Findings
Research on nearly 3 decades of democratic innovation and e-participation in Latin America has some interesting findings (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru). According to an Open Democracy blogpost (the actual project’s website is down): civil society participation programming uses tech more often than not, smaller countries are less prolific than large countries in terms of tech-driven innovations, and tech driven innovations are just as common at the national level as they are at the sub-national level. Though digital innovations are widespread, they only rarely facilitate decision-making (30%) or are formalized in legislation or policy (less than 50%).
University of Maryland research on anti-Trump protests finds digital media commonalities among an exceptionally diverse group, suggesting something that approximates a “movement.”
A review of research on government social media use finds that it is generally quantitative, ignoring both users and impacts, while a library study in the UK suggests that Open Data makes it hard to archive well in the NHS, and a study of service delivery in Kenya found that it was improved by decentralization, but that the mediating effects of e-government initiatives were insignificant (275 respondents, 8 county govts).
Things that work:
A review of original research from 2000-2015 (US) suggests that “nudge” programming by governments is a cost-benefit effective means of achieving social objectives when combined with other programming modalities. Open source pays, according to a recent report on seven years of strategic investment by the GFDRR (World Bank-hosted disaster response partnership), which showed a “200% return on investment in its open source software efforts.” There’s also new evidence that governance performance assessments influence country behavior most when they are comparative and participatory (my hot take here).
Not quite findings:
Last week saw papers calling government co-design magical thinking, presenting a a Do-it-yourself public visualization kit, describing two east African case studies on citizen-generated data, reviewing anglophonic standards for democratic consultations, arguing that deliberative democracy initiatives should forget being representative, proposing a model for measuring open government data success and then testing it in Indonesia, and finally, a new report from @billorme assesses access to information in Mexico, Chile and Brazil under the SDG framework (#itscomplicated).
Community & Resources
In the Methodological Weeds
Based on our main results, Table 1 and Figure 1 show average marginal effects of corruption on political stability at different levels of youth bulge. We are 90% confident that a youth bulge beyond 20% of adult population, on average, combined with high levels of corruption can significantly destabilise political systems within specific countries when other factors described above also taken into account. We are 99% confident about a youth bulge beyond 30% levels.
That’s Mohammad Reza Farzanegan on using economic, demographic and corruption data to predict political uprisings. Unsurprisingly, I’d like to see information and communication capacities tested.
Otherwise, this blogpost argues for program evaluations that show no impact, and how they can and should impact policy, and the @fhi360research blog has more guidance on appropriate sample sizes.
Academic Opps
- The OGP is offering grants for research on the impacts of open government (5pg proposals due 14 July)
- The EU’s 2017 Ministerial Declaration on Digital Government is open for comment.
- Webinar on ICT-mediated citizen engagement: voice or chatter (review of case studies supported by @allvoicescount, 5 July)
Hires
- 2 Media/Comms PhDs @ Bournemouth University, UK, with special interest in Politics & media and Law, war & conflict, among many other areas (deadline 2 July)
- Interdisciplinary Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Disasters (11 July, Univ Edinburgh)
- Senior Research Analyst @ the Mo Ibrahim Foundation (application deadline 12 June)
- Project Coordinator: Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence (Berkman Klein Center)
Calls for proposals/papers:
- Radical Networks conference (deadline: 30 June, 19-22 Oct, Brooklyn)
- Volume 2 of the International Handbook of Internet Research (deadline: 17 July)
- Special Issue: Comunicación, poder y cambio social (Deadline 15 Oct)
- Digital Society Research Methods Workshop: “Interpreting Social Activities Online” (Deadline: 30 June, Event: 10-11 Sept, Warsaw)
- Ways of Being in a Digital Age – A Review Conference (Deadline; 21 July, Event 10-11 Oct, Liverpool)
- IMODEV’s second “Academic Days on Open Government Issues” (following up on the satellite event to last year’s OGP Summit) (Deadline ??, Event: 14-15 Nov, Paris)
Miscellanea & Absurdum
- Brazilian civil society wants to use social media to ween itself off foreign donors
- There’s funding available for masters and PHD students to work on the datafication of cycling
- Knight First Amendment Institute threatening to sue Trump for blocking ppl on Twitter
- Moscow’s Higher School of Economics has erected a monument to peer review
- Rep. Mike Quigley has introduced the COVFEFE Act (the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act) that would include presidential social media content in presidential archives
- Kenya has the world’s fastest internet (beating the United States, ranked 28th)
- Taste of City Conference 2017
- Inside the military tactics used during Standing Rock
