Browsing by Subject "public administration"

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    Conference Paper
    Algorithmic Decision Making in Public Administration: A CSCW-Perspective
    (Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Flügge, Asbjörn Ammitzböll
    In this paper, I propose a study of algorithmic decision making in public administration from a computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) perspective. Each day the public administration makes thousands of decisions with consequences for the welfare of its citizens. An increasing number of such decisions are supported or made by algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems, yet in the scientific and public sphere there is a growing concern that these algorithms become a 'black box' possibly containing hidden bias (Olsen et al., 2019), obstacles for human discretion (Rason, 2017), low transparency (Alkhatib and Bernstein, 2019) or trust (Mittelstadt et al. 2016). For example, ADM is currently tested in public administration in job placement for the prediction of a citizen's risk of long-term unemployment. Following prior research questioning the usefulness of the black box metaphor, my interest is to understand how caseworkers' and citizens understand ADM, as a basis for design of CSCW technologies employing ADM.
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    Conference Paper
    Algorithmic Decision Making in Public Services: A CSCW-Perspective
    (Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 2020) Flügge, Asbjörn William Ammitzböll; Hildebrandt, Thomas; Möller, Naja Holten
    Each day the public administration makes thousands of decisions with consequences for the welfare of its citizens. An increasing number of such decisions are supported or made by algorithmic decision making (ADM) systems, yet there is a widespread concern that these algorithms create a 'black box' of embedded bias, lack of human discretion, transparency or trust. For example, ADM is currently tested in public administration in job placement for prediction of a citizen's risk of long-term unemployment. This research project focus on bringing about research on citizens' 'trust' and 'transparency' from a practice-oriented perspective when algorithms are increasingly introduced in public services such as job placement. We propose a study of citizen-government relations to begin to uncover how computational systems and semi-automated decisions affect the relationship between citizens and caseworker, as they work through the collaborative processes around casework. In this context, our question is: What are citizens and caseworkers' different concepts of trust and transparency? How are casework processes affected as we are beginning to see a closer integration between legal guidelines and computational systems in casework? These questions are of huge importance to get a better understanding of how algorithms are changing the ways society makes decisions in core areas of public services in order to inform the responsible design of technologies in areas such as job placement.
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    Conference Paper
    Supporting Communities of Practice in Public Administrations: Factors Influencing Adoption and Readiness
    (Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, 2017) Blunk, Oliver; Prilla, Michael; Lewkowicz, Myriam; Rohde, Markus; Mulder, Ingrid; Schuler, Douglas
    Exchange of experiences is a common means of informal learning in work places. Multiple organizations have discovered the benefits of actively supporting a community of practice to support this. We implemented a community of practice platform in two public administration organizations concerned with employment and experienced differences between the cases as well as difficulties during the implementation. After conducting a systematic analysis, we identified several influencing factors affecting the emergence of a community of practice. We propose a set of readiness indicators derived from this analysis, offering researchers and practitioners a tool to estimate the readiness of a public administration organization towards adopting communities of practice.