Data and participation 2018/11/14/apunts/01

https://pad.femprocomuns.cat/p/sharebcn2018dataparticipation

Enric Senabre

Data surrounds us, it has economic value, as citizens we are constantly providing data.

Beth Coleman City as Plaform Lab, we have achieved a shift in the discourse on the value of data, how can we go from some agreements on to how to move into the actions, what type of systems can we design?

We have been working through new tech platforms, augmented and virtual reality and  air quality index data,  we have been working on where the data comes from, how has it been stamped as the official count.

From an AR view you get the city in front of you and when you zoom in you see an avatar, in a cube of polluted air, and you have a bottle to spray CO2. You see the pollution, and you feel the effects, the only acton you can do as an avatar is to die.

I am all for the invention around technology, but also how can we use it in a way that is meaningful and gives context.

A mode of speculative design, to see what is making up our datasets. AQI air quality, when you have the impact of cars, of noise,.. you get a typology of the city, data is politicised

I am collaborating with a group working with Imperial Oil company, the people working there and impacted by it are indigenous, and the dataset is difficult to put together because Imperial Oil segments the data, so to find it and put it together is political and productive in pointing to what is the effect of this industry in the neighborhood.

Mattia Marini, form the Sharing Cities Alliance.

Sharing Cities Alliance funded in May 2017 during the second summit in New York.

Alliance LEXicon or Alex: in order to address the challenges of our cities we need to provide knowledge. For this purpose, in Alex we store case studies, research, experiences...

Financial sustainabiluty is a challenge: We want to make it sustainable through partnership and collaboration

The second challenge is to open Alex: we believe in the value of open knowledge, but at the same open databases might lack in quality of the product, and we want to preserve the value of our work.

For open knowledge, collaboration is key for expantioning.

Cities are key in this process

We need a balance between open database and the quality of the materials provided.

Enric Senabre

We are also questioning what is the impact of data sets in the commons dimension, what can be a deeper look at data commons, this is something we will be discussing later.

Arnau Monterde, Research, Innovation and Participation of the City of Barcelona:

Decidim is a platform for participation to organise democratic processes for public institutions or for any kind of organizations.

It is a free software project: one of three key free software projects from the city of Barcelona.

A community around the project to govern and decide democratically about the project

The most important is Decidim Barcelona is hosting today 36 participatory processes in the city, 30.000 active users, 40.000 proposals, 1000 meetings

The master plan Pla d'Actuació Municipal for the city had 40000 people involved in its development.

we can track the evolution of the proposals done by the citizens in this process, what commitments has the city council executed.

We have many ways to be involved in the project, not only developing the software. We have an Affero free license. We follow the principles of transparency, and integrity

We need to guarantee to the citizens that we are not interfering or transforming their proposals.

We have different ways of measuring democratic quality with no discrimitanion, inclusive , training...

we have to facilitate the infrastructures to the city to participate.

Security: we keep the anonymity of the citizens in the platform.

How does Decidim work? Decidim allows to develop participatory processes; it also allows to propose, meet, deliberate, decide, monitor,...

We have an easy way to configure participatory processes, including budgets, etc.

We are worried on how to integrate physical and online participation.

Different components and modules, to have a modular ecosystem to configure the platform.

A kind of change.org but madator, We have assemblies to organize our organization in different working groups, and we also have consultations.

We believe that any kind of investment from the public sector has to be open and free: anyone can copy and distribute the code. This is why Decidim is a success. And we organize it democratically. It is a platform for the community.

It has been translated to several languages and it has been replicated in several other cities.

Q. How can you make each other stronger?

Beth Coleman: do you have a very diverse demographic?

Arnau Monterde: We don't know about that, because we want to preserve the anonimity of participants, looking at the people who participates in presencial meetings we have the intuition that older people is participating more, and young people are participating less. We do not know why: the platform experience, time availability, or participatory culture....

Mattia Marini: one think we could learn from these projects is how to improve this participatory approach. Since we are a network of cities we cannot have monthly meetings... we are doing seminars...

About your project I like how you are trying to really understand what is going on on the cities, we need to go more in depth, and see what is going on

Beth Coleman: we have a huge commercial interest around and we also have very little design that is civically oriented. We can use paradigms that already exist and change the way we approach them

Arnau Monterde: we defend that by default citizens must have their data protected. The principle we follow is that citizens are the owners of their own data and they must decide the rules according to which we use their data.

Q. Is there an ambition to incorporate this particpatory platform into the legal structure of how decisions are made?

Arnau Monterde: This question is key for our project. We believe that we must have public and common infrastructures: we cannot have democratics processes if we do not have democratic infrastructrures.

we try to promote the autonomy of citizens

We need to be very aware that the citiens trust in the government is not given by default, we need to recover the trust of citizens in the government by giving them democratic tools to participate.

Beth Coleman: There is an erosion to trust, it doesn't recreate democracy it charges us on how to participate.

 In a country like Switzerland you have almost a 100% participation and they vote every month, small population super highly engaged,

Mattia Marini: our role is to provide this safe place in a participatory way...

and of course "cities" means citizens too, not only governments...