This week we are talking about deepening democracy in our communities through participatory budgeting and participatory decision making more broadly. We’re joined by three great guests: Shari Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Lorian Ngarambe of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, and Yale University Ph.D. student Alexander Kolokotronis.

Adam Simpson: Welcome to The Next System podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson. Today we’re talking about participatory budgeting and, more broadly, broadening the scope of democracy in our communities and movements. We have a great group of guests lined up, starting with Shari Davis, co-executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project. Shari, welcome to the program.

Shari Davis: Thank you so much.

Adam Simpson: We also have Alexander Kolokotronis, a Ph.D. student at Yale University, and founder and board chair of the Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives. Alex, thanks for joining.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Thanks for having me.

Adam Simpson: And we also have Loriane Ngarambe, a community engagement specialist with the United Way. Loriane, it’s great to have you with us.

Loriane Ngarambe: So excited to be here.

Adam Simpson: Shari, can you start us off with just a brief intro into participatory budgeting. What is it? How does it work? What are some of the benefits and limitations?

Shari Davis: Sure. Participatory budgeting is something that gets me really excited. I’m a person who worked in local government in the City of Boston, Massachusetts for just about 15 years overseeing youth services. While I had seen a lot of really interesting and innovative approaches to community engagement, participatory budgeting was an opportunity to explore that in a way that I hadn’t seen before. My first introduction to this was in my role overseeing youth initiatives. The mayor coming to me saying, “I really want young people to play a leadership role, not just a figurehead role, in how I govern and in how I make the City of Boston better.” When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern, and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community.

From that initial introduction, I learned that participatory budgeting is relatively new in the United States, but, globally, it’s been around for several decades. That said, the way that we practice it in the US is also a bit different. The first thing that happens, and my favorite part to ensure transparency, is that community members come together to write the rules that will govern a participatory budgeting process. Then we enter the idea-collection phase, where we collect hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas on how to spend a pot of money to make a community better. We’re not talking about the entire public budget; we’re talking about identifying a space, a line item in the budget, where we can make some decisions together.

After we collect those ideas, we go into the next phase, maybe my most favorite. This is proposal development. This is where community members come together and form a couple of committees to review all of the ideas that have come in based on need, feasibility, and impact. This is an important piece around ensuring equity, not only for the projects that come in but the projects that make it onto the ballot. They work alongside agency or institutional staff to distill and vet those projects so that we have final projects for the ballot. Nothing makes it on a participatory budgeting ballot unless it can really happen if it gets enough votes.

We enter the almost final phase then, the voting phase. Unlike traditional local or national elections, the voting phase is usually a bit longer. It can last a week. And the vote goes out to where people are. That steering committee, and the folks that have been involved in the process, really think about who is typically left out, and how do we really center their engagement in this process, so that their voice is heard. After the vote phase, the projects with the most votes are implemented, truly enacted in the community, until that pot of funds runs out. Then the process begins again the following year, after an evaluation.

When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community. That’s the quick-and-dirty overview.

Adam Simpson: Wow, so much to dig into there. Thank you for that, Shari. In particular, you mentioned that participatory budgeting isn’t a new idea. I’ve actually read in some of your work, Alex, that the tradition of participatory democracy having both international indigenous roots. Can you say a bit more about this and how you view participatory budgeting fitting into that historical tradition?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Sure. Traditionally, I think we connect these things to direct democracy, and we think of ancient Athens. But I think a lot of recent work, in the last few decades, has been connecting up this notion around participatory democracy to the Iroquois Confederacy here in the United States. Most recently, in explicit work on participatory democracy, Michael Menser really foregrounds this in his beginning chapters of his book, We Decide. But on through that, into history, we see a lot of other instances of participatory democratic praxis on a wide scale. So, of course, there are the traditions I’ve just mentioned, but then we see larger cases in the 20th century, such as the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. Then, of course, the coining of the term, participatory democracy, in the ’60s by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Statement, which itself has a lot of international renown.

Often, if I mention that some of the things I’m looking into with my own research include SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, I’ll hear people from various parts of the world say, “The Port Huron Statement and participatory democracy.” But its practical roots really, really lie in different areas of the world, including right here with the Iroquois Confederacy.

Adam Simpson: Now, there are a variety of ways that participatory budgeting can be deployed. In Loriane in Monroe County, New York, this was part of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, which incorporated a participatory budgeting process. What do you think was different about the outcomes, and the initiatives, of that process, as opposed to the outcomes that would have been advanced from a more top-down process, either from city leaders alone, or social impact investors, nonprofits, et cetera? What do you think was different about the fact that this process to alleviate poverty in the Rochester, Monroe County area because of the participatory nature of it? For so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives.

Loriane Ngarambe: This is the thing I always use whenever I’m talking about communities, or other community engagement efforts over at RMAPI: It’s always that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. And for so long, any time people are talking about poverty, and strategies, and solutions you always have this top-down approach. I look at this through a context of content experts, and context experts. And for so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or, maybe, it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives. They understand it through, and through, because it’s not just a nine-to-five thing for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: When they go home, they still have to deal with the poverty. At night, they deal with it when things are good. When things are bad, they understand it at a deeper level. A PB process really allowed an opportunity to see just what happens when you give these context experts an opportunity to really tell you what makes sense for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: The PB process allowed for ideas to come up that could be sitting at tables for decades and an idea like 24-hour daycare, that was one idea that came out a couple of times when we’re doing idea collection. It’s just like, “Wait, why isn’t that something that happens more often?” You have A, B, and C-shift jobs, but when you think of daycare, it’s usually for people who are working A-shift. But then there’s all these jobs that are available, and people, especially single mothers, aren’t able to take advantage of them, because they don’t have something like 24-hour daycare, where they can be secure on where they’re leaving their child. It’s things like that, that make the PB process make sense because they’re able to bring ideas and propose solutions that a content expert may not think about, because their understanding to the problem is limited to their experience.

Loriane Ngarambe: So PB just allowed us to really highlight what happens when you co-create solutions with community, rather than come up with an idea, a creative solution, and then present it to the community that has to live with the consequences of whatever decisions are made. So PB just allowed us to highlight that, and it’s really given us a lot of momentum, and energy, and buy-in from the community, as well, too. Now, you have people who then, as part of this process, that say, “We want more. How can we be more involved? What are more opportunities where we can really let our voices shine through?” And it’s just been an incredible experience for us.

Adam Simpson: That’s something I want to ask about directly. I think Shari mentioned a little bit what the process of participatory budgeting looked like, but I’m interested, particularly, in how you get people involved and engaged. I know that a lot of people, they have work, they have, as you mentioned, childcare, they have so many duties going on. Did you find it difficult to get people engaged? What were the strategies you employed there? In your experience, were people really eager to get involved?

Loriane Ngarambe: The main strategy that we used, that was really important, was meeting people where they were at, and not making this be an additional thing that they have to do. For instance, in idea collection, just getting out there and getting people more informed and engaged with what was going on. We would go to places like our Department of Human Services, where people are going to be sitting there for hours anyway to get their benefits or go to their appointments. So, instead of making a meeting, later on in the evening, where they have to find their way there, meet people where they’re at, go to schools, go to libraries, go to rec centers, go to churches, meet people where they’re at. Identify your key communities’ members, people who already have those relationships, people who will be advocates for what’s going on.

It’s a ripple effect, essentially, right? We’ve identified our 20 key people who really understand what PB is and are really for it. So they start going onto their networks and that’s, really, how the engagement bloomed, how the engagement grew. Then you’d have people hitting up our Facebook page, people reaching out to us because their cousin, who goes to their church, told them about this thing that they’ve been taking a part of. That’s really how we were able to get that engagement going. It wasn’t because of what me and my colleague, Graham, are doing. It was more about the people who understood this for what it was and were passionate about it, and so they were looping in their neighbors, their friends, their family. That’s really how the engagement happened.

Then just meeting people where they’re at, mitigating barriers. If we knew that childcare was an issue, then we made sure we had childcare available at a meeting that we had. We made sure we had food. We had giveaways, if people needed it, just to incentivize people to be able to get there, so it’s worth their time, essentially. I don’t want you to have to leave your kids to come participate and be engaged; bring them with you. We’ll have things for them to do, as well, too. Just meeting people where they’re at and being cognizant of the barriers they need to be facing and how you can help mitigate that. That was really important for us.

Adam Simpson: Wow. That sounds like a really amazing process. Shari, could you say a little bit about this and your experience? What do you see as the most successful strategies for getting the community engaged in these participatory processes?

Shari Davis: Well, one thing I want to just underscore is this principle that was mentioned before, and that’s around content and context expertise. I often say, “If I were to build a building, I would get an expert.” I would go get an architect because I don’t want the building to fall down. So, if I’m going to build a healthy community, I need experts to do that. I need people that live, walk, breath, and exist in that space on a regular basis. When we’re infusing their ideas, impact, and, really, voice, we’re able to build communities that are responsive to generations to come. I think that’s a really important piece here.

In terms of what we’ve seen work, and how this really works is, is centering those folks—who now we’re turning to as experts, and have always been experts and leaders in their own right. But if we’re going to center their engagement, we have to design the process with them, and not for them, and that’s why this steering committee component is so important. If we want single parents, or parents period, to participate, then we have to really think through childcare, times that we’re meeting. If we want young people to be in the room, then we probably can’t meet at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. These considerations and the design process are essential. And that’s not me, Shari, or other members of PBP, that make those decisions. It’s the important folks that are on the ground, the folks that work in government, but especially those that are of the community that we’re trying to engage in a participatory budgeting process, really need to be at the helm of that design.

That’s what we’ve seen work in Oakland, where there’s no minimum voting age, anyone of any age, as long as they can interact with the materials, can participate. That’s what we’ve seen work in the City of Boston, where young people reported being more likely to engage in their community or being more likely to vote in a local or national election, as a result of participation. That’s what we saw in Phoenix, Arizona, where the entire school district engaged in a participatory budgeting process. And, last year, nearly a thousand of those young people that engaged in the PB process also registered to vote in local and national elections.

That’s what we’ve seen be a big piece of success is making sure that community, and those that are representative of their community, are really involved in the design process early, and in a way that they can make some decisions.

Loriane Ngarambe: Just to add to that, real quick. Here, in Rochester, we have a community advisory council. This is made up of community members who have decided to take on that extra time to really be involved with what’s going on, and provide input and guidance to the solutions and programs, and conversation, that are being had around what’s going to be happening with our communities. They played a really important role in the education part of introducing PB to the community. We brought it to them. We explained what it was to them, and they helped with the creation of our steering committee, and getting the word out there. Just to back up that statement, that was a huge, huge component of this, as well, too for us.

Shari Davis: I think you were touching on something that’s super important, and I know Alex can attest to this too. Often times we see councils and engagement strategies, and the councils may work, sometimes they’re a bit defunct, so participatory budgeting can be a way to really build robust advisory council level support. And, to your point, really allow them to infuse the beginning stages of planning that lead to the steering committee creation. And, in the City of Boston, we saw that with the Mayor’s Youth Council. They became huge ambassadors and key to the success of participatory budgeting, and really ran this process, and continue to now. I know that’s true, in terms of what Alex has seen, on the university scale, as well. Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Yeah, to add to that. At the university scale what we’ve seen is—and you’ll find this again; this is another product of the ’60s—so many schools have a series of advisory committees in every aspect of the school structure, in terms of making school policy, or making recommendations for school policy. What we found, when we were doing our participatory budgeting process at Queens College, was that there were all these committees for different things, related to finance, related to buildings and grounds, related to all these things. As we looked through the lists, nearly all the students’ seats were vacant. It really astonished us, because it was clear that in a school with 20,000 students, there was an opportunity there and that no one, nearly no one, was taking up this opportunity to push things forward.

At the same time, we were recognizing that these are advisory structures and, after all, we, ourselves, are pushing for a process where we actually had decision-making power and weren’t simply being shuffled off into advisory seats that we were afraid might not affect change. But the result in having a participatory budgeting process is that people felt anchored, and felt able to try out, maybe, also sitting on some of these advisory seats, and, maybe, also having that feedback into the participatory budgeting process itself at Queens College.

The effect has been, over the last few years, that students have consistently found certain committees are really great to work within and are able to push things that sometimes may spill out of the PB process. For example, we have, at Queens College, a lot of technology projects have been pushed, rather simply having those projects having funds allocated through PB itself, they’ll be brought into the technology feed committee and will be pushed that way. We’ve seen, in that case, a lot of spillover effects in terms of the preexisting advisory structures and how PB not only provides people with the confidence to step up into positions in those councils or committees but also brings in the information and all the different perspectives that are accumulated through PB into those advisory structures themselves, affecting change in a lot of different ways.

And that’s what we’ve seen, where projects have been, ultimately, taken up and have been funded well beyond the PB process itself at Queens College.

Adam Simpson: I’m really interested in what your views are, all of you really, on participatory processes at different layers beyond different governments, including universities, as you mentioned, Alex, or neighborhoods, and workplaces, et cetera. But maybe, in an effort to begin gesturing toward that, I think one of the really resonating things to me about participatory budgeting is that the community—and this is what I’ve heard from Shari and Loriane—is being treated explicitly as the actor rather than something that’s acted upon. Alex, I wanted to ask, in your research, have you seen what effect this level of gesturing toward direct democracy has on broader social participation and building a sense of community and community wellbeing?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Absolutely. I think, actually, this indirectly gets back into one of the earlier questions you asked, in terms of traditions that this all derives from or is related to. A big push in the first half of the 20th century, and is now, of course, creeping back in and is something that is often addressed by The Next System Project is a push towards workers’ control, towards cooperatives, and towards, really, trying to reshape the workplace from something that is seemingly separate, or it feels separate, from us to something that actually can constitute a community in its own right.

Things like participatory budgeting, I think, do the same thing for neighborhoods, and for any institution that’s using participatory, or has a participatory, budgeting process where people might feel quite apart and distinct from their neighborhood. That’s something you’ll experience, for example, in New York City, where I’m from, where people often get caught up in their daily commute, caught up in a lot of the different transformations of New York City, where, maybe, a lot of locally owned businesses have now terminated. A lot of the community and civic life has slowly been drained. And, of course, New York City has been a big battleground for things like this, when we think of, for example, Jane Jacobs in the ’60s and ’70s, and the fights around neighborhoods and maintaining a neighborhood vitality.

Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of. This is something I’ve seen time and again. But, in terms of my own research, I really look at participatory democracy within public schools. There are a few reasons for that. One, actually, connects to what Shari and Loriane were talking about. I view the adult-child relationship as the first iteration of the expert-layperson relationship. For me, when I think about these issues in terms of expertise, when it comes to architecture, when it comes to medicine, or when it comes to physical infrastructure, and we talk about the very particular distinctions between expertise in all those realms, I try to get at that thinking about, “Well, how is this expert-layperson relationship constructed from the very beginning and, particularly, within schools?”

Alexander Kolokotronis: I think one thing that we see in schools is that kids, and children, and teachers themselves, often experience the school as theirs, like “This is my school,” or “At my school, we’re doing this.” But, at the same time in their daily life, their daily experiences, they don’t necessarily feel the school is really theirs. Something like participatory democratic processes, including PB, really allow for people to not just take ownership of the school, and take ownership in the sense that what is theirs is actually really theirs, but that they are an agent, as you push forward, within that setting and can constitute themselves as a collective agent in the process.

I’ve seen that in my own research in the way in which students and teachers at more traditionally and, dare I say, authoritarian-structured schools have a far different sense of, and range of emotions, when it comes to their setting, than those, even if there are problems and difficulties at participatory democratic schools and trying to build a community around that, as well. I mean, that might be a long-winded way of getting at that, but I think we see that daily in the daily distinctions between different types of schools and how well incorporated people are, in terms of acting within them.

Shari Davis: Alex, you bring up something that’s so important to me and, as you were talking, I was just thinking about one thing. That is, a lot of what we talk about when it comes to democracy—and we haven’t talked about it or defined the problem—there is no secret that a lot of folks are not happy, or feel that government is not designed for the benefit of all. There’s been reasonable research on this, and I think that one part of the long-game strategy to addressing this bigger problem is to change government, and to change who’s in government, so that government looks like the people that we see in communities, so that they’re familiar with the issues, and so that there is more of a conversation, and there’s not this big divide between those individuals.

How do we prepare folks for roles? Not everyone necessarily wants to be, or is interested in being, an elected official. There are so many roles in government that serve community and I ask myself this question: What does lifelong civic engagement look like? What does onboarding look like? I was a young person who started working in government as a teenager and had nearly a 15-year career in local government, and that was unique. How do we not make that a unique story and make that an opportunity that folks can really attain, and lean into, and explore, especially as a young person? I think, to Alex’s point, introducing that in a school context is so important, and then can become foundational. And organizationally, at the Participatory Budget Project, that’s why we’re not only focusing our efforts on the county level, and citywide level, and regional, and larger scale PB, but we’re also really focusing on school, and school-district level PB, because it’s so important to empower our young leaders that are not future leaders but are leaders today, and need tools and support. [Participatory budgeting] is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved.

Loriane Ngarambe: For us, we also had our Mayor’s Youth Advisory group that was heavily involved in this whole entire process. And the energy that they brought, and just the innovation that they brought to this process, it wouldn’t have been what it was without them. To just piggy-back off of when you’re trying to say, “How can we get communities that are more centrally engaged?” You’re right, it is foundational. It needs to start early on.

I know when we would go out into the community and tell people about what this PB process is, you have community members who almost feel siloed from the democratic process that’s going on. You have these people in position of power making decisions, but, to them, it’s like, “I got to figure things out for me. I don’t have time to worry about what they’re doing or how they’re doing it.” Because, in their minds, decisions that are being made are not being made with them in mind because, if that was the case, then these decisionmakers would be way more informed about what really matters for people living in poverty. They’d be more aware of what is it that community members are doing that works, that we can build from, what is it that community members are missing that we’re missing on our end, as well.

This process, a lot of it, was just relationship building and education, as well, too, really informing community members of the power that their voices have. The power that they have, as a collective, when they really stand up and say, “Hey, enough is enough,” or “This is what we need. This is what should be happening.” In RMAPI community engagement, it’s a huge cornerstone, a huge part of the work that we’re doing, because we understand poverty is not going to be reduced, eradicated, or any other word, if community is not a part of what’s going on.

Again, I keep saying this, PB is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved; they want to know, “How can I, in my sphere of influence, do something that can make a difference? How can I be more involved? How can I be part of this greater democratic process? What does that look like? There just needs to be more education and strategies around making sure people get the information that they need. So, whatever they decide to do with that, at least, they have that information.

Adam Simpson: I want to turn from how we’re thinking about community engagement and broadening this scope of democracy, and think about how racial equity fits into that. Shari, I know I’ve seen you highlight, and you, as well, Loriane, in the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, a participatory budgeting process as a pathway to creating racial equity, and bring that, really, out of frame and into focus. Shari, could I start with you? Can you tell me about the impacts you’ve seen and how participatory budgeting, and participatory processes, in general, can really begin building pathways toward racial equity?

Shari Davis: Absolutely. Since 2009, the first instance of participatory budgeting in the US, we’ve seen over 400,000 people be empowered to decide how to invest over $300 million on community projects in over 30 cities across the United States and Canada. The participatory budgeting projects have played a lead role in most of these processes in US and Canada at some point. For us, ensuring equity, and racial equity, in particular, is a little bit different in every space. No two PB processes are the same, but, honestly, I can’t find two communities that are the same.

With that said, layering in the important elements of racial equity, it really goes back to design. That means, who is designing the process? What are the considerations that they’re making? And how are we ensuring that this process is really centered around people? People that are, you could say, often left out, but these end up being the folks that are easiest to ignore. With that said, I think a lot of our strategy around racial equity is having honest, open, and transparent conversations, and allowing folks to be on the same side of the table. A key element to that is excellent facilitation and training folks to be able to hold space, so that they can have some group agreements, and really be able to dig into some things.

I’m really interested to hear how this rolled out in Rochester, in practice, and I can give a few other examples.

Loriane Ngarambe: I know, when we were designing the process, there was a lot of time and emphasis around making sure that this made sense for our community. What does that look like? We wanted to be very intentional about reaching to, but also reaching past, the usual suspects, as I like to refer to them. Anytime there’s anything new that comes into Rochester, those engaged community members are always there. But we wanted to make sure that we were making an effort to reach behind them, to the people who are not engaged for whatever reason. When our steering committee first came together, there were a lot of honest, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that needed to be had to say, “All right, so why is it that anytime something new comes to Rochester, the people who are going to benefit from it the most, are always the last to hear about it.” And when they hear about it, it’s usually when decisions are already made. There’s a plan already being rolled out, and they didn’t know anything about it, but what can we do, this time, that’s different?

Having those intentional conversations was really important. They did so much work in creating the guidebook and making sure that they were taking into consideration things that normally wouldn’t be taken into consideration. So having single mothers at the table, having young people at the table, was really important as well. Then having predominantly context experts and then having people, who I call the hybrids, context experts who also are content experts, so they can live in both of those worlds. They’re almost like culture brokers, so they know how to navigate both of those worlds, and being able to think practically like, “Okay, this is something that’s going to make sense,” or “This is something that’s not going to make sense,” and just encouraging those conversations. As staff persons who are helping facilitate this process, we wanted to make sure this was as community-led as possible.

We wanted to do everything on our end to mitigate barriers, to mitigate influencing what these guidelines or rules that they laid out look like, and just really making sure this was community-led, and community-owned. I think it made a huge difference for this process to be what it was.

Shari Davis: Loriane, I have a question for you. First, let me just commend you, because I think often folks get nervous when we talk about opening up transparent processes that center race and, really, that center tension. I think that there’s a way that tension can be healthy and tension can be toxic. But I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about your experience in moving this through government and getting to a “yes” and dealing with some of the strong hesitation around being so transparent. I think folks are often afraid that it’s going to be counterproductive and not productive. You’re telling a different story. I know a different story. How do we get there?

Loriane Ngarambe: Yeah. At RMAPI, we were lucky enough to be able to roll out this pilot PB process without having to do it through government. Our process wasn’t through a city government. We secured the funding, and we helped roll out the process. So, as a result, we didn’t necessarily have to deal with the red tape of government and the bureaucracy that lies everywhere. We were able to really make the process whatever is the community members who were helping design it be what it was. Then, also, at RMAPI we have our three guiding principles of addressing structural racism, being trauma informed, and community building. This is something that we infuse in everything that we’re doing.

Any project, any solution, any process, conversation that’s being had, these guiding principles are meant to be utilized as lenses in which we’re doing all of this, so that we’re not just sitting around sugarcoating what the real problem is. We’re trying to deal with the root causes of why we’re here, and what we’re going to do, and what’s going to make the most sense. Having these tense conversations goes with the territory of doing RMAPI work. So having the right people in the room, and being able to sit in those moments, was interesting, because it was almost the community members themselves guiding that process. When you were in moments of tension, moments of people not sure of how to receive what was being said, just sitting in that moment and facilitating: Where are people’s heads at? How do we move past? What about this do you not understand? Just allowing the space to really get through that, I think, is and was really important.

Shari Davis: Adam, the reason why I very much tagged Loriane in on this is because I mentioned no two PB processes are the same. But a big piece in addressing racial equity is grassroots leadership, and that usually looks like a strong community-based partner that is very much involved in this, because they have the connections, they’ve done a lot of this work, and they have a really good sense of the landscape. Oftentimes we’re talking about bringing these folks together, making these connections, getting them on the same side of the table. I can’t think of one PB process where this wasn’t the case, where there weren’t really strong relationships with community-based organizations that were centered on things like racial equity, housing inequality, gentrification, and really inviting those folks to be at the forefront who are doing some of this deep engagement.

Shari Davis: We need those community ambassadors, whether it is a youth council, an advisory board, or, really, those groups that have the deep relationships in communities with those folks that are often hard to reach, is a key element to centering this process and really using a lens of equity, racial equity, gender equity, and these other pieces. We have to be clear on the goals at the beginning of the process, otherwise they will not show up in the design.

Adam Simpson: Before moving on, I wanted to follow-up, Shari, on something you mentioned earlier about the first PB project in the United States, or in North America, maybe, you said, beginning in 2009, now, over 400,000 participants across the country. I get a sense that PB is spreading, and I wanted to ask, why do you think that is? Why do you think? Maybe, it’s something to do with this particular moment or maybe it’s something that the idea is just compelling to a lot of people. But why do you think PB is growing in this popularity, in this particular moment?

Shari Davis: Well, I think, to be honest and completely transparent, we’ve seen some slower growth of participatory budgeting in the United States compared to what we’ve seen in some other places. I think there are a few things to think about here. In Paris, France, for example, they do a PB process with over 100 million euros, a school-based process, a district-based process, and a city-wide process. The mayor has committed 5 percent of the budget to be decided on by folks that live in the City of Paris. So it can be that big. We’ve seen countrywide PB in Portugal. We’ve seen really big large scale PB processes in other places across the world. And, I think, we’re starting to see some real growth of participatory budgeting in the US since 2009. And, as I mentioned, the practice of participatory budgeting is different in every process, but it’s also a bit different in the United States, and it should be, because the context in the US is a bit different.

I do think that we are seeing a continued growth, and there is a moment here for us to think about what participatory democracy looks like overall, and really, for us, to think about what civic engagement looks like beyond just voting, and what building pathways to lifelong civic engagement are. And, I think, participatory budgeting is not the silver bullet or the only solution, but is one of some innovative solution that should definitely be considered in addressing this. And I think we’re in a moment where we’re seeing an uptick, and a real desire for things like PB.

Adam Simpson: Absolutely. I just want to follow-up on that. As a tool for building community power, and a sense of community cohesion, I’m hoping to hear from folks about how far they think these processes can go beyond budgeting, really, to local issues like zoning or economic development plans. The recent fiasco with Amazon HQ II in New York City comes to mind immediately. But being conscious that one of the criticisms I’ve heard about PB is sometimes that of the decisions that are put on the table by various local governments, et cetera, the amounts of money involved are relatively small, or the decisions involved are not as consequential as they could be.

Maybe we could start with Alex. Do you think that participatory budgeting, or participatory processes more generally, could be applied to bigger economic decisions whether we’re talking about the state level, or the regional level, or even the federal level, or is there really, truly a scale dilemma and this is much more appropriate for municipal processes? I’m just wanting to get a sense of the scale and what are the limitations or the potentialities.

Alexander Kolokotronis: This is a question I thought about for years. Recently, I started to think about the criticism of PB, and what that criticism says in the more underlying way. I think what the criticism of PB does is that it actually says something about the way we understand money. The way we understand money is really this very orthodox neoclassical economics-based outlook of seeing money as something really separate from us. If you take an Econ 101 class, the way it starts, and the thing that animates it all the way through, is the supply and demand curve, and that’s that.

Somewhere the consumer and the producer are supposed to meet at this optimal space. The whole point there is the service or good being exchanged. Money is external to that. Money is not seen as really a part of that. Money is just this separate thing that, at best, maybe helps facilitate that private meeting or exchange. This is the private money story, where we really start our barter. Now, and I think in recent years, what’s really taken off, especially with modern monetary theory, is another story that is more historically based, that it’s not that we were born as these isolated individuals who come to market and then separate; we’re really born into a community, and when we think of things that way, we understand provisioning far differently.

Let’s say I’m looking for a shoe and someone else is looking for a bottle of water. Instead of understanding it as, “Well, we so happen to have this double coincidence of loss, so I’ll give you want I need, and you’ll give me what I need.” It’s rather more like, “You have this, I owe you one.” Then that person, who I’m exchanging with, owes someone else one. Then we come to the question of, well, what is one? One of what? This is something covered really well in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. We see that this story is not really barter comes first, then money, and then credit. It’s really credit comes first and then money.

The reason why I’m taking this story and bringing it here is that when you think of it this way, money is really a part of, and really emblematic of, the community that we’re building. And money is not really the super-private isolated thing. Actually, money is public. And if we think of it that way, things like participatory budgeting are not simply this add-on thing. Think about participatory processes, like participatory budgeting, as actually really necessary to community control. They’re not simply a tool for someone to maybe pat themselves and look better. And they’re certainly not necessarily this thing that some on the left will criticize as things that are just about crumbs and don’t really get at bigger things.

In fact, I think a really big power of participatory budgeting is it gets at the very question of how we experience money. In our day-to-day lives, we experience money as something completely alien to us, whether it’s our boss who pays us, whether it’s a government that bureaucratically allocates funds, or whether it’s money in terms of the sense in which we don’t have it. What I think you experience with PB is actually really unique and almost a rupture in how we relate to each other through money. We start to see money as not this necessarily disgusting alien thing that’s above us and controls us, or that we lack control in relation to. I mean, you can think of when someone might feel quite ashamed of spending money. I mean, all these dynamics. All of these are reversed or upended, when we do something like PB, where people start to relate to each other through, “Well, how are we going to allocate funds?” Participatory budgeting is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale.

I think PB is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale. As Shari was referring to, there are some national initiatives, such as in Portugal, with national PB process there, and there have been statewide PB processes, such as in Ontario, Canada, or in Rio de Consul, Brazil. So there have been some initiatives to try and get at this, and it’s really about, I think, getting at the mechanics. But PB is, I think, connecting very much with modern monetary theory, and I don’t think it’s absolutely coincidental that we’re seeing these things dovetail, in terms of their rise in the current political moment, that we’re fundamentally re-understanding what money means, or can mean, to us, and that it neither has to be this thing that is a fetish, as Marxists, might frame it, as the only way money can exist, nor does it have to be a thing where it’s something that we just have to, as a result of being a fetish, feel ashamed of even touching. Rather, it’s something we have to embrace and redesign to have an experience of something far more shared and something that will facilitate the provisioning of community-building, of individual fulfillment, such as you see in the project development phase, where people are individually really cultivating their own projects. These are all things that PB points the way to and, I think, it’s something we have to add more to.

Adam Simpson: We’re getting really close to time, so probably this is my final question. Given what Alex just said, I want to ask you, Loriane, the outcomes of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, in the Rochester, Monroe area. The outcomes touched housing, they touch food scarcity, so many different things. And the way Alex was talking about, they do have to do with money, but also these are also very much policy issues. I wanted to know, specifically, what’s your thinking on this? What are the limits of participatory budgeting from just your recent experience of participatory processes? Do you think that it’s possible to engage in the way that you’ve been engaging, in the Rochester community, to make these broader decisions about the local area, and the different bigger economic decisions more broadly?

Loriane Ngarambe: Right. At the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, our goal here is to bring system change. So, there’s a lot of information gathering that is required. There’s a lot of understanding of what is a problem; what’s been done that wasn’t working, that’s working; What are some new strategies; what are some new solutions. I think, more than anything, what the PB process does, as I keep saying, is brings community into this conversation and, now, we have to figure out a way to keep community as part of these conversations and part of this solution-creation. But then, also, it sheds light on what the real problems are. It sheds light on not just the problems, but what some of the assets are within our communities that are so often overlooked. Because, when you’re talking about poverty, you come at it from such a deficit point of view and often overlook just how people are making ends meet, how people are living day-to-day with the dire circumstances that they’re living in.

When you’re talking about systems-level change, when you’re talking about policy-level change, all those conversations require evidence, and PB, for us at least, I would say has been a great tool, a great process to bring to light what evidence exists. Because it’s really hard to look at over 2,600 people who voted on the projects that won, because these are things that they feel are important and should be highlighted, and should be regarded as conversation builders around how to really support individuals living in poverty. I think it just provides the evidence to be able to change policies and change systems in a way that, if this was just a closed-door process, when just policy makers stand on policy gains, it wouldn’t be as effective, and it wouldn’t be able to get to the core of what it is that people really actually need to live self-sufficient, full, and complete lives.

Adam Simpson: I know I said that was probably my final question, but I’m going to kick this to Shari, if you don’t mind. I just wanted to get your perspective, just a closing comment given what was just said by Alex and Loriane, on your view of participatory budgeting in the context of system change.

Shari Davis: I think Alex and Loriane raised some really wonderful points. One of them that’s sticking with me is, when we’re talking about participatory budgeting, we’re not talking about blowing up or highlighting only problems. We’re talking about thinking through solutions. That includes really doubling down on the assets that exist in place, building them out, understanding what to duplicate and invest in. Participatory budgeting is about understanding community spending priorities, government spending priorities, and having an opportunity to reconcile them. This is about an opportunity to lift up the lid, invite folks in, and do things better. Ultimately, we’re talking about building more sustainable, effective, and responsible communities. This truly is an opportunity for us to maximize the finite resources that we have to serve folks the best way that we can. This is one strategy of many to do exactly that.

In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks, this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave that, I hope, really is fueled and ignited, so that we can see things like participatory budgeting really take hold and become the way that we do business.

Adam Simpson: I can’t thank you all enough for joining me today to talk about participatory budgeting, and all of your work around it. Just a final thank you to Shari Davis, Alexander Kolokotronis, and Loriane Ngarambe. Thank you all for joining me today on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.

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This video was filmed at New Frontiers / Te Tūhura Nuku – November 2018 in Upper Hutt, New Zealand.

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We are living in turbulent times for electoral democracy. But it didn’t start with the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump. Over the period 2006 – 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index recorded a decline in democratic health for more than half the 167 countries it monitors.

Join the P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and many others for this special day of Democracy, as part of the Imagine! festival of ideas and politics, celebrated in Belfast from the 12th to the 18th of March. The text below is taken from the Festival’s page on Democracy Day.

We are living in turbulent times for electoral democracy. But it didn’t start with the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump. Over the period 2006 – 2016 the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index recorded a decline in democratic health for more than half the 167 countries it monitors.

In many parts of the world citizens are losing faith in the electoral system that had been considered the consensus vehicle of human progress over much of the last century. Northern Ireland is no exception to this trend.

Whilst populist demagogues would have us believe ‘strong’ leadership and a return to authoritarianism is the answer, proponents of deliberative democracy believe quite the reverse – that a key part of the solution to this malaise is a deeper involvement of citizens in decision-making.

Democracy Day is a Building Change Trust event and is back for its second year at Imagine 2018. It’s a full dawn to dusk programme exploring the health of democracy, the role of citizens and the latest local and international thinking about what needs to be done to reinvigorate democracy and make it fit for purpose in the 21st Century.

Attendees will get a hands-on exploration of innovations like Citizens’ Assemblies and Participatory Budgeting, as well as hearing from inspiring international speakers including Michel Bauwens from the Peer to Peer Foundation and our evening keynote Carmen Perez, co-organiser of the Women’s March on Washington.

With the exception of the Michel Bauwens event ‘Commoning Our Democracy’, all of the daytime events for Democracy Day are covered by a single registration – simply register once on any of the Democracy Day daytime event pages to attend as many events as you wish. The evening events on the Good Friday Agreement and Carmen Perez’s talk also require separate registration. All events are free – here’s the lineup for the day.

Programme

the people’s breakfast

Kick off Democracy Day with a hearty free breakfast and a short drama performance to set the scene.

putting people at the heart of decision making

How will a Citizens’ Assembly for Northern Ireland work?

commoning our democracy

Michel Bauwens leads a workshop on the emerging crisis in democratic nation-states

the end of facts? taking on fake news

FactCheckNI introduces fact-checking champions from Methodist College Belfast.

debate, deliberate, decide: community conversations about education

A workshop exploring the emotive issue of the loss of primary schools within communities.

participatory budgeting works: a practical introduction

Find out about Participatory Budgeting and how you can decide!

the good friday agreement: is it still fit for purpose?

Twenty years on, participants in this session will examine the constitutional arrangements bequeathed by the Good Friday Agreement.

keynote speaker: carmen perez

Democracy Day’s keynote speaker is Carmen Perez, National Co-Chair of the Women’s March on Washington.

The post Commoning our Democracy: Democracy Day at Imagine! Belfast 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since 2015 Outlandish have spent £192,450 in Cobudget across 34 buckets.

Kate Beecroft interviews Brian Spurding, from the web services coop Outlandish about their use of Cobudget. Originally published in Greater than/finance. 

A web services consultancy based in London, Outlandish is a worker owned cooperative.

They use Cobudget to democratically distribute dividends to all cooperative members as a way to invest in new projects they care about, for example new tech products, social impact projects that need software, match funding of international initiatives.

We talked to Outlander Brian Spurling about how they have been using Cobudget.

How does Cobudgeting work at Outlandish?

At Outlandish the Cobudget process works like this: every quarter, the surplus is distributed proportionally according to the hours that people have spent working for Outlandish. This money goes to everyone’s Cobudget accounts. From there, these funds can be allocated to different ‘buckets’ — buckets are projects that people from Outlandish have proposed.

Anyone who is either a member of the cooperative or close collaborator — called ‘Outlanders‘ — can create proposals for projects to be funded.

Mandatory information for these proposals is the description of the project goals, as well as the people who will be working on the project and the estimated time and money needed for the work. The projects should all in some way or another serve Outlandish’s mission and theyshould not be core expenses or costs of the business.

What have been some of your most funded projects?

Featured amongst the funded projects have been a prototype for the site schoolcuts.org.uk. This site features an interactive infographic to show how your local schools are being de-funded. It turned from a successful Cobudget project into a commercial project in cooperation with the National Union of Teachers and won silver at the digital impact awards 2017.

Another big investment by Outlandish has been Daugher of Social Monitor, a project to develop an existing system into a product offering. With no sales opportunities in the pipeline, this is a great example of how Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.

“Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.” — Brian Spurling

One of our favourite clients (a research organisation fighting corruption in Papua New Guinea) brought us a great project idea. We identified some additional tech we could build — stuff that would be good for them and interesting for us — so we match-funded their budget (£32, 250). This was a huge success.

Screenshot of one of the projects Outlandish funded on Cobudget

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What has changed since you started using Cobudget to spend your surplus?

Before Cobudget, it was easy to spend small amounts of surplus (<£5,000), because an individual member could sign this off themselves. But it was hard to do anything bigger than that because there was no defined framework on how to make those decisions.

“The way Outlandish makes decisions about our surplus has changed dramatically. Pre-Cobudget, there was a lack of transparency and the authority to spend the surplus was limited to the co-ops members.” — Brian Spurling

This could have been defined without using Cobudget, of course. But with Cobudget, not only is the spending of the surplus now transparent, but anybody working at Outlandish can propose projects, and funds can be distributed directly to individuals. It is the combination of these three elements that make it so transformative for how we manage our surplus.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to learn more about the tool Cobudget, read more here.

For further resources and use cases, check out our Guide to Collaborative Finance.

The post Investing surplus for impact: Cobudgeting at Outlandish appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kevin Stark: The word Decidim translated from Catalan means we decide, and it’s the name of Barcelona’s digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. One part functional database and one part political statement, organizers say Decidim is key to a broad digital transformation that is taking place in Barcelona — its institutions, markets, and economy. Organized by the Barcelona City Council, Barcelona’s citizens participate in a new digital commons, and its organizers hope that technology can improve democratic participation and foster good government. The open-source platform allows the public to participate directly in government as they would a form of social media, and they have had early success. The city council hosted several organizing events to decide on a strategic plan, and nearly 40,000 people and 1,500 organizations contributed 10,000 suggestions.

Decidim was born when a young protest movement in Spain swept into power, according to Xabier Barandiaran, a project leader, who compares the fledgling political party to the Occupy movement in the U.S. Its leadership’s first goal was to create a platform for open strategic planning for the city. “People were in the streets and saying let’s participate in democracy, let’s write a strategic plan,” Barandiaran said.

What developed was an open-source software that embodied the group’s transformation plan, a digital common where citizens can have a say in government — the code is available on Github. “We decided how we would decide,” he said. The leadership is still hosting public meetings once a month as well as large conferences — the next one is on October 26-28. I spoke with Barandiaran about Decidim and its origins. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Kevin Stark: What was the context in which Decidim was born?

Xabier Barandiaran: It started in Barcelona and Madrid because there was a change of government that resulted from the indignados movement [sometimes called the 15-M Movement or anti-austerity movement], which was connected to the Occupy movement in the U.S. — for your American readers to make a connection. The political movement became a political party and then institutionalized. There was a change in politics that was motivated by a change in society and its mindset, and on the demands of the people.

It was really targeted towards politicians. And among these demands, perhaps, the most important one was to open-up democracy. Not to let it in the hands of the political parties and the establishment. So, once these new political parties or movements went into power in different cities in Spain — particularly Barcelona and Madrid — one of the earliest projects was to enhance all the means for participatory democracy, including the potential of technology to speed up and make possible a more complex participation.

I live in the city of Chicago. In my neighborhood, we have participatory budgeting — once a year my neighbors gather to decide what roads will be paved, street lights installed, or where we want to paint a mural. What is the Decidim vision of participatory democracy? What sort of change is made possible through the digital platform?

Budgeting is one part of participatory democracy but there are many others. Decidim makes possible almost all of them. It is only limited right now because we are still developing the software and new features are coming out every week. We have learned a lot. We have gathered collective intelligence from different expert citizens. All hackers, public servants, academics, people interested in their government. We run workshops and open citizen meetings. We came out with a wider spectrum of possibilities for participatory democracy, other than participatory budgeting. There are budgeting pilots in Barcelona. But we did not put all our eggs in that basket. We felt it was more important to identify the problems, to bring people together to speak about public services.

Everybody understands the potential of social networks. Often for silly things. Mostly for kittens and fancy photos and things. The potential for open knowledge like Wikipedia, or information spreading like Twitter, or intense relationships like Facebook, also applies to politics. But it does so with high controversy (post-truth, lack of privacy, democratic deficit, no-transparency, etc.). With Decidim we talk about a new generation of political networks that are oriented to decision making, commitment, and accountability. This new generation of social or political networks has to be open source, guarantee personal privacy and public transparency, sovereignty of the infrastructures, independence from private corporations and they have to enforce, by design, digital rights and equity. This is what Decidim provides.

Decidim is open-source software. But that’s not the only way the software is democratic. Decisions about the software are made democratically — it was built democratically. But there must be barriers for people who don’t have access or technological experience. How do you address that?

This is a very common worry. But the digital divide is no bigger than other barriers or gaps. Like the precariousness gap — people don’t have time to show up to a meeting, or they are have to combine different low paid jobs and are too busy to participate. The cultural gap, people need sufficient information and knowledge so that people can think of better policies. Or the gender gap — women are excluded from public participation. There are many gaps and the digital gap is the smallest of all the gaps.

It turns out that, with Decidim platform, we can close or reduce the impact of some of the other gaps (improve available information, flexible participation, gender imbalances, etc.). This being said, we take the digital divide very seriously and we have two programs that are important to us. One is the digital mediation program that we are launching soon so that citizens can get direct help at any library or civic centers to access the platform. We also have a training program. We have run some pilots, and we will have training workshops throughout the city next year to train and empower people of the potential of digital technologies for self-organization, democratic participation, data privacy protection, and digital rights.

There’s a video circulating online of you discussing Decidim in which you say that representative democracy is in crisis and “the political system that hasn’t changed in 200 years. Youth were living in a precarious situation and change had to happen.” What was the experience of being a young person in Barcelona and how Decidim is addressing issues?

We suffered (and we are still suffering) an economic crisis, but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a political crisis. It was easy to see that it was coming. There was a lot of speculation of housing, and a very suspicious collaboration between political parties and the banks. Many of us could see it coming. It was going to explode. There was a big gap between the rich and the poor and that could only be filled with debt, but debt has a limit. There are physical limits in terms of time (you can’t pay a mortgage for more than 50 years) and the kind of jobs that were created where far from sustainable. It is regular people who paid for the foreseeable catastrophe and the existing democracy did not protect their basic rights. It was a failure of democracy altogether.

Hundreds of thousands of people joined the 15M protests all across the country, we had very specific demands and proposals to change politics, economy and society but the government failed to listen and to open the doors to public participation against the crisis. There was a generational change challenging the establishment and no means to channel the transition. There is a serious structural problem behind. Voting every four years is clearly not enough.

Democracy needs an update 200 years after its original design during the French Revolution. Moreover, while socio-technical innovations are disrupting our societies continuously (AirBnB rising the housing prices even higher, Google delivering free-of-charge services in exchange of our privacy, etc.), public institutions and political democracy was being left behind, creating an even greater democratic deficit on our societies. This is the situation that Decidim is progressively changing. This is what is new in Barcelona (and other cities like Madrid, Zaragoza, a Corunha): People can channel their collective intelligence into public administration, policy making and politics, We can propose, decide and monitor public policies with flexibility, with a fluid online-offline interaction, from our mobiles or from our neighborhood meeting.

But there is more to this story on the global landscape. We inherited the legacy of the Smart City. Barcelona hosts the Smart City Expo and it is ranked among the three smartest cities in different international rankings. We found a profound weakness of democracy and public institutions on this project: big tech corporations are taking city data and shaping our city life with private algorithms. This is a form of algorithmic governance that was progressively capturing the public sphere. There are two fundamental problems with this.

First, people, not machines, know much better how to solve their daily life problems, the only unsolved problem is to coordinate the potential of the collective intelligence of 1.5 million people. Second, a smart device can optimize a solution, but cannot define what is a problem to be solved, or fix the goal. The vision of our city is not something a machine or a corporation can do, it is something we need to build democratically. Decidim, as a platform for collective intelligence, is here to challenge this legacy and solve these problems, to show that democracy is smart. And we are doing so with the people, designing, testing and programming the software in an open and collaborative manner. We use Decidim to design Decidim. We call this community process MetaDecidim, and everybody is welcome to join and share.

This Q&A was updated on Sept. 6, 2017, with clarifications from Xabier Barandiaran.

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Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

The post To Create a Real Sharing Economy, Think Replication — Not Just Scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To revitalize labor unions, workers themselves will have to be put in control. Applying participatory budgeting to dues allocation would be a good start.

Originally posted by Alexander Kolokotronis at ROAR Magazine.

According to exit poll data, Donald Trump won Ohio union households 54 percent to 41 percent against Hillary Clinton. At the national level, Clinton achieved a narrow victory, winning 51 percent, to Trump’s 42 percent. This despite the fact that labor unions spent more than $100 million in support of Clinton. Of course, factors relating to race, gender and class are at play. Nonetheless, the right-wing slant of union households should also be cause for concern.

Unionization of US workers has declined both under Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses. In the 1950s, approximately 35 percent of US workers were in unions. Today, this number has dropped to a mere 11 percent. Unless organized labor finds solutions to problems pervasive within its own organizations and structures, union membership numbers will continue to shrink, and remaining members will be too cornered to mobilize effectively.

To tackle longstanding administrative and organizational problems endemic to labor unions, we must start with how we approach union dues. That is, creating member-focused and driven mechanisms which endow the rank-and-file with direct control over dues allocation — a fiscal base amounting to $8.6 billion in the United States.

Fortunately, such mechanisms of direct control — like participatory budgeting — have been tried and tested in other areas of social life. Participatory budgeting has revitalized social life and empowered people through its implementation in municipalities, in schools and colleges, in public housing and now even at the national level. What problems could participatory budgeting address in labor unions? And how can it provide a socialist thrust to one of the bulwarks of the American left?

Organized labor’s democracy deficit

Too often union members are seen as dues-paying devices that are to be turned out and checked off. Leaderships view their rank-and-file as a burdensome hurdle to contract ratification. Members see their unions as corrupted empty shells that nevertheless offer some valuable legal services and a defanged formal check on their employers. Members don’t see themselves as the union, but see it as an entity over and above them. These phenomena are, in part, a result of a deficit in democratic decision-making apparatuses.

The democratic deficit was witnessed in splits between and within unions prior to the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. The Intercept reported that, when leaders decided which candidate to endorse, Hillary Clinton received the organization’s support. When members decided, Bernie Sanders received the endorsement. In times of rampant populism, the former only intensified existing distrust of union leadership felt by members.

In the face of this, there has been a sporadic rise of rank-and-file unionism. Yet, rank-and-file unionism often amounts to simply more regularized interaction. Meetings that are substantively deliberative, organizers in consistent contact with individual members, occasional referenda and generating informal spaces that inject energy into the union. When members are encouraged to step up, it’s often for positions requiring skills in mobilization. These are all valuable ingredients to a well-functioning workers’ organization. However, none of them alter the very structure of a labor union.

It is not enough to simply hold general membership meetings and assemblies. Particularly meetings that consist of talking at people, rather than talking with people — and people talking amongst themselves. How can we expect members to constructively discuss union issues and activities on their own time when we don’t make official union meeting spaces and times an example of how this can be done? General assembly participation fades in quantity and quality if such spaces are not tied to the exercise of material power.

Lack of proposals

Even with all the talk of unions being in crisis, many proposals exclusively focus on organized labor’s external relations. In more extreme forms, proposals veer off into disavowing unionism itself. For example, in an article in The Nation, proposals to rectify organized labor’s external relations are framed in a manner that appears to almost renounce unionism:

The organizations we give birth to won’t look like old-school unions. Instead, these new models and platforms could look more like politically constructed regional or sectoral bargaining (such as the Seattle minimum-wage commission, or the New York fast-food wage board); increased worker ownership of firms; a system of labor-employer co-determination as in European nations; more collective power over work distribution technologies like TaskRabbit and Uber; deeper and more effective labor standards enforcement; the launch of purchaser-facing certification and labeling; or better systems for connecting all workers with the quality, portable benefits they deserve.

Yet the conclusion is: “Labor might seize an opportunity to switch gears from merely acting as bargaining agents to fostering vibrant, participatory workplace democracy.”

Prior to her illness, Karen Lewis, current president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), was slated to run for mayor. Lewis called for “the restoration of participatory democracy,” which meant a call for the implementation of participatory budgeting in “in everything from the Board of Education’s annual budget to the city’s annual budget.” Even recent participatory democratic books such as Stanley Aronowitz’s The Death and Life of American Labor: Towards a New Workers’ Movement, and Julius Getman’s Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement, fail to make real proposals about the internal structure of unions.

While the above-stated proposals are concerned with fostering participatory workplace democracy, they do not aim at doing so within unions themselves. How do we do this? Where do we begin? To effectively and sustainably implement participatory democracy within unions, it is worth looking at those areas in which material power can be exercised. One such area is the collection of union dues.

Dues collection apparatuses are both a binding force and a source of toxic tension. Even the most sympathetic non-union workers fear union dues. And while this fear is often the result of right-wing propaganda, we do not put the rank-and-file at the heart of our most effective responses to such fears. We correctly point out that dues are never instituted without at least an equal increase in wages. And we also correctly point out that these dues go to essential services. If this wasn’t the case, we would not be witnessing sustained right-wing efforts to deplete union capacity through right-to-work legislation.

Yet, in speaking about union dues, organizers rarely frame their introduction as a positive development. We almost never speak of dues as a collective resource for the workers themselves to command. We implicitly regard dues as a necessary evil in labor’s struggle against capital. But if dues are one of the largest sources of power for the workers — and potentially the left — then we cannot continue to regard them as a necessary evil. Dues should not be ignored, or considered a burden that must be borne. Instead, dues must be discursively and materially readied as a resource for the workers themselves.

More substantively, this means we cannot continue to only design, implement and defend dues-collection apparatuses, which so much of the present-day dues check-off battles are about. We must also design membership-driven dues-allocation apparatuses. The workers themselves cannot put themselves on the road to emancipation if they are deprived of exercising control over what can and should be one of their primary sources of social power.

To flesh out what this might look like, it is worth putting this proposal in conversation with what Moody identifies as four problems in organized labor: (1) unpredictability and lack of control in raising class-consciousness; (2) unions as schools for socialism — particularly in the operationalization of the micro-structures and mechanisms of socialism; (3) the adversarial character of relations within unions; and (4) the role of bureaucracy in such adversarial relations.

Fostering class consciousness

Recently, political theorists like John McCormick and Jeffrey Edward Green have touted the creation of a class-based political organization, with strong institutions of “plebian democracy.” McCormick stresses the need to create “class-specific, popularly empowering, and elite-constraining institutions that accomplish two tasks: … raise the class consciousness of common citizens and formally enable them to patrol more exalted citizens with a vigor that electoral politics in and of itself does not provide.”

Despite the current right-wing imbalance, we need not foreclose ourselves to this thinking. In the absence of government initiative to create class-based democracy, labor unions can create such institutions. Unlike other sectors of the left, unions possess an infrastructure of buildings, meeting spaces, massive mailing lists and extensive administrative apparatuses.

As such, participatory budgeting need not be circumscribed to union locals. To foster class consciousness, participatory budgeting can be operationalized at the level of cross-union formations, such as geographically-based union federations and other types of cross-union arrangements. This builds off of Kim Moody, Fred Eppsteiner and Mille Flug, who wrote in 1966 that “participatory democracy is just as viable for workers as for anyone. In fact, it is absolutely the best way to organize workers, because it is the only way that actually builds revolutionary consciousness.” If we do in fact believe in the democratization of our unions — and a number of unionists do make explicit commitments to “participatory democracy” within unions — then the question is one of mechanism and operationalization.

Cross-union participatory budgeting processes could foster feelings and material networks of solidarity. Currently, when solidarity is expressed between unions, it is characteristically between respective leaderships. Union leaders often symbolically express solidarity with one another, but there is little opportunity for rank-and-file to do so — and worse, there’s little opportunity to convert and operationalize such solidarity when it does exist. Unions that conduct sympathy strikes are often punished. There has not been a general strike in a major US city since 1934.

The left needs other ways to foster class consciousness through labor unions and their various federated arrangements. Leftists also need other ways to foster cross-occupational solidarities, primarily by using the existing material infrastructures of unions, which the rest of the left so sorely lacks. Union halls and buildings can become sites of participatory budgeting assemblies. Municipal central labor councils could also become sites of municipal labor assemblies, where rank-and-file educators, manufacturers, transit workers, etc., intermingle through the exercise of material power. Contact between the rank-and-file of various unions, on the basis of constructive power, will generate positive spillovers into arenas outside of participatory budgeting.

Cross-occupational labor assemblies are not foreign to US unions. For the Knights of Labor, assemblies were the bedrock of union power. From this perspective, it is no surprise that the Knights of Labor promulgated a vision of moving beyond capitalism to a cooperative commonwealth. It is equally unsurprising that the Knights of Labor proved to be the most effective union in US history in developing cooperatives. This leads to our next point: labor unions organized as schools for socialism.

Participatory budgeting as worker education

Before the working class can aspire to generalized control over the means of production, it must aspire to and operationalize control over the means of its defense: labor unions. In operationalizing the self-management of its defense, labor — en masse — would acquire the know-how and organizational capacities to eventually self-manage production, wherever and however opportunities for this might arise.

Anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker wrote of unions serving as schools for the working class:

[…] the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the socialist society of the future, the elementary school of socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or create new worlds out of nothing. It therefore concerns us to plant these germs while there is still yet time and bring them to the strongest possible development, so as to make the task of the coming social revolution easier and to ensure its permanence.

To be schools for socialism, unions must do more than simply mobilize. They must create structures that prepare workers for what are the ingredients of a socialist society. How many warehouses and factories with idle physical capital have been left vacant? What if those formerly employed in such facilities were prepared — by their unions — to take over production? While participatory budgeting does not in itself fully acquaint workers with how to self-manage production, it can serve as a big step towards preparing workers for control of their workplaces.

Before initiatives of workers’ control can be put into full effect — as the United Steelworkers and Cincinnati unions hope to do (as well as the more general union co-op model from “1worker1vote”) — the workers themselves must be collectively empowered with a vocabulary and material experience to act in such a manner. Workers are far more likely to succeed in operationalizing workplace democratization schemes if they have already experienced and dealt with issues related to participatory democracy. Participatory budgeting within the union could provide such a training that helps operationalize democratization schemes within the workplace and beyond.

Furthermore, unions’ participatory budgeting processes could also be designed to ensure equity. This means designing processes to address issues of gender and race. Just as any school of socialism must provide workers with technical training and administrative capability, it must also be a school for a kind of socialism that aspires to and enacts racial and gender equality.

Transforming bureaucracy, forging collaboration

At a May 2014 event at the New School, Moody repudiated the idea that union bureaucracy could be eliminated. Bureaucracy is here to stay, and the question, instead, is how to deal with it. As Gabriel Winant notes, in contrast to the other segments of the American left, “organized labor … is at its finest both reliable bureaucracy and mass spirit.” Winant rightfully argues that “rank-and-file insurgency simply will not form without being fostered.” He argues that “forming organizations and hiring staff is a necessary step toward enabling workers to be heard; it is not, in itself, the elimination of their voices.”

Winant also writes that the union exists as an organization for workers to “pool their resources,” as opposed to being a “network of felt solidarities.” To its detriment, organized labor often lacks a network of felt solidarities. Nowhere is this more apparent than between rank-and-file and union bureaucracy.

One of the transformative innovations of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre was the reorientation and reorganization of municipal bureaucracy. Through a study of participatory budgeting, scholars Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza assert that “self-rule … does not rest only in communication … [but in] the coupling of the assemblies with administrative structures.” In Porto Alegre, spaces of non-coercive and egalitarian deliberation were coupled with reform of government administrative apparatuses. Baiocchi and Ganuza identify three key administrative reforms.

First, they point to the “exclusive conveyor belt.” The idea is that “the chain of popular sovereignty” is protected from external interference. It also means documenting every phase of the participatory budgeting process in a publicly accessible “Book of Projects.” Furthermore, to ensure neutrality and evenhandedness, a new budget planning office was created to stand above the other municipal departments to ensure city agencies did not deviate from the wishes of the residents.

Second, neighborhood assemblies generated a need for reforms in the internal structure of each administrative office. Each office was required to hire “community facilitators” that interfaced between residents and technical experts. Community facilitators were required to attend assemblies, and a weekly forum that ensured the coherence of the participatory budgeting process.

Third, the Municipal Council of the Budget constituted a “forum of forums” wherein representatives from different phases and points of the process where brought together “to debate and legitimate the process as a whole”:

[…] members of the council dealt with unexpected events beyond the rules; they deliberated and decided on the rules of the process; they set broad investment priorities according to abstract social justice criteria… This forum of forums provided the ability of participants to self-regulate the process and to have a second-order debate about the general principles that finally would shape administrative public policies.

These dimensions of the Porto Alegre process could also be translated to — and even deepened within — the labor union. One could imagine a union hiring a small staff whose job is to interface between the various administrative departments and the rank-and-file. Bureaucrats themselves may even be required to attend participatory budgeting assemblies. This would allow for the transmission of information about union benefits that members are often unaware of as a whole. It may also work to uncover the levers of power too often hidden in the backrooms of union staff and leadership.

Organized labor could also create Labor Union Council(s) of the Budget. Such Labor Union Budget Councils would bring together various actors within a union to ensure member input and control — which in turn would reflect beyond the participatory budgeting process. This Council could serve as a site of collaborative relations between the rank-and-file and the union leadership.

The untapped potential of the rank-and-file

Participatory budgeting within unions is not simply about addressing the problems outlined above. It’s most simply and primarily about unleashing the untapped potential of nearly every union member. It’s about creating the networks of solidarity that can unleash a scale of people power that by far and away surpasses the fiscal power possessed by unions. If the power of the union is in its membership, then the power of the membership must be harnessed and materialized.

In speaking about his experiences at union meetings, Dave Kamper writes that at union meetings he often asks “members to raise their hands if they ever talk to their nextdoor neighbor about their union or their politics. After counting the number of people who respond, I always have fingers left over.”

A union that endows its members with the power to decide its direction — to decide where its funds go — is a union that a member will surely talk to their neighbor about. It is a union their neighbor will want to join.

Photo by ProgressOhio

The post Democratize the union: let the rank-and-file decide! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This year we’ve been talking about the municipalist uprising in Barcelona and, more recently, in A Coruña and Valencia. But what about Madrid, the state capital of Spain and a conservative stronghold for 2 decades? How did a bunch of 15M activists form an electoral coalition which, after lagging in the polls, finally had a breakthrough victory? A win that shatters the chronic neoliberal narrative and forges an alternative path bearing little resemblance to the Brexits, the Trumps, to all that we’ve been conditioned to endure, if not expect.

We see the networked, humane logics of P2P and the Commons reflected clearly in these civil-society led electoral platforms. Against all odds, they upend the power structure and challenge the establishment clique. But is it about winning power, or more about reexamining it? What happens when you find yourself taking that power, as an individual working towards change from within – does your life change? Do you find yourself feeling absorbed by the system, or can you manage to hack it from within?

With these and other questions in mind, I paid a visit to the Madrid city council’s citizen participation, transparency and open government department, and sat down with Victoria Anderica, head of Transparency, and Miguel Arana, director of Citizen Participation. Their shared office is spacious and well-lit, nothing to take for granted in an unsurprisingly institutional government building. Like protective amulets against the dire aesthetics, they’ve peppered the walls with 15M protest posters and Ahora Madrid cartoons. Some booklets on free healthcare for undocumented immigrants and refugees are strewn about the desks. “Yes, Madrid cares for you”, they read.

Among other things, Victoria and Miguel spoke about citizen participation, transparency, the Commons, a 60 million-euro participatory budget, the persistent misunderstanding that Podemos equals Ahora Madrid or Barcelona en Comú, how to bring “open source logics” to city governance, and the difficulties of institutional encroachment for those used to consensus-oriented assembly spaces. Although recorded separately, we’ve edited the interview to read in-line. We hoped that in doing this, the answers to the questions I asked both Victoria and Miguel form a fuller picture of their municipal – and personal – experiences.

Victoria Anderica and Miguel Arana

Stacco Troncoso: There were some meetings two years ago, in a well-know Madrid squat/social center called Patio Maravillas, among other places, where people made a statement: “We’re going to take power”. That was Ganemos. They were called crazy, yet one year later, you took power. I’d like to hear your view of these last two years – first, the transition from Ganemos Madrid to Ahora Madrid, and then the second, the year since the election.

Victoria Anderica: Well, I was working in Access Info Europe, fighting for transparency in Europe. Our offices are here in Madrid, so, we’ve had a big campaign here in Spain. I was in touch with people in the movement because they were interested in promoting and including transparency within the electoral program, which we were very happy about. So I knew about the movement, but I wasn’t personally involved in the creation of the Ganemos movement. I was just hoping, as someone who lives in Madrid, that Manuela Carmena, the mayor, was going to win. But it really was a surprise at the end.

Miguel Arana: OK. First, one important word is power. When social movements think about power, they think about institutions. That’s where power resides: you just have to enter the building, become the one who gives the orders, and then things will change. One thing I love about Spain in this recent period is that from the very beginning of the movements on the streets, the idea was that we’re not going to the institutions. That was wonderful – we were out there for three or four years in the streets, in the squares, the assemblies, the “citizen tides” (mareas) green, white, etc. – the Stop Evictions movement – and the idea then was, “We don’t care about institutions! We’ll get together and think about how to change everything, press on and make all these crazy actions and ideas and everything we can imagine”. And then, just in this last phase, after we tried everything else (laughing) we said, “…ok, maybe we could also try to enter the institutions. Some part of the power is there – we should get inside”.  I think this is an important remark. When people are looking from the outside – from other countries – it’s difficult to understand what’s been happening all these years. It’s very easy to focus just on this last part: “ok, they built a party, finally, they got into the institutions – now they’re changing things…”

Stacco: “Now they’re serious…”

Miguel: Yeah, “now they’re serious” and it’s like…no, no, no (laughing), it’s the opposite. We got to the institutions because we spent four years building something really strong, really powerful, and that’s what allows us to enter them now. This is also important because the game in the institutions is a difficult and special one. To some degree, it’s designed so you usually can’t win when you come from outside. We won because we were in the streets for all these years, thinking about the things we wanted to do and change, being really clear, building the movement without leaders, without faces, without laws – everything. Now, we can be in the institutions and face the attacks, which are really crazy. Outside, you’re a lot more resilient against attacks because it’s about the ideas, not the people. It’s about the ideas of how the country should be. When you’re inside, they only focus on the people. They just focus on the subtle things, crazy things, you know?

One of the many brilliant campaign images from the Movimiento de Liberación Gráfica Madrid featuring Manuela Carmena.

Stacco: Can you clarify who you mean by “they”, or, the attacks?

Miguel: Especially the media and the other parties, the traditional parties – the way they interact with you is by not focusing on problems or solutions; they only focus on you, personally. It’s like, “you did this…” or, “you’re coming from this world”, or – whatever. And it’s a totally different kind of debate. Previously, when we were not a party, when we weren’t the people inside, we never talked about ourselves. We just talked about the problems (laughing), that was the important thing!  All the things we talked about for four years, now we can go inside and try to put these ideas into practice. Solve things, and face these attacks with some strength. If we had built a party the first year, it could have been very easily destroyed. Back then, we would have had some leaders; leaders can be attacked, which could make it look like the whole thing is destroyed. We’re very happy we didn’t make that mistake in the first years. We built something serious, and now we can enter the institutions.

So this last phase, building the party, was really different. The values that the movement held as important before — horizontality, avoiding structures, no hierarchies — well, once you get inside, you are required to build some kind of hierarchy. Things are not as horizontal as you would like anymore. Of course this is problematic. You have to understand, and imagine how you want to solve these things. I think we’ve been able to get through some of the main problems, for example, building the electoral list. That was done in Ahora Madrid, in a very open way. Anyone could just join…

Stacco: Could you explain that, because people may not be familiar with the lists.

Miguel: It was an open process where any person could propose him/herself on a list with other people. Then we had an online voting process where people could register and vote. We used a proportional system called Dowdall [1] —  the same kind of system, just to explain it in common terms, that’s used in Eurovision…

Stacco: The Eurovision song contest?

Miguel: (laughing) Yeah. If you give one point to the first one, one half to the second, one third – you give different weighted points to the people you vote for. That was important because usually, when there are lists competing in a system, people know the head (or the “leader”) of the list, but they don’t know the rest. Sometimes a prescribed list can take total control of the structure without voters wanting everyone actually in that list to be there – maybe they want the leader, they trust the leader. The leader usually – or sometimes – is the one who chose the others on the list. So, the democracy of this system can get a bit lost.

Stacco: Right, because in the end you have this unitary list, but what you proposed, what happened, was more diversity – you had different voices, complementary…

Miguel: Since you’re giving different powers to all the lists, all the lists get mixed. Even if one of the lists gets 70% of the vote, they don’t have 70% of the upper position, the most important positions. So, with this system, all of the lists get mixed and then you have real diversity there. That worked really wonderfully. Now, in the city government, there are ecologists, people from the traditional parties, the independent people, people from the communist party, as examples…

Stacco: Wow…

Miguel: I mean, real diversity, and they all have different kinds of power, and they have to survive together. This is wonderful. We have seen other situations during this last phase of electoral experiences where this has not been done. Or, there have always been online voting systems where anyone could propose anyone, but if you don’t control the way it’s done, one single list can take all the power.  In the end, the effect can be just as if it was done in the traditional way, as if the leader prescribed the candidates on the list, and so on. Despite the institutional requirement to build a recognizable hierarchy and settle on the those who would take the roles of power inside the city council, we still managed to find a system where it was done in the most open and democratic way of ways. To me, this is key.

Also, the party program was, essentially, built in an open, collaborative way. There were working groups deciding the main issues for the program, it was open on the internet for people to vote, etc. It’s a difficult problem – maybe one of the most difficult problems to solve in collective process – to draft such a complex text including ideas for the long term. It’s not easy to be absolutely sure that everyone agrees with the ideas. That’s a problem we still haven’t solved. But at least it was done with the tools we have, where people could vote, and have opinions.

But then, of course, once we were inside the institutions, things got more “traditional”. Now, there are councilmen and councilwomen, they have the power and decisions, it’s quite vertical – but, since most of us are not really coming from the traditional political field, we’re coming up with different ideas of how to do this.

Stacco:  So, would you say there’s something of a nominal hierarchy – because there are “boxes” which people must fit inside – but that informally, you bypass that hierarchy? And they know that they’re representing the people but also their other co-workers in the party?

Miguel: Yeah…we’re bypassing the hierarchy as much as we can (laughing). It’s really difficult to bypass. In the end, there is a small group of people taking a lot of the decisions. Every week, they have to take a lot of decisions, it’s crazy. The system is not really well thought out, so you can’t really open the process and ask citizens a lot of questions, get their feedback – this is not done. Even if you wanted to, it’s not really possible with the system as it is now. Something totally different would need to be thought of. The government works in a really traditional way, but it’s the will of the people inside to do it differently. So they’re really open: the doors of the councilmen and women are open, it doesn’t matter if you’re a collective or a person – doesn’t matter who you are, they’re meeting everybody, every day, every hour, and making a strong effort to be able to solve this problem.

Stacco: So, they’re exhausted (laughing)…

Miguel: Yeah, they’re totally exhausted, working like 14 hours a day, every day, weekends…it’s a bit beyond human forces, I mean, you can’t do it. The system is not designed to solve this. We’re somewhat lucky because we’re in a specific department, which is the Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government department, so our role is to solve that problem. We don’t have to produce some specific content to decide specific laws – just to make these laws or rules to listen to the people. Perhaps we don’t suffer as much as other departments. I think we’re starting things to solve and bypass this problem in a real way. We’re starting all these new processes – Direct Democracy processes…

Stacco: Yes, I’m going to ask about that, but first I want to backtrack. Just tell us what your specific roles are, Victoria and Miguel, within the Ayuntamiento, and if you can tell us about your personal trajectory before you got into office. Let’s start with you, Victoria…

Victoria: Nowadays, I’m the head of transparency for the city of Madrid. We’re putting all kinds of measures into place that we consider essential to ensure and promote transparency within the city. Before that I was a transparency advocate, working at Access Info for almost 6 years, trying to get governments to improve transparency policies. So basically, now I have to do it myself! It’s quite a challenge, but I think we’re getting there. In one year, we’ve done a lot. We’ve based the first step in ensuring that everything we’re going to do is going to last. This means having rulings — not laws, we don’t make laws — but making sure that whatever we do is not only because we want to, but ensuring that the following government will also be transparent. For most of our first year, we’ve published a lot of information and put a lot into practice, but mainly we’re also making sure that it’s going to last, that it’s not something that this government does for four years and then after that, everything’s just going to go back to where we were.

Stacco: So, what you’re saying is you’re making actual legal rulings; you’re embedding it in the “code” so it carries on itself?

Victoria: Exactly, so it can’t be changed. If there’s another government which has absolute majority and they want to change it, well, there’s nothing we can do. But obviously, it’s not very sexy for a government to say “no” to transparency.

Stacco: (laughing) Say “yes” to opacity.

Victoria: Yeah.

Stacco: Miguel, what can you tell me about your specific role within City Hall, your trajectory and how you got here?

Miguel:  OK. My position is director of the Citizen Participation project. The department is divided into two: participation and transparency (that’s me, and Victoria is the director of transparency). I come from science, I’m a doctor of theoretical physics – nothing to do with politics – and I was working in that field until I came here. At the same time, I was working in the University, finishing my PhD, and I was very involved in the movement in the squares and 15M. Most of us had parallel lives during these last years. We had some kind of job, and at the same time, we were trying to use all the time we had to be involved in the movement, because we were absolutely clear that this could change everything. In the last phase, it became really absorbing! We were full-time, because of course here you can’t be part-time. You use up all your free time. Some of us decided to be here full time. But the most important part of my trajectory was probably the experience we had in the squares.

Stacco: That’s great  – for me, it’s not your labor history, but where you’re coming from. OK, I’m going to ask about the various platforms. First of all, I’d like to talk about transparencia.madrid.es. What are your plans for it, how will it work, and how has it been received so far?

Victoria: Well, the website hasn’t changed very much since we arrived, at least formally. We’ve added a lot of information which was not there before we arrived, but the site itself hasn’t changed. The way people interact with the website, and can – or can’t, in many cases – find information, hasn’t changed yet. That’s going to take more time. For us it was more important, as I said, to start by establishing the foundations of what a transparency system should be. So, the next step would be to actually change the portal. We have some ideas to have a site where people could find information very easily, but we also want to have a portal which goes beyond displaying the data. It has to be possible for anyone to understand it. That’s a key aspect of what we want from these four years of transparency.

We don’t want to just publish documents that no one understands. Normal people – I’m including myself, of course – we just don’t speak the administrative language. We need to find information in the way that we normally find it…here’s a very silly example. If you go to the transparency portal of the state and search for “salaries”, you won’t find anything. You have to put in a very specific word, I don’t know if it was “remuneration” or what, to find the salaries – that’s very stupid! And that’s just the most basic thing. We want to work with the portal so the questions are answered very easily.

Cartoon images of Ahora Madrid working. Original art by Enrique Flores.

Stacco: What kind of outreach are you doing with non-digital natives, or for people who might not have access to the internet?

Victoria: Well, the transparency systems are divided into two parts. One part is the right of every person to request information. That’s something that is, and has been, implemented and ensured for anyone who wants to request it via computer, or anyone who wants to come in personally, or send by mail, a request for information which is put in a register. For the practical application, it’s a fact that for transparency, the evolution of new technology has been essential.  It wouldn’t be possible without a transparency portal. It’s not possible to have a room with all that information printed, so that anyone could publish it. So, we don’t have a physical bureau, but anyone can request information and receive it in a printed version. If anyone requires it, they will get it, by law. But, that said, the reality is that most of the people who request information do so digitally, because that’s how we interact with each other nowadays.

Stacco: Let’s talk now about the citizen participation portal, Decide Madrid. Tell us how it works, how long it’s been up, and what the general reaction has been.

Miguel: OK. Before coming into the institutions, one of the main problems we faced was that the moment you want to open the movement to everybody and have them make decisions, you start facing the complexity of the situation. If you want to have 20 people debate and decide something, it’s easy. You make an assembly, like we had in the squares, you talk, and that’s it. If you want to have 100 – or 1,000 – people, maybe you can still have an assembly or some kind of a more complex system, but if you want to scale up, it’s impossible.

Stacco: Say, how many people are in the census, in Madrid?

Miguel: We have 3.2 million people, something like that…

Stacco: They won’t fit in a squat…(laughing)

Miguel: Yeah, it’s totally impossible, anywhere! You also want to build an effective system. You don’t want just one decision in four years, you want to take all of the important decisions, every day. We believe that this can only be solved through the internet with a digital platform where all the physical barriers disappear, and where you can have thousands of people talking, deciding, proposing, whatever. This whole year, we’ve been thinking about the tools we had available, trying and experimenting with everything that was on the internet. We learned a lot, tried a lot of platforms and got a lot of experience. But still there is no set, proper platform really capable of allowing all these direct democracy processes that we want. Nothing fits what we really need.

So, we decided from the beginning to design a platform that collects our years of experiences and similar experiences we’ve heard about from all over the world, and build something that allows us to produce mechanisms and reproduce the democratization we want to see. We started with this new platform. The software is called Consul and the platform is called Decide Madrid.

• From Citizen Data to the Wisdom of the Crowds: The Case Study of Decide Madrid from Pablo Aragón

We started from scratch in June, it got built very fast. In September of last year, we opened the first very basic process for the platform to start to work. It’s a free software platform, we’re sharing it with different cities. Barcelona, Oviedo and A Coruña are using it. We’ve already spoken with 40 or 50 cities who are interested, in Spain but also in other countries. Complutense in Madrid, the city’s largest university with one-hundred thousand students, they’re installing the platform – so it’s really spreading. It’s great because we’re not building it alone. The core developers team is here in Madrid, plus others in Barcelona and other places who are really helping – it’s amazing. It’s meant to be a flexible platform for different kinds of processes, different democratic mechanisms.

Stacco: Can you give us an example?

Miguel: Yes, the basic process is the citizens initiative process. Anyone can enter the platform and propose something in common language. Anyone can support the proposals. Once a proposal reaches the threshold, which is 2% of the census or 50,000 people, it goes to a referendum one month later. Then, if there are more people voting “yes” or “no”, we take it as binding and we fulfill the proposal.

Stacco: And, is this debated in parliament, is it debated online, or…

Miguel: The thing is, we have a problem in Spain because the constitution forbids us to have binding referendums.

Stacco: But you have a majority, so, if it’s binding internally for you, that means that automatically, you have the majority of votes…

Miguel: Exactly, we take it as binding but legally, we can’t force it to be, because of the constitution. It’s something absolutely crazy, I think no place in the world forbids this – it’s illegal! It’s really illegal…

Stacco: But in your jobs as representatives, when you go to assembly you will vote, and just by mathematics, you will get a majority.

Miguel: Exactly, the thing is that some of the decisions can be taken by the executive of the city council (the Ahora Madrid party), so that’s automatic. Some decisions should be taken into the local parliament where the other parties are, and where Ahora Madrid is the minority party. We have the support of the Socialist party, and together we have a majority, but they have to agree with things. They say they agree with the mechanism, that we’ll have binding agreements, of course, and that there will be no problems, but…(laughing) we’ll see! .

Stacco: There are very different economic interests at play.

Miguel: Yes, it’s a bit different because the Socialist party is a traditional party, a “real” party. Ahora Madrid is just an instrumental party, something very different. We’ll see, but in principle, it could work as if it were binding without a problem. Decide Madrid is the most important mechanism because it comes from the bottom up. Really, people can decide what they want to do. There is no limit to the kinds of proposals they can suggest, and they are not limited to the city. For example, they can propose that we want to stop the war in Iraq. Of course, the city cannot stop the war! But if one million people in Madrid were to vote against the war, that could produce a very important political effect. This makes a statement against the war that is not aesthetic. Maybe what could be voted on would be having the Mayor meet the Ambassador…

Stacco: …to amplify the effect.

Miguel: Yes. The city government could call the national government and say, “We should abandon this war”, something like this. The thing is, we don’t want to impose limits. We want to build something that anyone in the city can join, to have a debate and decide together whatever they want. If we can do it, people will join. If we can’t, we’ll do as much we can to get closer.

We’re also studying different mechanisms to open the city council for the citizens. For example, we opened the citizen budget, a participatory budget. This year a small part of the budget, 60 million euros (which, anyway, is a huge sum of money) is now decided by the people. Yes, people can always make proposals, but this is much more specific because now, they’re proposing on how to spend a certain amount of money. You cannot propose just anything, it has to be focused on how to use money. It’s part of the city’s investment budget. It’s open, but not everything is an investment, so, it’s close to specific issues. You can build a school, a social center, maybe fix some streets, but you can’t spend the money however you like. There are legal terms.

This is not so powerful, it hasn’t got as much potential as some other mechanisms, but we thought it was interesting because the budget is one of the main tools in the city council. It can really design the kind of policies that you want, so it’s important to be open to everybody. It’s been very well received: 5,000 really good proposals were submitted. Nothing stupid, all really focused on issues that haven’t been solved in recent years. We also have another process, the redevelopment of one of the main squares of the city (Plaza de España), and we started that process on the web.

Refugees are welcome in Madrid City Hall. Image by Jerome Paz.

Stacco: But you put forward that proposal, it wasn’t put forward by someone…

Miguel: Exactly, it’s another kind of process which we call the “electoral” process. Here we start from the top, rather than the bottom. Parts of the government that were traditionally executed in a closed way by the councilmen, like the redevelopment of this square, for example. That was one of the main problems in the last few years:  the big, stupid construction and waste of money. The councilmen decided with us to make it participatory, to open it up to everybody. We created a specific process where people answered 18 questions to design the kind of square they want – do they want it green, with bike lanes or not. These answers are binding for the square. The process is now open, so architects can send their projects, but they must fulfill what people requested. They present their projects, we upload them to the website. People will be able vote and, in the last phase, decide what to build.

The potential is not as huge as the main, general process because it’s so specific, but it’s also important that we start taking these small corners of power inside, to bypass them and build a new way of solving these problems. We just have to go step-by-step, taking what we can. Next month, we’ll start a human rights program that is also going to be done in a participatory way, people will vote on the measures they want us to fulfill. We’re going to start a process with a disability plan, and a citizen audit of the city council (which will be very important). We’re going to take all the information on what’s been done in the last 8 years, and ask everybody to help us understand it, and see what we need to do with the decisions. Maybe the contractors were in fact illegal, for example, maybe there were debts taken on that shouldn’t have been. We’re going to make it possible for people to check every corner, and decide what they want to do with these things.

Stacco: Speaking of the various portals, how about Datos abiertos, how does that relate to the rest of the ecosystem you have in place?

Victoria: As I said, the transparency policy of the City of Madrid would be completed by different pieces, right? We have the transparency portal, we have the right to request information, we have the Open Data portal — a portal that was set up around 3 years ago. Nowadays, we publish roughly 200 datasets, which is not too much for a big city like Madrid. The quality of the data that we’re publishing is not yet as good as it should be. Still, it’s a good portal. We’re publishing useful information, and every day we’re publishing more.  

The transparency ordinance that we drafted this year, which hopefully will be approved at the plenary session at City Hall, includes an article making it mandatory for the government to publish all information in open formats. This will have a huge impact in increasing both the number and the quality of datasets we publish on the portal. That’s because we’re also working on internal education, telling people not to use PDFs, but to use spreadsheets or any format that can be reused by anyone. So, we have big plans for the portal.

We have a project with three other cities to have interoperable systems among them. We’ll not only be publishing more information; it will be in a better format, and using the same architectures. When you have big countries that are very decentralized like Spain, you find that information is held by different administrations, and you can’t really understand who has the competence for what. You don’t understand who has the information, and even if you can find that out, what if you need to re-use the information and everyone has different formats, or different information related to the same issue?

Here’s a silly example: you can find the list of buildings that a city has, and what they do with them, but you have different datasets and they’re differently organized. To be able to compare them, you’d have to undertake enormous manual work to do some homogenization, making it effectively impossible. The conviction that we need to work in open formats, using open software, is key to our department in participation, transparency, and open government. We believe in it, and we will do it. The transparency and open data portals are being created as open software, that’s a definite requirement we will follow.

Stacco: Which cities are you talking about?

Victoria: The cities we’re working with are Zaragoza, A Coruña, and Santiago, with whom we’re also working on the participatory processes we’re opening up. That’s the idea — we work together to create one project that can be shared and improved upon by anyone who uses it.

Infographic by Politocracia.es depicting the political parties and movements who coalesced into Ahora Madrid.

Stacco: That ties into my next question. Comparisons between Madrid and Barcelona are very artificial, even a bit odious to me, but I’d like to turn that around somehow and ask you your opinion on what’s been going on in Barcelona, and to compare it with Madrid just to see the differences. So the people outside can understand what’s going on.

Miguel: This is very interesting because when Ahora Madrid began, it happened the same way in almost every city in the country. New parties began to appear in every small village and city…

Stacco: There’s something else I should have asked about. My experience outside Spain, is that everybody confuses Podemos with what’s actually going on. I think that it’s very important for our friends in the commons movement to know that Podemos is not Guanyem, or En comú; or that Podemos is not Ahora Madrid, etc.

Miguel: I will try to clarify this. When people decided to build new parties, the first one on the scene was Podemos. This was at the time of the European elections. Podemos came along with leaders like Pablo Iglesias and others, and it was a strange mix. They had leaders, but they also had assemblies where everybody could go participate, and be part of the party. This was totally unseen, and it turned out to be a complete success. They won five seats in the European parliament and grew from there.

The next elections were the local elections. At that time, people decided they wanted local parties. Podemos didn’t want to run for the locals because it was impossible for them to build 5,000 new local structures and ensure that they weren’t full of crazy people, etc.  As Podemos weren’t running in the locals, people decided to build a new party. All of these local parties are disconnected from Podemos. They aren’t part of its common structure, the people have no relationship. Yes, they may have a working relationship, but that’s it. The idea underlying these parties is very similar: we are all taking the content from the social experiences of the last four years and putting it in practice within the institutions. The idea was to open the decisions as well as the information to everybody, making it a citizen project more than a traditional party.

I think there’s a difference in how it’s working at those two different levels. The local parties have been built by people who were in the streets and squares as part of the 15M movement, people who were obsessed with horizontality, openness and inclusivity. It worked quite well in that sense. All the leaders that were chosen in the main cities in Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, most of them came out of nowhere. In Madrid, our current Mayor, Manuela Carmena wasn’t even there as we were building the party. We were a party without a leader. It was totally crazy, but we just opened up the process and someone proposed this woman, saying “she’s gonna be great!” Most of us didn’t even know who she was, but as we got to know her we all thought, “oh, she’s wonderful”, and it turned out great.

But you see the exact same thing happening in other places. The leaders of the new city councils in many cities were largely unknown, but now people are in love with them, and like, “wow, how come you haven’t met this important political person” now that they’re all over the media. That was pretty great. Also, given the way we built the electoral lists, as I explained earlier, it really was a mixture of people, open to everybody. Conversely, Podemos was built in a much more traditional manner. They had some defined leaders from the start, invested in building the project. Now, they remain as the people taking the most important decisions on everything.

Of course, it’s not quite a traditional party. It’s more open: the base, the membership, and those who are really upholding the party are also unknowns who value openness, assemblies, etc. But at the end of the day, the party’s structure now, after this year, resembles a traditional party. It has an executive, the leader has a huge amount of power, and is able to make a lot of decisions. So, it’s something quite different from what we’re doing, and not as open. It was open in the sense that they started a few participatory processes, but there is a lot of control. This doesn’t lead to anything substantial, and it’s more about whether people agree with the vision espoused by the party’s leadership.

They’re still light years away from the traditional parties we’ve had in Spain, but it’s important to understand that the effects are a bit different. The fact that we built a totally open platform that people could trust was one of the big draws for Ahora Madrid. We were able to win the elections because of this. A month before the election, we thought that there was no way we could win the elections, it was totally impossible! No one knew about our party. Sure, everybody knew about Podemos, but the local parties? No one knew about us, and at that time, Manuela Carmena was hardly known.

But we were really open, and our attitude was like, “ok, you take control of it! You can control the campaign, control everything. It’s your party, you can do whatever you want!” And that’s how we built trust, people really trusted this. They trusted the process and supported us massively. In one or two months, we had a very good shot at winning — and with no money. The money we had was raised through crowdfunding, and it wasn’t all that much either. We did it without the support of the media, without any of the kind of power that everybody assumes is necessary to win elections: money, the media, etc. But we proved otherwise. Common citizens who self-organized…and won!

And this is something that, until now, hasn’t happened with Podemos. Podemos entered the regional elections, then they went to the nationals and they weren’t able to win any of these. I think it’s because of what I’ve explained earlier. If you don’t open up and share your control with everyone, you lose that potential. People will not support you because they understand it’s more your game, and not theirs. They don’t feel the need to engage.

Stacco: Can you explain to people, because I think this is quite telling. In Spain, when we have local elections, we have elections for the city and the province simultaneously.

Miguel: Exactly.

Stacco: And in the last local elections one year ago, we had Ahora Madrid running for the city of Madrid, and Podemos running for the province. But these, in the case of Madrid, are voted on by exactly the same people, the same census. If you live in the city of Madrid, you vote at the city and at the provincial level simultaneously. It’s two ballots. Can you tell us about the results of that election?

Miguel: This is the interesting thing, and the same thing happened in every region and every province of Spain. Podemos didn’t win in any of them. At the same time, the “local versions” of these parties won in all the major cities. We won in Madrid, Barcelona, Cádiz, A Coruña, Zaragoza. So, this was very clear: this is the way you do it. You have to share this control with everybody else. If you make it look as if you’re opening up, but you’re not really doing it in the end, people see through that straight away.

Stacco: You can’t fake it.

Miguel: You can’t! This may be very subtle, but you should be true to your principles.  It doesn’t matter how participative it “looks”, it really has to be. And this was clearly proven. The results spoke for themselves. It’s interesting because all these local parties, Madrid, Barcelona, A Coruña, are different. We don’t have a common structure. The people in each city are totally different, even if some of us have a prior relation from the squares.

Representatives and Mayors from Spain’s new municipalist coalitions. Image by Terrassa enComu.

Stacco: So, with this focus on openness, do you mutualize information and best practices?

Miguel: All of us are working on the same things. We’re just taking the common ideas developed in the last four years and putting them into practice. At the end of the day, all the programs are quite similar but it’s not like we wrote them together, it’s just that we’re coming from the same place. Common traits include being open to everybody, participatory decision-making, putting social justice at the core of everything we do. This is a very comfortable feeling, it’s really great when working together. And we really are working together, in everything. In all the plans.

This is significant. Normally, you find a sense of competition among the major cities. Madrid, Barcelona, big cities…“mine is better!”, etc. But here it’s is the opposite. We really love each other, we really want to work together and to help. Whenever something bad happens to the people in Barcelona, we’re totally outraged and screaming our lungs out: “No, the same thing can’t be happening to them!” And it’s the same with the other cities, it’s amazing. We meet in lots of forums, conferences, working groups. We really are working together, which makes life much easier. Normally, most city councils work and develop their projects in isolation, and they want to come out on top of the other cities. So, if they want to build software for participation, you go to a big technology company and pay a million euros…

Stacco: …and you make it proprietary…

Miguel: …and you get your proprietary software. At the same time, the next city is doing exactly the same. They have exactly the same software but they also paid a million, and it’s the same for other cities. You end up with 50 cities using the same software while announcing it as this great new thing. It’s totally stupid (laughs). And we’re doing absolutely the opposite. We started the software from scratch – this is Consul, from Decide Madrid. Some months later, Barcelona started using the same software. Now the developers from Barcelona have come to Madrid and they’re working together. And now it will be adopted by the people in A Coruña, working together – Victoria mentioned that.  

Even from the point of view of saving money, even if you forget about politics, ideology, everything, it’s like, “we’re saving money, we’re saving lots of money!” (laughs). And of those millions of euros the others were spending…nothing! We’re just paying the people developing the software, who actually work for the city council. It’s available for every city in the world. If we start solving all our problems by applying collective intelligence and debating how to scale everything, we will have something available for everybody in the world. This is the way it should be done. We agree that working together is the way to go and we’re seeing the benefits. It’s not something we do to look good (laughs).

Stacco: Besides your own personal work here, what other things are happening here in Madrid that you’d like people to know about.

Victoria: Well, somehow I prefer not to give my insights on how other people are doing because I think they’re doing great, but that’s an insight.

Miguel: Right now we’re in a bit of a bubble. As I’ve said, working here is quite crazy. We’re living our whole lives inside this building and we’re really focused on this phase. I think that once we entered institutions, a lot of the stuff that was going on outside became more quiet. This is partly because a lot of people who were outside are now within the institution. Because of this, they’re totally focused on their day-to-day while assuming that other people can be outside doing a lot of things. But a lot of the really active organizers are not out of there any longer.

I also think that in this specific phase of the movement, people are mostly focused on the institutions instead of on protest, direct action or building new projects on the outside. This is because, given the potential of institutions, everybody is thinking of how to exploit and use this potential. This is just a phase. I am totally sure that it will pass and we will go back to the streets to build something new, or whatever comes later. Regardless, I think that it’s really important to focus and understand how to change this. This is a huge monster, a huge machine, and it’s really difficult to change things. We really need to put a lot of focus on ideas for this.

Stacco: OK, let’s turn the question around. We talk about politics and counter politics, we talk about power and counterpower. Now that you find yourself within power, how do you enable and make sure that there is a counterpower, and respect that? I guess that, through your work, you’re enabling the great majority of people outside institutions to still have a voice, to still matter.

Miguel: Yeah, for us specifically this is our objective: to give people the control of institutions, and then…disappear! (laughing) I mean, our department could last a very short time.

Stacco: So you can finally go on holiday! (laughing)

Miguel: For sure! Our specific role here could be quite short. This what we need to do: enable people to take decisions, to take control. Once that’s done with, we don’t need to do anything else. Ok, we have to take care and do the maintenance so it keeps working, and nothing more. We’ve started all these processes and think that they have the potential to change everything, but up until now, the bulk of the decisions taken by the city council are elected in the traditional way. We can’t forget that 99% of the system still works that way. People are doing their best to open everything to everybody, but power remains focused on a small group of people.

Stacco: OK, so this is my final, long-winded question. To me, in 15M I could identify the Commons as part of the discourse, both explicitly and implicitly. My observation was, I see a commons being made over here. There was a lot of popular resonance with 15M, huge indexes of approval from the general populace who may have been sympathetic to 15M, even if they weren’t participating in the squares actively. So now that you’ve come into power, do you think that the Commons is still part of the dialogue? Not just with the activists and the people working here but with the citizens that you interact with? Or, do you think it’s a hard political concept to understand?

Victoria: I think it’s a hard political concept to understand. I think that in cities like Barcelona, they use it more naturally than we do here in Madrid, probably because of the people who are working in the city right now. But the fact that you don’t use it as a concept doesn’t mean that we’re not actually putting it into place. The feeling that brought everyone in, which nowadays exists in the Madrid government is very similar to the one that struck the people of Barcelona, Zaragoza, and other cities That’s something they had in common. I think it’s being used, or verbalized, more by people in Barcelona. They’ve even done a congress about it, talking about it — but I think in Madrid, it’s also happening. It’s probably something we don’t say, but I would say, yes, it’s definitely happening.

Stacco: I definitely think it’s part of the matrix, and I would like to see it become more part of the conversation because, it’s impossible to define. Because of that, it’s actually an interesting conversation to have with people, to engage their creativity. It’s not something you just explain with a little pamphlet and no further dialogue: “here’s all you need to know about the commons, read it, goodbye.”

Victoria: Exactly. I think it’s the philosophy behind the commons that’s moving every single department here in the city of Madrid, because the idea is to give the city back to the citizens. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. That’s what we’re doing, actually doing, no? I would say there are a lot of concepts that are difficult for people to understand because they don’t normally use them, but it doesn’t mean they don’t really understand them – they know what’s going on. Even if they don’t call it “the Commons”, they can feel what’s really happening. In that sense, I think it’s just a different approach in terms of communication, but I don’t think it’s different in terms of what’s actually happening.

Miguel: I think that the Commons, as a concept, is absolutely important because it offers us a new path to follow. It’s quite a complex concept which points to an absolute paradigm change, but we’re still ensconced in the old paradigms and it may be difficult to understand the concept and its full potential. Still, it’s a beacon to follow and one of the few new possibilities allowing us to change things because it really questions the matrix of the whole system. It’s huge and complex as it has to do with economy, with knowledge, with power and its distribution. However, at this moment I can’t say that it’s playing a very visible or specific role.

Stacco: Would you say that the commons is part of the matrix which informs what you’re working on over here, but not communicated so much to the outside due to its complexity?

Miguel: Absolutely. It’s not communicated, and it’s also something that we have to develop. We need new ways to see how the commons could work everyday in our economy, our information systems, everything. But this is something that we have to invent, to build. This has to be clear. We more or less know where we want to go and the direction we want to follow, but we don’t know what we’ll find there. This something we have to work on. It’s going to take a lot of time but, otherwise I cannot imagine another tangible direction capable of changing the whole system.

Stacco: Ok, now that we’re talking about large scale change, and we’ve left Madrid far behind…

Miguel: Yeah!

Stacco: How do you see this crystallising and scaling up, both nationally and transnationally? These experiences you’re building here, do you think they are feasible at other levels? Or do you think that we need to go through a process of maturation of the urban commons before we can tackle national and transnational Commons?

Miguel: All these ideas, including the commons but also focusing on things like collective intelligence, or mechanisms for direct democracy – they’re not really concerned with scale, or the way power and society were previously organized. A true paradigm change will not be fixed to the old structures. For example, take this decision-making platform we’re building: once you’ve built a viable platform that incites tens of thousands of people to work, think and take decisions together, the number of people or the scale doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter what type of decision you make, it doesn’t matter if it’s a local or national decision, none of that matters.  The same thing happens with the Commons.  

Since one of the characteristics of these ideas is how fluid and open they are, I don’t think they’re fixed to preexisting structures. Anything that we can make in Madrid and other cities will work at any scale, anywhere in the world. Actually, inside the department we have built a service, a kind of working group called “The Institutional Extension Service”. And that’s precisely what they do: they’re calling every city council in the world, every country, everybody to tell them: “Okay we’re building this platform, it’s free and we’re going to give you the platform, we’re going to give you all the rules and laws we had to write to make it work, and we’ll give you all the knowledge that we have built around this platform, for free. It’s working for Madrid, so it can also work for you – so, why aren’t you using it?”

Stacco: Please, fork it and surprise us!

Miguel: Yes! Fork it and also help us with it. But, please, use it! We’re not navel-gazing. It so happens that we’re in Madrid, but we could be in any city government and institution, and we’d be doing exactly the same things. If it works here, it works everywhere. Furthermore, we have to tell every institution that we should be working this way. Institutions are designed to work for the citizens, so the Madrid city council should work for the people in Madrid — and this may be one of the main problems.

Every government at the local or national level is not thinking about the common good, about everybody. They’re just thinking about their common good and that brings the competition, the arguments, the fights and all that stuff. If you start to build new institutions with a shift in logic, and build them to always take into account what’s going on on the outside…perhaps some of the largest problems can be stopped.

Stacco: Anything else you want to say?

Miguel: No! I’ve said enough already! (laughs)

Victoria: We talked about the transparency policies, but I haven’t gone into much detail about what we’ve already done and what we can share. For example, in this transparency ordinance which will include what the government must do, we will include, for example, the publication of diaries, or agendas. That means that every single public official needs to publish their meetings. We need to say who we’re meeting, and what we’re talking about. This is essential to decision-making transparency and is one of the goals we want to achieve within the three years we have left. We’ve built the software for that, and it’s being used very well. In terms of people filling in their agendas, it’s working quite well. So, anyone who is interested in reusing that can also find it.

Then, the second thing I haven’t talked about is the transparency of the lobbies. This ordinance includes the obligation to create a lobby register, which is something that is not very common in Spain. The locations that have put a transparency register into place, like Catalonia, haven’t had it implemented in a very good way. There are many lobbies that aren’t registering, because no one is taking care of it. So, we will create a mandatory lobby registry, we’re working on it. I think this will be a very good tool to share. I’m talking about the software, because we will mix it with the agenda so it will be easy to register a new one, and then access the agendas and request meetings. It will flow – it will be very easy to use.

In terms of losing the fear that many people have about the transparency of decision making, we’re doing it and nothing is happening — in the good sense. I mean, we’re publishing the agendas, we’ve published the CVs of everyone that is not a public official who works in City Hall.  We thought it was going to be the end of the world — and nothing happened. We’ve had positive feedback. People are happy to know who they’re working with because actually, we have really good professionals joining us in City Hall. That’s great. I think that’s something where Madrid can work as an example of how we should lose that fear of transparency, because it can be done. There’s no apocalypse after publishing any data!

Stacco: I like the fact that you’ve done it pre-figuratively. I mean, you’re already doing those practices even though you’re not bound by law to do them, while you’re working and making those practices actually codified.

Victoria: Yeah, it’s something that we also want to achieve for participation, because we do believe that. Of course, we want to do things. Of course, we want to publish information and open participatory process, but we believe that those two sides, those two elements are essential for democracy to exist! So we want that to last, and to be established as something which the next government following us will also have to implement. Because it shouldn’t be optional.

Stacco: Perfect closing.

Victoria: Great!

Lead image by Enrique Flores. See his Ahora Madrid images here. Ahora Madrid office images by Stacco Troncoso. Other images are credited in the captions.

[1] The following is extracted from Government of the Republic of Nauru’s website. Nauru were the first to implement this system named for its creator, Desmond Dowdall: “The electoral system that was adopted in 1971, the Borda count, known locally as the ‘Dowdall system’, involves an unusual form of preferential voting. There are 6 two-member constituencies, 1 three-member constituency and 1 four-member constituency. Voting is compulsory and voters must indicate a preference for all candidates on their ballot paper. Rather than a process of successive elimination of candidates with the lowest number of votes, each preference is allocated a value corresponding to its fraction of a vote. For example, a first preference is 1, a 6th preference is one sixth of a whole vote, 0.16 (so preferences are valued respectively as 1, 0.5, 0.33, 0.25, 0.2, 0.16 etc). All values are tallied and the two candidates (or in Meneng, the three candidates, or in Ubenide, the four candidates) with the highest scores are elected. As the Constitution does not prescribe an electoral system, the current system can be changed by Parliament without the need to amend the Constitution.”

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While the amount allotted for the project is relatively small in its first year — €3 million, as opposed to the €100 million spent in 2016 in Paris, the world’s largest PB project—it’s a step toward engaging people both in cities and in rural areas. It also gives government officials a better idea of what people want and need in their lives and communities.

To better reach those in outlying areas, organizers of the Portugal PB project, led by Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible for it, hope to enable people to vote via ATM machines. This is to boost turnout and ensure that more voices are heard in the democratic process. As Fonseca wrote in Apolitical:

“It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK? And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.”

Photo: Grace Fonseca with the Orçamento Participativo Portugal bus. Photo Orçamento Participativo Portugal

The official window for proposals begins in January, though some ideas, including one to equip kindergartens with open-source technology to teach them about robotics, have already been submitted. Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture, and lifelong learning. Organizers will host more than forty events next year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

“The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens,” writes Fonseca. “Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails.”

Cross-posted from Shareable. Top photo: Jason Briscoe (CC-0)

The post Portugal Announces World’s First Nationwide Participatory Budgeting Project appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At its essence, PB is a democratic process that gives people direct control over a portion of a budget, whether in government, an organization or a school. It enables people to play an active role in shaping their communities and helps leaders better serve their stakeholders.

A new white paper, Participatory Budgeting: Next Generation Democracy, from the Participatory Budgeting Project provides an overview of PB and spotlights some of the benefits of using it, including:

• It’s effective leadership. The process motivates broad participation and engages communities in finding solutions that respond to community needs.
• It’s fair leadership. PB engages a true cross-section of the community. More people get inspired and active, including those who often can’t or don’t participate, like youth.
• It’s visionary leadership. By supporting their communities to become more resilient and connected, officials who do PB build a legacy as bold and innovative leaders.

Participatory Budgeting enables everyday people to directly support community projects. Image: Participatory Budgeting Project

The report is a guide for leaders to give them a deeper understanding of PB, to answer questions they may have, and to provide support materials for them in convincing city officials of the importance of PB.

People of all ages can participate in participatory budgeting. Photo: Participatory Budgeting Project

The paper looks at how leaders implement PB to reach more people, bridge community divides, and make government more effective by developing solutions with citizens. Included are case studies, tips on implementing PB, a timeline of the growth of the PB movement, testimonials from city officials, infographics and more—all pointing to the power and effectiveness of PB. As the report states:

People are disconnected from the tough choices of public service…Most city leaders are facing slashed budgets, shrinking revenue, and widespread mistrust of their work. Elected office is an overtime job (and often on a part-time salary). People rarely understand the nuanced compromises that leaders have to make. Many believe our democracy is no longer fair. In this climate, participatory budgeting offers a way to re-engage.

Want to start PB in your town or city? Start with our guide, “How to Start Participatory Budgeting in Your City.”

Cross-posted from Shareable.net. Lead photo credit: Participatory Budgeting Project.

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