AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

Did participants in the ‘Future of Europe’ process influence President Juncker’s State of the European Union speech, as promised? Of course not. Rightly.- 2nd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy

Saying goodbye to my oldblog on my old platform’s 10th birthday.

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

In an era of “wicked problems” why are current leadership behaviours and culture apparently not fit for purpose? ... so many failures in policy and strategic forecasting? Are they human frailties? Or ... systemic?

appointing facilitators to help us make the most of each meeting....more effective, so you (and everyone else) can make the most of your time.more inclusive, because the loudest person won’t dominate the room.more fun. You’re digging into challenges, identifying what can actually get done, and moving on.Here are a couple of typical meeting challen…

This page is to help co-create the fourth U.S. National Action Plan (NAP 4) with input from civil society. This is one opportunity to suggest and/or comment on the NAP 4 framework and ideas presented below. Share your NAP 4 feedback by commenting on a GitHub issue below or propose a new commitment by following the guidance and creating a new issue…

to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

Confirmation bias... such a prevalent feature of human cognition, that until recently a second phenomenon has been hidden in plain sight. Recent research suggests that something called desirability bias may be just as prevalent in our thinking... When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire usually wins out.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website... Do they have nothing of value to provide, and hide behind flowery marketing babble that’s as empty as their offering? ... tell people who you are, what you do, and maybe even why they should be interested. ... not look to dazzle with style over substan…

The open-plan office continues to doggedly spread, despite study after study suggesting it makes employees more miserable, more ill, less friendly and less productive... if a company is determined to inflict this woe on its workers, it should observe some basic rules...:

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

SocialChallenges.eu is a new, highly interactive platform dedicated to pilot-testing a new approach to stimulating startups, making innovation ecosystems more efficient and solving social and environmental problems. 

While consumers are increasingly prepared to pay for online services, news is seen as less valuable than entertainment apps like Netflix and Spotify, according to a new report... consumers may be more interested in paying for experiences that aggregate multiple news brands and perspectives than for any single brand... the widespread availability …

What separates honest people from not honest people is not necessarily character. It's opportunity... rationally, more people ought to get away with cheating than actually do.... the flip side ... is that people are also unthinkingly dishonest... small slips without really thinking about it ... the brain reacts very strongly to a first act of l…

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...

a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work... “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false... Trump supporters and adults under 26... could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users wil…

A few people have asked me recently whether my Medium membership is worth it... We’re trying to fight the dark forces of advertising that are destroying our minds and democracy.

the future that Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams sees ... doesn’t include advertising, not even the native advertising that was a key piece of Medium’s plan ... a Spotify-ish model that pools subscribers’ $5 monthly contributions and doles them out to a select group of creators based on how many “claps” the creators get... once they’re in the …

A Mathematical Journey Into How Medium Payment [Probably] Works for Premium Authors

It’s time to #pay4content, which is why I’m wearing The Oatmeal’s t-shirt and brandishing the YANSS book on Bondi beach. Next time you read and use something from an independent content creator (like I did for my #backfire post), find a way of supporting them.

Since launching Medium membership, our primary focus has been on funding the creation of exclusive content ... to empower writers and publishers to produce original content directly for our paying members and earn money based on depth of reader engagement... we’re partnering with many publishers we love to bring you... curated selections from The…

I moderated a panel discussion about Virtual Reality ... used Engagenow to bring the audience and the panelists closer. How?

internal mandate demanding that Amazon teams communicate with each other by exposing “their data and functionality through services interfaces.” ... Bezos had quietly refactored Amazon into a platform company.... information technology can’t be compared to the transition from steam engines to railroads or from telegraphs to telephones — technolog…

ProPublica published an in-depth investigation into the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what it considers “hate speech” ...Facebook’s rules were being inconsistently applied... to learn more ... its first Facebook Messenger bot... to collect stories about people’s experiences with hate speech on Facebook... to help quantify the organiz…

"lead magnets” or “freebies” or “opt-in incentives,” and they are insanely effective for growing your email list. And not only that, they can be excellent for growing trust with your audience as well... In this post you’ll learn: What makes a GOOD freebie What’s working for others (9 examples) How to design the right freebie for your business

it won’t be the thousands of citizens’ dialogues orchestrated by the EU Commission across Europe over the summer that will re-engage EU citizens with Europe... There are an estimated 30,000 corporate lobbyists operating in Brussels, dominating the EU policy process. While NGOs have increasingly been included in EU policymaking... under-staffed ..…