ICTlogy

This report aims at providing an overview of the normative and institutional state of art of ICT-mediated citizen participation in Spain. The first section provides an overview of the political and civic liberties framework in Spain. In the second section the landscape of ICT mediated citizen engagement is mapped. In the third section, the report engages with implications of technology mediations for deliberative democracy and transformative citizenship.

This report is the outcome of a collaboration between IT for Change and Ismael Peña-López, School of Law and Political Science, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya under a research project titled Voice or Chatter? Using a Structuration Framework Towards a Theory of ICT-mediated Citizen Engagement.

The State of the Art reports provide an overview of the normative and institutional state of art of ICT-mediated citizen participation in various countries. They provide an overview of the political and civic liberties framework, the landscape of ICT-mediated citizen engagement; and delve into the implications of technology mediations for deliberative democracy and transformative citizenship.

Report:
Peña-López, I. (2017). State of the Art: Spain. Voice or chatter? Using a Structuration Framework Towards a Theory of ICT-mediated Citizen Engagement. Bengaluru: IT for Change.

A former version of this report was released as a working paper as Technopolitics, ICT-based participation in municipalities and the makings of a network of open cities. Drafting the state of the art and the case of decidim.Barcelona.

About the Project

This research has been produced with the financial support of Making All Voices Count. Making All Voices Count is a programme working towards a world in which open, effective and participatory governance is the norm and not the exception. This Grand Challenge focuses global attention on creative and cutting-edge solutions to transform the relationship between citizens and their governments. Making All Voices Count is supported by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and Omidyar Network (ON), and is implemented by a consortium consisting of Hivos, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and Ushahidi. The programme is inspired by and supports the goals of the Open Government Partnership.

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank the guidance, thorough review and suggestions made by Deepti Bharthur, Nandini Chami and Anita Gurumurthy from IT for Change. The author also wants to thank the indispensable help from Arnau Monterde from UOC/IN3.

Amartya Sen revolutionized the concept of human development by presenting his capability approach. From his point of view, it is not enough to have physical access to resources, but, in addition, one must be able to put them to the benefit of oneself. This step from objective choice to subjective choice has been completed in recent years with a third stage of development: effective choice. According to that, it is not enough to have resources, or to want or know how to use them, but, moreover, it is necessary that one is allowed to do so. Indeed, it is the strengthening of democratic institutions what has recently been at the center of debates around human development and, by extension, social inclusion.

In a digital world, in the Information and Knowledge Society, it is easy to establish comparisons between these three stages of development with the three digital divides that have been identified since the term made its fortune in the mid-1990s.

• The first digital divide is one that refers to access (or lack thereof) to technological infrastructures. A gap that, although persisting, will soon be residual as economies achieve certain income thresholds.
• The second digital divide refers to skills, the so-called digital literacy. A gap that schools, libraries and telecentres have been tackling as a priority for some years.
• The third digital divide, which adds up to (and does not replace) the former two, refers to the strategic use of ICTs to improve one’s life. We speak of online education, e-health or technopolitics, to mention only three cases where this gap is already more than patent.

This third gap, opened relatively recently, is quickly widening with the increasing presence in our lives of teleassistance, online training or political participation through social networks and spaces of deliberation, etc.

Therefore, social inclusion, and by extension the active exercise of citizenship, will increasingly depend on that third level e-inclusion, which enables a development based on full objective, subjective and effective choices.

It is likely that there will be no democracy, health or education without the active participation of citizens in these aspects.

Available data tell us that while the first digital divide is getting smaller and smaller, the second (skills) is increasingly important (especially in relative and qualitative terms: there are no more people, but they do see themselves as more digital illiterates) and, consequently, it contributes to enlarge the third one, that in many cases ends up with a flat rejection to everything that has to do with digital technology.

The so-called digital refuseniks are a group generally neglected when it comes to addressing social inclusion policies, with the probable outcome that they will be the great excluded of a society that, today, is building heavily on digital participation.

In an age of participation, engagement, co-building, it is to expect that there will be no greater active exercise of citizenship without greater and better use of the Internet; and there will be no greater and better use of the Internet if the problem of effective use of the Net is not addressed beyond physical access to infrastructures and beyond digital literacy.

As it has been stated above, there are three areas — health, learning and democracy — that are today the three most important areas (besides economic, often determined by the three previous ones) where social inclusion will be determined especially by the respective degree of e-inclusion of a given person… or an institution.

The recent achievements that have come from social innovation, open innovation and open social innovation are virtually inexplicable without that desire for an emancipated citizenship enabled by ICTs.

Selected readings

Digital divide

Political participation

Health

Education

Ideathon workshops takeaways

Open data portals and engagement mechanisms

Who is a user of the open data portal? After identifying the user, a user list sorted by priority should be drawn.

Scholars should explain what open data is and promote it’s use.

Free open data management tools.

Keep data updated and update it and make it known.

Adopting the Open Data Charter

How do tell the quality of open data? How do we know about its usage?

We have a lot of data, but we lack the storytelling, the visuals.

What makes sense for a government, what can work for them, what makes sense for technicians.

We need open data champions.

The charter seems simple but its application is complex. It is a good idea to ‘deconstruct’ it principle by principle, recommendation by recommendation, and go step by step while aiming for the whole.

Create networks of cities that have adopted the charter and see how they did it.

Competitiveness and economic development

We have to identify what is the problem. But not like “unemployment is the problem” but more focused on people. And then, try to come up with an idea that most people will quickly understand because it relies with some other familiar initiative (e.g. “Facebook for dogs”).

We can create the “Tinder for data”, a meta-data portal for open data. It would identify data that could be open and thus create opportunities.

Smart and resilient cities

Bring the users in the design of the projects.

Identify the key role players and establish communication strategies among them.

How do we enable the measurement of vulnerability and how to address it. What defines a resilient city.

Interdisciplinary collaboration and organizational change

Better name: culture change for common understanding.

Start with the challenge.

Creating common context.

Actively create and maintain feedback.

Go across disciplines and across sectors.

Interaction between civil society organizations and between civil society organizations and governments.

Fiscal transparency

Entrepreneurs, SMEs, etc.: they might find hard to find the kind of information that is relevant to them. What are they needs? What are the usual tasks that require data? Awareness on their needs and awareness of the possibilities of open data.

Try and draw a chronological story of data for firms: When starting a business, what is the information that you need? What is the government spending (procurement) in the field? What is the budget and what is the execution of that budget. Do I have benefits for operating in this field? What are the trends in my area?

Making city services accessible

It is very difficult for people to see the safety net, to know what public services can one citizen access.

To build a healthy ecosystem, accessible, interoperable, sustainable, that relates referral providers and social service services.

Standards and interoperability

A good way to understand standards and interoperability is by looking at the path that goes from raw data to indicators, in an aggregation process.

The big issue is that standards apply to very small portions of reality, while reality is much more complex. Open data, smart cities, open government, etc. begin to create their own specific (ad hoc) standards that often overlap.

Who provides the data and how?

Who will reuse the data and how?

Ideathon workshops: Interdisciplinary collaboration and organizational change Katelyn Rogers, Open Knowledge Foundation Eric Reese, Johns Hopkins University

Agencies that do not talk to each other.

Barriers to work with other organizations, especially across disciplines.

Political impact vs. technical impact:

• what are the priorities
• budget constraints
• role of infomediaries
• Horizontal collaboration vs. hierarchical paths
• multidepartment teams
• who leads (what department leads)

Restarting connections, changes in leadership (e.g. elections change the mayor, etc.), having to convince again the leaders or decision-makers

The is not an internal culture of data.

How does institutionalization happens?

Is open data part of the internal/institutional process?

Technical language might be a barrier.

• have to explain what technology does or implies, e.g. what an API or JSON is and what it does and what it implies
• have to build a space so that everybody understands the concepts

How to?

• identify the beneficiaries
• identify the different usages
• create feedback loops
• make positive stories
• remove the barriers for the people to engage (with agencies), often meaning removing the middle-man, shortening the gap between users and agencies, making agencies accountable of their own data
• build communication channels that are constructive
• give them answers not just raw data
• empower people
• allow people to engage with information, sometimes even providing different interfaces for the very same data, but or different profiles
• build trust, active listening

Takeaways

• Start with the challenge. This includes the law, legacy systems, social context.
• Using/creating common language together, creating a common place/context.
• Building trust, making sure that feedback loops exist, having an ear and being able to listen, remove barriers to conversations.

Petcha Kucha presentations of the eight projects developed along Visualizar’16 international workshop at Medialab-Prado (26 September – 5 October
Presented by José Luis de Vicente

staDAtus: a way to escape the Desert of Knowledge

Most of research results are not transparent. On the other hand, most citizens neither realize the importance of transparency nor where to get the data in case they would like to. staDatus aims at showing the state of transparency/open data portals.

staDatus is a community-based/crowdsourced project. It creates templates so that citizens can track and assess portals, especially according to what the law says. These tools will be designed with gamification methodologies in able to help citizens.

urBside-art

The project is made up by artists and architects and focuses on the solid waste that cities produce, with the aim to raise awareness on this issue. Another goal is to democratize art.

An app has been developed to help citizens and urban artists to share their works and to enable interaction between citizens and urban art.

My museum

The project aims at monitoring the behaviour of visitors in cultural institutions. Museums need to know what visitors do, what do they do, how do they move in order to be able to give them the best experience.

Re-thinking the museum has to take into consideration storytelling, interaction, etc.

The project has developed an app that mixes tracking with augmented reality. As the visitor moves inside the museum, the application will give the visitor (augmented reality) information, enable interaction, etc. On the other hand, this will also produce tracking data that the museum can use to reflect on the exposition or the cultural activity.

Gala

Goal: show/visualize the concerts happening all over the world as a galaxy/constellation according to the musical gender. Data comes from last.fm

The visualization can help to identify music styles geographic clusters, or how e.g. minority styles spread and evolve.

Fab City Dashboard

What is the resilience of a city regarding its manufacturing, distribution and consumption of goods?

What is the role of citizens in shaping a Fab City with open, distributed and collaborative initiatives?

A dashboard has been created to monitor eleven measurements for the resilience of a city.

The dashboard can also be used to measure the impact of a given project on resilience on the city.

liQen

Goal: Mapping micro-conflicts through people experiences.

(Please follow the link above. See also http://commonactionforum.net/projects/)

Open Referral

Information about health, people and social services. From long documents in PDF format to structured open data.

An application makes it easy to scrap, store and publish data. And it can be done in a crowdsourced way.

apps4citizens is a collection of apps for citizen action.

An app has been deployed to map these apps in the territory using Quadrigram.

Expert panel on what is an open city: emerging trends, scaling opportunities, strengthening networks.
Moderator: Antonio Moneo-Laín (IADB)

Barbara Ubaldi, OECD

Open data needs cities because cities know who the local actors are.

Because open data is about action.

Networks of cities — within the country or at the international level — are very important.

Jean-Noé Landry, Open North

How do we reconcile the opportunity of open data with the resilience of cities.

Most of the global open data movement has been led by citizens, nonprofits, etc. How can local governments empower these actors?

It is important what happens before data is released, what are the ethics behind making data available.

Where does the demand come from? Who has the means to ask for data? We have to look into that carefully.

Stephen Larrick, Sunlight

How do we scale local open data programmes and make them global (and sustainable)?

Risk-aversion can be “medicated” by showing that your programme works in another place.

Open formats also help to connect with other actors, to scale up.

If open data is not only about data but about decentralization of democracy, about engagement of the citizen, then this ethos has to be included in the very design of any open data initiative.

We have to link engagement to specific needs. Start with the needs of citizens, not with open data.

Dinand Tinholt, European Data

How do we make open data a priority?

Build upon what others are doing.

It is important that there also is an economic insight in open data. It may not be very “sexy” but it is important to bring in companies that will use open data for profit, as they contribute to make the system sustainable, to foster demand and to maintain it live.