Stanford University

Democracy

ICT Design for Social Good: It's Potentials and Pitfalls

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Abstract
As part of the liberation technologies project and of Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute for Design (the "d.school") I have been a participant and an observer in a variety of courses and projects that are intended to serve goals of development and democracy in underserved areas of the world.  In this talk I will reflect on some of the lessons we have learned in that process, and on some of the underlying difficulties with current conceptions of Design for Good.

Terry Winograd is a co-leader of the Liberation Technology program at CDDRL and Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His research focus is on human-computer interaction design, especially theoretical background and conceptual models. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, and is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

Prof. Winograd was a founding member and former president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. Some of his publications includes Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Addison-Wesley, 1987)and Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools (Oxford, 1992). 

Terry Winograd received a BA in mathematics from The Colorado College in 1966 and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from M.I.T in 1970.

Wallenberg Theater

Terry Winograd

Gates Computer Science 3B
Room 388
Stanford, CA 94305-9035

(650) 723-2780
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Professor of Computer Science
founding faculty member at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford
and CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
winograd.jpg PhD

Terry Winograd is a co-leader of the Liberation Technology program at CDDRL and Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His research focus is on human-computer interaction design, especially theoretical background and conceptual models. He directs the teaching programs and HCI research in the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, and is also a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

Prof. Winograd was a founding member and former president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. Some of his publications includes Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Addison-Wesley, 1987) and Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools (Oxford, 1992). 

Terry Winograd received a B.A. in Mathematics from The Colorado College in 1966 and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from M.I.T in 1970.

Terry Winograd Professor of Computer Science; founding faculty member at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford; and CDDRL Affiliated Faculty Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
Program on Liberation Technology
Liberation Technology Seminar Series
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Economic Development and Conflict Resolution: Lessons and Challenges from Palestine

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Efforts to bolster economic and private sector development in Palestine are central components to many current efforts to build peace and resolve the conflict. But what do we really know about the relationship between economic development and conflict resolution? What does research, and experience tell us about when economic interventions help reduce conflict, and when they fail? This distinguished panel will offer insights and lessons from Palestine -- with voices from the Palestinian business community, the US government, and academia.

The panel is co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

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Stanford Law School
Moot Courtroom, Room 80

Ammar Aker CEO Speaker Palestine Telecom Group
Allen Weiner Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation Moderator Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation
Sonia Franceski Director Speaker Middle East Affairs, Office of the US Trade Representative
Sabri Saidam Advisor to the President on Telecom, IT and Technical Education, and former Minister of Telecom & IT Speaker
Saumitra Jha Assistant Professor of Political Economy Speaker Stanford Business School
Conferences

Democratic Governance in China

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Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Philippines Conference Room

YU Keping Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations Speaker Peking University
Seminars

The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Taiwan's Future Development Strategy

Abstract:

On October 11 and 12th, the Democracy in Taiwan Project at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in cooperation with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will hold its 8th annual conference, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by at least nine Pacific Rim countries that has the potential to re-shape economic relations in the region for the coming decades. This conference will bring together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. to examine the evolution, geopolitics and future of the TPP, and also to consider how Taiwan is responding to the challenge of freer trade and what its strategy for deepening its trade relations and maintaining its economic development should be.

 

Among the issues to be addressed are:

  • How the economic and trading environment of East Asia is evolving, and what Taiwan’s future place will be in that regional environment.
  • The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a potentially far-reaching new economic and strategic framework for the region, including the origins and evolution of the TPP, US participation and China’s response, and the implications for the balance of power in East Asia.
  • Taiwan’s response to the challenge of freer trade to date, including the impact on US-Taiwan relations and domestic constituencies for free trade in Taiwan.
  • The perspectives of other key countries in the region toward the TPP, including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China.

This event is co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

 

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Agenda

Speaker Bios

Presentations

Conference Papers

Conference Report (full report, abridged report)

 

 

Conferences
CDDRL Conferences

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

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Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

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Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

Authors
Vivek Srinivasan
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Technology, accountability and democracy in South Asia and beyond

Location: University of Mumbai, India

Dates: January 17-18, 2014

Over the last few years, there has been unprecedented focus on corruption and accountability across South Asia.  Accountability movements have resulted in a variety of initiatives including special monitoring bodies, transparency laws, monitoring mechanisms, judicial reforms and refining government processes.  These initiatives bring different understandings of problems and approaches, with varied strengths and weaknesses.  Despite these differences, they are increasingly converging on the use of technology to augment a growing set of accountability strategies.

The availability of new devices, the power of the Internet, the reach of mobile phones, and citizen activism give us reason to believe that the use of technology has real promise in advancing the accountability agenda. Yet the claim of technology’s promise is not without its critics. The use of technology has created new avenues for corruption despite claiming to combat it. Technologies rolled out in the name of advancing citizenship also create avenues for greater surveillance and disenfranchisement.  Many initiatives are not controversial, but their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated rigorously. Finally marginalized people, who need tools for accountability more than anyone else, have significantly lower levels of engagement with it.  The promises and problems of technology’s relationship with accountability require closer examination.

This conference proposes to bring together people who are engaged in these questions as activists, officials, academics and innovators to examine how technology is currently being used for accountability projects and to build meaningful platforms for the future. We specifically seek to bring together people with experience in accountability movements (with or without the use of technology), young innovators and researchers in order to promote rich multidisciplinary conversation and to build new collaborations.

One of the most persistent criticisms of technology for democracy projects is that they focus heavily on the tools without paying attention to the complexity of their use and the fact that accountability is a political project steeped in power relations.  In order to ensure that technical imagination goes hand in hand with a sophisticated understanding of the problems and strategies necessary to make technology a tool for progressive change, we propose to invite seasoned civil society activists and leaders from the government who have had a successful track record in managing positive change to meet individuals who are just beginning to consider technology as a response to the same problems. The conference will thus foster an exchange of ideas between innovators and experienced activists so that innovators can share their tools and experiences while also deepening their understanding of technology’s relevance and challenges for potential uses on the ground.  In turn, experienced political, social and economic leaders will gain ideas on how elements of technology can be introduced into in their work.  With this in mind, the conference format provides for opportunities to learn about technology projects, meet with platform creators, and participate in workshops to gain tools suitable for diverse campaign needs. 

The conference will be based on four broad themes: (1) Citizen activism for free and fair elections (2) Combatting “last-mile” corruption in public services (3) Gender, technology and accountability and (4) Building safeguards around India’s Aadhar project.  For further details including application, please download the call for papers here.

 

Organization:

The conference is led by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) both at Stanford University.  It will be organized in partnership with Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai and the Stanford Alumni Association of India.

 

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Technology, Accountability and Democracy in South Asia and Beyond

Over the last few years, there has been unprecedented focus on corruption and accountability across South Asia.  Accountability movements have resulted in a variety of initiatives including special monitoring bodies, transparency laws, monitoring mechanisms, judicial reforms and refining government processes.  These initiatives bring different understandings of problems and approaches, with varied strengths and weaknesses.  Despite these differences, they are increasingly converging on the use of technology to augment a growing set of accountability strategies.

The availability of new devices, the power of the Internet, the reach of mobile phones, and citizen activism give us reason to believe that the use of technology has real promise in advancing the accountability agenda. Yet the claim of technology’s promise is not without its critics. The use of technology has created new avenues for corruption despite claiming to combat it. Technologies rolled out in the name of advancing citizenship also create avenues for greater surveillance and disenfranchisement.  Many initiatives are not controversial, but their effectiveness is yet to be evaluated rigorously. Finally marginalized people, who need tools for accountability more than anyone else, have significantly lower levels of engagement with it.  The promises and problems of technology’s relationship with accountability require closer examination.

This conference proposes to bring together people who are engaged in these questions as activists, officials, academics and innovators to examine how technology is currently being used for accountability projects and to build meaningful platforms for the future. We specifically seek to bring together people with experience in accountability movements (with or without the use of technology), young innovators and researchers in order to promote rich multidisciplinary conversation and to build new collaborations.

One of the most persistent criticisms of technology for democracy projects is that they focus heavily on the tools without paying attention to the complexity of their use and the fact that accountability is a political project steeped in power relations.  In order to ensure that technical imagination goes hand in hand with a sophisticated understanding of the problems and strategies necessary to make technology a tool for progressive change, we propose to invite seasoned civil society activists and leaders from the government who have had a successful track record in managing positive change to meet individuals who are just beginning to consider technology as a response to the same problems. The conference will thus foster an exchange of ideas between innovators and experienced activists so that innovators can share their tools and experiences while also deepening their understanding of technology’s relevance and challenges for potential uses on the ground.  In turn, experienced political, social and economic leaders will gain ideas on how elements of technology can be introduced into in their work.  With this in mind, the conference format provides for opportunities to learn about technology projects, meet with platform creators, and participate in workshops to gain tools suitable for diverse campaign needs. 

The conference will be based on four broad themes: (1) Citizen activism for free and fair elections (2) Combatting “last-mile” corruption in public services (3) Gender, technology and accountability and (4) Building safeguards around India’s Aadhar project.  For further details including application, please download the call for papers below.

 

Organization:

The conference is led by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) both at Stanford University.  It will be organized in partnership with Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai and the Stanford Alumni Association of India.

Download pdf

University of Mumbai, India

Conferences
CDDRL Conferences

Contrasts Across the Strait: International Human Rights Norms in Taiwan and China

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Abstract:

In less than three decades, Taiwan has transformed from a repressive, authoritarian state into a vibrant democracy. Changes to the legal system, and particularly the criminal justice system, have played a central role in this story. Reform-minded politicians, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and scholars have been crucial advocates for strengthening human rights protections, as has Taiwan’s Constitutional Court. Since the end of martial law, the Court has vigorously given heft to rights enshrined in the Republic of China’s constitution. Now that Taiwan has adopted the contents of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as domestic law, it is an opportune moment to reflect on Taiwan’s journey towards embracing international human rights norms and to confront remaining challenges. The situation across the strait is markedly different. Today, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court has no counterpart on the Mainland and analogues to Taiwan’s former police-controlled punishments remain in full effect. As calls for reform on the Mainland become increasingly vocal, how might Taiwan’s experience inform efforts to increase human rights protections in the People’s Republic of China? 

Speaker Bio:

margaret lewis1
Maggie Lewis joined Seton Hall Law School as an Associate Professor in 2009. She is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and an Affiliated Scholar of NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Her recent publications have appeared in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Columbia Journal of Asian Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She is also the co-author of the book Challenge to China: How Taiwan Abolished Its Version of Re-Education Through Labor with Jerome A. Cohen. 

Most recently before joining Seton Hall, Professor Lewis served as a Senior Research Fellow at NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute where she worked on criminal justice reforms in China. Following graduation from law school, she worked as an associate at the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City. She then served as a law clerk for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Diego. After clerking, she returned to NYU School of Law and was awarded a Furman Fellowship.

Professor Lewis received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she was inducted into the Order of the Coif and was a member of Law Review. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, from Columbia University. In addition, she has studied at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing, China, and Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany. 

Philippines Conference Room

Margaret Lewis Associate Professor Speaker Seton Hall Law School
Seminars

The Unintended Consequences of Internet Diffusion: Evidence from Malaysia

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Abstract:
Can the introduction of the Internet undermine incumbent power in a semi-authoritarian regime? I examine this question using evidence from Malaysia, where the incumbent coalition lost its 40-year monopoly on power in 2008. I develop a novel methodology for measuring Internet penetration, matching IP addresses with physical locations, and apply it to the 2004 to 2008 period in Malaysia. Using distance to the backbone to instrument for endogenous Internet penetration, I find that areas with higher Internet penetration experience higher voter turnout and higher candidate turnover, with the Internet accounting for one-third of the 11% swing against the incumbent party in 2008. The results suggest that, in the absence of the Internet, the opposition would not have achieved its historic upset in the 2008 elections.
 

Luke Miner recently completed his PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Liberation Technology Program. He is currently working as a data scientist in the techology sector.

Miner’s research interests are political economy and development economics. In particular, he aims to quantitatively assess the effect of the Internet and new media on political accountability, development, and election outcomes. His past research finds a strong effect of Internet diffusion on results of Malaysia's 2008 elections, where it contributed to the ruling coalition's largest electoral setback in thirty years. His current research looks at the effect of the Internet on the 2008 U.S. presidential elections, in particular as a means of promoting campaign contributions.

Wallenberg Theater

Luke Miner Data Scientist Speaker
Seminars
Program on Liberation Technology
Liberation Technology Seminar Series

Reforming the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem in Post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia

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Abstract:

The seminar session will present findings from a new study on the entrepreneurship ecosystem in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. The discussion will focus on the challenges facing entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs in these countries and the MENA region, and will highlight the importance of reform of the legal and regulatory environment.

Speakers bio:

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Amr Adly has a Ph.D. from the European University Institute-Florence, Department of political and social sciences (Date of completion: September 2010). His thesis topic was "The political economy of trade and industrialization in the post-liberalization period: Cases of Turkey and Egypt". The thesis was published by Routledge in December 2012 under the title of State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt.

He has several other academic publications that have appeared in the Journal of Business and Politics, Turkish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, in addition to articles in several other periodicals and newspapers in English and Arabic.

Before joining Stanford, he worked as a senior researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, heading the unit of social and economic rights, and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat.

At Stanford, he is leading a research project on reforming the regulatory environment governing entrepreneurship after the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, which will result in policy papers as well as conferences in the two countries. 

Greg Simpson is Deputy Regional Director of the Middle East and North Africa division at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), where in addition to co-managing the division with the regional director, he also directly oversees CIPE’s sizeable Egypt portfolio. A veteran of the nongovernmental sector with eighteen years of experience in strengthening democratic institutions, Simpson came to CIPE from the U.S. online political firm New Media Communications, where he focused on developing and managing the company’s international initiatives. Prior to New Media, Simpson worked at the International Republican Institute (IRI), where he held three successive country director posts in the Balkans. There he directed assistance programs in political party development, political communications, local governance, grassroots organization and mobilization, civil society development, public opinion research, and election observation. During this time, Simpson advised and trained hundreds of political activists and elected officials, and directly advised two of the region’s presidents. Before joining IRI, Simpson held positions at the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL) and the Center for Civil Society in Southeastern Europe. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from American University in Washington, DC. Simpson currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and two children. 

One of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy and an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) is a U.S. non-profit organization with the mission of strengthening democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform. CIPE has supported more than 1,300 initiatives in over 100 developing countries, involving the private sector in policy advocacy and institutional reform, improving governance, and building understanding of market-based democratic systems. CIPE provides management assistance, practical experience, and financial support to local organizations to strengthen their capacity to implement democratic and economic reforms.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Lina Khatib Program Manager, Arab Reform and Democracy Moderator CDDRL
Amr Adly Postdoctoral Scholar Panelist CDDRL
Gregory Simpson Deputy Regional Director of the Middle East and North Africa division at the Center for International Private Enterprise Panelist CIPE
Seminars
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