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DemocracySpot
At the intersection of participation and technology. By Tiago Peixoto. Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of any institutions with which I am or have been affiliated.
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Category Archives for civic tech
46 favorite reads on democracy, civic tech and a few other interesting things
I've recently been exchanging with some friends on a list of favorite reads from 2020. While I started with a short list, it quickly grew: after all, despite the pandemic, there has been lots of interesting stuff published in the areas that I care about throughout the year. While the final list of reads varies in terms of subjects, breadth, depth and methodological rigor, I picked these 46 for different reasons. These include my personal judgement of their contribution to the field of democracy, or simply a belief that some of these texts deserve more attention than they currently receive. Others are in the list because I find them particularly surprising or amusing.
As the list is long – and probably at this length, unhelpful to my friends – I tried to divide it into three categories: i) participatory and deliberative democracy, ii) civic tech and digital democracy, and iii) and miscellaneous (which is not really a category, let alone a very helpful one, I know). In any case, many of the titles are indicative of what the text is about, which should make it easier to navigate through the list.
These caveats aside, below is the list of some of my favorite books and articles published in 2020:
Participatory and Deliberative Democracy
While I still plan to make a similar list for representative democracy, this section of the list is intentionally focused on democratic innovations, with a certain emphasis on citizens' assemblies and deliberative modes of democracy. While this reflects my personal interests, it is also in part due to the recent surge of interest in citizens' assemblies and other modes of deliberative democracy, and the academic production that followed.
Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Landemore 2020)
Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions – Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020)
Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge (Matsusaka 2020)
Reflecting on Fifty Years of Democratic Theory – Carole Pateman in Conversation with Graham Smith (2020)
Democracy without shortcuts – Special Issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation (2020)
A Formal Theory of Democratic Deliberation (Chung & Duggan 2020)
Deliberative democracy in the age of serial crisis (Curato et al. 2020)
Does Deliberation Increase Public‐Spiritedness? (Wang et al. 2020)
Social deliberation systematically shifts resource allocation decisions by focusing on the fate of the least well-off (Ueshima et al. 2020)
Deliberation improves collective decisions: Experimental evidence from Kenya (Grillos 2020)
Is Deliberation an Antidote to Extreme Partisan Polarization? Reflections on "America in One Room" (Fishkin et al. 2020)
Do discussions in like-minded groups necessarily lead to more extreme opinions? Deliberative democracy and group polarization (Strandberg 2020)
Using Collective Intelligence to Solve Public Problems (Nesta/GovLab 2020)
The Challenge of Global Deliberative Democracy (Bermejo & Lee 2020)
Of democratic governance and revenue: Participatory institutions and tax generation in Brazil (Touchton et al. 2020)
On Civic Tech and Digital Democracy
2020 was the year where the field of civic tech seemed to take a democratic turn, from fixing potholes to fixing democracy.
Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (Bernholz et al. 2020)
The Unintended Consequences of Democratic Reforms: Electronic Voting and Criminal Violence in Brazil (Nieto-Matiz & Skigin 2020)
How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online (Lorenz-Spreen et al. 2020)
False equivalencies: Online activism from left to right (Freelon et al. 2020)
The (Minimal) Persuasive Advantage of Political Video over Text (Wittenberg et al. 2020)
Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions (Kennedy et al. 2020)
Multi-trait diversity of online groups improves geo-political forecasting accuracy as a function of group size (Pescetelli et al. 2020)
Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Impacts of 311 Services in Public Service Delivery (Xu & Tang 2020)
Political Dividends of Digital Participatory Governance: Evidence from Moscow Pothole Management (Gorgulu et al. 2020)
Linking Theories of Motivation, Game Mechanics, and Public Deliberation to Design an Online System for Participatory Budgeting (Gastil & Broghammer 2020)
What Happens to All These Hackathon Projects? – Identifying Factors to Promote Hackathon Project Continuation (Nolte et al. 2020) [spoiler, only about 5% of projects are continued after five months]
Access Granted: Facebook's Free Basics in Africa (Nothias 2020)
Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest (Nucera et al. 2020)
The Future of Digital Democracy (CitizenLab 2020)
Finally, a section as random as 2020.
Contested terrain: International development projects and countervailing power for the excluded (Fox 2020)
Insights from Transparency and Accountability Action Plans in Indonesia and Tanzania (Creighton et al. 2020)
Review of the evidence: increasing accountability and reducing corruption through government audits (J-PAL 2020)
Signals International Development (Public Digital 2020)
Political Partisanship Influences Behavioral Responses to Governors' Recommendations for COVID-19 Prevention in the United States (Grossman et al. 2020)
Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk (Harden et al. 2020)
Latent transparency and trust in government: Unexpected findings from two survey experiments (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2020)
Citizens as Complicits: Distrust in Politicians and Biased Social Dissemination of Political Information (Bøggild et al. 2020)
Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: evidence from three field experiments (Kalla & Broockman 2020)
Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting (Wasow 2020)
The Franchise, Policing, and Race: Evidence from Arrests Data and the Voting Rights Act (Facchini et al. 2020)
Making Black Lives Matter in academia: A Black feminist call for collective action against anti‐blackness in the academy (Bell et al. 2020)
Motivated reasoning and policy information: Politicians are more resistant to debiasing interventions than the general public (Christensen & Moynihan 2020)
Who enters politics and why? On the psychology of British politicians (Weinberg 2020)
Ignorance is Bliss? Age, Misinformation, and Support for Women's Representation (Burden & Ono 2020)
The effects of electoral Competition, party fragmentation, and air quality in Mexican Municipalities (Su et al. 2020)
The President Will See Whom Now? Presidential Engagement with Organized Interests (Miller 2020)
As mentioned before, the list is already too long. But if there's anything anyone thinks should absolutely be on this list, please do let me know.
January 13, 2021 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, collective intelligence, cyberactivism, deliberation, democracy, development, digital government, direct democracy, elections, empowerment, evidence, gender, governance, inclusiveness, Open Government, parliament, participation, Participatory Budgeting, partisanship, representation, responsiveness, right to information, sortition, tax morale, tax revenues, technology, transparency, trust	| Tags: academia, accountability, behavioral sciences, civic tech, civic technology, collective intelligence, deliberation, deliberative democracy, democracy, democratic theory, Free Basics, gender, online activism, online deliberation, open government, participatory budgeting, participatory democracy, race | Leave a comment
Virtual Parliaments in Times of Coronavirus: Flattening the Authoritarian Curve?
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, legislative bodies around the world have struggled to function. Meanwhile, from Europe, all the way to Australia and Pakistan, calls to ensure that national legislatures continue to operate abound. In the UK, over 100 MPs signed an open letter asking for the creation of a digital parliament to "maintain democratic traditions in accordance with social distancing." In the US, amidst media concerns of a "sidelined" Congress, dozens of House Democrats sent a letter to their leadership calling for a change in the rules to enable remote voting.
The disruption in legislative work caused by the pandemic has visibly impacted crisis response efforts. For instance, in Canada, the House of Commons delayed for weeks the vote on a critical wage bill, aimed at covering a percentage of employees' wages so that employers can keep them on the payroll. The key point of contention? Liberals wanted to vote via virtual parliament, while Conservatives asked for in-person participation.
The functioning of parliaments becomes all the more important as fears of executive overreach are revealed to be founded). Indeed, previous evidence suggests that a pandemic crisis is fertile ground for authoritarian drifts; and chronic abuses are unlikely to stop as the outbreak expands and a growing number of parliaments are unable to work.
Freedom of information for example – particularly relevant during such crises – is under assault. The Global Right to Information Rating shows that since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, countries on multiple continents have altered or lifted their "right to know" legislation. At the same time, a growing number of governments restrict journalistic coverage of the outbreak through threats and detentions.
In a context where traditional forms of collective action and resistance – such as social movements and protests – are constrained by physical distancing, parliaments should be the first line of defense in flattening the authoritarian curve. While innovative models of social activism are certainly emerging, they may not be sufficient to contain authoritarian drifts. To avoid rule of law giving way to rule by decree, parliaments must continue working, even if virtually.
The Brazilian Virtual House of Representatives
On March 11th, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Six days later, in one of the swiftest parliamentary responses, the Brazilian House of Representatives approved a normative resolution authorizing MPs to vote online and provided guidelines for the launch of a "virtual parliament".
The Office of the Clerk and the House's digital services (Department for Information Technology and Innovation, DITEC) immediately got to work on the technical solutions required by this rule change. The mobile application Infoleg, originally developed to follow up on the work of the House of Representatives, was repurposed to enable MPs' mobile phones, following authentication protocols, to function as remote devices for registering presence and casting votes. But Infoleg is more than an e-voting app: it integrates most of the information required by an MP to properly navigate parliamentary sessions, including the list of representatives that will discuss a bill, or the pending procedural motions involved in the deliberation of a matter. While MPs use an external videoconferencing system for their interventions during sittings, the critical systems for registering presence and votes are entirely developed and managed by the House's internal digital services.
On March 25th, eight days after enacting the new Rules of Procedure, the House of Representatives conducted the first online voting in its history. By April 9th ten virtual sessions had been held, with 15 pieces of legislation, six urgency motions and one constitutional amendment passed. Average attendance for these ten virtual sessions was 98.6% (503 out of 513 representatives), far above the in-person average (87.1%). The constitutional amendment, it seems, was the first ever to be approved by a legislative body through online voting. It was also one of the fastest legislative responses to the financial challenges generated by the pandemic – especially important given the delicate fiscal situation of the country.
Explaining the rapid transition
There is no single explanation of why some parliaments are struggling to function, while others are being more reactive. Yet in the case of Brazil, three enabling factors are worth highlighting.
Political response
Strong digital capacity does not guarantee a smooth transition to a virtual modus operandi. Take for instance Estonia, which has one of the most technologically savvy governments in the world and where online voting for elections is old news: as noted by Andy Williamson, Senior Researcher for the Inter Parliamentary Union, existing regulation prohibits remote sitting of the Estonian parliament. In other words, along with digital capacity, the shift to a virtual parliament may in many cases require political leadership to eliminate analog obstacles. In the Brazilian case, this included swift action by the Speaker of the House, who expedited a normative resolution that was rapidly approved by MPs across the political spectrum. This process, however, must be understood in its broader political context. The current relationship between the national Executive and Legislative is notoriously conflictual. It is therefore possible that the rapid response was also a preemptive move by the House to avoid executive overreach and to maintain political relevance during the crisis. Parliaments in similar situations may want to take note.
Administrative capacity
The importance of the administrative capacity of the Office of the Clerk (the Office) should not be understated. Amassing some of the most qualified civil servants in Brazil, it is the Office that makes political responses technically viable – examining constraints and opportunities and advising the House leadership on the most effective approaches. It should be noted that the adoption of the virtual parliament resolution was facilitated by existing legislation. Passed in October 2019 as a result of a shared vision between the House leadership and the Office of the Clerk, this legislation includes guidelines for a paperless legislative process.
Digital capacity
Finally, a key enabler of the rapid response by the Brazilian House was the existence of a highly qualified, in-house digital team (DITEC), with the mandate and resources to quickly redesign systems that were already developed , maintained and updated internally (e.g. Infoleg, remote voting for committees). The full implementation of the virtual parliament was by no means a small task, and involved DITEC's core teams on user experience, cybersecurity, application development, legislative informatics, voting and attendance systems, plenary operation (e.g. video streaming), help desk, and emergency response.
It is worth noting that DITEC's response builds on a tradition of excellence. The House of Representatives has for over a decade been a trailblazer in digital democracy, illustrated for instance by the 2009 launch of e-Democracia, a collaborative platform to engage citizens and civil society organisations in the lawmaking process.
In short, digital transformation does not happen overnight, and the House's timely response to pandemic-related challenges was in part due to in-house capacity built and honed over the years. (Full disclosure, I was an adviser to the e-Democracia program in its early days, when working on my research on digital parliaments).
(MP connects to virtual session)
Potential effects of virtual parliaments
It is too early to assess the effects of the pandemic on democratic institutions. The same is true for the medium- and long-term effects of legislatures' transitions to digital environments. But for the Brazilian case, we can hypothesize:
Effects on party politics
The virtualization of parliamentary procedures may lead to further strengthening of party leaders. First, given that MPs are no longer traveling to the capital, the number of in-person meetings, both formal and informal, is drastically reduced. This reinforces the coordination role of party leaders, already an important position in Brazil. Second, with sittings taking place virtually, for practical reasons the 'floor time' allocated to MPs is reduced, increasing the visibility of party leaders who also control the floor time allowed for their MPs.
The impact of this increased influence and visibility of party leaders is uncertain. On the one hand, in a multi-party system with 24 parties represented in the House, a strengthening of leaders' coordination roles may facilitate the management of legislative politics and even enhance House efficiency. On the other hand, it may weaken the position of a considerable contingent of representatives who work somewhat independently, across party lines. This could be particularly problematic for newly elected MPs who benefited from the support of political renewal movements, whose allegiances to party lines are weaker. This effect could be offset, however, by the stronger online presence of these new, often younger MPs who are used to engaging remotely with their constituents.
Effects on media coverage and third party oversight
As in most countries, the media coverage of politics in Brazil is centered in the capital city, with most journalists, offices and support staff based in Brasília. A good part of that infrastructure depends on in-person and informal exchanges between journalists and their sources, through hallway conversations, over coffee, or at social events. Civil society organisations follow a similar pattern, focusing their advocacy and oversight activities where most MPs are found. With a transition to virtual operation, economies of scale in terms of geographic location and in-person interactions are lost.
A potential secondary effect is that the House becomes less subject to scrutiny from the press and organized groups. Some CSO leaders have indeed expressed such concerns over the shift. José Antonio Moroni, leader of a coalition of social movements for political reform lamented to a local media outlet: "[…] before the MPs circulated in the corridors, and we managed, to a certain extent, to have a dialogue. Now, with this process, we get nothing." But organisations are reacting quickly, as described by a member of the Education Workers' Confederation: "We, for instance, already have a list of all the MPs, with e-mail, WhatsApp details, and now we are incentivizing our member organizations not only to maintain their communication with MPs, but actually to intensify the online pressure."
More digital politics (and fake news)
As the Brazilian parliament moves to an online environment and physical distancing measures continue to be implemented (with varying degrees of success), we should also expect that more political conversations will take place online. This is not necessarily good news, particularly given that some studies suggest that Brazil is particularly fertile ground for fake news. Add to this a combination of a growing polarization between the branches of government, and the infodemic generated by the current crisis, and you have all the ingredients for accelerating the fake news arms race in the country. As we argued in a recent report, a possible consequence of this arms race is a further and unhealthy shift of the focus of public debates: towards disputes over the authenticity of statements and evidence, reducing the time and energy left to discuss possible actions and solutions to problems.
Whether these hypotheses are validated or not remains an empirical question. These effects become more probable the longer that parliament is obliged to work remotely – a function of the length of the crisis.
For national legislatures like Brazil's, the hypothetical adverse effects of a virtual parliament are dwarfed by the possibility of undermining the structure of checks and balances. In other words, these potential effects should be weighed against the possibility of a closed parliament.
The temporary transition to an online environment should also be regarded as an opportunity to explore options for a more open parliament going forward. For example, virtual citizen panels, consisting of randomly selected citizens representing a microcosm of the population, could be convened online to advise on divisive issues including crisis response measures (after all, if parliament can function in a decentralized manner, why not consider the same for a more participatory model of politics?) Such an effort – which would, again, require a political decision by the House leadership – would put the parliament at the forefront of democratic innovations.
In this respect, from a digital democracy perspective, the Brazilian case is one more example of the prospects and limitations of technology for achieving democratic aspirations. The fact that the House adopted a virtual model is critical at this moment. Yet it does not render the legislative any more transparent, representative or participatory than before. Without reforms, digital practices will always mirror their analog origins, whether good and bad. International organizations, donors and tech enthusiasts should not therefore delude themselves: establishing virtual parliaments will do nothing for national legislatures that suffer from pre-existing conditions or that are already on life support. As some recent events attest, national parliaments themselves can be accomplices in the crossing of democratic lines during the coronavirus response.
From a more technical perspective, democracy scholars and practitioners (myself included), have long been aware of the importance of face-to-face interactions for democratic processes. The limitations of existing solutions for digital replication of these interactions was no secret. What few of us expected, however, was how fast democratic praxis would have to transition to a virtual space in order to maintain basic functioning. This applies not only to legislative procedures but also to democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting and citizens assemblies. Unless one believes this pandemic is a one-off with short-term consequences only, the current context reveals the need to invest time and resources in reducing, at least partially, the dependency of democratic processes on face-to-face interaction. If the question of how to best achieve online participation and deliberation at scale was once a niche area, this is no longer the case.
On a more futuristic note: could virtual parliaments be an additional source of resilience in the case of unilateral action by any given executive? Consider the case of Estonia's Digital Embassies program. Based on cloud technology and off-site servers based in Luxembourg, the program aims to ensure the functioning of critical government functions regardless of Estonia's territorial integrity. Historically, parliaments have been shut down through coercion of parliamentarians and the closure of legislatives' physical spaces. But what happens if a parliament can work virtually, with MPs geographically dispersed within and outside their territory? Again, it is an empirical question that – one hopes – won't need to be answered anytime soon.
Finally, and back to the Brazilian case: as previously mentioned, several countries have altered or lifted their "right to know" legislation during the crisis. The Brazilian President recently enacted a provisional measure temporarily suspending deadlines for answering certain information requests from the public. The Speaker of the House has already announced his intention to reverse the measure in parliament. While the final result is hard to anticipate, one thing is certain: the next battle for the right to information in Brazil will take place online.
GovLab – CrowdLaw Communiqué: Continuity of Legislatures
OECD – How can digital tools support deliberation?
Hansard Society – How are parliaments responding to the coronavirus pandemic?
The Inter-Parliamentary Union – Parliaments in a time of pandemic
April 21, 2020 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, Brazil, civic tech, deliberation, e-voting, Internet, legislative, parliament, representation, right to information, third party monitoring	| Tags: Brazil, coronavirus, COVID-19, democracy, digital parliament, national legislatures, parliament continuity, virtual parliament | 6 Comments
2020 and beyond: 11 predictions at the intersection of technology and citizen engagement
pic by @jmuniz on Unsplah
The rapid evolution of digital technologies has been changing relationships between governments and citizens around the world. These shifts make it the right time to pose the key question a new World Bank publication explores:
Will digital technologies, both those that are already widespread and those that are still emerging, have substantial impacts on the way citizens engage and the ways in which power is sought, used, or contested?
The report, Emerging Digital Technologies and Citizen Participation, benefits from the insights of 30 leading scholars and practitioners, and explores what technology might mean for citizen engagement and politics in the coming years.
The report argues that, regardless of lower technology penetration levels, and given more malleable governance contexts, developing countries may be more influenced by the effects of emerging technologies than older states with greater rigidity and legacy technologies. Digitally influenced citizen engagement is potentially a "leapfrog" area in which developing nations may exploit emerging technologies before the wealthier parts of the world.
But countries can leapfrog to worse futures, not only better ones. The report also conveys concerns about the negative effects digital technologies can have on the governance of nations. Yet, despite emerging challenges, it contends that new and better citizen engagement approaches are possible.
What is missing from public discourse is a discussion of the wide range of options that citizens and decision-makers can call upon to enhance their interactions and manage risks. To consider these options, the report makes 11 predictions regarding the effects of technology on citizen engagement in the coming years, and their policy implications. It also offers six measures that would be prudent for governments to take to mitigate risks and leverage opportunities that technological development brings about.
None of the positive scenarios predicted will emerge without deliberate and intentional actions to support them. And the extent to which they can be shaped to further societal goals will depend on constructive dialogue between governments and citizens themselves. Ultimately, this new publication aims to contribute to this dialogue, so that both developing and developed countries are more likely to leap into better futures.
Text co-authored with Tom Steinberg, originally cross-posted from the World Bank's Governance for Development blog. You can also read another article about this report in Apolitical here. While I'm at it: if you work in public service and care about making government work better, I highly recommend Apolitical, a peer-to-peer learning platform for government, sharing smart ideas in policy globally. Join for free here .
December 27, 2019 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: activism, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, collective intelligence, cyberactivism, deliberation, democracy, development, governance, ICT4D, participation, service delivery, sortition, technology, Uncategorized	| Tags: activism, augmented reality, blockchain, bots, citizen engagement, civic technology, cyberactivism, fake news, ID4D, Internet, participation, participatory democracy, political parties, social credits, Social Media, technology, World Bank | Leave a comment
NOSSAS as the New Civil Society: Online, Offline, and as a Platform
The other day, a friend of mine who was going to speak at a conference asked me for good cases of civic tech "that works". I didn't hesitate, and advised him to get in touch with the people at NOSSAS, a Brazilian organization that combines online and offline collective action to promote social change (full disclosure, I am a member of their board). Until now, however, it has been a challenge to convey to unfamiliar audiences what the organization does, and how. This is why I am particularly glad to see that they have produced a short documentary (16 mins) "NOSSAS: a Laboratory of Other Futures", which provides a glimpse into the organisation's thinking and work. So, adding to the video, here are some of the reasons why I think this is a great example of a civic tech organization:
Blending online and offline: "oneline" activism
To my knowledge, no other organization combines online and offline action better than NOSSAS, with online mobilization often used as a gateway to more intensive (and offline) types of participation.
NOSSAS' successful campaign in the State of Sao Paulo for the creation of the first Police Station dedicated to combating violence against women.
Along with their digital campaigns, they will often mobilize citizens to take offline action. This includes, for instance, attending legislative votes and exerting pressure on elected officials, or taking part in more performative interventions that draw attention from the mainstream media and the population as a whole.
Beyond the obvious target
Understanding that policy change often requires more than a simple stroke of a pen, NOSSAS' engagement with public officials goes beyond the decision-makers who are formally entitled to make the policy change (e.g. mayor, governor). Their initiatives consistently target the ensemble of actors (e.g. legislators, public prosecutors) who may have an influence over a policy decision or implementation (either directly or indirectly).
NOSSAS' rich combination of online and offline tactics of popular mobilization, together with this well-calculated engagement of state actors, creates multiple pressure points for governments to respond.
Civil Society as a Platform
A common denominator among the majority of traditional civil society organizations (CSOs) is the self-appointed representation of a specific constituency. In other words, these CSOs will often represent a fixed set of interests of a given constituency by which the CSOs have neither been elected nor authorized. However, one could argue that – for better or for worse – in a period in which citizens increasingly engage directly in political action through a variety of means, the importance of these traditional CSOs may be reduced at worse, and redefined at best.
In this respect, NOSSAS is a great example of emerging CSOs that are more adapted to their time. As such, these new CSOs do not claim to represent the interests of a certain constituency. Instead, they play the role of a platform that amplifies the voices of individuals, facilitating their engagement in collective (connective?) action on a multiplicity of issues they care about.
Structured knowledge
NOSSAS does have great knowledge of two key ingredients for civic tech: 1) how to mobilize citizens, and 2) how to get governments to respond. But what I find particularly interesting is that they translated this knowledge into a structured methodology to provide online and offline support to users of NOSSAS' platforms to further their causes.
Does it work? Some evidence suggests that it does. For instance, Pressure Pan is a platform that allows any citizen to initiate collective action to exert pressure on the government regarding a particular agenda (e.g. public safety, mobility rights). And as we documented in Civic Tech in the Global South, while not all of the hundreds of campaigns on Pressure Pan can benefit from specific support from NOSSAS, when they do they are three times more likely to succeed.
A/B testing is similar to an online version of a randomized controlled trial. One of the main differences however is that A/B testing is low-cost, easily deployed (when you have the expertise), and real-time. Yet very few civic tech organizations take advantage of that opportunity. This not the case for NOSSAS: at any given point they are running a number of A/B tests, which help them to refine their mobilization tactics on an ongoing basis. If this sounds like a simple detail, it is not. Beyond generating precious knowledge for the organization's core functions, the capacity to run A/B tests is often a good litmus test for whether organizations know how to leverage technology beyond the most obvious uses.
And finally, unlike many civic tech initiatives, NOSSAS does have a solid track record of results, a few of which are featured in the video, which you can watch below:
Before joining the board of Nossas, I was already a fan of the work they do: online, offline, and as a platform. I look forward to their work in 2018.
For more about Nossas, also read this excellent post by Felipe Estefan from the Omidyar Network.
December 30, 2017 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, activism, Brazil, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, cyberactivism, responsiveness, technology, third party monitoring	| Tags: activism, Brazil, civic tech, civic technology, civil society, cyberactivism, Nossas, technology | Leave a comment
Catching up: civic tech research, crisis of participation in Brazil, podcasts and more
picture by tollwerk on flickr
The dream consultancy
The Hewlett Foundation is seeking consultants to help design a potential, longer-term research collaborative to study the application of behavioral insights to nudge governments to respond to citizen feedback. This is just fantastic and deserves a blog post of its own. Hopefully I will be able to do that before the EOI period ends.
Rise and fall of participatory democracy in Brazil?
In an excellent article for Open Democracy, Thamy Pogrebinschi and Talita Tanscheit ask what happened to citizen participation in Brazil. The authors note that "The two main pillars on which institutional innovations in Brazil had been erected – extensive institutionalization and a strong civil society – have not been enough to prevent a functioning system of social participation being torn to shreds in little more than a year."
I have been asked for my take on the issue more than once. Personally, I am not surprised, despite all the institutionalization and the strength of civil society. Given the current Brazilian context, I would be surprised if the participatory spaces the article examines (councils and conferences) remained unaffected.
Playing the devil's advocate, this period of crisis may also be an opportunity to reflect on how policy councils and conferences could innovate themselves. While they extremely important, one hypothesis is that these structures failed to appropriately channel societal concerns and demands that later exploded into a political crisis, leading to the current situation.
Provocations aside, it is just too early to tell whether this is the definitive death of conferences and councils. And my sense is that their future will be contingent upon two key points: i) the direction that Brazilian politics take following the 2018 general election (e.g. progressive x populist/authoritarian), ii) the extent to which councils and conferences can adapt to the growing disintermediation in activism that we observe today.
The Business Model of Civic Tech?
If you are working in the civic tech space, you probably came across a new report commissioned by the Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation, "Scaling Civic Tech: Paths to a Sustainable Future." As highlighted by Christopher Wilson at the Methodical Snark, while not much in the report is surprising for civic technologists, it does provide the reader with a good understanding of the expectations of funders on the issue of financial sustainability.
When thinking about business models of civic tech efforts, I wonder how much money and energy were devoted to having governments open up their datasets while neglecting the issue of how these governments procure technology. If 10% of those efforts had been dedicated to reforming the way governments procure technology, many of those in the civic tech space would now be less dependent on foundations' grants (or insights on business models).
Having said this, I am a bit bothered by the debate of business models when it comes to democratic goods. After all, what would happen to elections if they depended on business models (or multiple rounds of foundations' grants)?
Walking the talk: participatory grant making?
A new report commissioned by the Ford Foundation examines whether the time has come for participatory grant making. The report, authored by Cynthia Gibson, explores the potential use of participatory approaches by foundations, and offers a "starter" framework to inform the dialogue on the subject.
Well-informed by the literature on participatory and deliberative democracy, the report also touches upon the key question of whether philanthropic institutions, given their tax benefits, owe the public a voice in decisions they make. If you are not convinced, this Econtalk podcast with Bob Reich (Stanford) on foundations and philanthropy is rather instructive. There is also a great anecdote in the podcast that illustrates the point for public voice, as described by Reich:
"So, in the final days of creating the Open Society Institute and associated foundations, there was disagreement amongst the staff that Soros had hired about exactly what their program areas, or areas of focus would be. And, to resolve a disagreement, Soros allegedly slammed his fist on the table and said, 'Well, at the end of the day, it's my money. We're going to do it my way.' And a program officer that he'd hired said, 'Well, actually Mr. Soros, about 30% or 40% of it would have been the taxpayer's money. So, I think some other people actually have a say in what you do, here, too.' And he was fired the next week."
Democracy podcasts
Talking about podcasts, the Real Democracy Now Podcast is fantastic. It is definitely one of the best things out there for practitioners and scholars working with citizen engagement.
Although broader in terms of the subjects covered, Talking Politics by David Runciman and Catherine Carr is another great option.
Other tips are more than welcome!
And this is brilliant…
(via @oso)
Elinor Ostrom's Rules for Radicals by Derek Wall (@Anothergreen). https://t.co/oBS4ydUvZp pic.twitter.com/KiceVwo9jw
— Teemu Leinonen (@teemul) December 1, 2017
Other interesting stuff you may have missed
Study analyzing Pew survey data suggests a "gateway effect" where slacktivism by the politically uninterested may lead to greater political activity offline
Seeing the World Through the Other's Eye: An Online Intervention Reducing Ethnic Prejudice
Smartphone monitoring streamlined information flows and improved inspection rates at public clinics across Punjab (ht @coscrovedent)
The Unintended Effects of Bottom-Up Accountability: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Peru
Literature review: does public reporting in the health sector influence quality, patient and provider's perspective?
December 4, 2017 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: activism, behavioral economics, Brazil, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, crisis, cyberactivism, democracy, foundations, grant making, participation, research, responsiveness, technology	| Tags: behavioral economics, Brazil, civic tech, civic technology, Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, national policy conference, national policy council, nudge, participatory grant making, philanthropy, Talita Tanscheit, technology, Thamy Pogrebinschi | Leave a comment
Techniques and Technologies for Mobilizing Citizens: Do They Work?
Techniques for mobilizing citizens to vote in elections have become highly sophisticated in large part thanks to get-out-the-vote (GOTV) research, with fascinating experimental evidence from interventions to increase turnout. Until recently, the use of these techniques has been mostly limited to electoral processes, often resorting to resource intensive tactics such as door-to-door canvassing and telemarketing campaigns. But as digital technologies such as email and SMS lower the costs for targeting and contacting individuals, the adaptation of these practices to participatory processes is becoming increasingly common. This leads to the question: how effective are GOTV-type efforts when using technology outside of the electoral realm?
One of the first (if not the first) efforts to bring together technology and GOTV techniques to non-electoral processes took place in the participatory budgeting (PB) process of the municipality of Ipatinga in Brazil in 2005. An automated system of targeted phone calls to landlines was deployed, with a recorded voice message from the mayor informing residents of the time and the location of the next PB meeting closest to them. Fast forward over a decade later, and New Yorkers can receive personalized text messages on their phones indicating the nearest PB polling location. Rather than a mere coincidence, the New York case illustrates a growing trend in participatory initiatives that – consciously or not – combine technology with traditional GOTV techniques to mobilize participation.
However, and unlike GOTV in elections, little is known about the effects of these efforts in participatory processes, the reasons for which I briefly speculated about in a previous post. We have just published a study in the British Journal of Political Science that, we hope, starts to reduce this gap between practice and knowledge. Entitled "A Get-Out-the-Vote Experiment on the World's Largest Participatory Budgeting Vote in Brazil", the study is co-authored by Jonathan Mellon, Fredrik M. Sjoberg and myself. The experiment was conducted in close collaboration with Rio Grande do Sul's State Government (Brazil), which holds the world's largest participatory budgeting process.
In the experiment, over 43,000 citizens were randomly assigned to receive email and text messages encouraging them to take part in the PB voting process. We used voting records to assess the impact of these messages on turnout and support for public investments. The turnout effect we document in the study is substantially larger than what has been found in most previous GOTV studies, and particularly those focusing on the effect of technologies like email and SMS. The increase in participation, however, did not alter which projects were selected through the PB vote: voters in the control and treatment groups shared the same preferences. In the study, we also assessed whether different message framing (e.g. intrinsic versus extrinsic) mattered. Not that much, we found, and a lottery incentive treatment had the opposite effect to what many might expect. Overall, our experiment suggests that tech-enabled GOTV approaches in participatory processes are rather promising if increasing levels of participation is one of the goals. But the "more research is needed" disclaimer, as usual, applies.
You can find the final study (gated version) here, and the pre-published (open) version here.
November 15, 2017 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, e-voting, evaluation, get-out-the-vote, GOTV, i-voting, mobile, Participatory Budgeting, RCTs, research, technology	| Tags: Brazil, experiment, get-out-the-vote, GOTV, mobile, mobilization, participatory budgeting, research, Rio Grande do Sul, technology | 1 Comment
Catching up (again!) on DemocracySpot
It's been a while since the last post here. In compensation, it's not been a bad year in terms of getting some research out there. First, we finally managed to publish "Civic Tech in the Global South: Assessing Technology for the Public Good." With a foreword by Beth Noveck, the book is edited by Micah Sifry and myself, with contributions by Evangelia Berdou, Martin Belcher, Jonathan Fox, Matt Haikin, Claudia Lopes, Jonathan Mellon and Fredrik Sjoberg.
The book is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of twenty-three information and communication technology (ICT) platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery. Focusing on empirical studies of initiatives in the global south, the authors highlight both citizen uptake (yelp) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (teeth). The first evaluation looks at U-Report in Uganda, a mobile platform that runs weekly large-scale polls with young Ugandans on a number of issues, ranging from access to education to early childhood development. The following evaluation takes a closer look at MajiVoice, an initiative that allows Kenyan citizens to report, through multiple channels, complaints with regard to water services. The third evaluation examines the case of Rio Grande do Sul's participatory budgeting – the world's largest participatory budgeting system – which allows citizens to participate either online or offline in defining the state's yearly spending priorities. While the comparative study has a clear focus on the dimension of government responsiveness, the evaluations examine civic technology initiatives using five distinct dimensions, or lenses. The choice of these lenses is the result of an effort bringing together researchers and practitioners to develop an evaluation framework suitable to civic technology initiatives.
The book was a joint publication by The World Bank and Personal Democracy Press. You can download the book for free here.
Women create fewer online petitions than men — but they're more successful
Another recent publication was a collaboration between Hollie R. Gilman, Jonathan Mellon, Fredrik Sjoberg and myself. By examining a dataset covering Change.org online petitions from 132 countries, we assess whether online petitions may help close the gap in participation and representation between women and men. Tony Saich, director of Harvard's Ash Center for Democratic Innovation (publisher of the study), puts our research into context nicely:
The growing access to digital technologies has been considered by democratic scholars and practitioners as a unique opportunity to promote participatory governance. Yet, if the last two decades is the period in which connectivity has increased exponentially, it is also the moment in recent history that democratic growth has stalled and civic spaces have shrunk. While the full potential of "civic technologies" remains largely unfulfilled, understanding the extent to which they may further democratic goals is more pressing than ever. This is precisely the task undertaken in this original and methodologically innovative research. The authors examine online petitions which, albeit understudied, are one of the fastest growing types of political participation across the globe. Drawing from an impressive dataset of 3.9 million signers of online petitions from 132 countries, the authors assess the extent to which online participation replicates or changes the gaps commonly found in offline participation, not only with regards to who participates (and how), but also with regards to which petitions are more likely to be successful. The findings, at times counter-intuitive, provide several insights for democracy scholars and practitioners alike. The authors hope this research will contribute to the larger conversation on the need of citizen participation beyond electoral cycles, and the role that technology can play in addressing both new and persisting challenges to democratic inclusiveness.
But what do we find? Among other interesting things, we find that while women create fewer online petitions than men, they're more successful at it! This article in the Washington Post summarizes some of our findings, and you can download the full study here.
Other studies that were recently published include:
The Effect of Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen Participation (Public Administration Review)
What effect does bureaucratic responsiveness have on citizen participation? Since the 1940s, attitudinal measures of perceived efficacy have been used to explain participation. The authors develop a "calculus of participation" that incorporates objective efficacy—the extent to which an individual's participation actually has an impact—and test the model against behavioral data from the online application Fix My Street (n = 399,364). A successful first experience using Fix My Street is associated with a 57 percent increase in the probability of an individual submitting a second report, and the experience of bureaucratic responsiveness to the first report submitted has predictive power over all future report submissions. The findings highlight the importance of responsiveness for fostering an active citizenry while demonstrating the value of incidentally collected data to examine participatory behavior at the individual level.
Does online voting change the outcome? Evidence from a multi-mode public policy referendum (Electoral Studies)
Do online and offline voters differ in terms of policy preferences? The growth of Internet voting in recent years has opened up new channels of participation. Whether or not political outcomes change as a consequence of new modes of voting is an open question. Here we analyze all the votes cast both offline (n = 5.7 million) and online (n = 1.3 million) and compare the actual vote choices in a public policy referendum, the world's largest participatory budgeting process, in Rio Grande do Sul in June 2014. In addition to examining aggregate outcomes, we also conducted two surveys to better understand the demographic profiles of who chooses to vote online and offline. We find that policy preferences of online and offline voters are no different, even though our data suggest important demographic differences between offline and online voters.
We still plan to publish a few more studies this year, one looking at digitally-enabled get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts, and two others examining the effects of participatory governance on citizens' willingness to pay taxes (including a fun experiment in 50 countries across all continents).
In the meantime, if you are interested in a quick summary of some of our recent research findings, this 30 minutes video of my keynote at the last TicTEC Conference in Florence should be helpful.
October 2, 2017 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, activism, Africa, big data, Brazil, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, cyberactivism, democracy, e-government, e-voting, efficacy, empowerment, equality, evaluation, evidence, gender, i-voting, ICT4D, Internet, Open Government, Participatory Budgeting, petitions, political efficacy, responsiveness, service delivery, technology, World Bank	| Tags: accountability, Brazil, change.org, civic technology, e-participation, e-petition, e-voting, evidence, i-voting, inclusiveness, Internet, Kenya, Latin America, mobile, participatory budgeting, participatory democracy, research, responsiveness, technology | Leave a comment
New Papers Published: FixMyStreet and the World's Largest Participatory Budgeting
Voting in Rio Grande do Sul's Participatory Budgeting (picture by Anderson Lopes)
Here are two new published papers that my colleagues Jon Mellon, Fredrik Sjoberg and myself have been working on.
The first, The Effect of Bureaucratic Responsiveness on Citizen Participation, published in Public Administration Review, is – to our knowledge – the first study to quantitatively assess at the individual level the often-assumed effect of government responsiveness on citizen engagement. It also describes an example of how the data provided through digital platforms may be leveraged to better understand participatory behavior. This is the fruit of a research collaboration with MySociety, to whom we are extremely thankful.
Below is the abstract:
An earlier, ungated version of the paper can be found here.
The second paper, Does Online Voting Change the Outcome? Evidence from a Multi-mode Public Policy Referendum, has just been published in Electoral Studies. In an earlier JITP paper (ungated here) looking at Rio Grande do Sul State's Participatory Budgeting – the world's largest – we show that, when compared to offline voting, online voting tends to attract participants who are younger, male, of higher income and educational attainment, and more frequent social media users. Yet, one question remained: does the inclusion of new participants in the process with a different profile change the outcomes of the process (i.e. which projects are selected)? Below is the abstract of the paper.
The extent to which these findings are transferable to other PB processes that combine online and offline voting remains an empirical question. In the meantime, nonetheless, these findings suggest a more nuanced view of the potential effects of digital channels as a supplementary means of engagement in participatory processes. I hope to share an ungated version of the paper in the coming days.
March 5, 2017 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: big data, Brazil, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, crowdsourcing, data, deliberation, democracy, democrat, e-voting, efficacy, evaluation, evidence, i-voting, inclusiveness, Internet, methods, Participatory Budgeting, political efficacy, predictors of participation, redistribution, research, responsiveness, social media, technology	| Tags: civic technology, fixmystreet, Internet, participatory budgeting, political efficacy, political participation, research, technology | 2 Comments
Catching Up on DemocracySpot
It's been a while, so here's a miscellaneous post with things I would normally share on DemocracySpot.
Yesterday the beta version of the Open Government Research Exchange (OGRX) was launched. Intended as a hub for research on innovations in governance, the OGRX is a joint initiative by NYU's GovLab, MySociety and the World Bank's Digital Engagement Evaluation Team (DEET) (which, full disclosure, I lead). As the "beta" suggests, this is an evolving project, and we look forward to receiving feedback from those who either work with or benefit from research in open government and related fields. You can read more about it here.
Today we also launched the Open Government Research mapping. Same story, just "alpha" version. There is a report and a mapping tool that situates different types of research across the opengov landscape. Feedback on how we can improve the mapping tool – or tips on research that we should include – is extremely welcome. More background about this effort, which brings together Global Integrity, Results for Development, GovLAB, Results for Development and the World Bank, can be found here.
Also, for those who have not seen it yet, the DEET team also published the Ev aluation Guide for Digital Citizen Engagement a couple of months ago. Commissioned and overseen by DEET, the guide was developed and written by Matt Haikin (lead author), Savita Bailur, Evangelia Berdou, Jonathan Dudding, Cláudia Abreu Lopes, and Martin Belcher.
And here is a quick roundup of things I would have liked to have written about since my last post had I been a more disciplined blogger:
A field experiment in Rural Kenya finds that "elite control over planning institutions can adapt to increased mobilization and participation." I tend to disagree a little with the author's conclusion that emphasizes the role of "power dynamics that allow elites to capture such institutions" to explain his findings (some of the issues seem to be a matter of institutional design). In any case, it is a great study and I strongly recommend the reading.
A study examining a community-driven development program in Afghanistan finds a positive effect on access to drinking water and electricity, acceptance of democratic processes, perceptions of economic wellbeing, and attitudes toward women. However, effects on perceptions of government performance were limited or short-lived.
A great paper by Paolo de Renzio and Joachim Wehner reviews the literature on "The Impacts of Fiscal Openness". It is a must-read for transparency researchers, practitioners and advocates. I just wish the authors had included some research on the effects of citizen participation on tax morale.
Also related to tax, "Consumers as Tax Auditors" is a fascinating paper on how citizens can take part in efforts to reduce tax evasion while participating in a lottery.
Here is a great book about e-Voting and other technology developments in Estonia. Everybody working in the field of technology and governance knows Estonia does an amazing job, but information about it is often scattered and, sometimes, of low quality. This book, co-authored by my former colleague Kristjan Vassil, addresses this gap and is a must-read for anybody working with technology in the public sector.
Finally, I got my hands on the pictures of the budget infograffitis (or data murals) in Cameroon, an idea that emerged a few years ago when I was involved in a project supporting participatory budgeting in Yaoundé (which also did the Open Spending Cameroon). I do hope that this idea of bringing data visualizations to the offline world catches up. After all, that is valuable data in a citizen-readable format.
picture by ASSOAL
I guess that's it for now.
April 29, 2016 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cameroon, civic tech, Kenya, tax, tax morale, technology, Uncategorized	| Tags: accountability, citizen engagement, evaluation, Internet, open government, participatory budgeting, technology | 1 Comment
New IDS Journal – 9 Papers in Open Government
The new IDS Bulletin is out. Edited by Rosemary McGee and Duncan Edwards, this is the first open access version of the well-known journal by the Institute of Development Studies. It brings eight new studies looking at a variety of open government issues, ranging from uptake in digital platforms to government responsiveness in civic tech initiatives. Below is a brief presentation of this issue:
Open government and open data are new areas of research, advocacy and activism that have entered the governance field alongside the more established areas of transparency and accountability. In this IDS Bulletin, articles review recent scholarship to pinpoint contributions to more open, transparent, accountable and responsive governance via improved practice, projects and programmes in the context of the ideas, relationships, processes, behaviours, policy frameworks and aid funding practices of the last five years. They also discuss questions and weaknesses that limit the effectiveness and impact of this work, offer a series of definitions to help overcome conceptual ambiguities, and identify hype and euphemism. The contributions – by researchers and practitioners – approach contemporary challenges of achieving transparency, accountability and openness from a wide range of subject positions and professional and disciplinary angles. Together these articles give a sense of what has changed in this fast-moving field, and what has not – this IDS Bulletin is an invitation to all stakeholders to take stock and reflect.
The ambiguity around the 'open' in governance today might be helpful in that its very breadth brings in actors who would otherwise be unlikely adherents. But if the fuzzier idea of 'open government' or the allure of 'open data' displace the task of clear transparency, hard accountability and fairer distribution of power as what this is all about, then what started as an inspired movement of governance visionaries may end up merely putting a more open face on an unjust and unaccountable status quo.
Among others, the journal presents an abridged version of a paper by Jonathan Fox and myself on digital technologies and government responsiveness (for full version download here).
Below is a list of all the papers:
Introduction: Opening Governance – Change, Continuity and Conceptual Ambiguity
Rosie McGee, Duncan Edwards
When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?
Tiago Peixoto, Jonathan Fox
ICTs Help Citizens Voice Concerns over Water – Or Do They?
Katharina Welle, Jennifer Williams, Joseph Pearce
When Does the State Listen?
Miguel Loureiro, Aalia Cassim, Terence Darko, Lucas Katera, Nyambura Salome
'You Have to Raise a Fist!': Seeing and Speaking to the State in South Africa
Elizabeth Mills
The Right of Access to Information: Exploring Gender Inequities
Laura Neuman
Men and Women of Words: How Words Divide and Connect the Bunge La Mwananchi Movement in Kenya
David Calleb Otieno, Nathaniel Kabala, Patta Scott-Villiers, Gacheke Gachihi, Diana Muthoni Ndung'u
Test It and They Might Come: Improving the Uptake of Digital Tools in Transparency and Accountability Initiatives
Christopher Wilson, Indra de Lanerolle
The Dark Side of Digital Politics: Understanding the Algorithmic Manufacturing of Consent and the Hindering of Online Dissidence
January 27, 2016 by Tiago Peixoto	Categories: accountability, activism, Africa, Budget Transparency, citizen engagement, civic tech, collective action, crowdsourcing, cyberactivism, data, development, empowerment, evaluation, evidence, governance, ICT4D, Internet, mobile, open data, Open Government, technology, transparency	| Tags: citizen engagement, civic technlogy, development, IDS, open data, open government, technology | 1 Comment


30 May 2012, New work, Would you like to leave a comment?
Here's a sneak preview of a new piece I've just been making. Pictured is a small natural edge yew bowl being turned on the lathe – it looks tiny compared to the one featured in my last blog post! Also in the pipeline are some burr oak fruit bowls which look simply gorgeous and a small natural edge elm burr.


Vincent Y, "Vinnie" Ware, Sr. of Felton passed away at the Delaware Hospice Center in Milford on December 5, 2010 at the age of 76. He was a Life Member of the Felton Community Fire Company having joined on December 3, 1952 and completed his 25 years of service on December 3, 1977. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Anna B. Ware of Felton, son Vincent "Vince" Y. Ware, Jr., daughter Melanie Alexander, and 3 sisters Margaret Ware, Ruth Kemp & Jean Kish all of Felton.


text:
Fataneh Soleimani (فتانه سلیمانی), née le 3 avril 1956 (14 favardin 1335 du calendrier persan) à Téhéran est une chanteuse pop iranienne. Elle a commencé à chanter au début des années 1970 et, après la révolution de 1979, elle a émigré à Los Angeles.

Fataneh était l'une des chanteuses les plus actives des années 80 et 90. De sorte qu'elle est l'une des chanteuses iraniennes les plus populaires. Fataneh a été absente de la scène pendant plusieurs années. Puis elle s'est installée à Londres où elle a donné plusieurs concerts. Elle a de nouveau publié un album (Bavaram Kon ou Believe me) en 2002. Depuis 2016, elle a publié plusieurs singles.

Elle a joué dans le film Djinn sorti en 2008. Mais on prendra garde de ne pas la confondre avec une autre actrice nommée Fataneh, qui a joué dans Mashadi Ibad en 1956.

Namehraboon
Nameharboun, sur l'album Gol va atash, est l'une des chansons les plus connues de Fataneh. Les paroles de Nameharabon sont de  et la musique est composée par Hassan Shamaizadeh. Nameharboun parle d'une relation amoureuse malsaine, qui peut être considérée comme le modèle d'une relation toxique.

Albums

 Tafsir, Caltex records, 1988.
 Gol Va Atash, , 1990.
 Sang, Taraneh, 1991.
 Havar havar, Pars video, 1992.
 Gonah, 1992.
 Sallar, Taraneh, 1993.
 Koli, Caltex records, 1994.
 Ghanariha, Taraneh, 1995.
 Believe me (Bavaram Kon), 2002.

Singles

 Aziztarin, Avang music, 2016.
 Del Sang, Avang music, 2018.
 Vase Eneh, Taraneh Enterprises, 2021.

Références

Liens externes
Discographie complète sur iranlyric.com.

Chanteuse iranienne
Naissance en 1956
Naissance à Téhéran

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


You may already know how powerful NLP is.
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Do you remember the Entertainments Committee when you studied at Langham Tower?
Graham Fraser and friends still to this day keep entertaining old friends by maintaining their link with the University and organising a reunion every 3 years.
This group was originally set up for those who studied at Langham between 1966-1969 and has grown in popularity and now has over 80 friends attending the reunions.
Would you like to join this society? Contact us and we will put you in touch with Graham.
Graham Fraser is the contact for this society. If you wish to pass a message on to Graham please contact us at alumni@sunderland.ac.uk.


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text:
Q: Changing a tile's appearance on hover or press In a GridView (Metro-style XAML app), I want one of my tiles to have a VCR-style "pause" icon on it. But when the user hovers over the button (with the mouse) or presses the button, I want the icon to change to "play". (I want to give subtle cues to reinforce the idea that it's paused now, but pressing the button will start playing.)
How can I detect whether the mouse is over the tile, and whether the tile is pressed, so I can change my tile's appearance?
Ideally I'd like to hook into the tile's VisualStateManager. But I'm still a newbie to the VisualStateManager, and when I'm editing my ItemTemplate, I don't see any visual states available. (Blend's "States" docked window is empty.)
If I make a copy of the ItemContainerTemplate and edit that, then I can get at the visual states for the tile. But that seems like incredible overkill. It adds reams upon reams of XAML (since it means duplicating every last bit of functionality that's supported by any tile anywhere). And it means that if Microsoft makes any changes before Windows 8 ships, I'll have to make my changes all over again.
Is there a lighter-weight way to change my tile's appearance in the "pointer over" and "pressed" states?

A: Nope.  Sadly if you want to change how the control behaves you need to over-ride the template.  I've done exactly what you've described to change the look and feel of the template.  It's a pain in the neck.
I read somewhere that "Xaml makes it incredibly easy to do the incredibly hard and incredibly hard to do the incredibly easy".  This pretty much sums up my experience with it.
Sorry I couldn't deliver better news.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Andrea Peyser
Oscar Pistorius' pathetic display at his trial is sickening
Social Links for Andrea Peyser
More From: Andrea Peyser
Robert Durst's death means we may never know what happened to Kathie Durst
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Huma Abedin makes a mockery of real sexual assault
Give this retching, crying, sniveling, vomiting degenerate an Oscar! I don't know how much more I can take of Oscar Pistorius' rubbish.
A prosecutor on Wednesday told the athlete known as the "Blade Runner'' for the carbon-fiber blades that replace his lower legs — which he's not afraid to use as props to score pity — to "take responsibility'' for slaughtering his beautiful girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on Valentine's Day 2013.
He told Pistorius, 27, to look at a picture of the blood- and human-tissue-covered head of the model and TV personality who died, like a caged animal, at age 29 inside Pistorius' bathroom. He refused to look.
"It's time that you look at it!'' yelled lead prosecutor Gerrie Nel.
"I will not look at a picture where I'm tormented by what I saw and felt that night,'' Pistorius cried. "As I picked Reeva up, my fingers touched her head,'' he said in a sobbing, three-hanky performance capable of drawing the envy of many a Hollywood star. "I remember. I don't have to look at a picture, I was there."
It was Pistorius' third day of testimony in his premeditated-murder trial in a Pretoria, South Africa, courtroom and his first day of cross-examination. On Monday, he vomited into a plastic bucket conveniently located on the floor by his side as a forensic psychologist detailed the bullet wounds that killed Steenkamp. The sight of Pistorius' insides are old news to court observers, who've been treated to his upchucking fits during court sessions past.
Born without fibulas, Pistorius, whose legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old, is as shameless as he is gross. On Tuesday, Pistorius played the sympathy card by removing his prosthetic legs, to show just how vulnerable he is without them. Crying crocodile tears, he testified he was legless and thought Steenkamp was in bed on the night he shot her four times, believing she was an intruder hiding inside "the toilet,'' waiting to pounce inside his Pretoria home.
Prosecutors maintain Steenkamp cowered in the bathroom after a vicious fight, then Pistorius killed her in a fit of rage. If convicted of premeditated murder, he could get 25 years to life in prison.
That a six-time gold-medal Paralympian who competed in the 2012 Olympics in London — the first double-amputee ever to run alongside able-bodied athletes — could try so hard to be seen as soft and powerless is an insult to strong and capable disabled people.
On Wednesday, Pistorius testified, incredibly, "I made a mistake'' when he shot his girlfriend. Strapping on your blades backward is a mistake. Taking a young woman's life is an obscenity.
"You made a mistake?'' shot back prosecutor Nel. "What was your mistake?" Pistorius said his mistake was that he "took Reeva's life."
"You killed a person, that's what you did! You shot and killed Reeva. Won't you take a responsibility for that?" Nel demanded.
"Say it: 'I shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp.' "
But Pistorius would not repeat the words. He replied only, "I did" as he held his head in his hands and rocked from side to side.
The prosecutor showed a video of a grinning Pistorius shooting at a watermelon, saying it was "softer than brains'' and calling a powerful .50-caliber handgun a "zombie stopper.''
"You know the same happened to Reeva's head,'' said the prosecutor. "It exploded."
Oscar Pistorius makes me sick to my stomach.
oscar pistorius
reeva steenkamp
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
El Suzuki Twin (スズキ・ツイン, Suzuki Tsuin) va ser un kei car de la marca japonesa Suzuki. El Twin va ser produït des de 2003 fins a 2005. Aquest model només va ser produït per al mercat domèstic japonés. Cal destacar que el Suzuki Twin va ser el primer kei car hibrid de la història, estant a la venda tant la versió híbrida com la de gasolina. El model de gasolina va marcar un consum mitjà de 4,54 l/100 km i la versió híbrida un de 2,93 l/100 km.

Referències

Twin
Kei car


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Q: Predict values from fitted logistic model by group Trying to fit multiple logistic models to data for different counties and would like it all together in one data frame at the end (all counties, all predicted populations, for specified years).
Here's the data:
county <- structure(list(name = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 2L, 2L,
2L, 2L, 2L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 3L, 4L, 4L, 4L, 4L, 4L, 5L, 5L, 5L,
5L, 5L, 6L, 6L, 6L, 6L, 6L, 7L, 7L, 7L, 7L, 7L, 8L, 8L, 8L, 8L,
8L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L, 9L), .Label = c("Alachua", "Columbia", "Gilchrist",
"Lake", "Levy", "Marion", "Orange", "Seminole", "Volusia"), class =
"factor"),
year = c(1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L, 1940L,
1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L,
1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L,
1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L,
2010L, 1920L, 1940L, 1970L, 1990L, 2010L, 1920L, 1940L, 1970L,
1990L, 2010L), pop = c(24662.84498, 38518.67335, 105080.0739,
182378.0527, 247964.4355, 14353.67655, 16988.63031, 25423.53768,
42636.12851, 67396.52047, 6955.297482, 4331.7027, 3661.621676,
9835.709676, 16780.95117, 12812.1731, 27202.15681, 65668.28125,
153585.2153, 297441.8053, 10034.20186, 12707.52359, 12911.58508,
26370.47373, 41650.51535, 23990.09377, 31340.67059, 69056.41468,
194358.0547, 334117.7792, 19825.73528, 68559.76913, 337259.2307,
670422.46, 1140314.083, 11027.52715, 23881.62063, 91628.11201,
298115.877, 438079.7446, 24526.72497, 55775.68449, 175004.8787,
382885.1367, 516049.0225)), .Names = c("name", "year", "pop"
), row.names = c(NA, -45L), class = "data.frame")

and here's what I've ended up with:
library(dplyr)
county %>%
    group_by(name) %>%
    (function(x) {
            fm<- nls(pop ~ SSlogis(year, phi1, phi2, phi3), data = x)
            timevalues <- c(1992, 2002, 2007, 2012)
            predict <- predict(fm,list(year=timevalues))
            cbind(predict, predict)
    })

but this only gives me a list of four data points:
out:
  predict  predict
[1,] 226713.5 226713.5
[2,] 293596.4 293596.4
[3,] 326455.5 326455.5
[4,] 357640.8 357640.8

with no clue as to what county they are for? If I use this code separately (without using groupby), I can get it to work. But then I have to do it separately for each county and then bind it all myself, which is going to get tedious once I'm working with more than 9 counties.

A: As @Esther suggests in the comments, a good first step would be to extract
your anonymous prediction function into a named one. It would also make sense
to make the function accept the prediction years as an argument, rather than
fixing them inside the function:
predict_pop <- function(data, year) {
  model <- nls(pop ~ SSlogis(year, phi1, phi2, phi3), data = data)

  nd <- data.frame(year)
  pred <- predict(model, nd)

  cbind(nd, pred)
}

Let's just check that this works with the full data:
library(dplyr)
#>
#> Attaching package: 'dplyr'
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
#>
#>     filter, lag
#> The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
#>
#>     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

years <- c(1992, 2002, 2007, 2012)
predict_pop(county, years)
#>   year     pred
#> 1 1992 226713.5
#> 2 2002 293596.4
#> 3 2007 326455.5
#> 4 2012 357640.8

Great! Now one way (as suggested by @eipi10 in the comments) to fit the model
for each county would be to first split() the data into a list of data
frames for each county and then use lapply() to get predictions in each subset.
split(county, county$name) %>%
  lapply(predict_pop, years)
#> Error in nls(y ~ 1/(1 + exp((xmid - x)/scal)), data = xy, start = list(xmid = aux[[1L]], : step factor 0.000488281 reduced below 'minFactor' of 0.000976562

However, this results in an error: it seems that the model can't be fitted
for some counties on their own. You'll probably need to address that with the model itself; but if we want predictions from this model for those counties that the model can be fitted for, we can modify the prediction function to
handle cases where the model doesn't fit.
One way to do this would be to use purrr::safely() to make a "safe" version
of the nls() function, that doesn't stop everything on an error, but
instead always returns a two element list: a result, which contains the
result if the function executed successfully, and NULL if there was an
error; and an error which contains the error if one occurred.
With the safe modelling function, we can then check if the model could be
fitted, and if not, return NA as the predictions rather than erroring.
Here's a modified version of the prediction function that does just that:
predict_pop <- function(data, year) {
  safe_nls <- function(...) purrr::safely(nls)(...)$result
  model <- safe_nls(pop ~ SSlogis(year, phi1, phi2, phi3), data = data)

  nd <- data.frame(year)
  pred <- NA_real_

  if (!is.null(model))
    pred <- predict(model, nd)

  cbind(nd, pred)
}

Now we can use the technique form before to get the predictions. I added a
bind_rows() call to combine the list results into a data frame instead:
split(county, county$name) %>%
  lapply(predict_pop, years) %>%
  bind_rows(.id = "county") %>%
  head()
#>     county year     pred
#> 1  Alachua 1992 186020.6
#> 2  Alachua 2002 222332.3
#> 3  Alachua 2007 239432.0
#> 4  Alachua 2012 255440.9
#> 5 Columbia 1992       NA
#> 6 Columbia 2002       NA

Here we can see the missing predictions for Columbia, one of the counties
that the model fitting fails for.
There are also a couple of other ways to predict for each county. One such
alternative, mentioned in the comments by both @rawr and @Esther, is to use
do():
county %>%
  group_by(name) %>%
  do(predict_pop(., years)) %>%
  head()
#> # A tibble: 6 x 3
#> # Groups:   name [2]
#>   name      year    pred
#>   <fct>    <dbl>   <dbl>
#> 1 Alachua   1992 186021.
#> 2 Alachua   2002 222332.
#> 3 Alachua   2007 239432.
#> 4 Alachua   2012 255441.
#> 5 Columbia  1992     NA
#> 6 Columbia  2002     NA

Another way would be to create a "nested" data frame by assigning grouped
data into a list column with tidyr::nest(). Then we can use lapply() to
get predictions from models for each subset of the data, and finally
tidyr::unnest() to get the predictions from the list column.
county %>%
  tidyr::nest(-name) %>%
  tidyr::unnest(lapply(data, predict_pop, years)) %>%
  head()
#>       name year     pred
#> 1  Alachua 1992 186020.6
#> 2  Alachua 2002 222332.3
#> 3  Alachua 2007 239432.0
#> 4  Alachua 2012 255440.9
#> 5 Columbia 1992       NA
#> 6 Columbia 2002       NA

And there we have it: a whole host of techniques for handling many models. For further discussion and examples of this, you might be interested in the many models chapter in the R for Data Science book.
Created on 2018-06-04 by the reprex package (v0.2.0).


For many years I was a huge procrastinator. Unfortunately, this procrastination would usually leave me with no time to revise my papers. I would barely finish typing the last word before having to submit the assignment. Not only that, but I found the revision process difficult. I had already worked so hard just writing the paper. Didn't I deserve a break? However, later I learned that revision is an integral part of the writing process.
I found that when I revised, I was embarking upon a dialogue between myself and my writing. I was asking tough questions, looking for underlying connotations, and expanding upon my ideas with fresh insight. Unlike I previously believed, revision is not just editing. It's clarifying and discovering meaning. How can I connect with my reader without a full understanding of my own intent? I now see revision as a creative process: first creating, and then re-seeing my work through the audience's eyes. This tension between the original intent and the final product leads to new ideas and new understandings.
After experiencing the benefit of dialogue, I made the commitment to make sure procrastination never trumped revision again. I would never have grown as a writer, if I had continued to "just get by." I find that writing is infinitely richer when I write not just to fulfill the assignment, but also to engage in a deeper awareness of my own ideas. Revision can be difficult, messy, and exacting; however, it is exactly the conflict and struggle of the revision process which eventually leads to a higher, synthesized understanding for both myself and my reader.


Is it easier to take drugs than to resolve relationship issues?
stimulants than to apply intelligence and analytical skills to your relationships?
Since the dawn of history, most people lived in rural communities with many relatives. Almost everyone they knew was family. Learning parenting was simply part of growing up … with family members watching and sometimes too willing to offer advice.
In older times, most parents were teenagers and child-raising was a normal part of busy lives. Who needed to learn parenting? Yet healthy parenting is still rather new in Western countries, and seems little known in older cultures.
Much culture is simply people copying other people. Our cultures seem shaped more and more by the ideals of marketers, politicians and television producers. Many families suffer more seclusion in urban apartments than in rural villages.
It is a sad fact that although children do the least to cause marriage and family problems, children will will suffer the most from them. Children are subject to their parents' rules, maturity, parenting skills, background and beliefs.
I know of no accepted definitions of child abuse, child maltreatment or cruelty to children. Decisions to label a person as an abuser are usually made by victims, or by legal or health professionals. The situation is further confused by differences between physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect.
As emotional abuse seems to be normal in many families, I define it as behavior that causes people to dissociate or fragment or "split-off" parts of themselves.
If so, build trust and offer emotional first aid – breathe, walk and relax.
Empathize with child's emotions. Listen carefully and talk it through.
Build trust and ask about what happened. Listen carefully.
Help child deal with ideas of guilt and punishment.
Explore options for solutions and restitution.
The effects of child abuse range from hurt feelings to lasting behavioral, emotional and mental impairment, especially following sexual assault. Some abused children become adults who are chronically depressed or dissociated, people who may abuse or neglect children themselves.
Structural consequences of childhood maltreatment include disruptive development of corpus callosum, left neocortex, hippocampus, and amygdale; functional consequences include increased electrical irritability in limbic areas, frontal lobe dysfunctions … and subsequently the stress response. Grassi-Oliveira R, Ashy M, Stein LM.
While this may suggest that people suffering the consequences of child abuse cannot change, we continually help people to change many consequences of abuse.
We find no no single abusive personality. Only a small percentage of abusive parents seem to have severe mental health disorders or extreme religious beliefs. However, most abusive parents lack relationship skills – they often lack friendship skills, teamwork skills, partnership skills and parenting skills. Their skill deficiencies often include problems coping with stress and emotional self-control.
Do you want to to improve your parenting skills? If you can evaluate your own family and friends, solve emotional problems and develop friendship and partnership skills, you are likely to develop healthy parenting skills.
In our systemic psychology, both the prevention and resolution of child abuse begins with helping adults evaluate their families (relationship diagnosis). A person's evaluations of his or her family members can be recorded as a family matrix.
Following relationship diagnosis, we help people plan which should be the first relationship to clarify … which next … and so on. Each clarification helps a person choose how to behave, which changes emotions, compulsions, conflicts, relationship bonds and other effects of trauma and abuse.
The result is a relationship coaching plan in which a person's verbal and non-verbal communication shows full support of the plan without verbal or non-verbal objections.
Most people want better interpersonal skills to enjoy better relationships – although few seem to be motivated to change. Communication skills help build lasting friendships and improve working relationships and are a basis for partnership and parenting.
Know your values and define your goals.
Solve relationship problems. Learn how to stay calm in chaos.
Express yourself appropriately with parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, etc.
People who were abused as children may fear happiness and success, and sabotage their own relationships. We can help most people change negative emotions, build happy relationships and move on with their lives – in short time frames.
We coach people to identify their individual needs, and make action plans for change. We support and encourage people to achieve their goals and objectives. Contact us for help handling relationship problems.


I used un-dutched cocoa powder since I had read it retained more of the original cocoa flavor and double the antioxidants. The dutching process treats the cocoa with an alkalizing agent to enhance color and smooth flavor. Un-dutched cocoa powder on it's own has a slightly bitter flavor with some acidity. The acidity could come in handy when baking with baking soda. I will have to experiment later.
I mixed up the crust and couldn't help but taste the mixture. Wow! The combination of almond, coconut, and cocoa is fabulous. The chocolate flavor dominates with a hint of coconut in the background. It's soft and delicious and melts quickly in your mouth or hand.
I've made this several times in the last couple weeks. Other chocolates pale in comparison to the robust dark chocolate flavor of this ganache. I'm finding it hard to buy chocolate bars now since this is so easy and delicious. Check out the recipe over on Wannabe Chef, and then go straight to the store to get the ingredients!
These look amazing! They'd be perfect for impressing dinner guests or during the holidays. I think I need to try them ASAP.
Lauren: They ARE amazing. Everyone who's had one was impressed. I'd recommend cutting them into bit sized pieces when sharing. My wife loves hers with coffee.
I'll make you some when you get back.


text:
Those Redheads from Seattle 3-D	05/20/17
3-D Blu-Ray
Another 3-D breakthrough, this time for a Paramount musical rescued from oblivion and remastered by the 3-D Archive. Rhonda Fleming and Gene Barry star in a blend of songs and Alaskan adventure filmed in downtown Hollywood. The depth effects are great, but the big surprise is Teresa Brewer, the radio star turned one-shot movie musical wonder whose voice resurrects memories of pop vocals just prior to the arrival of Rock 'n' Roll. Also with the Bell Sisters, Guy Mitchell and Agnes Moorehead. The story of what was required to bring this one back from the brink of extinction, is fully covered — and 3-D fans can't get enough of these shows! On 3-D Blu-ray from KL Studio Classics.
Rescuing the Runes: The Almost-Lost Original Long Cut of Night of the Demon


This training program offers an efficient toolkit of essential skills that can meld diverse perspectives into mutual decisions, resolve disagreements and boost acceptable agreements to outstanding breakthroughs.
Miscommunications often masquerade as differences of opinion. And that's good news. In this program, learn to "translate" different communication styles so you can nip such "differences" in the bud.
Groups often misunderstand their dynamics. Sensing an impasse, they may give up or give in to a decision that never works out in practice. This training program shows how to use that impasse as a threshold to breakthrough thinking.
Harmonizing divergent views produces better results for all concerned. But how do we go about it? Principles such as respect, compassion and honesty are not always enough.
Margaret is working on a 3rd book, Bridges to Understanding. Check it out on a whole new page of this website.


The Orillia Channel Cats Swim Club recently competed at the Barrie Aquafest. Forty swimmers were in attendance from the Bronze, Silver and Gold training groups.
"This is the first meet of the season that offers preliminaries and finals for the 13-and-over swimmers, it seems to get them fired up," says head coach Meredith Thompson-Edwards.
The 13-and-over age group races in the morning, and if they make top 16 in their events they race those events again at night.
"Some swimmers had to race eight events in one day which is definitely a test of mental and physical strength. We had faster swims at finals as well which was really encouraging to see," adds Thompson-Edwards.
The 12-and-under age group raced Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and we saw a lot of personal best times from them as well.
"Our swimmers did great, they are showing improvement in technique and learning the difference between swimming versus racing," says Coach Tatum Haslem.
Blythe improved her qualifying times for the Ontario Swimming Championships in the 50 freestyle, 100 freestyle and 100 backstroke.
Caleb Near, 16, won the High Point award for the 15-and-over males earning a total of 127 points. Just one point separated him from the second-place finisher.
Near also qualified for Ontario Swimming Championships in the 100 metre (1:00.23) and 200 metre backstroke (2:13.49), 50 metre freestyle (24.92) and Owen Rosati, 16, qualified for Ontario Swimming Championships in the 100 metre backstroke (1:01.47).
Swimmers in attendance included: Tess McKenzie, Meagan Mckenzie, Evangeline Cooke, Nathan McClinchey, Flora Haslem, Katie Heckendorn, Peyton Nie,Hayden Nie, Caleb Near, Indiana Abram, Chloe smith, Emily Gordon, Owen Rosati , Esmee Rosati, Owen Wagner, Evan Wagner, Alexander Baillie, Ariel McGee, Rachel Carr, Tristan Sekleski, Anna Holton, Kait Madden,Olivia LePage,Ava Holly Eliott, Grier Kershaw, Marley Grave, Charlee Tillmanns, Nicolas Rainville, Mathieu Rainville, Blythe Wieclawek, Adair Wieclawek, Owen McCool, Holly McCool, Jackson Denne, Zach Moczkodan, Meghan Rogers, Hughie Edwards and Hannah Kennedy.


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