Blockchain and Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Literature Review by Jörn Erbguth: “Democratic states are entities where issues are decided by a large group – the people. There is a democratic process that builds upon elections, a legislative procedure, judicial review and separation of powers by checks and balances. Blockchains rely on decentralization, meaning they rely on a large group of participants as well. Blockchains are therefore confronted with similar problems. Even further, blockchains try to avoid central coordinating authorities.

Consensus methods ensure that the systems align with the majority of their participants. Above the layer of the consensus method, blockchain governance coordinates decisions about software updates, bugfixes and possibly other interventions. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this blockchain governance?
Should we use blockchain to secure e-voting? Blockchain governance has two central aspects. First, it is decentralized governance based on a large group of people, which resembles democratic decision-making. Second, it is algorithmic decision-making and limits unwanted human intervention

Cornerstones
Blockchain and democracy can be split into three areas:

First, the use of democratic principles in order to make blockchain work. This ranges from the basic concensus algorithm to the (self-)governance of a blockchain.

Second, blockchain is seen as providing a reliable tool for democracy. This ranges from the use of blockchain for electronic voting to the use in administration.

Third, to study possible impacts of blockchain technology on a democratic society. This focusses on regulatory and legal aspects as well as ethical aspects….(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)”.

The Nollywood Nudge: An Entertaining Approach to Saving

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aidan Coville, Vincenzo Di Maro, Felipe Dunsch and Siegfried Zottel: “This paper investigates the immediate and medium-term behavioral response to an emotional trigger designed to affect biases in intertemporal financial decisions. The emotional trigger is provided by a narrative portraying the catastrophic consequences of poor financial choices. Even when people are fully aware of the most appropriate action to take, cognitive biases may prevent this knowledge from translating into action.

The paper contributes to the literature by directly testing the importance of linking emotional stimulus to financial messages, to influence borrowing and saving decisions, and identifying the interaction between emotional stimulus and the opportunity to act on this stimulus. The study randomly assigned individuals to a featured production — a Nollywood (the Nigerian Hollywood) movie — on the financial consequences of poor borrowing and saving behavior. This treatment is interacted with the option of opening a savings account at the screening of the movie. At the exit of the screening, individuals in the financial education movie treatment are more likely to open a savings account than individuals in the placebo movie treatment. However, the effects dissipate quickly. When savings and borrowing behavior is measured four months later, the study finds no differences between treatments. The paper concludes that emotional triggers delivered in the context of a one-time feature film might not be enough to secure sustained changes in behavior….(More)”.

Strategies and limitations in app usage and human mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marco De Nadai, Angelo Cardoso, Antonio Lima, Bruno Lepri, and Nuria Oliver: “Cognition has been found to constrain several aspects of human behaviour, such as the number of friends and the number of favourite places a person keeps stable over time. this limitation has been empirically defined in the physical and social spaces. But do people exhibit similar constraints in the digital space? We address this question through the analysis of pseudonymised mobility and mobile application (app) usage data of 400,000 individuals in a European country for six months. Despite the enormous heterogeneity of apps usage, we find that individuals exhibit a conserved capacity that limits the number of applications they regularly use. Moreover, we find that this capacity steadily decreases with age, as does the capacity in the physical space but with more complex dynamics. Even though people might have the same capacity, applications get added and removed over time.

In this respect, we identify two profiles of individuals: app keepers and explorers, which differ in their stable (keepers) vs exploratory (explorers) behaviour regarding their use of mobile applications. Finally, we show that the capacity of applications predicts mobility capacity and vice-versa. By contrast, the behaviour of keepers and explorers may considerably vary across the two domains. Our empirical findings provide an intriguing picture linking human behaviour in the physical and digital worlds which bridges research studies from Computer Science, Social Physics and Computational Social Sciences…(More)”.

Data Is a Development Issue

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Susan Ariel Aaronson: “Many wealthy states are transitioning to a new economy built on data. Individuals and firms in these states have expertise in using data to create new goods and services as well as in how to use data to solve complex problems. Other states may be rich in data but do not yet see their citizens’ personal data or their public data as an asset. Most states are learning how to govern and maintain trust in the data-driven economy; however, many developing countries are not well positioned to govern data in a way that encourages development. Meanwhile, some 76 countries are developing rules and exceptions to the rules governing cross-border data flows as part of new negotiations on e-commerce. This paper uses a wide range of metrics to show that most developing and middle-income countries are not ready or able to provide an environment where their citizens’ personal data is protected and where public data is open and readily accessible. Not surprisingly, greater wealth is associated with better scores on all the metrics. Yet, many industrialized countries are also struggling to govern the many different types and uses of data. The paper argues that data governance will be essential to development, and that donor nations have a responsibility to work with developing countries to improve their data governance….(More)”.

Open Governance of Cities: A new paradigm for understanding urban collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper Albert J. Meijer, Miriam Lips and Kaiping Chen: “This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action is organized. These technologies reduce the transaction costs for massive collaboration dramatically and thus facilitate new forms of collaboration that we could call ‘open governance’: new innovative forms of collective action aimed at solving complex public policy issues, contributing to public knowledge, or replacing traditional forms of public service provision. These innovative open and collaborative organisational forms in cities seem to point towards not only a wide variety of digitally connected actors but also to a fundamentally different and more invisible role of government in these arrangements. We argue that the recently emerging paradigm of New Public Governance (NPG) (Osborne 2010) also fails to capture the dynamics of open governance since it does not acknowledge the emergent – pop-up – character of the new collaborations; neither does it present an understanding of massive individualized collaboration in cities.

This paper aims to theoretically and empirically explore the core elements and the underlying socio-technical developments of this new Open Governance (OG) paradigm and compare and contrast OG with existing governance paradigms. Based on illustrative real-life cases, we will argue that we need a new paradigm that is better capable of explaining these emerging innovative forms of governing cities. We will argue that this requires an understanding of governance as a platform that facilitates an urban ecosystem. By connecting new insights from studies on digital governance to the debate about governance paradigms, this paper results in a set crucial empirical and normative questions about governance of cities and also in guidelines for urban governance that builds upon the rich, emerging interactions in cities that are facilitated by new technologies….(More)”

Responding to Some Challenges Posed by the Reidentification of Anonymized Personal Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Herman T. Tavani and Frances S. Grodzinsky: “In this paper, we examine a cluster of ethical controversies generated by the reidentification of anonymized personal data in the context of big data analytics, with particular attention to the implications for personal privacy. Our paper is organized into two main parts. Part One examines some ethical problems involving re-identification of personally identifiable information (PII) in large data sets. Part Two begins with a brief description of Moor and Weckert’s Dynamic Ethics (DE) and Nissenbaum’s Contextual Integrity (CI) Frameworks. We then investigate whether these frameworks, used together, can provide us with a more robust scheme for analyzing privacy concerns that arise in the re-identification process (as well as within the larger context of big data analytics). This paper does not specifically address re-identification-related privacy concerns that arise in the context of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Instead, we examine those issues in a separate work….(More)”.

E-Nudging Justice: The Role of Digital Choice Architecture in Online Courts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ayelet Sela: “Justice systems around the world are launching online courts and tribunals in order to improve access to justice, especially for self-represented litigants (SRLs). Online courts are designed to handhold SRLs throughout the process and empower them to make procedural and substantive decisions. To that end, they present SRLs with streamlined and simplified procedures and employ a host of user interface design and user experience strategies (UI/UX). Focusing on these features, the article analyzes online courts as digital choice environments that shape SRLs’ decisions, inputs and actions, and considers their implications on access to justice, due process and the impartiality of courts. Accordingly, the article begins to close the knowledge gap regarding choice architecture in online legal proceedings. 

Using examples from current online courts, the article considers how mechanisms such as choice overload, display, colorfulness, visual complexity, and personalization influence SRLs’ choices and actions. The analysis builds on research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics that shows that subtle changes in the context in which decisions are made steer (nudge) people to choose a particular option or course of action. It is also informed by recent studies that capture the effect of digital choice architecture on users’ choices and behaviors in online settings. The discussion clarifies that seemingly naïve UI/UX features can strongly influence users of online courts, in a manner that may be at odds with their institutional commitment to impartiality and due process. Moreover, the article challenges the view that online court interfaces (and those of other online legal services, for that matter) should be designed to maximize navigability, intuitiveness and user-friendliness. It argues that these design attributes involve the risk of nudging SRLs to make uninformed, non-deliberate, and biased decisions, possibly infringing their autonomy and self-determination. Accordingly, the article suggests that choice architecture in online courts should aim to encourage reflective participation and informed decision-making. Specifically, its goal should be to improve SRLs’ ability to identify and consider options, and advance their own — inherently diverse — interests. In order to mitigate the abovementioned risks, the article proposes an initial evaluation framework, measures, and methodologies to support evidence-based and ethical choice architecture in online courts….(More)”.

The Impact of Citizen Environmental Science in the United States

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by George Wyeth, Lee C. Paddock, Alison Parker, Robert L. Glicksman and Jecoliah Williams: “An increasingly sophisticated public, rapid changes in monitoring technology, the ability to process large volumes of data, and social media are increasing the capacity for members of the public and advocacy groups to gather, interpret, and exchange environmental data. This development has the potential to alter the government-centric approach to environmental governance; however, citizen science has had a mixed record in influencing government decisions and actions. This Article reviews the rapid changes that are going on in the field of citizen science and examines what makes citizen science initiatives impactful, as well as the barriers to greater impact. It reports on 10 case studies, and evaluates these to provide findings about the state of citizen science and recommendations on what might be done to increase its influence on environmental decisionmaking….(More)”,

Artificial Intelligence and Law: An Overview

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Harry Surden: “Much has been written recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and law. But what is AI, and what is its relation to the practice and administration of law? This article addresses those questions by providing a high-level overview of AI and its use within law. The discussion aims to be nuanced but also understandable to those without a technical background. To that end, I first discuss AI generally. I then turn to AI and how it is being used by lawyers in the practice of law, people and companies who are governed by the law, and government officials who administer the law. A key motivation in writing this article is to provide a realistic, demystified view of AI that is rooted in the actual capabilities of the technology. This is meant to contrast with discussions about AI and law that are decidedly futurist in nature…(More)”.