Back to the bad old days, as civil service infighting threatens UK’s only hope for digital government

by Helen Margetts 10/08/2016

The Government Digital Service (GDS) isn’t perfect, but to erase the progress it has put in place would be a terrible loss.

by Helen Margetts 10/08/2016

Technology and the public sector have rarely been happy bedfellows in the UK, where every government technology project seems doomed to arrive late, unperform and come in over budget. The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to drag the civil service into the 21st century, making services “digital by default”, cheaper, faster, and easier to use. It quickly won accolades for its approach and early cost savings. But then its leadership departed, not once or twice but three times—the latter two within the last few months. The largest government departments have begun to reassert their authority over GDS expert advice, and digital government looks likely to be dragged back towards the deeply dysfunctional old ways of doing things. GDS isn’t perfect, but to erase the progress it has put in place would be a terrible loss. The UK government’s use of technology has previously lagged far behind other countries. Low usage of digital services rendered them expensive and inefficient. Digital operations were often handicapped by complex networks of legacy systems, some dating right back to the 1970s. The development of the long-promised “digital era governance” was mired in a series of mega contracts: huge in terms of cost, scope and timescale, bigger than any attempted by other governments worldwide, and to be delivered by the same handful of giant global computer consulting firms that rarely saw any challenge to their grip on public contracts. Departmental silos ensured there were no economies of scale, shared services failed, and the Treasury negotiated with 24 departments individually for their IT expenditure. Some commentators (including this one) were a little sceptical on our first encounter with GDS. We had seen it before: the Office of the e-Envoy set up by Tony Blair in 1999, superseded by the E-government Unit (2004-7), and then Directgov until 2010. Successes and failures In many ways GDS has been a success story, with former prime minister David Cameron calling it one of the “great unsung triumphs…

Ethics, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Alan Turing Institute and OII: Summit on Data Science for Government and Policy Making

by Helen Margetts 31/05/2016

Leading policy makers, data scientists and academics came together to discuss how the ATI and government could work together to develop data science for the public good.

by Helen Margetts 31/05/2016

The benefits of big data and data science for the private sector are well recognised. So far, considerably less attention has been paid to the power and potential of the growing field of data science for policy-making and public services. On Monday 14th March 2016 the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) hosted a Summit on Data Science for Government and Policy Making, funded by the EPSRC. Leading policy makers, data scientists and academics came together to discuss how the ATI and government could work together to develop data science for the public good. The convenors of the Summit, Professors Helen Margetts (OII) and Tom Melham (Computer Science), report on the day’s proceedings. The Alan Turing Institute will build on the UK’s existing academic strengths in the analysis and application of big data and algorithm research to place the UK at the forefront of world-wide research in data science. The University of Oxford is one of five university partners, and the OII is the only partnering department in the social sciences. The aim of the summit on Data Science for Government and Policy-Making was to understand how government can make better use of big data and the ATI—with the academic partners in listening mode. We hoped that the participants would bring forward their own stories, hopes and fears regarding data science for the public good. Crucially, we wanted to work out a roadmap for how different stakeholders can work together on the distinct challenges facing government, as opposed to commercial organisations. At the same time, data science research and development has much to gain from the policy-making community. Some of the things that government does—collect tax from the whole population, or give money away at scale, or possess the legitimate use of force—it does by virtue of being government. So the sources of data and some of the data science challenges that public agencies face are…

Collective Action, Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Exploring the Ethics of Monitoring Online Extremism

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen 23/03/2016

(Part 2 of 2) The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. In the second of a two-part post, Josh Cowls and Ian Brown discuss the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen. Read the first post. Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorised in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet? Josh: I think that is right—many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US). A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing! Ed: So…

Democracy, Ethics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material

by Bertram Vidgen 18/02/2016

Exploring the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights.

by Bertram Vidgen 18/02/2016

In terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. Image by Miguel Discart (Flickr).

The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. Josh Cowls discusses the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen.* *please note that the views given here do not necessarily reflect the content of the report, or those of the lead author, Ian Brown. Ed: Josh, could you let us know the purpose of the report, outline some of the key findings, and tell us how you went about researching the topic? Josh: Sure. In the report we take a step back from the ground-level question of ‘what are the police doing?’ and instead ask, ‘what are the ethical and political boundaries, rationale and justifications for policing the web for these kinds of activity?’ We used an international human rights framework as an ethical and legal basis to understand what is being done. We also tried to further the debate by clarifying a few things: what has already been done by law enforcement, and, really crucially, what the perspectives are of all those involved, including lawmakers, law enforcers, technology companies, academia and many others. We derived the insights in the report from a series of workshops, one of which was held as part of the EU-funded VOX-Pol network. The workshops involved participants who were quite high up in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, the tech industry civil society, and academia. We followed these up with interviews with other individuals in similar positions and conducted background policy research. Ed: You highlight that many extremist groups (such as Isis) are making really significant use of online platforms to organise,…

Collective Action, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Controlling the crowd? Government and citizen interaction on emergency-response platforms

by Gregory Asmolov 07/12/2015

Government involvement in crowdsourcing efforts can actually be used to control and regulate volunteers from the top down—not just to “mobilise them”.

by Gregory Asmolov 07/12/2015

RUSSIA, NEAR RYAZAN - 8 MAY 2011: Piled up wood in the forest one winter after a terribly huge forest fire in Russia in year 2010. Image: Max Mayorov (Flickr).

There is a great deal of interest in the use of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations. Gregory Asmolov’s article Vertical Crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing Governance of Crowds and State–Citizen Partnership in Emergency Situations (Policy and Internet 7,3) examines crowdsourcing of emergency response in Russia in the wake of the devastating forest fires of 2010. Interestingly, he argues that government involvement in these crowdsourcing efforts can actually be used to control and regulate volunteers from the top down—not just to “mobilise them”. My interest in the role of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations was triggered by my personal experience. In 2010 I was one of the co-founders of the Russian “Help Map” project, which facilitated volunteer-based response to wildfires in central Russia. When I was working on this project, I realised that a crowdsourcing platform can bring the participation of the citizen to a new level and transform sporadic initiatives by single citizens and groups into large-scale, relatively well coordinated operations. What was also important was that both the needs and the forms of participation required in order to address these needs be defined by the users themselves. To some extent the citizen-based response filled the gap left by the lack of a sufficient response from the traditional institutions.[1] This suggests that the role of ICTs in disaster response should be examined within the political context of the power relationship between members of the public who use digital tools and the traditional institutions. My experience in 2010 was the first time I was able to see that, while we would expect that in a case of natural disaster both the authorities and the citizens would be mostly concerned about the emergency, the actual situation might be different. Apparently the emergence of independent, citizen-based collective action in response to a disaster was considered as some type of threat by the institutional actors. First, it was a threat to…

Democracy, Politics & Government

Does crowdsourcing citizen initiatives affect attitudes towards democracy?

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Exploring how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy

by Henrik Serup Christensen 22/11/2015

Crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. In their Policy and Internet journal article ‘Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland’, Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen explore how involvement in the citizen initiatives affects attitudes towards democracy. They find that crowdsourcing citizen initiatives can potentially strengthen political legitimacy, but both outcomes and procedures matter for the effects. Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilise online communities to achieve specific organisational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear. In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate…

Collective Action, Interviews, Politics & Government

Do Finland’s digitally crowdsourced laws show a way to resolve democracy’s “legitimacy crisis”?

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

Discussing the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland and analysing how the campaign created practices that affect democratic citizenship.

by Taneli Heikka 16/11/2015

There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. In his article The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation, Taneli Heikka (University of Jyväskylä) discusses the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland in 2014, analysing how the campaign used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making. Ed: There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. For example, less than half of the Finnish electorate under 40 choose to vote. In your article you argue that Finland’s 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act aimed to address this problem by allowing for the crowdsourcing of ideas for new legislation. How common is this idea? (And indeed, how successful?) Taneli: The idea that digital participation could counter the “legitimacy crisis” is a fairly common one. Digital utopians have nurtured that idea from the early years of the internet, and have often been disappointed. A couple of things stand out in the Finnish experiment that make it worth a closer look. First, the digital crowdsourcing system with strong digital identification is a reliable and potentially viral campaigning tool. Most civic initiative systems I have encountered rely on manual or otherwise cumbersome, and less reliable, signature collection methods. Second, in the Finnish model, initiatives that break the threshold of 50,000 names must be treated in the Parliament equally to an initiative from a group of MPs. This gives the initiative constitutional and political weight. Ed: The Act led to the passage of Finland’s first equal marriage law in 2014. In this case, online platforms were created for collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation. An NGO created a well-used platform, but it subsequently had to shut it down because it couldn’t afford the electronic signature system. Crowds are great, but not a silver bullet if something as prosaic as authentication is impossible. Where should the…

Politics & Government

Assessing crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project

by Simo Hosio 09/11/2015

How do you increase the quality of feedback without placing citizens on different-level playing fields from the outset—particularly where technology is concerned?

by Simo Hosio 09/11/2015

Ed: Given the “crisis in democratic accountability”, methods to increase citizen participation are in demand. To this end, your team developed some interactive crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project in Oulu, Finland. What form did the consultation take, and how did you assess its impact? Simo: Over the years we’ve deployed various types of interactive interfaces on a network of public displays. In this case it was basically a network of interactive screens deployed in downtown Oulu, next to where a renovation project was happening that we wanted to collect feedback about. We deployed an app on the screens, that allowed people to type feedback directly on the screens (on-screen soft keyboard), and submit feedback to city authorities via SMS, Twitter and email. We also had a smiley-based “rating” system there, which people could us to leave quick feedback about certain aspects of the renovation project. We ourselves could not, and did not even want to, assess the impact—that’s why we did this in partnership with the city authorities. Then, together with the city folks we could better evaluate if what we were doing had any real-world value whatsoever. And, as we discuss, in the end it did! Ed: How did you go about encouraging citizens to engage with touch screen technologies in a public space—particularly the non-digitally literate, or maybe people who are just a bit shy about participating? Simo: Actually, the whole point was that we did not deliberately encourage them by advertising the deployment or by “forcing” anyone to use it. Quite to the contrary: we wanted to see if people voluntarily used it, and the technologies that are an integral part of the city itself. This is kind of the future vision of urban computing, anyway. The screens had been there for years already, and what we wanted to see is if people find this type of service on their own when…

Politics & Government

Crowdsourcing for public policy and government

by Jonathan Bright 27/08/2015

The growing interest in crowdsourcing for government and public policy must be understood in the context of the contemporary malaise of politics, which is being felt across the democratic world.

by Jonathan Bright 27/08/2015

If elections were invented today, they would probably be referred to as “crowdsourcing the government.” First coined in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine (Howe, 2006), the term crowdsourcing has come to be applied loosely to a wide variety of situations where ideas, opinions, labor or something else is “sourced” in from a potentially large group of people. Whilst most commonly applied in business contexts, there is an increasing amount of buzz around applying crowdsourcing techniques in government and policy contexts as well (Brabham, 2013). Though there is nothing qualitatively new about involving more people in government and policy processes, digital technologies in principle make it possible to increase the quantity of such involvement dramatically, by lowering the costs of participation (Margetts et al., 2015) and making it possible to tap into people’s free time (Shirky, 2010). This difference in quantity is arguably great enough to obtain a quality of its own. We can thus be justified in using the term “crowdsourcing for public policy and government” to refer to new digitally enabled ways of involving people in any aspect of democratic politics and government, not replacing but rather augmenting more traditional participation routes such as elections and referendums. In this editorial, we will briefly highlight some of the key emerging issues in research on crowdsourcing for public policy and government. Our entry point into the discussion is a collection of research papers first presented at the Internet, Politics & Policy 2014 (IPP2014) conference organised by the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) and the Policy & Internet journal. The theme of this very successful conference—our third since the founding of the journal—was “crowdsourcing for politics and policy.” Out of almost 80 papers presented at the conference in September last year, 14 of the best have now been published as peer-reviewed articles in this journal, including five in this issue. A further handful of papers from the conference focusing on labor…

Economics, Governance & Security, Politics & Government

Why are citizens migrating to Uber and Airbnb, and what should governments do about it?

by admin 27/07/2015

What if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets?

by admin 27/07/2015

Protest for fair taxi laws in Portland; organisers want city leaders to make ride-sharing companies play by the same rules as cabs and Town cars. Image: Aaron Parecki (Flickr).

Cars were smashed and tires burned in France last month in protests against the ride hailing app Uber. Less violent protests have also been staged against Airbnb, a platform for renting short-term accommodation. Despite the protests, neither platform shows any signs of faltering. Uber says it has a million users in France, and is available in 57 countries. Airbnb is available in over 190 countries, and boasts over a million rooms, more than hotel giants like Hilton and Marriott. Policy makers at the highest levels are starting to notice the rise of these and similar platforms. An EU Commission flagship strategy paper notes that “online platforms are playing an ever more central role in social and economic life,” while the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop on the topic in Washington. Journalists and entrepreneurs have been quick to coin terms that try to capture the essence of the social and economic changes associated with online platforms: the sharing economy; the on-demand economy; the peer-to-peer economy; and so on. Each perhaps captures one aspect of the phenomenon, but doesn’t go very far in helping us make sense of all its potentials and contradictions, including why some people love it and some would like to smash it into pieces. Instead of starting from the assumption that everything we see today is new and unprecedented, what if we dug into existing social science theory to see what it has to say about economic transformation and the emergence of markets? Economic sociologists are adamant that markets don’t just emerge by themselves: they are always based on some kind of an underlying infrastructure that allows people to find out what goods and services are on offer, agree on prices and terms, pay, and have a reasonable expectation that the other party will honour the agreement. The oldest market infrastructure is the personal social network: traders hear what’s on offer through word of mouth and…