The Internet enables democratic participation without intermediaries. Guanyem Barcelona promotes open and transparent public discussion, where everyone can participate. To achieve this, we need open and transparent online tools. Together with the D-CENT project, Guanyem Barcelona´s digital participation team has developed an improved version of the DemocracyOS software. Here we explain how it works (in Spanish).
D-CENT already has published several research documents. Here’s a short listing of those published so far.
In 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.
The Australian National Development Index, Happy City, HelpAge International, Nesta, the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, the European Network on Measuring Progress and Wikiprogress, invite you to join online discussion about well-being and progress statistics.
A new European-wide project launches which will build decentralized and privacy-aware tools for democratic participation to empower European citizens.
The initiative, D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies), backed by the European Commission, will see the development of new open source, decentralized and privacy-aware digital tools and applications for direct democratic and economic empowerment.
The D-CENT team was on location in Helsinki in the first week of March. The objective was to understand the Finnish context i.e. what kind of issues are active citizens facing when trying to self-organize and coordinate actions. The days were packed with user interviews with people behind citizens initiatives, citizen activists, municipal politicians, members of parliament and civil servants from different ministries and the city of Helsinki.
“The big lesson we’re reflecting here is how to move away from democracy of permanent referendums, binary choices and mere petitions towards the question how do you build in deliberation, conversation and reflection to every step of the democratic process.” – Geoff Mulgan, Nesta CEO
Around a hundred high-level policy makers, academics, activists, communities and hackers attended the D-CENT launch event “Democracy reboot: Re-imagining democracy and currency in Europe” to discuss direct democracy and digital currencies. The event, organized at the 14th of March 2014 in London, launched the project to a wider audience. Read more +
D-CENT builds on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy in Finland, Iceland and Spain. Since October 2013, we have organized pilot workshops in these three countries, talking to people and finding out their needs and requirements for future tools for digital democracy.
On the 8th – 14th of February D-CENT partners travelled to Barcelona, Spain, for a workshop organized by the partner University of Catalunya (UOC). The six-day session involved intensive meetings with local communities, drawing tech visions and sharing experiences.
