Article archive: May 2014

D-CENT at OuiShare Festival

tumblr_inline_n56uqgn5R71syapwmD-CENT coordinator Francesca Bria participated in the Ouishare Festival, in a session together with Fabrizio Sestini from the European Commission, head of the Collective Awareness CAPS projects portfolio. D-CENT was presented as one of the flagships project of CAPS that can inspire a new wave of innovation building open, decentralized and privacy-aware digital infrastructures for citizens’ engagement and democratic participation. We have been asking Francesca Bria a few questions about the OuiShare session. Read more +

D-CENT in Spain: working on a real time consensus sensor

Screen Shot 2014-05-19 at 6.23.05In Spain we are working with social collectives such as PAH (mortgage victims platform) and X Party to understand the needs of citizen networks, and develop software that can support the daily work of this kind of grassroots organizations for citizen engagement.

The first need we are addressing is that of a real time consensus sensor: it is not about formal voting, but just about having a tool to receive quick feedback, or approximated consensus, from a community.

This is essential for what we call net-work, where the need is that of coordinating the distributed work of many people on different tasks, escaping the bureaucratisation of solemn decision making, which in many contexts risks of just being paralysing.

We are developing a first prototype to be tested in small-medium groups, that allows people to receive instant feedback (+1 or -1, or short comments) on a task their are carrying on, so that the group’s consensus can orient individual work without paralysing it.

We are also following the work of PAH, who recently launched ComPAHs, an integrated responsive app consisting of a mapping tool, real-time polling for rapid decision-making, secure real-time messaging and a topic-based information feed. We are collaborating with PAH, aiming at enhancing the application and making it available to other social collectives.

International CAPS event coming in July

The first international CAPS conference will be organised in Brussels the 1st July – 2nd July 2014. The event joins together the first CAPS pilots and projects, launched with the support of the European Commission in 2013. D-CENT is part of this CAPS family (website: caps2020.eu).

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