D-CENT Showcase and Opportunities for UK Digital Democracy

On the 15th of December, D-CENT was showcased in London for an enthusiastic crowd of 200. The event, titled D-CENT Showcase and Opportunities for UK Digital Democracy was hosted by Nesta, UK innovation charity and D-CENT project coordinator. And we were happy to be onstage to share our insights of our tools and pilots. See full agenda here.

The Digital democracy event was organised in conjunction to our 2nd year EU review, which was a success.

Screen Shot 2015-12-19 at 12.17.24Our team was sharing key findings from our recent work around direct democracy and digital currencies. To sum up the work, we’ve recently published a new tools page, which collect our tools and pilots into one website. In the event, Natalie Eskinazi from Thoughtworks explained how D-CENT tools are built on open source code and open standards,
valuing privacy and security. They form a federated architecture, which means that they can be combined in many ways to support democratic processes.

Learn more about our tools Objective8 (collaborative policy making tool), Stonecutter (common open authentication) and Mooncake (secure notifications engine) from our tools page, with links to demos and Github code.

Piloting the tools

D-CENT also shared insights of our tools in action, meaning activities run in Barcelona, Reykjavik, Helsinki and Madrid. These large-scale experimentations have enabled more collaborative decision-making through mass-scale content sharing, deliberation and voting, and been widely adopted in their respective cities.

“We want to use tech to build a heartbeat between citizens and civil servants,” said Jaakko Korhonen from Open Knowledge Finland, when talking about the Finnish pilot.

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D-CENT team from left: Francesca Bria (Nesta), Guðjón Idir (IMMI), Jaakko Korhonen (OKF), Natalie Eskinazi (Thoughtworks), Jaromil Rojo (Dyne.org), Pablo Aragon (Eurecat), Javier Toret (UOC).

IMG_8752_ed_webJaromil Rojo of Dyne.org shared the development of
D-CENT Freecoin – a set of tools to let people run reward schemes that are transparent and auditable to other organisations.

Freecoin is made for participatory and democratic organisations who want to incentivise participation, unlike centralised banking databases. Freecoin aims to leverage the use of social digital currencies in a reliable, simple and resilient way.

Opportunities for UK Digital Democracy

After the D-CENT showcase, a panel of movers and shakers in the UK digital democracy scene took the floor. The speakers of the panel, chaired by Geoff Mulgan from Nesta, were Sym Roe, founder of Democracy Club, Andy Williamson, founder of Democratise and Democracy SpaceHelen Milner, Chief Executive of the Tinder Foundation, and Will Perrin, from Indigo Trust, Talk about Local and NED Tinder Foundation. The panelists discussed the practicalities of applying similar approaches in UK cities and how to use digital technology to reinvigorate democracy and participation in the UK.

Event discussion and pics can be found from Twitter: #dcent

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UK panelists from left Sym Roe, Andy Williamson, Helen Milner, and Will Perrin.

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