Type, tweet, tap, and pass: How smart city technology is creating a transactional citizen

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter A.Johnson, Pamela J.Robinson, andSimonePhilpot: “In the current push for smart city programs around the world, there is a significant focus on enabling transactions between citizen and government. Though traditionally there have always been transactional elements between government and citizen, for example payment of taxes in exchange for services, or voting in exchange for representation, the rise of modern smartphone and smart city technologies have further enabled micro-transactions between citizen, government, and information broker. We conceptualize how the modern smart city, as both envisaged and enacted, incorporates the citizen not necessarily as a whole actor, but as a series of micro-transactions encoded on the real-time landscape of the city. This transactional citizen becomes counted by smart city sensors and integrated into smart city decision-making through the use of certain preferred platforms.

To approach this shift from traditional forms of citizen/city interaction towards micro-transactions, we conceptualize four broad modes of transaction; type (intentional contribution), tweet (intermediated by third party), tap (convened or requested transaction), and pass (ambient transaction based on movement). These four modes are used to frame critical questions of how citizens interact with government in the emerging age of the smart city, and how these interactions impact the relationship between citizen and government, introducing new avenues for private sector influence….(More)”

Democratising decisions about technology: a toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The RSA: “As decisions are increasingly automated or made with the help of artificial intelligence, machines are becoming more influential in our lives. These machines are generating a range of predictions, such as the likelihood of a defendant reoffending or the job performance of a candidate based on video interview. In some cases, these predictions could lead to positive outcomes, such as less biased decisions or greater political engagement, but there are also risks that come with ceding power or outsourcing human judgment to a machine.

The RSA’s Forum for Ethical AI ran a citizens’ jury to explore the use of AI in decision-making. We convened participants to grapple with the ethical issues raised by this application of AI under different circumstances and enter into a deliberative dialogue about how companies, organisations, and public institutions should respond.

This report presents a toolkit for organisations seeking to deploy their own ethical processes around the proliferation of AI….(More)”.

To What Extent Does the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Apply to Citizen Scientist-led Health Research with Mobile Devices?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Edward Dove and Jiahong Chen: “In this article, we consider the possible application of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to “citizen scientist”-led health research with mobile devices. We argue that the GDPR likely does cover this activity, depending on the specific context and the territorial scope. Remaining open questions that result from our analysis lead us to call for a lex specialis that would provide greater clarity and certainty regarding the processing of health data for research purposes, including by these non-traditional researchers…(More)”.

Communal Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Talk By Seth Lloyd at The Edge: “We haven’t talked about the socialization of intelligence very much. We talked a lot about intelligence as being individual human things, yet the thing that distinguishes humans from other animals is our possession of human language, which allows us both to think and communicate in ways that other animals don’t appear to be able to. This gives us a cooperative power as a global organism, which is causing lots of trouble. If I were another species, I’d be pretty damn pissed off right now. What makes human beings effective is not their individual intelligences, though there are many very intelligent people in this room, but their communal intelligence….(More)”.

Comparative Constitution Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Hanna Lerner and David Landau: “In a seminal article more than two decades ago, Jon Elster lamented that despite the large volume of scholarship in related fields, such as comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, there was a severe dearth of work on the process and context of constitution making. Happily, his point no longer holds. Recent years have witnessed a near-explosion of high-quality work on constitution-making processes, across a range of fields including law, political science, and history. This volume attempts to synthesize and expand upon this literature. It offers a number of different perspectives and methodologies aimed at understanding the contexts in which constitution making takes place, its motivations, the theories and processes that guide it, and its effects. The goal of the contributors is not simply to explain the existing state of the field, but also to provide new research on these key questions.

Our aims in this introduction are relatively modest. First, we seek to set up some of the major questions treated by recent research in order to explain how the chapters in this volume contribute to them. We do not aim to give a complete state of the field, but we do lay out what we see as several of the biggest challenges and questions posed by recent scholarship. …(More)”.

Massive Citizen Science Effort Seeks to Survey the Entire Great Barrier Reef

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jessica Wynne Lockhart at Smithsonian: “In August, marine biologists Johnny Gaskell and Peter Mumby and a team of researchers boarded a boat headed into unknown waters off the coasts of Australia. For 14 long hours, they ploughed over 200 nautical miles, a Google Maps cache as their only guide. Just before dawn, they arrived at their destination of a previously uncharted blue hole—a cavernous opening descending through the seafloor.

After the rough night, Mumby was rewarded with something he hadn’t seen in his 30-year career. The reef surrounding the blue hole had nearly 100 percent healthy coral cover. Such a find is rare in the Great Barrier Reef, where coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 led to headlines proclaiming the reef “dead.”

“It made me think, ‘this is the story that people need to hear,’” Mumby says.

The expedition from Daydream Island off the coast of Queensland was a pilot program to test the methodology for the Great Reef Census, a citizen science project headed by Andy Ridley, founder of the annual conservation event Earth Hour. His latest organization, Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, has set the ambitious goal of surveying the entire 1,400-mile-long reef system in 2020…(More)”.

CROWD4EMS: a Crowdsourcing Platform for Gathering and Geolocating Social Media Content in Disaster Response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ravi Shankar et al” Increase in access to mobile phone devices and social media networks has changed the way people report and respond to disasters. Community-driven initiatives such as Stand By Task Force (SBTF) or GISCorps have shown great potential by crowdsourcing the acquisition, analysis, and geolocation of social media data for disaster responders. These initiatives face two main challenges: (1) most of social media content such as photos and videos are not geolocated, thus preventing the information to be used by emergency responders, and (2) they lack tools to manage volunteers contributions and aggregate them in order to ensure high quality and reliable results. This paper illustrates the use of a crowdsourcing platform that combines automatic methods for gathering information from social media and crowdsourcing techniques, in order to manage and aggregate volunteers contributions. High precision geolocation is achieved by combining data mining techniques for estimating the location of photos and videos from social media, and crowdsourcing for the validation and/or improvement of the estimated location.

The evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out using data related to the Amatrice Earthquake in 2016, coming from Flickr, Twitter and Youtube. A common data set is analyzed and geolocated by both the volunteers using the proposed platform and a group of experts. Data quality and data reliability is assessed by comparing volunteers versus experts results. Final results are shown in a web map service providing a global view of the information social media provided about the Amatrice Earthquake event…(More)”.

A Strong Democracy Is a Digital Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Audrey Tang in the New York Times: “Democracy improves as more people participate. And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation — as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating consensus, not division.

These are lessons Taiwan has taken to heart in recent years, with the government and the tech community partnering to create online platforms and other digital initiatives that allow everyday citizens to propose and express their opinion on policy reforms. Today, Taiwan is crowdsourcing democracy to create a more responsive government.

Fittingly, this movement, which today aims to increase government transparency, was born in a moment of national outrage over a lack of openness and accountability in politics.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party.

Catalyzing what came to be known as the Sunflower Movement, the protesters demanded that the pact be scrapped and that the government institute a more transparent ratification process.

The occupation, which drew widespread public support, ended a little more than three weeks later, after the government promised greater legislative oversight of the trade pact. (To this day, the pact has yet to be approved by Taiwan’s legislature.) A poll released after the occupation, however, showed that 76 percent of the nation remained dissatisfied with the Kuomintang government, illustrating the crisis of trust caused by the trade deal dispute.

To heal this rift and communicate better with everyday citizens, the administration reached out to a group of civic-minded hackers and coders, known as g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”), who had been seeking to improve government transparency through the creation of open-source tools. The organization had come to the attention of the government during the Sunflower occupation, when g0v hackers had worked closely with the protesters.

In December 2014, Jaclyn Tsai, a government minister focused on digital technology, attended a g0v-sponsored hackathon and proposed the establishment of a neutral platform where various online communities could exchange policy ideas.

Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. VTaiwan (which stands for “virtual Taiwan”) brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders. Though the government is not obligated to follow vTaiwan’s recommendations (a policy that may soon change), the group’s work often leads to concrete action….(More)”.

The Colombian Anti-Corruption Referendum: Why It Failed?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Haman: “The objective of this article is to analyze the results of the anti-corruption referendum in Colombia in 2018. Colombia is a country with a significant corruption problem. More than 99% of the voters who came to the polls voted in favor of the proposals. However, the anti-corruption referendum nonetheless failed because not enough citizens were mobilized to participate. The article addresses the reasons why turnout was very low…

Conclusions: I find that the more transparent a municipality, the higher the percentage of the municipal electorate that voted for proposals in the anti-corruption referendum. Moreover, I find that in municipalities where support for Sergio Fajardo in the presidential election was higher and support for Iván Duque was lower, support for the referendum proposals was higher. Also, turnout was lower in municipalities with higher poverty rates and higher homicide rates…(More)”.

Civic Duty Days: One Way Employers Can Strengthen Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Erin Barnes: “As an employer, I’m always looking for structural ways to support my team in their health and wellbeing. We know that individual health is so often tied to community health: strong communities mean, among other things, better health outcomes, reduced crime, and better education for our children, so making space for my team to be able to be active participants in their neighborhoods gives them and their families better health outcomes. So, from my perspective, allowing time to give back to the community is just as important as providing sick days.

When my cofounder Brandon Whitney and I started ioby — a nonprofit focused on building civic leadership in our neighborhoods — we wanted our internal organizational values to reflect our mission. For example, we’ve always given Election Day off, and Brandon created ioby’s Whole Person Policy inspired by the work of Parker Palmer. And a few years ago, after a series of high-profile killings of people of color by police made it difficult for many of our staff to feel fully present at work while also showing up for those in their community who were struggling with pain and grief, we decided to add an additional 5 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) for civic duty.

At ioby, a Civic Duty Day is not the same as jury duty. Civic Duty Days are designed to give ioby staff the time to do what we need to do to be active participants involved in everyday democracy. Activities can include neighborhood volunteering, get-out-the-vote volunteering, fundraising, self-care and community-care to respond to local and national emergencies, writing letters, meeting with local elected officials, making calls, going to a healing workshop, and personal health to recover from civic duty activities that fall on weekends.

A couple weeks ago, at a retreat with other nonprofit leaders, we were discussing structural ways to increase civic participation in the United States. Given that nearly 15% of Americans cite lack of time as their reason for not voting, and 75% of Americans cite it as their reason for not volunteering, employers can make a big difference in how Americans show up in public life.

I asked my team what sorts of things they’ve used Civic Duty Days for. In addition to the typical answers about park cleanups, phone banking, door knocking and canvassing, postcard writing, attending demonstrations like the Women’s March and the Climate Strike, I heard some interesting stories.

  • One ioby staff person used her Civic Duty Days to attend Reverse Ride Alongs where she acts as a guide with cadets for the entire day. This program allows cadets to see the community they will be serving and for the community to have a voice in how they see policing and what ways best to be approached by new police officers.
  • An ioby staff person used Civic Duty Days to attend trial for an activist who was arrested for protesting; this would have been impossible to attend otherwise since trials are often during the day.
  • Another ioby staff person used his days to stay home with his kids while his wife attended demonstrations….(More)”