OECD Report: “The past decade has seen increasing international recognition of civic space as a cornerstone of functioning democracies, alongside efforts to promote and protect it. Countries that foster civic space are better placed to reap the many benefits of higher levels of citizen engagement, strengthened transparency and accountability, and empowered citizens and civil society. In the longer term, a vibrant civic space can help to improve government effectiveness and responsiveness, contribute to more citizen-centred policies, and boost social cohesion. This first OECD comparative report on civic space offers a baseline of data from 33 OECD Members and 19 non-Members and a nuanced overview of the different dimensions of civic space, with a focus on civic freedoms, media freedoms, civic space in the digital age, and the enabling environment for civil society. It provides an exhaustive review of legal frameworks, policies, strategies, and institutional arrangements, in addition to implementation gaps, trends and good practices. The analysis is complemented by a review of international standards and guidance, in addition to data and analysis from civil society and other stakeholders…(More)”.
What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life
Book by Peter Levine: “People who want to improve the world must ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Although the specific issues and challenges people face are enormously diverse, they often encounter problems of collective action (how to get many individuals to act in concert), of discourse (how to talk and think productively about contentious matters), and of exclusion. To get things done, they must form or join and sustain functional groups, and through them, develop skills and virtues that help them to be effective and responsible civic actors.
In What Should We Do?, Peter Levine, one of America’s leading scholars and practitioners of civic engagement, identifies the general challenges that confront people who ask the citizens’ question and explores solutions. Ultimately, his goal is to provide a unified theoretical foundation for effective civic engagement and citizen action. Levine draws from three rich traditions: research on collective action by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, work on deliberation and discourse by Jürgen Habermas, and the nonviolent social movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Using real-world examples, he develops a theory of citizen action that can effectively wrestle with these problems so that they don’t destabilize movements.
A broad theory of civic life, What Should We Do? turns from the question of what makes a society just to the question of how to relate to our fellow human beings in a context of injustice. And it offers pragmatic guidance for people who seek to improve the world…(More)”.
Is bigger better? A study of the effect of group size on collective intelligence in online groups
Paper by Nada Hashmi, G. Shankaranarayanan and Thomas W. Malone: “What is the optimal size for online groups that use electronic communication and collaboration tools? Previous research typically suggested optimal group sizes of about 5 to 7 members, but this research predominantly examined in-person groups. Here we investigate online groups whose members communicate with each other using two electronic collaboration tools: text chat and shared editing. Unlike previous research that studied groups performing a single task, here we measure group performance using a test of collective intelligence (CI) that includes a combination of tasks specifically chosen to predict performance on a wide range of other tasks [72]. Our findings suggest that there is a curvilinear relationship between group size and performance and that the optimal group size in online groups is between 25 and 35. This, in turn, suggests that online groups may now allow more people to be productively involved in group decision-making than was possible with in-person groups in the past…(More)”.
All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity
Paper by Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro: “Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to encourage citizen reporting of electoral irregularities. We also cross-randomized whether candidates were informed about the campaign in a subset of municipalities. Total reports, and evidence-backed ones, experienced a large increase. Across a wide array of measures, electoral irregularities decreased. Finally, the reporting campaign reduced the vote share of candidates dependent on irregularities. This light-touch intervention is more cost-effective than monitoring efforts traditionally used by policymakers…(More)”.
Virtual Public Involvement: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic
Report by the National Academies: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, transportation agencies’ most used public-engagement tools were virtual public meetings, social media, dedicated project websites or webpages, email blasts, and electronic surveys. As the pandemic subsides, virtual and hybrid models continue to provide opportunities and challenges.
The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program’s NCHRP Web-Only Document 349: Virtual Public Involvement: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic discusses gaps that need to be addressed so that transportation agencies can better use virtual tools and techniques to facilitate two-way communication with the public…(More)”.
The Risks of Empowering “Citizen Data Scientists”
Article by Reid Blackman and Tamara Sipes: “New tools are enabling organizations to invite and leverage non-data scientists — say, domain data experts, team members very familiar with the business processes, or heads of various business units — to propel their AI efforts. There are advantages to empowering these internal “citizen data scientists,” but also risks. Organizations considering implementing these tools should take five steps: 1) provide ongoing education, 2) provide visibility into similar use cases throughout the organization, 3) create an expert mentor program, 4) have all projects verified by AI experts, and 5) provide resources for inspiration outside your organization…(More)”.
The Power of Partnership in Open Government
Book by by Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner and Alex Ingrams: “At the 2011 meeting of the UN General Assembly, the governments of eight nations—Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States—launched the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative aimed at promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. At the time, many were concerned that the Open Government Partnership would end up toothless, offering only lip service to vague ideals and misguided cyber-optimism. The Power of Partnership in Open Government offers a close look, and a surprising affirmation, of the Open Government Partnership as an example of a successful transnational multistakeholder initiative that has indeed impacted policy and helped to produce progressive reform.
By 2019 the Open Government Partnership had grown to 78 member countries and 20 subnational governments. Through a variety of methods—document analysis, interviews, process tracing, and quantitative analysis of secondary data—Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Daniel Berliner, and Alex Ingrams chart the Open Government Partnership’s effectiveness and evaluate what this reveals about the potential of international reform initiatives in general. Their work calls upon scholars and policymakers to reconsider the role of international institutions and, in doing so, to differentiate between direct and indirect pathways to transnational impact on domestic policy. The more nuanced and complex processes of the indirect pathway, they suggest, have considerable but often overlooked potential to shape policy norms and models, alter resources and opportunities, and forge new linkages and coalitions—in short, to drive the substantial changes that inspire initiatives like the Open Government Partnership…(More)”.
The rise and fall of peer review
Blog by Adam Mastroianni: “For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)
That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.
Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.
The results are in. It failed…(More)”.
A catalyst for community-wide action on sustainable development
Article by Communities around the world are increasingly recognizing that breaking down silos and leveraging shared resources and interdependencies across economic, social, and environmental issues can help accelerate progress on multiple issues simultaneously. As a framework for organizing local development priorities, the world’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) uniquely combine a need for broad technical expertise with an opportunity to synergize across domains—all while adhering to the principle of leaving no one behind. For local leaders attempting to tackle intersecting issues using the SDGs, one underpinning question is how to support new forms of collaboration to maximize impact and progress?
In early May, over 100 people across the East Central Florida (ECF) region in the U.S. participated in “Partnership for the Goals: Creating a Resilient and Thriving Community,” a two-day multi-stakeholder convening spearheaded by a team of local leaders from the East Central Florida Regional Resilience Collaborative (ECFR2C), the Central Florida Foundation, the City of Orlando, Florida for Good, Orange County, and the University of Central Florida. The convening grew out of a multi-year resilience planning process that leveraged the SDGs as a framework for tackling local economic, social, and environmental priorities all at once.
To move from community-wide planning to community-wide action, the organizers experimented with a 17 Rooms process—a new approach to accelerating collaborative action for the SDGs pioneered by the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation. We collaborated with the ECF local organizing team and, in the process, spotted a range of more broadly relevant insights that we describe here…(More)”.
Which Connections Really Help You Find a Job?
Article by Iavor Bojinov, Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Sinan Aral: “Whom should you connect with the next time you’re looking for a job? To answer this question, we analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments involving 20 million people to measure how different types of connections impact job mobility. Our results, published recently in Science Magazine, show that your strongest ties — namely your connections to immediate coworkers, close friends, and family — were actually the least helpful for finding new opportunities and securing a job. You’ll have better luck with your weak ties: the more infrequent, arm’s-length relationships with acquaintances.
To be more specific, the ties that are most helpful for finding new jobs tend to be moderately weak: They strike a balance between exposing you to new social circles and information and having enough familiarity and overlapping interests so that the information is useful. Our findings uncovered the relationship between the strength of the connection (as measured by the number of mutual connections prior to connecting) and the likelihood that a job seeker transitions to a new role within the organization of a connection.The observation that weak ties are more beneficial for finding a job is not new. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea in a seminal 1973 paper that described how a person’s network affects their job prospects. Since then, the theory, known as the “strength of weak ties,” has become one of the most influential in the social sciences — underpinning network theories of information diffusion, industry structure, and human cooperation….(More)”.