Sandwich Strategy


Article by the Accountability Research Center: “The “sandwich strategy” describes an interactive process in which reformers in government encourage citizen action from below, driving virtuous circles of mutual empowerment between pro-accountability actors in both state and society.

The sandwich strategy relies on mutually-reinforcing interaction between pro-reform actors in both state and society, not just initiatives from one or the other arena. The hypothesis is that when reformers in government tangibly reduce the risks/costs of collective action, that process can bolster state-society pro-reform coalitions that collaborate for change. While this process makes intuitive sense, it can follow diverse pathways and encounter many roadblocks. The dynamics, strengths and limitations of sandwich strategies have not been documented and analyzed systematically. The figure below shows a possible pathway of convergence and conflict between actors for and against change in both state and society….(More)”.

sandwich strategy

Be Skeptical of Thought Leaders


Book Review by Evan Selinger: “Corporations regularly advertise their commitment to “ethics.” They often profess to behave better than the law requires and sometimes may even claim to make the world a better place. Google, for example, trumpets its commitment to “responsibly” developing artificial intelligence and swears it follows lofty AI principles that include being “socially beneficial” and “accountable to people,” and that “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.”

Google’s recent treatment of Timnit Gebru, the former co-leader of its ethical AI team, tells another story. After Gebru went through an antagonistic internal review process for a co-authored paper that explores social and environmental risks and expressed concern over justice issues within Google, the company didn’t congratulate her for a job well done. Instead, she and vocally supportive colleague Margaret Mitchell (the other co-leader) were “forced out.” Google’s behavior “perhaps irreversibly damaged” the company’s reputation. It was hard not to conclude that corporate values misalign with the public good.

Even as tech companies continue to display hypocrisy, there might still be good reasons to have high hopes for their behavior in the future. Suppose corporations can do better than ethics washingvirtue signaling, and making incremental improvements that don’t challenge aggressive plans for financial growth. If so, society desperately needs to know what it takes to bring about dramatic change. On paper, Susan Liautaud is the right person to turn to for help. She has impressive academic credentials (a PhD in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and a JD from Columbia University Law School), founded and manages an ethics consulting firm with an international reach, and teaches ethics courses at Stanford University.

In The Power of Ethics: How to Make Good Choices in a Complicated World, Liautaud pursues a laudable goal: democratize the essential practical steps for making responsible decisions in a confusing and complex world. While the book is pleasantly accessible, it has glaring faults. With so much high-quality critical journalistic coverage of technologies and tech companies, we should expect more from long-form analysis.

Although ethics is more widely associated with dour finger-waving than aspirational world-building, Liautaud mostly crafts an upbeat and hopeful narrative, albeit not so cheerful that she denies the obvious pervasiveness of shortsighted mistakes and blatant misconduct. The problem is that she insists ethical values and technological development pair nicely. Big Tech might be exerting increasing control over our lives, exhibiting an oversized influence on public welfare through incursions into politics, education, social communication, space travel, national defense, policing, and currency — but this doesn’t in the least quell her enthusiasm, which remains elevated enough throughout her book to affirm the power of the people. Hyperbolically, she declares, “No matter where you stand […] you have the opportunity to prevent the monopolization of ethics by rogue actors, corporate giants, and even well-intentioned scientists and innovators.”…(More)“.

Amateurs without Borders: The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion


Book by Allison Schnable: “Amateurs without Borders examines the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. These small aid organizations, now ten thousand strong, sidestep the world of professionalized development aid by launching projects built around personal relationships and the skills of volunteers. This book draws on fieldwork in the United States and Africa, web data, and IRS records to offer the first large-scale systematic study of these groups. Amateurs without Borders investigates the aspirations and limits of personal compassion on a global scale….(More)”.

Citizen science allows people to ‘really know’ their communities


UGAResearch: “Local populations understand their communities best. They’re familiar both with points of pride and with areas that could be improved. But determining the nature of those improvements from best practices, as well as achieving community consensus on implementation, can present a different set of challenges.

Jerry Shannon, associate professor of geography in the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, worked with a team of researchers to introduce a citizen science approach in 11 communities across Georgia, from Rockmart to Monroe to Millen. This work combines local knowledge with emerging digital technologies to bolster community-driven efforts in multiple communities in rural Georgia. His research was detailed in a paper, “‘Really Knowing’ the Community: Citizen Science, VGI and Community Housing Assessments” published in December in the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Shannon worked with the Georgia Initiative for Community Housing, managed out of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS), to create tools for communities to evaluate and launch plans to address their housing needs and revitalization. This citizen science effort resulted in a more diverse and inclusive body of data that incorporated local perspectives.

“Through this project, we hope to further support and extend these community-driven efforts to assure affordable, quality housing,” said Shannon. “Rural communities don’t have the resources internally to do this work themselves. We provide training and tools to these communities.”

As part of their participation in the GICH program, each Georgia community assembled a housing team consisting of elected officials, members of community organizations and housing professionals such as real estate agents. The team recruited volunteers from student groups and religious organizations to conduct so-called “windshield surveys,” where participants work from their vehicle or walk the neighborhoods….(More)”

Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future


Book by Jer Thorp: “To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and surveilled. Data—our data—is mined and processed for profit, power, and political gain. In Living in Data, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: How do we stop passively inhabiting data, and instead become active citizens of it?

Threading a data story through hippo attacks, glaciers, and school gymnasiums, around colossal rice piles, and over active minefields, Living in Data reminds us that the future of data is still wide open, that there are ways to transcend facts and figures and to find more visceral ways to engage with data, that there are always new stories to be told about how data can be used.

Punctuated with Thorp’s original and informative illustrations, Living in Data not only redefines what data is, but reimagines who gets to speak its language and how to use its power to create a more just and democratic future. Timely and inspiring, Living in Data gives us a much-needed path forward….(More)”.

Help us identify how data can make food healthier for us and the environment


The GovLab: “To make food production, distribution, and consumption healthier for people, animals, and the environment, we need to redesign today’s food systems. Data and data science can help us develop sustainable solutions — but only if we manage to define those questions that matter.

Globally, we are witnessing the damage that unsustainable farming practices have caused on the environment. At the same time, climate change is making our food systems more fragile, while the global population continues to rapidly increase. To feed everyone, we need to become more sustainable in our approach to producing, consuming, and disposing of food.

Policymakers and stakeholders need to work together to reimagine food systems and collectively make them more resilient, healthy, and inclusive.

Data will be integral to understanding where failures and vulnerabilities exist and what methods are needed to rectify them. Yet, the insights generated from data are only as good as the questions they seek to answer. To become smarter about current and future food systems using data, we need to ask the right questions first.

That’s where The 100 Questions Initiative comes in. It starts from the premise that to leverage data in a responsible and effective manner, data initiatives should be driven by demand, not supply. Working with a global cohort of experts, The 100 Questions seeks to map the most pressing and potentially impactful questions that data and data science can answer.

Today the Barilla Foundation, the Center for European Policy Studies, and The Governance Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, are announcing the launch of the Food Systems Sustainability domain of The 100 Questions. We seek to identify the 10 most important questions that need to be answered to make food systems more sustainable…(More)”.

Innovating Public Service Delivery Through Crowdsourcing: What Role for The Third Sector and Civil Society?


Paper by Nathalie Colasanti, Chiara Fantauzzi, and Rocco Frondizi: “The purpose of this paper is to study the involvement of the “crowd” in designing innovative public policies, and the possibility for the Third Sector to play a role in this process. To do so, we want to answer the following research question: what is the extent to which crowdsourcing is adopted in financing and delivering public services within New Public Governance arenas? In order to answer it, we employ the following approach. First of all, we will set public innovation into the context of New Public Governance; secondly, we will analyse definitions for crowdsourcing, and thirdly, we will provide an overview and crisis of crowdsourcing examples to demonstrate their significance as novel forms of public service finance and delivery. This approach evidences the potential and the outcomes of applying crowdsourcing in the public sector, and indicates the role of the actors involved: the adoption of a leadership role by the Third Sector could facilitate crowdsourcing processes. The outcome of the application of crowdsourcing in the public sector is a greater involvement of the civil society in its relationship with the State….(More)”.

We Need to Reimagine the Modern Think Tank


Article by Emma Vadehra: “We are in the midst of a great realignment in policymaking. After an era-defining pandemic, which itself served as backdrop to a generations-in-the-making reckoning on racial injustice, the era of policy incrementalism is giving way to broad, grassroots demands for structural change. But elected officials are not the only ones who need to evolve. As the broader policy ecosystem adjusts to a post-2020 world, think tanks that aim to provide the intellectual backbone to policy movements—through research, data analysis, and evidence-based recommendation—need to change their approach as well.

Think tanks may be slower to adapt because of long-standing biases around what qualifies someone to be a policy “expert.” Traditionally, think tanks assess qualifications based on educational attainment and advanced degrees, which has often meant prioritizing academic credentials over lived or professional experience on the ground. These hiring preferences alone leave many people out of the debates that shape their lives: if think tanks expect a master’s degree for mid-level and senior research and policy positions, their pool of candidates will be limited to the 4 percent of Latinos and 7 percent of Black people with those degrees (lower than the rates among white people (10.5 percent) or Asian/Pacific Islanders (17 percent)). And in specific fields like Economics, from which many think tanks draw their experts, just 0.5 percent of doctoral degrees go to Black women each year.

Think tanks alone cannot change the larger cultural and societal forces that have historically limited access to certain fields. But they can change their own practices: namely, they can change how they assess expertise and who they recruit and cultivate as policy experts. In doing so, they can push the broader policy sector—including government and philanthropic donors—to do the same. Because while the next generation marches in the streets and runs for office, the public policy sector is not doing enough to diversify and support who develops, researches, enacts, and implements policy. And excluding impacted communities from the decision-making table makes our democracy less inclusive, responsive, and effective.

Two years ago, my colleagues and I at The Century Foundation, a 100-year-old think tank that has weathered many paradigm shifts in policymaking, launched an organization, Next100, to experiment with a new model for think tanks. Our mission was simple: policy by those with the most at stake, for those with the most at stake. We believed that proximity to the communities that policy looks to serve will make policy stronger, and we put muscle and resources behind the theory that those with lived experience are as much policy experts as anyone with a PhD from an Ivy League university. The pandemic and heightened calls for racial justice in the last year have only strengthened our belief in the need to thoughtfully democratize policy development. While it’s common understanding now that COVID-19 has surfaced and exacerbated profound historical inequities, not enough has been done to question why those inequities exist, or why they run so deep. How we make policy—and who makes it—is a big reason why….(More)”

Diverse Sources Database


About: “The Diverse Sources Database is NPR’s resource for journalists who believe in the value of diversity and share our goal to make public radio look and sound like America.

Originally called Source of the Week, the database launched in 2013 as a way help journalists at NPR and member stations expand the racial/ethnic diversity of the experts they tap for stories…(More)”.

The power of words and networks


Introduction to Special Issue by A. Fronzetti Colladon, P. Gloor, and D. F. Iezzi: “According to Freud “words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power”. By words, behaviors are transformed and problems are solved. The way we use words reveals our intentions, goals and values. Novel tools for text analysis help understand the magical power of words. This power is multiplied, if it is combined with the study of social networks, i.e. with the analysis of relationships among social units. This special issue of the International Journal of Information Management, entitled “Combining Social Network Analysis and Text Mining: from Theory to Practice”, includes heterogeneous and innovative research at the nexus of text mining and social network analysis. It aims to enrich work at the intersection of these fields, which still lags behind in theoretical, empirical, and methodological foundations. The nine articles accepted for inclusion in this special issue all present methods and tools that have business applications. They are summarized in this editorial introduction….(More)”.