levels of populist communication, online users are exposed to more disinformation.

Another condition that has been linked to resilience to online disinformation in previous research is trust in news media. Previous research has shown that in environments in which distrust in news media is higher, people are less likely to be exposed to a variety of sources of political information and to critically evaluate those. In this vein,the level of knowledge that people gain is likely to play an important role when confronted with online disinformation. Research has shown that in countries with wide-reaching public service media, citizens’ knowledge about public affairs is higher compared to countries with marginalised public service media. Therefore, it can be assumed that environments with weak public broadcasting services (PBS) are less resilient to online disinformation….

Looking at the economic environment, false social media content is often produced in pursuit of advertising revenue, as was the case with the Macedonian ‘fake news factories’ during the 2016 US presidential election. It is especially appealing for producers to publish this kind of content if the potential readership is large. Thus, large-size advertising markets with a high number of potential users are less resistant to disinformation than smaller-size markets….(More)”.

Disinformation is particularly prevalent on social media and in countries with very many social media users, it is easier for rumour-spreaders to build partisan follower networks. Moreover, it has been found that a media diet mainly consisting of news from social media limits political learning and leads to less knowledge of public affairs compared to other media source. From this, societies with a high rate of social media users are more vulnerable to online disinformation spreading rapidly than other societies…(More)”.

Using Technology to ‘Co-Create’ EU Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “What will European Union (EU) decision-making look like in the next decade and beyond? Is technological progress promoting more transparent, inclusive and participatory decision-making at EU level?

Technology has dramatically changed both the number and quality of connections between citizens and public administrations. With technological progress, citizens have gained improved access to public authorities through new digital communication channels. Innovative, tech-based, approaches to policy-making have become the subject of a growing debate between academics and politicians. Theoretical approaches such as ‘CrowdLaw’, ‘Policy-Making 3.0’, ‘liquid’, ‘do-it- yourself’ or ‘technical’ democracy and ‘democratic innovations’ share the positive outlook towards technology; and technology is seen as the medium through which policies can be ‘co-created’ by decision-makers and stakeholders. Co-creation is mutually beneficial. Decision-makers gain legitimacy by incorporating the skills, knowledge and expertise of citizens, who in turn have the opportunity to shape new policies according to their needs and expectations.

EU institutions are at the forefront of experimentation with technologically innovative approaches to make decision-making more transparent and accessible to stakeholders. Efforts in modernising EU participatory channels through technology have evolved over time: from redressing criticism on democratic deficits, through fostering digital interactions with stakeholders, up to current attempts at designing policy-making in a friendly and participative manner.

While technological innovation holds the promise of making EU policy-making even more participatory, it is not without challenges. To begin with, technology is resource consuming. There are legal challenges associated with both over- and under-regulation of the use of technology in policy-making. Furthermore, technological innovation raises ethical concerns. It may increase inequality, for instance, or infringe personal privacy… (More)“.

Why no one is reading your coronavirus emails

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Opinion by Todd Rogers: “…As a behavioral scientist, I study how people make decisions and process information, and I develop communications to change behavior for the better. And if there’s one lesson all the coronavirus email writers should take, it’s this: Messages should be as easy to understand as possible. This is difficult in normal times — and is no doubt much more so with facts on the ground changing as rapidly as they are….

As an illustration of how potent simplifying messaging can be, Carly Robinson at Harvard, Jessica Lasky-Fink of the University of California, Berkeley, Hedy Chang of Attendance Works and I conducted an experiment with a large school district, in which we rewrote a state-required notification about attendance.All schools in California are required to send a truancy notification to families after a student is late or absent three times. The state legislature offered recommended language for the notice that was written at a college-reading level and contained 342 words in seven-point font. We rewrote the letter at a 5th grade reading level, in 14-point font and with half as many words. We then randomly assigned 131,312 families to either receive the state-recommended language or a version of our simplified letter.The best version of our simplified letters was an estimated 40% more effective at reducing absences during the subsequent 30 days than the state-recommended language. Writing with an understanding of how humans work turns out to be more effective than writing with the sole goal of complying with the delivery of mandatory written information.So, what can be done to make coronavirus messages, so critical to the functioning of our country right now, easier to understand — and more likely to be read?

  • Write in the most accessible way possible. Use the Flesch-Kincaid readability test (built into Microsoft Word and Google Docs) to test the reading-level complexity of your writing.
  • Use as few words as possible. Shorter messages are more likely to be read (see the long email in your inbox from three months ago that you still have not read).
  • Write in a larger font. This makes long messages look ridiculous and makes it easier to read for recipients with eyesight issues. It also reduces the chance of the accidental — but way too common — occurrence of emails appearing in inboxes with absurdly small font.
  • Eliminate gratuitous borders and images. These can often distract from the message you are trying to send.
  • Use a clear structure. People skim, so help them. As opposed to a multi-paragraph email written in normal prose, consider categorizing information under headings like, “What we want you to know” (or just “KNOW”) and “what we would like you to do” (or, concisely, “DO”). Consider putting content within each category in bullet points….(More)”