scholarly journals Effective public participation is fundamental for marine conservation - lessons from a large scale MPA

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon C. Day
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Marine Conservation ◽  
Environmental Conservation ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The Public ◽  
Marine Park ◽  
Participation Program

The Representative Areas Program (RAP) was, at the time, the most comprehensive process of community involvement and participatory planning for any environmental issue in Australia. The RAP was a key component of the widely acclaimed rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and although completed in 2003, many lessons learned are still relevant today. This paper provides an analysis of the comprehensive public participation program that significantly influenced the final planning outcome. It provides insights into a fundamental component of effective marine planning, assessing what worked well and what did not in terms of public engagement. Some aspects of the public participation program were innovative, and some were more effective than others. The outcome was one-third of the Marine Park was declared as highly protected no-take zones in 2004, with the remainder of the park also zoned to provide lower levels of protection. The methods used to engage the public and the 25 lessons discussed in this paper should be of interest for practitioners, policy makers and academics elsewhere aiming for ‘good practice’ approaches to achieve environmental conservation.

scholarly journals The public accountability of social platforms: lessons from a study on bots and trolls in the Brexit campaign

2018 ◽  
Vol 376 (2128) ◽  
pp. 20180003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Application Programming ◽  
Access To Data ◽  
The Uk

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.

The Dewey-Lippmann Debate Today: Communication Distortions, Reflective Agency, and Participatory Democracy

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Whipple
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Current Context ◽  
The Public Sphere

In this article, I introduce the Dewey-Lippmann democracy debate of the 1920s as a vehicle for considering how social theory can enhance the empirical viability of participatory democratic theory within the current context of advanced capitalism. I situate within this broad theoretical framework the theories of Habermas and Dewey. In the process, I argue (a) that while Dewey largely failed to reconcile his democratic ideal with the empirical constraint of large-scale organizations, Habermas, in particular his work on the public sphere, provides an important starting point for considering the state of public participation within the communication distortions of advanced capitalism; (b) that to fully understand the relation between communication distortions and public participation, social theorists must look beyond Habermas and return to Dewey to mobilize his bi-level view of habitual and reflective human agency; and, finally, (c) that the perspective of a Deweyan political theory of reflective agency best furthers our understanding of potential communication distortions and public participation, particularly in the empirical spaces of media centralization and intellectual property rights.

Conceptual and Practical Considerations in Alternative Service Delivery

2003 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
John K. Wilkins
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Service Delivery ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Good Practice ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Alternative Service ◽  
Alternative Service Delivery ◽  
The Many

Alternative service delivery (ASD) is a Canadian phenomenon that spread, surfaced important issues and made a wider impact. ASD refers to the many and varied organizational forms and delivery mechanisms governments use to achieve their objectives. It is anchored in a spectrum of options that mirrors the diversity of the nation, its governments and its public institutions. Innovations sustain the capacity to serve the public interest and to leverage efficiency, accountability and renewal. They embrace a strategy of collaboration across sectors and boundaries to overcome impediments to change and to transform service delivery. Countless spin-offs cascade throughout the Canadian public sector. Many governments benchmark the international scene and adapt innovations to their settings. Respect for situation and reciprocal learning facilitate the transfer of good practice. Lessons learned from ASD experiences across Canada and in countries like Tanzania, Latvia and New Zealand improve the prospects of `getting service delivery right'.

scholarly journals A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design Thinking

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Brandon Reynante ◽  
Steven P. Dow ◽  
Narges Mahyar
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Design Thinking ◽  
Effective Management ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Public ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Future Work

Civic problems are often too complex to solve through traditional top-down strategies. Various governments and civic initiatives have explored more community-driven strategies where citizens get involved with defining problems and innovating solutions. While certain people may feel more empowered, the public at large often does not have accessible, flexible, and meaningful ways to engage. Prior theoretical frameworks for public participation typically offer a one-size-fits-all model based on face-to-face engagement and fail to recognize the barriers faced by even the most engaged citizens. In this article, we explore a vision for open civic design where we integrate theoretical frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking to consider the role technology can play in lowering barriers to large-scale participation, scaffolding problem-solving activities, and providing flexible options that cater to individuals’ skills, availability, and interests. We describe our novel theoretical framework and analyze the key goals associated with this vision: (1) to promote inclusive and sustained participation in civics; (2) to facilitate effective management of large-scale participation; and (3) to provide a structured process for achieving effective solutions. We present case studies of existing civic design initiatives and discuss challenges, limitations, and future work related to operationalizing, implementing, and testing this framework.

scholarly journals Mining Public Opinion on Transportation Systems Based on Social Media Data

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 4016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawei Li ◽  
Yujia Zhang ◽  
Cheng Li
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Participation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Web Crawler ◽  
Allocation Model ◽  
Public Opinions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Probabilistic Topic Modeling

Public participation plays an important role of traffic planning and management, but it is a great challenge to collect and analyze public opinions for traffic problems on a large scale under traditional methods. Traffic management departments should appropriately adopt public opinions in order to formulate scientific and reasonable regulations and policies. At present, while increasing degree of public participation, data collection and processing should be accelerated to make up for the shortcomings of traditional planning. This paper focuses on text analysis using large data with temporal and spatial attributes of social network platform. Web crawler technology is used to obtain traffic-related text in mainstream social platforms. After basic treatment, the emotional tendency of the text is analyzed. Then, based on the probabilistic topic modeling (latent Dirichlet allocation model), the main opinions of the public are extracted, and the spatial and temporal characteristics of the data are summarized. Taking Nanjing Metro as an example, the existing problems are summarized from the public opinions and improvement measures are put forward, which proves the feasibility of providing technical support for public participation in public transport with social media big data.

scholarly journals ‘The Kāpiti Distressway’: A Sociological Case Study of Public Involvement in a Socio-Technical Controversy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Morgan Jasper Hamlin
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Public Involvement ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
The Public ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
National Significance

<p>This thesis examines public involvement in socio-technical controversies from a sociological perspective. Public engagement in science and technology is becoming increasingly important in societies where citizens are asked, and expected, to be involved with issues that have been dominated by experts. In New Zealand, a contemporary example of public participation in science and technology is the large-scale road building programme called the Roads of National Significance. The central aim of this thesis is to understand how the public engage with and create meaningful evaluations of complex issues that are associated with expert-driven politics and top-down decision-making processes. I examine the public’s involvement in the Kāpiti expressway project by discussing how locally-based groups evaluated and publicised it as an object of concern. Specifically, I investigate the demonstration and visual imagery technologies that were utilised to publicise the expressway as a public matter. I then explore how opponents translated their concerns with the environmental, political, and social aspects of the project as legal and technical issues. The second aim of this thesis is to contribute to the material turn in the human sciences by engaging with object-oriented (Barry, 2013; Latour, 2005a; Marres & Lezaun, 2011) and socio-cultural (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) approaches to public involvement in socio-technical controversies. The role that technologies play in materialising public participation and re-presenting the Kāpiti expressway project as an object of concern are examined. However, to create a dialogue between object-oriented and socio-cultural approaches to public dispute, I investigate the technologies of justification and criticism, and the cultural modes of evaluation that qualify people and things within moral vocabularies. I argue that the public were obliged to re-present the Kāpiti expressway as an object of concern by demonstrating how their personal objections were relevant to the legal and technical aspects of the project. A range of technological devices enabled local groups to evaluate the project during the early planning stages of the project, but convincing decision-makers to reject the expressway involved the difficult task of critiquing the planning process, and enrolling allies. This thesis uses a qualitative, case study approach to socio-technical controversies. I use interviews, qualitative observations, and documentary methods to examine the actions of locally-based groups and the modes of evaluation used to challenge the Kāpiti expressway project.</p>

Connected data landscape of long-term ecological studies: the SPI-Birds data hub

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antica Culina ◽  
Frank Adriaensen ◽  
Liam D. Bailey ◽  
Malcolm D. Burgess ◽  
Anne Charmantier ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Integration ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Meta Data ◽  
Standard Format ◽  
Global Issues

The integration and synthesis of the data in different areas of science is drastically slowed and hindered by a lack of standards and networking programmes. Long-term studies of individually marked animals are not an exception. These studies are especially important as instrumental for understanding evolutionary and ecological processes in the wild. Further, their number and global distribution provides a unique opportunity to assess the generality of patterns and to address broad-scale global issues (e.g. climate change). To solve data integration issues and enable a new scale of ecological and evolutionary research based on long-terms studies of birds, we have created the SPI-Birds Network and Database (www.spibirds.org) – a large-scale initiative that connects data from, and researchers working on, studies of wild populations of individually recognizable (usually ringed) birds. Within a year of the establishment, SPI-Birds counts 120 members working on more than 80 populations, with data concerning breeding attempts of almost a million individual birds over a 1700 cumulative years, and counting. SPI-Birds acts as a data hub and a catalogue of studied populations. It prevents data loss, secures easy data finding, use and integration, and thus facilitates collaboration and synthesis. We provide community-derived data and meta-data standards and improve data integrity guided by of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), and aligned with the existing metadata languages (e.g. ecological meta-data language). The encouraging community involvement stems from SPI-Bird's decentralized approach: research groups retain full control over data use and their way of data management, while SPI-Birds creates tailored pipelines to convert each unique data format into a standard format. We outline the lessons learned, so that other communities (e.g. those working on other taxa) can adapt our successful model. Creating community-specific hubs (such as ours, COMADRE for animal demography, etc.) will aid much-needed large-scale ecological data integration.

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