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.

What is Decide?

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.”

Key Features

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.

Presupuestos participativos: Participatory budgeting

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

Debates and Consultations

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.

Membership Levels

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.

• Registered users, who provide a username, email address, and password but do not verify residence, are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals
  • Create expenditure projects
• Basic verified users must verify residence online by entering their residence data. If it is correct, they will be asked to provide a mobile phone number in order to receive a confirmation code to activate their verified account. People may also elect to do this in person at a Citizen Assistance office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals and expenditure projects in the support phase
• Completely verified users must fully verify their account in person at a Citizen Assistance Office or via mail. If done by mail they will receive a letter containing a security code and instructions to carry out the verification, which they must send back to a Citizen Assistance Office. These users are able to:
  • Participate in discussions
  • Create proposals and expenditure projects
  • Vote for proposals in the support phase
  • Vote for proposals in the final decision phase

Conclusions

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.

The advent of the Internet, the ICTs and the collective intelligence enabled by them point to the rise of a networked democracy that promises, among other things, the protagonism of the common citizen in relation to the State and to the distribution of power. In recent years, there have been a number of initiatives in this area that, somehow, advanced towards this goal, but the promise remains unanswered.

One reason may be the fact that, advocating for a leading role to the ordinary citizen and the distribution of power, one is severely threatening the interests of politicians, political parties and companies that have been benefiting from an autocratic and centralized paradigm for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. So, we are aware that the mission we have before us is one that will take some time and effort to be accomplished, as it is inscribed in the great transition we are all going through.

Believing in the digital culture statement that “technology is everywhere, the people is what matters” seems adequate to avoid the fetish of technology itself and the creation of solutions that do not realize the potential of a distributed network, responding to the challenge of consolidating autonomous collective action processes that would ultimately lead to the distribution of power.

It was the promise of common citizen protagonism and distribution of power that, in 2008, sparkled the development of Instituto Cidade Democrática’s free software. Four years latter, new functions were added to the digital platform to respond to the human dynamics of autonomous collective action, modeling unique experiences such as the challenges: Amazonian Webcidadania Xingu (2013), São Paulo state city Jundiaí Cidadonos focused on social accountability (2015), Brazilian National Youth Conference digital process (2015) and São Paulo city Free Laboratories of Social Participation(2016), which promotes the appropriation of open source applications by cultural social movements for autonomous political action.

Still, in our perspective, the social participation ecosystem as a whole is far from delivering initiatives that significantly advance into the construction of this networked democracy. In this post, some of the lessons learned in recent years are presented to help us understand the complexity of obtaining some of the necessary elements for this answer: scale without intermediation, financial sustainability for ICD from a hard to measure value created, debate quality without exclusion, permanent changes in state institutions and building commons.

The answer to the above issues seems to reside between softwares’ interaction architectures, initiatives’ business models and projects’ impact and the likelihood of social participation technology ecosystem initiatives to engage in collective impact. Below are some of our latter reflections. We hope that you enjoy and that our learnings will help you work better and make the promise to come true.

1) Audience success is good for democracy?

The widespread use of social media platforms brought the promise of horizontal communication from many to many and the possibility of mobilization without media control. Groups organized around communications and campaigning tools would be able to spread their messages, becoming strong actors to influence the course of action towards their interests.

This promise has given rise to initiatives that select ‘relevant’ agendas through content curation to be offered to the ordinary citizens, producing incidence masses that act via automated systems (e-mail, phone calls or social media publications) to urge decision makers to act towards these initiatives intermediaries’ interests. Together with leading social media algorithms, this strategy only strengthens the logic of audience competition, increasing the chances of the chosen agendas to get attention and be adopted by decision makers.

The above-mentioned initiatives, almost always based on proprietary software and nontransparent algorithms, have shown to be effective at putting messages through targeted audiences, sometimes achieving positive political results and, most often, producing promising return on advertising investment. Products’ campaigns (political or non-political) are benefiting from new and effective tools to influence the public, allowing new combinations of feelings and emotions with products and messages. On the other hand, those tools are definitely not suited for the political debate. For this purpose, the strategy must include interaction architectures and algorithms that value cultural and democratic dynamics, are transparent and efficient in identifying noise and establishing minimum consensus.

That is why we keep wondering: where will this audience success lead us in the long run? Must we conform to a refashioned logic, able to mobilize ordinary citizens through impactful messages, as the next step towards a networked democracy?

Our answer is no and, therefore, we have been working on a more adequate change theory to respond to common citizen protagonism and distribution of power, stimulating autonomous collective action to surpass the limits of audience oriented social participation and enabling arrangements that strengthen each one willing to participate in the decisions on the common good. We will talk about this in the end of this post.

2) Qualifying the debate leads to exclusion?

As summarized in the previous section, this issue is not new. Several organizations, governments and open source communities have been developing and using applications based on interaction architectures and algorithms that foster informed and autonomous debate between different ideas. Some examples are: Liquid Feedback (Pirate Party), collaborative public consultations based on Dialoga and Delibera (Marco Civil da Internet, Pensando o Direito, Participa.br), Cidade Democrática (contests of ideas, Webcidadania Xingu), Decide Madrid (Cónsul), Decidim Barcelona(Dedicim), DemocracIT (Greece). Our close analysis of those initiatives shows that there is a clear desire of governmental and civil society organizations to offer alternatives for democratic dialogue based on the collective intelligence and network intelligence, but these experiences have been having difficulty in scaling or generating the desired impact.

Why, to date were these initiatives unable to scale or impact? Our opinion is that it is because of the engagement limit represented by architectures that required the user-activist to have cognitive resources, time, motivation and training to be able to use these platforms properly. In other words, the unfitted way these solutions were developed requires empowered citizens — a social ‘category’ that has grown very slowly in times when politics and consumer markets still operate in the old autocratic logic of media and political power centralization. These citizens must be able to jump on a discussion with resources and willingness to hold long conversations, often requiring a lot of prior knowledge that are not widely distributed in society. It’s possible to say that we are reaching a kind of “participation elite”, ie people who already have pre-disposition and time to participate.

Moreover, even for those who have mobilized themselves to participate in the traditional tree process, the incentives (proposals/ discussions resulting on improvements in their lives) are far from encouraging: often there is no clear decision-making process that takes advantage of all that information made available by the participants leading participants to feel disempowered. Some examples of tree or mixed mode architectures that present clearer processes of deliberation (Loomio, Cidade Democrática, Decide Madrid, Application of Brazilian Youth Conference, Liquid Feedbackor even the proprietary ConsiderIT) do so at the cost of significant increase to the process complexity, setting stages, rules and obligations which ultimately reduce the engagement potential, despite of the increased effectiveness for those who pass the barrier.

To respond to this barrier that prevents more people to participate, we believe that the design of collective deliberation should take into consideration the pedagogical aspect of interaction. A good example of digital tool with minimalistic and dynamic interface is the one of collective deliberation that we will name here as ‘crowdsourced discussion’ architectures — able to gradually increase the amount of energy that participants need to offer at every step of the engagement process. These kind of applications are able to gather data from different ways in which people participate, almost no information is lost and all is put to good use in the final result.

This research of architectures that allow mass participation in a pedagogical way and facilitate the generation of autonomous collective action motivated us to choose the Pol.is open source software for the challenges of collective deliberation. In the current state, this application can provide a simple interaction architecture and uses advanced machine learning algorithms to foster the creation of groups of people based on how they participate in the proposals. Though Pol.is is very good at identifying these affinity groups, currently it only shows this information and do not progress towards helping these people to organize around autonomous collective action. In our opinion, there are improvements to be made in the application precisely to carry out this type of action.

Media-Lab Prado (Madrid, Spain) selected our proposal for a prototype that incorporates the feature mentioned above in the call for Collective Intelligence for Democracy to be developed together with the creators and main developers of this community in November 2016.

3) Autonomous collective action is enough to change policies?

In the previous reflections we have presented some of the pitfalls of opting for interaction algorithms and architectures that bet on audience as a mean to scale and that operate through events, maintaining broadcast standards, reinforcing a passive form of participation, with strong intermediation structures, maintaining the dominant political culture and stimulating content and agenda consumption instead of autonomous collective action.

To build an effective networked democracy, we must be able to encourage autonomous collective actions as the ones that express singular interests and hyperlocal contexts, stimulating the role of agenda promoter that each one can perform. In the current context, however, there are few chances for these proposals to be highlighted and outreach because they end up being overwhelmed by strong intermediation structures or, also, they do not prevail against evidence brought by social indicators and the inescapable finitude of resources.

So, besides being limited by the small audience provided only by the singularly qualified citizens, proposals created through autonomous processes have an additional risk to be taken off from the agenda setting process as they are the expression of interests of small groups with little chances of being highlighted in the deliberation, planning and prioritizing processes of political institutions. Thus it seems necessary to have some kind of ‘magnet’ for societal agendas arising from autonomous collective action to adhere to State agendas for which there are available public resources (public budget) and which respond to the most critical demands (weak social indicators). When the autonomous collective action consider these two diagnoses in its strategy, it increases the likelihood of its actions to have greater impact and it also leads the State to better plan and execute the public budget and policies in the areas where it is most needed.

To our knowledge, to date, there are no social participation processes implemented by the State or civil society taking into account such evidences. That could be one of the reasons why social participation initiatives have been lacking impact. Designing participatory processes to foster autonomous collective action around the intersection between popular needs/ desires, existing public resources and deficient social indicators seem to be the way to address this problem. This also provides a strong incentive for participants to engage around proposals that, besides of being critical, have better chances of being implemented.

For this to happen, that is, for the autonomous processes of participation to join (magnet) the issues where there is public funds (and also private as far as there are records of the availability of companies and private foundations resources for public affairs) and weak social indicators, we argue towards the articulation of current social participation initiatives with initiatives that map public resources and social indicators (e.g. IPS Amazônia) and present them through data visualization and open data. Thus, open and accessible provision of information on public resources and social indicators will increase the effectiveness of autonomous collective social participation actions.

4) Are society and State ready for joint efforts to build common digital resources?

Another barrier for the common citizen to play a protagonist role and the distribution of power is the dispute between public and societal parties to command the way through which social participation should occur, a matter that can be translated as: who decides which process and application will be adopted. And the quality and effectiveness of the process, as said before, depend on the characteristics (architecture, implicit process and features) of the applications used.

We believe that a plausible way out of this impasse is to join efforts from State and civil society to build common digital resources, with the State participating by adherence to the work of open source software development communities. This has happened to a part of the governmental social participation policies in Brazil, over the last 7 years, benefiting from the efforts invested by Brazilian civil society to build technologies for collaborative social participation on the Internet.

The first of these experiences took place in Marco Civil da Internet consultation that had its technology based on the work of an open source community from digital culture agenda, led by the Ministry of Culture. As an extension of this experience, a number of other public consultations used the same technology or articulated other open source communities developing collective deliberation technologies. This was the case of Participa.br and Pensando o Direito who adhered to at least three different open source communities: Noosfero, Delibera (WordPress) and Allourideas (Pairwise). The common trace of these initiatives is that they were all based on the use and adherence to open source software development communities who had already been working on the creation of innovative technologies for collective deliberation.

Beyond bringing innovative technology into the governmental processes, State’s relationship with those open source communities was also an opportunity for State and society to work together in the construction of shared common digital resources. We believe that the knowledge to build and maintain relationships with open source communities and manage the development and use of software as a common good is a capacity for the State to acquire and incorporate into its formal processes.

This would be a way for the State to develop public policies from the standpoint of the common goods (technologies/ digital resources), ensuring State’s sovereignty (often dependent on isolated processes and proprietary technologies) and, at the same time, preserving the autonomy of society. These institutional changes would significantly reduce the information asymmetry and produce sustainable and democratic policies’ designs. We see this as a clear way of building the bridge to a networked democracy.

5) Conclusions

In this post we have tried to present a synthesis of our recent reflections on the limits faced by the social participation technologies ecosystem. We have analyzed event based advocacy models and other models of qualified deliberation in terms of advantages and disadvantages of each kind. We have put both models on stage starting from a discussion that has, as the background, the promise of achieving a networked democracy that enables autonomous collective actions and distributes power.

Designing engagement processes aiming at the building of a networked democracy seems like the most promising strategy to be taken on days strongly marked by transitions in politics, economy, climate, health, education and other systems that governs our lives. In our perspective, these engagement processes will derive from open source commons arrangements capable of building crowdsourced and easy to use interaction architectures, connected with state resources mapping and public indicators dataviz solutions.

This is a fairly good description of Instituto Cidade Democrática’s change theory, built from our project’s experience in the recent years. This is the result of a wide-ranging reflection, motivated by the burden of perceiving the social participation technologies ecosystem to have low capacity to scale and impact towards a networked democracy. This theory was the basis for the shaping of our next products and prototypes, and sharing it with all of you who follow us and other stakeholders as an invitation to jointly address the challenges posed here, is a contribution that we are proud to offer to the our field of work. We hope that you enjoy it and we encourage you to share your thoughts with us.

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