Welcome to Part 2 of our tour of democratic innovations happening all over the world to give you a little hope right now. After attending the 23rd International Observatory on Participatory Democracy (IOPD) conference that took place in Valongo, Portugal in October (read part 1!), I headed over to Barcelona’s Decidim Fest 2024. In case you aren’t familiar, Decidim is a digital platform that we use to run participatory budgeting processes.
Decidim Conference
This year’s Decidim fest was focused on the relationship between ecology, democracy, and technology. Taking place over the course of 3 days (Oct 23th – 25th) in Barcelona’s Canòdrom, a center for digital and democratic innovation, this free conference convened a balanced mix of civic technologists, people implementing a variety of participatory processes in their own contexts, and researchers to explore how we can move towards ecologically and socio-economically desirable societies in a democratic way. The Canòdrom, Decidim’s warm community and pacing of the conference provided an intimate setting to explore these topics further. Below are a few highlights of everything I learned at Decidim Fest 2024:
1) How governments are using participatory democracy and Decidim’s open source digital participation platform to engage their residents in designing their climate policies:
Brazil: In a time when Brazil has been impacted by deadly floods and droughts, Carla de Paiva Bezerra shared Brazil’s work collaborating with their residents to develop ‘Plano Clima’, a participatory climate plan being hosted through ‘Brazil Participativo,’ the largest instance of digital participation ever conducted by the country’s federal government. The website uses Decidim’s platform in order to engage over 1.4 million residents in policymaking. Residents can present up to 3 proposals and will be able to vote on up to 10 proposals under the plan’s 18 categories. Resident input will be analyzed and integrated into the climate plan. To find out more about this initiative check out this update.
Catalunya: Pablo García Arcos discussed Catalan’s Climate Assembly, which selected 100 residents through a lottery to build solutions in response to the climate crisis. The residents have been tasked with learning about, deliberating, and making proposals about the deployment of renewable energy and Catalunya’s food model. Residents met over the course of 6 weeks and were compensated for their time. To learn more about this initiative, visit the process page on the Decidim platform.
European Union: Steffen Schulz from the European Commission discussed the E.U’s Citizen Panels, which randomly select 150 EU citizens representing the EU’s diversity along geographic, gender, age, education, and socioeconomic lines to meet over the course of 3 weekends and design policies regarding food waste, learning mobility, energy efficiency, and tackling hatred in society. While the panels met in person, any EU resident can contribute to the discussions through the European Commission’s platform’s online debates.
2) How 50 university students are fostering civic engagement and participatory democracy in Brazil through a program that integrates Decidim into academic courses at the University of Brasilia. Eduardo Nunes, Tech Lead at Brazil Participativo shared the ways the program supports students by providing a supportive network, involving the students in the Google Summer of Code (GSOC), and discussed the ways in which students are making contributions and innovations to the Decidim platform (and digital participation) in Brazil. This includes the integration of a survey component that allows people to submit opinions about different issues and agree or disagree with each other’s statements. This feature was used to help engage residents in developing the National Culture Plan.
3) How the Method of Equal Shares, a proportional voting rule for participatory budgeting that has already been used in several small cities in Poland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands can foster more diverse and inclusive outcomes in PB voting.
Jan Maly, Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business offered the Method of Equal Shares as a solution to the issues that can arise from “majority rules” voting. Because many cities choose the PB projects that get the most votes, the budget is often spent on similar projects that may be popular with the same majority group of voters, which can limit minority voices from being heard and result in a lack of diversity in projects.
The Method of Equal Shares assigns each voter an equal part of the budget which can be used for the projects each person has voted for. A project is selected if it can be funded with the budget shares of everyone who voted for the project. This way each voter has equal ability to impact the outcome of the election. To read more about how it works click here.
4) How discussions about democratizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) have neglected how AI is woven into our supply chains, human labor, and commodities, and the ways in which AI-based algorithms perpetuate colonial legacies and inequities across the globe.
Ana Valdivia, Lecturer in AI, Government and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute discussed how debates around water privatization are going to become very important since data centers consume a lot of water and AI algorithms keep growing. Drawing on examples from data centers in communities in Mexico where water scarcity is an issue and in some instances, where crops can no longer be harvested, Ana questioned what the role of institutions should be when we talk about data centers.
Acknowledging that community members sometimes want these data centers there because of the employment they create, Ana also debated how to create pedagogical processes that effectively engage the communities affected by the data centers in identifying the kind of relationship they would like these companies to have with their environments.
5) The importance of grounding our participatory democracy practice in ideology
While I had expected Decidim Fest to be fairly technical, the variety of speakers from different sectors helped underpin the role of technology, democracy, and institutions in addressing our most pressing issues. Notably, French philosopher and economist Frédéric Lordon and Belarusian writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov’s debate questioned the role of participatory democracy in being the tool that will help us move into a just transition.
Importantly, Frédéric & Evgeny showed the importance of using history and economic theory to understand where we are in capitalism, and how we cannot divorce this from any discussion that imagines what’s next.
This talk was a humbling reminder of the importance of revisiting the history and ideology of what our social movements and practices are trying to achieve. It also demonstrated the importance of not being afraid to question if we are achieving our goals, even at a conference championing our approach! Only then, can our movements grow and evolve.
Wow! So much is happening in the digital democracy space around the world. I left Decidim Fest feeling hopeful and inspired to continue to build participatory democracy in North America with our team. I hope these innovations give you hope too!
Isabel Luciano
With a decade of experience helping governments and institutions engage communities that have been excluded from traditional decision-making processes in allocating public funds, Isabel has dedicated herself to opening access to our democracy. She spent the first half of her career helping cities and institutions in North America implement participatory budgeting (PB). More recently, she has been focused on creating youth programming that equips and resources youth to lead their own engagement innovations in their city’s PB process. She is currently applying the insights she’s gathered from this work to develop PBP’s training curriculum and help community members build PB processes that are responsive and tailored to the unique needs of their own contexts.
