ICTlogy

Case Studies I

Soraya Vargas Cortes | Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
E-participation in municipal governments in Brazil

Abstract: One of the characteristics of the current crisis of liberal democracies is the challenge the fragmented civil society placed before traditional forms of participation, while many regard that organizations, such as political parties or trade unions, dot not represent their views and interests. Moreover, there are new forms of civil society mobilization and individual active participation through social media. Governments, in Brazil and elsewhere, have developed new mechanisms to reach collective actors and individuals taken advantage of the information technology and computer services (ITCS) there available. In Brazil, a federation with three levels of government, there is a growing interest in the subject of ‘e-participation’. However, most studies address federal and state level of government even considering that, since the 1990s, municipal administration has grown in importance, in terms of revenue, spending and functions. The paper will analyse the online participation of organizations and individuals in the decision-making at the municipal level of government in the country. The main source of data is available in the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística – IBGE) under the annualized database Research on Basic Municipal Information (Pesquisa de Informações Básicas Municipais – MUNIC).

With new ICTs, government decision-making process is more disperse and transparent. And civil society demands for more participation. Governments can improve efficiency, increase accountability, respond to demands for more participation.

But the digital divide can have a possible effect on participation, especially in lesser developed countries. Regional inequalities persist in the conditions offered by municipal governments to e-participation.

This research uses a database of the 5,570 Brazilian municipalities (MUNIC).

The development level of a given municipality and/or Brazilian state will determine the intensiveness of ICT usage for government and democracy: municipal websites, online transactions capacity, section to assure the right to information, information on expenditures, information on monitoring of government actions, etc. There is a regional digital divide reproducing the socioeconomic inequalities found among great Regions of Brazil. Digital exclusion and lesser possibilities of e-participation can further widen the historical socioeconomic gap between Northern and Southern regions of Brazil.

Governments should be aware of this digital divide and design policies to reduce this new type of inequality.

Ismael Peña-López | Open University of Catalonia (Spain)
decidim.barcelona, from e-participation to the devolution of sovereignty

Abstract: In September 2015, Madrid – the capital of Spain – initiated a participatory democracy project, Decide Madrid (Madrid decides), to enable participatory strategic planning for the municipality. Less than half a year after, in February 2016, Barcelona – the second largest city in Spain and capital of Catalonia – issued their own participatory democracy project: decidim.barcelona (Barcelona we decide). Both cities use the same free software platform as a base, and are guided by the same political vision. The Barcelona model is based on ubiquitous deliberation, openness, absolute transparency and accountability and pervasive participation to increase quantity and quality of proposals. In many ways, the model is the institutionalized version of the technopolitics ethos that emerged from the 15M Spanish Indignados Movement, was embedded in the political parties that came after them and ended up entering the governments of many Spanish municipalities. The initiative has implied important shifts in meaning, in legitimacy and in power and has a strong potential of becoming the needed bridge between new citizen movements and new ways of doing politics. It can also achieve an interesting stage if its evolution in several municipalities – autonomous but somewhat synchronized by common ethics and technology – leads to a network of local governments that can end up challenging the powers of the state.

Online Participation – stock taking

Paolo Spada | University of Coimbra (Portugal)
The Untapped Potential of Participatory Systems

Abstract: Participatory systems that combine multiple engagement processes have moved from being an isolated case in the Brazilian city of Canoas and the state of Rio Grande do Sul to a global trend. Many European cities in the last two years have begun to build prototype participatory systems in the form of web-containers that describe the variety of participatory processes implemented by the city and available to citizens. To date these participatory systems are still not fully developed and are not much more than a directory of participatory processes. However, some experiments have shown the great potential of these systems to allow for new and innovative engagement strategies coupled with advanced monitoring and research capabilities. In this presentation I will overview the emerging body of knowledge on participatory systems and I will highlight some of the untapped potential of participatory system, together with the risk that these new participatory technologies face. The presentation will leverage a vast array of case studies and practical examples from my own work in Brazil, UK, US, Canada, UK and Europe and will use research conducted over the course of the EMPATIA project in collaboration with the International Observatory of Participatory Democracy (IODP) and the Participedia Project.

How to reach several types of citizens, or communities, or targets in a participatory process? Depending on how you design the process, you might leave outside some citizens. Multi-channel democratic innovations come to fix this. And then you have, as a step forward, participatory systems to integrate multiple democratic innovations each with its own domain.

Of all the projects so far in Participedia (135), most cities have more than one project and in different platforms. And the majority are hybrid or face to face, diminishing the share of online only processes.

There is a growing number of integrated systems. This is the real challenge, to integrate all the tools that come together in a participatory process.

But integration comes with strings attached: who will be in charge of the management? who will control the controllers? Other problems of integration: complexity, transparency, accountability, autonomy, negative interactions…

Advantages: diversification, differentiation, data, cross selling, efficiency, resilience, some other democratic goods, inclusion, etc.

Discussion

We need to define the “Lego blocks” of participation to be able to compare different initiatives, to design them better, to tell the core blocks from the complementary ones, etc.

Panos Panagiotopoulos | Queen Mary University of London (UK)
‘eParticipation research: from government platforms to new forms of interaction’. A Review.

Abstract: Originally focusing on formal engagement on government platforms, eParticipation research now includes many new types of digital interactions such as social media and crowdsourcing applications. The presentation will review main developments based on accumulated experiences from the 9 years of the eParticipation track, IFIP 8.5 International Conference on eGovernment.

We have gone from government platforms to new forms of interaction. Ubiquitous participation is moving people out from institutional platforms. The definition of e-Participation has been changing since the last ten years.

Social media has gone from being something for youngsters, or to address young ones, to be arguably the most important part of any e-participation initiative, including regular government communication practices. Now social media is fully integrated into workflows, especially in:

• Event-based communications like emergencies,
• Questions, complaint management and engagement with representatives
• crowdsourcing capabilities starting from basic social media monitoring.

So what?
Chair: Prof Melissa Leach, IDS

Deus Rweyemamu, independent

Governments are especially receptive to new proposals in times of crisis: Wait for a crisis to bring your solution to the government.

Before scaling up, think of scaling down: can it be done more effectively? Can it be done more efficiently? Etc.

Technology is a pain-killer, but it is not the cure.

Adi Eyal, Open Up

Specific technologies require specific methodologies and specific environments.

Same for people: you need to find the right people for any given scenario. Do not choose the technology: choose the technologist.

Edwin Huizing, Hivos, Making All Voices Count;

Projects have not to become too technical or too institutional if we expect people to own them.

Civil society space is shrinking. We need to create space, and this is done by building trust in civil society actions and with citizenry at large.

Judith Herbertson, DFID;

There is an interesting negotiation between civil society organizations, which want to push an issue forward, and governments, which should represent all citizens. This negotiation can be — and should be — a creative effort to achieve consensus around common lines of action.

Let’s stop talking about “failure” and let’s talk instead about what worked, what did not work and what can be done differently.

Joe Powell, OGP Support Unit

Civil servants have to be considered part of civil society, actors that have to be included in projects about governance and democracy. Governments are part of society too. We need a coalition of leadership from civil servants, subnational leaders and civil society organizations.

Opening spaces in governments should bring dividends for politicians, so that they have incentives to do it.

Lessons about supporting work in this field
Chairs: Ellen Pieterse

How could you the work in this field be better supported?

Ideally, research should provide ground for the design of intervention projects, and then come back to these projects and, more than assess them (which is OK), do more research after them. Constraints (time, money, convenience) make that, sometimes, research and practice, though related, are not intertwined and enriching one each other.

Pre-grants, to design better projects, provide some evidence, etc. could be an option to have better designed and better grounded projects.

In knowledge intensive projects, creating a community to exchange knowledge between different people involved in different projects can be a way to support each other, identify best practices, develop capacity, identify trends and core issues in the field, etc.

It is usually said that an organization that learns, an organization that adapts to the context, is better. But have we measured this improved performance? We should. We should measure the relationship between learning organizations and successful organizations.

The cycle of projects, beginning and ending every three or four years make it more difficult to apply what you learned in either the same or the next project. How do we continue to learn and build knowledge in the long run.

How can programmes like MAVC enable, capture and use internal learning to be more adaptive?

The best way to encourage learning is to incentivize it. There has to be an experiencing of an issue to learn from it, and then a period of reflection to settle knowledge. This should be included in the design (funds, resources, etc.) of the project.

Fostering communities of practice also helps in building knowledge together.

When there are synergies in sharing knowledge, in the sense that the collective can achieve higher grounds than acting individually, then collaboration makes sense and is a sufficient incentive to learn together. E.g. in qualitative research, where results might be difficult to compare, sharing methodologies, sharing approaches, working together may imply that the individual results can be compared and thus produce an “extra” piece of knowledge, which is the comparison itself.

What has MAVC learnt about supporting work in this field?
Framer: Fletcher Tembo, Programme Director, MAVC

How you actualize your theory of change as a project deploys? Can you? Should you? Testing is fundamental, and adjusting your assumptions the most clever thing to do. But not only the “theory” has to adapt, but also program management.

In such a flexible, liquid environment, trust and relationships play an important role, as they let you move quickly and with confidence. It is important to include an adequate inception phase for building an appropriate consortium.

Host: Walter Flores, CEGSS (Centre for Equity in Health Systems Governance), Guatemala
Panellists: Helena Bjuremalm, Sida; Debby Byrne, MAVC; David Sasaki, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation; Lu Ecclestone, Department for International Development; Michael Canares, Web Foundation/Open Data Lab Jakarta

How do we turn the new knowledge that we have into new practices?

How do we select people? According to the challenges? Their experience? Their capacity? Choosing is a matter of who you exclude from your project, which is hard. The usual suspects may be good, because they have proven their value in the past, but also bad, just because they are “usual”, meaning that maybe not new people or new approaches will come from them.

Are donors comfortable with experimentation? Sometimes donors find a “window of opportunity” due to some political will to foster a specific issues, and then they take the chance to try something new, with new people. The problem is that these windows of opportunity sometimes remain open for very limited time, and hence programs are designed in a rush, without taking into account all the variables that matter. On the other hand, sometimes there is a sense of urgency to foster a field and when the opportunity comes one feels like it is now or never.

New landscapes come with new approaches and tools: innovative governance work requires innovative monitoring, evaluation and learning.

Having a flexible, multilayer/multistakeholder network can be very handy. Each organization/layer can concentrate on what they do best (draw the general strategy, find the partners, develop the projects, etc.). Rigid and hierarchical structures, who want to have control over the whole program, may not be the best option. E.g. donors should commit the money and get out of the way, after participating in identifying what success looks like. In this new scenario, fostering collaboration instead of competition is the way, especially complementary collaboration.

Grant making architecture should be inclusive by design and more prone to assume risks.

Keys to design proposals: think big, think of the partners, think about the problems to be solved, think about your liaison with other civic organizations and/or individual citizens at large.

Open Government Partnership
Breakout session

What are the challenges and opportunities in trying to bring the OGP ‘closer to the people’?

There is a need to link what happens at the national level and what happens at the local level. See if there is a thread linking both (or more) levels).

What is the enabling environment that exists at the local level? Can it be transposed at other levels? (and vice-versa)

Open government is about generating new types of citizen engagement.

What role do technologies play in this?

Access to technology is an absolute priority. But effective use of access comes with specific skills and in specific cultural contexts.

The government could co-own a system with the people.

Can we have open government without open data about budgeting or expenditure?

There is a difference between seeing open government as a tool and seeing it as a governance strategy for a change of democratic culture. In this sense, it might be very different to approach open government from the transparency and accountability point of view or the collaboration (and co-management) point of view.