Science and Industry

First, let’s go back a few years, when I was on my 3rd year in the university. One of our courses was methodology in political sciences, and one topic was the two different views of the world, one based on structures, such as institutions, and the other on agency, like individuals and actors.

So, I returned to the past, but why? William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute visited Helsinki to make observations about his new article on research-centered computational networks. However, what I thought to be more interesting was the difference he made on networked institutions and networked individuals.

The more Internet orientated social scientists had a meeting before Dutton gave his presentation, and we went trough what we study and how the OII functions. Dutton made an observation that in e-democracy field research tends to focus on networked institutions.

With networked institutions, Dutton meant maintaining and empowering the existing structures with the capabilities of computer networks. An example of this might be the university, which maintains its academic status by creating institutional support services, such as blogs, document repositories, …

However, as I understood it, Dutton’s argument was that information and communication technology could go further and redistribute the power currently held in the structures. As the Web enables one to publish and collaborate without the middleman, Dutton’s idea is that individuals should be studied as part of the networking society too.

In terms of e-democracy research, some terms already cover these topics. New social movement is the most obvious for me: it studies how humans group together and act on a common cause, but they are not organized as an institution. Concept ‘reflective action’ can also be used to describe the phenomena: reflective actors use network technology to advocate their agenda. However, as Dutton observed, lots of effort goes to understanding and prototyping the use of technology for institutions, the existing structures – not focusing on re-inventing new systems that could allow more direct responsibility.

This is just one sample of the structure vs. agency-fight, ongoing in the social sciences. And, as in most cases, this is not a black-white question; rather there are grey colors too. So, both of these views of the world have explanatory powers, and in the best case they should be used together to create a more complete picture. And the presentation was a good reminder for me of the methodology lecture I had totally forgotten.

In previous text, I discussed mainly on Jyrki Kasvi’s presentation of information society. In this part, I will look closer on group works done. I participated to a group that had a topic of stimulating the dialogue between citizens and administration.

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…

It’s two days after elections in Finland and it been brought up to media that somewhat 200 votes has been “lost” in our electronic voting pilot (somwhat 12 000 votes casted) that has been promised to be secure in every way. Actually I’m not surprised of this for some reason.

So, about the background of the problem: every voter who wanted to participate into this pilot had their ballot in electronic form, something similar to credit card. One should put this card to selection machine; then one needs to select the candidate with numerical input and press ok to confirm this choice. Many people have missed the part of pressing ok, causing the electronic card be blanco.

This is just design of the workflow in the application, not even related to user interface. You can verify a good solution while visiting your ATM. At least here Finland it first gives out your card and after that your money — guess why in that order?

So, what has been the reaction? Our ministery of justice stated

Osoittautui, että järjestelmä ei ole ollut se ongelma, vaan sittenkin ihminen. (source: Helsingin Sanomat)

Which can be freely translated: “It became clear that the system was not the problem, but it was human after all.” Remind me of the HAL 9000 and famous “It can only be attributable to human error.” So what goes here wrong?

The users needs are not understood and this causes poor experience and in this case failure of the system, even thought it might technically be reliable it really don’t matter. What matters is that the user is not lost; what ever hack there’s in the engine — but always assume that user can do things differently.