Charities are underestimating the importance of trust. That’s a problem.


Jill Halford & Neil Sherlock at NPC: “A growing mistrust and scepticism of organisations, experts and leaders has become a defining feature of recent times, causing many to question established truths that they’ve traditionally held dear. Against a backdrop of increasing volumes of data and commentary, amplified by social media, and the rise of ‘fake news’, it has become much harder for the public to both know who the experts are and to trust them to get things right. This directly impacts many charities who are themselves experts in their field and rely on the public to listen to and respond to their advice. In an increasingly digitalised world, there’s a sense that it is harder to gain and retain trust. There are growing concerns among CEOs about the impact of social media on the level of trust in their industry.

A growing mistrust and scepticism of organisations, experts and leaders has become a defining feature of recent times.

The questioning of experts is underpinned by a pervading sense that many actors are driven by hidden or ulterior motives, perhaps making some people less willing to trust organisations and their leaders. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 finds that 60% of the UK public think ‘the system’ is failing. This is defined as feeling a sense of injustice, a lack of hope and confidence and a desire for change. There is an emerging view that everyone from politicians, to businesses to charities need to do more to explain what they do and how it benefits both individuals and wider society….Public polling for the Charity Commission showed that the overall level of trust and confidence in charities fell from 6.7 out of 10 in 2012 and 2014 to 5.7 in 2016. This is a trend that is also reflected in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2017. Meanwhile other studies suggest that trust is bouncing back.

 

…Trust is often an overlooked asset for charities. For many organisations, trust can typically only come on the agenda when things are going wrong. NPC’s State of the Sector research report Charities taking charge shows that nearly a third of charity leaders think a loss of trust in the sector would have no effect on their organisation. The research also finds a narrow association between trust and fundraising rather than taking a more holistic view to trust.

Trust is a fundamental prerequisite of effective human interaction and meaningful, constructive relationships.

But trust matters deeply to people, and so it should matter to the organisations that serve them. Trust is considered a fundamental prerequisite of effective human interaction and meaningful, constructive relationships. It is the ‘glue’ that binds society and the economy together. There is a clear need for all organisations to take a broader view of trust. While those charities that rely on fundraising may feel that they need to be more concerned with public trust than a philanthropic foundation, for example, trust impacts a charity in many ways. For example, people’s trust in an organisation can fundamentally shape their behaviour and actions towards it. This can include trusting an organisation with your data and personal information, being more willing to collaborate and engage, and listening and acting on advice and expertise.

Trust is a powerful asset for organisations in four specific ways:

  • trust drives performance;
  • trust allows organisations to be true to themselves;
  • trust can help win round stakeholder scepticism; and
  • trust can put organisations on the front foot in a crisis that will inevitably happen at some point, positioning them in a better place to recover.

All four of these should resonate with charities as they seek to deliver greater impact in line with their values and ethos….(More).

Crowdsourcing Expertise to Increase Congressional Capacity


Austin Seaborn at Beeck Center: “Members of Congress have close connections with their districts, and information arising from local organizations, such as professional groups, academia, industry as well as constituents with relevant expertise (like retirees, veterans or students) is highly valuable to them.  Today, congressional staff capacity is at a historic low, while at the same time, constituents in districts are often well equipped to address the underlying policy questions that Congress seeks to solve….

In meetings we have had with House and Senate staffers, they repeatedly express both the difficulty managing their substantial area-specific work loads and their interest in finding ways to substantively engage constituents to find good nuggets of information to help them in their roles as policymakers. At the same time, constituents are demanding more transparency and dialogue from their elected representatives. In many cases, our project brings these two together. It allows Members to tap the expertise in their districts while at the same time creating an avenue for constituents to contribute their knowledge and area expertise to the legislative process. It’s a win for constituents and a win for Member of Congress and their staffs.

It is important to note that the United States lags behind other democracies in experimenting with more inclusive methods during the policymaking process. In the United Kingdom, for example, the UK Parliament has experimented with a variety of new digital tools to engage with constituents. These methods range from Twitter hashtags, which are now quite common given the rise in social media use by governments and elected officials, to a variety of web forums on a variety of platforms. Since June of 2015, they have also been doing digital debates, where questions from the general public are crowdsourced and later integrated into a parliamentary debate by the Member of Parliament leading the debate. Estonia, South Africa, Taiwan, France also…notable examples.

One promising new development we hope to explore more thoroughly is the U.S. Library of Congress’s recently announced legislative data App Challenge. This competition is distinct from the many hackathons that have been held on behalf of Congress in the past, in that this challenge seeks new methods not only to innovate, but also to integrate and legislate. In his announcement, the Library’s Chief Information Officer, Bernard A. Barton, Jr., stated, “An informed citizenry is better able to participate in our democracy, and this is a very real opportunity to contribute to a better understanding of the work being done in Washington.  It may even provide insights for the people doing the work around the clock, both on the Hill, and in state and district offices.  Your innovation and integration may ultimately benefit the way our elected officials legislate for our future.” We believe these sorts of new methods will play a crucial role in the future of engaging citizens in their democracies….(More)”.

Global network of ‘hunters’ aim to take down terrorists on the internet


 at The Guardian: “Colonel Kurtz used to spend hours playing social games like Farmville. Now he hunts terrorists on the internet.

The pseudonymous 41-year-old, who runs his own construction company, is one of dozens of volunteer “hunters” to dedicate hours each day trying to identify and infiltrate terror groups online and block the spread of their propaganda.

“We’re trying to save lives and get this crap off the net to keep the next vulnerable kid from seeing propaganda and thinking it’s cool,” said Kurtz.

These hunters plug a gap in social media companies’ ability to keep terrorists off their networks by obsessively tracking and reporting Isis’s most prominent recruiters and propagandists across private messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp and public networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Some of them also provide valuable tip-offs of credible threats to law enforcement.

This type of hunting originated in 2014, when hacktivist collective Anonymous declared “war” on Islamic State with the #OpIsis campaign. The loosely affiliated army of digital activists set out to expose and report Isis supporters on social media, and hack or take down their websites.

Kurtz became a hunter following the November 2015 Paris attack. He had been watching the France-Germany friendly football match online when it was disrupted by loud explosions. That day seven attackers carried out mass shootings and suicide bombings that killed 129 people in France’s capital.

After writing an angry Facebook post about the attack, Kurtz was contacted by a friend and member of Anonymous asking if he’d like to help out with #OpIsis. “It took me a few days to figure things out and after a few weeks I was dropping accounts like flies,” he said.

Out of Anonymous’ #OpIsis there have emerged more considered, organized groups including Ghost Security Group, KDK and a “drama and ego-free” group that Kurtz formed in 2016 after getting tired of the Islamophobia and inaccuracy within the operation…(More).

Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation


Report by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard: “Cyber troops are government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media. In this working paper, we report on specific organizations created, often with public money, to help define and manage what is in the best interest of the public. We compare such organizations across 28 countries, and inventory them according to the kinds of messages, valences and communication strategies used. We catalogue their organizationalforms and evaluate their capacities in terms of budgets and staffing. This working paper summarizes the findings of the first comprehensive inventory of the major organizations behind social media manipulation. We find that cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon. Many different countries employ significant numbers of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online, sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign publics.

  •  The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries.
  • Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political‐party‐supported campaigns target domestic voters. 
  • Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high‐profile elections.
  • Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns….(More)”

Features of Parliamentary Websites in Selected Jurisdictions


Report by The Law Library of Congress, Global Legal Research Center: “In recent years, parliaments around the world have enhanced their websites in order to improve access to legislative information and other parliamentary resources. Innovative features allow constituents and researchers to locate and utilize detailed information on laws and lawmaking in various ways. These include tracking tools and alerts, apps, the use of open data technology, and different search functions. In order to demonstrate some of the developments in this area, staff from the Global Legal Research Directorate of the Law Library of Congress surveyed the official parliamentary websites of fifty countries from all regions of the world, plus the website of the European Parliament. In some cases, information on more than one website is provided where separate sites have been established for different chambers of the national parliament, bringing the total number of individual websites surveyed to seventy.

While the information on the parliamentary websites is primarily in the national language of the particular country, around forty of the individual websites surveyed were found to provide at least limited information in one or more other languages. The European Parliament website can be translated into any of the twenty-four official languages of the members of the European Union.

All of the parliamentary websites included in the survey have at least basic browse tools that allow users to view legislation in a list format, and that may allow for viewing in, for example, date or title order. All of the substantive websites also enable searching, often providing a general search box for the whole site at the top of each page as well as more advanced search options for different types of documents. Some sites provide various facets that can be used to further narrow searches.

Around thirty-nine of the individual websites surveyed provide users with some form of tracking or alert function to receive updates on certain documents (including proposed legislation), parliamentary news, committee activities, or other aspects of the website. This includes the ability to subscribe to different RSS feeds and/or email alerts.

The ability to watch live or recorded proceedings of different parliaments, including debates within the relevant chamber as well as committee hearings, is a common feature of the parliamentary websites surveyed. Fifty-eight of the websites surveyed featured some form of video, including links to dedicated YouTube channels, specific pages where users can browse and search for embedded videos, and separate video services or portals that are linked to or viewable from the main site. Some countries also make videos available on dedicated mobile-friendly sites or apps, including Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. In total, apps containing parliamentary information are provided in just fourteen of the countries surveyed. In comparison, the parliamentary websites of thirty countries are available in mobile-friendly formats, enabling easy access to information and different functionalities using smartphones and tablets.

The table also provides information on some of the additional special features available on the surveyed websites. Examples include dedicated sites or pages that provide educational information about the parliament for children (Argentina, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey); calendar functions, including those that allow users to save information to their personal calendars or otherwise view information about different types of proceedings or events (available on at least twenty websites); and open data portals or other features that allow information to be downloaded in bulk for reuse or analysis, including through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces) (at least six countries)….(More)”.

Civil society and online connectivity: controlling corruption on the net?


Niklas Kossow, Roberto Martínez and Barranco Kukutschka in Crime, Law and Social Change:”Over the past years, an increasing number of studies have looked at the use of internet and communications technology (ICT) in the fight against corruption. While there is broad agreement that ICT tools can be effective in controlling corruption, the mechanisms by which they are doing this are much less clear. This paper attempts to shine some light on this relationship. It focusses on the role of ICT in empowering citizens and supporting civil society. It argues that enlightened citizens can use internet access and social media to inform themselves on corruption, mobilise support for anti-corruption movements and gather information in order to shine a light on particularistic practices. Defining corruption as a collective action problem, the paper provides quantitative evidence to support its claim that ICT can support collective action of an informed citizenry and thus contribute to the control of corruption….(more)”

The Prospects & Limits of Deliberative Democracy


Introduction by  and  of Special Issue of Daedalus:Democracy is under siege. Approval ratings for democratic institutions in most countries around the world are at near-record lows. The number of recognized democratic countries in the world is no longer expanding after the so-called Third Wave of democratic transitions. Indeed, there is something of a “democratic recession.” Further, some apparently democratic countries with competitive elections are undermining elements of liberal democracy: the rights and liberties that ensure freedom of thought and expression, protection of the rule of law, and all the protections for the substructure of civil society that may be as important for making democracy work as the electoral process itself. The model of party competition-based democracy – the principal model of democracy in the modern era – seems under threat.

That model also has competition. What might be called “meritocratic authoritarianism,” a model in which regimes with flawed democratic processes nevertheless provide good governance, is attracting attention and some support. Singapore is the only successful extant example, although some suggest China as another nation moving in this direction. Singapore is not a Western-style party- and competition-based democracy, but it is well-known for its competent civil servants schooled in making decisions on a cost-benefit basis to solve public problems, with the goals set by elite consultation with input from elections rather than by party competition.

Public discontent makes further difficulties for the competitive model. Democracies around the world struggle with the apparent gulf between political elites who are widely distrusted and mobilized citizens who fuel populism with the energy of angry voices. Disillusioned citizens turning against elites have produced unexpected election results, including the Brexit decision and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The competitive elections and referenda of most current democracies depend on mobilizing millions of voters within a context of advertising, social media, and efforts to manipulate as well as inform public opinion. Competing teams want to win and, in most cases, are interested in informing voters only when it is to their advantage. The rationale for competitive democracy, most influentially developed by the late economist Joseph Schumpeter, held that the same techniques of advertising used in the commercial sphere to get people to buy products can be expected in the political sphere. On this view, we should not expect a “genuine” public will, but rather “a manufactured will” that is just a by-product of political competition.

Yet the ideal of democracy as the rule of “the people” is deeply undermined when the will of the people is in large part manufactured. The legitimacy of democracy depends on some real link between the public will and the public policies and office-holders who are selected. Although some have criticized this “folk theory of democracy” as empirically naive, its very status as a folk theory reflects how widespread this normative expectation is.5 To the extent that leaders manufacture the public will, the normative causal arrow goes in the wrong direction. If current democracies cannot produce meaningful processes of public will formation, the legitimacy claims of meritocratic autocracies or even more fully autocratic systems become comparatively stronger.

Over the last two decades, another approach to democracy has become increasingly prominent. Based on greater deliberation among the public and its representatives, deliberative democracy has the potential, at least in theory, to respond to today’s current challenges. If the many versions of a more deliberative democracy live up to their aspirations, they could help revive democratic legitimacy, provide for more authentic public will formation, provide a middle ground between widely mistrusted elites and the angry voices of populism, and help fulfill some of our common normative expectations about democracy.

Can this potential be realized? In what ways and to what extent? Deliberative democracy has created a rich literature in both theory and practice. This issue of Dædalus assesses both its prospects and limits. We include advocates as well as critics. As deliberative democrats, our aim is to stimulate public deliberation about deliberative democracy, weighing arguments for and against its application in different contexts and for different purposes.

How can deliberative democracy, if it were to work as envisaged by its supporters, respond to the challenges just sketched? First, if the more-deliberative institutions that many advocate can be applied to real decisions in actual ongoing democracies, arguably they could have a positive effect on legitimacy and lead to better governance. They could make a better connection between the public’s real concerns and how they are governed. Second, these institutions could help fill the gap between distrusted elites and angry populists. Elites are distrusted in part because they seem and often are unresponsive to the public’s concerns, hopes, and values. Perhaps, the suspicion arises, the elites are really out for themselves. On the other hand, populism stirs up angry, mostly nondeliberative voices that can be mobilized in plebescitary campaigns, whether for Brexit or for elected office. In their contributions to this issue, both Claus Offe and Hélène Landemore explore the crisis of legitimacy in representative government, including the clash between status quo – oriented elites and populism. Deliberative democratic methods open up the prospect of prescriptions that are both representative of the entire population and based on sober, evidence-based analysis of the merits of competing arguments. Popular deliberative institutions are grounded in the public’s values and concerns, so the voice they magnify is not the voice of the elites. But that voice is usually also, after deliberation, more evidence-based and reflective of the merits of the major policy arguments. Hence these institutions fill an important gap.

How might popular deliberative democracy, if it were to work as envisaged by its supporters, fulfill normative expectations of democracy, thought to be unrealistic by critics of the “folk theory”? The issue turns on the empirical possibility that the public can actually deliberate. Can the people weigh the trade-offs? Can they assess competing arguments? Can they connect their deliberations with their voting preferences or other expressions of preference about what should be done? Is the problem that the people are not competent, or that they are not in the right institutional context to be effectively motivated to participate? These are empirical questions, and the controversies about them are part of our dialogue.

This issue includes varying definitions, approaches, and contexts. The root notion is that deliberation requires “weighing” competing arguments for policies or candidates in a context of mutually civil and diverse discussion in which people can decide on the merits of arguments with good information. Is such a thing possible in an era of fake news, social media, and public discussions largely among the like-minded? These are some of the challenges facing those who might try to make deliberative democracy practical….(More)”

The Problem With Participatory Democracy Is the Participants


Eitan D. Hersh in the New York Times: “…For years, political scientists have studied how people vote, petition, donate, protest, align with parties and take in the news, and have asked what motivates these actions. The typical answers are civic duty and self-interest.

But civic duty and self-interest do not capture the ways that middle- and upper-class Americans are engaging in politics. Now it is the Facebooker who argues with friends of friends he does not know; the news consumer who spends hours watching cable; the repeat online petitioner who demands actions like impeaching the president; the news sharer willing to spread misinformation and rumor because it feels good; the data junkie who frantically toggles between horse races in suburban Georgia and horse races in Britain and France and horse races in sports (even literal horse races).

What is really motivating this behavior is hobbyism — the regular use of free time to engage in politics as a leisure activity. Political hobbyism is everywhere.

There are several reasons. For one, technology allows those interested in politics to gain specialized knowledge and engage in pleasing activities, like reinforcing their views with like-minded friends on Facebook. For another, our era of relative security (nearly a half-century without a conscripted military) has diminished the solemnity that accompanied politics in the past. Even in the serious moments since the 2016 election, political engagement for many people is characterized by forwarding the latest clip that embarrasses the other side, like videos of John McCain asking incomprehensible questions or Elizabeth Warren “destroying” Betsy DeVos.

Then there are the well-intentioned policy innovations over the years that were meant to make politics more open but in doing so exposed politics to hobbyists: participatory primaries, ballot initiatives, open-data policies, even campaign contribution limits. The contribution rules that are now in place favor the independent vanity projects of wealthy egomaniacs instead of allowing parties to raise money and build durable local support.

The result of this is political engagement that takes the form of partisan fandom, the seeking of cheap thrills, and amateurs trying their hand at a game — the billionaire funding “super PACs” all the way down to the everyday armchair quarterback who professes that the path to political victory is through ideological purity. (In the face of a diverse and moderate country, the demand for ideological purity itself can be a symptom of hobbyism: If politics is a sport and the stakes are no higher, why not demand ideological purity if it feels good?)….

What, exactly, is wrong with political hobbyism? We live in a democracy, after all. Aren’t we supposed to participate? Political hobbyism might not be so bad if it complemented mundane but important forms of participation. The problem is that hobbyism is replacing other forms of participation, like local organizing, supporting party organizations, neighbor-to-neighbor persuasion, even voting in midterm elections — the 2014 midterms had the lowest level of voter participation in over 70 years.

The Democratic Party, the party that embraces “engagement,” is in atrophy in state legislatures across the country. Perhaps this is because state-level political participation needs to be motivated by civic duty; it is not entertaining enough to pique the interest of hobbyists. The party of Hollywood celebrities also struggles to energize its supporters to vote. Maybe it is because when politics is something one does for fun rather than out of a profound moral obligation, the citizen who does not find it fun has no reason to engage. The important parts of politics for the average citizen simply may not be enjoyable….

An unqualified embrace of engagement, without leaders channeling activists toward clear goals, yields the spinning of wheels of hobbyism.

Democrats should know that an unending string of activities intended for instant gratification does not amount to much in political power. What they should ask is whether their emotions and energy are contributing to a behind-the-scenes effort to build local support across the country or whether they are merely a hollow, self-gratifying manifestation of the new political hobbyism….(More)”

The solution to US politics’ Facebook problem is Facebook


Parag Khanna in Quartz: “In just one short decade, Facebook has evolved from a fast-growing platform for sharing classmates’ memories and pet photos to being blamed for Donald Trump’s election victory, promoting hate speech, and accelerating ISIS recruitment. Clearly, Facebook has outgrown its original mission.

It should come as no surprise then that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has in the past few months issued a long manifesto explaining the company’s broader aim to foster global connectivity, given a commencement speech at Harvard focused on the need for people to feel a meaningful “sense of purpose,” as well as more recently changed the company’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

In truth, Facebook has been doing this all along. In just a three year period between 2011-2014, the average number of international “friends” Facebook members have (whether from rich or poor countries) doubled and in many cases tripled. There is no denying that without Facebook, people would have much less exposure to people they would never meet, and therefore opportunities to gain wider perspectives (irrespective of whether they confirm or contradict one’s own). Then there are charities and NGOs from UNICEF to Human Rights Watch that raise millions of dollars on Facebook and other online platforms such as Avaaz and Change.org.

Facebook has just crossed two billion monthly users, meaning more people express their views on it each month than will vote in all elections in the world this year. That makes Facebook the largest player in wide array of social media tools that are the epicenter–and the lightening rod–for our conversation about technology and politics. Ironically, though, while so many of these innovations come out of the US, the American approach to using digital technology for better governance is at best pathetic…. Sloppy analysis, a cynical Kommentariat and an un-innovative government have led America down the path of ignoring most of the positive ways digital governance can unfold. Fortunately, there are plenty of lessons from around the world for those who care to look and learn.

Citizen engagement is an obvious start. But this should be more than just live-streamed town halls and Q&As in the run-up to elections. European governments such as the UK use Facebook pages to continuously gather policy proposals on public spending priorities. In Estonia, electronic voting is the norm. In the world’s oldest direct democracy, Switzerland, citizen petitions and initiatives are being digitized for even more transparent and inclusive deliberation. In Australia, the Flux movement is allowing all citizens to cast digital ballots on specific policy issues and submit them straight to parliament. Meanwhile, America has the Koch Brothers and the NRA…..

Even governments that are less respected in the West because their regimes do not resemble our own do a better job of harnessing social media. Sheikh Mohammed, ruler of Dubai, uses Facebook to crowdsource suggestions for infrastructure projects and other ideas from a population that is a whopping 90 percent foreign.

Singapore may be the most sophisticated government in this domain. Though the incumbent People’s Action Party (PAP) wins every parliamentary election hands-down, more important is the fact that surveys the public ad nauseam on issues of savings and healthcare, transit routes, immigration policy and just about everything else. Singapore is not Switzerland, but it might be the world’s most responsive government.

This is how governments that appear illegitimate according to a narrow reading of Western political theory boast far higher public satisfaction than most all Western governments today. If you don’t understand this, you probably spend too much time in a filter bubble….

The US should aspire to be a place where democracy and data reinforce rather than contradict each other….(More)

Using Collaboration to Harness Big Data for Social Good


Jake Porway at SSIR: “These days, it’s hard to get away from the hype around “big data.” We read articles about how Silicon Valley is using data to drive everything from website traffic to autonomous cars. We hear speakers at social sector conferences talk about how nonprofits can maximize their impact by leveraging new sources of digital information like social media data, open data, and satellite imagery.

Braving this world can be challenging, we know. Creating a data-driven organization can require big changes in culture and process. Some nonprofits, like Crisis Text Line and Watsi, started off boldly by building their own data science teams. But for the many other organizations wondering how to best use data to advance their mission, we’ve found that one ingredient works better than all the software and tech that you can throw at a problem: collaboration.

As a nonprofit dedicated to applying data science for social good, DataKind has run more than 200 projects in collaboration with other nonprofits worldwide by connecting them to teams of volunteer data scientists. What do the most successful ones have in common? Strong collaborations on three levels: with data science experts, within the organization itself, and across the nonprofit sector as a whole.

1. Collaborate with data science experts to define your project. As we often say, finding problems can be harder than finding solutions. ….

2. Collaborate across your organization to “build with, not for.” Our projects follow the principles of human-centered design and the philosophy pioneered in the civic tech world of “design with, not for.” ….

3. Collaborate across your sector to move the needle. Many organizations think about building data science solutions for unique challenges they face, such as predicting the best location for their next field office. However, most of us are fighting common causes shared by many other groups….

By focusing on building strong collaborations on these three levels—with data experts, across your organization, and across your sector—you’ll go from merely talking about big data to making big impact….(More).