PIT Colloquium Series IV: Open Government - more than transparency by Janssen, Wilcock, and Whelan

Open Government - more than transparency:
Open government has been heralded for advancing transparency and is expected to result in trust. Yet practices has proven more cumbersome and the benefits are often not realized. Open government challenge the traditional relationship between governments and the public and new forms of governance are emerging. In this talk we discuss the need to go beyond the technology realm and to develop new governance models.
Prof.dr. Marijn Janssen is a Full Professor in ICT & Governance in the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology He is particularly interested in situations in which multiple public and private organizations want to collaborate, in which ICT plays an enabling role, socio-technical solutions are constrained by organizational realities and political wishes, and there are various ways to proceed. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Government Information Quarterly, chair of the IFIP WG8.5 in ICT and public administration, conference chair of IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-ePart series and president of the Digital Government Society (DGS). He was ranked as one of the leading e-government researchers in surveys in 2009, 2014, and 2016. He was nominated in 2018 and 2019 by Apolitical as one of the 100 most influential people in the Digital Government worldwide apolitical.co/.... He has published over 600 refereed publications, his google h-score is 75, having over 23K citations. More information: www.tbm.tudelft.nl/marijnj.
Risk profiling in the welfare state:
This presentation will discuss the proliferation of algorithmic risk profiling techniques to detect welfare fraud and non-compliance in the Australian welfare state. Drawing on interviews with welfare compliance officials, including data miners and intelligence personnel, it will interrogate how these techniques can reinforce and legitimise the targeting of the most marginalised welfare recipients, including single mothers. The presentation will conclude with some reflections on the future of risk profiling in the context of rapid technological change and the continued expansion of the digital welfare state.
Dr Scarlet Wilcock is a lecturer at the University of Sydney, School of Law. Her research explores the introduction and effects of new technologies within welfare regimes, including how these technologies may shape or transform welfare law, policy and practice. She is an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (AMS+S) and a member of the Board of Directors of the Welfare Rights Centre, Sydney.
The 'right to be forgotten' has a material history
Article 17 of the EU GDPR famously affirms the ‘right to be forgotten’ (RTBF). This right is often discussed in terms of potential conflict with free speech rights (perhaps it goes too far), or in terms of undue burden on individuals attempting to exercise their RTBF (perhaps it doesn’t go far enough). Situating the RTBF in historical contexts casts these discussions in a particular light. In this presentation, I will foreground two such contexts. Firstly, the RTBF as a sociotechnical process can be located in the longer history of records management and disposition, and the distinct and sometimes contradictory administrative ethics instantiated in document retention and destruction processes. For example, via the 2014 Google Spain ruling (the precedent for Article 17), we can trace the transition from the archive to the (big) database as a politically consequential site. Secondly, and following on from this, the RTBF as a mode of data governance arises from and responds to specific political histories, including those in which records detailed, were involved in, or in their erasure obscured historical atrocities. Cognizance of this can lead to greater emphasis on the subject’s control over their data, and an appreciation of how a rights-based framing risks misrepresenting what is at stake in these discussions.
Andrew Whelan is a Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia. His research interests lie in the relations between emerging technologies and formal and informal social organizations. He is working currently on algorithmic social welfare and on processes of data erasure.