The Goteo Foundation (www.goteo.org), in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, launches the call “Conjuntament” A matchfunding pool of 96.000€ are available to multiply citizens donations made to the 24 social initiatives. Every € donated by the citizens will be duplicated by the Goteo Foundation.

The 24 social initiatives want to change Barcelona and its neighborhoods through a lot of projects which are economically sustainable and related to sectors as agro-ecology, feminism, technological sovereignty, cooperative housing, labor inclusion, documentary production, the commons, the economy of cares and the sharing & social economy.

Matchfunding is a new way to manage institutional budgets which provides:

• Legitimacy: Public institutions legitimize their budgets while allowing citizens to decide and prioritize how public money is used. Creating a space for participation where citizenship promotes and supports initiatives coming from below.
• Participation: Citizens decide to launch projects and to choose which projects to support.
• Sustainability: Projects come from neighborhoods and organized citizenship, in opposition to top-down policies. Communities are behind these projects and they want to make them alive.
• Transparency: Citizens audit the whole process, as they can check and visualize instantly how the money is used.
• Success: The success rate rises until more than 90%, when a public institution multiplicate the donations made to the crowdfunding campaigns.
• Learning lab: While they are in campaign, projects learn as they work collectively, making the project stronger and growing their network.

Key points

• The call for projects was open from October 23th to December 4th 2017.
• 24 projects have been selected and ranked according to the criteria gathered into the Terms (https://ca.goteo.org/call/conjuntament) and according to two categories: 1. social entrepreneurship and 2. Common and collaborative economies.
• Past 8th of February a communication workshop for the 24 selected projects was held.
• Advising has been carried out with the promoters in order to help them to prepare their crowdfunding campaigns. This will continue during the campaign and post-campaign.

What is the impact of the matchfunding call Conjuntament?

67 projects have been submitted, where 24 of these were selected.

These projects need a total of € 192,543 as a minimum budget of crowdfunding and € 321,419 as a optimal.

The Goteo Foundation, in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, created a matchfunding pool of € 94,000 available for the projects (€ 4,000 per project) to meet their budgets.

About Goteo

Goteo is a civic crowdfunding platform for initiatives with a high social impact on cultural, technological and educational projects. Through this social and commons approach, Goteo designes tools, such as matchfunding, which allows public and private institutions supporting and promoting social projects by multiplying the amount of donations they receive from citizens.

Goteo is also a community of communities made up of more than 120,000 people, with a success rate of more than 75%.

However, it is much more than that. Behind the platform there is a non-profit foundation (with the consequent fiscal advantages for donors in Spain) and a multidisciplinary team developing tools and services for co-creation and collective financing.

With a common mission always linked to the principles of transparency, progress and improvement of society. Its philosophy of open source and free licenses resulted in copies and alliances in several countries, as well as is has been recognized and awarded internationally since 2011.

For further information and/or collaborations, please contact at [email protected]

Photo by raindog

The post Matchfunding Social Entrepreneurship and the Commons Collaborative Economy in Barcelona appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city, we’ll have the power to transform it.”  – Ada Colau, Mayor of Barcelona.

Excellent assessment of Barcelona en Comú’s first 20 months in power. It was written by Bertie Russel and Oscar Reyes and originally published in Open Democracy.

On 24 May 2015, the citizen platform Barcelona en Comú was elected as the minority government of the city of Barcelona. Along with a number of other cities across Spain, this election was the result of a wave of progressive municipal politics across the country, offering an alternative to neoliberalism and corruption.

With Ada Colau – a housing rights activist – catapulted into the position of Mayor, and with a wave of citizens with no previous experience of formal politics finding themselves in charge of their city, BComú is an experiment in progressive change that we can’t afford to ignore.

After 20 months in charge of the city, we try to draw some of the main lessons that can help inspire and inform a radical new municipal politics that moves us beyond borders and nations, and towards a post-capitalist world based on dignity, respect and justice.

1. The best way to oppose nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment is to confront the real reasons that life is shit

There is no question that life is getting harder, more precarious, more stressful, and less certain for the majority of people. In the US and across Europe, reactionaries, racist and nationalist politicians are blaming this on two things – immigrants, and ‘outside forces’ that challenge national sovereignty. Whilst Trump and Brexit are the most obvious cases, we can see the same phenomenon across Europe, ranging from the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany through to Front National in France.

In Barcelona, there is a relative absence of public discourse that blames the social crisis on immigrants, and most attempts to do so have fallen flat. On the contrary, on 18 February over 160,000 people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand that Spain takes in more refugees. Whilst this demonstration was also caught up with complexities of Catalan nationalism and controversy over police repression of migrant street vendors, it highlighted the support for a politics that cares for migrants and refugees.

The main reason for this is simple – there is a widespread and successful politics that provides real explanations of why people are suffering, and that fights for real solutions. The reason you can’t afford your rent is because of predatory tourism, unscrupulous landlords, a lack of social housing, and property being purchased as overseas investments. The reason social services are being cut are because the central government transferred huge amounts of public funds into the private banks, propping up a financial elite, and because of a political system riddled with corruption.

Whilst Barcelona played a leading role in initiating a network of “cities of refuge”, simply condemning anti-immigrant nationalism is not enough. In a climate where popular municipal movements are providing a strong narrative as to what they see as the problem – and identifying what they’re going to do about it – it’s incredibly difficult for racist and nationalist narratives based on lies and hatred to take root.

2. Politics does not have to be the preserve of rich old white men

Ada Colau is the first female mayor of Barcelona. She is a co-founder of BComú, and was formerly the spokesperson of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform), a grassroots campaign challenging evictions and Spain’s unjust property laws. Colau leads a group of eleven district councillors, seven of whom are women, whose average age is 40.

BComú’s vision of a “feminized politics” represents a significant break with the existing political order. “You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything”, Colau explains. Instead, she offers a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions. This is backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and the common good – as well as policies designed to build on that vision.

The City Council’s new Department of Life Cycles, Feminisms and LGBTI is the institutional expression of these values. It has significantly increased the budget for campaigns against sexist violence, as well as leading a council working group that looks to identify and tackle the feminization of poverty.

The changing face of the city council is reinforced by BComú’s strict ethics policy, Governing by Obeying, which includes a €2,200 (£1850) monthly limit on payments to its elected officials. Colau takes home less than a quarter of the amount claimed by her predecessor Xavier Trias. By February 2017, €216,000 in unclaimed salaries had been paid into a new fund that will support social projects in the city.

Ada Colau at a public engagement event that took place in Sants-Montjuïc on 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

3. A politics that works begins by listening

BComú started life with an extensive process of listening, responding to ordinary peoples’ concerns, and crowd-sourcing ideas – as summarized in its guide to building a citizen municipal platform.

Drawing on proposals gathered at meetings in public squares across the city, BComú created a programme reflecting immediate issues in local neighbourhoods, city-wide problems and broader discontent with the political system. Local meetings were complemented by technical and policy committees, and an extensive process of online consultation.

This process resulted in a political platform that stressed the need to tackle the “social emergency” – problems such as home evictions on a huge scale, or the effect of uncontrolled mass tourism. These priorities came from listening to citizens across the city rather than an echo-chamber of business and political elites. BComú’s election results reflected this broader appeal: it won its highest share of the vote in Barcelona’s poorest neighbourhoods, in part through increasing turnout in those areas.

On entering government, BComú then began to implement an Emergency Plan that included measures to halt evictions, hand out fines to banks leaving multiple properties empty, and subsidise energy and transport costs for the unemployed and those earning under the minimum wage.

4. A politics that works never stops listening

Politics doesn’t happen every four years – it is the everyday process of shaping the conditions in which we live our lives. This means that one of the central tasks of a politics that works is to forge a new relationship between citizens and the institutions that we use to govern our societies.

For BComú, the everyday basis of politics means citizens and civil society organisations directly shaping the strategic plan of their city. It means not just consultation, but active empowerment in helping move citizens from being ‘recipients’ of a politics that is done to them, to active political agents that shape the every-day life of their city.

In the first months of occupying the institutions, BComú introduced an open-source platform, Decidim Barcelona, for citizens to co-create the municipal action plan for the city. Over 10,000 proposals were registered by the site’s 25,000 registered users. While that’s a small share of the city’s population, the online process was complemented by over 400 in-person meetings.

The Decidim platform is now being adapted to run participatory budgetary pilot-schemes in two districts, as well as being used in the ongoing development of new infrastructure, pedestrianisation and transport schemes. Meanwhile, the municipal Department of Participation is undertaking a systematic rethinking of the ‘meaning’ of participation, looking to move away from meaningless ‘consultations’ and towards methods for active empowerment.

This is an imperfect process – and BComú have got things wrong at times, such as the failure to properly engage when introducing a SuperBlock in the Poblenou district – but the principle is simple. To govern well, you must create new processes for obeying citizens’ demands.

At the same time, the structures that built BComú remain in place, with 15 neighbourhood groups and 15 thematic working groups providing an ongoing link between activists and institutions. No structure is perfect, and it remains unclear if these working groups can help BComú avoid “institutionalization” and remain connected to social movements, but the hope is that this model provides a basis for remaining in touch with grassroots concerns.

5. Politics does not begin with the Party

BComú is not a ‘local’ arm of a bigger political party, and does not exist merely as a branch of a broader strategy to control the central political institutions of the nation-state. Rather, BComú is one in a series of independent citizen platforms that have looked to occupy municipal institutions in an effort to bring about progressive social change.

From A Coruña to Valencia, Madrid and Zaragoza, these municipal movements are the direct effort of citizens rejecting the old mode of doing politics, and starting to effect change where they live. Instead of a national party structure, they coordinate through a “network of rebel cities” across Spain. Most immediately, this means coordinating press releases and actively learning from how one another engage with urban problems.

That doesn’t mean that BComú can reject political parties entirely. While the initiative arose from social movements, it ended up incorporating several existing political parties in its platform. These include Podemos – another child of the 15-M movement  – and the Catalan Greens-United Left party (ICV-EUIA), which had consistently been a junior coalition partner in city councils headed by the centre-left Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) from 1979 until 2011.

These parties continue alongside BComú, with their own completely separate organizational and funding structures. But entering BComú has forced existing parties to significantly change how they operate. Coalition negotiations encouraged the selection of new councillors (only two of the elected candidates have previously held office), and they are subject to a tough Ethics Code that considerably increases their accountability.

The fluid relationship between the new coalitions and political parties allows for multiple levels of coordination, without having to pass through a rigid central leadership. It may also be replicated in regional government, where the recently formed Un Pais En Comú seeks to replicate the city government coalition across Catalunya. On a terrain that contains a different set of politics – not least a strong national-separatist sentiment – it remains to be seen whether this latest initiative will be successful.

Upwards of 180,000 people demonstrate in favour of accepting migrants and asylum seekers in Catalonia, organised by the group Casa Nostra, Casa Vostra – 18 February 2017. Photo by Bertie Russell. CC BY-NC-SA.

6. Power is the capacity to act

BComú does not subscribe to traditional notions of power, whereby if you hold public office, you somehow ‘have’ power. On the contrary, power is the capacity to bring about change, and the ‘occupation of the institutions’ is only one part of what makes change possible.

BComú emerged after almost a decade of major street-protests, anti-eviction campaigns, squatting movements, anti-corruption campaigns, and youth movements – the most visible form being the ’15-M’ or ‘indignados’ protests that began in 2011. After years of being at a high-level of mobilization, many within these movements made a strategic wager – we’ve learned how to occupy the squares, but what happens if we try to occupy the institutions?

Frustrated by the limits of what could be achieved by being mobilized only outside of institutions, the decision to form BComú was to try to occupy the institutions as part of the same movement that occupied the squares. In practice, this is not so simple.

Politics is a messy game, full of compromises forced by working in a world of contradictions. In the most practical sense, BComú may be leading the council, but it holds only 11 of the 41 available seats. Six other political parties are also represented on the council, mostly seeking to block, slow-down or weaken its initiatives. Frustrated by these moves – and overwhelmed by the demands of the institutions – BComú formed a governing coalition with the PSC, a move supported by around 2/3 of its registered supporters. But it remains a minority government, and two left parties that refused a similar pact responded by stepping up their block on almost all legislative initiatives. The resulting political crisis delayed the passing of the city’s 2017 budget, which was eventually forced through on a confidence motion when BComú challenged the opposition to unite around another plan – which it failed to do.

While this experience has shown the resilience of BComú in the confrontational confines of the council chamber, the key lesson here is that occupying the institutions is not enough. An electoral strategy is not sufficient alone to create change. The power to act comes from a combination of occupying both the institutions and the squares, of social movements organizing and exercising leverage, providing social force that can be coupled with the potential of the occupied institutions – the power to change comes when these work in tandem. It’s been a bumpy ride, but BComú has been able to justify its budget on the grounds that it prioritizes social measures (such as building new nurseries, combatting energy poverty and focusing resources on the poorest neighbourhoods) with reference to the extensive and ongoing process of participation that it has encouraged.

One of the biggest dangers in looking to build radical municipalist movements in other cities is to mistake electoral victory with victory, to sit back and think that now we’ve got ‘our guys’ in the institutions, we can sit back and let change occur.

7. Transnational politics begins in your city

In a time where reactionary political movements are building walls and retreating to national boundaries, BComú is illustrating that a new transnational political movement begins in our cities.

To this end, BComú has established an international committee tasked with promoting and sharing its experiences abroad, whilst learning from other ‘rebel’ cities such as Naples and Messina. Barcelona has been active in international forums, promoting the “right to the city” at the recent UN Habitat III conference, and taking a leadership role in the Global Network of Cities, Local and Regional Governments.

These moves look to bypass the national scale where possible, prefiguring post-national networks of urban solidarity and cooperation. Recent visits of the First Deputy Mayor to the Colombian cities of Medellín and Bogotá also suggest that links are being made on a supranational scale.

One of the most tangible outcomes of this level of supranational urban organizing was the strong role played by cities in the rejection of the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP). As hosts of a meeting entitled ‘Local Authorities and the New Generation of Free Trade Agreements’ in April 2016, BComú led on the agreement of the ‘Barcelona Declaration’, with more than 40 cities committing to the rejection of TTIP. As of the time of writing, TTIP now looks dead in the water.

At this early stage, it remains unclear how this supranational network of radical municipalism may develop. Perhaps the most important step for BComú is to share their experience and support those in other cities that are looking to reclaim politics, helping to build citizens platforms across Europe and beyond. But the idea of a post-national network of citizens also allows us to dare to dream – of shared resources, shared politics and shared infrastructure – where it’s not where you were born, but where you live, that determines your right to live.

8. Essential services can be run in our common interest

The clue to BComú’s strategy for essential services is hidden in its name – the plan is to run them in common.

At the end of 2016, and faced with a crisis in the funeral sector in which only two companies controlled the sector and charged prices almost twice the national average, the Barcelona council intervened to establish a municipal funeral company that is forecasted to reduce costs by 30 per cent. Around the same time, the council voted in favour of the remunicipalisation of water, paving the way for water to be taken out of the private sector at some point this year.

In February 2017, Barcelona amended the terms and conditions for electricity supply, preventing energy firms from cutting off supply to vulnerable people. The two major energy firms – Endesa and Gas Natural – protested this by not bidding for the €65m municipal energy contracts, hoping this would force the council to overturn the policy. Instead, a raft of small and medium size energy companies were happy to comply with the new directive to tackle energy poverty, and stand to be awarded the contracts if a court challenge from the large firms proves unsuccessful. BComú is also actively planning to introduce a municipal energy company within the next two years.

However, it’s important to recognize the major difference between the public and the common. As Michael Hardt argues, our choices are not limited to businesses controlled privately (private property) or by the state (public property). The third option is to hold things in common – where resources and services are controlled, produced and distributed democratically and equitably according to peoples need. A simple example of what this could look like was the proposal – that narrowly failed only due to voter turnout – for Berlin to establish an energy company that would put citizens on the board of the company.

This difference underpins the Barcelona experience. This is not a traditional socialist government that thinks it can run things better on behalf of the people. This is a movement that believes the people can run things better on their own behalf, combining citizen wisdom with expert knowledge to solve the everyday problems that people face.

Photo by BarcelonaEnComu

The post Eight lessons from Barcelona en Comú on how to Take Back Control appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Anna Bergren Miller: When the City Council of Barcelona asked democracy activist and researcher Mayo Fuster Morell for policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy, she suggested that the City Council take a different approach: Rather than relying on an expert to dictate policy from the top down, why not use a collaborative process to build a sustainable set of institutions and practices that would draw strength from the grassroots?

Fuster Morell crowdsourced a sharing economy policy framework through a series of in-person and online interactions with a range of stakeholders, including city residents, representatives of sharing economy initiatives, and municipal authorities. From the 120 policy recommendations initially drafted, Barcelona’s city council has since developed a collaborative economy action plan and provided funding to specific projects. Meanwhile, the broader conversation on the sharing economy in Barcelona continues through organizations including Procomuns, which started in March 2016 as a policy brainstorming forum.

I spoke to Fuster Morell recently about the process behind and the prospects for the Barcelona policy recommendations. We talked through what Fuster Morell calls Barcelona’s collaborative economy “ecosystem,” the status of the collaborative economy plan, and the replicability of the Catalan capital’s particular approach to sharing.

Anna Bergren Miller: You were instrumental in helping craft a series of policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy in the city of Barcelona. How did the policy recommendations come to be? Specifically, how did you involve city residents in the process?

Mayo Fuster Morell: Barcelona City Council asked me to advise them about what to do regarding the collaborative economy. I suggested that we build an ecosystem of public policies involving the different stakeholders. This way, even if there is a change of government in the next election, the city will have a structure of actors and relationships already in place.

At the City Council of Barcelona there is a lack of expertise in this matter. They don’t know about the technologies, or the companies involved because it’s pretty new. We have an historical tradition of commons production in the city. But until this government, there hasn’t been an institutional interest in supporting collaboration.

We built the stakeholder ecosystem in layers. The first layer is BarCola, a coworking group between the city council and the sector. To join BarCola as an initiative, you have to be active in Barcelona. We privilege organizations that take a commons approach, which means that they are based on cooperatives, foundations, or enterprises that have a democratic government system. We prioritize projects that are based on open source or open data, that are connected to social challenges in the city, and that have socially inclusive policies.

BarCola meets every month or month and a half. We also communicate frequently on a mailing list and Telegram. Our main concern is promotion. For example, we are not so much about penalizing Airbnb, as about how we build an incubating system and funding for new initiatives, to promote the modalities that we are more in favor of. The second layer of the ecosystem is Procomuns, which started as an event in March to open the proposals for policy recommendations for the city council. Four hundred people participated, and spent three days discussing how the city council can do support a commons development, and a collaborative economy. The event resulted in the Procomuns declaration with 120 policy recommendations. We sent it to Barcelona City Council, obviously, but also to European Commission and other organizations.

Now Procomuns is a monthly Meetup. At each meeting, we address different issues. We are going to do another big event at the end of June, in Barcelona. Out of the initial 120 policy recommendations emerged the third layer of the ecosystem, which is Decidem Barcelona. Decidem Barcelona is a participatory democracy platform for citizens to provide feedback on municipal policies in every area. Using Decidem Barcelona, we selected the policies that were more supported by Barcelona residents. With that, we defined the Barcelona collaborative economy plan, which has 80 percent of the 120 policies generated by Procomuns. It doesn’t have them all, because there are some areas that are not under the competency of Barcelona City Council.

Now we have a final layer of the ecosystem. We created an inter-area body inside of the city council, which coordinates what we are doing regarding transport, housing, tourism, and labor. This layer operates solely within the municipal government.

Tell me more about the city council’s response. Was creating a collaborative economy plan something that they were encouraging you to do, or did you bring it to them? How receptive were they, and where have they taken it since?

The current Barcelona government started 18 months ago as a citizens’ candidature with many non-professional politicians. For example, our mayor Ada Colau was very active in the housing movement. All of them were very much in support the idea of injecting the citizens into the policy process. There was not resistance.

But some of the city council, when they think about the collaborative economy, they only think about Uber or Airbnb. They are not aware of the other movements. So the first step actually was a bit hard. We had to say, okay, the collaborative economy is not only the big for-profit actors.

What is the current status of the Barcelona policies?

The city now has a collaborative economy plan and budget. The plan is not available online, but to give you some examples of the measures involved: We created a program of entrepreneurship on the collaborative economy. We did a call for new initiatives, and we selected 30, to which we will provide mentorship, legal advice, and match funding. Like with BarCola, we prioritize the initiatives that are more connected to the commons. We have also been mapping the city council’s underutilized infrastructure resources, starting with computers, in order to put them to collaborative uses by the citizens. We have also begun a €100,000 match funding program, and are designing a collaborative economy incubator.

We support a lot of events. We provide funding for OuiShare; we provide funding for the local annual meeting of the social economy. We support the annual meeting of the city’s cooperatives. We also supported an event about do-it-yourself technology. We have a study underway on the level of participation in the collaborative economy within Barcelona. We are also developing a framework for understanding its impact.

What’s the timeline for the study?

The study will be ready in July.

A lot of what you’ve been able to do seems specific to Barcelona, to the political climate and the history and culture there. But have you heard from other cities that have wanted to model your process? Or were you looking at other cities as examples?

I think it’s very unique to Barcelona, this element of believing that collaborative economy policy should be built collaboratively. We also have a very clear position regarding which initiatives are the best models to promote. But we are not unique in providing some programs of support. For example, Seoul has put a lot of resources into promoting the collaborative economy. Also, Amsterdam is providing a lot of resources, but with a different perspective.

The geographer David Harvey has recently written and spoken about so-called “Rebel Cities.” Barcelona has been identified as part of a nascent network of Rebel Cities. What is a Rebel City? Why do they matter now? And what evidence is there that they are beginning to work together?

In the context of Spain, “Rebel Cities” refers to the cities that are governed by citizens’ candidatures as of the last municipal elections. In each case, a unique coalition won power — so they have their independence. But, recognizing the affinities between then, we built a network of Rebel Cities in order to exchange experiences and learn from each other. We recently suggested a similar process, building on Spain’s experience, for Rebel Cities in the United States.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Header photo of the city of Barcelona by Bert Kaufmannvia Flickr. 

The post Barcelona Crowdsourced its Sharing Economy Policies. Can Other Cities Do the Same? 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.”

The post This is how people power wins an election: the story of Ahora Madrid appeared first on P2P Foundation.

CommonsPolis — a civil society initiative to create dialogue between progressive municipalist movements and city governments, and European citizens — held an encounter described as “a common space for exchange; cities in transition and citizen struggles” in Paris on November 24, 2016, at the offices of the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation (FPH) and with the collaboration of the Utopia Movement. Spanish activists from a variety of regions were invited to share with their French counterparts their recent experiences of entering the municipal public administrations, and their efforts to make the political process more participatory and inclusive for citizens. The event was held in Spanish (Castellano) and French, with simultaneous interpretation. I went along with Stacco Troncoso as observers from the P2P Foundation. We were invited to attend, listen, and share our P2P/Commons perspective about the coming political landscape.

The Spanish context was outlined in a handout offered at the event, which described the most significant breakthroughs of the last two years (2015-16). In May 2015, the new citizens’ coalitions which had emerged from the street-level movements were successful in a number of large municipal elections. The path of these citizens’ coalitions traces back to reactions against the failures of Spain’s post-Transition bipartisanism, and their victories indicate a shift in mindset, culture, and power. These new, municipalist “non-parties” are outgrowths of the 15M indignado movement and “las mareas” (tides), citizens’ initiatives around housing, health, education, culture and urban ecology. They build on prior political traditions of self-management and governance, while also drawing influences from the de-growth, ecology and free/libre movements and applying mindful use of technology and media.

The event began with a brief introduction by Vladimir Ugarte, who described Commonspolis as a mixture of personal and professional developments. Sergi Escribano, originally from Spain, was living in France and observing the tremendous changes shaking up Spanish civil, and political, society. Meanwhile Vlad, originally from Uruguay, brought a Latin American perspective on the political environmental and cultural crisis worldwide. As they witnessed the local governance initiatives taking shape under a municipalist ethic in Spain, they decided to do something about it — but instead of writing a grand manifesto, they would first proceed by listening. This event was created in support of that intention, and to explore the question of how such a shift would scale or transfer to another context – how can the municipal experiences of Spanish activists help inform the next steps elsewhere, in France for example?

From bipartisanism to municipalism: Spain’s Political Landscape

We spent the day together in a clean, modern room with light wooden paneling and lots of windows facing an interior courtyard at the FPH offices. The atmosphere was friendly and familiar, and a number of people had either previously met or corresponded, so the morning started with upbeat conversation and coffee. The organizers called us to sit in a circle to begin, and for the next several hours, the story of the municipal victories in Spain unfolded.

Members of Barcelona en Comú, Marea Atlántica and València en Comú started by sharing their perspectives on what provoked the crisis and its reactions in Spain, and the relationships and patterns that they see emerging among the resulting different movements and parties.

A brief look at Spain’s most recent forty years set the context for the stories that would follow. The post-Franco years were marked by the rise and fall of Spanish bipartisanism. The power structures of the dictatorship were largely preserved in one of the two dominant political parties, Partido Popular or the People’s Party (PP), supported by old-guard power players and the Catholic church. Meanwhile, the more moderate and steadily center-leaning Partido Socialista Obrera Español (PSOE), the Socialist Worker’s Party, swiftly abandoned Marxism in the late 70s. In the early 2000s, Spain adopted the Euro with great expectations but, after a decade of speculative action, the quality of day to day life began to deteriorate. Prices went up, but salaries stayed flat. While neither party was solely to blame, neither was innocent. Corruption became more prevalent and obvious. Unprecedented construction speculation culminated in the devastating housing bubble, triggering “the crisis” marked by rising incidences of mortgage foreclosure and eviction, and rampant unemployment.

As we know, this political/economic crisis provoked a widespread activist reaction in Spain, beginning in 2011 with the eruption of the 15-M movement. Five years later, a large part of this activism has since moved indoors from the streets and squares to government posts, but this did not come easily. Power and influence struggles persist, both internally among activists with different missions, and as a by-product of the constraints felt in being a minority power. A relatively low number of seats in parliament poses an obvious disadvantage for those activists now working within government. Progress is often hamstrung by the institutional rigidity of government structures, not to say the baroque quality of Spanish law.

So, how did these activists manage to grab the power needed to break the bipartisan stranglehold? In 2014, 5 Members of European Parliament (MEPs) from Podemos were elected, evidence of a strong resistance to bipartisanism. The kind of changes Podemos triggered started on a local scale with municipal platforms, creating networks for every city to work for local change. These platforms are the “how”, but not the “who”, of change; it’s important to remember that any one party, Podemos included, is a part of the platform, and not the whole.

L-R: Vladimir Ugarte (Empodera), Laura Roth (BCN en Comú), Rafa Juan (València en Comú), Sergi Escribano (Empodera), Neus Fàbregas (València en Comú), Daniel Rodríguez (Marea Atlántica), Marcelo Expósito (BCN en Comú), Diego Jimenez (Marea Atlántica). See all participants here.

On the practical level, many people who felt indignation in response to the crisis indeed became indignadas, activists not just in their own lives but also in electoral politics.“Las Mareas”, or the “tides”, are citizen-activist groups formed throughout Spain after 15M, each acting in a specific sector and often identified by color (green for education, white for health, etc.). Mainly, they help create or safeguard access to different public services hit by austerity policies. La Marea Atlántica, formed in 2014 in A Coruña, Galicia, was formed with another goal in sight. Building on a long tradition of local leftist politics, La Marea Atlántica intended to develop a participative municipal administration. They collected 2,500 signatures towards presenting candidates for city council and also mayor, the latter of which they won in the 2015 elections. There is a special cultural significance in this win: the mayor, Xulio Ferreiro, is the first in office who speaks the local language (Gallego).

As they describe themselves, La Marea Atlántica has several currents. They incorporate the ideals of 15M, but for the platform to be successful, they stress that everyone involved must work together. For example, the platform should not be considered as a projection of Podemos in particular, there are a number of parties represented. It’s a political space where many come together, what they call a “political proposal”.

Marea Atlántica’s online instruments have been created to enable all types of citizens’ participation. “Mareas abiertas” (open tides) is a key element: there are no party-imposed quotas, any individual can participate. The campaigns are completely self-financed. And they continue to develop more participatory, inclusive projects, such as Co-Lab. The website describes Co-Lab as “a recent social innovation project with a mission to improve quality of life for people and have a more egalitarian citizenship, through mechanisms of collaborative, open and re-usable knowledge production.”

But the truth is, they sometimes have difficulties in keeping it all up. The daily management is hard work, and it doesn’t sustain itself without a lot of input. Maintaining a high level of interest and engagement in people sometimes becomes challenging in the flow of action between activism and institutions, even when the processes are open and participatory.

Why have a such wide range and high number of people in Spain have turned to activism? Not long ago, many people were working hard just to pay the mortgage, only to see their job security and financial stability slip away. People started going “underwater” on their mortgages, and the ugly spectacle of police-enforced home evictions proved to be too much to bear without resistance by those affected and their friends, neighbors and communities. 2009 saw the beginning of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca or (PAH) — Platform for People Affected by Mortgages — in Barcelona. Through civil disobedience and direct action, people take part in opposing evictions, often putting themselves physically between law enforcement and homeowners— the banks take the property, but the cops take the people.

PAH has successfully prevented well over one thousand such evictions. One of their founding members, Ada Colau, became a spokesperson of Barcelona en Comú, and more recently was elected the mayor of Barcelona. Where 15M once had people in the streets and squares chanting “no nos representa” —  “they don’t represent us” —  now, in Ada Colau, they have a mayor who emerged from the movement itself. The “en Comú” movements in other cities including València are municipal platforms that have gathered a good deal of public interest and support. From the en comú movements in these two cities, Barcelona and Valencia, many reflections and indeed, even warnings were shared.

En Comú in València is a platform of the streets, now in the transition to electoral politics and campaigns. With its roots in street assemblies, food sovereignty campaigns and the student and housing movements, en Comú identified a shift: people moved toward thinking in terms of “ours”, rather than “mine”. They’ve also crowdfunded their own “improvised” campaign and gained 33 seats in the local parliament. But being in the minority, like La Marea, they’ve got a vertiginous climb ahead.  With the political will to survive, the members of VEC stress that it’s worth the trouble of persisting. Although the process is full of problems, they’re committed to keeping on, moving forward, not losing hope. This is the moment for reality checks but also going back to the roots of the organization, to recuperate what people have in common while also confronting an administration that mainly seeks to take care of itself.

Barcelona en Comú are often asked to tell their story, and they do so “warts and all”, with all of the problems and challenges along with the successes. Yes, they did win in the Barcelona elections, but with 11 seats (out of 41) in city assembly, it’s clearly not enough to govern a city; the change is local and limited, for the moment. While they may form part of the government, the ongoing question is how to be part of a government that doesn’t want you to make changes. So, within the small space between simple legislation and doing nothing at all, BeC is attempting to do something different with the many limits and problems at the government level.

Through their organization’s creation and continued evolution, they have come to understand that the change in political discourse has taken place on both the right and the left. Extensive changes are occurring in traditional politics. The left, however, seems to communicate in abstracts, which creates rather than solves problems at the local level. People do not want abstract terms, they want concrete solutions.  This must be discussed, but not in the accepted, unquestioned, persistent ways. Results should come by treating concrete problems, being realistic, and going through phases at the local level, growing real participation among people. The PAH platform, for example, has been built step by step, acknowledging every little victory that adds up to something (previously) unimaginable. And finding the appreciation for the small steps is part of the change.

Keenly aware of the masculine style of typical political discourse, along with its implications, the movements in Spain have been working to feminize the discourse and encourage more and better participation. Bringing others into the platforms depends on something mentioned multiple times: an ethical code, designed for open participation and the encouragement of real politics with people creating their own platforms – implementing radical democracy. Participatory conversation creates political change, and the feminization of politics is not only about the political work itself, it also means a change of style.

But these municipal platforms are not solely designed for local citizens; it was made clear, they must be part of a multi-level structure capable of operating at the national, and even transnational, levels. To make this happen, the municipal platforms must coordinate among themselves and beyond. They need to present viable political alternatives that channel the rising resistance to recent right-populist political developments such as Brexit and the election of Trump.

Crucially, each of these new municipalist coalitions has based their work on their “codigo etico”, the ethical code which shapes everything they do in the platforms, participation in institutions. This ethical code is developed from existing experiences, and acts as both the glue and the attractor for participants. Its main principles are:

• No revolving doors (no cycling through public/private positions)
• Salary cuts
• Participative program
• Open primaries — no party quotas, and open to anyone
• Voluntary/citizen self-financing, and rejection of institutional or bank financing

Caveats and cautions were offered about the problems found in making municipal change. Hard limits, even something like a “glass ceiling”, were described. Some of this is surely due to the experimental nature of this new institutional style grating against the very durable, quintessentially neoliberal, crisis produced by the established political powers. Opposition is not easy, and neither have been these first moves from the streets into municipal chambers. They said it again and again: for all the progress made in Spain, there’s no formula for entering these institutions.

Winning is not the same as gaining power; to gain effective power takes a very empowered citizenship, and citizens are starved of power. Broadening citizen participation is obviously important, but this must be done within the local context, and will create something different in each location — so, again, “recipes” are impossible. While it’s true that the regime crisis has led to a growth in political and urban “lab” environments, making the leap into the municipal government is not simple, and successful attempts at change are slow and hard won. Even the new methodologies employed can cause problems.

Because of all this, the codigo etico — code of ethics — was described as indispensable. New government is, as has been learned, not always an effective government, and political organizations can be prone to inter-faction disputes. Think inclusively — how might a single, immigrant mother of several children, for example, be encouraged or enabled to participate, and why? For a positive reception to some kind of marea social, or citizens’ tide movement, there must be real solutions and a clear path to participation or there will be no way out of the crisis.

With so much of what’s familiar and concrete being constructs of neoliberalism — business, management, government — the path towards reconstruction from the bottom is difficult, and more so with a repressive legislative architecture. On top of it all, there’s another difficulty. This hard, neoliberal Europe has also produced a rapidly rising, bottom-up, citizen-level force from the right which must be watched and considered closely.

But, what do the movements find when they ask the people what they want? The people are still outraged and anxious. They want assurances of security, to finally get out of the economic crisis. What happens when those who’ve moved into municipal government want rupture, but what the people want is restoration? People say they want to “go back to the way things were”, but not only is that impossible, things were not really so good — but memories are short. This is the key of the extreme right, this ideological message. What’s needed is more empathy.

In conclusion, those presenting from the various movements in Spain all shared that their processes have been a qualified nightmare at times, and that navigating through the crisis has been very hard. But at the heart there remains a source of hope and motivation – sí se puede.

Widening the Conversation

In several small, multi-lingual groups, we had some animated discussions about the enthusiasm, curiosity and doubts in reaction to the initial expositions. What clearly came across were ideas about promoting self-management, the need for exercising caution with the existing paternalism in society, and providing more visibility to self-management practices. People discussed encouraging social empowerment to correct, rather than tolerate, constant institutional blockages, as well as how to promote more social income and participatory budgeting.

Even with some notable differences in the French context, there is a clear need for municipal learning and “unlearning” within concrete, multi-scale, autonomous movements; a need to find ways to resolve the eventual failures, and to put forth proposals that people can use. Strengthening bottom-up narratives and nurturing inclusivity in political practices are fundamentals. Without this shift towards change that remains in service of the community, people will eventually lose confidence.

Instability fomented the change in the Spanish territory, and that original energy continued to provoke changes in the context of the social movements. A strong focus emerged, along with a greatly increased local participation. Investigations into the crisis — what caused it, how to address it — provided a springboard from which people began thinking and working collectively, always keeping those ethical codes in sight.

The trajectory of personal transformation can lead into a political one, and ideas turn to politics. But how would those in the French context follow the work done in the Spanish municipal arena? By introducing the virus of change into the institutions. Study the length of time before elections, and find a way to anticipate what will be needed, and communicate it. Work to avoid power struggles, and work to make those personal transformations integrate into the platforms. This includes feminization to induce noticeable differences in governance — it’s important to dismantle patriarchal constructs, i.e. the tendency for the loudest to be heard, and for the longest time. Oh, and another thing — resolve the tension between just talking to people about problems, and changing things so that communication becomes empowerment.

But what about the fact that people have long adopted completely neoliberal behaviour patterns, right from primary school — how is it possible to address these limitations? At this point, how many people outside of these specialized groups really know how to work in a participatory style anymore? The dialogue has been long lost, and must be recovered, including a change in values. The tension between power and counterpower has to be acknowledged, and differences between “collective” and “commons”, where the commons is a search for construction among people.

Later in the day, some more clues and tools came through from the activists from Spain in an additional round of group work, some more conceptual and some more concrete. Keeping up a good level of critique was cited as a key component, and to avoid forming “bubbles”. Sustainability, in the material sense, can mean using local and complementary currencies, or instigating more activities, rather than just talks — having more action take place in the communities (eg. garden cultivation and instructions).  As far as inclusion, we need more work on “feminization”: get more women to participate, and change the grand-scale masculine logics and ideas for something more feminine, closer. Be inclusive of groups with fewer resources (eg, youth groups) and reach out to those former- or non-activists who feel excluded, cynical or disinterested. Make it all more open to the “others”, and work to maintain that level of inclusion.

Feminization, as it was described, can be a difficult, slow process of experimentation. Knowing this, it’s a good practice to create a protected environment for experimentation, and foster something slower but deeper. Create other forms of organization that are participatory from within the institutions: introduce techniques like speaking in turn, or request participants to give just one sentence, in quick rounds – things that encourage better participation. The goal is to break the usual tendencies for certain people to dominate and certain people to remain silent – time to shake up the comfort zone.  

What about all the people who are used to just voting and dropping all the responsibility on the elected officials? And the question of enabling people’s capacities in the spirit of commons – how can this be done? With education, making every action more visible and creating spaces for discussion – actual, physical spaces.  De-localize the decision-making within the platforms. Make proposals to the people, show them the ways to co-create communities using participatory principles, including codes of ethics. Someone could lead by example and propose a work group with specific rules and context, so everyone knows how to participate. Debate questions openly, eg. how to define the urban commons? Technical questions come up, and questions of tech, which is the means through which a large dominion of civic and political information is controlled. Think about how to make the technical solutions compatible with the political ones.

In the final afternoon discussions, there were several proposals following on the earlier dialogues. Why not hold the next European Commons Assembly in a “rebel” city, one undergoing commons-friendly changes, to see more potentially concrete changes and proposals in action. And with the EU elections coming in 2019, more work needs to be done within the commons political network, focusing on “free, fair, sustainable” principles with visible alliances around the different commons – knowledge, social justice, ecology, etc. It’s time to open some common spaces for action where people can learn to make, do and live differently, and discover how to exchange experiences around common development and management (“gestion en común”).

Change-making in France: a reaction

The question that was opened for exploration at the end of the day: exactly what aspects of the citizens’ platforms in Spain might be portable to France? Although it’s understood that the process and results are still in flux, there is ample space for change and a strong desire to experiment with what can be replicated at different scales. So, how to mobilize now – what kinds of tips and tricks might be viable in the French sociopolitical landscape?

In 2014, Spanish activists said “let’s take the city” – a seemingly impossible challenge. One year later, municipal elections were won by Ahora Madrid, and en Comú in Barcelona and València – and although these new parties and representatives may face hostility from inside, the spirit of “sí se puede” has been successfully validated and propagated. With a strong commons culture in France, the possibilities are wide open. How to organize and mobilize? The advice offered was: organize for what already exists, don’t over-politicize, keep to the needs of people in the communities, and work up from small steps.

While there are apparent cultural differences in the French and Spanish contexts, some form of “viral” idea sharing could promote a cultural change towards more widespread citizen engagement, particularly in municipal politics. In Spain, people organized in and from the public squares, where in France this kind of expanded organization may not yet have taken root fully — although Nuit de bot certainly offers us a good view on how it could develop —  but, that said, it was acknowledged that a movement has been born in France with roots in an economic crisis, even if different from that in Spain. For a young person, joining Uber is a lot cheaper and faster than obtaining a taxi license, but this easy entry could have a high cost in eventual precarity.

Conclusions. Where do we go from here?

All the municipalist players from the Spanish territory are working multi-scale (local, national, regional, and now in international dialogues). The coalitions are non-partisan, though inclusive of established political parties. They all want to end the isolation presently perceived at the city level, merging more towards an ideal of the “networked rebel cities”. Overall, the key point made for the French activists was the need to create and implement a common ethical code for participation. Meetings such as this one should obviously evolve to be more diverse and representative of the public at large, as the movements themselves are. As the meeting drew to a close, it was noted pretty bluntly – if we don’t get our shit together, the far right will, in terms of gathering massive support by addressing the concrete needs of people.

As commoners and activists concerned about caring for our neighbours and the environments which sustain us, the responsibility falls on all of us, beyond Spain, beyond France. We are the stewards of change, and this change needs to go beyond boundaries to engage real needs with viable, common-sense solutions. The community empowerment, network logics and feminization of politics displayed by municipalist platforms such as València en Comú, Marea Atlántica and Barcelona en Comú could inspire new bottom-up electoral coalitions in surprisingly different contexts. Let’s spread the word and show the world what happens when concerned citizens decide to take the power back.

CommonsPolis

“Common space for exchange; cities in transition and citizen struggles”

Event held in Paris on November 24, 2016

Sponsored by – FPH, Utopia Movement,

Lead image by Anna Guzzo. Event images by Jose Luis Iniesta/Empodera Consultures. See the full album below:

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Naples was the first Italian city to establish a “Department of the Commons” and the first to change the municipal statute by inserting the “commons” as one of the interests to be protected and recognised as the functional exercise of fundamental rights of the person.

A discussion from Italia che cambia:

“All these buildings were public properties, which had for years been in a terrible state of neglect and decay. Citizens and social movements transformed these spaces to places “that create social capital in terms of collective uses with a commons value”. The seven properties identified by the Resolution are very different in terms of origin and historical evolution, but they have in common the fact that the Neapolitans were worried about possible privatisation of the buildings or speculation. This concern drove them to take the decision of acting first and restoring them to the public interest.

The municipalist government of De Magistris has allowed social organisations to continue developing processes of cultural creation and productive innovation emergence: Government Resolution no. 446/2016 has as its objective “the identification of areas of civic importance ascribed to the category of the commons”. Immediately after its publication (the resolution is dated June 1 2016 but was publicised recently), some members of the City Council criticised the Neapolitan Government, because according to them it would be better for the city to sell or rent these public spaces to increase the city’s income. The Government was also accused of “legalising” an illegal occupation of public buildings. However, Resolution 446/2016 does not provide leases or concessions for the social movements that occupy the spaces; it only acknowledges the “civic use” they do with them. It is still not clearly established though who has the official responsibility for maintaining the space (regular checks, cleaning etc), meaning that it it is not clear if it’s the Government’s responsibility, the occupants’ or both. The resolution specifies that “the person temporarily in custody of the property management of municipal assets identified as a “common good” will have to respond to the principles of good performance, impartiality, cost management, and resource efficiency, respecting the public interest”.

The Neapolitan Administration defines as common goods “the tangible and intangible assets of collective belonging that are managed in a shared, participatory process and that it’s committed to ensure the collective enjoyment of common goods and their preservation for the benefit of future generations”. The administration has also created a “Permanent Citizen Observatory on the Commons” in the city of Naples which studies, analyses, proposes and controls the management and protection of common goods. The Observatory has eleven members, are all experts in the legal, economic, social or environmental fields. Seven of these members are appointed by the Mayor and four are citizens selected through simple online procedures.

Following the spirit of the rebel cities, the Resolution 446/2016 is important because it recognises the social value of the experiences living in the occupied spaces and not only the economic value of the properties. It is also important as it establishes “the recognition of public spaces as part of a process of constant active listening and monitoring of the city and its demands, in relation to the collective use of spaces and protection of the commons”.

To analyse the forms of management and regulation of the occupied buildings, there are already public discussion tables where citizens have co-decision power with the Administration. Each space is different so the required management and the profile of the spaces varies from one to another. They all have in common the protection of the commons and the objective of keeping alive cultural, social and political matters, sometimes even in the form of workshops and training centres for women, children and unemployed citizens.”

Photo by Pug Girl

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