The post If, When and How Blockchain Technologies Can Provide Civic Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Governments and civil society have now also joined the quest and are actively exploring the potential of DLTs to create transformative social change. Experiments are underway to leverage blockchain technologies to address major societal challenges – from homelessness in New York City to the Rohyingya crisis in Myanmar to government corruption around the world. At the same time, a growing backlash to the newest ‘shiny object’ in the technology for good space is gaining ground.
At this year’s The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC), organized by mySociety in Lisbon, the GovLab’s Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young joined the Engine Room’s Nicole Anand, the Natural Resource Governance Institute’s Anders Pedersen, and ITS-Rio’s Marco Konopacki to consider whether or not Blockchain can truly deliver on its promise for creating civic change.
For the GovLab’s contribution to the panel, we shared early findings from our Blockchange: Blockchain for Social Change initiative. Blockchange, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the promise and practice of DLTs in addressing public problems – with a particular focus on the lack, the role and the establishment of trusted identities – through a set of detailed case-studies. Such insights may help us develop operational guidelines on when blockchain technology may be appropriate and what design principles should guide the future use of DLTs for good.
Our presentation covered four key areas (Full presentation here):
In the coming months, we will continue to share our findings from the Blockchange project in a number of forms – including a series of case studies, additional presentations and infographics, and an operational field guide for designing and implementing Blockchain projects to address challenges across the identity lifecycle.
The GovLab, in collaboration with the , is also delighted to announce a new initiative aimed at taking stock of the promise, practice and challenge of the use of Blockchain in the extractives sector. The project is focused in particular on DLTs as they relate to beneficial ownership, licensing and contracting transparency, and commodity trading transparency. This fall, we will share a collection of Blockchain for extractives case studies, as well as a report summarizing if, when, and how Blockchain can provide value across the extractives decision chain.
If you are interested in collaborating on our work to increase our understanding of Blockchain’s real potential for social change, or if you have any feedback on this presentation of early findings, please contact blockchange@thegovlab.org.
The post If, When and How Blockchain Technologies Can Provide Civic Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post CrowdLaw as a tool for open governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Mukelani Dimba: The beauty of the northern Italian town of Bellagio on Lake Como transcends all natural elements. It is beautiful when the temperature drops and white snow caps the early Alps and fog is suspended between the quiet lake and the mountains. It is also beautiful when warm sun rays that blanket the entire Larian triangle bringing out the mallard ducks to come out and frolic on the lake. Bellagio provided the backdrop last week (sometimes literally, see picture) for a global meeting of data scientists, political theorists, academics and open governance practitioners to consider risks, benefits and opportunities for CrowdLaw, a cutting-edge idea for using technology to enhance public participation in urban law making. CrowdLaw is about informing, consulting involving, collaborating with, and empowering the public in the work of lawmaking bodies at local government levels. It is a technology-enabled participatory lawmaking mechanism.
Democracy is whole lot like Bellagio. Throughout the vicissitudes of democratic practice, the highs and lows, democracy remains the best form of governance (of all the ones that have hitherto been tried, to paraphrase Churchill). But democracy is a lot more than voting for public representatives every four or five years. Real democracy is about people’s participation in decision making about matters that affect their daily lives. Participation is the currency we use to enjoy the benefits of democracy. Without participation, we lose democracy.
However, that which does not transform with the changes in the environment is bound to become extinct. This is true for living organisms and ideas alike. Technological advancement is influencing every aspect of our lives, from how we interact with those around us to how we work, how we play, how we perceive the world and events around us. Likewise, technological advancement is transforming entire industries, professions and areas of knowledge. However the one area that seems still unsure about how to respond to change brought about by technological innovation, is the governance field.
I use the term “governance field” as the broad rubric that encompasses fields such as democratic practice, policy formulation and law making. While mobile banking, artificial intelligence (AI)-supported infrastructure design and usage of virtual reality in medical procedures have become standard features of modern life, there is still only minimal uptake of electronic or online voting during national elections, to give one example. While there are hundreds of examples and recorded best practice on how governments are using online and offline mechanisms to promote participation in policy formulation, the incorporation of new technologies into the entire law-making circle (problem identification, options identification, drafting, decision, implementation and review) at local levels of government are few and far in between but there are good examples (that will be elaborated on in subsequent blogs in this series). In some instances, existing legal frameworks have often been slow to respond to swift and sudden technological changes, rendering them — at least in part — unable to fully accommodate the areas they are meant to regulate.
There are strong arguments that technology is not the only (or even preferred) medium for enhancing public participation in law making. However, it is also true that traditional, mostly offline, mechanisms for public participation tend to favour those “in the know” and those that have access to information and resources to enable them to send their positions to legislative authorities or travel to seats of government to engage with lawmakers. The rapid growth of the rates of penetration of mobile phones globally,¹ means there are now greater opportunities to enable broad-based participation in law-making processes using technology. In instances of inequality technology can be a great leveler and can have a democratising effect and thus enabling more inclusive lawmaking.
If the governance area of knowledge and practice fails to adopt technological change, might it also fray, wither and become extinct? The concept itself cannot be said to be vulnerable to extinction but different approaches to governance could become irrelevant over time if they are not modernised. I believe that this is the case with the practice of democracy.
Fortunately there are many individuals, organisations and governments that are working together to experiment with how technology can be used to enhance the practice of democracy. These experiments are coming at the right time as the world experiences a sharp decline in public trust of governments. Multi-stakeholder initiatives such the the Open Government Partnership (OGP) working with governments, civil society groups and civic tech proponents are creating exciting new platforms that seek to enable deeper and more impactful engagement between the public and their governments on the conduct of public affairs and management of shrinking public resources. Governments across the globe are piloting new forms of engagement and feedback mechanisms to better understand and meet the needs of citizens, be it through online consultations, community score cards or e-services, to name a few.
The group convened at Bellagio by Professor Beth Noveck, head of The Governance Lab considered ways of nurturing a movement that will drive this important work through global project mapping, research into the effectiveness of these initiatives and development of norms and standards for implementing CrowdLaw. According to Prof. Noveck,²
“Technology offers the promise of opening how lawmaking bodies work and making lawmakers accountable to the public more than just on Election Day. CrowdLaw offers an alternative to the traditional method of lawmaking, which is typically done by professional staff and politicians working behind closed doors and with little direct input from the people legislation affects. Instead, we start from the hypothesis that, designed right, with the aim of improving the quality of outputs, there are opportunities at each stage of the lawmaking process, including problem definition, solution identification, research and drafting, subsequent crafting of implementing regulations, and monitoring of outcomes, to introduce greater expertise into the legislative process efficiently. At the same time, we acknowledge that, designed wrong, without regard for outcomes, engagement may only hamstring decision-making and deepen distrust of government.”
Prof. Noveck’s warning about some of the potential pitfalls of CrowdLaw is important. Implementing CrowdLaw comes at a cost in time, resources and, most importantly, ordinary people’s wishes and expectations. The value proposition for implementing and participating in CrowdLaw initiatives for both governments and the public has to be well articulated and based on evidence from pioneering initiatives.
While the case for the benefits of CrowdLaw for the public is easily made, more work needs to be done to demonstrate how CrowdLaw can strengthen existing public participation processes and how it can help governments graduate up the continuum of public participation by moving from informing, consulting and involving the public to collaboration with, and empowerment of, the public. The position of CrowdLaw within the broader ecosystem of governance-enhancement concepts, for example participatory budgeting and legislative openness, will also require more analysis. CrowdLaw champions will further need to grapple with the question of limitation of access (to information and participation) as a legally recognised provision in public law. While the CrowdLaw ideal is to place the public throughout the vein of legislative process, the contours of the limitations to public participation will need to be articulated and guidelines must be offered to CrowdLaw implementers on the government side.
With 76 Open Government Partnership (OGP) countries and subnational entities (municipal, provincial, state or devolved governments) currently drafting their action plans, OGP is an ideal incubator for CrowdLaw — especially with a view to curating knowledge and early lessons on “how technology can facilitate more participatory lawmaking in cities, and the benefits potential, risks and metrics”, as Prof. Noveck puts it.
There are clear synergies between the intentions of CrowdLaw and OGP’s stated agenda of promoting parliamentary/legislative openness. The CrowdLaw concept presents OGP participating countries and subnational entities with a tool to test the possibilities of innovation in making legislative process more open and collaborative.
It could well be that an idea hatched in a quiet little corner of Lake Como will resound around the world and fundamentally transform law-making processes forever. This is a good thing — perhaps a fundamental shake up is what is needed to restore the public’s faith in democracy and government.
*Mukelani Dimba is the civil society co-chair of the Open Government Partnership
Lead image: A breakout session at the three-day CrowdLaw conference hosted at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy. Picture by Beth Simone Noveck
¹According to the statistics portal, Statista, the global number of mobile phone users was 4,77 billion users in 2017 and it is forecast to reach 5 billion users in 2019. This is 67% mobile phone penetration. 50% of all mobile phone users currently use smartphones. Data available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/
²Beth Simone Noveck, Director, The Governance Lab, e-mail communication with author, 13 November 2017.
The post CrowdLaw as a tool for open governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post CrowdLaw: Transparency and Participation appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>
A session in progress at the CrowdLaw conference at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy
In this session on ‘Transparency and Participation’ at the Bellagio conference on Crowdlaw: People-Led Innovation in Urban Lawmaking (March 13–17, 2018), we discussed whether participation depended on more transparency and whether transparency could be counter-productive to more engagement. I had the pleasure of speaking and moderating a conversation with:
Transparency is instrumental for participation and for accountability. But in order to delve into the linkages between transparency and participation with discernment, it is necessary to clarify the concept of ‘transparency’. Transparency is the immediate visibility for citizens of all policy related aspects. It is the contrary of opacity but is can be compatible with a certain closure. It is more demanding that publicity. It can help citizens to engage in policy, be instrumental to accountability and be educational and transformative for citizens. Transparency helps citizens to know and understand whether their government is protecting their rights and delivering on public services. It can range from total transparency to partial transparency. In some cases, partial transparency has been used by governments and parliaments to justify certain decisions. But when transparency is only partial, it cannot be expected to deliver good outcomes as citizens voice their opinion without having the full picture.
Transparency and participation should be regulated by law, including through Freedom of Information laws and the rules of procedure of parliament. In Brazil, for instance, the rules of procedure of parliament state the obligation for citizens to participate in committee hearings. That being said, there is not a single legal provision of transparency that could grant access to full access to information. Even when regulated by law, the utopian possibilities of transparency as a means to inclusiveness, universality and transformation, are simply not borne out in reality. For instance, today there is no evidence that Freedom of Information laws on their own have dramatically improved government transparency, responsiveness and accountability.
Transparency mostly operates in circumstances of high inequality. In these circumstances, having more transparency does not mean that there are better dialogues between government/parliaments and citizens. In this sense, transparency can lead to more inequality and elite capture because only those who have access to resources and the information are able to participate. Ultimately, participation rests on access to information. Where there are information asymmetries, only voices and interests of the resource rich are audible.
Transparency should be accompanied by civic education and procedural language of government and parliament should be translated meaningfully to citizen to enable meaningful their participation. Participation channels should be linked to citizen’s interest on a single issue rather than party politics. In Chile, for instance, the parliament has developed an online tool “Ley fácil” (easy law) to make the law understandable for ordinary citizens (https://www.bcn.cl/leyfacil).
Transparency is not always the most efficient way to improve a legitimate participatory process and can be very time consuming. Some scholars have even gone further and argued that it has a counterproductive effect on democracy. Even if relative transparency is achieved, there are questions regarding the quality of participation (who participates and how, with what degree of sincerity) and the quantity of participation (how many people participate). This is for instance the case in Chile, where public hearings organized by the parliament are mostly attended by men with a legal background and living in the capital and the voices of other stakeholders are not being heard.
Transparency makes compromises between representatives more difficult. When discussions are transparent and public, it can harden negotiating positions and make it difficult for elected officials to compromise. Citizens are mostly in favour or against a single issue, while legislation requires compromises and trade-offs between single issues. The more trade-offs are involved, the more trade-offs are required the more difficult it is to have full transparency of the negotiation that led to the compromise. Finally, too much transparency coupled with a lack of understanding of parliamentary/governmental processes, for instance disclosure of donations, can have a dampening effect on participation and lead to increased lack of trust in the institutions and its systems.
In the end, participants agreed that transparency is the ideal default principle, with instrumental value, but should be compatible with exceptions. It should not in itself represent a judgement of democracy.
Julia Keutgen is a Technical Advisor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD)
Cross-posted from Govlab.org
The post CrowdLaw: Transparency and Participation appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Legislature 2.0: CrowdLaw and the Future of Lawmaking appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Although legislatures fund the research done in universities, they invest next to nothing in researching and reinventing how they themselves work. Thus, the Governance Lab at New York University is launching the CrowdLaw Research Initiative and website (“CrowdLaw”) to understand the future impact of technology on the lawmaking process, in particular those technologies that enable participation by individuals and groups. We focus on these collective intelligence tools — as distinct from the technology that enables greater legislative transparency — because they offer the potential for a two-way conversation that could channel more and more diverse opinions and expertise into the lawmaking process and may thereby improve the quality of legislation and its efficacy.
The focus is on creating not only more direct, but also more informed democracy. Our work starts from the hypothesis that expertise of all kinds is widely distributed in society and that we can use technology to introduce better information into the legislative process, making it an ongoing conversation and collaborative process.
The Crowd.Law website includes:
This work is informed by three online convenings among crowdlaw practitioners from more than a dozen countries1 and a semester-long graduate research project undertaken at Yale University in the Yale Law School’s Clinic on Governance Innovation.
The launch of Crowd.Law is only the beginning of a series of activities for the coming year designed to deepen our understanding of CrowdLaw practices, convene the community interested in legislative innovation, pilot additional CrowdLaw experiments in practice and study what works.
To that end, on November 17th, the Madrid Regional Assembly and the Madrid City Council will convene a workshop on CrowdLaw together with the GovLab at NYU and the Harvard Study Group “The challenge to design a technological Agora” designed to investigate potential pilot projects on CrowdLaw for lawmaking at the local and regional level in Spain.
This Spring, the GovLab and multi-disciplinary students from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering in Governing the City will undertake research for the city council of a large metropolis to map how a bill becomes a law and, in turn, how that law gets implemented into regulations, in an effort to identify the benefits and risks of greater public engagement.
With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Governance Lab will convene political and legal theorists, parliamentarians, platform designs and legislative staff from six continents at the Rockefeller Bellagio Conference Center in Italy in March to explore the theory and practice of public engagement in lawmaking and to set standards for data collection and sharing by parliaments practicing crowdlaw to enable evidence-based research.
Today the public, with the exception of interest group lobbyists, has very little impact on governing. There’s a vast literature on the infirmities of the legislative process, which explain the causes that have given rise to poor quality. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson conclude in Winner Takes All Politics, the multi-billion dollar lobbying machine of organized business that emerged in the 1970s to combat Great Society social programs has captured the political process and continuously pushed through a legislative agenda designed to favor the very rich over the middle class. Their book-length work chronicles the exclusion of the “every man” from politics and the resulting inequality in American society. In David Schoenbrod’s DC Confidential, he lays out the “five tricks” politicians use to take credit while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for their bad legislation. As another studyconcluded: “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”2
The unknown question is whether new forms participation beyond the Ballot Box can, in practice, enhance the legitimacy3 and quality4 of the lawmaking process and remedy what ails it. It is worth noting that these two goals are in often in tension because one focuses on ensuring that all voices are heard and the other on enhancing expertise in the process. There is no right answer as to which is more important. But most experiments with public engagement in law- and policymaking to date have focused on the former to the exclusion of the latter. They have not resulted in any measurable improvements in legislative outcomes. It will be crucial when designing new pilots to experiment with trying to design platforms and processes to achieve both goals at different stages of the lawmaking process.
For example, when parliaments decide what issues to take up (agenda-setting), this may be an opportunity to raise the concerns and problems of the community and for the public to propose, prioritize and critique problems to tackle, as is the case of Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act, in which a member of the public can propose new legislation. At this stage, participation has the potential to enhance information and bring empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise.
When legislative and regulatory bodies arrive at the substance of a solution to a problem (proposal-crafting), this could present the opportunity to identify innovative approaches by leveraging distributed expertise beyond that available from legislators and their staffs and occasional hearings5 and, at the same time, to create a process for gauging public preferences and public opinion in response to proposed solutions. Parlement & Citoyens in France enables citizens to submit proposals on the causes and solutions to a problem posed by a representative. Citizens’ proposals are then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation.
Many of the newer political parties from Podemos in Spain to the Alternative in Denmark have used new technology to invite their constituents to draft the party platform in an effort to assess the opinions of their base and be more responsive to them.
If parliaments distribute the work of monitoring implementation to citizens with camera-phones, for example, this could dramatically increase the ability to evaluate the downstream cost and benefits of legislation on people’s lives and introduce into lawmaking greater empirical rigor, which is typically lacking. 6 7 8 9 10
Yet it is not self-evident that more public participation per se produces wiser or more just laws. There are countless instances to the contrary, including notable recent plebiscites. Rather than improve the informational quality of legislation, opening up decision-making may end up empowering some more than others and enable undue influence by special interests. More direct participation could lead to populist rule with negative outcomes for civil liberties. Legislatures are rightly slow to implement public engagement, fearing that participation will be burdensome, at worst, and useless at best.
To counter these risks and realize the benefits, there is an urgent need for systematic experimentation and assessment to inform and guide how legislatures engage with the public to collect, analyze and use information as part of the lawmaking process. But if we want to get beyond conventional democratic models of representation or referendum, and evolve how we legislate, this requires knowledge of how more participation might help to improve the legitimacy and the effectiveness of lawmaking.
[1] “Toward More Inclusive Lawmaking: What We Know & Still Most Need to Know About Crowdlaw,” The Governance Lab, June 4, 2014, http://thegovlab.org/toward-more-inclusive-lawmaking-what-we-know-still-most-need-to-know-about-crowdlaw/. “Expanding Insights — #Crowdlaw Session 2 Highlights Need for Experimentation & Collaboration,” The Governance Lab, June 24, 2014, http://thegovlab.org/expanding-insights-crowdlaw-session-2-highlights-need-for-experimentation-collaboration/. “#CrowdLaw — On the Verge of Disruptive Change… Designing to Scale Impact,” The Governance Lab, December 4, 2015, http://thegovlab.org/expanding-insights-crowdlaw-session-2-highlights-need-for-experimentation-collaboration/
[2] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564–581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595.
[3] Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[4] Nam, “Suggesting frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government 2.0,” 18.
[5] John Wilkerson, David Smith and Nicholas Stramp, “Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach,” American Journal of Political Science 59:4 (January 2015): 943–956.
[6] “Initial Findings from Pará,” MIT Center for Civic Media, last modified May 2017, http://promisetracker.org/2017/05/23/initial-findings-from-para/.
[7] Janet Tappin Coelho, “Rio de Janeiro Citizens to Receive New App to Record Police Violence in City’s Favelas,” Independent, March 5 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rio-de-janeiro-citizens-to-receive-new-app-to-record-police-violence-in-citys-favelas-a6914716.html
[8] Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Damien de Walque and Jakob Svensson, “The Power of Information in Community Monitoring,” J-PAL Policy Briefcase (2015). Available at: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/publications/Community%20Monitoring_2.pdf
[9] Dennis Linders, “From e-Government to We-Government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media,” Government Information Quarterly 29:4 (October 2012): 446–454. Available at: http://www.academia.edu/27417288/From_e-government_to_we-government_Defining_a_typology_for_citizen_coproduction_in_the_age_of_social_media
[10] Tiago Piexoto and Jonathan Fox, “When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 41:1 (January 2016): 28. Available at: http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/835741452530215528/WDR16-BP-When-Does-ICT-Enabled-Citizen-Voice-Peixoto-Fox.pdf
Re-posted from the GovLab blog.
The post Legislature 2.0: CrowdLaw and the Future of Lawmaking appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Beyond Protest: Examining the Decide Madrid Platform for Public Engagement appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Sam DeJohn: Recently, Pablo Soto Bravo, Madrid City Council Member, computer programmer and the city’s lead for public engagement, spoke at an event in New York on “Restoring Trust in Government” on the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly. “Why should we trust government,” he asked, adding “the people don’t trust governments…they’re right not to trust the government.” Like many Spaniards, Soto had joined the 15-M movement in 2011 to protest the government’s austerity measures and rising levels of corruption.1 With trust in government having declined over twenty percentage points since 2007,2 Soto used his programming skills to champion the adoption of digital technology to give the public a greater voice in a traditional two-party governing system from which the average person had generally been excluded. But, as we shall explore in this three-part series, Decide Madrid, a pathbreaking civic technology platform co-designed by Soto to force “the administration to open their ears” (El Mundo), is evolving from a protest tool designed to challenge the status quo into a more mature platform for improving governance.
In Part 1, we will explore the platform, which is among the best-of-breed new generation of open source civic technologies, and its myriad features. In Part 2, we will draw on open data from Decide to focus in more depth on how people use the site. In Part 3, we focus on recommendations for improvements to Decide and how to test their impact on the legitimacy and effectiveness of decision-making.
The Ahora Madrid coalition (which was founded with support from the Podemos political party3) created Decide in 2015 to enable citizens to propose, deliberate and vote on policies for the city and ensure transparency of all government proceedings within the municipality. An information page on the Decide website further elaborates the program’s focus. “One of the main missions of [the platform] will be to ensure the inclusion of everyone in the participatory processes, so that all voices and wills form a part of them and no one is left out.” The website, which utilizes the free software Consul as many other administrations are now doing, allows Madrileños to influence the City’s planning and policy-making through voting, discourse, and consultations with the goal of empowering citizens, promoting transparency, and fostering open government practices. The site is composed of four distinct features to address these areas of desired impact. Of these components, two processes stand out as having the most potential for direct citizen influence: a proposal section where individuals may propose new laws and subsequently vote on them, and a participatory budget section where citizens decide how a portion of the City’s budget is distributed among different projects. The other two features include a consultation process where citizens are asked to offer, and vote on, opinions about City proceedings and finally a debate process which does not directly lead to action but rather deliberation for the City to assess public opinion. These processes are all designed with the intention “to create an environment that mobilizes existing collective intelligence in favor of a more hospitable and inclusive city.”
Propuestas: Citizen Proposals Enable More Direct Democracy
The proposals feature was designed as a way to allow citizens to utilize the full power of direct democracy and shape government actions. According to Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania, Director of Participation for the City Council of Madrid and Project Director for Decide Madrid, the proposals feature is by far the most important aspect of the platform as it has the greatest potential for impact. It has definitely generated interest as almost 20,000 proposals have been submitted since the launch of Decide in 2015.
This feature enables citizens to create and directly support ideas for new legislation. Registered users4 can propose an idea by simply clicking the “Create a Proposal” button and submitting a title and description. Proposals range significantly in terms of length and content, but gravity of the topic does not seem to influence popularity as two of the most supported proposals currently active on the site are “Penalty for those who do not collect the feces of their pets” and “Replacement of public lighting by LED lights.” Once a proposal is submitted, anyone with verified accounts can click a button expressing their support for said proposal.5 Each proposal is given twelve months to gather requisite support to advance in the process.
Screenshot from the “proposals” home page on the website
Example of an ongoing proposal
In order to move forward for consideration, a proposal must receive the requisite support, represented by 1% of citizens of Madrid over 16 years of age (~27,000 people currently). The process is designed this way to ensure that every citizen has the opportunity to submit proposals but that the administrators do not have to waste time considering proposals that fail to attract minimal backing.
Proposals that receive the necessary votes advance to the decision phase, which affords time and opportunity for citizens to get educated about the issues and make informed decisions. The site announces whenever a proposal reaches this phase and it is grouped with others that are in the same stage of the process, thus beginning a 45-day period of deliberation and discussion before the final voting phase. The managers of the platform do not provide background information other than what is posted by users, so citizens are responsible for conducting their own research and perusing the site for debates and comments about the proposal. Afterward begins a seven-day period where anyone over 16 years of age and completely verified in the municipality of Madrid can vote to either accept or reject the proposal.
It is important to note that proposals that receive majority support are not automatically implemented, as the Spanish Constitution does not permit binding referenda. Instead, the Madrid City Council commits to a 30-day study of any such proposal, during which they will determine if it is to be implemented. During this examination, the proposal is evaluated based on its legality, feasibility, competence, and economic cost, all of which are highlighted in a subsequent report that is openly published. If the report is positive, then a plan of action will be written and published to carry out the proposal. If the report is negative, the City Council may either propose an alternative action or publish the reasons that prevent the proposal’s execution.
Although it is understandable that the administration wants to ensure that only popular, viable proposals are presented before them, the hurdles that each proposal must clear are proving to be a significant obstacle. While it is difficult to determine the reason, the undeniable fact that only two proposals have even reached the final voting phase suggests a serious flaw in the system and a possible deterrent for future participation. However, on a more hopeful note, the two successful proposals (one calling for a single ticket for all means of public transportation and the other an extensive sustainability plan for the city) reached majority support in February of this year and in May the Council approved them and posted implementation plans.
This feature was created to allow citizens a substantial say in how their taxes are being spent. Specifically, it permits them to decide where a designated portion of the City’s budget is going to be allocated. In the first step, individuals registered in Madrid can submit expenditure projects which will be posted publicly on the website. Spending projects can be submitted for either the entire city or for an individual district. One key difference between this process and that of proposals is that authors of similar projects are contacted and offered the possibility of submitting joint projects as a way of limiting the volume of projects and ensuring cost-effectiveness.
The next phase consists of a two-week period where qualified voters are authorized ten support votes for city-wide projects and ten for projects in a district of their choosing. After this period, all projects undergo an evaluation by the City Council either confirming or denying that the projects are valid, viable, legal, and includible in the municipal budget. Following the evaluation, both approved and rejected projects are published with their corresponding reports and assessments. The “most supported” projects then move on to the final voting phase, but the administrators are unclear about this term’s definition as they do not specify how many projects are permitted to advance.
In the final voting phase, the total available budget and the final projects along with their estimated cost (produced by the City Council during the evaluation phase) are published. Qualified voters can vote for any number of projects for the whole city and one project from the district of their choosing but the projects they support cannot exceed the total amount of funds available in the budget.
Projects are then listed in descending order of votes received, both for city-wide projects and district projects. They are then selected down the line from highest number of votes to lowest number of votes, making sure each additional proposal can fit within the total available budget. If the estimated cost of a project would cause the budget to be exceeded, that project is skipped and the next viable option is selected. Finally, the selected projects are included in the Initial Project of the General Budget of the City of Madrid (Participatory Budgets).
This feature is making impressive progress consistent with its goals. From 2016 to 2017, the amount allocated to these projects rose from €60 million to €100 million and the total number of participants rose by almost 50% from 45,531 to 67,132 people. With each project’s status and details available in a downloadable file on this page of the site, transparency is not an issue for this component. Pablo Soto Bravo and Miguel Arana Catania have indicated that citizens should start seeing concrete results from the 2016 projects very soon, which should lend credibility to, and faith in, the process.
Screenshot of Downloadable Project Spreadsheet
In addition to the proposed actions which actually go through a voting process, the site contains sections that are intended more for simple deliberation, promoting communication and information-sharing. Debates do not call for any action by the City Council but are instead used to assess the public’s opinion and general consensus on a range of topics.
There is also a consultation process where users can voice their opinions about certain proceedings throughout the city. They can answer questions, make suggestions, and praise or denounce measures or activities that are already happening instead of creating new proposals. For example, the City Council currently plans on remodeling several squares and plazas throughout the city. Thus, there is a section where citizens are able to answer three questions created by the City Council pertaining to the revitalization of each area. City officials can comment and debate as well, allowing them to directly engage users on the site. There is no indication as to how seriously the public’s opinions are taken into consideration, but it is implied that their ideas are valued. At the very least, the highlighted names of politicians appearing on the debate space creates the appearance that they are taking an interest in these concerns.
Because Decide has the potential to cause such a grand impact on Madrid’s citizens, government, and economic prosperity, there are certain security precautions to encourage participation while protecting the integrity of the process. The platform has a sliding scale of permissions with stronger authentication enabling access to more features of the site to create the incentive for more accountable participation. The site is open to anyone with internet access and users may create an account simply by providing a username and valid email address. While anyone can submit proposals, additional authentication is necessary to access other capabilities. There are three levels of authentication, each with differing rights of access.
Although the concept of Decide is consistent with the highest ideals of open government, the execution falls short in practice as, with the exception of participatory budgeting, there is no evidence that the site leads to improved decisions. We will discuss these shortcomings in more detail in part two, however, on the surface it is seems that Decide has not yet accomplished its ultimate goals, as its creators acknowledge. Soto and Arana want Madrileños to understand and fully utilize the power of direct democracy. With only two proposals reaching the voting phase of the process, it is clear that neither citizens nor Madrid’s institutions are taking advantage of this novel system and it has yet to achieve a significant impact on governance in Madrid.
The platform’s design is innovative and impressive and has been inspiring many other administrations to adopt similar programs. Indeed it bodes well for Madrid, and the rest of Spain, that various cities throughout the country are being inspired by the same political aspirations to replicate this process, such as decidm.barcelona which uses the same Consul software. However, like many others, Decide still has its flaws. In the next installment, we will address how Decide handles the keys to a successful digital democracy, such as advertising, incentivizing, and stakeholder analysis. We have identified the strengths and weaknesses at its foundation, so the next step is to examine the results it is producing.
1 2016 marked Spain’s worst year on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index since its launch in 1995, as they scored just 58 on the 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (highly clean) scale.
2 Trust and Public Policy: How Better Governance Can Help Rebuild Public Trust, OECD, http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/4217051e.pdf?expires=1492821633&id=id&accname=ocid177224&checksum=6C5097C12FAE130455255C94D249CA20 (Mar. 27, 2017)
3 Podemos did not formally run in the most recent local elections. However, it has been the driving force behind local platforms that share the same political agenda.
4 See “Membership Levels” below for detailed explanation
5 Note: in order to maximize citizen participation and accommodate those without internet access, most actions that take place on the website can also be done in one of Madrid’s 26 Citizen Assistance Offices with the help of trained staff.
This post by Sam DeJohn is reposted from Featured Website, GovLab Blog
Photo by grantuhard 
The post Beyond Protest: Examining the Decide Madrid Platform for Public Engagement appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>