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.