Dr. Alois Paulin
“Can we build technology to control the state, instead of the state using technology to control us?” asks Dr. Alois Paulin, a pioneer of the Beyond Bureaucracy research field.
Beyond bureaucracy is concerned with the following central question: How to engineer cyber-physical platforms for controlling and transforming political order, whereby such platforms would enable non-mediated co-creation and direct-democratic control over public services? Co-creation through cyber-physical platforms has been identified to be a key driver of the future evolution of the Internet and mobile communications, and it will play a crucial role in advancing democracy into a post-bureaucratic stage.
The goal is to design a central future platform, which allows societies to control public funding and public mandates. Thus, it allows them to steer the actions of their public agencies. To this end, beyond bureaucracy is about enabling a radically new understanding of democracy beyond the limits inherent to generations in the era before ICT technologies were known. It allows us to imagine a future in which, for example, members of a community can themselves directly control which agencies, programmes or projects receive their taxes, and control which individuals assume public offices.
"Unhappy with your country dropping bombs on innocent civilians? – Don’t protest against warmongers, simply cut their funding! " declares Paulin.
In this capacity, beyond bureaucracy joins researchers interested in future technologies for distributed collaborative decision-making (mass online deliberation, liquid democracy), advanced data access mechanisms (dynamic fine-grained access control, fair nonrepudiable information exchange), as well as expertise from domains such as law, political science, public administration and sociology in building capacities for technology-enabled breakthroughs in the area of governance of political order. Spin-off applications have been successfully applied to medical logistics and hygienic integrity assurance, smart city governance and access control to sensible private data. Further areas of exploration include smart grids, political systems, public transport, cross-border mobility, migration control, personalized law, the IoT, 5G mobile communication services and open government data, which all rely on complex governance of personalized multi-stakeholder access to online resources.
Between June 8-9, 2017, the 18th annual
International Conference on Digital Government Research (DG.O 2017) will host the 2017 beyond bureaucracy track, where the emerging research community will gather for the fourth time, following successful events in Vienna, Krems and Shanghai.
The DG.O 2017 beyond bureaucracy track will be chaired by Dr. Alois Paulin (Edinburgh Napier University), and Dr. Leonidas Anthopoulos (TEI of Thessaly), the editors of the recent beyond bureaucracy themed special issue of the IGI Global’s
International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (Vol. 4, Iss. 2), "Reaching Beyond Bureaus: Challenges and Perspectives of Sustainable, Non-Bureaucratic Governance.”
IGI Global truly appreciates Dr. Alois Paulin for sharing his expertise on beyond bureaucracy and informing everyone of the upcoming conference.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of IGI Global.
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