“Protesting is not enough, we must transform the power structures,” Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange.

Organised on the 23–28 of May in Madrid, the Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city event joined together close to 500 participants to talk, workshop, discuss and debate about network democracy, new forms of citizen participation, digital tools for democratic participation, and urban commons. The inspiring week and its sessions attracted close to 500 participants. It was also the final event of the D-CENT project, showcasing our results, tools and research.

The Democratic Cities event marked the start of the Cities for Change Network and Democratic Commons Network (Red de Comunes Democráticos), aiming to make to make cities more democratic, by sharing organizational models, technologies, practices, legal material, narratives, and open resources that configure collaborative participation in democratic ways.

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández

Networks, technologies and open, collaborative narrative

The intense week started with five-day Democracy Lab, collecting more than hundred people to share, survey, debate and suggest ideas as to where the world is heading regarding direct democracy, citizen participation, commons networks, and open source software.

As part of the lab, a two-day unconference Initiatives for open democracy and a decentralized Internet was hosted by D-CENT, Redecentralise.org, and Labodemo.net. It provided an open space for initiatives developing privacy-aware, open source, and distributed technologies to showcase their work, share demos, debate and plan future development. Running it in the format of “unconference” meant that the talks, sessions and presentations were selected and scheduled by attendees on the day. Through an Open Call, we looked for groups and individuals to contribute to the sessions. The call was a success: it produced 60 proposals from different disciplines. The chosen participants were introduced here.

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández 

As the closing session of the lab, D-CENT session “Technologies and institutions for 21st century democracy”  was held with eight international speakers addressing new and different ways of democracy-building around the world. D-CENT partners Thoughtworks, Dyne.org and Citizens Foundation introduced the D-CENT Toolbox, with tools like Your Priorities, Mooncake, Objective8, Stonecutter and Freecoin. D-CENT partners presented also in How to increase citizens participation: Lessons from Iceland and elsewhere (Gunnar Grímsson, Citizens Foundation), Data Journalism with Decide Madrid (Pablo Aragon, Eurecat) and Digital Democracy: D-CENT, citizen engagement and economic empowerment (Francesca Bria, Nesta; Irina Bolichevsky, W3C).

Photo: Álvaro Minguito CC BY SA 2.0

Event videos from streaming:

• Day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R6yxQD6GTs
• Day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meE36QM2Tgk
• Day 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoGog-9pmqA
• Day 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu66X1R_trU

Blog articles about Democracy Lab:

• From the squares to decentralized politics
• Projects and tools that will open democracy
• Networks, technologies and open, collaborative narrative
  

From post-capitalism to collective intelligence

The Democratic Cities event culminated to the two-day International Conference, offering unique setting of interviews, conversations, panels, and debates with 35 speakers all around Europe. With keynotes like Manuela Carmena, Julian Assange, Paul Mason, and Raquel Rolnik, we explored the future of digital democracy. 

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández 

During her conversation with Paul Mason, journalist for The Guardian, Manuela Carmena reminded us that “power has always left viruses behind,” and warned –along with others– about whose hands technology is in. “We must be careful: we political administrators should be the ones determining technological needs, and not the other way around,” she concluded. Many eyes and ears listened carefully to this woman who is leading a whole new way of doing politics bottom-up. Her message to the young: “You’re the generation that will change this country’s state of affairs and will build a different kind of democracy.”

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández 

A few minutes later, from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (where he remains confined), Julian Assange had a conversation via streaming with Pablo Soto, a Citizen Participation and Transparency councilor in Madrid. The Wikileak’s founder talked about the TTIP (concerning which Madrid has declared itself a free city), the civil upheavals in the Arab world, the 15-M and other global mobilizations, and the corruption cases uncovered by Wikileaks, laying greater stress on something that did not go unnoticed: “Protesting is not enough, we must break the power structures.” Soto recalled that Assange’s arrest was illegal and asked for his release: “Don’t give up, we look forward to seeing you back in Madrid!”

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández

D-CENT partners spoke in several panels and sessions. Project co-ordinator Francesca Bria (Nesta) opened the conference with Setting the scene: Technologies of the Democratic City, chaired a session Post-capitalism, digital commons and democratic cities, and gave Closing remarks with Miguel Arana Catania. Jaromil Rojo (Dyne.org) gave introduction to the discussion between Pablo Soto and Julian Assange on the 27 May. Marco Sachy (Dyne.org) spoke in a session titled Global hacktivism for democracy, Joonas Pekkanen (City of Helsinki / Forum Virium Helsinki) spoke in a session titled Building a network of Cities of Change: the new democratic institutionality and the constituent power of the commons.

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández

And as a surprise, Birgitta Jónsdóttir (International Modern Media Institute/President of the Pirate Parliamentary Group in Iceland) appeared via video conference as part of the Closing remarks on the 28th of May. “Hello Madrid. It’s up to us to fix things, if we want to be the Robin Hoods of power, the architects of change, in this time of transition. This is our chance to shape the world. We are the future,” was her greetings to the full house in Madrid.

Photo: David Fernández CC BY SA 2.0

Blog articles about the International Conference:

• Activism and technology for a global democracy
• From post-capitalism to collective intelligence

Event video from streaming:

• Clip 1: http://livestream.com/museo-reina-sofia/events/5457128/videos/124236457
• Clip 2: http://livestream.com/museo-reina-sofia/events/5457128/videos/124257750
• Clip 3: http://livestream.com/museo-reina-sofia/events/5457128/videos/124354009
• Clip 4: http://livestream.com/museo-reina-sofia/events/5457128/videos/124368423

The Democratic Cities event was organised by D-CENT, Nesta, Medialab-Prado, Museum Reina Sofia, City of Madrid, City of Barcelona, and supported by Labodemo, redecentralize.org.

Photos: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández and Elvira Megías, source Medialab Prado Fickr

Photo gallery: https://www.flickr.com/photos/medialab-prado/with/27211525492

The network resulting from the #DCENTMadrid, #DemocraticCities, #CiudadesDemocraticas, Democratic Cities event organized on the 23–28 May 2016. Picture by Pablo Aragón and Alberto Bicho.

The resulting graph, produced by Pablo Aragón and Alberto Bicho, confirms a dense, thick and fairly transversal network. After applying the modularity function, which groups together interrelated nodes, the network is split into different communities.

The orange community, composed of 535 nodes, revolves round the MediaLab Prado profile (@MediaLabPrado), the most influential of the whole event. The community includes MediaLab Prado users and some of the participants in the sessions that were being held in this space, like @bienpensado (Javier Arteaga), @urbanohumano (Doménico di Siena), @WikipoliicaJal and @urbanbetas.

The pale blue community, composed of 471 users, consists of Madrid-based institutions, such as the Reina Sofìa National Museum (@museoreinasofia) and Madrid City Council (@MADRID). One major point to note is the prominence of Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena’s profile (@ManuelaCarmena), the node in this community with the most replicated content.

The green community, with 325 users, is clearly headed by the D-CENT Project (@dcentproject). It features influential international players in the fields of democracy and technology, most of whom use the English language. Particularly strong are the nodes for @nesta_uk (joint organiser of the event), @paulmasonnews (journalist Paul Mason), @RichDecibels (Richard D. Bartlett, founder of the Loomio tool), @francesca_bria (D-CENT co-ordinator) and @TreborS (academic Trebor Scholz).

In the purple community, comprising 265 users, the dialogue is woven by influential players in digital policy, social movements and technopolitics, like Julian Assange, Pablo Soto (in charge of Madrid City Council’s participation), Javier Toret and Baki Youssoufou (from French movement Nuit Debout). There is a sub-community, whose main node is Pedro Kumamoto, from Jalisco Wikipolitics. The purple community is a key one, as it connects almost all the conversations.

The dark blue community, with 104 users, is fairly mixed. Although most of its members are leading activists and Brazilian academics (like Sergio Amadeu, Raquel Rolnik, Marcelo Branco and Davi Miranda), this community also includes Birgitta Jónsdóttir (Pirate Party of Iceland) and Natalie Fenton (Goldsmiths University of London).

The network resulting from the #DemocracyLab, Democracy Lab event organised 23–27 May 2016. Picture by Pablo Aragón and Alberto Bicho.

The network resulting from the #DemocracyLab hashtag gives an overall view of the sessions, workshops and working groups held between 23 and 27 May at MediaLab Prado. A new feature of the graph corresponding to the whole event highlights the existence of a new community (green) with social movements, groups and players connected with the city. At the same time, applying the betweenness centrality (intermediation) parameter foregrounds the @abriendomadrid profile (from Madrid City Council participation department), @BarillariM5S (Davide Barillari, Movimento 5 Stelle) and blog @CodigoAbiertoCC.

The dialogue between the general event network and that of #DemocracyLab shows a large number of shared patterns. When there are clear hubs (more influential nodes) and clusters (sets of key nodes at the epicentre of a community), the conversation between democratic cities is open, cooperative and transversal. Some nodes are connected to several communities simultaneously. These nodes, like @iacocoba and @medialabprado, strengthen weak links, building bridges and relationships between different communities.

The network resulting from the #CiudadesDemocráticas event hints at a future of open institutions and asymmetric, international and transversal dialogues between the many players in search of new horizons for citizen involvement.

Original article: http://democratic-cities.cc/democratic-cities-collaborative-transnational-networks

The EU-funded D-CENT project develops next generation tools for online democracy and participation. In Helsinki, the piloting has focused on creating ways for citizens to follow the decision making process of the City of Helsinki.

On the 25th of May, the public beta of the democracy tool developed as part of the D-CENT Helsinki pilot was launched as Decisions Helsinki. As part of the launch, Open Knowledge Labs Helsinki, Forum Virium Helsinki and the 6AIKA project arranged a joint event for local and national government representatives and developers to raise awareness on the D-CENT tools and especially the decision API’s and tools such as the one developed in the D-CENT project. An earlier prototype from 2015 can be viewed here.

The prototyping has been well-timed as the Six City Strategy is gearing up to expand the lessons learned to the other big cities in Finland. The Six City Strategy and Open and Smart Services strategy for sustainable urban development carried out by the six largest cities in Finland: Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Tampere, Turku and Oulu. The strategy will be carried out between 2014 and 2020 and is funded by the EU with up to 80 million euros.

The decisions data API is one of the five API’s that will be synchronized across the six cities. It provides developers with all the decisions made by the City administrative bodies and individual civil servants in a structured format over an API. The D-CENT Decisions prototype and the user research carried out during the project will help make sure that the tools will benefit citizens in all the cities.

New participation model for Helsinki

The City of Helsinki is increasing its efforts to develop open source tools that leverage the software and research findings of the D-CENT project. Most notably, the city council has decided that the whole citizen participation model of the city will be redesigned in the collaborative co-design effort during the second half of 2016 and rolled out in 2017. Contact between city representatives and D-CENT tool developers and partners in Reykjavik, Barcelona and Madrid help the City of Helsinki to utilise the best tools for citizen empowerment.

The new participation model benefits from the research findings of the D-CENT project. The City Council wants the new participation model to allow citizen ideas from different areas of the city to be linked to the formal decision making processes when the restructuring of the City’s departments takes effect in 2017. The council also required that the model include tools for participatory budgeting. Potentially this could mean a similar model of supporting bottom-up ideas on the city level and in the neighbourhoods as currently in Madrid (60 million euro in 2016) and Paris (more than 100m€ in 2016).

Unique work on transparency

Helsinki is the first city to open up all of its decision making data in structured format. This means tens of thousands of municipal decisions annually as the data covers not only the Mayor’s decisions and the decisions of the City Board and City Council, but also the decisions of all the committees and boards of the city and the individual civil servants who make decision. The API – called Open Ahjo – provides the data in structured format with geo-location and keyword tags included. Traditionally municipal decisions have not been available to this detail. And the decisions that have been published online have been in PDF format to HTML at best making it very hard if not impossible to build any citizen engaging services using that information.

The internationally unique data opened by the City of Helsinki is an interesting testing ground for new citizen engagement tools. Although the data is public, there are as to date, no user-oriented and citizen-managed services that allow people to make use (get informed/notifies and to react to the decision data.

Apps ahead

Helsinki is now researching what kind of bottom-up participation platforms it could provide to citizens and how it could integrate these platforms to the official decision-making processes of the city.

Helsinki is already leveraging the work done in D-CENT in its internal development projects and roadmap. For example, the open source Open City App – a native mobile app for Helsinki and any other interested City – has adopted the philosophies and technical solutions delivered in the D-CENT project. The users will be notified via the mobile app when there are decisions, events, reservations, news and other activities related to the city and their active citizenship.

The ongoing open source projects of the City of Helsinki (along with links to the Github projects) are showcased at http://dev.hel.fi/projects.

Joonas Pekkanen, e-participation tools, City of Helsinki, joonas.pekkanen(at)hel.fi

Read more:
D-CENT Researches Helsinki Municipal Decisions as Social Objects

“There is no democracy without privacy.” “Our personal information is the 21st century’s new oil and it needs protection and anonymity.” The international conference #DemocraticCities ended yesterday, after 35 speakers from around the world had shared projects, experiences, stories, and proposals on activism, participation, democracy, transparency, and privacy. Is it possible to build new ways to govern? “We are the future,” stated Birgitta Jónsdóttir, in a surprising, virtual closing for the event, “We are the Robin Hoods of power, the architects of change that will shape the world.” Organized by D-CENT Project and MediaLab Prado, an intense week of democratic and technological connections has come to an end, as the Cities for Change Network begins operating.
How can technology serve democracy? How can transparency and privacy coexist? We can’t avoid being connected but what are the real hazards behind these technologies? Who controls our information and is trading in it? How to avoid data tyranny?

The last day of the #DemocraticCities event began with a debate as interesting as it is necessary: “Freedom and technological sovereignty in the era of digital surveillance”. This was the leading question and the Brazilian college professor Sergio Amadeu answered it: “Technologies are ambiguous; people are happy using them but we must start decrying the dangers that come with the control of data by corporations. Data bank crossing is very dangerous. The intertwining of our genetic data with that of Facebook, with that of our incomes, and everything that Google knows about us amounts to totalitarianism and we ought to denounce it.”

David Fernández MediaLab Prado, Urban Betas CC BY-SA 2.0

Our data is the new oil of the 21st century, summarized Gemma Galdón, expert security consultant: “Both the problem and the solution are related to data management.” And she added: “A lot of money is being made with data, but neither economy nor wealth are being generated. We’re creating technological databases but we’re not protecting them. It’s a real scandal that IBM be the one in charge of creating anonymity technologies.” In the words of Francesca Bria: “Nation states have stopped investing in digital infrastructures, and it’s nearly impossible to regulate Google and Facebook because they rule the web. We have to create public, collective infrastructures.”

Global Hacktivism and Cities for Change Network

As a common techno-political space of autonomy and self-organization, #DemocraticCities gave voice to outstanding experiences from democracy activists coming from Korea, Mexico, Australia, Taiwan and the Netherlands. And to the true architects of what is being done in Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, Oviedo, Helsinki, Barcelona and Porto Alegre. “Cities are certainly the driving forces behind change towards an open government,” stated Clémence Pène, Paris City Council Digital Director. They are reaching agreements, doing things together, and finding new ways of digital engagement: the Cities for Change Network has taken off.

Elvira Megías CC BY-SA 2.0

The surprise arrived via streaming and in real time. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, President of the Pirate Parliamentary Group in Iceland closed the event saying: “Hello Madrid. It’s up to us to fix things, if we want to be the Robin Hoods of power, the architects of change, in this time of transition. This is our chance to shape the world. We are the future.”

A wonderful week has come to an end. We’ll keep in touch!

Photo gallery of the May 28th session

Social media  hashtag: #DemocraticCities #DCENTMadrid

**********

Article translated by Georgina Reparado, edited by Susa Oñate – Guerrilla Translation

Original article published at: http://democratic-cities.cc/activism-and-technology-for-a-global-democracy

“I’m an older lady, an occasional politician. What’s a mayor? I’m just an ordinary citizen that happens to lead the city of Madrid.” Manuela Carmena, mayor of Madrid, and Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange gave the two keynote addresses at the “DemocraticCities” international conference that took place on Friday and Saturday at the Reina Sofia Museum. The meeting was organized by D-CENT Project, in cooperation with MediaLab-Prado. Paving the way for this event, the rest of the week we took part in #DemocracyLab, and sessions, presentations and workshops about direct democracy, citizen participation, commons networks and free software. Politics, technology, cities.

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández (La Manada) Medialab Prado

The city and its spaces, participation, shared management, citizens, our politicians, the technology that allows us to be connected as networks, post-capitalism, universal income, the uberization of the economy, data as a business, referendums, neoliberalism, tools to democratize cities, citizen innovation, commons networks, Wikileaks, and the Mayor that wants to remain an ordinary person… All of these matters, and some other too, is what Democratic Cities is about.

Friday’s sessions were as intense as they were diverse. Together with the aforementioned interviews/conversations between Carmena and Assange, several conferences and three discussion panels took place. They explored private property and capitalism, democracy, the economy, technology, security and privacy, or democratic participation systems as direct democracy activism. “I try to redefine politics,” said the Mayor, “because real change means modifying the structures; the time of laws as we know them is gone.” During her talk/conversation with Paul Mason, journalist for The Guardian, Carmena reminded us that “power has always left viruses behind,” and warned –along with others– about whose hands technology is in. “We must be careful: we political administrators should be the ones determining technological needs, and not the other way around,” she concluded. Many eyes and ears listened carefully to this woman who is leading a whole new way of doing politics bottom-up. Yesterday, she sent a message to the young: “You’re the generation that will change this country’s state of affairs and will build a different kind of democracy.” The Mayor stressed an unusual topic in political discourse: “Aesthetics and the citizens’ desire for happiness must be taken into consideration.”

A few minutes later, from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (where he remains confined), Julian Assange had a conversation via streaming with Pablo Soto, a Citizen Participation and Transparency councilor in Madrid. The Wikileak’s founder talked about the TTIP (concerning which Madrid has declared itself a free city), the civil upheavals in the Arab world, the 15-M and other global mobilizations, and the corruption cases uncovered by Wikileaks, laying greater stress on something that did not go unnoticed: “Protesting is not enough, we must break the power structures.” Assange insisted on the lack of freedoms and the risk implied in the fact that private companies own the technology. Soto recalled that Assange’s arrest was illegal and asked for his release. He left with a rousing goodbye to a moved audience that answered: “Don’t give up, we look forward to seeing you back in Madrid!”

Raquel Rolnik, Brazilian expert in urban politics and housing, did not mince words: “Public space can’t become the State’s private property,” and “Financial capital is the real cloud that’s razing the planet”. Rolnik openly criticized the Smart City model because it reduces citizens’ public space, and sent a powerful, poetic plea against neoliberalism: “We’re at a time of commons-building; we need imagination,” she concluded.

Post-Capitalism, Digital Commons and Democratic Cities

“We have to build consensus,” said Paul Mason. “We need an alliance”, footnoted scholar and activist Trebor Scholz in a discussion panel around post-capitalism and the need to create new political and economical frameworks. The journalist pointed out how the TICs facilitate a utopian socialism, as philosopher Francesco “Bifo” Berardi noted: “Capitalism is dead, but we live inside its corpse and we haven’t found a way out. From Madrid, things look promising but the dark side is that a sovereignist, nationalist front is emerging.” “Precarious employment isn’t exactly empowering,” said a brilliant Francesca Bria, whose statement revealed a not so evident fact: “Silicon Valley is interested in universal income because it will allow them to get rid of the welfare state.” So how do we transit from capitalism to a post-capitalism, and not to a new version of feudalism? Scholz’s presentation added reality bites on the economy’s uberization and the new digital cooperatives arising in New York. “We have to build open platforms that allow cooperation through technology, and develop a collaborative economy that restores the priority to workers.”

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 David Fernández (La Manada) Medialab Prado

Many things end and many others begin. How do we find the autonomy needed to re-program society? Andreas Gross was there in spirit when Bruno Kaufmann, president of Falun’s Democracy Commission (Sweden), reminded us of his definition for democracy: “It’s like looking at yourself in the mirror and not liking what you see, and not breaking the mirror but trying to improve it.” In the debate “New Opportunities for Re-Inventing Politics in the Digital Era,” the urbanist Adam Greenfield asked rhetorically: “What does being and individual mean?” And Kaufmann asked: “We need more direct democracy. What’s the next step?” Further questions and proposals arrived from Evgeny Morozov, who critiziced Facebook’s feudalism and its personal information policy: “If citizens were actually in power, how would we establish a common property regime for this information?”

Councilor Soto closed the session thus: “It’s stimulating to see people from all over the world here kindling collective intelligence. And do you realize that this is happening in a museum? Anything is possible in Madrid.”

Photo gallery of #DemocraticCities May 27th session: https://www.flickr.com/photos/medialab-prado/sets/72157666407254154

Social media hashtag #DemocraticCities #DCENTMadrid

……

Article translated by Georgina Reparado, edited by Susa Oñate – Guerrilla Translation

Original article: http://democratic-cities.cc/from-post-capitalism-to-collective-intelligence

From the Hackathon for Democracy to D-CENT Project’s ground-breaking undertakings and the creation of Red de Comunes Democráticos (Democratic Commons Network), four days at MediaLab Prado were packed with sharing, surveying, debating, and suggesting ideas as to where the world is heading regarding direct democracy, citizen participation, commons networks, and open source software. Techno-politics, new urban models, social innovation, and apps and platforms to share and invigorate around #DemocracyLab. From tomorrow on, the event #DemocraticCities moves to the Reina Sofía with presentations by over 30 leading politicians and activists.

Elvira Megías CC BY-SA 2.0

Rethinking democracy. It’s been four days, one hundred participants, five working teams (organization, political thinking, technology, communication, facilitation and media center), lots of collaboratively written TitanPads and, above all, a lot of ideas and willingness. The Democratic Commons Network has been set up! It was created somewhere between MediaLab’s Prado Auditorium and Bar, from Monday until today, Thursday, in a run of sessions in which Telegram channels, created as a means of communication, have been literally fuming.

What is the Network of Democratic Commons? “We’re people from different cities that, from 2015, organize ourselves online in an open, horizontal, transparent, and reconfigurable manner. We want a society that is completely democratic in every aspect, boosted by the opportunities afforded by online collaboration and work, both digitally and face-to-face. How do we do it? By creating, liberating and sharing organizational models, technologies, practices, legal material, narratives, and open resources that configure collaborative participation in democratic ways.”

Don’t miss the campaign launch event that will be held in the next few days!

Photo: Elvira Megías CC BY-SA 2.0

Hackers for Democracy

Coding Democracy has taken place on two consecutive days, Wednesday and Thursday. It consisted in a hackathon to contribute to the biggest participation open source tool now available in Spain: Consul (used by decide.madrid.es and exported and adapted to other municipalities). Expert developers from Madrid’s City Council led this informative workshop.

Photo: David Fernández MediaLab Prado, Urban Betas CC BY-SA 2.0

And as a closing event for #DemocracyLab, one of the two cornerstones of the Democratic Cities gathering, this afternoon we’ve held D-CENT Project: Technologies and Institutions for the 21st Century, where eight international speakers have addressed new and different ways of democracy-building around the world. They’ve also introduced electronic voting experimental tools (Agora Voting, Freecoin, Dyne.org, etc.).

Andreas Karitzis, development consultant and independent researcher, along with researcher Paolo Gerbaudo, have analyzed contemporary citizen movements and digital culture. Gerbaudo, director of London’s Kings College Digital Culture Centre, has advocated for a thought-provoking division between “techno-populism” (referendum oriented) and “citizenism” (bottom-up). And so the audience began debating: “Progressive governments want to work bottom-up but they don’t trust models that try to catalyze collective intelligence. That’s why we must make headway fast in collective intelligence organizations.”

Francesca Bria, coordinator of the EU’s D-CENT Project (the largest direct democracy and digital currency project in Europe), was also resounding: “One cannot govern along with technological companies that trade our personal information.”

Decentralized citizens and engaged technologies. For a direct democracy and economic empowerment.

Friday and Saturday we’ll meet in Madrid’s Reina Sofía.

Photo gallery of #DemocracyLab’s 26th May session

Social media hashtag #DemocraticCities

*****

Article translated by Georgina Reparado, edited by Susa Oñate – Guerrilla Translation

Original article published at: http://democratic-cities.cc/networks-technologies-and-open-collaborative-narratives

From Paris to Iceland, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Spain. Researchers, municipal technicians and activists from different countries have shared their new batch of direct democracy strategies, open source software, and citizen participation, in the context of Democracy Lab, at the Democratic Cities: Commons Technology and Right to a Democratic City gathering organized by the D-CENT Project and Madrid’s Town Council.

“We’re talking about an interconnected, global cycle of civil disturbances between 2010 and 2016 that are re-shaping collective communication.” “We are saying that conventional social theories on mobilization are no longer viable.” It was with these words that Javier Toret–researcher and 15-M activist–opened the session “Techno-Politics and Web Movements: From 15-M to Nuit Debout,” the first of a series of talks at Democracy Lab, the participative section of the conference Democratic Cities: Commons Technology and the Right to a Democratic City. The event will be held in MediaLab Prado until Thursday, May 26th; it will revolve around democratic innovation and recent participatory technologies and will conclude at the Reina Sofía Museum on Friday the 27th and Saturday the 28th, with an international conference and the intervention of leading politicians and activists.

Egypt (Arab Spring), Tunisia, Mexico, Spain (15-M), Hong Kong (#OccupyHonkKong, #UmbrellaMovement), United States (Occupy), Brazil and now France (Nuit Debout). “We are dealing with citizens’ movements and collective identities in connected societies, in which the concept of techno-politics lies in the understanding of this new reality as well as the strategic vision and tactical use of digital tools for a collective dynamics.” “What we’re saying is that we’ve got to make an effort and learn from science about mobilization and cooperation models.”

Toret shared time, space and presentation with Baki Youssoufou, member and activist of the recent French movement Nuit Debout, who explained to a captivated audience the development and use of communication and technology during the current upheaval in the Place de la Republique in Paris. The Spanish activist brought up questions such as How are emotions spread on – and offline?, What do the connections between the web and the brain look like?, along with observations regarding the course of action from the streets to the web to mass media. “We’ve learnt to concentrate our energies on the street layer, but we’re not present in our countries’ mass media until we show up in the Washington Post.”

Everything adds up when it comes to techno-political practices: “Every single upheaval has kept major fan pages, Facebook events have also been of great importance, Twitter has enabled us to align collective action in real time, and streaming is the live revolution because it allows us to build mobilization in real time.”

NUIT DEBOUT (which literally means “Up All Night”) has had a strong connection with the 15-M. Yossoufou narrated on Monday, in MediaLab Prado’s Auditorium, the way in which the movement is communicating its own story without intermediaries. “The mainstream media showed nothing but the conflicts, so we decided to create our own Media Center,” which is coordinated via Telegram, and where we’re developing a communication strategy based on an alternative discourse to that of the media. “Based on the experience of the 15-M, said Youssoufou, we decided to transmit what we are and what we do in Nuit Debout via Twitter as a source of information to journalists.” Actually, the first mention of the upheaval on the French media came from a storify in Le Monde that picked live tweets from journalists.

Baki Youssoufou, activist and member of the current French movement Nuit Debout.

WikiNuitDebout is another of the unequivocal tools presented: all the existing information about the movement, the actions in every city and committee, social media, working tools, proposals, ideas and inquiries are all gathered in this collaborative platform. As Baki Youssoufou explains, although Nuit Debout rose as a protest to the Labor Law reform known as El Khomri Law, the movement relies on a broad social base and intends to “change it all.” “We are staring at a new type of democracy, in which independence is much greater. And awareness is being raised.”

Gunnar Grímsson, CEO, Citizens Foundation. Photo: La Manada CC BY-SA 2.0

Artificial Intelligence to raise citizen engagement

So, where exactly is the international citizen participation debate heading? This is what Twitter users were asking yesterday. Gunnar Grímsson, CEO, Citizens Foundation (Reykjavik, Iceland), showed CF’s huge achievements: 600,000 people have used its tools, apps and software in order to improve electronic democracy in several countries.

He also assured that apathy is today’s great problem. “Except when people are very upset, the hardest thing is to have them show up and be engaged,” Grímsson said in Madrid. “The core question is to get citizens to participate: that’s the major challenge in every crowd-sourcing project.”

Citizens Foundation works to improve citizens’ democratic processes. They have recently launched a new version of the Your Priorities software, which allows for the creation of communities and groups for civil participation around any issue in a simple and rapid manner.

Grímsson described the participatory process in Iceland, as well as the set of digital tools that were developed, giving the interface a major significance and clearly betting on artificial intelligence (AI) and on the use of more sophisticated tools that could be used to interact off- and online. He supports the argument that “the digital is new but it is not a substitute for the analogical,” and accordingly defends an offline/online combination with the trio: brainstorm online, evaluate offline and vote on- and offline. He also made his claim for open source, free and transparent software.

One of the working groups of the Democratic Commons Network Workshop in MediaLab Prado, Madrid. Photo: Elvira Megías CC BY-SA 2.0

Spanish laws restrict civil and political participation

And from Iceland to Spain, the four speakers of the session “Direct Democracy: Legal Strategies for Local Implementation” concurred in openly questioning the existing legal boundaries over direct democracy processes. Gregorio Planchuelo, form the Madrid City Council, highlighted that “citizen participation is quite limited by our laws. In order to seek any information, you need a Government authorization, which can take a whole term.”

According to the jurist Francisco Jurado, neither the People’s Right of Initiative (ILP, Iniciativa Legislativa Popular) nor the referendum can be considered direct political participation formulas. Jurado criticized the “futility” of the motions in which representatives invest so much of their time even though “they end up being good for nothing.” He also announced that the Andalusian Parliament is working to transform the People’s Right of Initiative into a People’s Initiative Action for the co-creation of laws. “Legislation is quite obsolete and we are trying to go around restrictions and update democracy for the 21st century,” Jurado declared.

Amaia Aguirreolea, in charge of the Participation Department of Donostia-San Sebastián, told how the first thing they did when getting this department under way was to “explore this thing called direct democracy.” Juan Carlos Madroñal, Founder of Más Democracia, concluded: “It’s overtly absurd that a city council should need government permission when it intends to propose a referendum. It doesn’t happen anywhere in the world.”

Movements, citizenship, and politics in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia

Latin-American participatory experience has been around for a long time. The session “Latin America: Participation and Techno-Political Innovation” tried to break down the unilateral perspective. Marcelo Branco, a long standing activist put forward a historical development of the participative processes in Porto Alegre (Brazil), and concluded: “Without direct participatory democracy and citizen empowerment, governments are hostage to parliamentary alliances and corrupt politicians.”

Marcelo Branco, activist from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Photo: La Manada CC BY-SA 2.0

This session made public innovating experiences such as the world’s first School of Political Innovation (Escuela de Innovación Política), an Open Government project of the State of Nariño (Colombia), or Wikipolítica, a political organization without party affiliations that has developed an interesting participatory political process in Jalisco, Mexico. Diego Arredondo, in charge of Wikipolítica’s communication and technology, narrated the case of Pedro Kumamoto’s new way of making politics by way of the community. Or Natascha Symanksi, São Paulo’s Digital Hub designer, who highlighted that not just governments but also citizens must understand technology as a political strategy

In Democratic Cities event we are re-thinking democracy by means of the new digital approaches and always taking the human aspect into account. Movements that are local but also global. Free, connected, and coordinated cities to advance citizen participation. Collective intelligence movements that are setting a democratic lead around the globe.

*****

Article translated by Georgina Reparado, edited by Susa Oñate – Guerrilla Translation

Original article published at: http://democratic-cities.cc/from-the-squares-to-decentralized-politics

“The best open source tool is affectivity.” This isn’t an ordinary saying in an ordinary context. Its author, Diego, of the Todo por la Praxis collective, spoke at the session Urban Betas: Tools for an Open Source City that took place yesterday afternoon in #DemocracyLab, the international section of #DemocraticCities that is being held in MediaLab Prado. #DemocraticCities is a global gathering space that aims to improve democracy with open, collaborative technologies.

What does city-building mean? Is there any other way to organize a city? How can we make public things more public? Adolfo Estalella, anthropologist and researcher, tossed around these questions for which there aren’t closed answers yet, only open doors: “Urbanism is no longer in the hands of architects and experts but it’s being designed by citizens themselves through the collection of tools and recycled materials.”

The main goal of this interesting, intense session was to explore the material and documentary sources that make a city amenable for its inhabitants. We met different urban projects such as Red de Arquitecturas Colectivas (Collective Architecture Network), ARchive TAZ (an observatory that collects experiences from citizen-organized spaces: from urban gardens to community centres to cultural spaces), Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas (Citizen Initiative Incubator), Caseando (open-city housing tool for collectives), the mapping platform CIVICS, Ciudad Escuela, the Civicwise platform that connects citizens, Territoris Oblidats (Forgotten Territories), Ciudad Huerto (an educational itinerary that collects experiences and knowledge from Madrid’s urban community gardens), Mapa de los Madriles (Madrid Map), Red de Espacios Ciudadanos (REC, Citizen Spaces Network), or MICOS: school-based micro-interventions (that transform children’s spaces in a collaborative manner). These are all tools that refresh our relationship with all things urban: city maps, urban archives and city strolls, hand-made furniture, citizen infrastructure, digital platforms, and drafts of cities.

So, given that cities can build themselves up, Estalella pointed out, vacant lots have been opened for cultivation and empty city spaces made available to citizen’s creativity. Not only is this manual urbanism handcrafted, but it also produces the manuals themselves that document the process, thus liberating knowledge.

What does city-building mean?, the researcher and anthropologist Alberto Cosín kept wondering in Urban Betas. The concept of the new city implies a huge new challenge: New property forms, the idea of the commons, and new license and technology mechanisms. “We’ve learnt a lot concerning licenses in the open source sphere –Corsín said–, but questions such as secondary civil liability have not yet been resolved: We must come up with cooperative systems that can ensure these infrastructures.” Cities are very complex objects where technical and urban aspects as well as digital technologies intermingle. And free tools are not just to be used in public spaces, but also in our homes.

“Things happen because people get together and share,” said one of the promoters of Red de Espacios Ciudadanos. “Can you imagine democratic cities with spaces available for citizens and guarantees for everyone?,” asked a Twitter user during the debate. In the Urban Betas session there was a clear need for urbanizing democracy in squares, gardens and mundane infrastructures with different property regimes, open infrastructure and collective documentation. A clear need to create an urban activism that will ignore neither the old ways of city-building nor the need to interconnect it with common technology.

The path is being drawn up, from the squares to our homes. Some have already begun to think the city with languages beyond text or words. This is the new urban pedagogy, built of knowledge that becomes power.

David Fernández MediaLab Prado, Urban Betas CC BY-SA 2.0

From Korea to Berlin, Projects to Build a Citizen’s Politics

Centralized, decentralized, and distributed power were also debated in the Unconference on open democracy and a decentralized internet that took place yesterday and continues today, Thursday, in MediaLab Prado’s Auditorium. In a dynamic manner, every participant –from Korea, Berlin, London, Madrid, and Barcelona– briefly presented their project. A total of 14 initiatives were shared throughout the day in hands-on workshops organized collaboratively. There were apps, tools and open source software that emphasized the improvement of citizen empowerment processes, decentralized power, privacy and human rights.

Álvaro Minguito, MediaLab Prado, D-Cent CC BY-SA 2.0

From strategies to foster the active involvement of citizens through crowdsourcing, apps to re-imagine and improve your city (Hackity App), and open source decision-making tools for massive groups (BaoQu) to data and research journalism platforms (Pattrn), a personal server prepared to free you from spying services (FreedomBox) or a real time, collaborative API and text editor (Swellrt.org).

These are projects that aim to improve cities and make them more open and democratic. Redecentralize.org, a project that intends to unite communities interested in decentralization, presents itself this way: “Silently, some geeks are decentralizing the web. Who are they? Why are they doing it? What new technologies are they using? How is that changing the world?

Photo gallery of #DemocracyLab’s 25th May session.

Social media: #DemocraticCities

********

Article translated by Georgina Reparado, edited by Susa Oñate – Guerrilla Translation

Original article published at: http://democratic-cities.cc/projects-and-tools-that-will-open-democracy

The Democracy Lab Unconference (25-26 May) will include lightning talks, hands on workshops and presentations selected and scheduled by attendees on the day.

Our recent Open Call was looking for groups and individuals to contribute to the sessions. It produced the amazing 60 competing proposals from different disciplines, all very promising.

We are now happy to introduce some of chosen participants, please see the list below. They are all pioneers in launching new digital democracy tools or starting a discussion understanding citizen rights from a different perspectives, using the opportunities given by new media.

The Unconference format enables you to meet and chat with these thought leaders.

1. Sofía de Roa

Sofía de Roa is a Spanish journalist. She studied Political Campaign at Ortega-Marañon Institute, and Digital Citizienship, Culture and Comunication at Madrid’s Media Lab Prado and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, to research on how to improve the democracy at political parties, allowing public scrutiny and participation, by introducing new forms of internal operation. In particular, she suggests to implement a Quality Indicators System, a method promoted from Asociación Calidad y Cultura Democráticas, organization where she belongs from 2013. She participated at 15M Movement and municipalist project Ganemos Madrid. Currently, she works at Podemos, developing the transparency system.

2. Oliver Sauter

Oliver Sauter is the founder of the project “WorldBrain – Verifying the Internet with Science”, on the quest against (scientific) misinformation and for scientific literacy. Sauter is an Internet fanboy, thinker and tinker, open-Source and Open Data advocate.

3. Javier de la Cueva

Javier de la Cueva holds a Licentiate degree in Law and is Doctor of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. He works as a practicing lawyer. Amongst other cases, he has handled the defence of cases related to usage of free intellectual property licenses and diverse technological platforms. Beside his work as a lawyer and as a lecturer, he is currently engaged in programming technological projects, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Fundación Ciudadana Civio.

4. Manuel Rodríguez

Manu Rodriguez is data researcher and sociologist training. His career has been linked to data analysis and technology, he has spent more than 10 years measuring and analysing data for large companies. Rodriguez is a professor at McKinsey Social Initiative and ISDI. He feels great passion for understanding human motivations through research.

5. Philippe Baret

Philippe Baret is a French freelance journalist and online editor, technical and crowd-sourcing editor at FreedomBox, personal cloud server.

6. Elisa Lewis

Elisa Lewis is an expert in civic innovation and entrepreneurship. She has co-founded “Les Cols Verts”, a social enterprise promoting urban agriculture for vulnerable people. She is the vice-president of “Démocratie Ouverte”, a community gathering elected representatives, members of institutions, social entrepreneurs and citizens developing creative solutions to upgrade democracy in the French-speaking world. She is the co-author of a book on democratic innovations around the world (to be published this summer– La Découverte).

7. Joseph Kim

Joseph Kim has co-fouded WAGL and worked as Project Manager for publication job and global networking. Before that he joined Youth Party Korea for the general election in 2012 as one of the Party’s spokesmen and participated Occupy Seoul National University in May 2011. He recently works on proposing a new model of an innovative party or a crowd-sourced political platform based on citizen participation for South Korea.

8. Maro Horta Maro

Horta is a Human Rights lawyer and a passionate of New Technologies that can help those in need to improve their lives. This is why he is focused on the FairCoop project aiming to create a new economic system to reduce inequalities among human beings. In that sense, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are a new development that can help to achieve these goals.

The event activities, spread to 6 days, are organised by a group of organisations working with direct democracy, citizen participation, and bottom-up initiatives.

D-CENT (Decentralized Citizens ENgagement Technologies) is the largest European project on direct democracy. It has created open, secure and privacy-aware tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment. D-CENT has run from October 2013 to May 2016, and it is co-funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and innovation. It comprises a strong international consortium with nine partners from across Europe. The Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city is the final event of the D-CENT project, showcasing and celebrating its results especially in the International conference organised on the 27-28 of May.

NESTA (UK, London) is an independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK. The organisation acts through a combination of practical programmes, investment, policy and research, and the formation of partnerships to promote innovation across a broad range of sectors. Nesta is the coordinator of the D-CENT project.

MEDIA-LAB PRADO is a citizen laboratory of production, research and broadcasting of cultural projects that explores the forms of experimentation and collaborative learning that have emerged from digital networks. It is part of the Department of Culture and Sports (former Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism) of the Madrid City Council. Medialab-Prado aims to operate as an open platform that invites and allows users to configure, alter and modify research and production processes. It is the key organization behind the Democracy Lab, organized on the 23-27 May as part of the event Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city.

MUSEO REINA SOFIA (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia) is Spain’s national museum of 20th-century art. Offering a mixture of national and international temporary exhibitions in its many galleries it is one of the world’s largest museums for modern and contemporary art. Museo Reina Sofia is the event venue of the International Conference organized on the 27-28 May as part of the Democratic Cities – Commons technology and the right to a democratic city event.

In the last yearMADRID CITY COUNCIL has made a firm commitment to direct democracy, participation and transparency. Through the website Decide Madrid, citizen proposals are collected as well as direct interviews and discussion forums facilitated. The City Council has also launched the most ambitious participatory budget in Europe, through which citizens decide the use of 60 million euros. The objective of the City is to move forward and spread direct democracy beyond the city limits: as such, the free software developed for these participatory processes is available to any institution and administration worldwide.

BARCELONA CITY COUNCIL is committed to participatory, transparent and open democracy involving all social groups and citizens. Among the most recent projects is the participatory development of the Municipal Action Plan and the District Action Plans, for which there have been more than 400 physical meetings and contact with more than 30,000 individuals and associations. This engagement has resulted in more than 10,000 proposals being submitted through Decidim Barcelona. Further evidence of the commitment to participation can be seen through the collaborative production of public policies; community management of resources and municipal facilities; and the commitment to transparency and direct interaction by adopting a mix of new technologies and traditional communication with its citizens. The goal is to build a radically democratic city based on direct participation, open governance, urban commons and collective intelligence.