IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 6

Editorial
Editorial
Public Interest Technology, Citizen
Assemblies, and Performative
Governance
Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
Katina Michael
School for the Future of Innovation in Society,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-5306 USA
Need for PIT
 There are many domains of human endeavor
which invoke the " public interest, " for example, environmental
sustainability, law, journalism, and, perhaps
most pointedly in 2020-2021, health. All of these
domains require some sort of tradeoff between different
and potentially competing stakeholder priorities.
For example, public interest in environmental sustainability,
with respect to air quality, potable water,
and arable land, can be in contention with requirements
of manufacturing, transport, and consumer
demand. Advocacy for social justice through public
interest law might set a disadvantaged or disempowered
group against a privileged or powerful one [1],
[2]. Similarly, journalistic reporting in the public
interest must consider holding the powerful accountable
for their actions and decisions and the potential
impact on society against basic rights to privacy and
ethical practices in investigative journalism. Choices
in public health sometimes appeal to the concept of
procedural justice and can involve a multiperspective
tradeoff between individual risk and collective
benefit, personal preference and state mandate,
financial costs and effectiveness of treatments, and
speed and caution (and note these are tradeoffs not
false dichotomies, as some would have it).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3104402
Date of current version: 2 September 2021.
6
0278-0097/21©2021 IEEE
Roba Abbas
School of Business, University of Wollongong,
Wollongong, NSW 2522 Australia
These examples show that, however abstract,
multifacetted, and difficult to define in precise
terms, there is a socially constructed concept [3]
of " public interest. " Furthermore, social activity can
be directed toward attempts to produce, promote,
or optimize a particular facet of that concept, such
as social justice, common knowledge, or collective
well-being. The relative success of such activity can
be determined according to a metric, or system of
metrics, that might be used to measure the performance,
level, or quality of that facet, for example,
in social justice: Gini index, relative poverty metrics,
and inclusivity; in journalism: accountability and
democracy index; and in health: life expectancy and
quality-of-life index.
This social activity may also require collective
action [4], that is, the coordinated behavior of a sufficiently
significant proportion of a group in order to
achieve a desired outcome relative to the applicable
metrics. To do this at scale, some form of knowledge
alignment may be required [5], [6]: a group might
define policies-which are themselves, of course,
socially constructed-as a mechanism to realize
coordinated behavior. As a consequence of such
" application pull, " technologies are developed to
help implement the policies which are intended to
advance the public interest.
It could be argued that a common assumption
underlying the collection of papers in this special
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