Design, Engagement & Innovation

...An empirical challenge to deliberative theory?

At the core of many participatory policymaking schemes and civic engagement strategies is the exercise of public deliberation. What do contemporary currents in psychology and neuroscience have to say about the mental and social processes that shape our ability to deliberate and, ultimately, to reason? The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his team at CivilPolitics summarize the implications thusly:

"Moral psychology has undergone a revolution since the late 1990s. The field used to be focused on moral reasoning, leading researcher to examine the conditions that foster better deliberation. (See for example ongoing projects on deliberative democracy, which reflect this 'rationalist' orientation). But social psychologists in the 1990s began to question the power of reasoning and other 'controlled' conscious processes. They have emphasized the importance of 'automatic' and often unconscious processes, which often include emotion. They have also emphasized the importance of social norms and environmental factors in shaping behavior. (See this short review of the field, by Haidt). This perspective leads to a very different approach to the pursuit of civility. At CivilPolitics, most (but not all) of us believe that direct appeals to people to behave civilly will have very limited effects."

But do these findings extinguish all hopes for constructive public deliberation? Quite the opposite. In his latest book, Haidt reaffirms the power of reason, but stresses that such reasoning must be interactive. As the New York Times puts it: "It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s." Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.” Therefore, it would seem that carefully structured group deliberations may provide just the means for transcending the cognitive and motivational biases that constrain our individual reasoning, provided effective facilitation and broad representation. Alas, with users often veiled in anonymity, it would seem that the web lacks the primary drivers of social empathy and etiquette that are fundamental to fostering constructive dialogue.

For more on Haidt's research into morality and politics, watch his TED Talk.

JRM

...Can public engagement rescue professional journalism?

As the quality and economic viability of professional journalism continues to deteriorate steadily, media advocates have begun to ask whether civic engagement can save the industry. Josh Stearns, of Free Press, has some great ideas of what editorial boards could be doing in lieu of political endorsements: 

"What if editorial boards opened up the meetings in which they debate who they will endorse and turned them into something akin to a town hall? What if papers produced in-depth explainers for the issues the editorial board based their decision on? What if newspapers mine their own archives to help put the current race and their endorsement in a uniquely local and historical perspective? What if editorial boards judged candidates by some transparent criteria like the 'citizens agenda' which Jay Rosen has been developing?"

Daniel Moulthrop, curator at the Civic Commons, takes it one step further:

"Imagine we alter the mission and work of an editorial board. Its job is no longer to offer considered opinions on important community issues in an attempt to persuade voters or policy makers. Instead, it's an engagement board with the job is convening and hosting community dialogue about the same issues on which it would have opined. It would, as Stearns suggests, gather together all the best reporting and public documents on the issue, provide the tools, the information and the space for the kind of informed conversation and deliberation that could help communities make up their own mind and chart their own future. What if the engagement board had members of the community on it, people who weren't trained journalists and weren't advocates but cared about the future of the community? As many news organizations begin to implement strategies based on events, what if those events actually had an impact on policy making and did the work of connecting citizens to the government they pay taxes to support? Could an engagement strategy like this change the coverage a newsroom produced, bringing the news closer to the community, making it more relevant to more people?"

With the news industry in major flux, these suggestions provide some important food for thought, and respond to growing demands for more independent and participatory media. Certainly, with the spread of social media, modern news consumers have become increasingly accustomed to interacting with the once-distant journalistic establishment and having their voices heard, possibly clearing the way for greater civic involvement in a more formal capacity.

JRM

Do you want to fix procurement? Then give everyone the chance to make it worse

We would all be better off if a transparent network is set in place so that we can help define what governments should buy (Part IV)

By Juan-Pablo Giraldo

The first three posts in this series described the complexity of the public procurement system and opened the door for potential solutions. Part I explained the political dimension of procurement. Part II set forth some limitations of applying the lens of private practices to public procurement. Part III described the insights that a team of NYU graduate students identified on a project to improve procurement at the World Bank*. This entry presents the solution that we devised for that project, which aims at harnessing the power of peer networks to have better, faster and wiser procurement.

To read more go to my personal blog

 

Four insights on procurement

Finding the acupuncture points that would allow governments to buy efficiently and deliver services to citizens in a timely manner (Part III)

By Juan-Pablo Giraldo

The first two posts in this series described the complexity of the public procurement system. Part I explained the political dimension of procurement. Part II set forth some limitations of applying the lens of private practices to public procurement. This entry will deal mostly with the insights that guided the design of a solution devised for the World Bank* over the last year by a team of NYU graduates. (Full disclosure: I am a part of that team).

Insight # 1: better procurement means many things, but all those start with having better contracts. The basics: knowing how to define the problem and specify the solution is critical for success.

Insight # 2: contracts are better drafted in markets where techonological change is slow. Yes, governments have contracted the building of roads and bridges for years now and the basic technology hasn’t changed. Those contracts are, more or less, pro forma by now. It is a greater challenge to define the problem and specify the solution when public agencies need to buy technology intensive products or services— satellites components, chips, medical imaging devices or software. The expertise necessary to describe those products is usually outside of the organizational

Insight # 3: procurement is a world of too many words. Seriously, is a 372 page-long contract necessary to buy a cloud-computing system? I thought people were buying those all the time on Amazon. If you want to let more actors in the world of procurement, so that it actually increases its dynamism and emulates the private market, you need to be able to summarize problems and needs.

Insight # 4: siloed bilateral communication is a fertile ground for opaque practices. In procurement, communication between the government, vendors and citizens has to be transparent. Bilateral and private email chains and phone calls between public agencies and vendors are seen as suspicious by competitors and citizens.

Find the solution in Part IV of this series—coming soon.

*This post is a personal view that in no way represents the official position of the World Bank or NYU

Why is procurement so slow?

The search for unbiased spending of tax dollars ended up boycotting the possibility of effective government (Part II)

By Juan-Pablo Giraldo

In a previous post, I mentioned that procurement has turned into this sad, slow, and painful process that usually gets in the way of getting things done. One way of understanding how and why this happened is by comparing private purchasing decisions and public procurement decisions.

Taxpayers’ dollars are not yours only: you are free to spend your savings and income as you see fit. You may need to consult it with your family, but it is not illegal for you to spend your hard-earned money buying, on a whim, a board game that will forever be in its unopened box in the basement. It is illegal for governments and international agencies to spend dollars on a whim on anything. As public officials are evaluated heavily on procedural compliance, it is actually legal to spend taxpayers’ dollars to buy something useless only if you have bought it following the rules.

Private purchases are all about fulfilling your subjective personal preferences while public procurement processes aspire to ensure high levels of objectivity: advertisers and marketers try to appeal to your emotions because they trigger buying decisions. Procurement processes are set in place because Congress doesn’t want a bureaucrat making purchasing decisions following his personal criteria. That is why regulations encourage multi-party decision making. The rationale of this process-oriented buying system is that by having many people involved and lots of administrative safeguards for both buyers and vendors, objectivity will be attained. The unintended consequence, of course, is that streamlined multi-party decision making has not been executed successfully in any earthly bureaucracy.

Unlike private transactions, procurement rules are aimed at protecting vendors by giving them ample time and opportunity to ask for clarifications and dispute the process: as a private citizen, if you buy goods or services from one manufacturer, there is basically nothing that its competitors can do to you. At most, they could improve their marketing and offer you discounts and promotions trying to allure you for your next purchase. In procurement, instead of promotions, public officers get inundated by legal documents and requests that trigger lengthy procedural battles between vendors. This battles do not necessarily lower prices or increase the quality of the offering; indeed, government officials have their hands tied for several weeks or even months until, after answering all the vendors’ requests, they choose a supplier. Even then, if competitors feel they have a strong enough case, they will try to dispute this “final” decision. In summary, procurement is more uncertain and transactionally costly than the private market.

Long term agreements or acquisitions, commonplace in firms buying at large-scale, are out of reach of governments and international agencies: private firms are very good at stabilizing their supply chain. For example, if a mineral is an essential component of its products, a firm will work to establish a long term agreement with or even acquire mines. This will make sense because a predictable supply chain minimizes the firm’s operational and financial risks. Unlike most firms, governments and international agencies provide a wide array of goods and services. Thus, public agencies do not have the resources or the mandate to acquire companies and suppliers in every single market. Long term agreements are common only in concessions, but for almost any input necessary to fulfill its mission, public agencies need to periodically choose suppliers and vendors using public bidding. This makes for a much more fragmented and uncertain procurement system.

How do you fix procurement? Find that in Part III, coming soon.

Buenos Aires City, leading civic hackathon initiatives

by Paloma Baytelman

 

The Open Government Initiative of the city of Buenos Aires, in Argentina, just finished its second annual hackathon with an unprecedented success. More than twenty projects it were the result of this meeting that made work together citizens and government teams on May, 11th and 12th.

Over 400 people took part in the event that through collaborative work created varied diverse projects, such as a web application that reads music scores aloud, another for reporting human trafficking, and a video game for teenagers that provides information on sexual education.

According to Andrés Ibarra--the Argentinian Minister of Modernization--the event was remarkable because it showed passion for the people and from the people. “We were able to experience the magic that appears when we combine the experience and enthusiasm of our teams with the enormous talent and civic energy of our citizens”, he said.

This time the hackathon was focused on problems related with accessibility and inclusion, encouraging interdisciplinary projects, considering diverse perspectives, disciplines, and actors, such as programmers and designers, civil servants, urban planners, economists, and civic activists.

To present the projects, The Open Government Initiative of the city of Buenos Aires set a website that shows every idea, highlighting a brief description, the team members involved and related supporters: http://bahackaton.herokuapp.com/

Delibera: encouraging civic values through innovation

by Paloma Baytelman

Democracy relies on citizen participation and requires understanding. To reinforce the ability to exercise rights and participate as equals in society, during the last decade the National Library of the Chilean Congress (BCN) has developed different services and products aimed at making laws easier to access and understand, as well as implemented initiatives to encourage civic engagement.

Sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, in 2007 the BCN created an Innovation Lab focused on two main goals: understanding how to connect citizens with politicians through new technologies, and creating projects to encourage civic engagement on young people.

Regarding that second goal, in 2008 the Lab created “Delibera” (Deliberates), an interscholastic tournament that promotes civic education for high school students across the country and encourages the understanding of the legislative process through the hands-on experience of being a member of the Parliament. The knowledge and understanding of a member's role, legislation and current bills is acquired through an amusing experience where different teams compete by creating bills based on the concerns and aspirations of young people.

The tournament takes place over seven months and the game is to develop “Legal Young Initiatives”--focused on solving a local or a national problem--equivalent to a pre-legislative stage in the generation process of law. In this exercise, students are organized into teams of seven students per school and work in creating and disseminating their “Legal Young Initiatives” through social networks and their own communities.

After 5 years of successful performance, this initiative is a good example of how it is possible to strengthen democracy and citizen participation through innovation, with activities that also support the knowledge and understanding of the law and the legal process.

 

 

 

Icelandic Crowdsourced Constitution: an unsuccessful attempt of participatory democracy

by Paloma Baytelman

 

New technologies bring more and better opportunities for people to enhance direct democracy. One of the most emblematic examples was given by the Icelandic project of drafting a crowdsourced constitution. However, recent political events in that country, have defeated that initiative. This fact questions the viability of public projects that consider civic participation as a major axis.

The Icelandic constitution dates from 1944, and have been amended four times, in 1984, 1991, 1995 and 1999. When Iceland's economy collapsed in 2008 by the bankruptcy of its three major banks, citizens began to demand political change with demonstrations on the web and in the streets that ended with the resignation of the government and a call to early elections.

The new government--formed by the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement--came with the idea of ​​reforming the constitution in a participative process. To achieve that, 25 elected delegates of different ages and professions formed a constitutional council that created a first draft. The draft was fed with the help of Icelandic citizens participating through social networking sites, posting comments and suggestions. There were also public meetings and debates on traditional media.

The proposal addressed changes related with state’s separation of powers, country's natural resources, human rights and access to information, among others. Some of those issues led the opposition to reject the reform, especially from the conservative party that led the government until the crisis outbreak.

In July 2011, the council presented the final draft. The text was in the government drawer for over a year until it was voted in a referendum in October 2012, being approved by 66% of the voting population. Later that year, the government asked the opinion of the European Parliament and of the Venice Commission, organizations that pointed out several defects of the Icelandic constitution regarding its shape and the fact that some articles crashed with other laws.

Although many efforts were made to speed up the necessary adjustments, the final draft of the constitution was not completely ready before April 27, when government elections were held in Iceland. That day Icelandic voters ordered out the Social Democrats from power, returning a centre-right government that ruled over the country's disastrous financial collapse in 2008.

Considering that the new people in power have been the toughest opponents to changes in the constitution, it is highly probable that this collaborative exercise remains only as an anecdote in the history of global democratic development.

Rudi Borrmann, director of the Buenos Aires’ Open Government Initiative

by Paloma Baytelman

 

Coordinated by the Open Government office, at the Modernization Ministry of Buenos Aires City Government, the Buenos Aires’ Open Government Plan has three central themes: the approval of a favorable normative framework, the disclosure of public information--according to the international standards of open data--and the promotion of an Open Government culture among Buenos Aires’ citizens.

 

The normative framework which allowed the development of the Buenos Aires’ Open Government initiative comes to effect when Mauricio Macri, the City Mayor, signed a law-ranking decree endorsing the project. On its first article, the document states that “the site data.buenosaires.gob.ar is a platform that will make it easier to search, discover and access to those public sector datasets that shall constribute to the promotion of transparency, to the encouragement of participation and collaboration of the citizens”.

In this interview, Rudi Borrmann, Buenos Aires’ Open Government Initiative director, talks about how the initiative was articulated, as well as about the challenges and opportunities they have found along the way.

 

New study: Offline participatory inequality is reflected online...

Over the past few years there has been increasing speculation as to what impact political participation online might have on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics. An August 2008 survey provided little evidence that there had been any change in the extent to which political participation was stratified by socio-economic status. There has been tremendous growth in political activity on Social Networking Sites (SNS) since then. However, as researcher Aaron Smith reports in a new study entitled Civic Engagement in the Digital Age:

"The well-educated and the well-off are more likely than others to participate in civic life online – just as those groups have always been more likely to be active in politics and community affairs offline. Political activity in social networking spaces shows a somewhat more moderate version of that trend."

While this virtual class cleavage will come as little shock to anyone concerned with issues of digital innovation and governance, it provides a powerful and timely reminder of the very real challenges and constraints that open government entrepreneurs and advocates face. What implications do these findings have for the immediate goals and growth of open government programs and initiatives, particularly those targeted at increasing citizen participation? Could advances in the digital realm serve to reinforce or increase the gaping disparities between well-heeled citizens and the rest of society?

Previous studies indicate that uneven participation in civic life online has many of the same effects of participatory inequality offline, and may in fact exacerbate the well-known participatory deficit among those who have recently joined the electorate. More specifically, political scientists have found:

"Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline."

 As one might suspect, the pattern differs slightly among young adults, who are much likelier than their elders to be comfortable with digital technologies and to use the Internet. Yet, among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. Therefore, it would seem that the focus of policy should remain on supporting and expanding web access and literacy in low-income and marginalized communities while developing online programs and services that specifically address their needs as well as promoting and enabling civic engagement among youth (in forums where they are most comfortable, such as SNS) so that they can begin to see the Internet as a viable avenue for political activity.

JRM