https://www.bond.org.uk/sites/default/files/resource-documents/using_icts_to_create_a_culture_of_transparency.pdf

Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies

In this essay, we argue that pervasive digitization gives birth to a new type of product architecture: the layered modular architecture. The layered modular architecture extends the modular architecture of physical products by incorporating four loosely coupled layers of devices, networks, services, and contents created by digital technology. We posit that this new architecture instigates profound changes in the ways that firms organize for innovation in the future. We develop (1) a conceptual framework to describe the emerging organizing logic of digital innovation and (2) an information systems research agenda for digital strategy and the creation and management of corporate information technology infrastructures.

Research Commentary---The New Organizing Logic of Digital Innovation: An Agenda for Information Systems Research

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(12)60072-5.pdf

Adolescence: a foundation for future health

In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved a notable momentum that may deliver the best of expectations over many application sectors across the field. For this to occur, the entire community stands in front of the barrier of explainability, an inherent problem of AI techniques brought by sub-symbolism (e.g. ensembles or Deep Neural Networks) that were not present in the last hype of AI. Paradigms underlying this problem fall within the so-called eXplainable AI (XAI) field, which is acknowledged as a crucial feature for the practical deployment of AI models. This overview examines the existing literature in the field of XAI, including a prospect toward what is yet to be reached. We summarize previous efforts to define explainability in Machine Learning, establishing a novel definition that covers prior conceptual propositions with a major focus on the audience for which explainability is sought. We then propose and discuss about a taxonomy of recent contributions related to the explainability of different Machine Learning models, including those aimed at Deep Learning methods for which a second taxonomy is built. This literature analysis serves as the background for a series of challenges faced by XAI, such as the crossroads between data fusion and explainability. Our prospects lead toward the concept of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, namely, a methodology for the large-scale implementation of AI methods in real organizations with fairness, model explainability and accountability at its core. Our ultimate goal is to provide newcomers to XAI with a reference material in order to stimulate future research advances, but also to encourage experts and professionals from other disciplines to embrace the benefits of AI in their activity sectors, without any prior bias for its lack of interpretability.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI.

Our era is one of increasingly pervasive digital technologies, which penetrate deeply into the very core of the products, services, and operations of many organizations and radically change the nature of product and service innovations. The fundamental properties of digital technology are reprogrammability and data homogenization. Together, they provide an environment of open and flexible affordances that are used in creating innovations characterized by convergence and generativity. An analysis of convergence and generativity observed in innovations with pervasive digital technologies reveals three traits: (1) the importance of digital technology platforms, (2) the emergence of distributed innovations, and (3) the prevalence of combinatorial innovation. Each of the six articles in this special issue relates to one or more of these three traits. In this essay, we explore the organizational research implications of these three digital innovation traits and identify research opportunities for organization science scholars. Examples from the articles in this special issue on organizing for innovation in the digitized world are used to demonstrate the kind of organizational scholarship that can faithfully reflect and inform innovation in a world of pervasive digital technologies.

Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World

This essay makes the case that Internet-based platforms can be evaluated along two dimensions: the first between generative and sterile, indicating openness to further contribution and development from outsiders, and the second between hierarchy and polyarchy, indicating the ease with which those affected by the platform can escape its umbrella. The quadrants formed by these two dimensions can help us to understand patterns in the development of new technologies and platforms, and to brainstorm the widest array of solutions to problems arising under them, particularly problems involving enforcement of regulations against bad actors. Using cybersecurity as a principal example, the essay explains why current national security approaches to Internet vulnerabilities are unduly narrow, and how focusing attention on the "fourth quadrant" can broaden the range of options.

The Fourth Quadrant

To understand where digital governance is going, we must take stock of where it’s been, because the timbre of mainstream thinking around digital governance today is dramatically different than it was when study of “Internet governance” coalesced in the late 1990s.

Perhaps the most obvious change has been from emphasizing networked technologies’ positive effects and promise – couched around concepts like connectivity, innovation, and, by this author, “generativity” – to pointing out their harms and threats. It’s not that threats weren’t previously recognized, but rather that they were more often seen in external clamps on technological development and upon the corresponding new freedoms for users, whether government intervention to block VOIP services like Skype to protect incumbent telco revenues, or in the shaping of technology to effect undue surveillance, whether for government or corporate purposes.

The shift in emphasis from positive to negative corresponds to a change in the overarching frameworks for talking about regulating information technology. We have moved from a discourse around rights – particularly those of end-users, and the ways in which abstention by intermediaries is important to facilitate citizen flourishing – to one of public health, which naturally asks for a weighing of the systemic benefits or harms of a technology, and to think about what systemic interventions might curtail its apparent excesses.

Each framework captures important values around the use of technology that can both empower and limit individual freedom of action, including to engage in harmful conduct. Our goal today should be to identify where competing values frameworks themselves preclude understanding of others’ positions about regulation, and to see if we can map a path forward that, if not reconciling the frameworks, allows for satisfying, if ever-evolving, resolutions to immediate questions of public and private governance.

/pdf/three-eras-of-digital-governance-2gk0ah7iiq.pdf

Three Eras of Digital Governance

In August 2010, selected faculty and researchers at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, an independent, exploratory study analyzing ICANN’s decision-making processes and communications with its stakeholders. The study focused on developing a framework and recommendations for understanding and improving ICANN’s accountability and transparency.The study was undertaken as part of ICANN’s first Accountability and Transparency Review. On November 4, 2010, the Berkman team’s independent report was publicly posted alongside ICANN’s Accountability and Transparency Review Team's Draft Proposed Recommendations for Public Comment.The Executive Summary below outlines key Findings and Recommendations for Improvement. In addition to this Final Report, associated research materials, resources, and other supplementary inputs that were gathered in the course of the Berkman team’s work.1. Problem Statement:In recent years, ICANN has taken important actions — ranging from significant policy changes to formal reviews — to improve its accountability, transparency, and the quality of its decision making. Despite considerable efforts and acknowledged improvements, ICANN continues to struggle with making decisions that the global Internet community can support.2. Independent Review of Transparency and Accountability at ICANN:As part of a larger independent review process, faculty and researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society have taken on the challenge of researching ICANN’s current efforts to improve accountability via mechanisms of transparency, public participation and corporate governance, and of analyzing key problems and issues across these areas.3. Findings and Assessment:In-depth research into the three focus areas of this report reveals a highly complex picture with many interacting variables that make fact-finding challenging and also render simple solutions impossible. With this complexity in mind, and referring to the main text of the report for a more granular analysis, the findings and assessments of this report can be condensed as follows.ICANN’s performance regarding transparency is currently not meeting its potential across all areas reviewed and shows deficits along a number of dimensions. It calls for clearly defined improvements at the level of policy, information design, and decision making.ICANN has made significant progress in improving its public participation mechanisms and gets high marks regarding its overall trajectory in this regard. Remaining concerns about the practical impact of public participation on Board decisions are best addressed by increasing visibility and traceability of individual inputs, in order to clarify how these inputs ultimately factor into ICANN decision-making processes.ICANN’s greatest challenge ahead, despite significant recent efforts, remains corporate and Board governance. Proposed measures identified in this report aim to increase efficiency, transparency and accountability within the current context and in the absence of standard accountability mechanisms.4. Recommendations:There is no straightforward way to address the various challenges ICANN faces. The approach underlying this report’s recommendations takes an evolutionary rather than revolutionary perspective. This approach is aimed at continually improving ICANN’s accountability step by step, based on lessons learned, through a series of measured interventions, reinforced by monitoring and subsequent re-evaluation.For each of the three focal areas covered in this report and for each of the key issues addressed, this report suggests ways in which the status quo can be improved. Some of these recommendations can be implemented quickly, others require policy changes, and still others call for more in-depth research, consultation and deliberation among the involved stakeholders.This report’s recommendations vary in kind and orientation. They encourage the adoption of best practices where available and experimentation with approaches and tools where feasible. Several of the recommendations are aimed at improving information processing, creation, distribution, and responsiveness at different levels of the organization.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1998905_code727672.pdf?abstractid=1998905

Accountability and Transparency at ICANN: An Independent Review (Final Report)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction, The Backdrop, Key International Legal Instruments, Applying International Law to Filtering, Problem of Enforcement, Shifting the Emphasis to Private Actors, The Promise of International Standards, Notes

Filtering and the International System: A Question of Commitment

/pdf/accountability-and-transparency-at-icann-an-independent-307kp8mnbn.pdf

Jonathan L. Zittrain

Papers

The Fourth Quadrant

Three Eras of Digital Governance

Accountability and Transparency at ICANN: An Independent Review (Final Report)

Filtering and the International System: A Question of Commitment

Accountability and Transparency at ICANN: An Independent Review