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.

Pablo: During 15M, we didn’t have Telegram. Now, we’re the new government of activists and anarchists and so on, and we’re using Telegram all the time. To the point that the day that Telegram is offline for a short time, we are in big trouble. Also pads, we use TitanPad, when it goes down we are in trouble. The pads we started using in 15M, but not so massive as it is now. Not they’re fundamental tools. Like years ago it would have been like having a lawyer or an advertising company, that fundamental. So I’m always thinking what we could have done if we had Telegram and Loomio during 15M.

Baki: We come from your experience. You have the problem of the ancients. You were there before: sorry for you. Really, I’m serious. These tools, some of them existed at that time but they were not efficient. Now they are very efficient. We didn’t put all our eggs in the same basket, we used Telegram and Signal at the same time. We used Discourse and Loomio at the beginning. Then Loomio became the thing we use, thanks to the Numérique Commission which made crash-tests. Then Loomio existed more than Discourse. We used TitanPad, wiki, sometimes Word, we’re in France so sometimes we use paper!

You should not have done the revolution in 2011, you should have done it in 2016!

I was in France at the time, what you did in Spain was so advanced, we were obliged to do at least as well as you! I think the next generation in Europe that are doing things – I work with Africtivistes, a network of African web activists. We had a conference in Paris that was planned well before, but it happened during Nuit Debout, we brought 80 activists from 40 countries into the middle of Nuit Debout. It was so inspiring! The people who made the revolution in Burkina Faso, they removed a guy who was a paramilitary commander, they removed him by using WhatsApp! At that time it wasn’t even encoded, it was public, but they used it to make Blaise Compaoré go away!

Pablo: It’s not one technology. It’s not that we can use Twitter or Facebook or Loomio, it’s that we have a critical mass of different technologies. Probably the smartphone is the key, portable connected devices. The software is not about one platform. We have such a huge catalog of tools, people can rewrite, transform, recombine…

Baki: This is the only decision we took in the communication commission in France, is that all the tools we use have to be free software. Say for internal communication we don’t have a Facebook group for the Numérique Commission, we have one public Facebook for Nuit Debout, but for our internal coordinating, we use free tools. We know that the code can be rewritten, we can check the security. Very early we were joined by the two main groups of free software advocates in France. I asked them to join us from the beginning.

Pablo: That’s very interesting, because the first night in Madrid, in Puerta del Sol, like 25% of the people who slept that night were hackers and free software activists.

Baki: In France it’s also the same. This made it easier to use the tools. I know zero lines of code, I don’t even try.

Audrey: demonstrating logbot, one of the g0v internal coordination tools

If you see an S it came from Slack. If you see a T it came from Telegram. Otherwise it comes from Freenode. There are many other API points too. The logbot is replicated in three different containers. The idea is redundancy. We are not against using Slack, which is non-free. It is useful because it is very accessible. For instance they have existing live translator bots, so you can type in Chinese and read in English. This is very useful for our international friends. But we don’t trust Slack because it isn’t open source software. So we also have the two-way robots that synchronise with Telegram and Freenode, so it is impossible for all the three systems to go down together. We always have redundancy.

We do the same with Hackpad also, which is replicated to Github and into one of our in-house built systems. There’s always 3 or more storage, and the canonical storage is controlled by us. It’s not very featureful but we own it. Normally we use the featureful ones, but the archive is with us. If they go down, we can go back to Freenode.

Pablo: Does the average user understand the architecture? Or do they just use it without realising how smart it is.

Audrey: I think we make the architecture pretty transparent. You can see the S and the T, we could avoid that but we choose to represent the channels that the messages come from.

Pablo: It’s a political statement.

Audrey: It is a political statement. We understand not everybody cares so much about free software, or people are attached to Slack. But at least we make it democratic and transparent.

Pablo: At 15M we tried to move away from Facebook and use N-1 and it was a big crash. It destroyed the user base. You try to explain why it is important to use free software but it’s too late.

Rich: This is the problem with democracy right, you have your ideals, and then you have pragmatics, and you have to negotiate between them. If people are on Facebook, just because you ‘should’ be somewhere else, doesn’t mean it is going to work.

Audrey: Actually we pay Facebook, in the form of ads to take people out of Facebook. It used to be Loomio, not it’s Pol.is. We pay for people to see ads telling them to get off Facebook and into Pol.is. We tell them the binding decision is happening outside of Facebook, and no matter how many sentences you type there, it won’t be binding. That’s the only thing we pay Facebook for. It’s basically feudalism.

Pablo: We do the same. In the government of Madrid we created the decide.madrid.es platform. We buy ads on Facebook to entice people over. You can discuss on Facebook, but you decide over here.

Audrey: Even Richard Stallman says it’s ethical to use some non-free software, if your goal is to replace it.

Rich: In these conversations the subtlety often gets lost. There’s a difference between the arrival of technology and the shift in attitudes that happen. The technology doesn’t cause something to happen. It changes what’s possible, and changes people’s sensibilities and their desires. People think, if I can edit Wikipedia how come I can’t edit the Constitution. It changes possibilities, but it is an interaction between culture and technology. Building technology is really easy, but building culture is 900 times harder.

Baki: The non-decision we took in the Media Centre in Paris, in the beginning we didn’t want a Facebook page. We had Twitter. Our challenge was to disrupt the mass media, to oblige them to use a new narrative to tell what is happening. If they tell nonsense, people will say ‘but we saw these pages on Twitter.’

The first night, one of the representatives for Anne Hidalgo (Mayor of Paris) said, ‘we will not let people privatise Place de République, it’s for all Parisians’. This an error of communication. These guys have been in media training. I made a tweet, one minute later, in English, ‘we don’t occupy, we don’t privatise, we share’. Anne Hidalgo retweeted it! It wasn’t Anne, it was Clémence who works for her.

Pablo: She had hackers in the house!

Baki: This is very symbolic. When we tweeted this, to say we’re not going to occupy this place, we are going to share it as Parisians, and every Parisian can discuss, we’ll show a movie or make a film or create a commission. There’s the anti-speciesist commission for animal rights. Every day commissions are created. We share the space.

We use Facebook and Twitter to share this information into mass media. The non-decision is that we use tools, only as if we were making a press release. Everything we publish are not strategic, they are just communication. Then for our internal communication we use tools that we test all the time.

Place de la Concorde in Paris

For example: we make non-violent actions. We wanted to block the parliament. There’s a bridge between parliament and Place de la Concorde. There’s a story about Place de la Concorde. When they took la Bastille, they occupied this bridge, and obliged the parliament to give. We wanted to symbolically occupy it. You know the stones of Place de la Concorde are built with the stones of the Bastille prison.

In general, no one can capture that place, but we wanted to. We used Telegram to decide the action. After the decision, we built groups in Telegram. We sent a message telling people which group you’re in. When you’re in the group, we use physical papers for 3 days up until the occupation. You’re in a group of 5 people, you can call them and say ‘where are you’.

We decided this because we thought French police would enter the movement. French police are very good at infiltrating the unions and all that. So maybe they are in one of those groups. So every group has their own location. Only ten people know what we are going to do. We knew each other for many years. We give appointments to different places around Place de la Concorde. From that place we can occupy de l’Élysées, Champs-Élysées, Matignon and all these strategic points around the city/

Paris map showing Matignon, Madeleine, Concorde at the top, and Montparnasse far to the south

So we thought we had a policeman in one of our groups. We called them the sacrifice group. We sent them to Montparnasse (5km to the south). There were many policemen at Montparnasse at that time!

We made a decision with the taxi drivers, who were on strike against Uber, we gave them an appointment at Madeleine. We didn’t know if we could trust them. We said we’re going to make a big action, they said they would support us. We took them to Nuit Debout, they made a very good speech, so we supported their struggle. So they said they would support us. They came with 15 taxis at Madeleine. They thought they were going to take us somewhere far, but it’s like 200 meters!

When the action began, the taxis came, we blocked the bridge, and it was finished. The police came 30 minutes later. To do that, we had to circulate the decision at the last minute.

The next action is prepared now, we’ve been planning it for 3 weeks. For the moment, even I don’t know all the details. There is a small group that knows all the details, and they will communicate at the last moment. Telegram is good for the moment.

We blocked the bridge, then we moved. The police removed us, we took the metro, then we occupied outside the National Assembly. There were zero police. We could have entered the National Assembly.

We blocked everything. No one was arrested, we were already going by the time the police arrived.

We had so many Spanish people helping us directly. People with the experience from 15M.

Photo by Medialab Prado

The post Revolutionary technology from Spain to Burkina Faso to France to Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The people in this photograph are participants from the Tunisian revolution in 2010, the Spanish 15M movement and the New Zealand Occupy movement in 2011, the 2014 Sunflower Movement from Taiwan, and Nuit Debout, the horizontal protest movement currently underway in France.

The recording is 3 hours long, so I’ve loosely transcribed it and cut it down into a couple of chapters:

1. Nuit Debout: the French incarnation of the movement of movements
2. Revolutionary technology from Spain to Burkina Faso to France to Taiwan
3. How Taiwan solved the Uber problem
4. What happens once the protestors go home?

For more of this, check out another conversation I transcribed with a Nuit Debout activist.

Nuit Debout: the French incarnation of the movement of movements

Baki: we are a fucking frustrated generation.

First time I voted, extreme right wing guy almost won power. Since that day his ideas are taking power in France.

Many of us work in the digital field, but the progressive parties and unions, are not in the digital world. They are dead against digital, it’s too transparent, too this, too that.

We are working in this field. I built a platform called WeSign.It, a citizen mobilization platform, petitioning, campaigning, crowdfunding. Now we are building new tools. About 1 month before the 31st of March [when Nuit Debout started] we decided that the next struggle must be digital. We decided that non-democratically, we just made a statement. We decided to build a media centre, 20 days before this struggle started. Why? For two reasons:

1. Internal frustration. Digital is not used by progressives, only by conservatives.
2. We want to tell a real narrative of what is happening in the struggle. Not waiting for the mass media to tell their narrative, which in general is like, 2 guys broke into a car, the police arrested them, and so on. We wanted to build our own narrative of the movement.

We told all the unions that we’re meeting, told them we’re building a media centre. They said ‘ok’ but they weren’t interested.

So we built it. We tested all the communications tools before the day of the march, Telegram, Signal, Loomio. We tested everything. We even had Firechat, so we could communicate even if they shut the internet down. We were ready. Our phones were hot!

The day of the struggle, we decided to establish a stable media centre somewhere, and another mobile one.

Here is media centre group in Telegram. 173 people in there. People send us what is happening in the streets. We use that material to create tweets.

We thought this was just for 1 day, March 31st.

At the start of the day, 500 people following our Twitter account @NuitDebout [English language tweets on @GlobalDebout]. In the morning the mass media were sharing stories of guys breaking cars. They were saying “it’s in the streets near where the march is going to start”, but sharing it as if it was part of the march. These were the only images. So we said, let us start sharing the real images of the march. We started sharing these images: people marching, walking, doing things, all happy.

By 2pm we have like 5000 Twitter followers. We were surprised. There was a movie that was to be screened at night. We used two hashtags, #nuitdebout and one that meant ‘on the 31st of March I’m not going home’. People stayed, they camped at Place de République. The march ended at Nation, which is about 3km away, but they carried on to watch the movie and to stay. We didn’t think that people would really do it but they stayed.

All the media were talking about the struggle over the labor law. At 5am, April 1st, a journalist from Le Monde called me, and said ‘we know you’re working with Nuit Debout, how do you see this movement?’ I said, ‘I don’t know!’

This is the first article about Nuit Debout, and it is a Storify [an editorial collection of tweets]. The journalist just picked up all the tweets that we made through the day, and the videos, and that was the story. This is the very first article in the media. So at 5am, we say, we won. Our narrative is the reality!

From then, we created a Facebook page, which rapidly became the most popular page in France. 150,000 people.

So now in France we are changing the calendar. Instead of April 1st, we say March 32nd. Why March 32? In the middle of the night we saw the extreme right was making an attack. They were saying, “once again, the lefties are making an April Fools joke,” and we saw that the hashtag April1st was trending. I was about to go home, then we heard about this April1st attack. We said, this is not a joke, so tomorrow is not the 1st of April, it’s the 32nd of March. So we created the March32nd hashtag, and then that became a trending topic.

We bought the domain name nuitdebout.fr, we created the Numérique Commission, all kinds of developers and hackers came along eager to contribute. Next thing we have a website and 64 developers.

The main challenge we have is that the extreme left in France is not like it is in Spain. In Spain they are very poor. In France they are very rich. They have MPs, they have money, they have people working for them. The big fight we’re having right now in the square, is digital or not digital. Digital or physical.

I come from the digital field and I cannot do anything without digital today. If you are not physically there, you can’t be condemned for not being there. Digital is there to help. We need tools to make people write the text together, discuss on the text, vote on the text, and share it.

First tool: Loomio. A few people, a small number of noisy people, from the classical left, the pure ones, those who say they are more left than you. They tell us no, Loomio is a marketing tool. We say, oh it’s free, these people develop it. They say, someone can manipulate the data. We say, yes, someone can manipulate the ballot too, so what’s the problem?

With the Numérique Commission we decided to use Loomio for every discussion we had concerning the website. It works. When there is a text to discuss, we put it in Loomio, and we discuss it. Then it works. People see that it is not taking power in politics. Their main problem is: ‘is this going to take power in politics?’

The developers in the Numérique Commission, they are very good smart people, they decide to not be opponents to the classical leftists. They say, we have to build the tools, the tools must be neutral, you guys in the street, maybe the tools can help you, maybe not.

Now people are using these tools, but they cannot say they are using them! They have to say they don’t like them, even though they are using them.

My challenge was to explain how we created Nuit Debout and to show how progressive they’ve been. They’ve come so far! Now we have a big problem in France today. Classical politicians want to take this movement.

[…] Since Podemos in Spain, in all of Europe now, the political parties think a social movement is going to take them to power. We’re saying, ‘guys, no! It’s not going to take you to power unless you do the job to get to power.’

I have a small company to do communication for NGOs. So they say ‘Oh this guy has a private company, so he’s a capitalist!’ I say, ‘ok, what’s the problem’. They say ‘you cannot control the communication.’ I say, ‘I’m not controlling the communication, I’m trying to distribute the communication.’ They say, ‘but you have the codes!’ I say, ‘you can have the codes too.’

We are building all these tools together, people from my generation, the so-called digital natives. We have this frustration. For example, people always tell us, ‘you guys are too democratic, it is impossible to take everyone to parliament to decide.’ But today my tools can make that possible! You could tell me this 30 years ago, but today you can’t tell me this. I have too many tools that can make everyone participate.

For example. We go from a simple petition, to a direct action. Looking at our petition platform WeSign.It. Looking at this petition about the stop-and-search laws: 21,000 people sign this petition. You can call that clicktivism, ok. People criticise and say it is not real engagement, pure engagement is in the street. So ok, people can give money. They say, oh money is just a credit card, we need real engagement. Now we go to the next level. Everyone from the 21,000 people can say where they live, and we generate a tweet to their senator. They click one button to send a message to the senator saying “I’m against stop-and-search, what about you?”

When we launched this, we saw 5000 tweets a day for every senator. They went crazy! People accept this. Sometimes the senator reply to the tweet, saying ‘yes I’m going to vote against it’ or ‘no I support the law’. People say, ‘is she answering me!?’ yes, she is really answering you. Tweets are public, she can’t avoid seeing them. She can’t block me. Well she can block me but she can’t block Audrey. And if she blocks Audrey she can’t block the next person. The tweets are coming from everyone, there’s no central account to block. 5000 tweets from 5000 individual people. So she can’t go to court to say ‘they’re harassing me’, because one person only sent you one tweet, it’s not enough for harassment. Who are you going to prosecute in court?

People accept this. Our main concern now is to have deliberative platforms. We can sign petitions, give money, make direct actions, and deliberate. Why? When we built WeSign.It, we thought our challenge was to make people ask government to do something, or to be against something. Now we notice people are using it more and more to count their crowd, to do things themselves.

Another petition example is this one about a farmer. His land in Lyon has been in his family for 400 years. The Mayor of Lyon decided to build a stadium for the European soccer cup. They bought all the farms around him, but this guy said ‘no I can’t sell my farm, this is the only inheritance I have from 400 years of family’. So they decided to divide his farm in two by making a highway going from Lyon to the new stadium. He told them, I will give you the borders of my farm so your road can go around the edge. They decided to go between his house and where the animals live. Now his farm is cut in two.

This petition was not to tell the Mayor of Lyon to change his mind, but it is to say ‘we support the farmer.’ We are not asking the Mayor or the government anything, we just support the guy. 163,000 people say they support him, but they’re not asking anything of the government.

So we say ‘OMG what are we going to do? These people are not classical, we’re not going to print this petition and give it to an MP. What is the next level? Let them give money.’ The people that signed the petition say we need to build a bridge to connect the two halves of the farm. We were looking for 15,000 Euros to help him, we collected 25,000 in one week. This petition turned into that action.

These type of people don’t want us to challenge the MP, they don’t trust the MP enough to even ask him something. Not just because they want to do it themselves, but also because they want to count themselves, how many of us don’t want to ask the government anything.

This for us is the main point of the petition.

After this step, they asked us how can we act? It was impossible for us, because we don’t have a space to deliberate, to plan. This is the next level. We say, we’re not going to build tools that exist, so let’s see what exists. And then comes Loomio. We started to see how it works. Then comes Nuit Debout and we say OK! Nuit Debout is the training ground.

I can show you how the Numérique Commission in Nuit Debout is using Loomio. We have many discussions in there. For the movement this is not decision-taking, but work in progress.

People are very critical about all these tools. In general people who are critical, are critical about control. The old left want to control everything. If they can’t control it, that means someone else is controlling, in their minds. They want to know how it works. We tell them the code is open, but they say ‘no, there must be someone controlling.’ What we learnt from working with the Spanish people: these people are used to using control all throughout their activist life, so they think that when we’re using tools, someone must be controlling it. They always look for who is the man behind the code?

On the other hand, some of us say we don’t care. For example, in a general assembly I was asked to explain what I do with the data of the 150,000 people who liked our Facebook page. I said ‘guys, 150,000 people on the Facebook page of Nuit Debout are already on Facebook, so why are you asking me? Are you asking me to ask Zuckerberg to hand over the data? 100% of them were already on Facebook. 70% of the people who sign our petition have a Gmail account, 99% of them have a Facebook, so what are you saying? You want to discuss data?’

Things are moving but very slowly.

We need more tools to link. The problem we had with Loomio: we built a petition, then we tell people to come to Loomio. But it is not inside the petition site. People obey when it is inside the site, but they are not willing to go to another place. We say, you’ve signed the petition, now we need you to go to Loomio to discuss and decide, they say ‘who is Loomio?’ But if we link the tools and they can sign the petition, then discuss and decide in one place, that’s natural.

Whenever you change the place of the action, they feel there is a manipulation somewhere. This is few people, maybe less than 10% of the people. But they are very noisy, very tough. They’ll send 100 messages to ask who is behind the tool? That’s why I’m happy to meet you today so I can say, I met him, he’s a New Zealand guy, he has a beard…

If we can make people participate online, people who want to use old methods of activism, Stalinism, Leninism, all those people have to use physical pressure to make their point. Loomio don’t let them put physical pressure. If we succeed in doing this, it means they definitely have to change their ways of doing politics. This is not easy for people that think they are pure, always right. Audrey interjects: ‘Always left!’

This is a disease of the French left, they are more pure than you. Are you anticapitalist? Have you been in 100 demonstrations against capitalism? Then you’re not really serious. They have the truth. The light, the bible. If they lose control of where the decisions are taken, they lose the truth and purity. This makes them crazy.

For some of us, this is the fight. Why? Not only to fight against the classical left, it’s also fight for the new ways. My personal belief. Audrey is a conservative anarchist. I’m an anarcho-syndicalist. This is my hypothesis: if Karl Marx were living today, he’d have a Twitter account.

When they created the anarcho-syndicalist movement, they were talking directly with people in factories. They weren’t gathering in squares, it was in the workplace. They write books. There’s a French anarchist we call the Christ, he wrote one book and died at 33 years old. He said workers should have a place where they can save their own money, get their own healthcare etc. He wrote a newspaper, developed with the workers. Why? to touch people where they are.

Today, if we want people to come to Place de République everyday — The first day of Nuit Debout. I have a friend, a very good activist. He has a child. He couldn’t leave his child because his wife was not there. So he couldn’t come to Nuit Debout, he had to stay home. He says ‘how can I follow this?’ We say, we’re all over twitter and video streams, you can participate there. I was thinking, if I keep doing things the way the old left wants us to, this guy is excluded from the group. He can’t participate. His ideas are genius but he can’t participate in the Place. So if people can’t participate because they’re looking after children, or they have to work, or they are sick, if we exclude those people, that’s no longer progressive. For me it is ideological: people have to participate, whatever problems they have.

Rich: I want to share something my friend Ahi wrote:

“…the most radical thing is building relationships, being gracious, and being strategic.

Don’t burn bridges over imperfect politics but don’t let people get away with oppressive dynamics, talk like friends, meet people where they’re at, listen more. If your movement isn’t accessible to kids, disabled people, poor people, elderly people, and other minority groups; it’s not a movement it’s just a scene.

Accessibility is everything.”

Top image: May 26th 2016, Madrid, Audrey Tang, Baki Youssoufou, Richard Bartlett, Natalia Lombardo, Pablo Soto

The post Occupiers from Tunisia, Spain, New Zealand, Taiwan and France compare notes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“In 2008, Universal, Sony, EMI, Warner and “Spanish RIAA” Promusicae (Productores de Música de España) joined forces to sue MP2P Technologies, a company created by Pablo Soto, the brains behind Blubster, the “Spanish Napster” file-sharing software.

The record companies said that Soto had designed his Blubster, Piolet and Manolito software with the intent of providing a platform for users to pirate music while he generated profit. This, the labels said, amounted to unfair competition in the market. Soto should pay them 13 million euros ($18m) in damages, the labels argued.

Following years of litigation, in 2011 a Madrid court handed defeat to the labels by declaring Soto’s technology neutral. While his users may have infringed copyright, Soto was not responsible for that, the court said. Furthermore, since Soto wasn’t in the record business and the labels weren’t in the file-sharing business, the unfair competition claim was also dismissed.

After investing so much time in the case, the labels weren’t prepared to concede defeat. The case went to the Madrid Court of Appeals which has just made its decision public. It’s a decisive win for Soto and a big loss for the labels.

“[Soto’s] activity is not only neutral, and perfectly legal, moreover it is protected by article 38 of our Constitution,” the Court wrote in its ruling.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Soto says that the Court saw no problem with sharing technology and discovered no plan “to sink or unbalance the recording industry” or obstruct the development of its business.

“The court affirmed — yet again — that [the creation of sharing technologies] is not an act of looting, unfair competition or unfair benefit from others’ effort,” Soto informs TF.

The Spaniard, who has been developing software since he was 16 years old, adds that the win is not only good news for him, but also for others seeking to innovate.

“This clears the path for more opportunities to bring leading edge technologies to the marketplace and no longer be distracted by misguided legal tactics from the copyright conglomerates. We really appreciate and thank our loyal following, especially among the readers at TorrentFreak.”

Soto’s lawyer, David Bravo, who described the ruling as having a “very strong foundation”, said developers will now be able to go about their business free from “inventive legal interpretations that define the very creator of a file-sharing tool as the responsible of copyright infringement.”

In celebration of the victory, Soto has released a brand new version of his Blubster software, for the first time powered by BitTorrent.

“While we have continued innovating with Torrents.fm, we can now also focus once again on further creating and offering advanced P2P technology across our other networks with this new version of Blubster just launched today,” Soto told TF.

Traditionally Windows only, Blubster will soon debut on both Linux and Mac.”

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