Okay.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you for for these words. It's a pleasure to be here after one year planning more or less. But, yeah, yeah, you give a lot of maybe a lot of expectation about our project. We hope to be to answer all the expectations that that you put on the on on the project. I'm Arnaud Monteverde, the director of democratic innovation in the city of Barcelona and also one of the cofounders of the of the CDM platform, which is a a a free software project for for democracy and and and citizen participation. And it was born on 02/2016, and we are working on the project until until now. I I had a small presentation. I'm I don't know if because it's my first time here, but I don't know how you want to to proceed. But maybe it can be more illustrative to share with you the this short presentation and after that to have all the answers and and debate and whatever.

Okay. If it's okay, I I'll share you the presentation. Is is it I I think that in fifteen minutes, if it's okay to you, I can give the the overview of the of the project. And Perfect. Okay. Can you see the screen? Okay. Perfect. Okay. Let's go. It's important to understand why the the context in in the was born because it's very connected with the the political situation here in Spain and in in Barcelona because the the project has a lot of connections with the mobilization that we had on 2011 with the Indignados movement where a huge citizen movement in the whole country claimed for a real democracy. It was a moment where a huge demonstration, the people occupying the the squares and and and a huge claim for for more democracy to have more involvement on the on the government decisions, etcetera. And on 2015 here in the city of Barcelona, changed the changed the government and and initiate a new government come from a very activist tradition. The people coming from the social movements present a a a new a new political party and start a new government, and it was something very, very new. And it started a lot of new policies in terms of participation, and and the team was born in in this context. And the people who were involved at the beginning in the in this process, we were people coming from social movement, from the academia, from from the the hacktivism, the the the hacker culture, and people coming from free software. We had a lot of different relations between activism, democracy, university, and and and and freeze over movement. It is important to understand this. And, also, it's important to understand the the situation that the in the in the in the technological field where we see initially in 2011 how the social movements are using the the social networks and the the the mainstream social networks and the mainstream technologies for their own communication. But on 02/2015, we arrived in a moment that we start to see how these big companies start to win power and to centralize the the the Internet in the way that we can understand today. And we see the first risks on the on the on the technological way on 02/2015, and here is where where the the free software approach and the digital right approach and this and this approach to understand new new models of governance of technology are a key aspect of of this project. But the the second key aspect of the project definitely is we are having a huge demonstrations, and we are having a a a parliaments very far from the citizens and how we can build digital infrastructures to intermediate between citizens and and governments because we see an empty field, and we decide to how we can fill this empty field in terms of how we can imagine new ways of governments and to give the possibility to citizens to involve on the on the city governments. But what is the city? We always explain the city at at three levels. Initially, it's a a platform for to organize any kind of participatory process or democratic decision making process. It is also a free software project. It's is an an open source project with a GPL license. And from the first code line is do it in an open way. We actually we opened the the the GitHub repository. The first is the first project in the GitHub repository of the of the city of Barcelona. And, also, from the beginning, you can see all the lines that we have right on the on the project. And the third panel, maybe the most interesting part for today is the CDIM is a democratic community. The governance of the project is working on a on a with a community, with very active community who decide and who discuss and who debate and deliberate about how the software has to be and which are the the which are the most important techno political decisions about what happens inside inside the the the project. How just to give you an overview how how the works, the works is is a platform organized in participatory spaces. We have, like, four four different types of of participatory spaces to run participatory processes, to have participatory committees, to promote citizen initiative, and a system to have a secure and secure voting system. And, also, then you have different features, which actually, the city is a kind of you can combine the the the components and participatory spaces, and it's a very flexible system where you decide which features you enable in in the spaces that you you want to promote the the different participatory actions. You can have proposals, meetings, debates, participatory budgeting, accountability system, surveys, vlog, etcetera, and other other features. Maybe the main unit of of discussion are the proposals where the people give great proposals, and the proposals can be supported, can be there can be discussed with with comments and with threats and and deliberation system. You can you can have drafts, etcetera. The the second important thing are the meetings because from the beginning, it's very important on the project to have this combination between the digital and physical participation. Because in Barcelona, we had a very long tradition of of of physical participation in citizens' committees and neighborhood neighborhood councils, and and we designed a system to to combine the the physical participation with the with the digital flow. And we create the the meetings, and you can have the the the different meetings that we that you enable. And and after when you have a meeting, you can collect proposals, and you can, connect the proposals coming from a meeting to the to the proposal flow, etcetera. You can have, obviously, digital meetings. We have debates and a a deliberation system based on on provide arguments in favor against or or neutral and and different levels of of threatness. We have participatory budget budgeting using the system of the of the basket where you have a list of projects with a a specific amount of money, and you can vote for different projects. You have a system for accountability, and this is very useful for organizations who who want to have their own system of accountability when they want to show how they are developing the the commitments. For example, sit and create a proposal. This proposal is approved with an, an organization is, developing this proposal, and you can, track the level of execution of of a specific proposal. And you have other other components, like service, blocks, partitions, etcetera. It works as a as a social network in the sense that you can have your your own profile. You can follow other participants. In the, we call it participants. We don't call the people users because we want to engage the people to be part of the participatory action, and this is why we don't we don't have just an an utility relation. We want to involve the the people who is involved as a participant. And we have, like, different systems to understand what is happening inside inside the the the platform. We just launched, like, six months ago, the the progressive web app and and then the notifications in the in the mobile phone is designed to be adapted this to the to the mobile. And and, yes, this is the the main idea on how how the the technology works. The second part is the the question of how we build a a democratic platform. This is the project is it has been found funded by by the city of Barcelona in maybe the 90% of of the the funding of the project come from the city of Barcelona and other public administrations. And it follows the principle of public money, public code. We we believe that all the investments that the the public administration do in in in software should be in in in public code, and we follow this this principle, which is a campaign, coming from the free the Free Software Foundation. And thanks to that, today, the CDM is translated to more than 50 languages around the world. It's impossible to imagine this in a in a closed project. We start we create a a platform for a for the translation systems. And from the beginning, we decide that the the the project has to be not only free software. We had to facilitate the the ways to collaborate, not only receiving contributions in in GitHub, opening the the system of of translations, but also the technical decisions in how the the architecture of the of the code is designed is also a a modular way to create. So what we have, like, different models. And if you want new models that the the decision doesn't provide, you can create a new model without to modify everything, which is something that give a lot of possibilities possibilities to to contribute to the project. It is also it has a multi tenant architecture, and you can run one installation of the CD, but then you can have, like, several tenants. And you can manage different installations, different tenants of of the of the server. It's just one with one installation. This is very important, the social contract, in terms of governance because it was it's like our constitution, and we create at the beginning of the project, and it was discussed and decided for the for the community. And this is our democratic guarantee code and is where we have the main principles. You can find all this information in .org and also in meta..org, which which are the the main places of the of the of the project. But the social contract define the principles, the democratic principles that we are based on. And they say that the the all the the that the project has to be open to collaboration, has to be transparent, the participation has to be traceable, and we need to provide integrity in terms to give guarantees that the the the the the participation is not manipulated. We need to provide democratic quality guarantees. For example, the question related to the access to participation, this is a digital tool, but we when we are promoting the digital participation, we have to also provide the the the facilities to give the opportunity to everyone to participate, not just the people who has the the digital skills. And and also the question of of privacy and security, the the the minimize the the personal data that that is is is gathering. And and, also, we try to provide the best the best security and the best guarantees of privacy to the to to the participants. The they are like this is very, very important in terms to understand the governance of the project because, initially, the the the project just belongs to the city of Barcelona. But on 2019, the community constitute constituted an association, which is the deciduous association, who is who is today representing the the legal organization of the representation of the community. And we create an agreement between the city council and the association of of the city where we share the capacity to manage the repositories where the code is. And this is very important because, probably, it's the first agreement between a community and a public institution sharing the capacity to govern the code and to take decision on the code. And this is very a very important aspect of the project. We involve other, other institutions, in this in this, in this agreement, and, also, public institutions are helping in the funding initially the the minimum structure that we need to start to run than the the CDMA association, which is the mission of the CDMA association. The the system has a lot of of missions, but maybe the most important one is is to preserve the the social contract of the project and to guarantee the the democratic quality of the code independently of who is government governing the the public institution. Because our fear initially is what happens if the if the government change and and a new government doesn't want to support the the for example, wants to manipulate the software to do other things. And this is this is a a a way to ensure that we had the that we had the third party ensuring that the that the the principles of the project are preserved and the the democratic quality of the code are are preserved. How is how the community works and how we build this this governance model. We use the CDIM as our tool for government for governance and for transparency and for to to share with the whole community our decision making process and our governance model, which are which is the meta.decidim.org, which which is the we have a a a platform just for community. We we are, like, using our own technology to govern the our community. And this is a very, very important aspect because at the end, to improve the the the the improve the governance, the governance of the project implies to improve the the the the platform and and vice versa. We we need to to to to use our own technology to improve the the the technology. And how we work, we involve all the the the the different actors and and and and people who is using the software. And we provide different ways to to be involved on the on the community. Actually, one of other successful results of of the of the project is that we, through the governance of community, we create a we we call it a an ecosystem of of of companies and cooperative and and projects who start providing services based on the. We start just with one company developing initially the. And now there are more than than 15 different technical projects and developer projects who are providing services on the and who are creating their own business model on on providing services and developing new new features on on on the on the project. We have community meetings, and we have all the discussions opening. We have debates. You can propose a new new features. You can you can identify bugs and and and also commit to the to the community. And we have, like, assemblies, and we have, like, different spaces. I I can go farther to this if you if you have interest in the specific model of of organization. I this is an example on how the city means use it in the in the city of Barcelona. Just I I'll give you an example to show you how the city works in a real example in a city like Barcelona. But after this is the general numbers. More than one hand 150,000 people participants on the platform, 28,000 proposals collected in five years, 33,000 comments, 4,000 meetings documented and registered on on the platform, 100 participatory process, 200 participatory councils, etcetera. You can check all of this information in the city.barcelona, which is the maybe the main repository of patient of of citizen participation in the in the city of Barcelona. This is the the the example of participatory budgeting in Barcelona that now we are just finishing. Actually, now we are at the end of the the execution, but we put 30,000,000 for the 10 districts of of the city. 2,000 citizen proposals were collected. We organized more than 400 physical meetings, and we received more than 70,000 people participating in in this process. This is a real history, a group of young girls who plays cricket, and they need a facility to play this sport on the city because in the city, we have this field. They create the proposal on on on on the CDIM and the on the participatory budgeting process. They had a lot of people commenting and general discussion about what this project implies. They collect more than 2,000 supports on the first stage of priority prioritization. And then we help them, the the the whole projects that that that passed the first step. We help on on the on the communication of the projects, and they they and the final voting, they it was the the the the the second project most voted on the on on the district on the on their district. And the the the project was approved and now is on is on on execution. I think that we are now in the 60% of execution. But the interesting thing is that in the, you can follow Actually, this is this this this slide is not is is not updated. Now we are on the 60%, but today in the city in Barcelona, you can check the level of of the level of execution of each of the 70 projects selected by citizens on the on the on the on the on the voting stage at the end at the end of the of the process. We had other participatory actions and and process that just to give you an overview. And just to share the the the success of the of the of the project after from 2000 since 02/2016, we have more than 450 organizations using the in 30 countries, two two hundred and forty citizen citizen and govern and governmental organization, and also 180 social organizations as NGOs, unions, federations, cooperatives, political parties, etcetera. These are some examples of organizations using the city in Greenpeace, the city of Mexico, the the the the French assembly, cities in in Japan as as Kakagawa, or the the process of organizing by the European commission, call it the the the future of Europe conference, the participatory budgeting in the city of New York, or the the University of Bordeaux in in France using the city, which are our main challenge now. Initially, it's how we can scale our governance model at the international at the international level and how we can build the the sustainability of the of the community and how we can imagine this this this scalability. This is something important. We start to we switch now to to the first steps of the international governance, but we are thinking how we can start to promote the local groups in in different countries and how we create this this this meta governance process at the at the international level of the of the project. But also, and this is very important, how we update how we can imagine the CDM as a model in how we can create technology, not only from the public sector, but how we can inspire the public sector in the mission of great technology or support community centered solutions that are providing that are providing technologies for the for the the the the the challenge of of of the the of the future of of of society. This is very important in terms of of democratic approach. We we from the project, we we understand that we need, for our soon future, democratic technologies. And now the the market is definitely governed by the by the big techs with a very unclear democratic approach to the the the different models of governance, and we not we need to push other other models of of governance on the technologies that has to govern our our future. And, also, definitely, to extend the the decision participation, the democracy, and how we the how we as a citizens can can be involved in the in the in the decision making process at the and the and the the model of governance of our our societies. And also and this is what we try to do, how we we create spaces, networks for for democratic innovation, to seeing the the challenges of the of the digital. Thank you very much. I'm sorry if, I occupy more time than I had, but I'm open just to answer and discuss and share with you whatever you need to know about the project. Thank you very much.

And and

I actually wanna split it into two questions as I've thought about it and listened to to what you're saying. I I'm curious, number one, what problems you were running into with the existing neighborhood assemblies and and existing democratic processes that sparked the drive to to build software and and, you know, what problems were was what have you seen the software help with?

We have, like, different situations. Initially, on 02/1617, for more traditional organizations, they react like, why someone someone new can go to the platform and can say something. And me that I've I've been twenty years with my neighbor organization, I have more or less intimacy to say something. And some reactions like this, this is a real tension. But, actually, we create a lot of consensus because we after seven years, we see that the people who is creating proposals and the the people who is having the debates, and these these not individual people from their laptop at their house. They are organizations and people participating from collective from a collective perspective as family associations or schools or young organizations or sport organizations. We have to say that we have been mobilizing new communities, like the the schools and families or sport organizations or the people who's promoting any ways to to have the the to to understand the mobility of the of the city, the the the people who's promoting the cycle lines and these kind of things. But I think that we blew it a little bit this this tension. Initially, we we filled this a lot with more traditional, organizations, but they have seen that the CRM can can be a powerful tool to amplify their message. And also the CRM is not a a tool just for promoting individual participation. It's more related about cooperation and collective and having discussions and sharing ideas, etcetera.

That's that's really powerful. And I think, you know, even the decisions you're making to not use users and save participants, I've had a database with a user table in it so often, but, you know, that really does change the way you're thinking about the relationship people have with the tool. And, yes, especially if if this, enables those groups to to stay connected. That's that's fantastic. And it kinda leads into then the second question, which was, that's amazing that there's groups in Japan. I think you said Mexico City, some other places that are are finding this this useful too. I'm I'm curious, have those communities been in as involved in the development of of the software too, or have they, even brought maybe new new needs or new problems that the the the tool then grew to to to meet?

Yes. The the the different organizations, because they had the need, they involve on the on the governance of the code, attending their own needs. As I as I explained before, the ceiling works in a in a modular way, which means that you can develop your own model if you have a specific need. But sometimes, you need the modification of some aspects of the core, to to connect this model. And here is where start a negotiation with the with the and if this is very related with the with the governments. And but, actually, we are very we accept a huge part of the contributions to the core to adapt new new models. And, actually, when other organization create and propose new new new new needs, we we try to we evaluate initially trying to understand if this if this is committed with a social contract. This is the the first condition. And then we have, like, a technical evaluation in terms of the the quality of the code, and and it has all the the the standards that we ask for in terms of accessibility and and these kind of things. But in general, we try to be, like yes, to to facilitate the the the the collaboration. But if if if your your contribution doesn't fit exactly with a with a specific need of the the community, you can also develop your model and run your model. Actually, there are a lot of nonofficial models on on the developed by the by the the community.

Great. Thanks for thanks for taking the time today. Really cool project.

And but we we do all of this in a very transparent way on the Mhmm. On on GitHub and also on on on on the on this on the platform of the community.

That's awesome. Thanks.

Actually, the team works better with the large groups. Less than 100 people is very is difficult to to engage a community because with the small groups, at the end, they find other ways to to organize themselves if they are in the same place. If they are in different places, then then it it can be useful to but in general, it works better in larger groups because, for example, when you are having a you are collecting ideas or collecting proposals, it's definitely easy to have a huge community. Because with the smaller groups, the people, they use, like, like, other applications, like, to have a real time conversation Fastly and with Telegram or WhatsApp and and Google Docs and and collaborative tools for for write something. But when you need to organize something at a a mid scale level, then start towards better destiny. Maybe the the the difficulty start with a huge, huge participation. We still maybe the the the the more the most important process here in Barcelona, which is one of the most important instances in in in the world in terms of participation. We run, like, 50 or 30,000 people participating, and that's it. And at the same time, creating proposals or giving support to proposals or voting. And then sometimes we have to face we had to face technical issues in terms of capacity of the of the servers and these kind of things, but but but the the scalability was good. Our maybe we we have to improve or we are trying to deal in how we could have, like, deep deliberation process with a lot of people. For example, we are we've we had a process of a lot of people creating proposals and discussing at the different levels. But just having a deliberation process, just sharing ideas and having a long thread and giving different opinions, and maybe we don't have we still don't have experience of huge level of deliberation. This is one of our challenge for for the next years, definitely. And we are actually developing new models on how to improve the deliberation on on the on the platform.

The research. Yeah. Actually, I think that we we have received the same number of pull requests on the code that people asking for interviews from 2006 and '16. It actually, it generates a lot of interest that the project in terms of research, but also connected to the to the model of the the city of Barcelona and what the Barcelona is doing of the smart city model and how we can reimagine the way in which the citizens involved in the in the in the make the making decision process, etcetera. But I think that maybe the our contribution is just not not as a as a as a as a unique model, but also but but, yes, as a experience in how we can introduce in the in the in the digital policies new ways to understand the governance from the public sent sector and also with communities. Because we see the the risk of the fast privatization of the the the whole technological world with a huge lack of democracy. And I think that we need we need, with experience like the, to push these kind of new ways to understand the the the governance and these democratic governance models to to the to the technologies who has to govern us. But, actually, the the the technologies are governed as today and how we can we couldn't introduce ways to do that. If you are walking on the street and you see something on a square that you doesn't like, you can say something because this is a public space. But if you are working in your social network, you cannot say anything because this is a private place, and and the people who is behind, they don't have any commitment to answer you, and you don't have any possibility to to say anything. Actually, just before that, the the now the the the new platforms are, for example, Netflix. They doesn't ask you anything. They just show you the the content that you need to know because they know perfectly your preferences. In in two or three years ago, you had a rating system that you manually decide something about the the things, but today, the you don't have more possibly to to to show your your worth about something. And I think that maybe the the research could could contribute in how these models can be can be used to to put democracy on the on the digital field that we have this this lack of. I'm not sure if you're answering specifically because the the question of the research is is huge, but, Matt, and you can focus on the models, and you can focus on the tools, and you can focus on the but I think that, here, there's there is something deeper, which is where is the power and who is, running the power in the in the technological field.

Hi. So I'm interested in deliberative democracy as well. And one of the elements that I see criticized often with deliberative democracy is that people who come from, you know, privileged backgrounds tend to be the people who dominate discussions either in person and probably to a larger degree online. And it kind of implicates questions about who's speaking and who's being heard in these kind of assemblies. And I wonder if you've done any kind of research to see how in person assemblies, maybe sortation based assemblies, improve the ability for, you know, marginalized groups to participate productively in these processes versus online participation, which might tend towards highly educated individuals and that kind of thing.

Yeah. This is a very good question. And, actually, you have been thinking a lot through our experience. This is why from the beginning, we designed this as a hybrid system where on assemblies and citizen assemblies. And, also, as as citizen assemblies by sortition, we actually we we have brand two on the last year on on on on the on Barcelona. But, also, we always say that when we think the digital participation, we always think the digital participation new layer of participation on the physical participation. This is not a substitution. This is definitely something complimentary. You have to understand like that. You cannot imagine just a a a digital system for everything because on on the the case of the city of Barcelona, you have to you cannot understand the the the deliberation without what is happening the or the the territory because the the the the main unit of discussion is the city and the neighborhoods and the districts and the the the transformation of the city and what is happening there. I think that the we have to imagine like this, But I understand also the question of the of the the who has the privilege to to to be part of. But we have seen that we have more participation when we are amplifying the ways to be part of. And we are giving more opportunities because eight years ago, you you just can be part of something if you go to the neighborhood council one time every three months at eight eight by eight eight, 09:00 eight or 09:00 in the night and just with a very it was very limiting because if you are if you have a family or kids, it was impossible to participate. And now we are having this space, this physical space, but if you cannot assist on that, you can go to the platform and you can say something too. We are opening new new new ways to participate. But this is just the just the the the this is just the beginning. The allows to open several ways to participation and and imagine other model of governance at the different levels. You can build a governance infrastructure of the city having neighborhood councils, district councils, city councils, sortition councils, participatory process for different urban transformation plans, etcetera. You can build a different levels of governance on the different topics of the public policies design. You can design your own model of governance of the city. This is an interesting question because this is not like the this is not like Twitter that you have a timeline and you can post tweets. You have a flexible system that you can organize attending your needs. For example, we have a new filter that nobody is using. It's still nobody is using because the the politicians has a lot of fear about that, but you can have, like, self that you can have the the calls the you can have meetings proposed by citizens without the inter the intermediation of the the city council, like like a meet up, but provided these services provided by the by the the platform, the city. Nobody is using this, but this is a very political future in the sense that you are providing the possibility to every citizen of the city, create a a public meeting to discuss any kind of issue of the city.

Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure. And if you want more information, I will, share with you here my email and and all the information that we have about the project. You can find on the on our website, but we are here to, yeah, to answer whatever you need. And thank you very much for the conversation and the invitation.