Lightning Talks

🔵 Simplifying to Reach Millions

Speaker: Carla Rocha (Universidade de Brasília)

Engaging people with the most diverse backgrounds in participation platforms is a global challenge. This challenge involves offering participatory processes where the rules of the game are clear and make sense considering people's everyday problems. In addition, it is necessary to model the choice architectures in a simple and direct way so that the participants can easily visualize what they need to do in order to leave their contributions, reducing the participation barriers as much as possible, like number of clicks and the complexity of the interfaces.

During the experience of using the Decidim platform in the process of participatory planning of the priorities of the Federal Government of Brazil for the period 2024-2027, adaptations and simplifications of the Decidim standard interface were developed and are being packaged in a plugin to be made available to the global community.

The objective of this talk is to outline the main elements present at this work and a brief summary on how it was carried out.

Language of the session: English

🔵 Apropriação CosmoTécnica: A Importância das Experiências de Decidim na Amazônia para a Reconstrução da Democracia Brasileira

Speaker: Jader Gama (Confluências Amazônicas)

In this lightning talk, we want to share with the global community how Decidim arrived in the Amazon, its role in the constitution of the social participation ecosystem, and its implications for the agenda in defense of democracy and environmental and climate issues. We will present how the first approaches to use the tool were made through the Confluências Amazônicas movement, the Popular Participation Program Tá Selado, and Plantaformas Amazônicas.

Language of the session: Spanish and English

🔵 Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting

Speaker: Pablo Aragón (Wikimedia Foundation, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Decidim)

Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation increasingly supported by digital platforms. Like any technology, participatory budgeting platforms are not value-free or politically neutral; their design, configuration, and deployment display assumptions and configure participant behaviour. To understand what kinds of configurations occur and what kinds of democratic values they hold, we study 31 digital participatory budgeting cases in Spain, France, and Finland. These cases were all supported by the same technical platform, Decidim, allowing us to focus on the variations in its socio-technical configuration. We examined the data from these cases and identified 25 different technical configurations and 15 socio-technical configurations on the platform. These configurations exhibit individual and collaborative assumptions about expected state-society interactions, as well as citizen-driven and controlled approaches to participatory budgeting. Based on these findings, we highlight a dilemma for the designers of these technologies: to what degree should platforms be open to configuration and customization, and which political values should be enforced by platform design?

Language of the session: English

🔵 Study on Participatory Budgets in Catalonia: Extension throughout the Territory, Use of Participatory Platforms and Citizen Evaluation.

Speakers: Laia Márquez (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) & Joel Peiruza (Universitat de Barcelona)

The municipal participatory budgets in Catalonia have increased in recent years. Putting citizenship at the centre, by decision-making, is being a priority for municipal governments following a crisis of representative democracy that has been present since the end of the 20th century and especially since the outbreak of the crisis of 2008.

Citizens' participation has been able to adapt to new technological changes. Public administrations are using digital platforms, as in the case of Decidim, with the aim of improving the citizen-administration relationship.

One of the winning projects of the DEMOC2022 call, carried out by the research group CNSC of the IN3 of the UOC, is intended to evaluate the participatory budgets carried out in Catalan municipalities, especially since 2016 and Decidim, in order to identify where we are and where we are going.

Language of the session: Catalan

🔵 Building a Digital Platforms Network

Speaker: Carola Castellà (Diputació de Barcelona)

In front of the diverse needs of local administration to assume the management and maintenance of their own Decidim platform, the Diputació initiated the Participa311 project in 2017. This project aimed to create a multi-tenant architecture for Decidim platforms, offering it to municipalities that wish to join.

This system allows for the efficient creation of multiple instances, optimizing technical and economic resources. The Participa311 platforms empower public administrations with limited resources to take advantage of the opportunities that digital participation offers to citizens. Currently, over 115 local entities are part of the network, each having their own digital participation platform, potentially reaching a population of 2,216,093 individuals.

The Participa311 policy goes beyond providing economic and technical resources to local administration. Each of these platforms is considered a node in a network that fosters collective knowledge and learning. This collective intelligence is evident in the meetings, training sessions, and studies conducted in recent years, which materialize in the Comunitat311.

Language of the session: Catalan or Spanish