Democratic Innovations From Around the World: Lessons for the West

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Richard Youngs, and Ken Godfrey: “Recent initiatives for fostering citizen participation in Europe, Australia, and Canada have attracted much attention, especially selection-based “mini-publics”—of which one form, citizens’ assemblies, has become increasingly popular. Yet new forms of participation have also emerged in other countries and regions around the world. Like the innovations in Western democracies, these are far from perfect, but they offer valuable insights for those concerned with widening the pathways to democratic participation within Western states. The European Democracy Hub ran a project on democratic innovations outside the West in order to explore these lessons. This article synthesizes findings from the project by categorizing distinctive types of citizen participation from examples around the world and teasing out their policy implications…

With citizens’ frustration with and alienation from political elites becoming more widespread and severe around the world, as manifest in a rising number of significant antigovernment protests globally, the need for innovative channels of citizen participation has become more pressing. Despite the powerful global dynamics of democratic regression, many positive forms of such participation have taken shape in the last several years. Indeed, many analysts detect that a new ethos of citizen participation is defining efforts to push back against democratic decay.

Selection-based mini-publics are establishing an especially impressive track record as one form of citizen participation. These forums choose citizens by lot to deliberate on certain policy issues. In the West, this sortition template—now routinely implemented with highly sophisticated techniques of stratified selection to ensure representation from diverse sectors of society—is seen as the gold standard of participation, as it gives all citizens an equal chance to participate and ensures debates are highly structured around preset remits or elaborate formal institutional processes….(More)”.

The Data4COVID-19 Review: Assessing the Use of Non-Traditional Data During a Pandemic Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Hannah Chafetz, Andrew J. Zahuranec, Sara Marcucci, Behruz Davletov, and Stefaan Verhulst: “As the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate, pandemics pose major challenges on all levels–with cataclysmic effects on society. 

Decision-makers from around the world have sought to mitigate the consequences of COVID-19 through the use of data, including data from non-traditional sources such as social media, wastewater, and credit card and telecommunications companies. However, there has been little research into how non-traditional data initiatives were designed or what impacts they had on COVID-19 responses. 

Over the last eight months, The GovLab, with the support of The Knight Foundation, has sought to fill this gap by conducting a study about how non-traditional data (NTD) sources have been used during COVID-19. 

On October 31st, The GovLab published the report: “The COVID-19 Review: Assessing the Use of Non-Traditional Data During a Pandemic Crisis.” The report details how decision makers around the world have used non-traditional sources through a series of briefings intended for a generalist audience. 

The briefings describe and assess how non-traditional data initiatives were designed, planned, and implemented, as well as the project results. 

Findings

The briefings uncovered several findings about why, where, when, and how NTD was used during COVID-19, including that:

  • Officials increasingly called for the use of NTD to answer questions where and when traditional data such as surveys and case data were not sufficient or could not be leveraged. However, the collection and use of traditional data was often needed to validate insights.
  • NTD sources were primarily used to understand populations’ health, mobility (or physical movements), economic activity, and sentiment of the pandemic. In comparison with previous dynamic crises, COVID-19 was a watershed moment in terms of access to and re-use of non-traditional data in those four areas.
  • The majority of NTD initiatives were fragmented and uncoordinated, reflecting the larger fragmented COVID-19 response. Many projects were focused on responding to COVID-19 after outbreaks occurred. This pattern reflected an overall lack of preparedness for the pandemic and need for the rapid development of initiatives to address its consequences.
  • NTD initiatives frequently took the form of cross-sectoral data partnerships or collaborations developed to respond to specific needs. Many institutions did not have the systems and infrastructure in place for these collaborations to be sustainable.
  • Many of the NTD initiatives involving granular, personal data were implemented without the necessary social license to do so–leading to public concerns about ethics and hindering public trust in non-traditional data. 

Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief R&D of The GovLab explains: “The use of NTD offers growing potential during crisis situations. When managed responsibly, NTD use can help us understand the current state of the crisis, forecast how it will progress, and respond to different aspects of it in real-time.”…(More)”.

People’s Plan for Nature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The nature crisis affects everyone, and we believe everyone should have a say in how we solve it. The People’s Plan for Nature is the UK’s biggest ever conversation about the future of nature.

The People’s Plan for Nature will include recommendations for governments (local and national), food and farming businesses, non-governmental organisations, communities, and individuals.
 
These recommendations will be the outcome of the People’s Assembly for Nature, a citizens’ assembly that will run as part of the project. This assembly will bring together a group of people from all walks of life to have an honest conversation, find common ground and make recommendations for the protection and restoration of nature in the UK.
 
This will ensure the People’s Plan for Nature is rooted in the values, ideas and experiences of people from all corners of the UK…(More)”.

Improving Access and Management of Public Transit ITS Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies: “With the proliferation of automated vehicle location (AVL), automated passenger counters (APCs), and automated fare collection (AFC), transit agencies are collecting increasingly granular data on service performance, ridership, customer behavior, and financial recovery. While granular intelligent transportation systems (ITS) data can meaningfully improve transit decision-making, transit agencies face many challenges in accessing, validating, storing, and analyzing these data sets. These challenges are made more difficult in that the tools for managing and analyzing transit ITS data generally cannot, at this point, be shared across transit agencies because of variation in data collection systems and data formats. Multiple vendors provide ITS hardware and software, and data formats vary by vendor. Moreover, agencies may employ a patchwork of ITS that has been acquired and modified over time, leading to further consistency challenges.
Standardization of data structures and tools can help address these challenges. Not only can standardization streamline data transfer, validation, and database structuring, it encourages the development of analysis tools that can be used across transit agencies, as has been the case with route and schedule data, standardized in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format..(More)”.

Evaluating Social Innovation Prototypes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Social Innovation Canada: “…practical resource for those involved with social research and development and who would like to create, test, and learn from prototypes. This how-to guide explores 12 principles to guide the testing process, five key steps for carrying out the process, and includes tables that summarize a variety of prototyping techniques, evaluation methods, and sampling strategies. Learn how to effectively use prototypes and test promising solutions to address social challenges….(More)”

The Haves and the Have Nots: Civic Technologies and the Pathways to Government Responsiveness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Mellon, Tiago C. Peixoto and Fredrik M. Sjoberg: “As civic life has moved online scholars have questioned whether this will exacerbate political inequalities due to differences in access to technology. However, this concern typically assumes that unequal participation inevitably leads to unequal outcomes: if online participants are unrepresentative of the population, then participation outcomes will benefit groups who participate and disadvantage those who do not. This paper combines the results from eight previous studies on civic technology platforms. It conducts new analysis to trace inequality throughout the participation chain, from (1) the existing digital divide, to (2) the profile of participants, to (3) the types of demands made through the platform, and, finally, to (4) policy outcomes.
The paper examines four civic technology models: online voting for participatory budgeting in Brazil, online local problem reporting in the United Kingdom, crowdsourced constitution drafting in Iceland, and online petitioning across 132 countries. In every case, the assumed links in the participation chain broke down because of the platform’s institutional features and the surrounding political process.
These results show that understanding how inequality is created requires examination of all stages of participation, as well as the resulting policy response. The assumption that inequalities in participation will always lead to the same inequalities in outcomes is not borne out in practice…(More)”.

Innovative Data Science Approaches to Identify Individuals, Populations, and Communities at High Risk for Suicide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Emerging real-time data sources, together with innovative data science techniques and methods – including artificial intelligence and machine learning – can help inform upstream suicide prevention efforts. Select social media platforms have proactively deployed these methods to identify individual platform users at high risk for suicide, and in some cases may activate local law enforcement, if needed, to prevent imminent suicide. To explore the current scope of activities, benefits, and risks of leveraging innovative data science techniques to help inform upstream suicide prevention at the individual and population level, the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop series consisting of three webinars held on April 28, May 12, and June 30, 2022. This Proceedings highlights presentations and discussions from the workshop…(More)”

Cross-border Data Flows: Taking Stock of Key Policies and Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “As data become an important resource for the global economy, it is important to strengthen trust to facilitate data sharing domestically and across borders. Significant momentum for related policies in the G7, and G20, has gone hand in hand with a wide range of – often complementary – national and international initiatives and the development of technological and organisational measures. Advancing a common understanding and dialogue among G7 countries and beyond is crucial to support coordinated and coherent progress in policy and regulatory approaches that leverage the full potential of data for global economic and social prosperity. This report takes stock of key policies and initiatives on cross-border data flows to inform and support G7 countries’ engagement on this policy agenda…(More)”.

CNSTAT Report Emphasizes the Need for a National Data Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Molly Gahagen: “Having credible and accessible data is essential for various sectors of society to function. In the recent report, “Toward a 21st Century National Data Infrastructure: Mobilizing Information for the Common Good,” by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the importance of national data infrastructure is emphasized…

Emphasizing the need for reliable statistics for national, state and local government officials, as well as businesses and citizens, the report cites the need for a modern national data infrastructure incorporating data from multiple federal agencies. Initial recommendations and potential outcomes of such a system are contained in the report.

Recommendations include practices to incorporate data from many sources, safeguard privacy, freely share statistics with the public, ensure transparency and create a modern system that would allow for easy access and enhanced security.

Potential outcomes of this infrastructure highlighted by the authors of the report include increased evidence-based policymaking on several levels of government, uniform regulations for data reporting and users accessing the data and increased security. The report describes how this would tie into increased initiatives to promote research and evidence-based policymaking, including through the passing of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 in Congress.

CNSTAT’s future reports seek to address blending multiple data sources, data equity, technology and tools, among other topics…(More)”.