Paper by William Aboucaya, Sonia Guehis and Rafael Angarita: “Online consultation platforms have improved the possibilities for citizens to have an input on public decision making. However, and especially at large scale, identification of the topics discussed and entities evoked has been identified as difficult for both citizens and platform administrators. In this paper, we leverage topic modeling, Named Entity Recognition and Linking and Semantic Textual Similarity to build a knowledge graph representing the different contributions to the République Numérique online citizen consultation in French language. The generated graph links the different proposals to topics identified in the consultation and to relevant DBpedia resources. The model proposed for representation of citizen consultations as knowledge graphs simplifies the retrieval of proposals focused on specific topics or mentioning a given entity. It also allows us to improve contextualization of important words in proposals by linking them to short definitions extracted from Wikipedia…(More)”.
Building Online Public Consultation Knowledge
The Citizens’ Panel proposes 23 recommendations for fair and human-centric virtual worlds in the EU
European Commission: “From 21 to 23 April, the Commission hosted the closing session of the European Citizens’ Panel on Virtual Months in Brussels, which allowed citizens to make recommendations on values and actions to create attractive and fair European virtual worlds.
These recommendations will support the Commission’s work on virtual worlds and the future of the Internet.
After three weekends of deliberations, the panel, composed of around 150 citizens randomly chosen to represent the diversity of the European population, made 23 recommendations on citizens’ expectations for the future, principles and actions to ensure that virtual worlds in the EU are fair and citizen-friendly. These recommendations are structured around eight values and principles: freedom of choice, sustainability, human-centred, health, education, safety and security, transparency and integration.
This new generation of Citizens’ Panels is a key element of the Conference on the Future of Europe, which aims to encourage citizens’ participation in the European Commission’s policy-making process in certain key areas.
The Commission is currently preparing a new initiative on virtual worlds, which will outline Europe’s vision, in line with European digital rights and principles. The upcoming initiative will focus on how to address societal challenges, foster innovation for businesses and pave the way for a transition to Web 4.0.
In addition to this Citizens’ Panel, the Commission has launched a call for input to allow citizens and stakeholders to share their thoughts on the topic. Contributions can be made until 3 May…(More)”.
Participatory Digital Futures: How digital transformation can be made good for all
Paper by Mark Findlay and Sharanya Shanmugam: “Digital transformation through the widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted technology and big data usage is assumed to usher in socio-economic benefits. Notions of ‘digital readiness’ speak to the inevitability of a universalised digital transformation. But the common approach of exporting digital capacities across societies and markets—digital transformation is good for you all—is top-down and paternalist. It conjures the image of some common/average citizen or worker being able and willing to transform into a digitally competent economic unit. Such a top-down approach to digital transformation can ignore, and even underplay, important demographic differences across communities when it comes to related issues such as digital literacy, digital familiarity, digital readiness, access to technology, and consent for creating digital dependencies. These differences usually grow from structural vulnerabilities such as old age, low levels of education, and socio-economic vulnerabilities like poverty and restricted access to knowledge or technical opportunities. Above all, certain segments of a community, already disadvantaged or less able to manage change, could be further measurably disadvantaged by such a universal digital push.
In this article, through vignettes from the United Kingdom and Singapore’s experience, we highlight how digital transformation can be made more participatory for users affected by digital initiatives. In the process, we introduce the idea of Living Digital Transformation (LDT) as a more bottom-up and user-centric alternative that includes those from vulnerable communities, and therefore, can improve the benefits from digital transformation for all…(More)”.
Including the underrepresented
Paper by FIDE: “Deliberative democracy is based on the premise that all voices matter and that we can equally participate in decision-making. However, structural inequalities might prevent certain groups from being recruited for deliberation, skewing the process towards the socially privileged. Those structural inequalities are also present in the deliberation room, which can lead to unconscious (or conscious) biases that hinder certain voices while amplifying others. This causes particular perspectives to influence decision-making unequally.
This paper presents different methods and strategies applied in previous processes to increase the inclusion of underrepresented groups. We distinguish strategies for the two critical phases of the deliberative process: recruitment and deliberation…(More)”.
MAPLE: The Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement
About: “MAPLE seeks to better connect its constituents to one another, and to our legislators. We hope to create a space for you to meaningfully engage in state government, learn about proposed legislation that impacts our lives in the Commonwealth, and share your expertise and stories. MAPLE aims to meaningfully channel and focus your civic energy towards productive actions for our state and local communities.
Today, there is no legal obligation for the MA legislature (formally known as “The General Court”) to disclose what written testimony they receive and, in practice, such disclosure very rarely happens. As a result, it can be difficult to understand what communications and perspectives are informing our legislators’ decisions. Often, even members of the legislature cannot easily access the public testimony given on a bill.
When you submit testimony via the MAPLE platform, you can publish it in a freely accessible online database (this website) so that all other stakeholders can read your perspective. We also help you find the right recipients in the legislature for your testimony, and prepare the email for you to send.
We hope this will help foster a greater capacity and means for self-governance and lead to better policy outcomes, with greater alignment to the needs, values, and objectives of the population of Massachusetts. While you certainly do not have to submit testimony via this website, we hope you will. Every piece of testimony published , and allows more people to gain from your knowledge and experience…(More)”.
Using the future wheel methodology to assess the impact of open science in the transport sector
Paper by Anja Fleten Nielsen et al: “Open Science enhances information sharing and makes scientific results of transport research more transparent and accessible at all levels and to everyone allowing integrity and reproducibility. However, what future impacts will Open Science have on the societal, environmental and economic development within the transport sector? Using the Future Wheel methodology, we conducted a workshop with transport experts from both industry and academia to answer this question. The main findings of this study point in the direction of previous studies in other fields, in terms of increased innovation, increased efficiency, economic savings, more equality, and increased participation of citizens. In addition, we found several potential transport specific impacts: lower emission, faster travel times, improved traffic safety, increased awareness for transport policies, artificial intelligence improving mobility services. Several potential negative outcomes of Open Science were also identified by the expert group: job loss, new types of risks, increased cost, increased conflicts, time delays, increased inequality and increased energy consumption. If we know the negative outcomes it is much easier to put in place strategies that are sustainable for a broader stakeholder group, which also increase the probability of taking advantage of all the positive impacts of Open Science…(More)”
Unpacking Social Capital
Paper by Ruben Durante, Nicola Mastrorocco, Luigi Minale & James M. Snyder Jr. : “We use novel and unique survey data from Italy to shed light on key questions regarding the measurement of social capital and the use of social capital indicators for empirical work. Our data cover a sample of over 600,000 respondents interviewed between 2000 and 2015. We identify four distinct components of social capital – i) social participation, ii) political participation, iii) trust in others, and iv) trust in institutions – and examine how they relate to each other. We then study how each dimension of social capital relates to various socioeconomic factors both at the individual and the aggregate level, and to various proxies of social capital commonly used in the literature. Finally, building on previous work, we investigate to what extent different dimensions of social capital predict differences in key economic, political, and health outcomes. Our findings support the view that social capital is a multifaceted object with multiple dimensions that, while related, are distinct from each other. Future work should take such multidimensionality into account and carefully consider what measure of social capital to use…(More)”.
Can A.I. and Democracy Fix Each Other?
Peter Coy at The New York Times: “Democracy isn’t working very well these days, and artificial intelligence is scaring the daylights out of people. Some creative people are looking at those two problems and envisioning a solution: Democracy fixes A.I., and A.I. fixes democracy.
Attitudes about A.I. are polarized, with some focusing on its promise to amplify human potential and others dwelling on what could go wrong (and what has already gone wrong). We need to find a way out of the impasse, and leaving it to the tech bros isn’t the answer. Democracy — giving everyone a voice on policy — is clearly the way to go.
Democracy can be taken hostage by partisans, though. That’s where artificial intelligence has a role to play. It can make democracy work better by surfacing ideas from everyone, not just the loudest. It can find surprising points of agreement among seeming antagonists and summarize and digest public opinion in a way that’s useful to government officials. Assisting democracy is a more socially valuable function for large language models than, say, writing commercials for Spam in iambic pentameter.The goal, according to the people I spoke to, is to make A.I. part of the solution, not just part of the problem…(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 secrets of cooperation
Article by Bob Holmes: “People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their valuables. People pay their taxes and donate to food banks and other charities.
Most of us give little thought to these everyday examples of cooperation. But to biologists, they’re remarkable — most animals don’t behave that way.
“Even the least cooperative human groups are more cooperative than our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos,” says Michael Muthukrishna, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics. Chimps don’t tolerate strangers, Muthukrishna says, and even young children are a lot more generous than a chimp.
Human cooperation takes some explaining — after all, people who act cooperatively should be vulnerable to exploitation by others. Yet in societies around the world, people cooperate to their mutual benefit. Scientists are making headway in understanding the conditions that foster cooperation, research that seems essential as an interconnected world grapples with climate change, partisan politics and more — problems that can be addressed only through large-scale cooperation…(More)”.
Is Participatory Budgeting Coming to a Local Government Near You?
Article by Elizabeth Daigneau:”.. It’s far from a new idea, and you’ve probably been reading about it for years, but participatory budgeting has slowly been growing since it was first introduced in the U.S. in Chicago in 2009. Many anticipate it is about to see a boom as billions of federal dollars continue to pour into local communities…
But with the influx to local communities of billions in federal dollars through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, many experts think the time is ripe to adopt the tool.
“The stakes are high in restoring and rebuilding our nation’s crumbling civic, political and economic infrastructures,” wrote Hollie Russon Gilman and Lizbeth Lucero of New America’s Political Reform Program in a recent op-ed. “The long overdue improvements needed in America’s cities and countries call for remodeling how we govern and allocate federal funds across the country.”
ARPA dollars prompted the city of Cleveland to push for a participatory budgeting pilot.
“Cleveland is a city that has one of the higher poverty rates for a city of their size in the United States. They have over 30 percent of their population living below the poverty line,” Kristania De Leon, co-executive director at the Participatory Budgeting Project, said on The Laura Flanders Show’s podcast last July. “So when they found out that they were getting American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated to their municipal government, they said, ‘Wait a minute, this is a huge influx of relatively flexible spending, where’s it going to go and who gets to have a say?’”
A community-led push culminated in a proposal by Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb to the city council last year that $5 million in ARPA funds be allocated to pilot the first citywide participatory budgeting process in its history.
ARPA dollars also elicited Nashville’s city council to allocate $10 million this year to its participatory budgeting program, which is in its third year.
In general, there have been several high-profile participatory budgeting projects in the last year.
Seattle’s project claims to be the biggest participatory budgeting process ever in the United States. The city council earmarked approximately $30 million in the 2021 budget to run a participatory budgeting process. The goal is to spend the money on initiatives that reduce police violence, reduce crime, and “creating true community safety through community-led safety programs and new investments.”
And in September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced the launch of the first-ever citywide participatory budgeting process. The program builds on a 2021 project that engaged residents of the 33 neighborhoods hardest hit by Covid-19 in a $1.3 million participatory budgeting process. The new program invites all New Yorkers, ages 11 and up, to decide how to spend $5 million of mayoral expense funding to address local community needs citywide…(More)”.