Keynotes on Accessibility and Reuse of public sector information.
Accessibility. Fundación Sidar. Loic Martínez Normand. Presidente de la fundación
Accessibility: guaranteeing that the web is available for everyone independently of their capabilities. This definition has been broadened when more people are disabled in different ways (e.g. temporarily because of broken arm) and because of the proliferation of different displays with which one can access the world wide web. Functional diversity: sensory (sight, hearing, touch), motor (mobility, skills), cognitive (comprehension, language, learning).
Principles in accessible design: a website has to be perceptible, comprehensible, operable, robust. The new website scores average, but is much better than the previous one.
Reuse of public sector information. Fundación Civio. Mar Cabra. Directora de la fundación.
There is a lot of information that already exists, that has been paid by the taxpayers, and that is not used because it has not been made publicly available. There even is the possibility to make business/profit by reusing public sector information.
Make available:
Legally, by making it freely (no copyright) available by law.
Technically, so that computers can “read” the information (e.g. no scanned images, but text documents).
Humanly, presenting information in visual ways that humans can better understand than long lists of rows in tables.
Availability is also about being able to provide feedback, and providing feedback in a transparent way (e.g. no through forms).
Round table on transparency and communication. Chairs the Vicepresidenta 2ª del Senado Dª. Yolanda Vicente González.
Dª Mónica Almiñana Riqué. Senadora del Grupo Parlamentario Entesa pel Progrés de Catalunya.
How can we analyse the state of transparency in Spanish olitics?
The first law on the right to information is the US Freedom Act (1966)… when Spain did not have even a Democracy. That is, access to information still is a young matter in Spain. In the meanwhile, there’s been a technological revolution that has radically transformed itself the definition of access to information.
In Spain, the third problem is political parties and the political class, only below the economic crisis and unemployment. Notwithstanding, people still believe that democracy is the best of systems. People feel that they are not informed about what is happening in politics and people are occupying streets and plazas to demand for a better democracy.
There is the threat that this political disaffection becomes structural, yielding to unrest, radicalization of the political discourse, etc.
Dª Carmen Azuara Navarro. Senadora del Grupo Parlamentario Popular.
In the new website of the Senate the focus has been put on transparency, on letting know the citizen what is being dealt with in the Senate.
Besides transparency, the digitization of most information will mean more efficiency in terms of costs of communications.
D. Rafael Rubio. Profesor de Derecho Constitucional de la Universidad Complutense.
The Senate has a new website: what now? what comes next?
It is no use that the website aims at transparency if the attitudes of the Senate are not towards transparency. How will citizens use the information at their reach?
Some threats:
Representatives are digitally illiterate.
Citizens do not know about the processes in the Parliament.
Citizens are also digitally illiterate.
Too much effort to use.
Lack of dialogue.
Too much information and too complex.
Divides: digital, political, cultural, social.
Lack of answers or ability to provide answers.
Self-criticism: knowing what works and what does not.
So, what for a new website? To reinforce the (traditional) characteristics of the Senate: representativeness, transparency, accessibility, responsibility, efficacy, openness, confidence, better communication, rationalizing the legislative process, new ways of participation.
The Senate has to have its own voice, without intermediation, enabling communication.
We have to be aware of (1) whom are we talking to and (2) what are their languages so we can adapt our message to them.
And there is an urgent need for inter-institutional collaboration.
D. Luis Izquierdo. Presidente de la Asociación de Periodistas Parlamentarios.
Spain does not have a long tradition in matters of culture of transparency.
Transparency International España has several indices that measure the quality of transparency in Spanish municipalities, provinces and autonomous communities.
Transparency is not only about publishing information, but about getting it to the citizen.
And transparency is not only about the public sector, but also about the private sector, especially big corporations that concentrate big amounts of power.
Media have alto to be transparent. And citizens should be demanding it. There is no accountability in media.
Citizen protests have demanded more transparency to governments and media and these protests have spurred many initiatives related to transparency.
Round table: From movements to constitutions. How to think in a networked and open source constitutional process Chairs: Tomás Herreros
(see after time 1:00:00)
Is it true that citizens (Spaniards, Greeks, etc.) are lab rats upon which we can play socio-economic experiments?
What has been the role of the European Union before the economic and financial crisis?
There is only an exit to the crisis with a commons-based economy, a new way to understand politics and participation, etc.
These movements are based on self-communication and higher rates of participation. And the difference between activists and non-activists are blurring, as participation comes naturally with being informed, providing and opinion and getting in touch with one’s peers.
With this changing times, what is the role of traditional politics?
There are concepts like “separation of powers” or “administration of sovereignty” that should be addressed carefully. So, before asking how to do things, we should above all ask ourselves why some things should — or should not — be done.
Why a constituent process?
Because, historically, constitutive democracy is an emancipatory process: it has provided more rights to the citizens than never before. Modern constitutions introduce the concept of the sovereignty of the people, which becomes very important in order to control power and its management.
Although modern constitutions have improved empowerment and have evolved (positively) along the years, there still are some glitches that need being fixed: many times, constitutions are nominal (state principles) but are not normative (and thus require a deployment of further regulation). A good example of that is health, housing, etc. though they are mentioned as rights in many constitutions, they do not count as such if they are not reflected in positive laws (as it often happens). Consequence? Parts of the constitution are not applied.
Another glitch is the difference between constituent power and constituted power. Constitutions are the manifestation of regenerative powers. But if representatives do not change their behaviours according to (new) constitutions, the constituent and regenerative power becomes but reproductive power. The glitch of the glitch is when representatives (the constituted power) are the ones that change or write the constitutions (the constituent power). This is a total contradiction in the very core of the concept of a constitution.
Thus, there is a need to break (1) the nominal parts of the constitutions and (2) the hope or mirage that constitutions can be changed by the people but actually only constituted powers can do it. We need not fight for a reform of the constitution, but for a rupture.
The qualitative leap between the 15M and the 25S is putting the stakes on the constituent power as the basis of a rupture against the constituted power — very much like many Latin American constitutions that were reformed or rewritten in the nineties.
The constituent process is not the only exit, but it might be the best one. On the other hand, the constituent power is a power that many times needs fighting the constituted power; thus, many times the legitimacy of the constituent process begins with a clash of powers. There is a need for a transitional process that will not be “the” transition, but a real transition time that links the preceding constitution with the following one, where consensus have to be reached, and based on a deep democratic maturity.
There are many political institutions that instead of disclosing democracy, they actually close it: only some specific actors are acknowledged as such and the rest of actors is set aside of the democratic process. Besides representative institutions closing democracy, mainstream media have lately proven unable to channel the public opinion. Same with labour union, that have shifted towards representing only a specific part of the workers. Last, but not least, the economic power, whose jurisdiction has escaped the area of influence of all other powers.
[here comes a thorough explanation of the growing power of international finance, getting much bigger than any country’s GDP] The defence of economic and finance powers has become a political priority, with the Maastricht Treaty as the most significant “constituent” example.
Summing up, while the economy is fully integrated at the European level, politics (or civil rights) are not so. Until a total parallelism is achieved, full democracy within Europe will be an illusion.
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Digital culture, networks and distributed politics in the age of the Internet (2012)
Keynote: Robert Bjarnason (Icelandic non-profit “Citizens Foundation”) Citizen participation in Iceland through the web Better Reykjavík (European eDemocracy Awards 2011)
The economic crisis made trust on politicians a difficult issue. The idea of Better Reykjavík was to use technology to get politics closer to the citizens, to improve participation, to boost public debate. The initial website gathered more than 100 initiatives that only Best Party (the party that ended up winning the local election) used and applied. And not only proposals were made, but there also was discussion and quality debate.
Better Reykjavík opened in collaboration with the city of Reykjavík on the 19 October 2011, with a strong collaboration with the city council. It has been a success because there has been an active collaboration with the city government: 13 out of top 17 ideas are being processed by the city every month. People in the city have been made aware of the website through PR and marketing and feel that they are being listened to. The website is heavily connected to social media, which helped in providing lots of feedback. Most of the visits to the website come through Facebook.
Better Reykjavík succeeded in inviting people to provide pros and cons for each issue discussed, a thing that was easy to do as points were separated so that discussions did not become too complex. And its the very same community the one that filters content and prioritises the proposals. Transparency is a total priority.
The website also includes a secure voting system that worked both online and offline, with electronic ID or with username/password identification.
A project recently included is participatory budgeting, but this is a very specific issue in participation with its own “rules”: people participate less, it requires more time, more information, more understanding of what is at stake, etc.
Everything has contributed in settling the Better Reykjavík site as a structural tool in decision-making in the cityh. It has been used for financial planning, online debates, referendums, etc. at different levels of the local administration. The strongest asset is that helps people in making up their minds.
All the software is open source and can be found at GitHub as Social Innovation. On the other hand, the software also operates as an online service as Your Priorities now serving the whole world and supported by the Citizens Foundation.
Crowdsourced Constitution
A constitutional assembly of 20 was elected amongst 1000 candidates that presented themselves to the elections. All the meetings and proposals and documents (including drafts) of the assembly have been published online and, at last, the Constitution is being voted.
Discussion
Q: were there proposals that were not accepted by the administration? in case that happened, why was that so? what was the reaction of the citizens? Robert Bjarnason: when that happened, the government would explain why a specific proposal was not possible (usually lack of funds). A good thing about the platform is that people were treated by adults by the government, so the dialogue was serious, constructive and, above all, honest.
Q: was the success the tool’s or the fact that the government was listening? How does one make that the government listens? Bjarnason: it worked both ways. Of course the government was willing to listen and to get people to participate, but also the open and transparent process contributed in making the tool much more binding.
Q: when proposals get to the top, is all the population aware of that? Will they vote? Bjarnason: the website is widely used and everyone interested in local politics are aware. Voters range from 500 to 2000 citizens, which stands for 20-30% of active users of the site. But it has to be taken into account the people only vote for the things they care, and the website gathers all types of proposals.
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Digital culture, networks and distributed politics in the age of the Internet (2012)
Transforming institutions is compatible with occupying them, with questioning them, with trying to design new institutions. A key factor, though, of transformation or substitution of institutions is that major consensus and critical masses are required for changes to happen. There is a need to weave strong and broad alliances to question the status quo: it is a matter of democratic density.
There are many grounds that need being covered before citizen activism can take place. New laws on transparency or accountability are great milestones that enable further political activism. On the other hand, many of these laws are being designed as isolated laws and not as a part of a legal ecosystem.
Some times it’s institutions the ones that make the first steps (e.g. the Basque Government and the budget for 2012). These initiatives are good places that the citizenry can use to build bridges between institutions and social movements.
But while some institutions are trying to be more open, transparent, participative, this does not happen within political parties, whose DNA is just the opposite of the DNA of the movement of the XXIst century: centralized, vertical, often undemocratic and non-participative. We need to deeply transform political parties to their roots.
Top priorities: democratization of internal processes and creation of a culture of ideas (and not of mottos).
Social movements need less self-complaceny and dispersion: it is not about getting there first (and alone), but about getting there all together.
Democracia 4.0 aims at more participation, at understanding participation not as a problem but as a value, as an opportunity. A participation that can be either direct or representative depending on the personal will of the citizen.
A first foundation of Democracia 4.0 is that its technology must guarantee all democratic rights (privacy, security, etc.) and be, at the same time, as transparent as possible. Transparency is also about the workings of the tool, which has to be easy to use so that participation can take place without barriers.
The different powers are not balanced — there is no ‘check and balance’ — and the way to fix this is to distribute power: enabling better ways of watching power, of transparency, of accountability. Distribution of power also breaks with “politics in blocks”, where voting usually is not about specific issues but about sets of issues which cannot be voted individually.
Representative democracy, through intermediation, creates big hubs of power: Internet is a huge disintermediation machine that can end up breaking those big hubs while democratic efficiency and efficacy may not suffer at all. On the other hand, this lack of big powers would also enable vetoing specific laws that are unpopular or plain awful.
We can demonstrate that our political system is not compact and coherent (in Kurt Gödel’s words).
In the Internet matters not what (or who) but how (and where). Though focussing on the how the what gets revaluated.
Vasilis Kostakis The governance of communities based in the commons: laying the foundations of an open source democracy?
The social web has change the way we can communicate and create content. A good side-effect of social media is that participation many times just happens, unconsciously, on the run. This creates several different profiles according to how people approach creation of content: the amateur, the professional, the final user, the white hat and black hat hacker, etc. In this scenario, the amateur plays a key role and constitutes a new “class” as they become the new controllers of the means of production. New economies are created: sharing and aggregation economies, crowdsourcing economies, commons-based economies… What are the consequences of the emergence of these new economies? Is that a good or a bad thing?
Commons-based economies have ways of organization that are different from traditional for-profits, as they foster social dynamics that play a very important role producing value for the public domain. This value is created through peer-production.
If peer-production can create value in the field of information and knowledge, peer-governance can do the same in the field of politics. Unlike centralized power, on peer-production authority is the currency and ‘benevolent dictators’ have arisen to their positions by contributing with their work.
Abundance of intellect + resources + tools = unpredictable outcome. This is a difficult to handle outcome, by the way.
Cooperation + abundance + desktop manufacturing: another way of “manufacturing” an open source democracy.
Discussion
Alberto Lumbreras: how can we enable that representatives can be an option in parallel with direct democracy? How can we avoid that someone votes everything while others do not even notice? Francisco Jurado: the idea is not to create an total substitute, but an alternative to a one and only way to do things. The problem is not the system’s, but how we communicate and deliberate about issues.
Alberto Lumbreras: how can we avoid a commons-based economy from being stopped? Vasilis Kostakis: Commons-based economics is an alternative, but based on capitalism. Thus, it is much constrained by its legal framework. The idea is to go beyond this framework by entering the new mindset taht a digital economy is not based on scarcity or transaction costs.
Joan Coscubiela: it should be possible to “use” the insiders of the system to change it from within, but fostering change from the outside. Joan Coscubiela disagrees that unions are as centralized and hierarchical as political parties, but that the problem of unions is that they were created in the industrial society, vertical, corporate, not horizontal and networked. For unions the problem is creating critical mass around common axes. Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: it is interesting to see representative democracy as an “administered sovereignty”. In an industrial society, parties and unions worked very well; but what happens in a digital society? How are parties and unions administering our sovereignties? Do political parties and governments really understand the people they are serving?
Ismael Peña-López: in a direct democracy, in a binary world, how do we take into account minorities that will never be able to be represented by a majority? Francisco Jurado: we can design participatory processes that take into account weightings for different opinions, so that the outcome is not a yes or a no, but a shade of grays. Arnau Monterde: indeed, it is not only about voting, but if the whole deliberative process is open and participatory, all these shades of gray can be taken into account in the final outcome. Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: agreed, but it is very difficult to carry on a complex debate without polarization and simplification, without echo chambers that do nothing but resonate.
Q: these improvements are ok for parliaments, but what happens with governments? Francisco Jurado: if the government is loyal to the parliament, then there is no problem. Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí: regarding governments, new ways of democracy can play a major role in accountability.
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Digital culture, networks and distributed politics in the age of the Internet (2012)
Presentation of the 2n day of the Conference: Joan Coscubiela
Most social structures of the industrial society seem inadequate for today’s problems.
On the other hand, in times of change not only aren’t there many solutions, but existing solutions are far from being global or valid for all problems and contexts.
Another big problem is that people that have lived in previous social models usually do not have the keys for transformation.
Can we go forward with a de-constituent process that is followed by a constituent one? How will be build the required consensus? What is exactly the social conflict of the XXIst century? Is it capital? Is it the control of information? Of networks? Is it the control of the economic powers that are beyond the political power? How do we combine short-term solutions to daily problems with long-term, systemic ones?
Round table: From the Arab Spring to the Global Spring. How to think on the global relationships of the new movements in the digital age Chairs: Arnau Monterde (Programme in Communication and Civil Society, UOC/IN3)
#yosoy132 #15m #ows #tahrir have implied more thatn 10 millino tweets in the last year. What is the impact of the whole set? What are the relationships between these movements? What is going to be next in these movements and in the very nature of these movements?
Nizaiá Cassián (UOC); Israel Solorio (Member of YoSoy132 Mexico)
Israel Solorio
The nature of YoSoy132 was quite different form the 15M Indignados, at least in its origins.
The nature of YoSoy132 was quite different from the 15M indignados, at least in its origins. The movement originated in universities to fight poor democracy, but quickly grew outside of the educational environment and thus YoSoy132 International is like the assembly of the circa 70 assemblies that generated after the initial spark of the movement.
Nizaiá Cassián
YoSoy132 is a Mexican students protest that initiates when the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is haunted during a conference at a university because of denyal of human rights violation. After mainstream media minimize the impact on the image of the candidate labelling the students as a “few violent misfits”. The response of the students is a major, decentralized campaign, led by 131 students, stating that they are neither “a few” nor “violent misfits”. The result is that thousands of students support the initiative of the 131 by stating that they agree with them and that they are the 132 student.
This movement has determined the development of the electoral campaign, the way students have been more engaged in politics, etc. It is important to stress the point that the movement did not only address the political parties and politicians, but most especially mainstream media and their lack of neutrality and ethics. The criticism against Mexican media powers was very strong and as part of a demand for more and better democracy.
Israel Solorio
There is a deeper digital divide in Mexico than in Spain. In Mexico the usual way to diffuse (alternative) political messages is the bridageo, consisting in delivering leaflets in the underground or the streets. But YoSoy132 somewhat brought into the spotlight the power of social networking sites, and how they could bridge the Net and the street.
Indeed, having an influence on the communication agenda was always one of the main goals of the movement.
The movement YoSoy132 acknowledges the great wealth that the 15M movement generated by documenting procedures, sharing tools and opening their source code, analysing how people communicate and got engaged, etc. The 15M still is a good reference to be able to know the pace of things.
And the other way round: all movements feedback one each other, as “Rodea Televisa” was an inspiration to “Rodea el Congreso”.
If power goes global, let’s globalize the resistance.
A similar analysis with Occupy Wall Street and the pepper spray incident also shows that what people talk about and what media show is closely related, but unlike what used to happen in the past, it is interesting to see that social networking sites are beginning to condition what ends up in the front page of newspapers.
The relationship and mutual feedback between social media and traditional media is increasing, many times creating “transmedia” pieces of news that are originated in one platform and then is transposed to the other one, creating a dialogue across platforms and actors.
The Occupy movement generated around it a group of researchers and communicators that focused on gathering and curating content about the movement, in order to record what happened, diffused it, and, above all, analyse it, like #OccupyData NYC or Occupy Research.
Main things learnt: activists have learn new ways to mobilize and, more important, to communicate. Many citizens have seen new movements (and Occupy specifically) as new and fresh ways of engagement and of changing the typical political discourse. The movement has also acted as a bridge between collectives (immigrants, unions, etc.) that usually did not work together and that now are part of a same network, [added after numeroteca’s comment] though this bridging was not broadly achieved.
The Arab Spring really is a regional phenomenon, not a collection of isolated/national unrests. There really is a collective conscience that transcends the boundaries of countries. The increase in the number of blogs since 2004 in the Arab World is exponential: from just some dozens to literally hundreds of thousands, many of them speaking one to each other about human rights and civil liberties. Of course, every country has its own revolution (or transition in some of thems), but the collective sense prevails.
In the case of Egypt, even if now in a political transition, the revolution is still going on: there still are protests, there still are victims, there still are struggles to speak and be heard. There is a symbiosis between the fights in the streets and the fights that happen online: the street and the online world are not separate worlds. Indeed, one of the acknowledged flaws of the revolution in Morocco is that it has not succeeded in taking the streets.
On the other hand, despite the fact that all the Arab revolutions are part of a bigger network and share a lot of knowledge (tactics, tools, etc.) there still is the feeling that a closer relationship and collaboration could take place. Added to that, the different regimes are also fighting back the movements on the Net too. And, still, one of the problems to be informed of what a network does is being part of the network.
Kazeeboon’s channel on YouTube shares footage taken on the streets on protests and human rights violations. But these footage is taken “outside” of the Internet and shown in the streets, on walls, on the ground or even on people so that everybody (with or without Internet access) can see what has been taped.
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Digital culture, networks and distributed politics in the age of the Internet (2012)
