Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Five Years Later


O depósito foi em novembro passado, depois de quase desistir e de muitas reviravoltas. A defesa, naquele auditório vazio, mas onde já assisti aulas de Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen, Hellen Margetts, Richard Stallman, Wiebe Bijker... E, depois de conseguir voltar a ela e revisá-la, encontrei a parte que mais me interessa em mais de 250 páginas. Daqui pra frente minhas pesquisas serão sobre isso:

This type of participation based on big data about services requests, complaints, suggestions and use may be different on intention and content from direct participation processes. When a citizen contacts a service attention centre the message is usually one of complaint – “I cannot make an appointment with the doctor in the health centre” – while when she participates in defining priorities in, for instance, a participative budget process, the message more often takes the form of a suggestion – “the municipal government needs to hire more doctors in my neighbourhood”.  However when large sets of data of both requests, complaints, suggestions and patterns of use are aggregated and interpreted, the results for policy making and/or service improvement might be the same – “more investment in human resources in the health sector in region X”. 

Nonetheless, it is important to note that when governments decide to use citizen feedback to guide their service delivery and, as in the case of Rio, incentivize public servants in achieving performance targets for specific services, one must reflect on the role of this technology-mediated participation. Are citizens aware that their individual requests, complaints and suggestions about services are, aggregately starting to be used to restructure public services but also redirect public policies and investments? By placing efforts in improving electronic channels to expand participation regarding public services, public managers may be moving towards a model of participation that favours higher volumes of unmediated suggestions, since citizens may communicate directly with governments, instead of through organized social movements, not for profits, etc. or voice their opinion only during elections; the relationship to government may become individualized and then depolitized. Therefore, the role of interpreting citizens’ needs and priorities becomes more relevant and that responsibility might shift from civil society organizations and politicians to government technical staff.  

The 1746, for instance, is already guiding the city planning and investment processes when associating Departmental performance to the Municipality Target-Driven Plan, showing that this participation system may be going beyond a simplistic service attention centre. It seems inevitable that this type of participation system, with the aid of electronic means, requires the definition of protocols and standardization of categories for the participation process in order to transform the potential vast number of suggestions into input for policy-making. By doing so, it also becomes easier to be constantly transparent and continuously accountable about the inputs received and the actions taken upon them, closing the feedback loop.

Clearly, expanding electronic participation and feedback systems can foster service enhancement, interdepartmental collaboration, as well as technical decision-making and continuous accountability, less attached to the formal processes of elections. Nevertheless, more investigation needs to be carried out about whether citizens feel rightly interpreted and politically represented on this model of unmediated participation based on vast amounts of data. What needs to be further investigated is whether electronic feedback models may improve some of the acknowledged deficits of present representative democracy, such as political legitimacy, or may on the contrary worsen them.






Friday, June 17, 2011

Show Me the Data

"So many things that I'd like to know
Come have a talk with me
I need a sign, something I can see
Why all the mystery?
I try not to fall for make believe
But what is reality?
Where do we go?
What do we know?
Life has to have a meaning
Show me the light
Show me the way
Show that you're listening"
               
                    (John Legend)

trecho da tesinha: "The quest for transforming the vast quantity of data generated by online interactions into information and knowledge about customers has become paramount for the private sector. At the micro-level, there are several web analysis tools that have become exponentially more sophisticated and offer several complex  resources. At the macro-level, and outside the e-commerce world, “Web Science” intends to understand how the web works through a systems approach - "to model the Web as a whole, keep it growing, and understand its continuing social impact". For instance, from a computational perspective (e.g. semantic web), one can go by analysing how social coordination and collaboration systems can lead to the emergence of large-scale, coherent resources such as Wikipedia, or from a social science perspective, by studying how digital records of network use could be used to understanding the sociological aspects of the Web.
 
In the public sector, the tendency of reorganising and reutilising data with the aid of ICTs has become more visible with the rise of “open government",  a practice that gives civil society the choice to use public data as need and curiosity arise, increasing transparency and political trust. However in this research I instead look at governments and ask, as the private sector already does for different purposes, whether they are using data about citizens' interaction with their governments – for instance by giving their opinion about services - and about their patterns of electronic services use, with the goal of improving service delivery."


Chopin-ho

Hoje é dia de Chopin.




E de choppinho com @s amig@s.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Entre Emusic e Jazz

Depois de mais de um ano, volto a escrever. Estou realmente nos momentos ultra duper finais dessa coisa que should not be named. Eu desgosto cada vez mais de escrever, mas acho que é normal. Semana passada estava relendo os primeiros capítulos, teóricos, e até que eles não ficaram mal, viu? Dá pra escrever uns artiguinhos de divulgação legais. Não vou mais publicar em journals fechados porque ninguém que ME interessa lê mesmo.

A reflexão dos últimos meses é que, se eu tinha alguma dúvida, sei que o mundo acadêmico não é pra mim. Meu ego intelectual é grande demais para ser acadêmica - é tanta preocupação com tudo que demoro muito pra terminar pesquisas. A gente tem que saber reconhecer quando algo não é pro nosso bico, mesmo que seja interessante e atraente. Em compensação, quando ponho a mão na massa tenho uma ansiedade imensa por ver resultados; o ego vai embora e é subsituído pelo thrill de ver as coisas acontecendo. Arrepia. Outro dia saiu uma notícia de que um projeto no qual eu estive profundamente envolvida em 2005 finalmente saiu na prefeitura de São Paulo. É muita felicidade! É isso aí que gosto de fazer!

E ultimamente ouço jazz, na AccuJazz, quando estou em momento tese, e Emusic, quando estou numa vibe mais Yes, I can. Aqui tem uns sets fantásticos: http://www.killingbeats.com/blog/

e pra agora, uma do New Order remixada por um residente molt especial de Barcelona, Funk D'Void:

Friday, January 22, 2010

The Day That I Feel Intelligent (or the Days that I write in Portuguese)

Every time I need to write something more analytical (and not just filling in sentences with examples and well known facts) I write in Portuguese first. It's faster, and I feel freer to play with words and concepts. Today is one of those days and I feel so damn intelligent all of a sudden :). I can't wait to go back to writing in my native tongue again.


Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Gleek (or the importance of having a FUN mind mapping tool)

My despair didn't last long, thanks to finally giving in to using a mind mapping tool. After 3 years of work, of course I was overloaded with information and couldn't organise my thoughts in a single sheet of paper, as I am used when I write essays and articles.

I avoided as long as I could learning how to use yet another software, but at 7pm today, after spending another day struggling with logical ideas and hierarchies of concepts, I made the call and chose View Your Mind over FreeMind simply because VYM is *really* easy to use. Very importantly, both are free, and run on Ubuntu (in fact I got them in the Ubuntu Software Centre).

Ok, it saved my life. Really. I've always needed to build a conceptual map of my arguments before writing, but it was becoming nearly impossible to do that by hand with that huge amount of information. Every time I had to change one argument I lost track of all the others. It used to be a nightmare... but now it's FUN!

So, "Gravity" no longer in my spirit, just Glee :)


Sunday, November 29, 2009

Gravity (or C'mon keep me where the light is)

Winter is almost here and I am still struggling with the first chapter. It's probably because I know this chapter means a lot more than just what it is - the first. It sets the tone for the whole lot coming ahead of me. Kind of scary.

Gravity - John Mayer



Gravity is working against me
And gravity wants to bring me down

Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away

Oh Gravity is working against me
And gravity wants to bring me down

Oh twice as much ain't twice as good
And can't sustain like a one half could
It's wanting more
That's gonna send me to my knees
[repeat]

Oh gravity, stay the hell away from me
And gravity has taken better men than me (now how can that be?)

Just keep me where the light is
Just keep me where the light is
Just keep me where the light is
C'mon keep me where the light is
C'mon keep me where the light is
Oh... where the light is! [repeat]