TOMORROW - Inside the Black Box: Making public-sector algorithms accountable - Wed @ 1100

UK Open Government Network Algorithmic Transparency
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Hi all

Hope you are well. See attached and below Open Government Partnership event in case of interest.

OGP Roundtable Discussion on Making Public Sector Algorithms Accountable to Citizens and Communities_RightsCon2021 (2).pdf (92.9 KB)

Best wishes,

Kevin

…

Dear colleagues,

I hope this email finds you well and safe.

On behalf of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) I am writing to invite you to the RightsCon side-event “Inside the black box: Making public-sector algorithms accountable to citizens and communities”. This invite-only roundtable will bring together implementers of reforms related to algorithmic accountability from OGP national and local members, with civil society and other partners to discuss the issue of civil society and community engagement in algorithmic accountability policy.

The session will be held virtually and is scheduled to take place on Wednesday June 9, 6:00 am ET/ 10:00 am GMT/ 10:00 pm Wellington.

This roundtable will build on the meetings of OGP’s informal open algorithms network, where the governments of Canada, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom meet to discuss the implementation of reforms on opening algorithms, including through commitments in their OGP action plans.

Building on our partnership with the AI Now Institute and Ada Lovelace Institute to develop the first global study evaluating the initial wave of algorithmic accountability policy, this session will discuss the preliminary findings of this report and provide an opportunity to share country experiences, including from government implementing agencies that have expressed interest in advancing this agenda.

Attached you will find a document with more information about the event. We will send an agenda for the session and a draft summary of the findings of the study the week before the meeting.

Please feel free to reach out to us to suggest other colleagues that would be interested in joining this conversation.

We kindly ask you to confirm your participation by responding to this email ( paula.perez@opengovpartnership.org). We would be delighted if you can join us and look forward to the discussion.

Warm regards,

Paula

Paula Pérez

Program Officer, Thematic Policy Areas

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Hello Kevin,

I hope you are well and thank you very much for sharing this. The invitation asks us to let Paula know we are attending.
Do you have an email for Paula please ?

Regards,
Alex

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Here you go Alex! paula.perez@opengovpartnership.org I added it to the post, but of course, it had already been sent out via email!

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Thanks Kevin

All ,

there was a related public event at RightsCon this UK morning. I saw a few twitter summary threads.

I can only share two links, because of the rules on this platform :), but if you follow this thread from Tonu Basu of the OGP, and look for quote tweets, then you will also find Etalab and the Ada Lovelace Institute’s summaries along with a link to a Jamboard with moar links:

Those links include the work by the Etalab bit of the French government, which was recently summarised in English on the OGP site and is an interesting read:

1 Like
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Hi Paula

I’d like to attend please!

Best

Linda Damerell

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HI Linda.

Could you drop a quick email to paula.perez@opengovpartnership.org RSVP-ing?

Best wishes,

Kevin

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Working designing services in local government, it is clear that highly transactional services can benefit from Digital assistance. When we begin to consider complex services that deal with people in need, then Digital, by definition, fails to deal with that complexity. The reason for that is that complexity creates elusive categorisation that cannot be replicated by binary thinking.
I spend much of my time ripping out poor Digital designs in such situations. In most cases the true outcomes of such designs are not observed by those implementing and managing those services, because they are not close enough to the reality of the situation.
A good example if Universal Credit in the UK. UC is a Digital logical design that fails to deal with the complexity inherent with some citizens, and as such causes significant personal issues in communities, and high operating costs.
I truly hope that any evaluation will consider the outside-in perspective and not simply examine measures. And I hope that those who have have an interested in Digital do not get blinded by their own enthusiasm.

John Mortimer