Decidim Fest 2020
#DecidimFest20 Democracy and Technology in times of Emergency
Program
(in Catalan)
Welcome speech to Decidim Fest 2020 from Marc Serra, Participation councilor from the Barcelona City Hall and Lucía Matin, councilor of Housing and rehabilitation and the Sant Andreu District.
1️⃣ Keynotes:
*The video has English and Spanish subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
The crisis of the covid has increased platform capitalism, that which feeds on global digital platforms that function as data extraction infrastructures. This shift not only affects the infrastructure in the sense of sophisticated forms of social control, but also the processes of subjectivation, making us turn towards the cognitive automaton. Starting from a careful description of this context, from a reasoned elaboration of the diagnosis, we also have to imagine and deploy practices and technologies that ensure the common good.
Moderates, Arnau Monterde, Director of Democratic Innovation Services at the Barcelona City Council
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes:
*Video with English subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
In this talk we will introduce several socio-technical systems for the governance of refugees and migrants used by international organizations such as the European Union and its member states. We will try to identify which policies these systems implement, if they can or could guarantee rights, or if on the contrary they are one more piece that contributes to the stigmatization, exclusion and oppression of migrant populations through mechanisms of criminalization, identification and social ordering.
Moderates: Marilín Gonzalo, journalist specializing in digital media.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes:
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in English)
In his book Sad by Design (2019) he distinguishes three phases: the age of media, networks and platforms. In this lecture I go deeper into decentralized networks vs. centralized platforms. There are alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Telegram and Signal but the vast majority of users are stuck on the platform and do not know how to leave behind Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. Independent community networks have virtually disappeared and have almost become subversive (again) in favour of large, closed worlds of platforms. Is the ‘organized networks’ concept that they introduced together with Ned Rossiter an alternative? Will offline networks thrive in response to the rising platform hegemony? How we need to embrace the socialist love affair with centralized platforms? Will we scale up or down, Can we take power and dismantle power at the same time?
Moderates, Antonio Calleja López, coordinator of Tecnopolítica.net and co-founder of Heuristica.barcelona.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes:
video with English subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
Digital colonialism is the new display of an almost imperial power over a large number of people, without their express consent, which is manifested in rules, designs, languages, cultures and belief systems by a widely dominant power. In the past, empires expanded their power through the control of key assets, from trade routes to oceans, from railroads to precious metals. Now, we also have the technology empires that control data and computer power to dominate the world. In this context, cities are strategic ecosystems to be recovered to create a global network of resistance as well as recovery of technology as a public common good, the technology of social possibilities, our technology. Code, public policies, new economic models and citizen participation play an essential role in this. The talk will indicate a route towards achieving this.
Moderates: Karma Peiró, journalist specializing on the Internet, Information and Communication Technologies and data journalism.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
(This session is held in English)
In this session we will discuss challenges of free software projects in terms of sustainability and scalability.
First, Jaya Allamsetty (Jitsi) will tell us about scaling up the video conferencing platform during the pandemic and Alba Roza (Foundation for Public Code) will explain what Code Stewarship is and how they contribute to different projects to make them sustainable, while remaining open and collaborative. Then, Carol Romero (moderator) will interact with the speakers to explore strategies for Decidim to address these challenges.
We are looking for community participation, so please leave questions for our speakers in the comments section :)
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(This session is held in English and Spanish)
- Xabier E.Barandiaran (UPV/EHU) / Technopolitical Autonomy: what it means and why Decidim is a good example
- David Vila (Univ. de Zaragoza) / Scalability and bottlenecks in digital participation
- Clara Crivellaro (Open Lab, Newcastle University) Democratising research in digital innovation: ideas for citizens-led research commissioning processes from small experiments (ENG)
Modera: Luce Prignano, researcher at the University of Barcelona and co-founder of Heurística.
Watch the streaming of this session:
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1️⃣ Keynotes:
*video with English subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(The debate will be in Russian with consecutive interpretation into Spanish)
Democracy is strongly intertwined to the idea of information freedom and information access rights. Today however most people who live in democratic countries are denied their right to access information in science. Academic journals have a price tag high enough to effectively prohibit their free circulation in society, or in other words, put them under censorship. A unique technology from Kazakhstan, developed in 2011, has put academic censorship to an end by opening free access to tens of millions academic journals. That is a website Sci-Hub that has 500,000 unique readers every day. Most people all over the world support Sci-Hub, but the website is outlaw in every country. How and why that happened?
Modera: Mariona Ciller, cofounder & codirector of Soko Tech.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
(This session will be held in Catalan, Spanish and English)
- Lars Kaiser & Carlo Beltrame (Urban Equip) [ENG]: Introducing and coordinating Decidim in a federal, direct democratic system
- Sergi Alonso & Lorena Torró (Coopdevs & CoopCat)(Coopdevs) [CAT] : Cercles.coop facilitating democratic participation at the cooperatives with Decidim
- Marta Anducas & Dante Maschio (Platoniq & Enginyeria Sense Fronteres) (CO)INCIDIM [CAST]: Use experience of Decidim from the Social Movements
- Francisca Keller, Matias Toledo & Sofía Brito (Coordinadora Social Shishigang) [CAST]: Democracy in Times of Trap; cracker culture, feminisms and hacker ethics for the new constitution in Chile
Moderates, Marc Serra, Regidor de Participació de l'Ajuntament de Barcelona
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(This session is held in Spanish)
A community pilot project for digital inclusion through the Xarxa Oberta and a collaboration agreement between the Ateneu de Innovación Digital y Democrática at the Canódromo and the Exo.cat/Guifi.net, which aims to extend Internet connectivity for the benefit of people in the Congrés Indians neighborhood and its surrounding area. The idea is to build interconnection nodes using telematic technologies (fiber optics and radio links) under the Open Network model (guifi.net) with the aim of supporting people at risk of digital exclusion. This network of nodes will be connected to the Open Network ecosystem of Barcelona, which has been working in the territory for more than a decade in favour of community telecommunications infrastructures.
1️⃣ Keynotes:
*we've uploaded English subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
The emergence of the pandemic has only triggered privatization trends, promoting data mining and algorithmic governance. The public spaces that we inhabit have been almost completely replaced by private spaces and what is worse, the digital infrastructures necessary for public management are being provided increasingly by private companies, generating a hidden privatization of education, health, surveillance… Only large companies have the resources to store the vast amounts of data we produce and with algorithms sophisticated enough to manage them. But can we still talk about public education when the new digital space in which it happens is Google? Can an algorithm protected by an intellectual property, which we do not know how it works, decide who is arrested or not for a crime? Can we be digital citizens in environments where just by entering we become products? Do we have to adapt to homogenizing global technologies instead of generating technologies that adapt to our needs? Can the future ultimately be guided by a commercial interest?
In the conference we will address the urgency of a digital autonomy that includes open data and software, but also the whole network infrastructure; the urgency to fight for the right to inhabit a digital space that is not governed by commercial interests but by the common good; the importance of generating situated technologies and, why not, the proposal of a playful governance.
Moderates, Antònia Folguera
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes:
*We've uploaded English subtitles
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
In the colonial arrangement of hegemonic technologies, there are naturalized orders of subordination where there are bodies that matter and others that are the victims of digital disruption. Within this framework, we will examine the operations of minimization and concealment in Silicon Valley with respect to gender violence, and reflect on participation in these digital territories and how the strategy of avoiding "solutions" and "getting on with the problem" is a vital form of democratic resistance.
Moderates, Gala Pin
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes
(with English subtitles)
2️⃣ Streaming
(This session is held in Spanish)
Red Levadura has been working for several months to combat the hateful messages flooding the social networks and to prevent fear from paralyzing us. We share knowledge, intuition and results of awareness campaigns, digital strategies and research; and we do it in a community with very diverse levels of involvement and experience because we believe that this is the way to try new ideas and get out of our activist or professional circles and inertia. In Decidim Fest we are going to discuss some ideas about what kind of communication we need for these moments of polarization and despair, and we hope to continue weaving alliances to bring them together.
Moderates, Elisenda Ortega, Ajuntament de Barcelona
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
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(This session is held in English)
Anonymous, the anonymous far right, QAnon: all three movements or trends cannot be explained without reference to the anonymous image boards like 4chan, 8chan, and others from which they partly came. How are we to make sense of the differences (and similarities) between such different political manifestations? In this talk I will focus on digital extreme right and cull out their differences and similarities to the hacktivists Anonymous as a means to maps some contemporary trends in digital politics and reflect on how scholars, journalists, and advocates should approach and think about anonymous image boards as vital sites for political organization.
Open interview with Carlos del Castillo. Journalist specialized in digital rights and social implications of technology.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
🎙️ xrcb | spotify | ivoox
(This session is held in English)
In this panel moderated by Pablo Aragón, Amy X. Zhang and J. Nathan Matias share findings from their research on online platform design to promote safe participation, deliberation, community health and to avoid harassment, misbehavior, trolling, etc.
Unfortunately and due to a technical error, the later discussion was not recorded. Nevertheless, you can watch the begining here
We are looking for community participation, so please leave questions for our speakers in the comments section :)
1️⃣ Keynotes:
(Video with English subtitles)
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in Spanish)
In recent years, deliberative processes ( implemented by governments) involving people chosen by sortition from the citizenry to answer questions about public policy have been gaining more and more strength. In this talk we will review the main existing formats, their advantages and limitations. We will present examples of current processes, and give some clues for implementing citizens' assemblies or citizen juries at different territorial scales.
Moderates: Olivier Schulbaum, head of R+D at Platoniq. Creativity&Democracy.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
(This session is held in English)
- Eloïse Gabadou (Open Source Politics) - “The digital participatory process that fed into the French Climate Assembly”
- Mauricio Mejia (OECD) - “Deliberation: Surfing the digital wave”
- Kelly McBride & Mel Stevens (Democratic Society) - ““Citizens Assemblies everywhere”: raising the question of scale in deliberative democracy”
Moderates: Arantxa Mendiharat, co-fundadora of democraciaporsorteo.org and deliberativa.org
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1️⃣ Keynotes:
2️⃣ Debate:
(This session is held in English)
Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher exploring how new kinds of data sets, be it emotional data, traumatic data, or political data can then affect algorithms through the lenses of social justice and intersectional feminism. How can these outputs be actualized as an art piece? Her work explores the intersections of critical design, data, and AI as art. This talk will explore the methodology she’s created to guide both her art and research practice, called “research driven art.” Inspired by photojournalism, critical design, and open source software, research driven art is a process driven artistic methodology, focusing on question answering and question exploring, and how a research process can be an artistic practice as well as an artistic output.
Moderates: Tayrine Dias, researcher at Tecnopolítica and CNSC, IN3.
We want the community to participate, so please leave your questions in the comments section :)
(This session is held in Spanish)
From the Decidim community, we know that the code creates normative frameworks and we want ours and its development to be more inclusive and diverse. Therefore, this year we launched the DecidmFemDev Program, an open call for female/non-binary developers that seeks parity in the development of the Decidim code, strengthening and facilitating their participation in the platform. After two editions of the program, some of the participants will share their experience with us.
- Vera Rojman
- Alejandra González
- Thais Ruiz de Alda
Moderates: Carol Romero
(This session is held in Spanish)
- Inés Binder & Martu Isla (la_bekka) “The right to have our own infraestructure: how to set up a feminist server with a home connection”
- Alejandra López Gabrielidis & Toni Navarro: “We, our (data) bodies: reproductive justice as a framework for digital sovereignty”
Moderates: Thais Ruiz de Alda
