ICTlogy

Miguel Arana (Laboratorio Democrático y grupo de participación de Podemos)
From Acampada Sol to Podemos. Experiments of digital democracy in Podemos.

Labodemo adapted Loomio, a collaborative decision-making tool. It enables people that do not like to speak out, to participate in assemblies and other collaborative spaces, while it allows to know what is happening in a group, during a discussion, etc.

Another tool that was put up during the 15M: Propongo. But it did not work as it was expected. To solve the lack or participation, they put up a channel on Reddit, a little more chaotic, but more flexible and, thus, more successful. With these tools, the concept that verticality is more effective than horizontality has been quite challenged. One of the problem, though, is that novelties catch more the attention than older threads. To have a less chaotic environment, when a thread is tagged as ‘proposal’, it is taken onto another platform so that they can be discussed more calmly and thoroughly.

It is crucial that no space dominates over other spaces. That is why participation is called to transpose what is spoken at a given platform (including face-to-face assemblies) onto other platforms or spaces.

So far, openness and flexibility has worked well and there is no trolling or abuse of power. It is unknown whether in the future managing the platforms will become more complex, but so far participation has been smooth and respectful.

To try and gather up what was being discussed in the several threads and in order to prepare for the Podemos General Assembly, a “wikisynthesis” was put up (by using a wiki tool). But people participated much much less, maybe due to the different and more complex environment.

During the General Assembly, Appgree was used to support a more traditional event based on presentations and questions to the presenters. Appgree helped in sorting the questions and assessing their popularity or relevance.

Next challenge: that the proposals that people put up on the web (through Agora Voting, another tool) are selected in a binding voting, so that decisions made afterwards take into account these open processes.

Francesca Bria (D-CENT)
urban and digital infrastructures for a constituent phase. A look upon Europe

What kind of infrastructure do we need for a constituent phase?

The identity and democratic infrastructures of today’s digital society must be managed as a common good.

The Internet of Things, the industrialization of the Internet,s is the convergence of the communication Internet, the energy Internet, the logistic Internet, transport networks, data-intensive welfare (health, education, housing, work) and the money and payment system.

Surveillance is the new business model:

• A huge market of data and new information intermediaries as powerful monopolists.
• Algorithmic governance.
• Austerity on steroids.

Is there still room for democracy? Will there be an app for that?

The smart city is the city as a black-box, the logic of financialisation, the ruling of cities as banks. Instead, we need the democratic city, the right to the city and to public spaces. The city should not be a mega-market, a bunch of assets. The city today is what factories used to be for the industrial times.

We are giving away all the critical infrastructures of our common spaces, of our cities.

Alternatives?

• Build a federated, open, privacy-aware modular infrastructure for democracy.
• Politics of data (data ownership, data portability, crypto tools) is key.
• From the Smart City to the Democratic City.

Key issues:

• Citizen ownership of data and identity.
• Security and privacy by design.
• Federation, open source, open standards.
• Inclusiveness, accessibility, collective governance.
• Exploit the network effct through mass user adoption.

And most of these are not technological issues, but political ones.

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