Changes at "LAB Metadecidim - Session 17. decidim.delibera: Decidim Deliberative Democracy"

>>> The Metadecidim LABs are back with a debate and a workshop on deliberative democracy in Decidim!

Decidim aspires to be a democratic project for the future. For this reason, in this session of the metadecidim LAB, we want to discuss possible improvements in one of its facets or fundamental possibilities: the deliberative one. The session is based on the idea that Decidim should incorporate and promote deliberative democracy, defined by authors such as Gutmann & Thompson (2004) as a form of governance in which free and equal persons (and their representatives, if any) justify their positions through processes in which mutually acceptable and generally accessible reasons are given, with the aim of reaching decisions that are binding on all but are open to amendment in the future.

The objective of this session is to invite the Decidim community to deliberate on deliberation, on the incorporation of new functionalities (operational elements of the Decidim design) that help to better articulate debate and dissent, as well as consensus and collective decision. Functionalities that feed knowledge and mutual recognition between different actors, the development of individual and collective reasoning and, ultimately, dynamics that transform and enrich the perspectives of the participants (eg, the positions from which they are identified and discussed common problems, proposed solutions, etc.).

The program for this session is divided into two parts. The first includes talks by experts and an open debate to reflect on the relationship between deliberative democracy and Decidim based on specific cases, approaches and methodologies. The second part, which will feature two practical workshops, will address two complementary issues: a) how to improve Decidim-supported deliberation through (and beyond) the current redesign of the platform; and, b) how the Citizen Assemblies can contribute to said deliberation supported by the platform.

Some questions that will guide this session are:

-How do we understand or should we understand deliberation, especially in Decidim? What concepts and metrics can help us study and improve it, on the platform and beyond?

-What existing functionalities, linked directly or indirectly to deliberation, can be improved? How could it be done?

-What new deliberative functionalities can be added? What specific aspects would you try to improve these functionalities?

-What deliberative platforms and/or experiences can serve as a reference to improve the possibilities and forms of deliberation in Decidim? How can the Citizen Assemblies in Decidim contribute to quality deliberation?

-Beyond technological development: how do we guarantee or promote that the use of new functions for deliberation are used and used well? What are the technopolitical principles that should govern deliberation in Decidim?

Program

10:00 - 11:30 First part: presentations and debate

-Oliver Escobar (Universidad de Edimburgo). Debate, Diálogo y Deliberación: ¿Cómo se diferencian y por qué importa en el diseño de espacios participativos digitales? 

-Rosa Borge (UOC). La capacidad y la calidad deliberativa de las plataformas participativas: el caso de Decidim

-Yago Bermejo (Deliberativa). Asambleas deliberativas y Decidim. Cómo convertir Decidim en la plataforma que las asambleas deliberativas necesitan.

Zero Row Discussion:

-Maite López Sánchez (UB) 

-Marta Cambronero (UOC) 

-Carol Romero (Decidim) 

-Emmanuele Cozzo (UB)

11:30 - 12:00 Break

12:00 - 14:00 Second part. Workshop: Decidim and Deliberation

Notes:

*In the next few days we will publish a debate on deliberation in Decidim, motivated in part by the proposal made by a participant in the community.

*Unfortunately there will be no streaming this time :-(, but the session will be recorded and published later.

*Admission is free with prior registration. The language will be Spanish/Catalan, with some intervention in English.

Recommended bibliography

Borge, R., Balcells, J., & Padró-Solanet, A. (2022). Democratic Disruption or Continuity? Analysis of the Decidim Platform in Catalan Municipalities. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221092798

Dryzek, J. S., Bächtiger, A., Chambers, S., Cohen, J., Druckman, J. N., Felicetti, A., ... & Warren, M. E. (2019). The crisis of democracy and the science of deliberation. Science, 363(6432), 1144-1146. https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/pub/Crisis%20of%20Democarcy%20and%20the%20Science%20of%20Deliberation.pdf

Escobar, O. (2011) Public dialogue and deliberation: A communication perspective for public engagement practitioners. Edinburgh: UK Beacons for Public Engagement. https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/imports/fileManager/eResearch_Oliver%20Escobar.pdf

Escobar, O. (2019). Facilitators: The micropolitics of public participation and deliberation. In: Elstub, S. & Escobar, O. (eds.) Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/facilitators-the-micropolitics-of-public-participation-and-delibe

Elster, Jon (1998). Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elstub, S., Thompson, R., Escobar, O., Hollinghurst, J., Grimes, D., Aitken, M., Mckeon, A., Jones, K. H., Waud, A. & Sethi, N. (2021). The Resilience of Pandemic Digital Deliberation: An Analysis of Online Synchronous Forums. Javnost - The Public. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13183222.2021.1969616

Faulkner, W. & Bynner, C. (2020). How to design and plan public engagement processes. Glasgow: What Works Scotland https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/public-engagement-processes-handbook/. https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/public-engagement-processes-handbook/

Gastil, J. (2021). A Theoretical Model of How Digital Platforms for Public Consultation. Can Leverage Deliberation to Boost Democratic Legitimacy. Journal of Deliberative Democracy, 17(1), pp. 78-89. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/jdd.963

Gutmann, Amy; Thompson, Dennis (2004). Why Deliberative Democracy? Nueva Jersey: Princeton University Press

Lafont, Cristina (2020). Democracy without Shortcuts. A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Parkinson, John; Mansbridge, Jane (2012). Deliberative Systems. Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Russon Gilman, H. and Carneiro Peixoto, T. (2019) "Digital Participation" in Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance, edited by Stephen Elstub, and Óliver Escobar, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited.

Recommended empirical-design-analysis literature

Asambleas ciudadanas - Decidim Fest 2020 - Decidim. (2020). Retrieved 29 April 2022, from https://meta.decidim.org/conferences/decidimfest2020/f/1390/meetings/1455?commentId=25048&component_id=1390&conference_slug=decidimfest2020&locale=es

Aitamurto, T. and Saldívar, J. (2017) Examining the Quality of Crowdsourced Deliberation: Respect, Reciprocity and Lack of Common-Good Orientation. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, pages 2314–2321. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053248 

Aragón, P. (2019) Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies. Doctoral Thesis. Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies. UPF. 

Aragón, P., Kaltenbrunner, A., Calleja-López, A., Pereira, A., Monterde, A., Barandiaran, X. E., & Gómez, V. (2017). Deliberative platform design: The case study of the online discussions in Decidim Barcelona. In G. L. Ciampaglia, A. Mashhadi, & T. Yasseri (Eds.), Social informatics (pp. 277–287). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

Borge, R., Balcells, J. & Padró-Solanet, A. (2019) A Model for the Analysis of Online Citizen Deliberation: Barcelona Case Study. International Journal of Communication, 13, pp. 1-25. 

Borge, R. & Santamarina, E. (2016) From Protest to Political Parties: Online Deliberation in New Parties in Spain. Media Studies, 7 (14): 104-122. http://hrcak.srce.hr/171179?lang=en

Fournier-Tombs, E, Di Marzo Serugendo, G (2020) DelibAnalysis: Understanding online deliberation through automated discourse quality analysis, Journal of Information Science, 46: 810–822. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551519871828

Fournier-Tombs, E., & MacKenzie, M. K. (2021). Big data and democratic speech: Predicting deliberative quality using machine learning techniques, Methodological Innovations, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20597991211010416

Ganuza, E. & Mendiharat, A. (2020). La democracia es posible : sorteo cívico y deliberación para rescatar el poder de la ciudadanía. Bilbao: Consonni.

Gold, V, El-Assady, M, Hautli-Janisz, A, et al. (2015) Visual linguistic analysis of political discussions: Measuring deliberative quality, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32(1): 141–158. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv033 

Goldberg, Y (2017) Neural network methods for natural language processing, Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, 10(1): 1–309. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00762ED1V01Y201703HLT037 

Gonzalez-Bailon, S, Kaltenbrunner, A, Banchs, RE (2010) The structure of political discussion networks: A model for the analysis of online deliberation. Journal of Information Technology 25(2): 230–243. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2010.2 

OECD (2020), Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/339306da-en 

Steenbergen, M, Bächtiger, A, Spörndli, M, et al. (2003) Measuring political deliberation: A Discourse Quality Index. Comparative European Politics, 1(1): 21–48. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110002