New 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
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.”
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
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
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.
- Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions. …
- Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. …
- Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). …
- Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. …”
Open Intellectual Property Casebook
New book by James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins: “..This book, the first in a series of Duke Open Coursebooks, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. It can also be purchased in a glossy paperback print edition for $29.99, $130 cheaper than other intellectual property casebooks.
This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three main forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright and patent—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States.
The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open coursebook, which can be freely edited and customized, it is also suitable for an undergraduate class, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class. Each chapter contains cases and secondary readings and a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.
Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society is current as of August 2014. It includes discussions of such issues as the Redskins trademark cancelations, the Google Books case and the America Invents Act. Its illustrations range from graphs showing the growth in patent litigation to comic book images about copyright. The best way to get some sense of its coverage is to download it. In coming weeks, we will provide a separate fuller webpage with a table of contents and individual downloadable chapters.
The Center has also published an accompanying supplement of statutory and treaty materials that is available for free download and low cost print purchase.”
Public Innovation through Collaboration and Design
New book edited by Christopher Ansell, and Jacob Torfing: “While innovation has long been a major topic of research and scholarly interest for the private sector, it is still an emerging theme in the field of public management. While ‘results-oriented’ public management may be here to stay, scholars and practitioners are now shifting their attention to the process of management and to how the public sector can create ‘value’.
One of the urgent needs addressed by this book is a better specification of the institutional and political requirements for sustaining a robust vision of public innovation, through the key dimensions of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and design. This book brings together empirical studies drawn from Europe, the USA and the antipodes to show how these dimensions are important features of public sector innovation in many Western democracies with different conditions and traditions.
This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.
Contents:
This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.
Contents:
1. Collaboration and Design: New Tools for Public Innovation (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing) 2. Necessity as the Mother of Reinvention: Discourses of Innovation in Local Government (Steven Griggs and Helen Sullivan) 3. Reconstructing Bureaucracy for Service Innovation in the Governance Era (Robert Agranoff) 4. The Complexity of Governance: Challenges for Public Sector Innovation (Susanne Boch Waldorff, Lone Søderkvist Kristensen, and Betina Vind Ebbesen) 5. The Impact of Collaboration on Innovative Projects: A Study of Dutch Water Management (Nanny Bressers) 6. Understanding Innovative Regional Collaboration: Metagovernance and Boundary Objects as Mechanisms (Stig Montin, Magnus Johansson Joakim Forsemalm) 7. The Importance of Joint Schemas and Brokers in Promoting Collaboration for Innovation (Barbara Gray and Hong Ren) 8. Collaborative Networks and Innovation: The Negotiation-Management Nexus (Robyn Keast and Jennifer Waterhouse) 9. Innovative Leadership Through Networks (Katrien Termeer and Sibout Nooteboom) 10. Designing Collaborative Policy Innovation: Lessons from a Danish Municipality (Annika Agger and Eva Sørensen) 11. Design Attitude as an Innovation Catalyst (Christian Bason) 12. Collaborating on Design – Designing Collaboration (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing)“
Knowledge is Beautiful
New book by David McCandless: “In this mind-blowing follow-up to the bestselling Information is Beautiful, the undisputed king of infographics David McCandless uses stunning and unique visuals to reveal unexpected insights into how the world really works. Every minute of every hour of every day we are bombarded with information – be it on television, in print or online. How can we relate to this mind-numbing overload? Enter David McCandless and his amazing infographics: simple, elegant ways to understand information too complex or abstract to grasp any way but visually. McCandless creates dazzling displays that blend the facts with their connections, contexts and relationships, making information meaningful, entertaining – and beautiful. Knowledge is Beautiful is an endlessly fascinating spin through the world of visualized data, all of it bearing the hallmark of David McCandless’s ground-breaking signature style. Taking infographics to the next level, Knowledge is Beautiful offers a deeper, more wide-ranging look at the world and its history. Covering everything from dog breeds and movie plots to the most commonly used passwords and crazy global warming solutions, Knowledge is Beautiful is guaranteed to enrich your understanding of the world.”
Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World
New book by Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene : “Big Data is made up of lots of little data: numbers entered into cell phones, addresses entered into GPS devices, visits to websites, online purchases, ATM transactions, and any other activity that leaves a digital trail. Although the abuse of Big Data—surveillance, spying, hacking—has made headlines, it shouldn’t overshadow the abundant positive applications of Big Data. In Reality Mining, Nathan Eagle and Kate Greene cut through the hype and the headlines to explore the positive potential of Big Data, showing the ways in which the analysis of Big Data (“Reality Mining”) can be used to improve human systems as varied as political polling and disease tracking, while considering user privacy.
Eagle, a recognized expert in the field, and Greene, an experienced technology journalist, describe Reality Mining at five different levels: the individual, the neighborhood and organization, the city, the nation, and the world. For each level, they first offer a nontechnical explanation of data collection methods and then describe applications and systems that have been or could be built. These include a mobile app that helps smokers quit smoking; a workplace “knowledge system”; the use of GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile phone data to manage and predict traffic flows; and the analysis of social media to track the spread of disease. Eagle and Greene argue that Big Data, used respectfully and responsibly, can help people live better, healthier, and happier lives.”
In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors
Wall Street Journal: “Behavioral scientists look for environmental ‘nudges’ to influence how people act. Pelle Guldborg Hansen, a behavioral scientist, is trying to figure out how to board passengers on a plane with less fuss.
The goal is to make plane-boarding more efficient by coaxing passengers to want to be more orderly, not by telling them they must. It is one of many projects in which Dr. Hansen seeks to encourage people, when faced with options, to make better choices. Among these: prompting people to properly dispose of cigarette butts outside of bars and clubs and inducing hospital workers to use hand sanitizers.
Dr. Hansen, 37 years old, is director of the Initiative for Science, Society & Policy, a collaboration of the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. The concept behind his work is known commonly as a nudge, dubbed such because of the popular 2008 book of the same name by U.S. academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that examined how people make decisions.
At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds.
Thirty-five minutes before a flight departed, the team got into position. Andreas Rathmann Jensen stood in one corner, then moved to another, so he could survey the entire gate area. He mapped where people were sitting and where they placed their bags. This behavior can vary depending, for example, if people are flying alone, with a partner or in a group.
Johannes Schuldt-Jensen circulated among the rows and counted how many bags were blocking seats and how many seats were empty as boarding time approached. He wore headphones, though he wasn’t listening to music, because people seem less suspicious of behavior when a person has headphones on, he says. Another researcher, Kasper Hulgaard, counted how many people were standing versus sitting.
The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side….”
The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance
New book by The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. The Responsive City is a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age that will help leaders link important breakthroughs in about technology and big data analytics with age-old lessons of small-group community input to create more agile, competitive, and economically resilient cities. Featuring vivid case-studies highlighting the work of individuals in New York, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Indiana, and Chicago, the book provides a compelling model for the future of cities and states. The authors demonstrate how digital innovations will drive a virtuous cycle of responsiveness centered on “empowerment” : 1) empowering public employees with tools to both power their performance and to help them connect more personally to those they service, 2) empowering constituents to see and understand problems and opportunities faced by cities so that they can better engage in the life of their communities, and 3) empowering leaders to drive towards their missions and address the grand challenges confronting cities by harnessing the predictive power of cross-government Big Data, the book will help mayors, chief technology officers, city administrators, agency directors, civic groups and nonprofit leaders break out of current paradigms in order to collectively address civic problems. Co-authored by Stephen Goldsmith, former Mayor of Indianapolis, and current Director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and Susan Crawford, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The Responsive City highlights the ways in which leadership, empowered government employees, thoughtful citizens, and 21st century technology can combine to improve government operations and strengthen civic trust. It provides actionable advice while exploring topics like:
- Visualizing service delivery and predicting improvement
- Making the work of government employees more meaningful
- Amplification and coordination of focused citizen engagement
- Big Data in big cities – stories of surprising successes and enormous potential”