Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Susan L. Moffitt: “This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability. Looking closely at federal level public participation in pharmaceutical regulation and educational assessments within the context of the vast system of American federal advisory committees, this book demonstrates that participatory bureaucracy supports bureaucratic administration in ways consistent with democratic accountability when it focuses on complex tasks and engages diverse expertise. In these conditions, public participation can help produce better policy outcomes, such as safer prescription drugs. Instead of bureaucracy’s opposite or alternative, public participation can work as its complement.

  • Argues that public participation through FDA drug review advisory committees leads to safer drug experiences on the market: fewer boxed warnings and fewer drug withdrawals
  • Suggests that the American system of public committees is truly vast, involving upwards of 70,000 committee members across 1,000 different committees
  • Details that public committees can be a source of transparency in government operations”

The Age of Intelligent Cities: Smart Environments and Innovation-for-all Strategies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Nicos Komninos:  “This book concludes a trilogy that began with Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and digital spaces (Routledge 2002) and Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks (Routledge 2008). Together these books examine intelligent cities as environments of innovation and collaborative problem-solving. In this final book, the focus is on planning, strategy and governance of intelligent cities.

Divided into three parts, each section elaborates upon complementary aspects of intelligent city strategy and planning. Part I is about the drivers and architectures of the spatial intelligence of cities, while Part II turns to planning processes and discusses top-down and bottom-up planning for intelligent cities. Cities such as Amsterdam, Manchester, Stockholm and Helsinki are examples of cities that have used bottom-up planning through the gradual implementation of successive initiatives for regeneration. On the other hand, Living PlanIT, Neapolis in Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia intelligent cities have started with the top-down approach, setting up urban operating systems and common central platforms. Part III focuses on intelligent city strategies; how cities should manage the drivers of spatial intelligence, create smart environments, mobilise communities, and offer new solutions to address city problems.
Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.”

The Decalogue of Policy Making 2.0: Results from Analysis of Case Studies on the Impact of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sotirios Koussouris, Fenareti Lampathaki, Gianluca Misuraca, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, and Dimitrios Askounis: “Despite the availability of a myriad of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based tools and methodologies for supporting governance and the formulation of policies, including modelling expected impacts, these have proved to be unable to cope with the dire challenges of the contemporary society. In this chapter we present the results of the analysis of a set of promising cases researched in order to understand the possible impact of what we define ‘Policy Making 2.0’, which refers to ‘a set of methodologies and technological solutions aimed at enabling better, timely and participative policy-making’. Based on the analysis of these cases we suggest a bouquet of (mostly ICT-related) practical and research recommendations that are relevant to researchers, practitioners and policy makers in order to guide the introduction and implementation of Policy Making 2.0 initiatives. We argue that this ‘decalogue’ of Policy Making 2.0 could be an operational checklist for future research and policy to further explore the potential of ICT tools for governance and policy modelling, so to make next generation policy making more ‘intelligent’ and hopefully able to solve or anticipate the societal challenges we are (and will be) confronted today and in the future.

The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Book by Luciano Florini (Chapter 1 (pdf): “Considers the influence information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having on our world; Describes some of the latest developments in ICTs and their use in a range of fields; Argues that ICTs have become environmental forces that create and transform our realities; Explores the impact of ICTs in a range of areas, from education and scientific research to social interaction, and even war..
Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.
As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an “infosphere”. Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our ‘real’ lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, “onlife”. Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.
“Onlife” defines more and more of our daily activity – the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the ‘e’ in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.”

From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.
The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man.
Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book, published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book is available in print and ebook formats (Kindle and epub) from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books. The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), may also be downloaded for free as a pdf file from ID3.
One chapter that inspires the book’s title traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as

  • evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements;
  • smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective;
  • the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and
  • new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.

From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond also introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called “Open Mustard Seed,” or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems.
“OMS is an integrated, open source package of programs that lets people collect and share personal information in secure, and transparent and accountable ways, enabling authentic, trusted social and economic relationships to flourish,” said Dr. John H. Clippinger, executive director of ID3, an acronym for the Institute for Institutional Innovation and Data-Driven Design.
“The software builds individual privacy, security and trusted exchange into the very design of the system. In effect, OMS represents a new authentication, privacy and sharing layer for the Internet,” said Clippinger “– a new way to share personal information selectively and securely, without access by unauthorized third parties.”
A two-minute video introducing the capabilities of OMS can be viewed here.”

The wisest choices depend on instinct and careful analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Kay in the Financial Times: “Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s 2003 book on the science of picking baseball teams, was perhaps written to distract himself from his usual work of attacking the financial services industry. Even after downloading the rules of baseball, I still could not fully understand what was going on. But I caught the drift: sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of the records of players, proved a better guide than the accumulated wisdom of experienced coaches.

Another lesson, important for business strategy, was the brevity of the benefits gained by the Oakland A’s, Lewis’s sporting heroes. If the only source of competitive advantage is better quantitative analysis – whether in baseball or quant strategies in the financial sector – such an advantage can be rapidly and accurately imitated.

At the same time, another genre of books proclaims the virtues of instinctive decision-making. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) begins with accounts of how experts could identify the Getty kouros – a statue of naked youth purported to be of ancient Greek provenance and purchased in 1985 for $9m – as fake immediately, even though it had supposedly been authenticated through extended scientific tests.

Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist has for many years monitored the capabilities of experienced practical decision makers – firefighters, nurses and military personnel – who make immediate judgments that are vindicated by the more elaborate assessments possible only with hindsight.
Of course, there is no real inconsistency between the two propositions. The experienced coaches disparaged by sabermetrics enthusiasts were right to believe they knew a lot about spotting baseball talent; they just did not know as much as they thought they did. The art experts and firefighters who made instantaneous, but accurate, judgments were not hearing voices in the air. But no expert can compete with chemical analysis and carbon dating in assessing the age of a work of art.
There are two ways of reconciling expertise with analysis. One takes the worst of both worlds, combining the overconfidence of experience with the naive ignorance of the quant. The resulting bogus rationality seeks to objectivise expertise by fitting it into a template.
It is exemplified in the processes by which interviewers for jobs, and managers who make personnel assessments, are required to complete checklists explaining how they reached their conclusion using prescribed criteria….”

Secrecy in the Sunshine Era – The Promise and Failures of U.S. Open Government Laws

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

book cover imageNew book by Jason Ross Arnold: “A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable “sunshine era.” Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from overclassification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden.
After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we observe variation across administrations. While some administrations deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional secrecy, the book shows excessive secrecy was a persistent problem well before 9/11, during Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Regardless of party, administrations have consistently worked to weaken the system’s legal foundations.
The book reveals episode after episode of evasive maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright defiance; an army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions labels all manner of documents “top secret,” while other government workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a “sensitive but unclassified” designation. For example, the health effects of Agent Orange and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking out of Midwestern hog farms are considered too “sensitive” for public consumption. These examples and many more document how vast the secrecy system has grown during the sunshine era.
Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld, justice eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest flouted, Secrecy in the Sunshine Era reveals how our information society has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.”

Values at Play in Digital Games

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum: “All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation—as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed—may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games.
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.”

Enchanted Objects

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by David Rose: “Some believe the future will look like more of the same—more smartphones, tablets, screens embedded in every conceivable surface. David Rose has a different vision: technology that atomizes, combining itself with the objects that make up the very fabric of daily living. Such technology will be woven into the background of our environment, enhancing human relationships and channeling desires for omniscience, long life, and creative expression. The enchanted objects of fairy tales and science fiction will enter real life.
Groundbreaking, timely, and provocative, Enchanted Objects is a blueprint for a better future, where efficient solutions come hand in hand with technology that delights our senses. It is essential reading for designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone who wishes to understand the future and stay relevant in the Internet of Things. Download the prologue here.”

4 things you didn't know about civic crowdfunding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Rodrigo Davies at opensource.com: “Crowdfunding is everywhere. People are using it to fund watches, comic books, even famous film directors are doing it. In what is now a $6 billion industry globally, I think the most interesting, disruptive, and exciting work that’s happening is in donation-based crowdfunding.

That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US), and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. There’s a new crowdfunding site every week that may or may not have a few civic projects on it. If you’re interested in my methodology, check out Chapter 2. I don’t pretend to have captured every civic project that has ever existed, but I’m working with a representative sample.
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.

  1. Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions. …
  2. Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. …
  3. Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). …
  4. Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. …”