Going to a lecture on Emerging Normativities in Law, Governance and Digital Tech
It’s been three years and nine months since my last blog post (What’s GDS ever done for us? Many, many good things). I’ve had some time recently to think about some things I might have a crack at writing about, but I thought I’d start off with something smaller to get back into the flow. Since I’ve not been on social media for over a year, and don’t miss it at all, I’m not sure anyone is going to see this anyway 🙂.
Back on the 8th of Feb, I was invited to a lecture at the University of Westminster College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, called Emerging Normativities, as part of their new series on Law, Governance and Digital Tech. It was a small group with a moderator, two presenters, about 15 people in the room (mostly Law students) and another half a dozen online.
Despite not being a student, I was surprised to be pretty much the only person who took any notes during the session, which I’ve used to compile this post.
Before I talk about the content, a few comments about the organisation. It was a two-hour session and cumulatively at least the first 30 minutes were lost in trying to get laptops to work with the projectors, trying various methods to share presentations, getting the livestream to work, etc. In 2024, the fact that organisers don’t ensure their kit works in advance and make sure they have the presentations ready for the speakers to use is depressing. The loss of time meant that, by the time the second presenter had finished their piece, in rather a rush, the next class was already queuing outside the room, so there was no time for questions. To be fair, the host said they were going with the speakers to the student cafe to continue the conversation but I had to leave to get to another appointment.
When we finally got under way, the organiser began with an overly long introduction, especially as we were already so far behind time. From a quick view of their multiple email inboxes while they were trying to get the technology to work, it seems they are a consulting professor to many prestigious universities around the world. This made it extra depressing when they moved onto how “web 3”, defined by them as blockchain, VR and AI, has the potential to save democracy. They also briefly mentioned the “environmental empowering blockchain organisation” they consult for which spoke volumes.
They did mention the University of Westminster Law and Technology LLM, which sounded interesting. I found myself wondering how things like that complement Tom Steinberg’s Harvard Kennedy School course on Teaching Public Services in the Digital Age.
The first speaker was a representative of The Lemonade Foundation and, while earnest and extremely well meaning, represented everything that disappoints me about the civic tech movement (although to their credit, unlike many people in civic tech, myself included, they are at least doing something).
During the host’s introduction, one of the topics they mentioned was colonisation. This was during what I felt like was a half-hearted attempt to cover a list of current popular academic woke-ish topics (said as a card carrying member of the wokerati). I acknowledge that this part introduced the new (to me) topic of “digital colonisation”, which was really interesting. Tech people often have a habit of promoting tech solutions to problems as it’s the only thing they know how to do. This concept goes one stage further by pointing out how foreign, usually Western, countries, companies or organisations often arrive with a “democratic platform” to solve all the problems of a group of disempowered people. Another example of provider / participant power imbalance.
I’m sure the people who have created and continue to work on Lemonade have their hearts in the right place. They obviously really want to empower people at a local level but, by arriving with a highly complex, fully developed platform, it means that any group choosing to participate becomes dependent on them to support the project in the same way as the dysfunctional state actors they are trying to provide alternatives to. By bypassing the state, instead of doing the hard work to improve existing systems, they introduce another level of risk to people already in very difficult situations.
It doesn’t help when users have to buy into their system using crypto and there’s a large reliance on so-called smart contracts that have been around for a while but have gained very little traction in the real world.
By pitching their platform with scalability levels, including names like “country” (as in defining your own online country away from current state control), shows the kind of tech-bro approach they’re bringing to things. A quick Google shows that they’re also providing “blockchain lotteries” and selling NFTs.
In stark contrast, the second speaker is studying in the UK but is originally from Taiwan, where they are very involved in the “g0v” (gov-zero) community. They started off by being very clear that neither they, nor anyone else, officially “speaks for” gov-zero, but that participants like them are encouraged to talk about it — though not on behalf of it. Their slides can be found here.
I was immediately impressed when they next said that just adding “digital” to an existing way of doing something, without examining the goals and existing methods of trying to achieve outcomes, is often a massive waste of time and resources. They put it beautifully and succinctly, saying, “Adding digital to a broken thing just gives you a digital broken thing”. I will be producing stickers with this on soon!
They moved on to return to the actual point of the lecture by covering the key question of whether we should rush the development of new laws to cover fast-emerging technology, such as AI, or whether we should try and regulate the rate at which technology is deployed to wait for the law to catch up — or if that’s even possible.
They then described a couple of projects developed by gov-zero volunteers, which involved working closely and frequently with the planned users of the technology from well before any code was developed, to ensure that what is built is what they need and can best integrate with how they currently do things. One very successful example of this was reporting the development of illegal factories in remote areas of Taiwan, put in place without any planning permission or other required regulations. This has led to the closure of several such facilities.
They made an interesting, and rather sad, point that, by working with some of the poorer people in Taiwan on some of these projects, they received negative personal social indicators (“Why are you associating with them?”).
They described the extremely transparent ways of working used by gov-zero, which make extensive use of GitHub and similar tools to have discussions and host code and documentation in the open as much as possible.
They made sure that all contributors, including people from the related NGO and those involved in user research, were part of a BBC Digital Planet show on the project.
They are also planning to include the user research participants in the list of contributors to the project alongside the dev team and everyone else involved. This is absolutely something we should do in public sector projects here (after asking permission from participants first, of course).
Unfortunately, we ran out of time before we were able to discuss the fascinating ways gov-zero has been used to aid in policy development in Taiwan, but I strongly encourage anyone reading this to look into how that works.
So, to conclude, this was a very varied session with pretty bad overall organisation. One presenter represented the “build it and they will come” model I would normally associate with the private sector big commercial providers mixed in with a bunch of crypto-utopianism. The other described excellent real-world examples of the kind of highly transparent, bottom-up, inclusive, continually iterated model of service development championed by GDS and our broader community.
I’m not sure what the young lawyers not taking notes in the session took away from it. I hope it wasn’t “web3 is the future” with all its blockchain and VR ridiculousness. However, since there was no mention at the end of any online place to continue the discussion, and I wasn’t able to raise the issue due to being ushered out the door, we’ll never know.
