Book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard: “Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.
These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. (More) “
4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate
at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:
1. Open Data
…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….
2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics
…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.
3. Online Citizen Engagement
…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.
4. Geographic Information Systems
… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”
Open Government and Democracy
New paper by Karin Hansson, Kheira Belkacem, and Love Ekenberg at the Social Sciences Computer Review: “The concept of open government, having been promoted widely in the past 5 years, has promised a broader notion than e-government, as supposed to fundamentally transform governments to become more open and participative and collaborative. Unfortunately, this has not significantly enhanced a set of fundamental problems regarding e-government. One of the problems is that the underlying democratic ideology is rarely clearly expressed. In this paper, we have therefore constructed a framework for the analysis of open government from a democratic perspective, to explore the research foundation of open government and the types of research missing. We have looked closely at the notion of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, focusing on discussions of some fundamental issues regarding democracy and the type of solutions suggested. We have found that despite seemingly good intentions and an extensive rhetoric, there is still an apparent lack of adequate tools in which public deliberation and representation are addressed in any meaningful sense. There are two main important observations herein: (i) the rhetoric in the dominant discourse supports the concept of open government formulated by the Obama administration as transparency, participation, and collaboration, but in practice, the focus is predominantly on transparency and information exchange, while ignoring fundamental democratic issues regarding participation and collaboration, and (ii) the concept of the public is inadequately considered as a homogenous entity rather than a diversified group with different interests, preferences, and abilities.”
Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe
at Open Democracy: “What’s going on in Paris? This year over four thousand Parisians have been consulted on how to allocate twenty million Euros across fifteen projects that aim to improve the quality of life in the French capital.
Anne Hidalgo, who was elected as the Mayor of Paris in April 2014, has introduced a participatory budget process to give citizens an opportunity to decide on the allocation of five per cent of the capital’s investment budget. For the first time in France, a politician is giving citizens some degree of direct control over public expenditure—a sum amounting to 426 million Euros in total between 2014 and 2020.
This is an example of social innovation, but not the pseudo-revolutionary, growth-obsessed, blind-to-power variety that’s constantly hyped by management consultants and public policy think tanks. Instead, people are actively involved in planning their own shared future. They’re entrusted with the responsibility of devising ways to improve life in their communities. And the process is coherent with the purpose: everyone, not just the ‘experts,’ has an opportunity to have their say in an open and transparent online platform.
Participatory budgeting isn’t new, but this kind of public participation in processes of social innovation is a welcome and growing development across Europe. Public institutions need more participation from stakeholders and citizens to do their jobs. The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts.
INSITE started with the idea that societies’ love affair with innovation may be misplaced – at least with respect to the way that social innovation is currently conceived and organized. The lion’s share of attention goes to products that make a profit—not processes that enhance the collective good or transform systems, structures and values.
The hype around the “Innovation Society” also obscures the fact that innovation processes bring about cascades of changes that are unpredictable, and may produce toxic side-effects. Just think about the growth of new kinds of financial instruments which exploded in the sub-prime mortgage disaster, triggering the financial and economic crises that have dragged on since 2008. Market-driven cascades of innovation have also contributed to global warming and obesity epidemics in the industrialized world. Not everything that’s innovative is valuable or effective.
As presently constituted, neither governments nor markets are able to control these cascades of innovation. They lack the means and the intelligence to detect unintended consequences and encourage innovation processes to move in positive directions. So how can this ‘boat’ be steered through the ‘storm’ before it crashes on the ‘rocks?’
Since 2008, researchers from INSITE and elsewhere have been trying to address this question by refocusing innovation theory on social questions, power relations and democratic concerns. For INSITE, the “social” in “social innovation” isn’t simply a marker for a target group in society or the social intentions of innovators and entrepreneurs. It stands for something much deeper: giving power back to society to direct innovation processes towards greater prosperity for all. In this conception, social innovation challenges the foundations of the “Innovation Society’s” narrow ideology. It provides an alternative through which engaged citizens can mobilize to construct a socially sustainable future. …more.“
Five public participation books from 2014 you should take the time to read
Crispin Butteriss at Bang The Table: “Every year dozens of books are published on the subject of community engagement, civic engagement, public engagement or public participation (depending on your fancy). None of us has time to read them all, so how to choose.
I’ve compiled a short and eclectic list here that span the breadth of issues that public participation practitioners and thier public sector managers are likely to be thinking about; legal, organisational culture, bringing joy back into citizen engagement, thoughtful living and thoughtful engagement, and DIY citizenship (and what that means for the public sector).
Blocking Public Participation: The use of strategic litigation to silence political expression
written by Byron M Sheldrick, published by Wilfred Laurier University Press
The blurb…
Strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) involves lawsuits brought by individuals, corporations, groups, or politicians to curtail political activism and expression. An increasingly large part of the political landscape in Canada, they are often launched against those protesting, boycotting, or participating in some form of political activism. A common feature of SLAPPs is that their intention is rarely to win the case or secure a remedy; rather, the suit is brought to create a chill on political expression….
Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy
written by Susan L. Moffit, published by Cambridge University Press
The blurb…
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability….
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
written by Josh A. Lerner, published by MIT
The blurb…
Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy
written by Susan L. Moffit, published by Cambridge University Press
The blurb…
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability….
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
written by Josh A. Lerner, published by MIT
The blurb…
Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision….
What Would Socrates Do?: Self-Examination, Civic Engagement, and the Politics of Philosophy
written by Joel Alden Schlosser, published by Cambridge University Press
The blurb…
Socrates continues to be an extremely influential force to this day; his work is featured prominently in the work of contemporary thinkers ranging from Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, to Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière….
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media
edited by Matt Ratto & Megan Boler, published by MIT
The blurb…
Today, DIY — do-it-yourself — describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt’s “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to re-purpose corporate content (or create new user-generated content) in order to offer political counter-narratives….”
States and democracy
New paper by Francis Fukuyama in the journal Democratization: “The state, rule of law, and democratic accountability are the three basic components of a modern political order. The state concentrates and uses power, while law and democracy constrain the exercise of power, indicating that there is an inherent tension between them. This article looks at ways in which the state and liberal democracy interact in three areas: citizen security, patronage and clientelism, and the formation of national identity. In all three areas, state and democracy act at cross purposes in some domains, and are mutually supportive in others. The reason for this complex relationship is that both state and democracy are themselves complex collections of institutions which interact on a multiplicity of levels. Understanding the relationship between state and democracy is important in policy terms because many recent initiatives to improve the quality of governance assume that state quality and democracy are mutually supportive, something that is not fully supported by the empirical evidence.”
The Paradox of Openness
New Book on Transparency and Participation in Nordic Cultures of Consensus, edited by Norbert Götz, Södertörn University, and Carl Marklund, Södertörn University: “The ‘open society’ has become a watchword of liberal democracy and the market system in the modern globalized world. Openness stands for individual opportunity and collective reason, as well as bottom-up empowerment and top-down transparency. It has become a cherished value, despite its vagueness and the connotation of vulnerability that surrounds it. Scandinavia has long considered itself a model of openness, citing traditions of freedom of information and inclusive policy making. This collection of essays traces the conceptual origins, development, and diverse challenges of openness in the Nordic countries and Austria. It examines some of the many paradoxes that openness encounters and the tensions it arouses when it addresses such divergent ends as democratic deliberation and market transactions, freedom of speech and sensitive information, compliant decision making and political and administrative transparency, and consensual procedures and the toleration of dissent.”
Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry
New book by Caroline W. Lee: “Citizen participation has undergone a radical shift since anxieties about “bowling alone” seized the nation in the 1990s. Many pundits and observers have cheered America’s twenty-first century civic renaissance-an explosion of participatory innovations in public life. Invitations to “have your say!” and “join the discussion!” have proliferated. But has the widespread enthusiasm for maximizing citizen democracy led to real change?
In Do-It-Yourself Democracy, sociologist Caroline W. Lee examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. Lee looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. The beneficiaries of new forms of democratic empowerment are not only humble citizens, but also the engagement experts who host the forums. Does it matter if the folks deepening democracy are making money at it? How do they make sense of the contradictions inherent in their roles?
In investigating public engagement practitioners’ everyday anxieties and larger worldviews, we see reflected the strange meaning of power in contemporary institutions. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but Lee argues that they have also been marketed and sold as tools to facilitate cost-cutting, profitability, and other management goals – and that public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment….”
Restoring Confidence in Open, Shared and Personal Data
Report of the UK Digital Government Review: “It is obvious that government needs to be able to use data both to deliver services and to present information to public view. How else would government know which bank account to place a pension payment into, or a citizen know the results of an election or how to contact their elected representatives?
As more and more data is created, preserved and shared in ever-increasing volumes a number of urgent questions are begged: over opportunities and hazards; over the importance of using best-practice techniques, insights and technologies developed in the private sector, academia and elsewhere; over the promises and limitations of openness; and how all this might be articulated and made accessible to the public.
Government has already adopted “open data” (we will discuss this more in the next section) and there are now increasing calls for government to pay more attention to data analytics and so-called “big data” – although the first faltering steps to unlock benefits, here, have often ended in the discovery that using large-scale data is a far more nuanced business than was initially assumed
Debates around government and data have often been extremely high-profile – the NHS care.data [27] debate was raging while this review was in progress – but they are also shrouded in terms that can generate confusion and complexities that are not easily summarized.
In this chapter we will unpick some of these terms and some parts of the debate. This is a detailed and complex area and there is much more that could have been included [28]. This is not an area that can easily be summarized into a simple bullet-pointed list of policies.
Within this report we will use the following terms and definitions, proceeding to a detailed analysis of each in turn:
Type of Data |
Definition [29] |
Examples |
| 1. Open Data | Data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike | Insolvency notices in the London Gazette Government spending information Public transport information Official National Statistics |
| 2. Shared Data | Restricted data provided to restricted organisations or individuals for restricted purposes | National Pupil Database NHS care.data Integrated health and social care Individual census returns |
| 3. Personal Data | Data that relate to a living individual who can be identified from that data. For full legal definition see [30] | Health records Individual tax records Insolvency notices in the London gazette National Pupil Database |
This social productivity will help build future economic productivity; in the meantime it will improve people’s lives and it will enhance our democracy. From our analysis it was clear that there was room for improvement…”
Smart cities: the state-of-the-art and governance challenge
New Paper by Mark Deakin in Triple Helix – A Journal of University-Industry-Government Innovation and Entrepreneurship: “Reflecting on the governance of smart cities, the state-of-the-art this paper advances offers a critique of recent city ranking and future Internet accounts of their development. Armed with these critical insights, it goes on to explain smart cities in terms of the social networks, cultural attributes and environmental capacities, vis-a-vis, vital ecologies of the intellectual capital, wealth creation and standards of participatory governance regulating their development. The Triple Helix model which the paper advances to explain these performances in turn suggests that cities are smart when the ICTs of future Internet developments successfully embed the networks society needs for them to not only generate intellectual capital, or create wealth, but also cultivate the environmental capacity, ecology and vitality of those spaces which the direct democracy of their participatory governance open up, add value to and construct.”