Lightning talks - Round 3: Research & SaaS

Round 3: Research & SaaS

• Instància tipus per al disseny dels portals de participació dels ens locals

• Bridging Digital Politics and Local Action: The Role of Civic Tech in Political Participation

• Open Sourcing Brazil's Decidim Software-as-a-Service System

• Affordances and Constraints of Decidim usage during Democratic Restoration

• Comparación entre Plataformas de Colaboración en Software Libre y Participación Ciudadana: El Caso Decidim

1/ Instància tipus per al disseny dels portals de participació dels ens locals

Speaker: Laura Suñer, Generalitat de Catalunya

En el marc del Servei Decidim Catalunya, el Consorci Administració Oberta de Catalunya i la Generalitat ofereixen una instància tipus als ens locals per a ajudar-los a dissenyar i implementar els seus portals de participació ciutadana.

Language of the session: English

2/Bridging Digital Politics and Local Action: The Role of Civic Tech in Political Participation

Speaker: Macklin Miezejeski, researcher and advocate of digital rights, civic spaces, and responsible tech

A large scale study of Decidim Barcelona measures the role of platform in local political participation. Drawing from over 30,000 proposals since the platform’s inception, the level of engagement and degree of salience of each proposal were used to determine how user’s impact municipal outcomes. The research highlights the importance of user engagement in a proposal’s acceptance, however, it’s subsequent implementation is more dependent on the content proposed. The platform is framed as extending beyond tokenizing public input and opening the democratic process, however, as a public good, the technology is only one tool available in the democratic toolbox. The implications of the research extend into how to design tech affordances within a civic space and what this means in the wider political churn.

Language of the session: English

3/ Open Sourcing Brazil's Decidim Software-as-a-Service System

Speaker: Leonardo Michalski, University of Brasília's Lab Livre

Providing a platform for — potentially — each of Brazil's 5,570 municipalities presents significant hurdles for infrastructure and data engineering teams. We are now open-sourcing how we manage multiple Decidim instances with multiple organizations each, offering a replicable piece of open digital public infrastructure for collaborative progress. That system works on top of Kubernetes, a cloud-agnostic open-source container orchestrator.

Language of the session: English

4/ Affordances and Constraints of Decidim usage during Democratic Restoration

Speaker: Luiza Jardim, Fundação Getulio Vargas

This session will present the findings of a research that applies the Technology Affordance and Constraint Theory to Decidim in its use for the Brasil Participativo platform. This is relevant as it allows us to see that the effects of Decidim depend on how people perceive its affordances and constraints.

Findings reveal that the process was successful in attracting a large number of participants because of its virtual nature, and its mechanisms enabled participants to express their preferences.

However, citizens perceived and realized actions that were not intentionally designed by the government, such as the usage of the platform to voice out corporate demands, and other affordances were actually constraining their effective participation.

Language of the session: English

5/Comparación entre Plataformas de Colaboración en Software Libre y Participación Ciudadana: El Caso Decidim

Speaker: Sergio Cobos García, UOC

En esta propuesta, presentamos un análisis empírico del ecosistema Decidim en 2024, centrado en el estudio de la relación entre plataformas de software libre y de participación ciudadana. Estudiamos tres componentes: la instancia ciudadana Decidim Barcelona, el espacio de coordinación MetaDecidim y el desarrollo OSS en GitHub. Identificamos patrones diferenciados de participación y colaboración que pueden ayudar a informar en el diseño de un ecosistema Decidim más abierto y democrático.

Language of the session: English