690 research outputs found
Public crises, public futures
This article begins to map out a novel approach to analyzing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support
Sequential Deliberation for Social Choice
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study
of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in
instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for
ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical.
How then can we design a mechanism - preferably decentralized, simple,
scalable, and not requiring any special knowledge of the decision space - to
reach consensus? We propose sequential deliberation as a natural solution to
this problem. In this iterative method, successive pairs of agents bargain over
the decision space using the previous decision as a disagreement alternative.
We describe the general method and analyze the quality of its outcome when the
space of preferences define a median graph. We show that sequential
deliberation finds a 1.208- approximation to the optimal social cost on such
graphs, coming very close to this value with only a small constant number of
agents sampled from the population. We also show lower bounds on simpler
classes of mechanisms to justify our design choices. We further show that
sequential deliberation is ex-post Pareto efficient and has truthful reporting
as an equilibrium of the induced extensive form game. We finally show that for
general metric spaces, the second moment of of the distribution of social cost
of the outcomes produced by sequential deliberation is also bounded
Computing a maximum clique in geometric superclasses of disk graphs
In the 90's Clark, Colbourn and Johnson wrote a seminal paper where they
proved that maximum clique can be solved in polynomial time in unit disk
graphs. Since then, the complexity of maximum clique in intersection graphs of
d-dimensional (unit) balls has been investigated. For ball graphs, the problem
is NP-hard, as shown by Bonamy et al. (FOCS '18). They also gave an efficient
polynomial time approximation scheme (EPTAS) for disk graphs. However, the
complexity of maximum clique in this setting remains unknown. In this paper, we
show the existence of a polynomial time algorithm for a geometric superclass of
unit disk graphs. Moreover, we give partial results toward obtaining an EPTAS
for intersection graphs of convex pseudo-disks
Equality of Participation Online Versus Face to Face: Condensed Analysis of the Community Forum Deliberative Methods Demonstration
Online deliberation may provide a more cost-effective and/or less inhibiting
environment for public participation than face to face (F2F). But do online
methods bias participation toward certain individuals or groups? We compare F2F
versus online participation in an experiment affording within-participants and
cross-modal comparisons. For English speakers required to have Internet access
as a condition of participation, we find no negative effects of online modes on
equality of participation (EoP) related to gender, age, or educational level.
Asynchronous online discussion appears to improve EoP for gender relative to
F2F. Data suggest a dampening effect of online environments on black
participants, as well as amplification for whites. Synchronous online voice
communication EoP is on par with F2F across individuals. But individual-level
EoP is much lower in the online forum, and greater online forum participation
predicts greater F2F participation for individuals. Measured rates of
participation are compared to self-reported experiences, and other findings are
discussed.Comment: 14 pages, 10 tables, to appear in Efthimios Tambouris, Panos
Panagiotopoulos, {\O}ystein S{\ae}b{\o}, Konstantinos Tarabanis, Michela
Milano, Theresa Pardo, and Maria Wimmer (Editors), Electronic Participation:
Proceedings of the 7th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2015
(Thessaloniki, August 30-September 2), Springer LNCS Vol. 9249, 201
Designing effective public participation
This paper reviews the various connections that can exist between the design of participatory processes and the different kind of results that they can entail. It details how effective participatory processes can be designed, whatever are the results that participation is deemed to elicit. It shows the main trends pertaining to design choicesand considers how to classify different arrangements in order to choose from among them. Then the paper deals with the main dilemmas that tend to arise when designing participatory processes. Thanks to this review, the paper argues that participatory processes tend to display a certain degree of ambivalence that cannot be completely overcome through the design choices
Deliberative and epistemic approaches to democracy
Deliberative and epistemic approaches to democracy are two important dimensions of contemporary democratic theory. This chapter studies these dimensions in the emerging ecosystem of civic and political participation tools, and appraises their collective value in a new distinct concept: linked democracy. Linked democracy is the distributed, technology-supported collective decision-making process, where data, information and knowledge are connected and shared by citizens online. Innovation and learning are two key elements of Athenian democracies which can be facilitated by the new digital technologies, and a cross-disciplinary research involving computational scientists and democratic theorists can lead to new theoretical insights of democracy
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