Introduction to Special Issue of California Management Review by Anita M. McGahan, Marcel L. A. M. Bogers, Henry Chesbrough, and Marcus Holgersson: “Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges—as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference….(More)”.
Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century
Book by Hélène Landemore: “To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people—with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections—are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens.
Hélène Landemore favors the ideal of “representing and being represented in turn” over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Landemore recommends centering political institutions around the “open mini-public”—a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. She also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency.
Open Democracy demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed….(More)”.
Scaling up Citizen Science
Report for the European Commission: “The rapid pace of technology advancements, the open innovation paradigm, and the ubiquity of high-speed connectivity, greatly facilitate access to information to individuals, increasing their opportunities to achieve greater emancipation and empowerment. This provides new opportunities for widening participation in scientific research and policy, thus opening a myriad of avenues driving a paradigm shift across fields and disciplines, including the strengthening of Citizen Science. Nowadays, the application of Citizen Science principles spans across several scientific disciplines, covering different geographical scales. While the interdisciplinary approach taken so far has shown significant results and findings, the current situation depicts a wide range of projects that are heavily context-dependent and where the learning outcomes of pilots are very much situated within the specific areas in which these projects are implemented. There is little evidence on how to foster the spread and scalability in Citizen Science. Furthermore, the Citizen Science community currently lacks a general agreement on what these terms mean, entail and how these can be approached.
To address these issues, we developed a theoretically grounded framework to unbundle the meaning of scaling and spreading in Citizen Science. In this framework, we defined nine constructs that represent the enablers of these complex phenomena. We then validated, enriched, and instantiated this framework through four qualitative case studies of, diverse, successful examples of scaling and spreading in Citizen Science. The framework and the rich experiences allow formulating four theoretically and empirically grounded scaling scenarios. We propose the framework and the in-depth case studies as the main contribution from this report. We hope to stimulate future research to further refine our understanding of the important, complex and multifaceted phenomena of scaling and spreading in Citizen Science. The framework also proposes a structured mindset for practitioners that either want to ideate and start a new Citizen Science intervention that is scalable-by-design, or for those that are interested in assessing the scalability potential of an existing initiative….(More)”.
Curating citizen engagement: Food solutions for future generations
EIT Food: “The Curating Citizen Engagement project will revolutionise our way of solving grand societal challenges by creating a platform for massive public involvement and knowledge generation, specifically targeting food-related issues. …Through a university course developed by partners representing different aspects of the food ecosystem (from sensory perception to nutrition to food policy), we will educate the next generation of students to be able to engage and involve the public in tackling food-related societal challenges. The students will learn iterative prototyping skills in order to create museum installations with built-in data collection points, that will engage the public and assist in shaping future food solutions. Thus, citizens are not only provided with knowledge on food related topics, but are empowered and encouraged to actively use it, leading to more trust in the food sector in general….(More)”.
Crowdfunding during COVID-19: An international comparison of online fundraising
Paper by Greg Elmer, Sabrina Ward-Kimola and Anthony Glyn Burton: “This article performs a digital methods analysis on a sample of online crowdfunding campaigns seeking financial support for COVID related financial challenges. Building upon the crowdfunding literature this paper performs an international comparison of the goals of COVID related campaigns during the early spread of the pandemic. The paper seeks to determine the extent to which crowdfunding campaigns reflect current failures of governments to supress the COVID pandemic and support the financial challenges of families, communities and small businesses….(More)”.
‘It gave me hope in democracy’: how French citizens are embracing people power
Peter Yeung at The Guardian: “Angela Brito was driving back to her home in the Parisian suburb of Seine-et-Marne one day in September 2019 when the phone rang. The 47-year-old caregiver, accustomed to emergency calls, pulled over in her old Renault Megane to answer. The voice on the other end of the line informed her she had been randomly selected to take part in a French citizens’ convention on climate. Would she, the caller asked, be interested?
“I thought it was a real prank,” says Brito, a single mother of four who was born in the south of Portugal. “I’d never heard anything about it before. But I said yes, without asking any details. I didn’t believe it.’”
Brito received a letter confirming her participation but she still didn’t really take it seriously. On 4 October, the official launch day, she got up at 7am as usual and, while driving to meet her first patient of the day, heard a radio news item on how 150 ordinary citizens had been randomly chosen for this new climate convention. “I said to myself, ah, maybe it was true,” she recalls.
At the home of her second patient, a good-humoured old man in a wheelchair, the TV news was on. Images of the grand Art Déco-style Palais d’Iéna, home of the citizens’ gathering, filled the screen. “I looked at him and said, ‘I’m supposed to be one of those 150,’” says Brito. “He told me, ‘What are you doing here then? Leave, get out, go there!’”
Brito had two hours to get to the Palais d’Iéna. “I arrived a little late, but I arrived!” she says.
Over the next nine months, Brito would take part in the French citizens’ convention for the climate, touted by Emmanuel Macron as an “unprecedented democratic experiment”, which would bring together 150 people aged 16 upwards, from all over France and all walks of French life – to learn, debate and then propose measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030. By the end of the process, Brito and her fellow participants had convinced Macron to pledge an additional €15bn (£13.4bn) to the climate cause and to accept all but three of the group’s 149 recommendations….(More)”.
The Case for Digital Activism: Refuting the Fallacies of Slacktivism
Paper by Nora Madison and Mathias Klang: “This paper argues for the importance and value of digital activism. We first outline the arguments against digitally mediated activism and then address the counter-arguments against its derogatory criticisms. The low threshold for participating in technologically mediated activism seems to irk its detractors. Indeed, the term used to downplay digital activism is slacktivism, a portmanteau of slacker and activism. The use of slacker is intended to stress the inaction, low effort, and laziness of the person and thereby question their dedication to the cause. In this work we argue that digital activism plays a vital role in the arsenal of the activist and needs to be studied on its own terms in order to be more fully understood….(More)”
Digital Democracy’s Road Ahead
Richard Hughes Gibson at the Hedgehog Review: “In the last decade of the twentieth century, as we’ve seen, Howard Rheingold and William J. Mitchell imagined the Web as an “electronic agora” where netizens would roam freely, mixing business, pleasure, and politics. Al Gore envisioned it as an “information superhighway” system for which any computer could offer an onramp. Our current condition, by contrast, has been likened to shuffling between “walled gardens,” each platform—be it Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Google—being its own tightly controlled ecosystem. Yet even this metaphor is perhaps too benign. As the cultural critic Alan Jacobs has observed, “they are not gardens; they are walled industrial sites, within which users, for no financial compensation, produce data which the owners of the factories sift and then sell.”
Harvard Business School professor Shoshanna Zuboff has dubbed the business model underlying these factories “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism works by collecting information about you (your Internet activity, call history, app usage, your voice, your location, even your fitness level), which creates profiles of what you like, where you go, who you know, and who you are. That shadowy portrait makes a powerful tool for predicting what kinds of products and services you might like to purchase, and other companies are happy to pay for such finely-tuned targeted advertising. (Facebook alone generated $69 billion in ad revenue last year.)
The information-gathering can’t ever stop, however; the business model depends on a steady supply of new user data to inform the next round of predictions. This “extraction imperative,” as Zuboff calls it, is inherently monopolistic, rival companies being both a threat that must be eliminated and a potential gold mine from which more user data can be extracted (see Facebook’s acquisitions of competitors Whatsapp and Instagram). Equally worryingly, the big tech companies have begun moving into other sectors of the economy, as seen, for example, in Google’s quiet entry last year into the medical records business (unbeknownst to the patients and physicians whose data was mined).
There is growing consensus among legal scholars and social scientists that these practices are hazardous to democracy. Commentators worry over the consequences of putting so much wealth in so few hands so quickly (Zuboff calls it a “new Gilded Age”). They note the number of tech executives who’ve gone on to high-ranking government posts and vice versa. They point to the fact that—contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 declaration that privacy is no longer a “social norm”—users are indeed worried about privacy. Scholars note, furthermore, that these platforms are not a genuine reflection of public opinion, though they are often treated as such. Social media can operate as echo chambers, only showing you what people like you read, think, do. Paradoxically, they can also become pressure cookers. As is now widely documented, many algorithms reward—and thereby amplify—the most divisive and thus most attention-grabbing content. Keeping us dialed in—whether for the next round of affirmation or outrage—is essential to their success….(More)”.
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
Article by Clive Thompson: “…When the open source concept emerged in the ’90s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership.
Now, it’s true that open source has, overall, been a wild success. Every startup, when creating its own software services or products, relies on open source software from folks like Thornton: open source web-server code, open source neural-net code. But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn’t particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people.
Recently, Nadia Eghbal—the head of writer experience at the email newsletter platform Substack—published Working in Public, a fascinating book for which she spoke to hundreds of open source coders. She pinpointed the change I’m describing here. No matter how hard the programmers worked, most “still felt underwater in some shape or form,” Eghbal told me.
Why didn’t the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it’s partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis—which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people.
Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases—but without the huge, ad-based remuneration.
Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn’t regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms—and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency….(More)”.
CrowdHeritage: Improving the quality of Cultural Heritage through crowdsourcing methods
Paper by Maria Ralli et al: “The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the discoverability and usability of the digital content stored in museums, libraries and archives, aggregated and served through Europeana, thus often frustrating the user experience offered by these institutions’ portals. In this context, metadata enrichment services through automated analysis and feature extraction along with crowdsourcing annotation services can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of digital cultural content in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets. Such an effort is Crowdheritage, an open crowdsourcing platform that aims to employ machine and human intelligence in order to improve the digital cultural content metadata quality….(More)”.