 Making it this morning for raving those lines, and I also know Mary making went on into the wee hours So thank you for waking up and being here So so my name is panthea and I am with reboot and I'm talking about Participatory budgeting this morning and what reboots been working on and the And what reboots been working on in the last year or so around the the the global participatory budgeting movement And also what civic tech can and can't do for this global movement. I think that while we're going to be focusing on participatory budgeting PB I think that the applications and the lessons will actually be interesting to Folks working on other civic tech issues and on participatory democracy more broadly So who here is familiar with PB history where it's come from. Okay. I think most most of the crowd Maybe just a really quick history lesson 30 years ago And 85 Brazil ended about 20 years of military dictatorship 88 There was a new constitution and in 89 the workers party Along with a couple of pro-democracy social movements introduced participatory budgeting in in a in a Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil And this was really significant At the time there are about a third of the population living in informal settle in informal settlements or favelas Without really access to city services public health services infrastructure or whatnot and it was really seen as a movement for redistributive social justice as a way to Reallocate resources to the poor the marginalized and The way that participatory budgeting works It really does look different kind of everywhere you go But loosely the elements are the same citizens are able to input on the development of a city budget For the most part they're able to participate in how that budget is allocated What what needs and what challenges should be prioritized? They work with government to design these projects to allocate the money and then in the case of Porto Alegre and many places around the world They actually monitor the implementation of these to basically make sure that the projects are implemented according to plan And in the last 30 years, we've really seen a huge surge in participatory budgeting implementations globally And it's been called by some as a hope for democracy or the hope for democracy This is Nelson Diaz's term some of you may be familiar with his work And it's not hard to understand why you know, we live in an era where there is where liberal democracy is Failing where people growing mistrust of Government of their political institutions of the political class and people don't really know how to engage with government How to change this we know that we should show up to vote every four years six years whatever your cycle is But other than that, but but the thing is we feel that our elected representatives don't represent us Don't represent our interests and yet we don't really know what to do about them And so PB tries to change that PB tries to bring people into the process of government So that they can't input on solving the challenges that are most important to them oops and If we take a look at the rise of PB now in the last 30 or so years, there's been 7,000 implementations globally And really really across the world. It's spread faster than liberal democratic regimes themselves and it it sort of poses a contradiction to what we sometimes see as a stalemate in in the sort of growth of democracy and democratization efforts and sort of this and a sort of countering this this global trend in this in this sort of deadlock that we have and and and we see PB growing in mature democracies in new democracies in democracies that are struggling in autocratic regimes And I think something that it that something that is really interesting about PB is that it's really supporting local bottom-up Civic participation and supporting democratization at a rate in in a way that national level movements cannot And so what does civic tech have to do with all of this we're at tic-tac Well civic tech promises to make participatory budgeting easy The idea is if that if once a government decides to adopt this whether, you know by mandate or through pressure from ad from advocacy groups The idea is that you know different technology products offer a turnkey solution, you know, we have secure voting here It's GDP are compliant. We have different platforms Desi Dean is going to be talking a little bit later and there's a couple of different platforms out there that aren't purely focused on on PB But PB is one of the key applications and this is really helping power the uptake and spread globally as we're seeing Console which is one of the ones that my team looked at closely because we are working in Madrid Itself has been implemented in over 30 countries. There's about a hundred active contributors on github. It's an open-source platform and By its own accounting about 90 million citizens have participated in some way on the platform So that's great though. Those are the numbers, but what have we gotten 7,000 implementations later? The thing is it's kind of hard to say Because right now PB suffering a little bit from what calls sort of everything to everybody's syndrome So in one of the implementations we looked at these were all the reasons when we talked to officials that were involved as To why they were implementing PB. It's going to empower the marginalized. It's going to empower civil society It's going to improve government accountability It's going to improve government legitimacy so that we can then generate tax revenue and then attract donor support It is going to make sure that we allocate Natural resource revenue responsibly it's trying to be everything to everybody and what sometimes happens then is you kind of do Nothing great at all which is in the case of some of the implementations that we saw So back getting up for a moment. What's reboots role in all of this? So for those that are not familiar with us, we were founded nine years ago With the idea that ordinary people especially those most marginalized should have a meaningful say in the policies and programs that impact their lives And we work in many different ways to do that We were brought in to this process I'm actually following on the good work of my society and of Brian Wampler Mike touch and Stephanie McNulty Who had been working with the Hewlett Foundation for a while to understand why is participatory budgeting not living up to its potential? We've had significant investments. There's been sort of this global upsurge And yet it looks kind of different everywhere and the results have been pretty uneven So we sort of went underwent this co-design process that I'm actually not really going to go into But what's important for right now is we looked deeply at four different contexts because some of the work of my society and others noted that we actually needed to go beyond case studies and look at cross-country comparisons and There was the idea that we needed to actually set up a global participatory budgeting body to actually create and enforce standards Oversea the quality of implementations with the idea that that could help the movement have greater impact But Hewlett didn't want to get into what they call knee-jerk partnership creation. So We went through this process And so we took a look at four implementations closely We looked at a big national level effort in Madagascar one of the poorest countries in the world We went to Madrid one of the global civic tech innovators in participatory democracy where there's about a million a Hundred million euros being allocated each year in about 10% of the city participating Mexico City Where there's about 3% participating in 95% of the decided projects are actually implemented Which is interesting and we'll come back to later. And then finally we went to soul Which is one of the world's largest implementations where a third of the municipal budget is allocated through PV So we looked at a range of implementations as well as socio-political context for this work This is the co-design workshop we did at the end of last year. So what did we find? Is the hope for democracy billing correct Depends on what you think the problems of democracy are So what we found is that participatory budgeting is really great At giving folks a first-rate civic education And this is important because people for a long time in many countries have been told that Politics and governance is something they don't understand that they can't participate in I live in the US right now where Feels like for a long time people have been told you know pay attention to Brad and Angelina Pay attention to the Kardashians pay attention to reality TV show up and vote every four years do your civic duty And other than that you know policymaking is something that happens in DC or in Brussels or in London or wherever So don't worry about it And what that happened and then what what happens as a result of that is people don't really understand How government works and so when people talk about government not working for them Usually they're actually talking just at the tip of the iceberg up here What they're talking about is the the the the programs that are offered to me the services that are offered to me They don't actually meet my needs what they don't actually see or we don't often talk about is all these other steps all the other all the other steps in the process for actually Determining whether or not the right policies program services are implemented And so what PB does is it brings people into this process on how to identify different needs and challenges? How to prioritize and negotiate between them how to allocate funding how to design projects and takes people through all of this and The PB process itself is really fantastic at this And Beyond the natural civic education that citizens get through participating in this process We're also seeing some implementations doing some really interesting work at further supporting citizens civic education so in Seoul for example This is really fascinating so they they have set up this thing called budget school Which is basically any citizen that wants to sit on their citizen on their resident delegate committees has to attend the school to Understand what PB is and how to design and allocate money in a way that is in line with government protocol And so every year they have about 2,000 citizens that go through this program And then they randomly select about 250 of them to actually become these citizen delegates To prevent capture for personal or or or political interests and it's seen as a very competitive and prestigious thing Us Asians we like extra credit homework And then beyond that there's also Seoul actually invests in hiring citizen and hiring consultants So any citizen that develops a proposal that wants basically extra support on how to translate that into something for government The government will actually pay for consultants to help them do so I thought this is really really fascinating And so the more people understand how to engage with government the better democracy works And I think this is really the potential of participatory budgeting It helps them with the civic education and helps them with how to translate their ideas into practice So then back to civic tech What is the role of technology in all of this So with the caveat that my colleagues that are going to speak after Work on these platforms deeply we were We were looking at tech was actually not a focus of our work But we did have some interesting observations on where it can or can't help And so let's start with a theory The theory is that Technology lowers the barriers to participation So by enabling more people to be able to participate We think that citizens will then engage in civic and more citizens will engage in civic and democratic processes With more people inputting and putting pressure on governments and telling government what they want The idea is then that government is more responsive and more accountable to citizen needs Then democracy thrives sunshine rainbows. We're all happy Does this actually happen? So What we observed doesn't quite match with the theory and I'd be curious for other experiences That that that that my colleagues will share This first point should not be surprising to anyone here Technology amplifies the needs of those that know how to use technology We know this so With PB we've seen different processes that favor The privileged resource actors people with the time the capacity the energy who know how to use the process To achieve their ends and so one of the observations with Mexico City and why there's been 95% Implementation of winning projects far higher than in many other places is Basically, it's another form of clientelism and the folks that are submitting projects are basically folks that are embedded in the political structures already And there's been they found government officials that have basically Done voting fraud and taken citizens identities to be able to vote for them through the PB process I live in New York City and if you were to look at New York City this week on to as to what the top PB proposals are These are them So we have someone who is very Who's a who's a very passionate conservationist and very excited about monarch butterflies? Which I am not one to comment on whether or not monarch butterflies are important I'm sure they're beautiful and wonderful and important, but Should this be the top PB priority for New York City? I don't know who's to say Districts in New York that sign up for this get to have to commit to allocating one one million dollars of their of their budget Shoot, okay. I have to go Of their of their budget to PB So then the so then the the second part of our theory of change is that more citizens engage in civic and democratic Processes is that true? Well, we see more citizens exercising their civic voice certainly But the signal to noise ratio can be overwhelming to the point where people actually disengaged and people don't want to participate anymore This is a this is a comment that we heard from one of the Residents in Madrid who basically looked at who looked at console and I think the year that we were looking at it I think there were 200,000 proposals that were submitted and they said I'm done. I can't deal with this. There's too much. There's too much noise on here So I actually don't know what to what to put my vote behind. I don't have time to sift through all this. This feels overwhelming I'm out third link in our chain Government is more counted was more responsive and accountable the challenges with these Processes a lot of the times the proposals are getting that are getting submitted are actually not implementable by government So it is not within that government's jurisdiction It does not meet civic codes. It does not meet it is it is motivated by we've seen some sort of racist xenophobic proposals up there and And so I think a big part that's missing is sort of thinking about how to integrate these proposals and how to help government actually understand these proposals how to Integrate them into the way that governments up doing things and it was something that my colleagues will be speaking about in a bit and so the theory that PB Some of the other work that we do is going to help democracy thrive where we're actually seeing is that there's PB can also support democratic disillusionment by both citizens and governments. They've participated their proposals don't move forward Government gets overwhelmed. They feel like citizens are actually not helping and not giving them anything that's useful and so Yeah, and so if we think about what to do about this, let's go back to Porto Allegrae What worked about this process? What worked was that citizens and governments were sitting down talking about how to solve problems together It was messy. It was difficult, but over the course of this process. They sat down face-to-face with each other and worked through it and So while PB can inspire a democratic renewal I think one of the things that my team found was that civic tech plus PB can actually have runs the risk of accelerating democratic disillusionment and So what and so what to do? If three quick ideas that I'm going to run through The first thing is to help people help citizens find others that share their interests and frustration and Nurture their engagement the key the key word here being nurture Civic engagement is not something that happens magically as we all know But we know we have to foster and support it, but we actually don't often know how to go about that so something that's really fascinating that I thought in Madrid and that public I think worked on is Basically with those 200,000 proposals They started doing data analysis on it to understand what were the patterns and the themes and what were the things that came out? And how can we help people match make so four of the themes that came up that were common or common enough to have a critical mass were Children the elderly environment and sport and so they ran these workshop at Participa lab which is an independent semi-government group and Ran these and basically invited all the people that had submitted proposals under these four themes together to meet each other and To say hey, could you develop better proposals than you would on your own if you came and met and talked about it? What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you think should happen? This is these are photos from the children workshop where you see people brought their kids There was co-design work and the city invested in bringing designers and writers and technical specialists to help them develop their proposals And then to help them organize and so the proposals that came out of this This is the right to play campaign one of the most popular that I think has been since spun off into its own sort of movement NGO They developed these proposals that were That were rigorous that were well considered that were things that government could actually put forward And they had an active and engaged community around it And I think what's super fascinating about this is in Madrid they I mean yes They're known for console, but they're also thinking about how to use the how how to use console And how do you use PB as a sensing mechanism as a sensing mechanism for when someone put something in In a PB process? Yes, it gets lost. Yes, it doesn't move forward But someone's put up their hand to say I want to change things in my community and they're then helping them do so It may not happen through PB But they are funneling their interest and engagement into something else and I think that's really fascinating and something that we should all learn from So yes, we know this is not true, but this is what they did in Madrid Think of your platform broadly fine unexplained applications. Okay, go go go great nurture Can I take two more minutes? I'll wrap it quickly. Okay Second thing we have to help governments make sense of citizen sentiment. How do we look at the data exhaust? That's coming out of these platforms and so in Seoul basically they're looking at the The proposals that are submitted and even the ones that don't move forward They're basically using it as proxy indicators to understand what public services as citizens are dissatisfied with and then funneling that data Into the relevant ministries departments agencies to take care of Reboots doing our own sort of work and experiments with our own data exhaust And I think this is interesting for international organizations to think about when we do international research that feeds up Into international organizations movements whatnot. How do we actually feed back into the communities that we're extracting the state of from? We developed media fellowships happy to talk about that later And then the third is of course we need to build for citizens and government both because democracy requires both of them and so Folks over here we like to design for citizens This is the sexy front-end citizen engagement side of civic engagement. It's this we love people power This is what our funders will support. This is what we all think about Absolutely, but we need to integrate with how government works. I have stories on all these folks. You can find me later And so I think we need to design for the unsexy back-end government integration side of things I don't think a speggie is going to take off, but I would love a better acronym Because I think we need to work here And so civic tech 1.0. How do you aggregate and rise up voice? 2.0. How do we actually develop proposals using aggregated voice? And I think 3.0 is going to be the messy stuff of how we integrate with government I think this is a sweet spot. I think this is where responsible civic tech kitty lives She's lonely. She wants friends. Please work with her Because I think otherwise it's actually irresponsible the stuff that we're doing seriously I think we are then sort of driving up expectations. We are driving engagement. We want people to participate And frankly when that participation is not met by delivery by results people can disengage further and I think as a community That's that's irresponsible of us to do and I think we should think carefully about those consequences. Thank you very much Our next speaker is your Pardo talking about budgetary budget in France Good morning everyone. I'm just expecting my slides to appear So I will talk to this morning about the different cases of party battery budgeting that we have in France Just to let you know we started well a little bit like five years ago we had like maybe four cases of party battery budgeting and this weekend I was Updating my list and we got more than 150 cases now, so it's all started the big story started with Paris. Can we scale up the slides? Yeah, I'm putting off a screen Wait, it doesn't it's I will Carry on so basically I wanted to show you How this device traveled in in France And try to tell you that maybe Paris is not a model for their cities and I will explain why It's so as I said, it started like an in Paris the big trend arrived with Paris and they They are French so they are very proud this Tweet says like to say I have the biggest Partipatry budgeting in the world. So take the keys of the money. I think it's don't Google of it. What's it? So What we have is like a process processes that are very different from From Porto Alex. Well, I also have like some pictures from the last from the last year about what happened So they are still organizing meetings where they could discuss proposals about specific neighborhoods and also based on The different topics so it could be about education or it could be about public transport as you could see in in this Ballot paper you got They are not only select the representatives that they have but also they will vote on the different priorities So this one is on specific topic about culture and and youth and they will decide So the different policies within Culture and youth the different priorities. So it's not only about voting on specific projects They vote on policies, which is pretty different from what we see in in different countries and France is not an exception So my work during my PhD is about two different stuff I'm trying to compare France and Brazil about how this device is traveling. So what we called In our language policy transfers and we are trying to understand the different drivers and also the outcomes because what we Could build with participatory budgeting in Brazil is pretty different from what we have seen here in Europe. So To say in a short way in Porto Aleg you could build schools and health centers and Kindergarten while in in in France and said a bit like the proposals that you just saw about New York is more more about green spaces community gardens and bike lanes So, yeah, that's We are not Making the same city in the different part of the world with PB. So it's different to to to compare So one part of my work is trying to understand how to model the different variations of PB just to let you know, that's basically if we take the example about Brazil There is a difference between a distinction between What we could call like a powerful PB and something it is more like a PB lights light Version of PB without all the different features So in France, we have like different steps. I'm sure that you're already aware of that because you got the Perfect presentation from Paris yesterday Basically, they are defining the rules while each it is defining the rules then they could collect the proposals from individual citizens or from NGOs and then there is a phase that is a very Critical where they are reviewing the cost and feasibility for each proposal. So that's part this part where in Paris they got for the first year I think it was more than a three thousand Proposals it was difficult to to filter that and then they're organizing votes and the last part which is essential implementing proposals Which also goes with some difficulties. So basically most of the well many cities have Try to implement PB and using a platform. So for example in this case, it's like Angiens And I'm sure that you will look at there is a one specific part of the picture Which is actually a copy and paste from their DCDM platform You see that basically They are trying to collect the ideas and that's the first part Then they there is the vote and they are using many those platforms to organize the vote So we got different Waves nothing started exactly with Paris after the first world social forum Organized in Brazil. There were many processes that were started while many 10 cities Which is not a lot when you know that in France we have more than 35,000 cities So only 10 cities that were very close to the French Communist Party and then I started in In 2005 there was a new wave that was addressing the needs of High schools so basically Students were able to vote to decide what kind of works would be done in high schools in a specific Region that was led by the former Minister Segoren Royale and then in 2014 Since so it was the date of the last local elections We got Paris that studied the process and other cities and now it's like more than four millions of people that are able to take part in participatory budgeting Oops, no, that's a mistake Sorry about that Yeah, no, okay Just remember that Yeah, just remember that most of the cities that are implementing PB are Actually very in small towns, so it's like this is going crazy Okay Yes So we got so just the slides that you saw you saw the map of participatory budgeting across the world That was taken from the the book from Nelson Diaz in your in your presentation and last year we only had like 80 processes and now we are So we are like 70 more processes. So it's really hard to follow that So what is important here is like If you compare to the number of cities that we got and the number of participatory budgeting It's mainly targeting cities that are above a specific threshold. So if you're a city that's more than 100,000 Residents then you are more likely to implement PB even if most of the processes are in small towns But since they have very few inhabitants, they just don't represent much people So, yeah, it's a complicated to follow because it's a very a lot of cities and a lot of interviews to be to be done What was What was happening last year not last year the last decade for the first wave is like the processes were mainly consultative so basically people Would go to the meetings they will say what they wanted and then at some point the city hall would decide without any vote What would be the conclusion? So it's a bit like the grand debate that you have Heard of Basically, you go to a meeting you talk and then the elected people decide what they really want to do with us There is no not anything in the process that could say well the top the number one priority is this And so there's this first limit the last one is the fact that There was not any Procedural clarity about what is the way that process the process was done So in many cities basically they could change the rules During the process because of anything so that was not very clear And what is that the was what was striking as as well It was the fact that the mayor or actually the city officials were able to decide and they were really at the center of Of the process they could decide about everything. Well in Brazil Most of the processes where and the rules were decided by the civil society, which is very different from the the French former cases and from the the current ones as well where all the Processes are started by the city officials. There is not an official demand From civil society organizations. So they are not Designing the rules and that has some impact on that And Nightworks one thing that is very important from the last research that has been that have been done in Political science is the fact that in some cases participatory budgeting is much more powerful than other participatory processes So they some researchers Just like John font and Brian Smith have Tried to follow to track the different proposals from different participatory processes in in Spain and they've shown that actually the proposals made through PB were more likely to be implemented to be really to see the the the reality at some point and for two reasons mainly Because there is a dedicated Budget, which is very different from other Processes and then they claim that also because they have there is a part of citizen monitoring So people will push and put pressure on the city on the local government in order to implement this the decisions That were decided through participatory budgeting Which is not exactly the same thing in all their processes So what I'm following at the moment is the different features that could be allowed through the processes Well, there could be online or offline processes So just to show you I want to talk about all the those features And that's why it's like a written in very small I will talk about the ones that are written in red, which doesn't appear right to me right now, but it's okay So the what is interesting with the platforms is that they could allow citizen to comment Those proposals and to vote. So that are the different Feature the main features that could be interesting before Understanding that we need to see the the bigger picture of the budget So most of the cities in France are spending much less than one percent of the local budget very far from a third of the local budget like in Seoul And sometimes it becomes very ridiculous. So for example in puto one of the last processes started last year They are deciding about Something that is just a ridiculous amount of money So basically the idea behind this is like the city officials also try to put like some kittens to They are trying to say well, it's your taxes, but just let us deal with that You don't I really have a say about the most of the part of the budget So if you look at the where the the platforms So this is on the numbers from 20 well from last year so like as I said, we have like 70 more processes that I've been started in the last six months. Oh, this is not like the current trend But there are a few things that are very interesting first. They are very few Processes that are really using platforms that are allowing comments and The last the one thing that is interesting as well. It's like when a proposal is being analyzed by the city the city council then we are Witnessing something that is in interesting to me is the fact that you don't see when the some proposals are rejected by the city official for Many reasons. There is not any explanation Justification on the website saying why those proposals are being rejected So if you look at the website just to explain you and then I will have some help. Yeah, thank you So for example in this website from Saint-Lis, you just have like It's not interactive at all. Basically. You could download the rules. You could download like the The form and you have like a specific PDF explaining the rules But you don't have any kind of of interactivity because then the the form you will have to send it by email. So it's very Very simple website in doesn't cost a lot of money, of course As I said, like most of the cities are very small towns and this in this one, for example, it's like they are using Open-source platform to provide like only Special forms so they're not using a Google forms. They're using an open-source platform But still it's just like a form. There is not any transparency. So basically when you are Submitting your proposal, you won't see this proposal listed with other Proposals, so you won't be allowed to comment that of course and to call and to comment the Other proposals like in this one. So it's like a 15,000 euros. It's a small part of money But it's also a spot a small spot of small parts of Money because it's a small city in that case what I'm trying to do at the moment It's also trying to use social network analysis in order to connect those features with the city Cases so basically I'm trying to understand a little bit the families the different variations between Between the processes and the construction of those families through the years So basically in blue, I will just will talk about the world to two Families there is one that is related to the cases that appears in green which are very processes that where you don't have any any platform and You don't have any okay. You don't have any Any discussion at the city level. It's just like mainly at the juicic level Well, you have other Other cases That are in blue in light blue. That's where using platforms that could allow Transparency and comments what I want to show with this graph is like years after years Actually, most of the processes are not and Paris is in blue So basically most of the processes that are growing are in purple and in orange Which shows actually they are not following the same rules than than Paris So we got like different digital platforms providers in France Cap collective got like many websites and you have like a day city or Portugal's politics is providing The the the adaptation of DCD made by Barcelona and then you have other platforms So basically what's one thing that is very interesting when you look at the rules You have some project that could be rejected based on different criteria and what could happen I want Yeah, what I will try to explain you is like when it's filtered There is this review done by the city council and then at some point In the best cases like in Paris or I believe in most of the the cases that are done with the DCD You will see the justification of those proposals Why they are rejected before the vote Then you have something that I called informal evaporation So basically the city council will try to merge different proposals Based on their own logic and there is not much Incapability on that and that's very problematic to me and then there are some proposals that are Approved for the voting phase without any modification, but if you look at for example Paris yesterday Between depending on where how you calculate this there is between 60 to 80 percent of the proposals that are rejected Which is like a lot of so it's not a process that is very Like direct democracy is like much more a bureaucratic process So just to conclude We got a first wave that was like more than 20 years ago now That's where the creation was all and just like now. It's always top-down So it's like created by city officials the power sharing at that time It was like only consultative nights decisive the deliberation is very low We don't have I haven't talked much about that, but we have very few public meetings That could help to gather different point of views about the different proposals and the platforms that most of the processes are not using platforms that are Halloween comments The scope is also different 15 years ago. It was much more about your neighborhoods the local area Let's say at the street level when now you could have more and more processes that decide at the city level The procedure also more clear, but still we could see this thing of cherry picking which is still happening behind the scenes So it's something that I won't show in details right now But just as I said with the example of Paris like 80 percent of the proposals are rejected before the vote So basically you're just allowing the citizens to decide About a very specific part At the end and then you give the vote the vote is giving like some legitimacy to that Okay pretty girls same car a same map. I won't talk about that We just have to think that's PB is not a robust democratic innovation So we need to take care how to make it better and I have one minute left to tell you that I see at least three challenges that could be addressed First the scope of projects we need to move from proposals to something that is more like a strategic planning because You can't discuss something for example I see that in in Madrid say we're able to vote like two years ago about The cost of the ticket for the public transport that is not something that you could address in participatory budgeting in France so maybe we need to think about something that is bigger than just like the next to the The the con the process is that the projects that are just next to the your corner Then why we need to limit those proposals to infrastructure projects. We need to move beyond only capital budget We need a bigger pot of money for sure Because so far it's just ridiculous the way that is being spent then we need to Okay to ensure fewer barriers and in the same time to have more debilitation in order to allow empowerment At some point we just don't know what Citizen could really learn the public processes then at some point we don't know also because of the platforms we don't know why They could trust other citizens and also the impact Or you could trust your city council in a better way. We don't have any Impact assessment of that and the last point is that we might see For the next election next year a higher turnout I think most of the proposed the processes that were created for the last two years This in mind like if we are creating PB, maybe we have a higher turnout And maybe they will vote for the current government So we will see exactly how PB affects the next local elections results. Thank you very much Well, first of all, hello. Thank you for coming I'm very happy to to be here today with these great speakers in this session and the audience I Have to say also now a bit sad Because I didn't put any kitten in our slides So sorry for that, but we'll try to bring your attention. So this is the last slide It's nice to say thanks at the beginning, but If we can go to the first one, please Will be much easier Yeah Spoiler alert. So, thank you very much. I'm today with my colleague Virgil from open source politics called for France and democracy earth But we're going to talk specifically about the CDM the municipal action plan in Barcelona and also like the CDM as a platform beyond the Barcelona scope so first understand this project that has been mentioned it has been mentioned in the In the last presentations I have to explain a very particular instant that may be one of the most representative ones that is the one of the city council of Barcelona where everything started So what is the city in Barcelona? Well, the same Barcelona is a platform is the city's a participatory Democratic platform to host multiple processes government strategic city planning city initiatives and other kind of participatory processes But it's also the largest free open source project of Barcelona City Council and a prototype for public funded participatory data Infrastructure and most importantly is not only a common in terms of the code But it's also a common interest of the management is co-designed in a participatory manner by a community which is called meta the city But we are here in tic-tac and tic-tac is about impact So let's start to talk a bit about impact and in terms of quantitative indicators when we're talking about the impact of the city in Barcelona we're talking about a platform that has more than 30,000 participants at this moment there are 12 participatory processes open in total have been more than 30 Now there are also like collective account collective spaces co-assemblies are more than 100 is 174 in this moment there are thousands of Proposals affect the proposals supports results debate. So we're talking about big numbers in the scale of the city of Barcelona And Why why did the number happen? Well, mostly because it has started with a very important process which is a municipal action plan the municia action plan is The roadmap of the political local government of Barcelona and it has to be co-designed by law in a participatory manner. So in 2016 The city in Barcelona was deployed and during three months There were proposals from the city council the official ones, but there are also proposals from citizens proposals from our Organization and also proposals that emerge in offline meetings So during those three months Citizens we were invited to co-create proposals discuss proposals support the one we interested and in the end there were like more than 40,000 participants more than 10,000 proposals more than 100,000 supports But more importantly, there were also like offline meetings to discuss proposals in the platforms and also then to dump Those ideas that emerge in the offline meetings to the offline. So it was an e-brit process like the offline Should be facilitated by the online How can we see that well, this is an analysis a network analysis of the Interactions in the platform during that process. So the comments between Users and we can see in the middle There is this big note which is the city council that made like the first once more than 1000 proposals official ones that came from a Collaborative process of the ruling party and there is a community around it But mostly there is another community in other color both already, but it's not so visual Maybe yes, I'm sure but there's a second largest community, which is mostly like the citizens of Barcelona in a Distributed way creating and co-creating those proposals and around you can see some specific community in the periphery with our Civic organizations that they were doing proposals in these offline meetings and also bring their community. So it was like a complex social extractor for doing so in the digital sphere But as I say this e-brit participation, so there were more than 400 Offline meetings where proposal were discussed and also some Proposals were proposed They went to the platform and it happened in almost what it happened in every district of the city and in different topics of these Municipal action plan which is good government good living plural economy global justice and ecological transition And this is the result that we got like here is more than 10,000 Proposals that then they have to be converted into action plans and those action plans translated into projects So here we can see like most of the ones that came from the city council were accepted Obviously because they came from a participatory process of the ruling party and The ones from organizations and the ones from live meetings that were co-created They were much more successful that they one of individual citizens that most of them they were accepted But obviously the acceptance rate was a bit lower from these many times in the individualistic approach like collaboration and cooperation matters in terms of acceptance of the proposals and He has been discussed before The third step that you comment how to implement well one of the things that the city in included almost from the beginning It's like most of these civic take that we have been seen across years They are asking us as citizens to participate in co-creation of ideas brings turbine debating and Sometimes decision-making but one decisions are made. We cannot track the implementation of those decisions So from the early beginning and this is a real-time monitor You can see in the CDM like every proposal that you have participated if this is accepted or not in which action plan is included Which projects and which indicators see the progress of that proposal and you can check that in real time And in this moment like these are municipal action plan is close to a 90% of execution So his participation is not only until the face of decision-making like participants We should be invited to participate in accountability and tracking the implementation of the things that have been decided So this is the same Barcelona and it's work for the city But of course from the design team we had an idea of a much global scope for other cities, but also for organizations so for doing so We thought in different this roadmap that now we are in the last state The first one is the municipal action plan, but then we found that we need to have multiple processes Not only the municipal action plan, but we need Some spaces that were more than processes We need as assemblies that maybe it's not a process in terms that it doesn't have a temporal dimension But it's like a collective space also initiatives for bottom-up Ideas consultations for top-down, but also we need Maybe multi-organizations or having like a multi-tenancy model that you can provide services like the CDM as a service in terms of democracy as a service and in the end incorporate notifications and Activity the stream to have a political network. So it's it's not only participation. It's about political participation And because we're talking about politics I think it's quite important to to say like to do politics We need different features of course PB PB is very important But we need and has done the same voting we need these results and accountability. We need offline meetings We need proposals debates conferences space the notifications the possibility of having participatory decks Pages, but how to do so? Well with free libre open source if it's not open source seriously, it's not transparent It is not transparent. It's not democratic I seriously believe that this would be out of discussion Like we were talking about democratic civic tech it has to be open source. Otherwise, it might be Technology for civic purposes, but it's not going to be democratic And it's not if we're talking about democratic is not only about the computing code It's also about the political code. So the CDM does not only include a floss license, but a social contract. It's not the license of how The computing code must be deployed, but also how this code has to be implemented in a political level So every instance of the CDM that is recognized as an official instant of the CDM Everyone can install it and using because it's free. It's libre But if you want to do it in a correct political and democratic way you have to Fulfill the social contract that express terms of open to this must be open to collaboration Everything must be transparent trustable and Integral there should be the fulfillment of very basic democratic quality guarantees like hey human rights Are we using the victim for human rights? It should be granted by a social contract I'm for sure to ensure the privacy and security of users because in the end our participants are sitting sets So these are the ideas that we had when we deploy When we start co-designing the CDM in a participatory manner with our own community Which is called meet at the CDM and now with a government on process that came us to build an association to Co-design the next steps of the CDM But for doing so and to validate all these ideas that we have been presenting from the site of the CDM I thought and we thought that the best way to validate if these ideas were solid or they were Possible to make real or not was to consider another agent from the ecosystem To see if it's possible to replicate this model out of the Barcelona, Catalan or Spanish context For instance in the French context after that I'm so happy to have today Virgil de Ville that is going to explain how they replicate this model in France and Belgium and other places That's that's my size Hi everyone So yeah, our job at open source politics has been since 2015 to implement Open source civic tech for public institutions So we've been we've always been in an approach where we wanted to join an existing project be a partner be a contributor with technology with use cases and we've been using a bunch of platforms but in 2016 So in 2015 we were kind of building our own thing and like being a very small community and wanted to Buy and our approach was using like a CMS like Drupal and plug small tools like democracy as Ushairi and like that was a really hard approach In terms of maintenance and evolution, but we had like similar ideas when we were working on our CMS as The CDM was was working. We had the same ontology with participatory spaces the little tools that we were installing were like Mentors features and when we stumbled upon upon the CDM We saw that there was something going on that was way bigger than what we were trying to do and It's why we joined the CDM's that we were alone in our little ecosystem trying to collaborate with a lot of small civic tech Project and we saw the CDM coming and it was huge. I mean The CDM Pablo was talking about it. It's way more than just a Knopf and source project. It's a whole ecosystem behind it over a hundred people are working on it Or employed or living out of the CDM and the ecosystem is more or less composed by four I'd say circles the the and it's very interesting that they are very Interdisciplinary there is a research group around the CDM with a few universities in Catalonia, but also in France now we have a Researcher that's working with us at the ENS There is a whole lab dedicated to it in Barcelona That's very open and everyone can come into and like produce knowledge and experiences around The CDM. It's a huge beautiful brick building in in Barcelona and there was lots of events like the last one was about the impact of like Gender when you're building technology and the divide of like being many men's Working on on on on technology and how it impacts the software. So they are leading like very Deep reflections on like what we are doing as a whole ecosystem not just the software it's interesting also that They see that the city of Barcelona had an approach of like not trying to code its own thing with public servant But like trying to make a big project from the beginning with many contributors and like from the start they got a little consortium of SMEs like us and in Barcelona, which are like small businesses technical development teams design Consultancy and from the start there were like 20 30 contributors to the project with Businesses that could actually provide services Around the platform, which is very important for its maintenance over the course of the feature because you can't rely on Public funds all All your for all the project type and the last part is very interesting because as Paolo was saying It's more than an open source project. It's a it's a public comment So institutions are partnering with the project because they are using it and they rely on it and they are more and more institutional partners are investing in a mutual common and Joining forces to build around the city as it's becoming an important an important part of their participatory infrastructure So what you Paolo went quite quick on what is actually the city But what why we were interested by it is that it's it's a project that was meant to kind of spread outside of Barcelona and Catalonia and in that manner the ontology and the architecture Was the thing that really interested in us because we needed as we were working with many institutions from the small city council of ten thousand people to the big region Or even the national assembly Sometimes we need something that's very flexible and that can adapt to the context and that's the very architecture of the city so you have Participatory spaces and then like almost Lego. You are building out your whole process using bricks of features that will help you map your process with Information and interactive participation So that's what's really interesting about this teams that you can mostly do whatever you want if you have a little creativity We've never been blocked By the CDM and we were we could always find you know a way aside or a way of Configuring the the project so that that was a big attraction for us. And that's why today Businesses are able to provide a service that they don't have to revamp the whole software to actually use it In a different country in a different context The drawback of that architecture is that the city much grown to be a massive piece of software because Barcelona was very ambitious With their roadmap of doing consultation Then multi consultancy then multi ten and then political social network. And the problem is that Flexibility equals to complexity today. We have a very elegant and very powerful piece of software But there is a lot to understand for the admins the public servant that are using it And that's that's something we can measure through formation But even for the users like when you come to the same Barcelona, you have 30 processes thousands and thousands of proposals We have a big task ahead of using the innovative technology to have people navigate into such a massive flow of participation using I don't know AI or even mobile technology or asking interests so we can direct people towards the The information that are they are mostly interested about and So what's interesting about the same as I was saying is that it's for me It's Public funded free software done in the most efficient way you have a very low bus factor because they got a lot of Different people to contribute from the very beginning today are 53 people Working on the on the project So we have a low bus factor meaning like the project even if Barcelona is not There in the future the project is not going anywhere because many people are working on it There is like high very very high quality and on the on the code So it's a very stable piece of technology and the modular structure makes it that we have a core Core technology and then people can both build module and we are all bringing the effort to one repo and which make Which makes it quite quite stable and evolutive the installation is quite easy and the multi-tenancy mode allows for like widespread distribution the present the project is not that old and there are many many organizations using it there is governance around the common so Often in open source projects. You don't have a very formalized governance there You can join it's open and it's like there is a process to accept new features anyone can participate and that's very Impressive because you can actually like know what you're putting Yourself into and know that you can have an impact. It's not just a guy's in Barcelona. We're deciding and the good thing is that It's a it's very interdisciplinary. I was telling about the ecosystem. We have specialist in physical participation We have researchers. We have designers. We have public agents. We have coders. So there is like the same is very much the produce of that Today the CDM has been quite successful in extended its model Out of Barcelona out of California. We are there are like more than a hundred organization using it in France and Belgium We're responsible for 30 installations and it's interesting to see that the ontology is now working for other kind of use case like cooperatives collective for governance Generally, I put myself the timer and on the way but basically the the the the world I wanted to finish with is we're talking a lot about civic tech but when when we got really deep with open source politics inside the decedent community and Actually, we found out that many of the people building this technology are kind of 15m veterans and there are they go way beyond what civic take is they are like what they're building is Technopolitics is and the definition Pablo gave me yesterday is that it's yeah Technopolitics is that tactical and strategic and critical use of digital technology for collective political participation And it's it's very much the CDM is very much the result of that thinking Meaning that the the fact that they did not only build Open-source software. They build a whole ecosystem. They had a social contract they did the link between Offline participation online participation They went through the whole process of like having people to participate and having people tracking the the implementation So that this is techno politics is like how do we aren't do we govern with the multitude because today? It's in the it's it's inevitable and it's the the very the the things that they learn in 50m and like they were Working with many software at the same time Twitter Facebook online streaming pads the CDM is kind of the results of like all the research all the knowledge that was built out as activism and It's interesting because it's it's the same is the emanation of techno politics But from the institution for citizens. So that was the final world techno politics I hope you guys pick it up because For now, it's a we were discovering it and we hope like if you have some questions, please, please do. Thanks Yes, can I gather the other speakers on the stage of the Q&A? Yes, just a quick word and the schedule changes this morning So we'll have a 10 minute Q&A now We'll then go straight into the next session and then there'll be a break between that session and the keynote So after this session go straight on to the next one. Okay, there's some remarks at the back So can we keep questions? You know relatively short. I'll take them in groups are free and Any hands up questions? Any other questions of the room to learn a group or we do it one by one Many thanks to the panel and Thank you Panthea for your presentation. My name is Amina Saluho. I work with the MacArthur Foundation in a butcher and I wanted to ask if you have kind of looked at the intersection between participation and power and the fact that maybe sometimes citizens And is in my part of the world My thing that power does not reside with the citizen at a point where you decide what goes in the budget Because the budget hardly ever gets implemented. The best you get is 35 to 50 percent Where power would reside is if you are able to get an impact the particular project that you thought you wanted to have in that Budget gets passed. Are we thinking of possibility of having Severe tools that allow citizens truck implementation This I think might be a way to get citizens getting more excited because right now There's a very low expectation of government which is a very sad place to be and I'd also like to hear a bit as you Talk about techno politics about how that connects with voice and women's participation for example. Thank you Sorry behind you. Hi. Thank you. That was fascinating and I'm sorry. I missed the first one quick question the one is there's a big qualitative difference between the picture of France Painted in the second presentation and the picture of Spain and emerging France in Belgium and Since you talked about the context drivers that allow policy transfers It would be great to hear a bit from any of you. What do you think it is that enabled that different? Implementation of Participatory processes and a different social contract that wasn't has not been there in France the past ten years and didn't allow this to happen Maybe just you and the second if you have any time like the monitoring part the tracking the projects like I can name So many big institutions and corporations Struggling with their project management offices trying to figure out how to keep track of projects So how does this actually work like who says the project is on track? What kind of updates are there that could be great? Thanks Yes, it's going those as you know, do these mics work the moment? Yes, fantastic cool So if you just want to sort of take you into to have a go those questions We've got about five six minutes. So keep on to short, but hopefully involved. Thank you Okay regarding Those were very good questions the first one regarding the the power relationship, I really agree on that like I think the purpose of Developing this kind of technologies that we have been presenting is not having technology Just for the civic purpose This is this is very needed But we need to rethink the power relationships And this is something that we have been wondering around the decision project in terms like if the a very specific group that are Policy makers and software developers are deciding The design of this kind of technologies and they are designed at an ontology of what participation is How participation must be and more interestingly what is not included in their participatory model instead of the institution So that's why one of the reasons why they see Dean We use as a community our own instance It's called I eat your own dog food because if it doesn't work for us It cannot work for their cities organization and using the distance for taking decision as a community because as a community and the community that Stating Barcelona, but now it's getting international to redesign. How is the? digital Reflection of the power relationships. Otherwise Those technologies will be always be designed and developed by very specific group that normally are their privileged ones And they have like very strong bias in terms of age Status gender and so on and it's very important what you say about gender like for instance We have research seminars every Every month in the Meta CDM Community and the last one it was last last Tuesday Tuesday last week, sorry and It was about the CDM and feminist like trying to understand how would be the CDM We would have a apply a gender perspective from the beginning So we like in this was a seminar usually and it happened like three researchers three women in this case They came they explained their views about feminism technology and we review all the existing Legions of contribution to the project review the cold norms the gender gap and try to find the most critical ones for instance The most critical one is called the development. It's hard to Just find women who can contribute to that. So try to find Strategies to mitigate that gavel like for instance like giving training on the language at this program This is in which is rabbi on rails and trying to think in academies or summer school that they can especially focus to women so we can Incorporate a more diverse perspective gender is one of the dimensions that there are so many and And There was the other question there when it was about the difference between the friends because it's I think you can explain that better But there was a traceability accountability. Yeah, I think this is very important, but in terms like accountabilities Must be I think it must be developed and deployed in a way that it facilitates the work of public officers If it's the nightmare of public officers, it won't be sustainable in the long term so the idea is like In this case in the instance of Barcelona the public officers of Barcelona, they can upload using the the data of the price that they are tracking they can upload it in a Open data format directly to the instant of the CDM. So that's how the institution can that get updated and Of course as I say in a way of facilitation So when someone is interested in knowing the current status of the project That helped us to to them to express how they are working and in the end is our way to facilitate the communication of the existing work of the city council of Barcelona and regarding the question I think Brigille can explain so much better than me If I don't know if you if you guys want to But I can just about like the the difference that we observed from the Spanish context to the French context I think Gilles did a quite a good work Presenting some of the some of a lot of information about that and it's true We are doing a lot of BBs on the CDM when in Spain It's a feature that's been there, but that hasn't been much developed because they didn't really find a use case So they had the CDM Barcelona for four years, but they didn't do a participatory budgeting So that's one of the big difference We are like there is this growth and we are seeing it like we have seven institutions working with the CDM on participatory budgeting and also We see that in France. We have more tradition when we go out of participatory budgeting We tend to be way less Binded with the result of consultation. So we will just crowdsource ideas proposal comments and make a synthesis and Not use the rest of the platform whereas in in Spain as they have like an active in see an activist seen that I think has been more diverse more numerous and also a little bit more engaged and and And more demanding from the government at the local level It's they have it's very much designed around accountability So I put out a proposal and there must be a response from the public institution To ensure that the participation is listened heard and and accounted for in France We were like we have a very good use case with the same with PB and it's we are like trying to educate and get public institution going Further in terms of the link that they can create with the citizens, but it's a bit hard It's it's there is a lot of education to be made there Really quickly on the sort of citizen power question. I think that You know, I think it's I mean what what does I can in the presentation is I do think PB when done Well can do a really great job of Civic education and helping citizens understand how to engage even if they feel like there's no role for them They don't have power. They're disillusioned One woman we met in Mexico City. She had she was sort of very much of this mindset and Through the PB process basically recovered an abandoned green lot in her in or an abandoned lot in her neighborhood Ended up turning that into some kind of sort of park space submitted several Successful proposals over the course of several years and went on to found an NGO that worked with government for urban Regeneration someone that was totally disengaged that basically sort of PB hooked them Taught them how to work with the institutions of power and get things done on The flip side we've also seen scenarios where PB can make citizens further disillusioned disengaged what not I think one of the saddest examples that we saw was we were in a pretty rural village where very poor and and Citizens had participated over the course of a year to select 24 different projects that they were very excited about spent a lot of time Deliberating what they cared about what was most important in all these Ended up finding out because this was communicated too late to them. There was only five thousand dollars to implement the projects So then they ended at ending ended up implementing three projects Two classrooms in a bridge The citizens were then asked to contribute extra money in the form of taxes To contribute labor to actually build these Or to contribute in kind donations in the forms of bricks concrete or whatnot because there weren't enough resources And we wanted to show that their skin in the game that they're civically engaged The bridge the one of the classrooms took three years to build the bridge collapsed within a year And it was volunteer labor donated resources poor quality And I think that can actually further of course disenchanted ascends and also sort of contribute to the notion that we are subjects of the state We will take whatever it is that they give to us and anything else we actually have to do We have to further contribute ourselves So I think there's there's sort of two sides to that and I think it comes down to the process Just on the point on how we track projects Just I think we're gonna start the next session now, so thank you to all our speakers Okay, you can have 30 seconds if that's okay We could discuss about the drivers and Thank you, sorry about that so thank you to all our speakers the next session in here is about corruption and tech Thanks a lot