Examining Civic Engagement Links to Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Findings from the Literature and Implications for a Culture of Health by the Rand Corporation: “The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) is leading a pioneering effort to advance a culture of health that “enables all in our diverse society to lead healthier lives, now and for generations to come.” The RWJF Culture of Health Action Framework is divided into four Action Areas, and civic engagement (which RWJF defines broadly as participating in activities that advance the public good) is identified as one of the three drivers for the Action Area, Making Health a Shared Value, along with mindset and expectations, and sense of community. Civic engagement can serve as a mechanism for translating changes in a health-related mindset and sense of community into tangible actions that could lead to new health-promoting partnerships, improvements in community health conditions, and the degree of integration among health services and systems for better health outcomes.

The authors of this report seek a closer focus on the causal relationship between civic engagement and health and well-being — that is, whether better health and well-being might promote more civic engagement, whether civic engagement might promote health or well-being, or perhaps both.

In this report, authors conduct a structured review to understand what the scientific literature presents about the empirical relationship between health and civic engagement. The authors specifically examine whether health is a cause of civic engagement, a consequence of it, or both; what causal mechanisms underlie this link; and where there are gaps in knowledge for the field….(More)”

The Social Afterlife

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Andrew Gilden: “Death is not what it used to be. With the rise of social media and advances in digital technology, postmortem decision-making increasingly involves difficult questions about the ongoing social presence of the deceased. Should a Twitter account keep tweeting? Should a YouTube singer keep singing? Should Tinder photos be swiped left for the very last time? The traditional touchstones of effective estate planning — reducing transaction costs and maximizing estate value — do little to guide this new social afterlife. Managing a person’s legacy has shifted away from questions of financial investment and asset management to questions of emotional and cultural stewardship. This Article brings together the diverse areas of law that shape a person’s legacy and develops a new framework for addressing the evolving challenges of legacy stewardship

This Article makes two main contributions. First, it identifies and critically examines the four models of stewardship that currently structure the laws of legacy: (1) the “freedom of disposition” model dominant in the laws of wills and trusts, (2) the “family inheritance” model dominant in copyright law, (3) the “public domain” model dominant in many states’ publicity rights laws, and (4) the “consumer contract” model dominant in over forty states’ new digital assets laws. Second, this Article develops a new stewardship model, which it calls the “decentered decedent.” The decentered decedent model recognizes that individuals occupy heterogenous social contexts, and it channels postmortem decision-making into each of those contexts. Unlike existing stewardship models, this new model does not try to centralize stewardship decisions in any one stakeholder — the family, the public, the market, or even the decedent themselves. Instead, the decentered decedent model distributes stewardship across the diverse, dispersed communities that we all leave behind….(More)”.

The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Owen Williams at OneZero: “When you buy a product like Philips Hue’s smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that’s true for those who directly author a product’s software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through “open-source” projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab.

Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source “enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems.”

But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren’t paying attention.

It’s hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they’ve lost interest in for whatever reason — though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services….(More)”.

Citizens need to know numbers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Spiegelhalter at Aeon: “…Many criticised the Leave campaign for its claim that Britain sends the EU £350 million a week. When Boris Johnson repeated it in 2017 – by which time he was Foreign Secretary – the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (the official statistical watchdog) rebuked him, noting it was a ‘clear misuse of official statistics’. A private criminal prosecution was even made against Johnson for ‘misconduct in a public office’, but it was halted by the High Court.

The message on the bus had a strong emotional resonance with millions of people, even though it was essentially misinformation. The episode demonstrates both the power and weakness of statistics: they can be used to amplify an entire worldview, and yet they often do not stand up to scrutiny. This is why statistical literacy is so important – in an age in which data plays an ever-more prominent role in society, the ability to spot ways in which numbers can be misused, and to be able to deconstruct claims based on statistics, should be a standard civic skill.

Statistics are not cold hard facts – as Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise (2012): ‘The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.’ Not only has someone used extensive judgment in choosing what to measure, how to define crucial ideas, and to analyse them, but the manner in which they are communicated can utterly change their emotional impact. Let’s assume that £350 million is the actual weekly contribution to the EU. I often ask audiences to suggest what they would put on the side of the bus if they were on the Remain side. A standard option for making an apparently big number look small is to consider it as a proportion of an even bigger number: for example, the UK’s GDP is currently around £2.3 trillion, and so this contribution would comprise less than 1 per cent of GDP, around six months’ typical growth. An alternative device is to break down expenditure into smaller, more easily grasped units: for example, as there are 66 million people in the UK, £350 million a week is equivalent to around 75p a day, less than $1, say about the cost of a small packet of crisps (potato chips). If the bus had said: We each send the EU the price of a packet of crisps each day, the campaign might not have been so successful.

Numbers are often used to persuade rather than inform, statistical literacy needs to be improved, and so surely we need more statistics courses in schools and universities? Well, yes, but this should not mean more of the same. After years of researching and teaching statistical methods, I am not alone in concluding that the way in which we teach statistics can be counterproductive, with an overemphasis on mathematical foundations through probability theory, long lists of tests and formulae to apply, and toy problems involving, say, calculating the standard deviation of the weights of cod. The American Statistical Association’s Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (2016) strongly recommended changing the pedagogy of statistics into one based on problemsolving, real-world examples, and with an emphasis on communication….(More)”.

Next100

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Next100, a new “startup” think tank built for and by the next generation of policy leaders, officially launched today with the announcement of its inaugural class of eight “Policy Entrepreneurs,” selected from a highly competitive pool of more than 740 applicants. These eight rising leaders will spend the next two years researching and developing policy solutions to the issues that matter most to the next generation, focusing in particular on: education, immigration, criminal justice, climate change, economic opportunity, and the intersections between such issues.

Next100 was announced as an independent think tank earlier this year by The Century Foundation (TCF), in celebration of TCF’s 100th anniversary. It is built as a different type of “think and do” tank — both in terms of the people, perspectives, and policy areas represented, as well as its approach to advancing policy change. The organization’s mission is to change the face and future of progressive policy, through making the policymaking space more inclusive of diverse, next generation voices, and by helping emerging leaders translate their creative policy ideas into tangible policy change.

“The next generation is too often and too easily excluded from the policymaking table, despite having the most at stake in the decisions made at that table,” said Emma Vadehra, executive director of Next100. “As a result, we end up with the same people, with the same ideas, trying to solve the same problems, in the same ways. Next100 is trying to change that, and reimagine what a think tank can and should be. We’re giving diverse leaders of the next generation a chance to cut through the inertia and bring their unmatched creativity, knowledge, skills, and experiences to bear on the policymaking process. Policy by those with the most at stake, for those with the most at stake.”…(More)”.

Real-time maps warn Hong Kong protesters of water cannons and riot police

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary Hui at Quartz: “The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances.

Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?

One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.

HKMap during a protest on August 31, 2019.

Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground  live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.

“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap….(More)”.

The hidden assumptions in public engagement: A case study of engaging on ethics in government data analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Emily S. Rempel, Julie Barnett and Hannah Durrant: “This study examines the hidden assumptions around running public-engagement exercises in government. We study an example of public engagement on the ethics of combining and analysing data in national government – often called data science ethics. We study hidden assumptions, drawing on hidden curriculum theories in education research, as it allows us to identify conscious and unconscious underlying processes related to conducting public engagement that may impact results. Through participation in the 2016 Public Dialogue for Data Science Ethics in the UK, four key themes were identified that exposed underlying public engagement norms. First, that organizers had constructed a strong imagined public as neither overly critical nor supportive, which they used to find and engage participants. Second, that official aims of the engagement, such as including publics in developing ethical data regulations, were overshadowed by underlying meta-objectives, such as counteracting public fears. Third, that advisory group members, organizers and publics understood the term ‘engagement’ in varying ways, from creating interest to public inclusion. And finally, that stakeholder interests, particularly government hopes for a positive report, influenced what was written in the final report. Reflection on these underlying mechanisms, such as the development of meta-objectives that seek to benefit government and technical stakeholders rather than publics, suggests that the practice of public engagement can, in fact, shut down opportunities for meaningful public dialogue….(More)”.

Capturing citizen voice online: Enabling smart participatory local government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tooran Alizadeh, Somwrita Sarkar and Sandy Burgoyne in Cities: “Social media and online communication have changed the way citizens engage in all aspects of lives from shopping and education, to how communities are planned and developed. It is no longer one-way or two- way communication. Instead, via networked all-to-all communication channels, our citizens engage on urban issues in a complex and more connected way than ever before. So government needs new ways to listen to its citizens. The paper comprises three components. Firstly, we build on the growing discussions in the literature focused on smart cities, on one hand, and social media research, on the other, to capture the diversity of citizen voices and better inform decision-making. Secondly, with the support of the Australian Federal Government and in collaboration with the local government partners, we collect citizen voices from Twitter on selected urban projects. Thirdly, we present preliminary findings in terms of quantity and quality of publicly available online data representing citizen concerns on the urban matters. By analyzing the sentiments of the citizen voices captured online, clustering them into topic areas, and then reevaluating citizen’s sentiments within each cluster, we elaborate the scope and value of technologically-enabled opportunities in terms of enabling participatory local government decision making processes….(More)”.

Political innovation, digitalisation and public participation in party politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa Schmidthuber, Dennis Hilgers,  and Maximilian Rapp: “Citizen engagement is seen as a way to address a range of societal challenges, fiscal constraints, as well as wicked problems, and increasing public participation in political decisions could help to address low levels of trust in politicians and decreasing satisfaction with political parties. This paper examines the perceived impacts of an experiment by the Austrian People’s Party which, in response to reaching a historic low in the polls, opened up its manifesto process to public participation via digital technology. Analysis of survey data from participants found that self-efficacy is positively associated with participation intensity but negatively related to satisfaction. In contrast, collective efficacy is related to positive perceptions of public participation in party politics but does not influence levels of individual participation. Future research is needed to explore the outcomes of political innovations that use digital technologies to enable public participation on voting behaviour, party membership and attitudes to representative democracy….(More)”.

What the Hack? – Towards a Taxonomy of Hackathons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christoph Kollwitz and Barbara Dinter: “In order to master the digital transformation and to survive in global competition, companies face the challenge of improving transformation processes, such as innovation processes. However, the design of these processes poses a challenge, as the related knowledge is still largely in its infancy. A popular trend since the mid-2000s are collaborative development events, so-called hackathons, where people with different professional backgrounds work collaboratively on development projects for a defined period. While hackathons are a widespread phenomenon in practice and many field reports and individual observations exist, there is still a lack of holistic and structured representations of the new phenomenon in literature.

The paper at hand aims to develop a taxonomy of hackathons in order to illustrate their nature and underlying characteristics. For this purpose, a systematic literature review is combined with existing taxonomies or taxonomy-like artifacts (e.g. morphological boxes, typologies) from similar research areas in an iterative taxonomy development process. The results contribute to an improved understanding of the phenomenon hackathon and allow the more effective use of hackathons as a new tool in organizational innovation processes. Furthermore, the taxonomy provides guidance on how to apply hackathons for organizational innovation processes….(More)”.