Paper by Julia Romberg and Tobias Escher: “Public sector institutions that consult citizens to inform decision-making face the challenge of evaluating the contributions made by citizens. This evaluation has important democratic implications but at the same time, consumes substantial human resources. However, until now the use of artificial intelligence such as computer-supported text analysis has remained an under-studied solution to this problem. We identify three generic tasks in the evaluation process that could benefit from natural language processing (NLP). Based on a systematic literature search in two databases on computational linguistics and digital government, we provide a detailed review of existing methods and their performance. While some promising approaches exist, for instance to group data thematically and to detect arguments and opinions, we show that there remain important challenges before these could offer any reliable support in practice. These include the quality of results, the applicability to non-English language corpuses and making algorithmic models available to practitioners through software. We discuss a number of avenues that future research should pursue that can ultimately lead to solutions for practice. The most promising of these bring in the expertise of human evaluators, for example through active learning approaches or interactive topic modelling…(More)” See also: Where and when AI and CI meet: exploring the intersection of artificial and collective intelligence towards the goal of innovating how we govern.
The Platformization of Public Participation: Considerations for Urban Planners Navigating New Engagement Tools
Paper by Pamela Robinson & Peter Johnson: “Professional urban planners have an ethical obligation to work in the public interest. Public input and critique gathered at public meetings and other channels are used to inform planning recommendations to elected officials. Pre-pandemic, the planning profession worked with digital tools, but in-person meetings were the dominant form of public participation. The pandemic imposed a shift to digital channels and tools, with the result that planners’ use of technology risks unitizing public participation. As the use of new platforms for public participation expands, we argue it has the potential to fundamentally change participation, a process we call platformization. We frame this as a subset of the broader emergence of platform urbanism. This chapter evaluates six public participation platforms, identifying how the tools they provide map onto key participation frameworks from Arnstein (1969), Fung (2006), and IAP2 (2018). Through this analysis, we examine how the platformization of public participation poses ethical and scholarly challenges to the work of professional planners…(More)”.
The messy politics of local climate assemblies
Paper by Pancho Lewis, Jacob Ainscough, Rachel Coxcoon & Rebecca Willis: “In recent years, many local authorities in the UK have run local climate assemblies (LCAs) such as citizens’ assemblies or juries, with the goal of developing citizen-led solutions to the climate crisis. In this essay, we argue that a ‘convenient fiction’ often underpins the way local authority actors explain the rationale for running LCAs. This convenient fiction runs as follows: LCAs are commissioned as a response to the climate threat, and local decision-makers work through LCA recommendations to implement appropriate policies in their locality. We suggest that this narrative smooths over and presents as linear a process that is in fact messy and political. LCAs emerge as a result of political pressure and bargaining. Once LCAs have run their course, the extent to which their recommendations are implemented is dependent on power dynamics and institutional capacities. We argue that it is important to surface the messiness and political tensions that underpin the origins and aftermath of local climate assemblies. This achieves three things. First, it helps manage expectations about the impact LCAs are likely to have on the policy process. Second, it broadens understandings of how LCAs can contribute to change. Third, it provides a complex model that actors can use to understand how they can help deliver climate action through politics. We conclude that LCAs are important — if as yet unproven — new interventions in local climate politics, when assessed against this more complex picture…(More)”
AI and Global Governance: Modalities, Rationales, Tensions
Paper by Michael Veale, Kira Matus and Robert Gorwa: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is a salient but polarizing issue of recent times. Actors around the world are engaged in building a governance regime around it. What exactly the “it” is that is being governed, how, by who, and why—these are all less clear. In this review, we attempt to shine some light on those questions, considering literature on AI, the governance of computing, and regulation and governance more broadly. We take critical stock of the different modalities of the global governance of AI that have been emerging, such as ethical councils, industry governance, contracts and licensing, standards, international agreements, and domestic legislation with extraterritorial impact. Considering these, we examine selected rationales and tensions that underpin them, drawing attention to the interests and ideas driving these different modalities. As these regimes become clearer and more stable, we urge those engaging with or studying the global governance of AI to constantly ask the important question of all global governance regimes: Who benefits?…(More)”.
Model evaluation for extreme risks
Paper by Toby Shevlane et al: “Current approaches to building general-purpose AI systems tend to produce systems with both beneficial and harmful capabilities. Further progress in AI development could lead to capabilities that pose extreme risks, such as offensive cyber capabilities or strong manipulation skills. We explain why model evaluation is critical for addressing extreme risks. Developers must be able to identify dangerous capabilities (through “dangerous capability evaluations”) and the propensity of models to apply their capabilities for harm (through “alignment evaluations”). These evaluations will become critical for keeping policymakers and other stakeholders informed, and for making responsible decisions about model training, deployment, and security.
Figure 1 | The theory of change for model evaluations for extreme risk. Evaluations for dangerous capabilities and alignment inform risk assessments, and are in turn embedded into important governance processes…(More)”.
Best Practices for Disclosure and Citation When Using Artificial Intelligence Tools
Article by Mark Shope: “This article is intended to be a best practices guide for disclosing the use of artificial intelligence tools in legal writing. The article focuses on using artificial intelligence tools that aid in drafting textual material, specifically in law review articles and law school courses. The article’s approach to disclosure and citation is intended to be a starting point for authors, institutions, and academic communities to tailor based on their own established norms and philosophies. Throughout the entire article, the author has used ChatGPT to provide examples of how artificial intelligence tools can be used in writing and how the output of artificial intelligence tools can be expressed in text, including examples of how that use and text should be disclosed and cited. The article will also include policies for professors to use in their classrooms and journals to use in their submission guidelines…(More)”
Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding
Paper by Braley, A., Lenz, G.S., Adjodah, D. et al.: “Around the world, citizens are voting away the democracies they claim to cherish. Here we present evidence that this behaviour is driven in part by the belief that their opponents will undermine democracy first. In an observational study (N = 1,973), we find that US partisans are willing to subvert democratic norms to the extent that they believe opposing partisans are willing to do the same. In experimental studies (N = 2,543, N = 1,848), we revealed to partisans that their opponents are more committed to democratic norms than they think. As a result, the partisans became more committed to upholding democratic norms themselves and less willing to vote for candidates who break these norms. These findings suggest that aspiring autocrats may instigate democratic backsliding by accusing their opponents of subverting democracy and that we can foster democratic stability by informing partisans about the other side’s commitment to democracy…(More)”
Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science
Paper by Massimiliano Luca, Gian Maria Campedelli, Simone Centellegher, Michele Tizzoni, and Bruno Lepri: “Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale…(More)”.
Design of services or designing for service? The application of design methodology in public service settings
Article by Kirsty Strokosch and Stephen P. Osborne: “The design of public services has traditionally been conducted by managers who aim to improve efficiency. In recent years though, human-centred design has been used increasingly to improve the experience of public service users, citizens and public service staff (Trischler and Scott, 2016). Design also encourages collaboration and creativity to understand problems and develop solutions (Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). This can include user research to understand current experiences and/or testing prototypes through quick repeated cycles of re-design.
To date, there has been little primary research on the application of design approaches in public service settings (Hermus, et al., 2020). Our article just published in Policy & Politics, Design of services or designing for service? The application of design methodology in public service settings, seeks to fill that gap.
It considers two cases in the United Kingdom: Social Security services in Scotland and Local Authority services in England. The research explores the application of design, asking three important questions: what is being designed, how is service design being practised and what are its implications?…
The research also offers three important implications for practice:
- Service design should be applied pragmatically. A one-size-fits-all design approach is not appropriate for public services. We need to think about the type of service, who is using it and its aims.
- Services should be understood in their entirety with a holistic view of both the front-end components and the back-end operational processes. However, the complex social and institutional factors that shape service experience also need to be considered.
- Design needs flexibility to enable creativity. Part of this involves reducing bureaucratic work practices and a commitment from senior managers to make available the time, resources and space for creativity, testing and iteration. There needs to be space to learn and improve…(More)“.
Can Mobility of Care Be Identified From Transit Fare Card Data? A Case Study In Washington D.C.
Paper by Daniela Shuman, et al: “Studies in the literature have found significant differences in travel behavior by gender on public transit that are largely attributable to household and care responsibilities falling disproportionately on women. While the majority of studies have relied on survey and qualitative data to assess “mobility of care”, we propose a novel data-driven workflow utilizing transit fare card transactions, name-based gender inference, and geospatial analysis to identify mobility of care trip making. We find that the share of women travelers trip-chaining in the direct vicinity of mobility of care places of interest is 10% – 15% higher than men….(More)”.