Paper by Philip S.C. Lewis and Linda Mulcahy: “Government lawyers have been rather neglected by scholars interested in the workings of the legal profession and the role of professional groups in contemporary society. This is surprising given the potential for them to influence the internal workings of an increasingly legalistic and centralized state. This article aims to partly fill the gap left by looking at the way that lawyers employed by the government and the administrators they work with talk about their day to day practices. It draws on the findings of a large-scale empirical study of government lawyers in seven departments, funded by the ESRC. The study was undertaken between 2002-2003 by Philip Lewis, and is reported for the first time here. By looking at lawyers in bureaucracies the interviews conducted sought to explore what government lawyers do, how they talked about their work, and what distinguished them from the administrative grade clients and colleagues they worked with….(More)”.
Using Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning to Estimate the Livelihood Impact of Electricity Access
Paper by Nathan Ratledge et al: “In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We demonstrate how advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can help ameliorate these data and inference challenges. In the context of an expansion of the electrical grid across Uganda, we show how a combination of satellite imagery and computer vision can be used to develop local-level livelihood measurements appropriate for inferring the causal impact of electricity access on livelihoods. We then show how ML-based inference techniques deliver more reliable estimates of the causal impact of electrification than traditional alternatives when applied to these data. We estimate that grid access improves village-level asset wealth in rural Uganda by 0.17 standard deviations, more than doubling the growth rate over our study period relative to untreated areas. Our results provide country-scale evidence on the impact of a key infrastructure investment, and provide a low-cost, generalizable approach to future policy evaluation in data sparse environments….(More)”.
Citizen Needs – To Be Considered
Paper by Franzisca Maas, Sara Wolf, Anna Hohm and Jörn Hurtienne outlining “Requirements for Local Civic Participation Tools. In this paper, we argue for and present an empirical study of putting citizens into focus during the early stages of designing tools for civic participation in a mid-sized German town. Drawing on Contextual and Participatory Design, we involved 105 participants by conducting interviews, using Photovoice and participating in a local neighbourhood meeting.
Together with citizens, we built an Affinity Diagram, consolidated the data and identified key insights. As a result, we present and discuss different participation identities such as Motivated Activists, Convenience Participants or Companions and a collection of citizen needs for local civic participation, e. g., personal contact is irreplaceable for motivation, trust and mutual understanding, and some citizens preferred to “stumble across” information rather than actively searching for it. We use existing participation tools to demonstrate how individual needs could be addressed. Finally, we apply our insights to an example in our local context. We conclude that if we want to build digital tools that go beyond tokenistic, top-down ways of civic participation and that treat citizens as one homogeneous group, citizens need to be part of the design process right from the start. Supplemental material can be retrieved from https://osf.io/rxd7h/….(More)”
Social welfare gains from innovation commons: Theory, evidence, and policy implications
Paper by Jason Potts, Andrew W. Torrance, Dietmar Harhoff and Eric A. von Hippel: “Innovation commons – which we define as repositories of freely-accessible, “open source” innovation-related information and data – are a very significant resource for innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals: Availability of free data and information reduces the innovation-specific private or open investment required to make the next innovative advance. Despite the clear social welfare value of innovation commons under many conditions, academic innovation research and innovation policymaking have to date focused almost entirely on enhancing private incentives to innovate by enabling innovators to keep some types of innovation-related information at least temporarily apart from the commons, via intellectual property rights.
In this paper, our focus is squarely on innovation commons theory, evidence, and policy implications. We first discuss the varying nature of and contents of innovation commons extant today. We summarize what is known about their functioning, their scale, the value they provide to innovators and to general social welfare, and the mechanisms by which this is accomplished. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, and with the important exception of major digital platform firms, we find that many who develop innovation-related information at private cost have private economic incentives to contribute their information to innovation commons for free access by free riders. We conclude with a discussion of the value of more general support for innovation commons, and how this could be provided by increased private and public investment in innovation commons “engineering”, and by specific forms of innovation policymaking to increase social welfare via enhancement of innovation commons….(More)”.
The promise and the premise: How digital media present big data
Paper by Gastón Becerra: “This paper analyzes the thematic and discursive construction of big data by the Argentine digital press. Using text mining techniques — topic modelling and enriched associative networks — together with qualitative and quantitative content analysis — in both discourse and images — over 2,026 articles, we sought to identify the topics wherein big data is treated, the promises and risks it addresses, its definition within the semantic field in which is explicitly expressed, and the pictures that illustrate it. Results herein presented compare how big data is portrayed in news about politics, business, and technological innovations, as well as in focal pieces targeted to a generic and massive audience, and critical reflections about its risks. Although in each of those thematic contexts big data is anchored differently, there is a common idea that associates big data with a socio-technological premise and an epistemic promise: because of the availability of large volumes of data, something new that will allow better decisions can be known. Our exploration contributes to a more detailed knowledge on how the news media social systems make sense of novel phenomena such as big data….(More)”.
Future of e-Government: An integrated conceptual framework
Paper by Suresh Malodia, Amandeep Dhi, Mahima Mishra and Zeeshan Ahmed Bhatti: “The information and hyper-connectivity revolutions have caused significant disruptions in citizens’ interactions with governments all over the world. Failures in implementing e-government interventions suggest the lack of an integrated approach in understanding e-government as a discipline. In this study, we present an overarching and integrated conceptual framework of e-government grounded in robust qualitative research to describe the factors that must be integrated to implement e-government successfully. Drawing insights from 168 in-depth interviews conducted with multiple stakeholders in India, this study defines e-government as a multidimensional construct with customer orientation, channel orientation and technology orientation as its antecedents. Building on customer orientation and relationship marketing theories, this study proposes that the most significant factor impacting success in implementing e-government projects is citizen orientation, followed by channel orientation and technology orientation. The study also identifies the digital divide, economic growth and political stability as moderators of e-government. Furthermore, the study proposes the tangible and intangible outcomes of e-government with perceived privacy and shared understanding as moderating conditions. Finally, the study presents relevant theoretical and practical implications with future research directions….(More)”.
Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from a Survey of Machine Learning Researchers
Paper by Baobao Zhang, Markus Anderljung, Lauren Kahn, Naomi Dreksler, Michael C. Horowitz, and Allan Dafoe: “Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers play an important role in the ethics and governance of AI, including through their work, advocacy, and choice of employment. Nevertheless, this influential group’s attitudes are not well understood, undermining our ability to discern consensuses or disagreements between AI/ML researchers. To examine these researchers’ views, we conducted a survey of those who published in two top AI/ML conferences (N = 524). We compare these results with those from a 2016 survey of AI/ML researchers (Grace et al., 2018) and a 2018 survey of the US public (Zhang & Dafoe, 2020). We find that AI/ML researchers place high levels of trust in international organizations and scientific organizations to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest; moderate trust in most Western tech companies; and low trust in national militaries, Chinese tech companies, and Facebook….(More)”.
Citizen science—discovering (new) solutions to wicked problems
Paper by Ian R. Hodgkinson, Sahar Mousavi & Paul Hughes: “The article explores the role citizen science can play in discovering new solutions to pressing wicked problems. Using illustrations of citizen science projects to show how and where citizens have been fundamental in creating solutions and driving change, the article calls for wider recognition and use of citizen science in public administration and management research. For wider utilization of citizens’ active co-participation in research design, delivery and dissemination, the article presents a set of citizen science pathways….(More)”.
Data in Crisis — Rethinking Disaster Preparedness in the United States
Paper by Satchit Balsari, Mathew V. Kiang, and Caroline O. Buckee: “…In recent years, large-scale streams of digital data on medical needs, population vulnerabilities, physical and medical infrastructure, human mobility, and environmental conditions have become available in near-real time. Sophisticated analytic methods for combining them meaningfully are being developed and are rapidly evolving. However, the translation of these data and methods into improved disaster response faces substantial challenges. The data exist but are not readily accessible to hospitals and response agencies. The analytic pipelines to rapidly translate them into policy-relevant insights are lacking, and there is no clear designation of responsibility or mandate to integrate them into disaster-mitigation or disaster-response strategies. Building these integrated translational pipelines that use data rapidly and effectively to address the health effects of natural disasters will require substantial investments, and these investments will, in turn, rely on clear evidence of which approaches actually improve outcomes. Public health institutions face some ongoing barriers to achieving this goal, but promising solutions are available….(More)”
Looking to the future? Including children, young people and future generations in deliberations on climate action: Ireland’s Citizens’Assembly 2016–2018
Paper by Clodagh Harris: “The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and future generations were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. This may have been beneficial in terms of impact, but it came at the expense of input legitimacy and potentially intergenerational justice. Referring to international developments, it suggests how these groups may be included through enclave deliberation, institutional innovations, design experiments and future-oriented practice…(More)”