Overview: Online Strategy

Third of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brande’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity. Sets out the public policy participation model first presented at EWRC 2017, and sets up the fourth.

I’ve recently published five posts on three interrelated ideas, two projects one report and a workshop. That happened because the competition brought a Brussels Bubble Outsider to Brussels. Which happens to be one principle of the participation model I presented at the EWRC workshop. Full circle.

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works....exploit[s] a vulnerability in human psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop”... you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed

Engaging Europeans with the EU requires a new Brussels Bubble culture - fourth of several posts written in reaction to Luc van den Brand’s Reaching out to EU Citizens: A New Opportunity.

The second meeting Madeleina Kay had was with Luca Jahier. It went longer, and the wifi cut out midway this time - see the 2nd part of this lovely chat.

Chatbots are the digital democratizer of our day... natural, conversational interaction ... enabling participation ... for everyone... At the heart of creating chatbot ease of use is language design...

CFPs also have the capacity to help foster and strengthen non-parliamentary democratic structures and practices. As such, they should be supported and encouraged as part of a framework of further European democratization and civic integration.

give ourselves the following assignment: Government engagement must contribute to the quality of democracy.... provides a solid foundation for the design and execution of ... communication and participation forms and processes... an angle to critically review ... collaboration formats and tools. Participation is not an end in itself; reinforcing …

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

“Governments in Europe have been spending money for years on improving the availability of services online, and uptake was always below expectations... citizens didn’t want to use the online platform. The idea was to digitise a process without improving it.”... there is a much bigger prize ... an opportunity to use the internet as a platform for…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Resources and first thoughts from my recent ‘EU communities & policy participation’ workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC).

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

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…

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…

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

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

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…

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 ..…

platforms like Facebook have ... amassed unprecedented gatekeeping powers ... Can new decentralized systems with no single point of control... be a remedy? A new report ... concludes that “protecting the future of speech online involves not only these ambitious experiments in decentralization, but the cultivation of an ecosystem of competing publi…

Iris is the Conversational AI part of Proxima. This is where conversational experiences are created. It’s pretty easy to use as it’s one of few platforms that lets a user build with Entry Points, Conversation Nodes, Decision Points and advanced settings. It’s essentially a drag and drop experience — Up to a certain point.

New tools are needed to help organizations leverage on the power of ecosystems and enable participation of external entities in the business process. That’s what the Platform Design Toolkit is for: design systems that create much more value than they capture and motivate everybody to join.

public policy is being pushed into a realm where it’s not accessible... After PSA was adopted in Lucas County, Ohio... crimes committed by people awaiting trial fell, even as more defendants were released without having to post bail... Most governments ... didn’t appear to have the expertise to properly consider or answer questions about the pred…

How ideologues, opportunists, growth hackers, and internet marketers built a massive new universe of partisan news on the web and on Facebook... publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page... since T…

Communities for Newsroom - Guides on: Manage ModerationUse Smart MetricsBuild Newsroom Skills

Airbnb has been expanding its trust platform ... allowing them to translate their passions into professions... go to Airbnb’s site and click ... “experiences.” ... endless smorgasbord of people turning their passion into profit and their inner artisan into second careers.... grown tenfold this year... I’d like to say that Airbnb created 100 millio…