Tali Sharot & Cass R. Sunstein in Nature: “Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information. Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. Our framework rests on the idea that information can alter people’s action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health. We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure….(More)”.
Experimenting with Public Engagement Platforms in Local Government
Paper by Seongkyung Cho et al: “Cities are venues for experimentation with technology (e.g., smart cities) and democratic governance. At the intersection of both trends is the emergence of new online platforms for citizen engagement. There is little evidence to date on the extent to which these are being used or the characteristics associated with adopters at the leading edge. With rich data on civic engagement and innovation from a 2016 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) survey, we explore platform use in U.S. local governments and relationships with offline civic engagement, innovation, and local characteristics. We find that use of online participatory platforms is associated with offline participation, goals for civic engagement, and city size, rather than evidence that this is related to a more general orientation toward innovation….(More)”.
Data as infrastructure? A study of data sharing legal regimes
Paper by Charlotte Ducuing: “The article discusses the concept of infrastructure in the digital environment, through a study of three data sharing legal regimes: the Public Sector Information Directive (PSI Directive), the discussions on in-vehicle data governance and the freshly adopted data sharing legal regime in the Electricity Directive.
While aiming to contribute to the scholarship on data governance, the article deliberately focuses on network industries. Characterised by the existence of physical infrastructure, they have a special relationship to digitisation and ‘platformisation’ and are exposed to specific risks. Adopting an explanatory methodology, the article exposes that these regimes are based on two close but different sources of inspiration, yet intertwined and left unclear. By targeting entities deemed ‘monopolist’ with regard to the data they create and hold, data sharing obligations are inspired from competition law and especially the essential facility doctrine. On the other hand, beneficiaries appear to include both operators in related markets needing data to conduct their business (except for the PSI Directive), and third parties at large to foster innovation. The latter rationale illustrates what is called here a purposive view of data as infrastructure. The underlying understanding of ‘raw’ data (management) as infrastructure for all to use may run counter the ability for the regulated entities to get a fair remuneration for ‘their’ data.
Finally, the article pleads for more granularity when mandating data sharing obligations depending upon the purpose. Shifting away from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, the regulation of data could also extend to the ensuing context-specific data governance regime, subject to further research…(More)”.
Pocket Democracy: Developing a User-Friendly App for Following Local Politics
Paper by Jenny Lindholm & Janne Berg: “Democratic innovations have been suggested as one way of increasing public participation in political processes. Civic technology may provide resources for improving transparency, publicity, and accountability in political processes. This paper is about the development of a smartphone application that provides users with information on municipal politics and representatives. We develop the application using a user-centered design approach. Thus, we establish its functions by hearing the end-users and considering their goals in the design process. We conducted three focus groups to find out what features end-users would like to see in an app. Six features were present in all three focus group discussions: receiving information, expressing opinions, creating/answering polls, receiving notifications, following issues and receiving emergency messages….(More)”.
Open Democracy and Digital Technologies
Paper by Hélène Landemore: “…looks at the connection between democratic theory and technological constraints, and argues for renovating our paradigm of democracy to make the most of the technological opportunities offered by the digital revolution. The most attractive normative theory of democracy currently available—Habermas’ model of a two-track deliberative sphere—is, for all its merits, a self-avowed rationalization of representative democracy, a system born in the 18th century under different epistemological, conceptual, and technological constraints. In this
paper I show the limits of this model and defend instead an alternative paradigm of democracy I call “open democracy,” in which digital technologies are assumed to make it possible to transcend a number of dichotomies, including that between ordinary citizens and democratic representatives.
Rather than just imagining a digitized version or extension of existing institutions and practices—representative democracy as we know it—I thus take the opportunities offered by the digital revolution (its technological “affordances,” in the jargon) to envision new democratic institutions and means of democratic empowerment, some of which are illustrated in the vignette with which this paper started. In other words, rather that start from what is— our electoral democracies, I start from what democracy could mean, if we reinvented it more or less from scratch today with the help of digital technologies.
The first section lays out the problems with and limits of our current practice and theory of democracy.
The second section traces these problems to conceptual design flaws partially induced by 18th century conceptual, epistemological, and technological constraints.
Section three lays out an alternative theory of democracy I call “open democracy,” which avoids some of these design flaws, and introduces the institutional features of this new paradigm that are specifically enabled by digital technologies: deliberation and democratic representation….(More)”.
Taming the Beast: Harnessing Blockchains in Developing Country Governments
Paper by Raúl Zambrano: “Amid pressing demands to achieve critical sustainable development goals, governments in developing countries face the additional complex task of embracing new digital technologies such as blockchains. This paper develops a framework interlinking development, technology, and government institutions that policymakers and development practitioners could use to address such a conundrum. State capacity and democratic governance are introduced as drivers in the overall analysis. With this in hand, blockchain technology is revisited from the perspective of governments in the Global South, identifying in the process key traits and proposing a new typology. An overview of the status of blockchain deployments in the Global South follows, complemented by a closer look at country examples to distill trends, patterns and risks. The paper closes with a discussion of the findings, highlighting both challenges and opportunities for governments. It also provides basic guidance to development practitioners interested in enhancing current programming using blockchains as an enabler….(More)”
Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law? The Rise of Hybrid Social-Ordering Systems
Paper by Tim Wu: “Software has partially or fully displaced many former human activities, such as catching speeders or flying airplanes, and proven itself able to surpass humans in certain contests, like Chess and Jeopardy. What are the prospects for the displacement of human courts as the centerpiece of legal decision-making?
Based on the case study of hate speech control on major tech platforms, particularly on Twitter and Facebook, this Essay suggests displacement of human courts remains a distant prospect, but suggests that hybrid machine–human systems are the predictable future of legal adjudication, and that there lies some hope in that combination, if done well….(More)”.
Trusted smart statistics: Motivations and principles
Paper by Fabio Ricciato et al : “In this contribution we outline the concept of Trusted Smart Statistics as the natural evolution of official statistics in the new datafied world. Traditional data sources, namely survey and administrative data, represent nowadays a valuable but small portion of the global data stock, much thereof being held in the private sector. The availability of new data sources is only one aspect of the global change that concerns official statistics. Other aspects, more subtle but not less important, include the changes in perceptions, expectations, behaviours and relations between the stakeholders. The environment around official statistics has changed: statistical offices are not any more data monopolists, but one prominent species among many others in a larger (and complex) ecosystem. What was established in the traditional world of legacy data sources (in terms of regulations, technologies, practices, etc.) is not guaranteed to be sufficient any more with new data sources.
Trusted Smart Statistics is not about replacing existing sources and processes, but augmenting them with new ones. Such augmentation however will not be only incremental: the path towards Trusted Smart Statistics is not about tweaking some components of the legacy system but about building an entirely new system that will coexist with the legacy one. In this position paper we outline some key design principles for the new Trusted Smart Statistics system. Taken collectively they picture a system where the smart and trust aspects enable and reinforce each other. A system that is more extrovert towards external stakeholders (citizens, private companies, public authorities) with whom Statistical Offices will be sharing computation, control, code, logs and of course final statistics, without necessarily sharing the raw input data….(More)”.
Responsible data sharing in a big data-driven translational research platform: lessons learned
Paper by S. Kalkman et al: “The sharing of clinical research data is increasingly viewed as a moral duty [1]. Particularly in the context of making clinical trial data widely available, editors of international medical journals have labeled data sharing a highly efficient way to advance scientific knowledge [2,3,4]. The combination of even larger datasets into so-called “Big Data” is considered to offer even greater benefits for science, medicine and society [5]. Several international consortia have now promised to build grand-scale, Big Data-driven translational research platforms to generate better scientific evidence regarding disease etiology, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis across various disease areas [6,7,8].
Despite anticipated benefits, large-scale sharing of health data is charged with ethical questions. Stakeholders have been urged to consider how to manage privacy and confidentiality issues, ensure valid informed consent, and determine who gets to decide about data access [9]. More fundamentally, new data sharing activities prompt questions about social justice and public trust [10]. To balance potential benefits and ethical considerations, data sharing platforms require guidance for the processes of interaction and decision-making. In the European Union (EU), legal norms specified for the sharing of personal data for health research, most notably those set out in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU 2016/679), remain open to interpretation and offer limited practical guidance to researchers [12,12,13]. Striking in this regard is that the GDPR itself stresses the importance of adherence to ethical standards, when broad consent is put forward as a legal basis for the processing of personal data. For example, Recital 33 of the GDPR states that data subjects should be allowed to give “consent to certain areas of scientific research when in keeping with recognised ethical standards for scientific research” [14]. In fact, the GDPR actually encourages data controllers to establish self-regulating mechanisms, such as a code of conduct. To foster responsible and sustainable data sharing in translational research platforms, ethical guidance and governance is therefore necessary. Here, we define governance as ‘the processes of interaction and decision-making among the different stakeholders that are involved in a collective problem that lead to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions’…(More)”.
From Ethics Washing to Ethics Bashing: A View on Tech Ethics from Within Moral Philosophy
Paper by Elettra Bietti: “The word ‘ethics’ is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or hands-off governance, “ethics” is increasingly identified with technology companies’ self-regulatory efforts and with shallow appearances of ethical behavior. So-called “ethics washing” by tech companies is on the rise, prompting criticism and scrutiny from scholars and the tech community at large. In parallel to the growth of ethics washing, its condemnation has led to a tendency to engage in “ethics bashing.” This consists in the trivialization of ethics and moral philosophy now understood as discrete tools or pre-formed social structures such as ethics boards, self-governance schemes or stakeholder groups.
The misunderstandings underlying ethics bashing are at least three-fold: (a) philosophy and “ethics” are seen as a communications strategy and as a form of instrumentalized cover-up or façade for unethical behavior, (b) philosophy is understood in opposition and as alternative to political representation and social organizing and (c) the role and importance of moral philosophy is downplayed and portrayed as mere “ivory tower” intellectualization of complex problems that need to be dealt with in practice.
This paper argues that the rhetoric of ethics and morality should not be reductively instrumentalized, either by the industry in the form of “ethics washing,” or by scholars and policy-makers in the form of “ethics bashing.” Grappling with the role of philosophy and ethics requires moving beyond both tendencies and seeing ethics as a mode of inquiry that facilitates the evaluation of competing tech policy strategies. In other words, we must resist narrow reductivism of moral philosophy as instrumentalized performance and renew our faith in its intrinsic moral value as a mode of knowledge-seeking and inquiry. Far from mandating a self-regulatory scheme or a given governance structure, moral philosophy in fact facilitates the questioning and reconsideration of any given practice, situating it within a complex web of legal, political and economic institutions. Moral philosophy indeed can shed new light on human practices by adding needed perspective, explaining the relationship between technology and other worthy goals, situating technology within the human, the social, the political. It has become urgent to start considering technology ethics also from within and not only from outside of ethics….(More)”.