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.

Consumption groups and cooperatives in Barcelona (article)

Ricard Espelt, Núria Vega and I have just published an article at on consumption cooperatives: Plataformas digitales: grupos y cooperativas de consumo versus La Colmena que dice sí, el caso de Barcelona (Digital platforms: consumption groups and cooperatives vs. The Food Assembly in the case of Barcelona).

The article compares the emergence of agroconsumption groups and cooperatives in Barcelona since the mid 1990s with the most recent appearance of (presumably) platform cooperativism-based initiatives such as The Food Assembly.

The main conclusions are that while agroconsumption groups and cooperatives are deeply rooted in the social and solidarity economy, and most of the times in the sharing economy, some platform-based initiatives not only do not share this principles but, as it is the case of The Food Assembly, they do not even match in what we understand by platform cooperativism.

The article is in Spanish. An abstract in English follows and then the link for downloading the full paper.

Abstract

The cooperative tradition around the consumption of agro-food products has a strong historical background in the city of Barcelona. Even if we refer to the first modern consumer cooperatives, we realize that their task has twenty-five years of permanence (Espelt et al, 2015). More recently —in July 2014— appears in the city another initiative of consumption to facilitate direct sales between local producers and communities of consumers, called food assemblies. Although the origins and differences between models are evident, they both share some common aspects in their approaches —willingness to self-manage, disintermediation of production and building a community—, articulated as part of the so-called “Collaborative Economy”. For their part, both types of initiatives, although with a very different approach, have in technology an important backbone for their activity. In this article, we analyze the points of encounter and discrepancy between the two actors as a model, placing the research framework in the city of Barcelona, where —in March 2017— we located some sixty groups and consumer cooperatives (Espelt et al., 2015) And thirteen food assemblies, six in operation and seven under construction. Emphasizing as differential factors, economic, technical, legal aspects, type of governance, values associated with the model or linked to the relationship between people, producers, final product or space.

Downloads

Article:
Espelt, R., Peña-López, I. & Vega Rodríguez, N. (2017). “Plataformas digitales: grupos y cooperativas de consumo versus La Colmena que dice sí, el caso de Barcelona”. In Redes.com, 15, 145-174. Revista de estudios para el desarrollo social de la comunicación. Sevilla: NMI/Compolíticas.

Open social innovation is defined as “the creative destruction that aims at making up new processes that can be appropriated by the whole of civil society” (Peña-López, 2014).

One common denominator that can be found in successful initiatives that deal about political participation and engagement is that they use ICTs to remove barriers and/or equal the ground of participation (leaping the knowledge gap), create new platforms and projects shared by broad and multi-stakeholder communities (new processes phase) whose outputs and outcomes positively impact on the community and, at the same time, achieve reasonable levels of economical and especially social (self)sustainability (leveraging quadruple helix).

In the figure below we have drawn a scheme that aims to synthesise the common points that we have found in our review of cases and that are also pointed at in the literature. In the following sections we will explain how the initiatives we analyzed address each of the four layers into which we schematized their operational design and why addressing every layer is crucial for the final success of the project.

Government as a platform for open social innovation

The point of departure: socio-economic status and the knowledge gap hypothesis

In 1970, Tichenor et al. showed how mass media consumption did not necessarily had an evenly distributed positive impact on people’s knowledge. On the contrary, the impact depended on the point of departure, being much more significant on more highly educated segments of society. Thus, exposition to information depended on socio-economic status and did not add up to the pre-existing knowledge levels of the population, but had a multiplier effect: educated people will do better, uneducated people will do worse.

This “knowledge gap hypothesis” has proven true not only related to information coming from mass media, but from other knowledge devices such as public libraries (Neuman & Celano, 2006), the Internet in general (Bonfadelli, 2002; Selwyn et al., 2005; Van Deursen & van Dijk, 2013), instructional technology (Warschauer et al., 2004; Warschauer, 2008; Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010; Horrigan, 2016; Patterson & Patterson; 2017) or social media and e-participation platforms (Yang & Zhiyong Lan, 2010; Anduiza et al., 2012; Robles et al, 2012; Schlozman, 2012; Gainous et al., 2013).

Successful participation usually address as a first stance this situation. When addressing inequalities is not their first stance —such as in the case of projects explicitly addressed to employment— most projects include accompanying measures that aim at leveling the ground so that, according to their means, all players can engage in equal conditions.

At this level, which we call the point of departure, it is important that there are instruments that contribute to leap the knowledge gap by providing basic and operational resources that enable objective choice (Welzel et al, 2003).

In general, this stage is especially suitable for policies and programmes that address basic needs of the youth in particular and the citizenry in general. Beyond the obvious fact that individual development and progress is good per se, we want keep on stressing the fact that we have already stated: further measures to empower citizens will only work as desired if there are former leveling initiatives. Thus, formal education initiatives or employment programmes should be thought as a pre-requisite of higher level measures so that these can act as appropriate multipliers.

The micro level: enabling the social tissue

Once individuals are in (more or less) good conditions to be actual and active citizens, what naturally comes is that they coordinate to collectively promote initiatives. The more intertwined these citizens and their respective collectives are, the more resilient, sustainable, scalable and replicable their initiatives are. If basic conditions are a requisite for leveling participation and thus avoiding the unwanted outcomes of the knowledge gap, a tight social tissue increases the possibilities of success of a given social initiative.

Projects that plan ahead in this train of thought, design devices to enable social tissue creation or to strengthen the existing one. Financial resources, facilitators (such as social workers), members of the Administration or researchers that bring in background and context, etc. contribute to this goal.

Not surprisingly, face to face initiatives are more common at this stage, as they are welcome as better weavers of this social tissue. On the other hand, at this stage it is also worth noting that local leaders easily emerge when grassroots movements are fostered.

Being crucial the strengthening of the social tissue, local leaders and grassroots movements, the role of the government has to be stealth: the government thus becomes a platform that provides context, facilitates and fosters interaction while staying in the background. Attempts of the government to move to the forefront are usually perceived as patronizing or intrusive, and thus have a discouraging effect.

At this stage, Internet and social media initiatives should be addressed towards access to information and knowledge management, especially in knowledge-intensive sectors of both the productive economy and the civil society. But not only, digital skills on building digital personae or digital identities are key at this level so that the weaving of the social tissue can go beyond the local arena and, as we will see below, overcome barriers of time and space and enter the field of networking.

The meso level: weaving the networks

Citizens are usually part of different collectives and collectives usually operate at different levels or layers. Networks contribute to the exchange of knowledge between scattered individuals and collectives which would otherwise act as isolated nodes.

But not only networks contribute to the articulation of collectives of collectives, but also contribute to the diversification of the typology of individuals and collectives involved in a given initiative. Networks become useful instruments to articulate multi-stakeholder partnerships —formally or tacitly— and, if well balanced in their nature, these networks can promote interactions and exchanges between governments, higher education and research organizations, the industry and civil society organizations. The Quadruple helix model of innovation posits (European Commission, 2016) that only such kinds of interactions between these four types of actors can really produce innovations that do respond to the needs of the society at large.

We have found that the synchronization of layers is achieved by successful projects by means of networks. And that this synchronization is most of the times achieved by means of online platforms and other digital constructs.

At this point, digital literacy (information literacy and media literacy) become a key aspect for further developments. On the one hand, because networks (either facilitated by digital means or not) have a logic that is much different from industrial hierarchical models. On the other hand, because, when powered by digital platforms, its mere operation does require capacitation in a broad range of digital skills.

Networks, in a knowledge society, heavily rely on the gift economy and the ability to concentrate and distribute information that can be applied locally as knowledge. It is thus worth bearing in mind the complex constellation of literacies and competences that can be labelled as digital skills: technological literacy, informational literacy, media literacy, digital identity or e-awareness are just some of the names and concepts that are part of a set of skills that enable or foster other ones like creativity, teamworking, leadership or critical solving – or, in other words, XXIst-century skills (Ananiadou & Claro, 2006; OECD 2016a, 2016b).

The macro level: mainstreaming and institutionalization

If weaving the social tissue was the way to leverage the potential of now equal and individual citizens, institutionalization is the way to leverage the potential of quadruple helix-like networks.

Many projects aim at raising their goals at the upmost level and seeing them going mainstream. Only institutions, through regulation and policy-making can realize this aspiration.

Of course, most projects do not get to see their designs mainstreamed, especially during their limited time-spans. Thus, their proxy goal to mainstreaming and institutionalization is visibility. Successful projects are strong in advocacy and awareness rising, and they do it in two opposite directions. Firstly, as we just stated, by looking “up” towards the institutions, by showcasing and modelling, by comparing with other related projects. Secondly, by looking “down” to their communities, by assessing and evaluating their impacts, providing feedback to their citizens.

This double aim —mainstreaming by “looking up” and laying strong foundations for social sustainability— are typical of successful projects.

It is interesting to note how this stage is both the end of the process but also the beginning of a virtuous circle.

On the one hand, it aims at creating social infrastructures —policy, regulation, institutions— so that the benefits of the projects can become structural and not temporary, as embedding them in established and stable social structures are the best bet for replication, scalability and sustainability at large.

On the other hand, by establishing a dialogue with the citizens and looking for the individual impact, they address —this time with a top-down approach— the socio-economic layer where the whole process began in the first place.

(note: paper prepared after the fieldwork of Alexandra Theben on the Impact of the Internet and Social Media on Youth Participation and Youth work.)

Bibliography

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.