policymaking20

How many pedestrians are present in the city? How do the behave over time? Good policy modeling requires accurate data.

"The demise of the expert"

ManaBalss.lv is a web-based tool for citizen involvement in legislative change in Latvia. 15% of Latvians are reported to have used the tool and two new laws have been passed as a result.

A concrete path to local policies.

An anthology of essays from the McKinsey Center for Government (written by political leaders, civil servants, economists and policy experts) exploring the approaches that governments around the world are taking to common, emerging problems.

If the goal is to accelerate societal learning, the interplay between scientists, policymakers and the wider public will be critical. However, the existing patterns of interaction leave much to be desired. First, the science-policy relationship is often difficult and dysfunctional. Second, the international governance infrastructure - the United Nations, World Bank, WTO and others - was designed to meet the needs of the post-WW2 era and is ill-adapted to the interconnected and transdisciplinary challenges it now faces. And finally, our main public communication channels seem better attuned to the linear and polarised narrative of crisis than to the nuanced, detailed, anticipatory work of crisis avoidance or minimisation.

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIt's affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

A Tool for Civil Engagement

Statistics and tools to decide.

Discussing opinions in the argument web.

An idea: the State of Massachussetts' chief innovation officer

The Serious Game Acedemy, part of GALA and ESGS, brings together European researchers in the field of serious gaming.

The purpose of the project is to create and convene an interdisciplinary network of thinkers and doers that could help with making the transition from closed-and-centralized to open-and-collaborative institutions of governance.