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.
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 +
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).
Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelandic Poetician who is currently serving as a member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Pirate Party, and is one of the founders of the party. Birgitta is also the founder and Chairperson of the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), one of the partners in the D-CENT project.
Birgitta has worked as a volunteer and activist for various organizations including WikiLeaks, Saving Iceland, and Friends of Tibet in Iceland. She specializes in lawmaking for the 21st century.
D-CENT interview birgitta jonsdottir vimeo from D-CENT on Vimeo.
This is a ground floor opportunity for the right developer to make an immediate and significant impact on the technology that will drive open democracy and participation for the next decade and beyond.
D-CENT is a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. The project will run from 2013 to 2016. www.dcentproject.eu
We’re now looking for
As Senior User Experience Developer for D-CENT, you will be developing the democracy tools’ front end in co-operation with the back-end development team, designers and users. You will have continuous releases, and continuous feedback from pilot user groups in Helsinki, Barcelona and Reykjavik. There will be continuous support and coaching from the D-CENT Partners, including W3C working groups for Social media and Crypto. For more partners, see: dcentproject.eu/about-us/partners.
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.
