How designers and design could improve participation in the democratic process and communication between electors? The essay collection ‘Designing Democracy’ examines this from different perspectives. Francesca Bria, Senior Project Lead in the Nesta Innovation Lab and project coordinator of the D-CENT project, writes about ‘Internet-era citizen movements and political parties’.
Writers: Darryl Chamberlain & Francesca Bria (Nesta)
Representatives of the groups involved in D-CENT met in London to share their experiences. Miguel Arana Catania, of LaboDemo, which is working with Spanish political party Podemos, talked about how he sees the project. Miguel took part in the FutureFest panel hosted by D-CENT titled “Networks, Movements, and Parties: D-CENT and the challenges of the netera politics”.
The 19th century institutions of democracy, such as Parliaments, elections, parties, manifestos democratic assemblies are in great need of revival since they are out of synchronization with the 21st century technologies, norms and collective aspirations. Network parties are appearing in Europe: the Pirate Parties in Iceland, Germany and Sweden; and the Five Star Movement in Italy have pioneered Internet-based decision-making structures. Podemos in Spain, now leading in the national pools, is opening decisions up to large numbers of people through the Internet, involving citizens in shaping policy and sharing their expertise. Read more +
Writer: Dr Igor Calzada
This article aims to connect Iceland and the Basque Country from the democratic regeneration perspective. The time frame chosen for the case studies is the period before and after 2008 global crisis. In Iceland the crisis had an economic and political aspect affecting the self-understanding of the territory as a whole. In the Basque Country it also deals with the current peace process to settle down political violence and its causes. In both cases there are deep underlying democratic regeneration issues. This article is part of a broader research project entitled ‘Benchmarking Future City-Regions’.
Gunnar Grimsson is the CEO of the Citizens Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Reykjavik, Iceland. Citizens Foundation has developed the online open source e-democracy platform Your Priorities and has used it to promote online, democratic debate and increase citizens’ participation in their community in Iceland and worldwide.
D-CENT interview: Gunnar Grimsson from D-CENT on Vimeo.
These are exciting times for new parties, like the UK’s UKIP, Germany’s Alternativ Deutschland, the True Finns and the Swedish Democrats, all of which are benefitting from anger and distrust directed against incumbent politicians and elites. Most are very traditional in their methods, but a few are radically reinventing how parties should work, and here I predict that 2015 will see the emergence of the first Internet-era political party in the UK. Read more +
D-CENT project started in 2013. Since then, we have conducted workshops with communities in the pilot countries Spain, Finland and Iceland, and did an analysis of distributed social networking, identity eco-systems, social data stores and privacy-aware tools.
We continued by merging the technical findings and existing user requirements into technical requirements for the D-CENT platform. In October the technical design document was ready, and plans for pilot implementation were published in November.
The piloting in Iceland focuses on improving and upgrading the online democracy software Your Priorities and utilizing it for D-CENT. The idea is to bring in new functionalities pointed out by users of the Better Reykjavík and Better Iceland websites. Read more +
Editors: Javier Toret, Pablo Aragón, Antonio Calleja-Lopez
In Spain, the purpose is to offer D-CENT tools for the use of citizen movements moving into the electoral arena. The piloting was launched with two new and influential political groups: Podemos at national level and Guanyem Barcelona at municipal level. More than 1000 people have been involved in the tests with D-CENT prototype (based on DemocracyOS) and Appgree software. Read more +
The Finnish pilot of the D-CENT project offers a kit of online tools for active citizens. New kinds of online democracy tools are tested to open up the decision-making of the City of Helsinki and in drafting crowdsourced citizens’ initiatives.
The EU-funded D-CENT project, now in pilot stage, develops next generation tools for online democracy in Helsinki, Barcelona and Reykjavik. The pilot in Helsinki tests a toolkit enabling active citizens to organize into groups and promote their agenda in the context of local decision-making.
“Citizens’ movements are quick and easy to launch online. D-CENT provides tools to make these movements more sustainable and organized”, says Joonas Pekkanen, the project’s democracy expert at Forum Virium Helsinki. Read more +
