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Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on November 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Wikipedia’s not as biased as you might think

Curated on November 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ananya Bhattacharya in Quartz: “The internet is as open as people make it. Often, people limit their Facebook and Twitter circles to likeminded people and only follow certain subreddits, blogs, and news sites, creating an echo chamber of sorts. In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it’s starting to see results

Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia’s online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012.

“That is just not a recipe for coming to a conclusion,” Shane Greenstein, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview. “We were surprised that Wikipedia had not failed, had not fallen apart in the last several years.”

Greenstein and his co-author Feng Zhu categorized each article as “blue” or “red.” Drawing from research in political science, they identified terms that are idiosyncratic to each party. For instance, political scientists have identified that Democrats were more likely to use phrases such as “war in Iraq,” “civil rights,” and “trade deficit,” while Republicans used phrases such as “economic growth,” “illegal immigration,” and “border security.”…

“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.”

More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time. “You can ask questions like ‘do editors with red tendencies tend to go to red articles or blue articles?’” Greenstein said. “You find a prevalence of opposites attract, and that was striking.” The researchers even identified the political stance for a number of anonymous editors based on their IP locations, and the trend held steadfast….(More)”

The People’s Code – Now on Code.gov

Curated on November 6, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tony Scott at the White House: “Today we’re launching Code.gov so that our Nation can continue to unlock the tremendous potential of the Federal Government’s software.

Over the past few years, we’ve taken unprecedented action to help Americans engage with their Government in new and meaningful ways.

Using Vote.gov, citizens can now quickly navigate their state’s voter registration process through an easy-to-use site. Veterans can go to Vets.gov to discover, apply for, track and manage their benefits in one, user-friendly place. And for the first time ever, citizens can send a note to President Obama simply by messaging the White House on Facebook.

By harnessing 21st Century technology and innovation, we’re improving the Federal Government’s ability to provide better citizen-centered services and are making the Federal Government smarter, savvier, and more effective for the American people. At the same time, we’re building many of these new digital tools, such as We the People, the White House Facebook bot, and Data.gov, in the open so that as the Government uses technology to re-imagine and improve the way people interact with it, others can too.

The code for these platforms is, after all, the People’s Code – and today we’re excited to announce that it’ll be accessible from one place, Code.gov, for the American people to explore, improve, and innovate.

The launch of Code.gov comes on the heels of the release of the Federal Source Code Policy, which seeks to further improve access to the Federal Government’s custom-developed software. It’s a step we took to help Federal agencies avoid duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and cross-agency collaboration. And it’s a step we took to enable the brightest minds inside and outside of government to work together to ensure that Federal code is reliable and effective.

Built in the open, the newly-launched Code.gov already boasts access to nearly 50 open source projects from over 10 agencies – and we expect this number to grow over the coming months as agencies work to implement the Federal Source Code Policy. Further, Code.gov will provide useful tools and best practices to help agencies implement the new policy. For example, starting today agencies can begin populating their enterprise code inventories using the metadata schema on Code.gov, discover various methods on how to build successful open source projects, and much more….(More)”

Learning Privacy Expectations by Crowdsourcing Contextual Informational Norms

Curated on November 1, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Yan Shvartzshnaider at Freedom to Tinker: “The advent of social apps, smart phones and ubiquitous computing has brought a great transformation to our day-to-day life. The incredible pace with which the new and disruptive services continue to emerge challenges our perception of privacy. To keep apace with this rapidly evolving cyber reality, we need to devise agile methods and frameworks for developing privacy-preserving systems that align with evolving user’s privacy expectations.

Previous efforts have tackled this with the assumption that privacy norms are provided through existing sources such law, privacy regulations and legal precedents. They have focused on formally expressing privacy norms and devising a corresponding logic to enable automatic inconsistency checks and efficient enforcement of the logic.

However, because many of the existing regulations and privacy handbooks were enacted well before the Internet revolution took place, they often lag behind and do not adequately reflect the application of logic in modern systems. For example, the Family Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was enacted in 1974, long before Facebook, Google and many other online applications were used in an educational context. More recent legislation faces similar challenges as novel services introduce new ways to exchange information, and consequently shape new, unconsidered information flows that can change our collective perception of privacy.

Crowdsourcing Contextual Privacy Norms

Armed with the theory of Contextual Integrity (CI) in our work, we are exploring ways to uncover societal norms by leveraging the advances in crowdsourcing technology.

In our recent paper, we present the methodology that we believe can be used to extract a societal notion of privacy expectations. The results can be used to fine tune the existing privacy guidelines as well as get a better perspective on the users’ expectations of privacy.

CI defines privacy as collection of norms (privacy rules) that reflect appropriate information flows between different actors. Norms capture who shares what, with whom, in what role, and under which conditions. For example, while you are comfortable sharing your medical information with your doctor, you might be less inclined to do so with your colleagues.

We use CI as a proxy to reason about privacy in the digital world and a gateway to understanding how people perceive privacy in a systematic way. Crowdsourcing is a great tool for this method. We are able to ask hundreds of people how they feel about a particular information flow, and then we can capture their input and map it directly onto the CI parameters. We used a simple template to write Yes-or-No questions to ask our crowdsourcing participants:

“Is it acceptable for the [sender] to share the [subject’s] [attribute] with [recipient] [transmission principle]?”

For example:

“Is it acceptable for the student’s professor to share the student’s record of attendance with the department chair if the student is performing poorly? ”

In our experiments, we leveraged Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) to ask 450 turkers over 1400 such questions. Each question represents a specific contextual information flow that users can approve, disapprove or mark under the Doesn’t Make Sense category; the last category could be used when 1) the sender is unlikely to have the information, 2) the receiver would already have the information, or 3) the question is ambiguous….(More)”

Big Data Is Not a Monolith

Curated on November 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Hamid R. Ekbia and Michael Mattioli: “Big data is ubiquitous but heterogeneous. Big data can be used to tally clicks and traffic on web pages, find patterns in stock trades, track consumer preferences, identify linguistic correlations in large corpuses of texts. This book examines big data not as an undifferentiated whole but contextually, investigating the varied challenges posed by big data for health, science, law, commerce, and politics. Taken together, the chapters reveal a complex set of problems, practices, and policies.

The advent of big data methodologies has challenged the theory-driven approach to scientific knowledge in favor of a data-driven one. Social media platforms and self-tracking tools change the way we see ourselves and others. The collection of data by corporations and government threatens privacy while promoting transparency. Meanwhile, politicians, policy makers, and ethicists are ill-prepared to deal with big data’s ramifications. The contributors look at big data’s effect on individuals as it exerts social control through monitoring, mining, and manipulation; big data and society, examining both its empowering and its constraining effects; big data and science, considering issues of data governance, provenance, reuse, and trust; and big data and organizations, discussing data responsibility, “data harm,” and decision making….(More)”

Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington

Curated on October 29, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jenna Wortham at The New York Times: “…“Fixing” problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way: It embodies the values and biases of the people who create it. Crime-predicting software, celebrated when it was introduced in police departments around the country, turned out to reinforce discriminatory policing. Facebook was recently accused of suppressing conservative news from its trending topics. (The company denied a bias, but announced plans to train employees to neutralize political, racial, gender and age biases that could influence what it shows its user base.) Several studies have found that Airbnb has worsened the housing crises in some cities where it operates. In January, a report from the World Bank declared that tech companies were widening income inequality and wealth disparities, not improving them….

None of this was mentioned at South by South Lawn. Instead, speakers heralded the power of the tech community. John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, gave a rousing talk that implored listeners to “get in trouble. Good trouble. Get in the way and make some noise.” Clay Dumas, chief of staff for the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House, told me in an email that the event could be considered part of a legacy to inspire social change and activism through technology. “In his final months in office,” he wrote, “President Obama wants to empower the generation of people that helped launch his candidacy and whose efforts carried him into office.”

…But a few days later, during a speech at Carnegie Mellon, Obama seemed to reckon with his feelings about the potential — and limits — of the tech world. The White House can’t be as freewheeling as a start-up, he said, because “by definition, democracy is messy. And part of government’s job is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” But he added that he didn’t want people to become “discouraged and say, ‘I’m just not going to deal with government.’ ” Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could. That lesson was apparent on the lawn. While I still don’t believe that technology is a panacea for society’s problems, I will always appreciate the first president who tried to bring what’s best about Silicon Valley to Washington, even if some of the bad came with it….(More)”

Kenyans have launched a campaign on Twitter to fix their roads

Curated on October 27, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lily Kuo in Quartz: “Traffic is a problem in Nairobi. A short commute can last for hours during morning or evening rush hour. Buses and motorbikes cut in and out of traffic, worsening congestion. It’s estimated that road congestion costs Kenya’s capital as much as $570,000 a day in lost productivity.

One of the reasons for the city’s bad traffic is the state of the roads: drivers swerve to avoid potholes, bumps, or breaks in the roads, causing a buildup of traffic. To help, an online campaign called “What is a Road” is crowdsourcing the location and condition of potholes around the city in an effort to push local officials to fix them.

Nairobians tweet a photo and location of a pothole under the hashtag #whatisaroad. Those reports are uploaded to a map, used to analyze where the city’s potholes are located and track which ones have been fixed. “We decided to take a more data driven approach to track progress, promises made and projects delivered,” says Muthuri Kinyamu, one of the organizers.

A map showing crowdsourced reports of potholes across Nairobi. (What Is a Road)

The campaign is also about addressing some of the fundamental problems that hold cities like Nairobi back. In Nairobi, branded the center of “Silicon Savannah” in recent years, there’s often more focus on entrepreneurship and innovation than resolving simpler problems like the state of the roads. …The

The campaign, started in August, will continue until January. Chris Orwa, a data analyst helping with the project, says that they can’t take credit for all the repairs they have been documented around the city, but they have noticed that roads are being fixed within days of a #Whatisaroad report. The average response time for fixing a road reported by a What is a Road user is three days, according to Orwa….(More)”

Could online democracy lead to governance by Trumps and trolls?

Curated on October 24, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Max Opray in The Guardian: “The first two user tutorials are pretty stock standard but, from there, things escalate dramatically. After mastering How to Sign Up and How to RecoverYour Password, users are apparently ready to advance to lesson number three: How to Create a Democracy.

As it turns out, on DemocracyOS, this is a relatively straightforward matter – not overthrowing the previous regime nor exterminating the last traces of the royal lineage in order to pave the way for a new world order. Instead Argentinian developers Democracia en Red have made it a simple matter of clicking a button to form a group and thrash out the policies voters wish to see enacted.

It is one of a range of digital platforms for direct democracy created by developers and activists to redefine the relationship between citizens and their governments,with the powers that be in Latin American city councils through to European anti-austerity parties making the upgrade to democracy 2.0.

Reshaping how government works is a difficult enough pitch by itself but,beyond that, there’s another challenge facing developers – the online trolls are ready and waiting.

Britain alone this year offered up two examples of what impact trolls could have on online direct democracy – there was the case of “BoatyMcBoatface” famously winning a Natural Environment ResearchCouncil poll to determine the name of a multimillion-pound arctic research vessel, and then there was the more serious case of trolls adding the signatures of thousands of residents of countries such as the Cayman Islands and Vatican City to a formal petition calling for a second Brexit referendum, in order to have the entire document disregarded as an online prank.

In the US presidential election even the politicians are getting in on it,with a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC (political action committee) hiring an army of online commenters to defend the candidate in arguments on social media, while the Republican contender, Donald Trump, is himself engaging in textbook trolling behaviour – whether that’s urging the hacking of Clinton’s emails, revealing the phone number of a Republican rival during the primaries, or unleashing a constant stream of controversial statements as a means of derailing conversations, attracting attention and humiliating his targets.

So what does this mean for digital platforms for direct democracy? By merging the world of the internet with that of politics, will we all end up governed by some fusion of trolls and Trumps promising to build Wally McWallfaces on our borders? And will the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution also usher in a revolution in how democracy functions?…(More)”