Digital Democracy and Data Commons is a pilot participatory process to test a new technology that will allow to improve the participatory platform Decidim, and to deliberate over the data politics of the future. This pilot is connected to the European project DECODE (Decentralized Citizen Owned Data Ecosystems), oriented to create technological, legal and socioeconomic tools that give citizens more control over their data and that elicit more common benefits from them. The pilot is led by the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Informatics (IMI), with the collaboration of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Eurecat and Thoughtworks.
From 18/10/2018 to 01/04/2019
Venue
Espanya
When
18/10/2018 - 22/02/2019
Organized by
Barcelona City Council. Partners: CNSC and Dimmons research groups of the IN3, Eurecat, and Thoughtworks.
Program
Today's digital economy is marked by the surveillance and influence of large digital companies and states over the lives of millions of people. DECODE (Decentralized Citizen Owned Data Ecosystems) is a European project that seeks to develop technological, as well as legal and socio-economic tools, to give citizens greater control over their data and thus contribute to the transformation of the current digital economy and politics.
The Digital Democracy and Data Commons (DDDC) pilot is a participatory process aimed at experts and people involved in the digital economy, political representatives, as well as citizens in general, with three main objectives: to test the new DECODE-Decidim system, which allows signing digital petitions in a secure, private, transparent and data enriched way; to deliberate on data regulation, policy and economy; and, finally, to build an experimental data commons, defined by the ideas and practices coming from the participatory process itself. The pilot is led by the Barcelona Municipal Institute of Informatics (IMI), with the collaboration of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Eurecat and Thoughtworks.
This participatory pilot will have a total duration of five months and will be developed in several phases, which will run between October 18th 2018 and April 1st 2019. Throughout the process, different face-to-face meetings will be held, connected with the activity developed in the dddc.decodeproject.eu platform.
- The first phase of the process will be dedicated to the elaboration of a brief diagnosis of the state of regulations, governance models and data economy, supported on the analyses previously developed in the context of the DECODE project. This phase will also include the launch of a sociodemographic survey which will also include various questions of perceptions on the digital economy. The data from this survey will allow, in later stages of the process, to design communicative actions aimed at improving the inclusiveness of the process.
- During the second phase of the process, proposals will be collected to address the issues mapped during the diagnosis phase, including proposals derived from the previous work in DECODE. Likewise, a session of analysis of the survey sociodemographic data will be carried out, linked to the design of communicative actions to improve inclusion in the process. The Barcelona Now (BCNNOW) viewer developed by the Eurecat team will be used for the analysis.
- In the third phase, proposals from the previous phase will be discussed.
- Subsequently, there will be a process of elaboration of the proposals, and the discussions, by the DECODE team and potentially interested participants.
- The results of the elaboration will later be reviewed by the participants.
- Then comes a central moment in the pilot: the collection of support for the pilot results using DECODE technology for secure and transparent signature (based on encryption techniques and distributed registration technologies). This technology, integrated with DECIDIM, represents a step forward in the construction of a more secure, transparent and distributed networked democracy.
- The process will end with a closing meeting and the launch of a survey that will help to assess the satisfaction of participants with the process and with the DECODE technology.
Throughout these phases (especially in face-to-face meetings), discussions will be organised around three main axes: legal aspects, governance aspects, and economic aspects. Although they have clear connections between them, each of them provides a differential approach to discussions around data. One of the results of the process will be a participatory document, white paper or manifesto around the digital economy. A fourth axis of the pilot, the experimental axis, will be dedicated to use and take collective decisions around the database resulting from the data (in particular, the anonymised socio-demographic data) shared during the pilot, constituting a temporary commons that will serve to improve the deliberative process itself, a practice that could be incorporated in Decidim processes in the future.
The pilot will therefore have several complementary objectives. Firstly, it will serve to test the new DECODE-Decidim technology, improving Decidim's infrastructure for participatory democracy. It will allow the development of a deliberative process on regulation, governance and data economy open to citizens. It will also facilitate experimentation with a data commons and its use to improve inclusion. It will also serve to improve DECODE's technological, legal and socio-economic tools, all of which are published under free licences. Finally, the pilot and its results aim to affect discourses, practices and public policies around data, at local and European level.
For further information, please visit the Decode participatory platform and the Decode project website, as well as Twitter: