416 research outputs found

    Government as a Brain: How Can Governments Better Understand, Think, Create, and Remember, and Avoid the Traps of Collective Stupidity Both in Emergencies and Normal Times

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    Governments are evolving new ways to think, combining observation, memory, analysis, models, and creativity. This article describes how they think, how the COVID crisis has accelerated innovation in new ways of thinking, the use of metaphors to understand these processes, the role of democracy and civil society, and the new skills needed

    The use of digital tools for political participation in digital democracy: Qualitative analysis of 10 case studies

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    This research aims to qualitatively analyze the use of digital tools for political participation in digital democracy using 10 case studies. Technological development is influencing every part of our reality. Political systems are not an exception. Democracies expanded by the use of information and communication technology are dubbed digital democracies. Digital democracies are forming new political participation forms by using digital tools to encourage political participation from their citizens. The core of the paper is an analysis of 10 case studies of digital participation platforms divided on three levels of applicability: parliamentary, local government and political party. There is a gap in understanding whether new digital innovations have a potential to shape the future of democratic processes or do they represent a failed experiment. The paper deals with understanding the use of digital tools for political participation in digital democracy from 2001 to 2020. Spatially, the paper will focus on Europe and individual countries of the world depending on the level of the analysis

    New Labour: A Witness History

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    This article is the edited transcript of a witness history seminar which brought together high profile ‘insiders’ and ‘outside’ academic commentators to reflect critically on New Labour’s governance of Britain, 1997-2010. The contributions cover major areas of government activity, notably the economy, industrial policy, social justice, energy policy, ‘Europe’, military intervention, the use of intelligence and government decision-making. In their respective area of expertise, the contributors investigate the Conservative legacy seen through the eyes of New Labour people, the policies New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tried to put in place, what changes these policies were intended to bring about and, finally, what the overall balance sheet of achievements was. The concluding section draws out the key domestic and foreign policy lessons learned during the New Labour years. The article presents a fascinating collection of findings that will be hugely relevant to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party as it gears up for the 2015 general election and after

    Social Innovation: What it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated

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    The results of social innovation are all around us. Self-help health groups and self-build housing; telephone help lines and telethon fundraising; neighbourhood nurseries and neighbourhood wardens; Wikipedia and the Open University; complementary medicine, holistic health and hospices; microcredit and consumer cooperatives; charity shops and the fair trade movement; zero carbon housing schemes and community wind farms; restorative justice and community courts. All are examples of social innovation – new ideas that work to meet pressing unmet needs and improve peoples’ lives. This report is about how we can improve societies’ capacities to solve their problems. It is about old and new methods for mobilising the ubiquitous intelligence that exists within any society

    Toward a political theory of social innovation: collective intelligence and the co-creation of social goods.

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    This paper proposes a political theory of social innovation. The paper begins by introducing and reviewing recent claims made for the ways in which social innovation can co-create public goods and services by utilizing forms of collection intelligence (CI) and CI Internet-based platforms. The paper provides a discussion and classification of the literature on collective intelligence before investigation the question of new forms and ways of delivering public goods and services through forms of co-creation and co-production

    A designed generation: Maker's maturity and social responsibility

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    The following paper is a first step towards a research path that investigates the role of the craftsman and new craftsmanship in the machine society. The research looks at the post-industrial panorama, the actors on stage and the effects that this revolution has brought, is bringing and can bring to the artisan activity. A context with a strong identity and a culture of know-how that has allowed, together with technological progress, the emergence of figures such as the Maker, the digital craftsman. A figure that is only recently beginning to proclaim itself as such, but still floating in a limbo of identity ambiguity. As uncertain instrument of this new 'productive group', also the technological potential risks failing its role. Craftsmanship and post-craftsmanship perhaps have the opportunity to cooperate in order to achieve a result greater than the sum of the parts

    "Coherent Mode" for the World's Public Square

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    Systems for large scale deliberation have resolved polarized issues and shifted agenda setting into the public's hands. These systems integrate bridging-based ranking algorithms - including group informed consensus implemented in Polis and the continuous matrix factorization approach implemented by Twitter Birdwatch - making it possible to highlight statements which enjoy broad support from a diversity of opinion groups. Polis has been productively employed to foster more constructive political deliberation at nation scale in law making exercises. Twitter Birdwatch is implemented with the intention of addressing misinformation in the global public square. From one perspective, Twitter Birdwatch can be viewed as an anti-misinformation system which has deliberative aspects. But it can also be viewed as a first step towards a generalized deliberative system, using Twitter's misinformation problem as a proving ground. In this paper, we propose that Twitter could adapt Birdwatch to produce maps of public opinion. We describe a system in five parts for generalizing Birdwatch: activation of a deliberative system and topic selection, population sampling and the role of expert networks, deliberation, reporting interpretable results and finally distribution of the results to the public and those in power
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