Aaron Fernando: It is common to see questionable policies enacted by state and local governments under the guise of economic development — policies which appear to serve the interests of private entities rather than the interests of society at large. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, real and sustainable sources of wealth, along with the many non-financial elements crucial to the health of societies, continue to be generated by individuals and small-scale producers, largely without much assistance from local governments.

Recently, the U.K.-based foundation Nesta released an interactive visualization called ShareTown, intended to help people think about what it might look like if local governments used technology and focused on both small-scale local organizations and individuals in creating positive social outcomes within a locality. Described as “an unashamedly positive vision of a preferred future in which interactions between citizens and local government are balanced and collaborative, and data and digital platforms are deployed for public benefit rather than private gain” ShareTown allows visitors to click around and explore an interrelated set of organizations, institutions, and individuals in one vision of a prosperous local economy of the future. These organizations include a makerspace, a community waste and re-use center, a childcare cooperative, a mobile library and resource center, and many others — all in some way utilizing technology and supported (financially or otherwise) by local government.

The ideas in ShareTown were derived from a workshop in May 2018 with leaders from local governments and members of the public, and discussed in light of drastic budget cuts faced by local governments around the U.K. Although ShareTown is U.K.-specific and offers links to “Reference Points,” which are existing projects, similar projects have already been sprouting up around the world. For instance, ShareTown contains a platform co-op which links freelancers with resources and protections against certain types of risks. The cooperative SMart is mentioned ShareTown, but others around the world like the Freelancer’s Union in New York City, New York, operate similarly.

However it is noted that “ShareTown is not intended as a prediction, but a source of inspiration — and provocation.” ShareTown was created by Nesta’s ShareLab, which has “a mission to grow evidence and understanding of how collaborative digital platforms can deliver social impact.” Thus, explicit in this approach is the belief that data collection and specific technological tracking and monitoring solutions will lead to positive social outcomes. This includes certain initiatives with potentially uncomfortable data-gathering, such as a mobile library operated with a mix of public and private funding which also tracks user outcomes.

In light of recent, serious data breaches like those of Marriott and Equifax, along with the reality that digital platforms and big data have been utilized by the few to manipulate the many, this technological optimism is indeed a provocation and something to be discussed. ShareTown provides a thought-provoking angle with which to think about the role of government and technology in maintaining a healthy local economy, and can be thought of in tandem with frameworks such as the Cleveland Model and the Preston Model. These two models in particular illustrate flows of money, time, and other resources between institutions and organizations without focusing on the usage of technology. Taken together, these frameworks can help both local residents and public officials think about and reframe how a locality achieves economic resilience even with limited resources.

Header image is a screenshot of Nesta’s ShareTown interactive

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About Team Human

A provocative, exciting, and important rallying cry to reassert our human spirit of community and teamwork.”―Walter Isaacson

Though created by humans, our technologies, markets, and institutions often contain an antihuman agenda. Douglas Rushkoff, digital theorist and host of the podcast Team Human, reveals the dynamics of this antihuman machinery and invites us to remake these aspects of society in ways that foster our humanity.

In 100 aphoristic statements, his manifesto exposes how forces for human connection have turned into ones of isolation and repression: money, for example, has transformed from a means of exchange to a means of exploitation, and education has become an extension of occupational training. Digital-age technologies have only amplified these trends, presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media undermining our democracy. But all is not lost. It’s time for Team Human to take a stand, regenerate the social bonds that define us and, together, make a positive impact on this earth.

Sourced from Amazon’s book description

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Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

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The best that nation-states could do was adapt to planet-scale forces of capital, technology and migration. And part of that adaptation meant national identities would become more worldly and cosmopolitan. It would be a functional necessity to tolerate, even embrace, difference.

Jump-cut to now. Where some in a 60,000-strong crowd for a national anniversary in Budapest freely hold up posters titled “White Europe” and “Clean Blood”. Where ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a self-proclaimed “economic nationalist”, addresses a French National Front rally with the words, “Let them call you racist… wear it as a badge of honour”. Where elements of the UK commercial press (and other pint-wielding provocateurs) describe domestic judges and MPs as “traitors” and “saboteurs”.

All of this underpinned by proclamations of national glory and tradition — more often than not deemed as under threat from a host of named and nameless “others”.

Understanding nationalism

Bewilderment is understandable. As are laments that this is a veritable retreat from the future. Yet at FutureFest, we try to set current developments in deep and wide contexts. As it extends outwards from now, the “cone of uncertainty” that futurologists talk about contains many thorny issues — and that means power, passions and asymmetries, as well as tidy and gleaming solutions.

If the call to nationhood is irresistibly on the rise, the future-minded should be thinking about how to turn its dynamics to the good.

What that might imply, to begin with, is an understanding of nationalism that is less phobic and alarmist than is (understandably) generated by the headlines.

In much political science, the assumption behind the term “nationalism” is that the qualities of the nation are the driving force of its ideology — just as the dynamism of capital propels “capitalism” or the primacy of social relations fuels “socialism”.

The anthropologist Ernest Gellner understood nationalism as a functional phenomenon. It was a means whereby industrialising territories established a common language, clock-time and other useful standards. It justified investing in education and welfare systems, in order to strengthen the capacities and character of the “folk”.

Now, 19th and 20th century nationalism could fall into preposterous myths of racial superiority, and provide a logic for imperial exploitation and the subjugation of others. But it could also — in, say, the Nordic countries — become a transformative spur for societal development in economy, culture, education and land ownership (as outlined in Tomas Bjorkman and Lene Rachel Anderson’s recent book The Nordic Secret).

Altruistic and narcissistic nationalism

What form of nationalism — with its “Janus” face, as Tom Nairn once called it, facing both forwards and backwards — is prevailing in the present moment? As reported in the Economist a few months ago, the Polish social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has made a useful distinction between “altruistic” and “narcissistic” forms of contemporary nationalism:

Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today’s blessings and look forward to a better future — a straight line sloping up across time. Narcissists exalt in a glorious past, denigrate a miserable present and promise a magnificent future — a rollercoaster U-curve with today in its pit… If you need a rule of thumb for assessing a nationalist movement, ascending ramp versus switchback U is as good as you are likely to get.

One might recognise the altruistic version in the small-nationalisms of Scotland and Wales, or the Catalonian independence movement, or even Macron’s forward motion for the French nation. These nationalisms are liberal and progressive. They are pro-EU or other transnational regimes, shouting ‘stop the world, we want to get on’.

Yet it would be fair to say the narcissistic form is currently dominant in Europe. The administrations of Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey — and the anti-immigration contenders in many other countries — do indeed combine these elements. That is: a glorious reading of their own history; a vision of a present society overrun by malign, polluting and external forces; and a future which restores national “Greatness”.

A post-Brexit UK looks like it’s trying to be both kinds of nationalism at the same time. Meaning a “Global Britain” that’s about to be freed from the exactions of European bureaucracy, in order to extend its national genius for democracy and industry around the world… so we are told. And as for Trump’s America? Well, as presidential tweet tumbles after presidential tweet, it’s difficult to tell.

“New nationalism” at Futurefest

In this year’s FutureFest, we’ve been trying to grapple with the full spectrum of creative (and destructive) forces shuddering through our lives at the moment. Our aim is to open up alternatives than can occupy the future in a confident way. The enduring appetite for collective identity has to be one path we explore. Which means taking nationalism seriously.

We’ve invited Professor Manuel Castells to dwell again on his remarkably prescient comments about the power of identity, made in his mid-90s trilogy The Information Age. Castells saw the interdependence of what he called “the Net and the Self”. Our networked, mobile and global existence is so demanding that it produces a need for a collective anchor in the storm; a more slow-moving resource of culture and history.

The narcissistic nationalisms previously mentioned indicate how this relationship can go badly wrong. Castells, himself Catalonian, will give us clues as to how it can be set right for the future. He will also be exploring these ideas in a conversation with Sir Nick Clegg.

Our panel on the “new nationalism” has a range of leading experts who will take “these islands” of Britain as their starting point. British Future’s Sunder Katwala has been conducting research on attitudes to Britishness since 2011 and Cambridge’s Michael Kenny is as interested in the nations that comprise the “United” Kingdom. As a leading scholar on cosmopolitan identity, the LSE’s Ayça Çubukçu will hold open a wider space in which a post-Brexit British identity can be explored.

A few decades ago, Benedict Anderson once described nationalism as an “imagined community” — a sense of connection with those who we will never actually, physically meet. How much of our virtualised, networked life does that concept also describe? How much of our future depends on how well we imagine our communities? What can the nations we craft teach us about how to invoke and locate the collective in our lives?

As ever, in one single FutureFest, many possible worlds.

Originally published by NESTA

Photo by alda chou

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Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

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“Politics is in crisis. Disillusionment, a lack of trust in politicians, apathy, falling turnout at elections and a surge in populist movements around Europe. What is the way out of this miasma?

Digital tools and technologies have transformed the way we live and work. Could they transform our politics too? New technologies are not likely to be a silver bullet to the current predicament, but the lesson from cities across Europe is that they can play a critical role in engaging new groups of people, empowering citizens and forging a new relationship between cities and local residents.

Many of those involved in this new wave of digital democracy came together earlier this summer at the Democratic Cities event in Madrid to discuss the future of politics and democracy. The event also marked the end of D-CENT, a 3-year EU funded project with partners from across Europe, including the Citizens Foundation, Forum Virium Helsinki, Open Knowledge Foundation, Thoughtworks and Centre d’economie de la Sorbonne.

The project, led by Nesta, developed a set of open source, distributed and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment. These include tools which enable citizens to receive real time notifications about issues relevant to them, work collaboratively to propose and draft policies, decide and vote on proposals, and allocate resources through participatory budgeting processes.

Take, for example, Objective8, a tool for online crowdsourcing of proposals and collaborative policy drafting; or Mooncake, which provides a single newsfeed to help bring together comments, media, and notifications from other D-CENT tools. For privacy awareness, Stonecutter is a secure single sign-on for D-CENT which gives users control over the personal data they share; and Agora Voting is a cryptographically secure, verifiable and transparent online voting software, which opens the ballot boxes and tallies the results while preserving secrecy. The D-CENT project also ran workshops and worked with a number of partners to pilot and improve digital platforms in Reykjavik, Helsinki, Barcelona and Madrid.

The Democratic Cities event was an opportunity to hear about the outcomes of the D-CENT project, but also to learn from digital democracy pioneers from further afield. For example, we heard how Pol.is – a tool that collects opinion and then visualises consensus and disagreements within a crowd – was recently used by about 600 participants to map different stakeholders’ views and inform new changes to local Uber regulations in Taipei.

WAGL, a “politics start-up” in South Korea built a tool for direct citizen input into the now famous 192 hour filibuster of an anti-terror bill. We also heard how Wellington City Council used Loomio to engage local residents in agreeing a set of principles for the city’s local alcohol management strategy.

The Net Party, the original pioneers of the now widely used DemocracyOS platform, shared their story of building a large following through online and offline methods, and how they secured the political buy-in to pilot their technology within the Buenos Aires legislature. You can listen back and watch some of these stories, along with a handful of others, here.

What have we learned so far?

If this field of digital democracy is to mature – with cities, parliaments and political parties adopting these tools to engage and empower citizens in their everyday decisions and deliberations – digital activists will need to consider the following issues.

1. Keeping users engaged and informed

Advocates will need to follow three tips for encouraging participation. First, tools should be kept simple. Successful upvoting tools like Plaza Podemos (on Reddit) and Your Priorities make barriers to engagement low through simple and intuitive interfaces. Second, users should be trusted with meaningful questions – asking trivial questions is likely to yield trivial answers (Boaty McBoatface is a useful yardstick in this regard). Third, users should be kept engaged with information about how their input was used. This is particularly difficult where the volume of input is high, where time and staff resources are limited, or where the path of legislation is slow and complex. Nonetheless, these insights remind us to keep the scale, expectations and intended goals of the project as clear as possible from the outset.

2. Finding common standards for evaluation

One of the striking features of the discussion was an absence of information about impact. Where is the evidence? Given the now massive list of examples available it’s important that projects learn from others, share best practice, and, crucially, share failures. Previous work in this area has highlighted that honest discussion around failures can be difficult for projects seeking adoption in an already reluctant political environment. Another difficulty is when the design of a tool is over-emphasised (i.e. look at my beautiful code) at the expense of how the project aims to actually attract participation and achieve impact.

Defining ‘impact’ can be challenging in this space: in most cases, the number of participants is used as the only measure. Other, more difficult questions need to be asked, such as: did the process improve the quality or legitimacy of decision making? Did it help to improve the quality of debate and inform citizens about important political issues? Did it succeed in improving public trust? The World Bank has recently published a useful, and more detailed framework for digital engagement evaluation.

3. Blending online and offline engagement

Some of the most successful digital platforms at the city level, like Decide.Madrid, Decidim.Barcelona and Better Reykjavik, have their roots in bottom-up forms of political engagement (originating from Ahora Madrid, Guanyem Barcelona/ Barcelona En Comu and the Best Party, respectively). City governments elsewhere should learn from this: offline engagement is especially important where accessing hard-to-reach groups is concerned. They must also work with social movements and civil society organisations in order to actively reach out to local residents and pilot digital tools in local communities.

This mindset was well captured by Aik van Eemeren from Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office who said “technology doesn’t own the city, it’s just an enabler”. All this links back to engagement. It’s not all about the tool – a key challenge is working with communities so that they see the value in using it.

4. Broader engagement vs smarter engagement

Other questions arose about the types of crowds necessary to foster collective intelligence. In larger-scale exercises (often above the city level) the shared experiences and knowledge of participants is reduced, segregation of opinion is widened and ownership of the process is more uncertain.

Is the logic of large crowds reconcilable with the logic of policy-making processes in these cases? One study of a crowdsourcing exercise on off-road traffic law in Finland found that “massive, atomic [and] diverse input” was detrimental to the quality of the end result. To make these processes worthwhile, we might need stronger political will; we might need better methods of idea synthesis and aggregation; or perhaps we should seek smaller crowds with more distinct hierarchies of talent and expertise? This is one of the issues Nesta is exploring as part of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance.

Further questions then arise about legitimacy. It was generally assumed among the Democratic Cities attendees, and in the democracy field more generally, that engagement is a good in of itself, and that engagement strategies derive their legitimacy by involving as many people as possible. That is, the more people who were engaged by the process, the more legitimate the process and the decision ultimately taken.

However, there are inevitably some collective problems where a smaller group of participants – who have relevant experience or expertise – can alone improve the quality of decision making. What if processes are perceived as less legitimate but lead to better quality decision making or the inverse, where some processes are seen as legitimate, but lead to poorer quality decision making? This potential tension is something we will consider further over the coming months.

What next?

We’re currently looking at inspiring examples of digital democracy from around the world to distill key lessons for political parties, city governments and national parliaments. We want to understand how digital tools can be used to improve the quality and legitimacy of decision making and how they can be embedded into existing democratic structures and institutions.”

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One of our guests at the recent Goteathon will be Maria Botella, who is the main researcher in the European Alternatives project “Mapping BTR”, a Nesta Policy and Research grant awardee for “Data Driven Methods for Mapping Below the Radar Activity in the Social Economy”. According to their website, “Mapping BTR” is a research project exploring how data-driven methods can be deployed to automatically identify “Below the Radar” organizations in crowdfunding platforms, in this specific study, UK-based.

“Below the Radar” (BTR) is a term presently being used to describe those organizations which have asocial purpose supported by voluntary activity, but which are not affiliated, registered or regulated, and (perhaps therefore) have no apparent, direct financial support from traditional funding entities. These are considered third sector organizations, and are understood to be voluntary and non-profit in nature. The significant implication in the label BTR is that by being below the radar, or undetected, this type of organization has a tendency to operate in more tenuous and less sustainable ways. For this reason, BTRs often gravitate toward crowdfunding as a means to gain financial and community support.

The Mapping BTR study documented a methodology developed for mapping BTR activity, focused on two UK-based crowdfunding platforms. In selecting these platforms, the study authors used the following questions as criteria:

• Which platforms are likely to be used by UK-based BTR groups to connect with their target audiences?
• Which platforms had sufficient data on groups that can be considered BTR organisations?
• Which platforms presented a suitable data structure to allow deployment of the co-link analysis, the method selected to map BTR activity?

The two platforms chosen were Spacehive and Crowdfunder, each with some unique characteristics that fit the study’s criteria and yet different enough from one another to provide some contrast. Spacehive keeps its focus narrowed down to projects with a social, civic purpose, and describes itself as “…a crowdfunding platform with a purpose: to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to bring their civic environment to life.” On the other hand, Crowdfunder’s aim is more broadly towards development in general: “Crowdfunder Mission: Connecting entrepreneurs with investors around the world to help fund their business and fuel economic growth.”

The authors of the study developed a methodology for identifying and tracking BTRs through their presence and activities on crowdfunding platforms, including a web-crawling software prototype developed to track activity, using hyperlinks. The process is called “co-link analysis”, employed to identify common themes, connected via hyperlinks, in crowdfunding campaigns. In earlier, unrelated uses, the process was used to uncover what was called “issue networks”, or groups of websites with common themes, connected by hyperlinks. Adaptations were made to the method for this study, due to the data structures in each crowdfunding platform. Typically, crowdfunding projects don’t link to one another, but instead link back to the profiles of their own backers – and in turn, to the other projects (if any) that those backers have supported.

Links from the first crowdfunding projects identified (which the study termed “seed projects”) were analyzed to identify additional, potentially similar projects. Only projects with at least 2 contributors in common with the “seed” are analyzed. Similarly, the projects tracked from the original “seed” are also expected to have a similar theme in common, e.g., environmental concerns. The following additional criteria were put in place:

• Only successfully funded projects (for the potential longevity)
• Only BTR organizations (for the aims of the study)

According to the authors, the criteria for determining which projects were probably run by BTR organizations is:

• They meet the condition upon which co-link analysis is based
• They have reached their funding target
• They are not run by registered organizations

The publication resulting from the research is a report called Data for Good, a compilation of reports generated by five projects released as a PDF by Nesta. Also available for download is a working paper for this project. The purpose of these publications is to explore how big and open data may be used for the common good, either by charitable organizations in their strategic development and refinement, and as a resource for the education of civil society.

We asked main researcher Maria Botella the following questions about the experience of conducting the study – the process, the results, and about the use of open API and data. Here we present her answers:

Regarding the choice to map BTR (below-the-radar) organizations and projects that operate under them, what is the ultimate purpose of this mapping? Specifically, is there some advantage in identifying projects and organizations operating in this unregistered, unaffiliated way, which benefits or helps support the sustainability of these projects or organizations? How might any political influence be achieved through identifying the BTRs?

The research project ‘Mapping BTR organisation on crowdfunding platforms’ is one of the five projects that were awarded the grand ‘Data Driven Methods for Mapping Below the Radar Activity in the Social Economy’, by the Nesta Policy and Research Unit. This grant programme builds upon existing voluntary sector research in the UK, more specifically, the work of the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) on its research stream ‘Below the radar’.

This research work runs parallel and operates within the specific political context of the UK. Over the last five years, regulation has been set up under the Conservative Party mandate that seeks to implement the ‘Big Society’, which is intended to ‘give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want’i. This contested concept is seen by many as the neoliberal ‘solution’ to the large-scale cuts in public expenditure, as an integral part of the goal of reducing the size of the state.

There is an urge to identify who those ‘communities’ – which can potentially benefit from being part of the Big Society by receiving support by the public and the voluntary sector and getting involved in decision-making in their local area – are. Otherwise, those resources risk remaining underused and the needs and claims of these communities unfulfilled, as they might just do not know the channels to become part of the Big Society and to count as such.

It is in such context that BTR research takes on its full meaning. However, the extent to which the results of BTR research are noted and acted upon by public and voluntary organisations remains a mystery for me.

Were the identified BTR projects informed that they were being included in this study? If so, were there any notable reactions to this information?

Actually they were not. The results of the case studies were only sent to the two crowdfunding platforms concerned.

Do the relationships uncovered by the co-link analysis you are using result in information about relationships that go beyond the thematic? If so, what other kinds of links or relationships has your co-link analysis uncovered?

Fundamentally not. Co-link analysis is used here to identify thematically related projects based on their common backers. Yet, to understand what exactly those thematic relations consist of, further analysis of projects and organisations has to be undertaken.

In doing so, a different type of relation among the Crowdfunder projects found was uncovered: a number of well-connected projects on the Crowdfunder network visualisation were part of the same campaign on the platform, the Crowdfund Cornwall Campaign, aimed specifically at funding Cornish projects. This geographical relation among Crowdfunder projects could be read as a success of the platform campaign in getting backers to support different projects in a given area.

Why might it be interesting or useful to your organization to have available API data for crowdfunding in Europe to create an expanded mapping? What ultimate purpose might that mapping serve?

Having available an API to collect data on BTR organisation in crowdfunding platforms across Europe would allow European Alternatives to furthering BTR research beyond the UK – something it has already done to some extent with qualitative methods through projects such as ‘Transeuropa Caravans’- but also to do some type of intervention based on the resulting mapping.

I can imagine, for instance, using those data to map initiatives searching for funding to accomplish similar or complementary projects, and this way, to identify distinctive themes across BTR initiatives in Europe. This analysis could serve to inform and push forward policies to support such initiatives at a national and European levels and / or to forge strategic partnerships between them.

What information might be visualized and utilized about the backers (donors) of the “seed” projects discovered in the co-link analysis? What ultimate purpose might that information serve?

The network visualisation could be extended to include backers and project creators as a second and third type of nodes. When clicking on one of these nodes, the right-hand panel would show all the other projects backed or created by that user and a measure of his overall activity on the platform.

This information could be employed by crowdfunding platforms to evaluate whether it would be worth it to include a similar type of analysis in future platform developments, such as a recommendation system that could offer creators and backers whose rate of activity is above a given threshold other projects they would likely want to support, based on the projects they have already created / backed. This is something that Change.org does with its sponsored petitions, which constitutes one of its main sources of funding.

Since Facebook wasn’t a cooperative participant in terms of open API, has any other social media platform been considered or approached for collaboration on this kind of analysis and mapping?

No, only the two crowdfunding platforms involved in this project were approached and asked for consent.

Was it possible to draw any visualizations, comparisons or conclusions between the social returns offered by BTRs as compared with those from projects with affiliations to supporting organizations?

No. In fact, it is not rare to find BTR projects and projects run by voluntary organisations or social enterprises on these crowdfunding platforms that present similar goals. Moreover, one of the main conclusions drawn from the two case studies is that BTR activity on crowdfunding platforms appears often combined with that of registered organisations and governmental bodies, making it difficult to analyse BTR activity as a pure and isolated entity.

Was there any specific information you wanted to find in the API of the two UK crowdfunding platforms, but did not have access to?

Yes, the information needed to perform co-link analysis. That is to say, the backers for each project. This would allow to identify new projects that share at least two backers with the seed project in a way far more consistent than using web crawling techniques. These new projects are expected to have a purpose similar to that of the seed – a social one in this case.

An easier way to identify social-oriented projects would be to define a specific category for this type of project while allowing creators to tag their projects with more than one category, thus making sure that no project with a social purpose is missed for having been classified under a different category.

The two crowdfunding platforms used in this research present such a category – and indeed project categories are available at least through the Crowdfunder API, but they do not allow creators to use more than one category at a time, what reduces significantly the amount of projects with a social purpose that can be achieved in this way.

Furthermore, being able to access the names of the organisations behind projects through an API would also have been extremely useful for this research.

What specific use could you make of the Goteo API in your research?

In order to deploy the methodology employed in my research using the Goteo API, the API would have to be extended to include ‘projects’ as an endpoint. Different ways of collecting BTR projects could then be implemented based on the features enabled for this endpoint. So, for instance, having the ID of donors among the response values would allow to deploy co-link analysis, while being able to filter projects by categories would enable an alternative way to check for the purpose of projects as described above.

Moreover, including the name of the organisation behind every project – it being either a formal or informal organisation or an individual – among the response values would allow to check whether that name is included in the official registers containing voluntary organisations and alike in order to remove projects created by registered organisations from the results. However, getting the creator of a project to specify whether the project belongs to a registered organisation or to a community group / informal organisation would make this analysis much more straightforward.

I see a great potential in combining the collection of data with the suggested endpoint and the ‘categories’ endpoint for future BTR research.  In line with the mapping of BTR projects across Europe mentioned above, the BTR projects returned by the projects endpoint could be used as parameters of the ‘projects’ filter for the categories endpoint. Using that filter together with three other filters available for this endpoint, ‘location’, ‘from_date’ and ‘to_date’, would enable to collect suitable data to inform some maps visualisation showing the evolution of BTR project themes in different geographical areas over time.

What kinds of apps can you imagine being created from the Goteo API?

A recommendation app to show users the projects they could support based on their interests – determined by the other projects they have already funded or collaborated in. Unlike the recommendation system mentioned before, this would not be implemented by the platform. Rather, it would be an external piece of software that users would have to intentionally download and use.

What other potential uses do you see for the Goteo API?

I imagine the data available through the different ‘reports’ endpoints being matched up, analysed and explore by Goteo and other crowdfunding platforms in order to get an insight into how to improve the performance of crowdfunding projects and the platforms in themselves.

The Goteo statistics visualisations can well serve such purpose, in the same way that the Civic Dashboard created by the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and Data Kind was intended to ‘give Citizens Advice staff an immediate overview of how issues are changing across the UK, visualise and analyse social and economic trends and use this to inform and shape the public debate and strengthen the impact of service delivery’.

Moreover, project creators can also use those data to understand what makes a successful project and social entrepreneurs to search for inspiration and new businesses opportunities.

We thank Maria Botella for her participation in our Goteathon, and look forward to more of her research, and opportunities for collaboration.

The post Mapping “Below the Radar” Organizations in Crowdfunding platforms, with Maria Botella of European Alternatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.