Argument schemes for two-phase democratic deliberation

A formal two-phase model of democratic policy deliberation is presented, in which in the first phase sufficient and necessary criteria for proposals to be accepted are determined (the ‘acceptable’ criteria) and in the second phase proposals are made and evaluated in light of the acceptable criteria resulting from the first phase. Such a separation gives the discussion a clear structure and prevents time and resources from being wasted on evaluating arguments for proposals based on unacceptable criteria. Argument schemes for both phases are defined and formalised in a logical framework for structured argumentation. The process of deliberation is abstracted from and it is assumed that both deliberation phases result in a set of arguments and attack and defeat relations between them. The acceptability status of criteria and proposals within the resulting argumentation framework is then evaluated using preferred semantics. For cases where preferences are required to choose between proposals, inference rules for deriving preferences between sets from an ordering of their elements are given.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value

Public Interest Representation in Global IP Policy Institutions

This paper compares the institutional and procedural arrangements that a range of global institutions make for civil society representation and input into policy development processes on intellectual property issues. The context for this analysis comes from two sets of norms for multi-stakeholder public policy development that exist in other regimes of governance: those of the Aarhus Convention (for environmental matters), and those of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (for Internet governance). These global norms, along with the actual practices of the institutions involved in global governance of intellectual property rights, are then contrasted with the proposed new institutional mechanisms for ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is found that ACTA falls short even of the practices of the other institutions analysed, but far shorter of the ideals promulgated in the Aarhus Convention and the Tunis Agenda. Whilst the shortcomings of the ACTA negotiation process are largely to blame for this, an underlying problem is the lack of a normative framework for civil society representation and participation in intellectual property policy development

A literature review. Introduction to the special issue

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 PTDC/FER-FIL/28278/2017 CHIST-ERA/0002/2019Argumentation schemes [35, 80, 91] are a relatively recent notion that continues an extremely ancient debate on one of the foundations of human reasoning, human comprehension, and obviously human argumentation, i.e., the topics. To understand the revolutionary nature of Walton’s work on this subject matter, it is necessary to place it in the debate that it continues and contributes to, namely a view of logic that is much broader than the formalistic perspective that has been adopted from the 20th century until nowadays. With his book Argumentation schemes for presumptive reasoning, Walton attempted to start a dialogue between three different fields or views on human reasoning – one (argumentation theory) very recent, one (dialectics) very ancient and with a very long tradition, and one (formal logic) relatively recent, but dominating in philosophy. Argumentation schemes were proposed as dialectical instruments, in the sense that they represented arguments not only as formal relations, but also as pragmatic inferences, as they at the same time depend on what the interlocutors share and accept in a given dialogical circumstance, and affect their dialogical relation. In this introduction, the notion of argumentation scheme will be analyzed in detail, showing its different dimensions and its defining features which make them an extremely useful instrument in Artificial Intelligence. This theoretical background will be followed by a literature review on the uses of the schemes in computing, aimed at identifying the most important areas and trends, the most promising proposals, and the directions of future research.publishersversionpublishe

Linked democracy : foundations, tools, and applications

Chapter 1Introduction to Linked DataAbstractThis chapter presents Linked Data, a new form of distributed data on theweb which is especially suitable to be manipulated by machines and to shareknowledge. By adopting the linked data publication paradigm, anybody can publishdata on the web, relate it to data resources published by others and run artificialintelligence algorithms in a smooth manner. Open linked data resources maydemocratize the future access to knowledge by the mass of internet users, eitherdirectly or mediated through algorithms. Governments have enthusiasticallyadopted these ideas, which is in harmony with the broader open data movement

Free to Air: An examination of the role played by a radio phone-in programme, Liveline, in the democratic process

The radio phone-in, Liveline, attracts a daily listenership of over 400,000. The topics aired in the programme regularly feature in the newspapers on subsequent days or they become the subject of parliamentary questions in the Dáil or of reactions by government ministers. The programme is seen to offer a place for 'ordinary' voices and opinions in a mass media setting which is usually the preserve of broadcasting professionals, politicians, journalists and expert commentators. In this thesis I examine how Liveline functions in Irish democracy - as a source of information, as a popular platform and as an agent for debate. While it may be shown to be successful in some or all of these areas, it is at the same time a media product where the immediate goals are to interest and entertain the audience and thereby to attract advertising revenue. In order to address that tension between the civic and the commercial I firstly explore those fields of theory that shed light on the connections between communicative agency and democratic effectiveness. One such is the concept of a public sphere where citizens may assemble in public to discuss issues of common concern in a dispassionate and rational way with a view to arriving at a consensus and decisions for action. In the light of criticisms that find this approach too idealistic, too restrictive or too exclusionary I consider a wider concept of deliberative democracy where the definition of the political is broader and the range of discursive means to address it is broader also. I pay particular attention to storytelling and emotional expression because of their prominence in the speech in Liveline. Becoming a better citizen is more than attracting rights and membership of a defined community; it is also about the identity we construct for ourselves within a civic culture and the practices we engage in to reinforce and revise that role. I examine how Liveline functions as a resource for this purpose by analysing the discourses of the programme over the course of a month. I also examine how the work of the programme team, especially the host, shapes the discursive context. I suggest that generally, media research tends to disregard the production process as irreparably ideologically loaded or ratings driven. In this thesis, based on analysis of programme discourses and leaning, to some extent, on evidence from my own experience as a radio producer, I contest this. I suggest that Liveline, with its complex three-way set of communicative relations - a cross collaboration between the host, the callers and the listening public - affords, a model, a location, and the resources which contribute to enabling contemporary citizenship

Citizens’ juries and social learning: understanding the transformation of preference

Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD University of LutonThe model of the citizens' jury is used here to examine whether the promise that deliberative democracy can enable transformations of preference among citizens is valid. Supporters of the citizens' jury go so far as to claim that it can encourage the habit of active citizenship. Deliberation has become central to academic work on the future of democracy and much of this work alludes to a relationship between deliberation and learning. So far however, the learning processes that are seen as central to it have not been fully investigated. This thesis explores the impact of participation in a deliberative process by presenting a predominantly qualitative analysis ofthe way the citizens' jury experience changes participants' preferences. The changes experienced by the jurors are presented as a juror journey but not all jurors embark on this journey in the same way, nor do they all travel at the same pace. Some of those interviewed for this study claim that their journey only ended some time after the jury itself came to an end and for some it is clearly ongoing. Addressing the juror journey as a learning process highlights the changes in the discursive strategies employed by the jurors as they come to understand the ethical components of discourse. By dividing the process into its constituent parts of thinking, willing and judging the procedural requirements of deliberation are highlighted. The results of the fieldwork show that the majority of respondents in this study of former citizens' jurors develop a heightened sense of efficacy that enables them to assert a sense of themselves as citizens. Most describe a new awareness that their actions affect others on whose behalf they are deliberating. This now occurs for many of them alongside a new sense of trust in others to make decisions on their behalf. The research concludes that if practitioners of deliberation want to continue to make claims about transformation of preference they need to use the principles of discourse ethics to examine the legitimacy of deliberative forums that are in use and to make recommendations about how to improve their validity in the eyes of the public

Linked Democracy

This open access book shows the factors linking information flow, social intelligence, rights management and modelling with epistemic democracy, offering licensed linked data along with information about the rights involved. This model of democracy for the web of data brings new challenges for the social organisation of knowledge, collective innovation, and the coordination of actions. Licensed linked data, licensed linguistic linked data, right expression languages, semantic web regulatory models, electronic institutions, artificial socio-cognitive systems are examples of regulatory and institutional design (regulations by design). The web has been massively populated with both data and services, and semantically structured data, the linked data cloud, facilitates and fosters human-machine interaction. Linked data aims to create ecosystems to make it possible to browse, discover, exploit and reuse data sets for applications. Rights Expression Languages semi-automatically regulate the use and reuse of content. ; Links information flow, social intelligence, rights management, and modelling with epistemic democracy Presents examples of regulatory and institutional desig

Progress and challenges of service delivery in South Africa since 1994

The new South Africa came into existence in 1994. The incoming government faced a massive task of fiscal, political, social and economic transformation, all of which would require an effective public service capability. Yet the public service itself had been subject during the Apartheid era to the same limitations as other key South African institutions. Due to the lack of know how in 1994, South Africa needed an overwhelming transformation of public service focus, culture and procedures. Yet, 15 years after the democratic dispensation’s arrival, many people still lack access to the most basic of necessities. Woolard (2002) in Burger (2005:483) argues that it is visible that poverty is South Africa’s priority as it is estimated that approximately 37% of South African households , and probably more today, survive on less than R1 000 in a month