Paper by Shweta Suray, Vishwajeet Pattanaik and Dirk Draheim: “Web-based crowd-oriented systems can be seen everywhere today. Some popular examples of such platforms include Reddit, MyGov, Wikipedia and GalaxyZoo. The main aim of such platforms is to harness individuals’ collective intelligence (CI) to offer several benefits to society — from solving complex problems to developing innovative solutions. Also, CI platforms are developing at an impressive pace, and each platform has unique features to gather, motivate and engage the crowd to achieve the platform’s goal. However, the design and development of CI systems is an expensive and time-consuming task. Thus, it is difficult for civic and government organizations to develop such platforms. Moreover, many CI platforms do not sustain for a longer period due to a lack of scientific knowledge about the several components that are required to build CI platforms. To fulfil this research gap, we developed a conceptual generic framework for CI systems that can be used to understand and examine CI systems regardless of their domains. Additionally, our CI generic framework allows stakeholders to combine several components in order to perform requirement elicitation for new platforms, thus enabling them to develop their own platforms in an efficient and effective manner. In order to evaluate the completeness and genericness and to find out the limitations of the CI generic model, we have conducted qualitative interviews with a series of CI experts. This article aims to present the findings of these expert interviews and suggest future directions for CI research to improve the generic CI model and to explore the CI from different perspectives…(More)”
Making Sense of Citizens’ Input through Artificial Intelligence: A Review of Methods for Computational Text Analysis to Support the Evaluation of Contributions in Public Participation
Paper by Julia Romberg and Tobias Escher: “Public sector institutions that consult citizens to inform decision-making face the challenge of evaluating the contributions made by citizens. This evaluation has important democratic implications but at the same time, consumes substantial human resources. However, until now the use of artificial intelligence such as computer-supported text analysis has remained an under-studied solution to this problem. We identify three generic tasks in the evaluation process that could benefit from natural language processing (NLP). Based on a systematic literature search in two databases on computational linguistics and digital government, we provide a detailed review of existing methods and their performance. While some promising approaches exist, for instance to group data thematically and to detect arguments and opinions, we show that there remain important challenges before these could offer any reliable support in practice. These include the quality of results, the applicability to non-English language corpuses and making algorithmic models available to practitioners through software. We discuss a number of avenues that future research should pursue that can ultimately lead to solutions for practice. The most promising of these bring in the expertise of human evaluators, for example through active learning approaches or interactive topic modelling…(More)” See also: Where and when AI and CI meet: exploring the intersection of artificial and collective intelligence towards the goal of innovating how we govern.
The Platformization of Public Participation: Considerations for Urban Planners Navigating New Engagement Tools
Paper by Pamela Robinson & Peter Johnson: “Professional urban planners have an ethical obligation to work in the public interest. Public input and critique gathered at public meetings and other channels are used to inform planning recommendations to elected officials. Pre-pandemic, the planning profession worked with digital tools, but in-person meetings were the dominant form of public participation. The pandemic imposed a shift to digital channels and tools, with the result that planners’ use of technology risks unitizing public participation. As the use of new platforms for public participation expands, we argue it has the potential to fundamentally change participation, a process we call platformization. We frame this as a subset of the broader emergence of platform urbanism. This chapter evaluates six public participation platforms, identifying how the tools they provide map onto key participation frameworks from Arnstein (1969), Fung (2006), and IAP2 (2018). Through this analysis, we examine how the platformization of public participation poses ethical and scholarly challenges to the work of professional planners…(More)”.
The messy politics of local climate assemblies
Paper by Pancho Lewis, Jacob Ainscough, Rachel Coxcoon & Rebecca Willis: “In recent years, many local authorities in the UK have run local climate assemblies (LCAs) such as citizens’ assemblies or juries, with the goal of developing citizen-led solutions to the climate crisis. In this essay, we argue that a ‘convenient fiction’ often underpins the way local authority actors explain the rationale for running LCAs. This convenient fiction runs as follows: LCAs are commissioned as a response to the climate threat, and local decision-makers work through LCA recommendations to implement appropriate policies in their locality. We suggest that this narrative smooths over and presents as linear a process that is in fact messy and political. LCAs emerge as a result of political pressure and bargaining. Once LCAs have run their course, the extent to which their recommendations are implemented is dependent on power dynamics and institutional capacities. We argue that it is important to surface the messiness and political tensions that underpin the origins and aftermath of local climate assemblies. This achieves three things. First, it helps manage expectations about the impact LCAs are likely to have on the policy process. Second, it broadens understandings of how LCAs can contribute to change. Third, it provides a complex model that actors can use to understand how they can help deliver climate action through politics. We conclude that LCAs are important — if as yet unproven — new interventions in local climate politics, when assessed against this more complex picture…(More)”
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intelligence for Democracy and Governance
Open Access Book edited by Stephen Boucher, Carina Antonia Hallin, and Lex Paulson: “…explores the concepts, methodologies, and implications of collective intelligence for democratic governance, in the first comprehensive survey of this field.
Illustrated by a collection of inspiring case studies and edited by three pioneers in collective intelligence, this handbook serves as a unique primer on the science of collective intelligence applied to public challenges and will inspire public actors, academics, students, and activists across the world to apply collective intelligence in policymaking and administration to explore its potential, both to foster policy innovations and reinvent democracy…(More)”.
How Would You Defend the Planet From Asteroids?
Article by Mahmud Farooque, Jason L. Kessler: “On September 26, 2022, NASA successfully smashed a spacecraft into a tiny asteroid named Dimorphos, altering its orbit. Although it was 6.8 million miles from Earth, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) was broadcast in real time, turning the impact into a rare pan-planetary moment accessible from smartphones around the world.
For most people, the DART mission was the first glimmer—outside of the movies—that NASA was seriously exploring how to protect Earth from asteroids. Rightly famous for its technological prowess, NASA is less recognized for its social innovations. But nearly a decade before DART, the agency had launched the Asteroid Grand Challenge. In a pioneering approach to public engagement, the challenge brought citizens together to weigh in on how the taxpayer-funded agency might approach some technical decisions involving asteroids.
The following account of how citizens came to engage with strategies for planetary defense—and the unexpected conclusions they reached—is based on the experiences of NASA employees, members of the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network, and forum participants…(More)”.
Citizens’ juries can help fix democracy
Article by Martin Wolf: “…our democratic processes do not work very well. Adding referendums to elections does not solve the problem. But adding citizens’ assemblies might.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned against the spirit of faction. He argued that the “alternate domination of one faction over another . . . is itself a frightful despotism. But . . . The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual”. If one looks at the US today, that peril is evident. In current electoral politics, manipulation of the emotions of a rationally ill-informed electorate is the path to power. The outcome is likely to be rule by those with the greatest talent for demagogy.
Elections are necessary. But unbridled majoritarianism is a disaster. A successful liberal democracy requires constraining institutions: independent oversight over elections, an independent judiciary and an independent bureaucracy. But are they enough? No. In my book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, I follow the Australian economist Nicholas Gruen in arguing for the addition of citizens’ assemblies or citizens’ juries. These would insert an important element of ancient Greek democracy into the parliamentary tradition.
There are two arguments for introducing sortition (lottery) into the political process. First, these assemblies would be more representative than professional politicians can ever be. Second, it would temper the impact of political campaigning, nowadays made more distorting by the arts of advertising and the algorithms of social media…(More)”.
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Paper by Braley, A., Lenz, G.S., Adjodah, D. et al.: “Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behaviour is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy…(More)”
Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
Book by Tamara Kneese: “Since the internet’s earliest days, people have died and mourned online. In quiet corners of past iterations of the web, the dead linger. But attempts at preserving the data of the dead are often ill-fated, for websites and devices decay and die, just as people do. Death disrupts technologists’ plans for platforms. It reveals how digital production is always collaborative, undermining the entrepreneurial platform economy and highlighting the flaws of techno-solutionism.
Big Tech has authority not only over people’s lives but over their experiences of death as well. Ordinary users and workers, though, advocate for changes to tech companies’ policies around death. Drawing on internet histories along with interviews with founders of digital afterlife startups, caretakers of illness blogs, and transhumanist tinkerers, the technology scholar Tamara Kneese takes readers on a vibrant tour of the ways that platforms and people work together to care for digital remains. What happens when commercial platforms encounter the messiness of mortality?..(More)”.
Civic Participation in the Datafied Society
Introduction to Special Issue by Arne Hintz, Lina Dencik, Joanna Redden, Emiliano Trere: “As data collection and analysis are increasingly deployed for a variety of both commercial and public services, state–citizen relations are becoming infused by algorithmic and automated decision making. Yet as citizens, we have few possibilities to understand and intervene into the roll-out of data systems, and to participate in policy and decision making about uses of data and artificial intelligence (AI). This introductory article unpacks the nexus of datafication and participation, reviews some of the editors’ own research on this subject, and provides an overview of the contents of the Special Section “Civic Participation in the Datafied Society.”… (More)”.