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Argument for rethinking the practices and policies that shape civil society in our digital age
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New Rules for New Tools Lucy Bernholz
Let’s assume we’re successful. All of our data are networked. They are accurate, interoperable, and available. Will we find new solutions to longstanding challenges? New cures for diseases, new educational strategies, and better ways to measure impact?
Yes, we will. Will we develop new insights about communities, new ways to manage natural resources, and new mechanisms for holding ourselves and others accountable?
Yes. I’m sure we will. Will we avoid completely predictable policy conflicts between existing forms of governance and these new digital possibilities?
Nope. Not the way we’re headed now. If we keep doing what we’re doing– here’s what’s bound to happen. [CLICK]
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A completely predictable train wreck between old rules and new practices. We’re already seeing it in the sharing economy where companies that rely on digital data are running headlong into local and state laws designed to protect people and support public infrastructure. We’re seeing it in education, where parents concerned about the unpredictability of the long term are challenging experimental uses of student data.
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And we’re seeing it in people’s heightened concerns about how our digital trails are used by businesses and government. We need a civil society that uses digital data to invigorate proven solutions and inform new ones. And we need to protect people and support public infrastructure. We can have all of this. We can stave off policy collisions. We can imagine new futures that meet all our goals – innovation, social solutions, personal control, and public infrastructure. We can write code that respects our rights and write laws that encourage the donation of private resources for public benefit. At the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford, we call this ReCoding Good. To do this we have to plan now for a social sector organized around digital data – the very future everyone in this room is working to create. This future is digital civil society. *** But first, we have to understand that digital data are a fundamentally different resource than what we’ve known in the past.
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For more than a hundred years we’ve organized civil society around time and money. Philanthropy and nonprofits are built on these two resources. And time and money share certain fundamental characteristics. (finger count)
• Only one person can use them at a time • They can’t be copied. • And they’re scarce.
Digital data share none of those characteristics. Digital data are not like time or money. They are renewable, replicable, networked, and abundant. They can be stored on vast scales, shared faster and more broadly than anything we’ve ever known, and they don’t respect our boundaries between public, private, and nonprofit. Data can be used by many people at once. They can be copied. They are abundant. And generative. Every time we use digital data we create more digital data – the datasets that hold all of our clicks, likes, and texts -‐ the metadata about our data – are yet another new resource. At the Lab, we suggest thinking of digital data as water, and time and money as land. [CLICK]
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We are right at the edge where these elements meet. And it’s exciting. And treacherous. Water and land each requires its own navigational skills, its own rules, and its own institutions and norms. We simply can not manage water the way we manage land.
This is the current state of digital civil society. [CLICK]
Photo:&Vkg,&h+p://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hokipai_Beach>_Huge_Waves_2.JPG&
The beauty and peril of edges &
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And houseboats are only equipped for the calmest of waters.
We have new tools.
We need new rules.
*** As the people in this room succeed, digital data will become ever more powerful resources for public good. Using them well is essential to civil society. So, how will we govern, store, and destroy digital data for public benefit? How will we use them ethically, respecting the rights of the people represented in datasets while also
Photo:&h'p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lake_Bigeaux_houseboat.JPG&
The current state of digital civil society
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pursuing the benefits available from the aggregated information? Each of these questions points to an opportunity for invention – and reinvention – to build the future we want. The Digital Civil Society Lab is dedicated to working with you to ask these questions – through experimentation and research – and to translating the answers into policy ideas for all of us. Here are three examples of our work: We’re creating a Good Digital Data Governance Guide – tools to help nonprofits and foundations create and implement data accountability practices and policies. Second, in partnership with BetterPlace Lab we’ll be collecting and telling stories of digital civil society from around the globe – documenting this emergent sector as it develops in different cultures and with many governance models. And third, we’re hosting an Ethics of Data conference for activists, scholars, and funders to proactively generate ethical principles for the use of digital data in civil society. Looking further into the future, we need to build an MIT Media Lab/Berkman Center/Open Data Institute –specifically for civil society and philanthropy. We need to
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come together – as doers, donors, activists and scholars -‐ and articulate the values of private and public that define this sector . Then we can write the code – both technical and legal – that carries those values forward. We need to define digital civil society – together -‐ and ReCode Good. [We can start now to experiment with data sources we know will soon be available, such as open 990s. We will research questions about appropriate incentives and limits to collecting private data for public benefit. We’ll look at inventing new kinds of enterprises to build long-‐term trust about private data and public good and study alternative governance models. And we’ll continue to help explain the changing finance options for social good, from crowdfunding to impact investing, each of which relies on – and generates – data for good. ] *** Everyone in this room is working hard to make data work better. Our goal at the Lab is to foster the ethical principles, institutional practices, and policy frames that will allow your innovations to spread. To not only manage digital data, but to do more than we ever thought possible.
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[CLICK]
We are almost in the very future you’re working to make happen. So there’s no better time than the present to prepare for digital civil society. Thank you very much.
The best possible future…