Unravelling Digitalisation – A personal blog dedicated to the challenges and opportunities for governance in the digital age

Inaugural lecture

It’s been a while since the last post but I intend to add more content from now on. To start with; almost a year ago I held my inaugural lecture, the text of which can be found here (in Dutch).

The lecture deals with the promises and pitfalls of digitalisation in government. Digital technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence) seem attractive to achieve as much as possible in an increasingly complex society such as government. Better service, less fraud, more responsive policies, more effective and efficient business operations. There is a lot of optimism about the opportunities, based on the possibilities of technology and the idea that the challenges mentioned can be solved technically. Yet, there is also pessimism: digital technology is sometimes almost seen as the source of the loss of human scale and public values in general. There is a call for normative and ethical requirements, frameworks and guidelines.

In the lecture, I speak of the nuance that is needed in the conversation about the use of AI and other digital technology in the public sector. In my research, I seek to look at how policy and implementation at different layers deal with the tension between on the one hand the beckoning perspective of rapid innovation, sometimes driven by an almost mythical image of what data, ICT, and AI can do, and often driven from the need to make better use of data and systems. And on the other hand, the slowness of unyielding existing systems and practices. Realism is about how these two (can) work at the same time.The realism that is based on unprecedented numbers of systems and applications, based on data that has been collected and structured in a way that they sometimes hardly lend themselves to this.” According to Klievink, the role of data and digitization is the big blind spot when it comes to theory development in policy implementation.

A policy realist perspective to algorithmic governance

Public organisations are interested in using AI, for example for risk identification or assessment, to prioritise riskier cases over others, to use AI for intelligence or predictive models, or to make policy more responsive to societal needs and policy effects. There is a lot of data that they use and they are using enhanced capacities to collect and process different kinds of data to these ends. The advanced technologies can help make the work of public sector professionals, policy- and decision makers more effective, more efficient, and ideally could make it more rationalised and evidence-based.

Within such use, the legitimate use of algorithms by government, depends on the capability to protect, promote and live up to public values. As algorithms may make the work of government more effective and more efficient, it promotes values such as proper use of public funds. Yet we are also and increasingly aware of threats to values stemming from bias, equality of treatment and privacy. Given their responsibilities, governments – way more than the private sector – seek to address these challenges by the responsible deployment and use of algorithms. Key for societal acceptance of the use of AI by government, is that they are transparent about the way they deploy these technologies, what limitations exist and how they deal with that. In the end, society must be able to hold governments and their agents accountable for their decisions and the way these decisions came to be.

With my new team at Leiden University we approach this topic from what we call a ‘policy realism’ perspective. This relates to data, organsitional and policy aspects. We focus on the important questions of what realistically the data governments have allows them to do, as data itself is a really tough topic. Advanced algorithms are however also notoriously hard to understand, especially for those who lack relevant expertise. The choices, limitations and trade-offs that are reflected in the development, deployment, configuration of an algorithm, or interpretation and visualisation of the outcomes thereof, those might be lost on the user of the insights produced by the algorithm. And if the user doesn’t understand the choices, limitations and caveats behind the insights, this does not find its way into the decisions or policies supported by the analysis.

New job

Per May 1, I’ve started as professor of public administration & digitalisation at the Institute of Public Administration at the faculty of Governance and Global Affairs of Leiden University.

This chair is really about the interaction between data and digitalisation on the one hand, and public governance on the other, and the interface between these topics is also what interests me most. I am really looking forward to joining this strong public administration institute and to build up this new chair.

More information can be found in the press release (also available in Dutch).

New paper on crowd-based innovations – a research agenda

The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT-developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity.

Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella-term ‘crowd-based innovations’ (CBI), offer novel opportunities in all domains of society by increasing the access, reach and speed of services and goods.

At the same time, they signify important challenges because these innovations occur in a context of traditional, well-established institutional arrangements. CBI create an ‘institutional void’: existing rules, standards and practices are challenged and renegotiated. This raises questions about the safeguarding of public values such as quality, legitimacy, efficiency and governance of crowd-based innovations.

In the Journal of Responsible Innovation, two colleagues and I published a research agenda (available open access) based on a combination of empirical and normative study of the crowd-based innovation phenomenon.

New multidisciplinary research project

It’s been in the works for a while, but today we finally officially announced a new research programme that I’ve set up together with Delft colleague Michel van Eeten and the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD).

As part of the project, Michel and I will, together with four PhD candidates and a post-doctoral researcher, study the cyber threat that comes with increasingly interconnected societies. We will address scientific research questions on cybersecurity in a public governance context using a combination of methods from computer engineering and social science. The research team will also feature people from these different disciplines to be able to include the interactions between technical, organisational, and institutional aspects.

More information can be found in TU Delft’s press release.

Hello world!

Hi,

This is my website/blog, where I’ll share recent work and stuff that interests me related to where and how the Information Age meets society. I have a special interest in the challenges and opportunities that digitalisation poses for public governance in , but will also post about how it affects societal structures and practices in general.

The website is still under construction, so not all pages may yet contain everything I aim to put there.