Social Innovation and the Journey to Transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special series by Skoll for the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…we explore system orchestration, collaborative funding, government partnerships, mission-aligned investing, reimagined storytelling, and evaluation and learning. These seven articles highlight successful approaches to collective action and share compelling examples of social transformation.

The time is now for philanthropy to align the speed and scale of our investments with the scope of the global challenges that social innovators seek to address. We hope this series will spark fresh thinking and new ideas for how we can create durable systemic change quickly and together…(More)”.

From Digital Sovereignty to Digital Agency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Akash Kapur: “In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued variants of digital sovereignty to regulate and control the global digital ecosystem. The pursuit of AI sovereignty represents the latest iteration in this quest. 

Digital sovereignty may offer certain benefits, but it also poses undeniable risks, including the possibility of undermining the very goals of autonomy and self-reliance that nations are seeking. These risks are particularly pronounced for smaller nations with less capacity, which might do better in a revamped, more inclusive, multistakeholder system of digital governance. 

Organizing digital governance around agency rather than sovereignty offers the possibility of such a system. Rather than reinforce the primacy of nations, digital agency asserts the rights, priorities, and needs not only of sovereign governments but also of the constituent parts—the communities and individuals—they purport to represent.

Three cross-cutting principles underlie the concept of digital agency: recognizing stakeholder multiplicity, enhancing the latent possibilities of technology, and promoting collaboration. These principles lead to three action-areas that offer a guide for digital policymakers: reinventing institutions, enabling edge technologies, and building human capacity to ensure technical capacity…(More)”.

How public-private partnerships can ensure ethical, sustainable and inclusive AI development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rohan Sharma: “Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve some of today’s most pressing societal challenges – from climate change to healthcare disparities – but it could also exacerbate existing inequalities if not developed and deployed responsibly.

The rapid pace of AI development, growing awareness of AI’s societal impact and the urgent need to harness AI for positive change make bridging the ‘AI divide’ essential now. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) can play a crucial role in ensuring AI is developed ethically, sustainably and inclusively by leveraging the strengths of multiple stakeholders across sectors and regions…

To bridge the AI divide effectively, collaboration among governments, private companies, civil society and other stakeholders is crucial. PPPs unite these stakeholders’ strengths to ensure AI is developed ethically, sustainably, and inclusively.

1. Bridging the resource and expertise gap

By combining public oversight and private innovation, PPPs bridge resource and expertise gaps. Governments offer funding, regulations and access to public data; companies contribute technical expertise, creativity and market solutions. This collaboration accelerates AI technologies for social good.

Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0, for instance, exemplifies how PPPs drive ethical AI development. By bringing together over one hundred experts from academia, industry and government, Singapore is building a trusted AI ecosystem focused on global challenges like health and climate change. Empowering citizens and businesses to use AI responsibly, Singapore demonstrates how PPPs create inclusive AI systems, serving as a model for others.

2. Fostering cross-border collaboration

AI development is a global endeavour, but countries vary in expertise and resources. PPPs facilitate international knowledge sharing, technology transfer and common ethical standards, ensuring AI benefits are distributed globally, rather than concentrated in a few regions or companies.

3. Ensuring multi-stakeholder engagement

Inclusive AI development requires involving not just public and private sectors, but also civil society organizations and local communities. Engaging these groups in PPPs brings diverse perspectives to AI design and deployment, integrating ethical, social and cultural considerations from the start.

These approaches underscore the value of PPPs in driving AI development through diverse expertise, shared resources and international collaboration…(More)”.

Engaging publics in science: a practical typology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Heather Douglas et al: “Public engagement with science has become a prominent area of research and effort for democratizing science. In the fall of 2020, we held an online conference, Public Engagement with Science: Defining and Measuring Success, to address questions of how to do public engagement well. The conference was organized around conceptualizations of the publics engaged, with attendant epistemic, ethical, and political valences. We present here the typology of publics we used (volunteer, representative sample, stakeholder, and community publics), discuss the differences among those publics and what those differences mean for practice, and situate this typology within the existing work on public engagement with science. We then provide an overview of the essays published in this journal arising from the conference which provides a window into the rich work presented at the event…(More)”.

Mini-publics and the public: challenges and opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conversation between Sarah Castell and Stephen Elstub: “…there’s a real problem here: the public are only going to get to know about a mini-public if it gets media coverage, but the media will only cover it if it makes an impact. But it’s more likely to make an impact if the public are aware of it. That’s a tension that mini-publics need to overcome, because it’s important that they reach out to the public. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how inclusive the recruitment is and how well it’s done. It doesn’t matter how well designed the process is. It is still a small number of people involved, so we want mini-publics to be able to influence public opinion and stimulate public debate. And if they can do that, then it’s more likely to affect elite opinion and debate as well, and possibly policy.

One more thing is that, people in power aren’t in the habit of sharing power. And that’s why it’s very difficult. I think the politicians are mainly motivated around this because they hope it’s going to look good to the electorate and get them some votes, but they are also worried about low levels of trust in society and what the ramifications of that might be. But in general, people in power don’t give it away very easily…

Part of the problem is that a lot of the research around public views on deliberative processes was done through experiments. It is useful, but it doesn’t quite tell us what will happen when mini-publics are communicated to the public in the messy real public sphere. Previously, there just weren’t that many well-known cases that we could actually do field research on. But that is starting to change.

There’s also more interdisciplinary work needed in this area. We need to improve how communication strategies around citizens’ assembly are done – there must be work that’s relevant in political communication studies and other fields who have this kind of insight…(More)”.

More-than-human governance experiments in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Claudia Chwalisz & Lucy Reid: “There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human intelligences.

‘More-than-human’ was initially coined by David Abram in his 1997 book The Spell of the Sensuous. The term refers to the animate earth and the impossibility of separating our human- ness from our relationship with it. Our exploration related to governance has been around how we might meaningfully consider our relationship with the living world when taking decisions.

We have undertaken a short exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to begin to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings…

There were three main types of approaches to applying the idea of more-than-human governance in practice, sometimes with an overlap:

  • Rights-based;
  • Representation-focused, and 
  • Artistic.

We identified four key groups we felt were missing from our initial research and discussions:

  • Indigenous voices;
  • More non-specialists and artists;
  • A few critical voices, and
  • People using technology in novel ways that reshape our relationship with the living world…(More)”

We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Help Us Solve The Climate Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Graham Smith: “Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision-making. How might they help us address the climate crisis? The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant effects on citizens’ lives. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly. Climate assemblies show us how this can be done.

This book explains the variety of climate assemblies that have taken place so far at local, national and international levels and explains why they have captured the imagination of government and activists alike. It examines the different contexts and designs of climate assemblies and assesses their impact. Drawing lessons from current practice, the book demonstrates how assemblies can take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics and how they can have a real and lasting impact on climate policy and politics…(More)”.

Conversational Swarms of Humans and AI Agents enable Hybrid Collaborative Decision-making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Louis Rosenberg et al: “Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is an AI-powered communication and collaboration technology that allows large, networked groups (of potentially unlimited size) to hold thoughtful conversational deliberations in real-time. Inspired by the efficient decision-making dynamics of fish schools, CSI divides a human population into a set of small subgroups connected by AI agents. This enables the full group to hold a unified conversation. In this study, groups of 25 participants were tasked with selecting a roster of players in a real Fantasy Baseball contest. A total of 10 trials were run using CSI. In half the trials, each subgroup was augmented with a fact-providing AI agent referred to herein as an Infobot. The Infobot was loaded with a wide range of MLB statistics. The human participants could query the Infobot the same way they would query other persons in their subgroup. Results show that when using CSI, the 25-person groups outperformed 72% of individually surveyed participants and showed significant intelligence amplification versus the mean score (p=0.016). The CSI-enabled groups also significantly outperformed the most popular picks across the collected surveys for each daily contest (p<0.001). The CSI sessions that used Infobots scored slightly higher than those that did not, but it was not statistically significant in this study. That said, 85% of participants agreed with the statement ‘Our decisions were stronger because of information provided by the Infobot’ and only 4% disagreed. In addition, deliberations that used Infobots showed significantly less variance (p=0.039) in conversational content across members. This suggests that Infobots promoted more balanced discussions in which fewer members dominated the dialog. This may be because the infobot enabled participants to confidently express opinions with the support of factual data…(More)”.

Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lily L. Tsai and Alex Pentland: “Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups. Discussions about community issues could take place among small numbers of people with similar concerns. As coordination across larger distances evolved, the costs of travel required representatives from each clan or smaller group to participate in deliberations and decision-making involving multiple local communities. Divergence in the interests of representatives and their constituents opened up opportunities for corruption and elite capture.

Technologies now enable very large numbers of people to communicate, coordinate, and make collective decisions on the same platform. We have new opportunities for digitally enabled civic participation and direct democracy that scale for both the smallest and largest groups of people. Quantitative experiments, sometimes including tens of millions of individuals, have examined inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. Their findings suggest that large networks of nonexperts can make practical, productive decisions and engage in collective action under certain (1) conditions. (2) These conditions include shared knowledge among individuals and communities with similar concerns, and information about their recent actions and outcomes…(More)”

Quality Assessment of Volunteered Geographic Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Donia Nciri et al: “Traditionally, government and national mapping agencies have been a primary provider of authoritative geospatial information. Today, with the exponential proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies or ICTs (such as GPS, mobile mapping and geo-localized web applications, social media), any user becomes able to produce geospatial information. This participatory production of geographical data gives birth to the concept of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). This phenomenon has greatly contributed to the production of huge amounts of heterogeneous data (structured data, textual documents, images, videos, etc.). It has emerged as a potential source of geographic information in many application areas. Despite the various advantages associated with it, this information lacks often quality assurance, since it is provided by diverse user profiles. To address this issue, numerous research studies have been proposed to assess VGI quality in order to help extract relevant content. This work attempts to provide an overall review of VGI quality assessment methods over the last decade. It also investigates varied quality assessment attributes adopted in recent works. Moreover, it presents a classification that forms a basis for future research. Finally, it discusses in detail the relevance and the main limitations of existing approaches and outlines some guidelines for future developments…(More)”.