Governance Level: city & municipal

Public service workers will have to become Jacks and Jills of all trades

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Needham in the Guardian: “When Kent county council was looking to save money a couple of years ago, it hit upon the idea of merging the roles of library manager and registrar. Library managers were expected to register births and deaths on top of their existing duties, and registrars took on roles in libraries. One former library manager chose to leave the service as a result. It wasn’t, he said, what he signed up for: “I don’t associate the skills in running a library with those of a registrar. I don’t have the emotional skill to do it.”
Since the council was looking to cut staff numbers, it was probably not too troubled by his departure. But this does raise questions about how to support staff who are being asked to work well beyond their professional boundaries.
In our 21st Century Public Servant project at the University of Birmingham, we have found that this trend is evident across public services. We interviewed local government managers who said staff needed to think differently about their skills. As one put it: “We need to use people’s latent talent – if you are a librarian, for example, a key skill will be working with people from the local community. It’s about a different background mindset: ‘I am not just here to do a specific job, but to help the people of this town.'”

The skills of this generic public service worker include interpersonal skills (facilitation, empathy, political skills), analysing skills (sorting evidence, making judgements, offering critique and being creative), organisation (particularly for group work and collaboration) and communication skills (such as using social media and multimedia resources).
The growing interest in genericism seems to have two main drivers. The first, of course, is austerity. Cost cutting on an unprecedented scale in local authorities requires those staff that survive the waves of redundancies to be willing to take on new roles and work in multi-purpose settings. The second is the drive for whole-person approaches in which proper engagement with the public might require staff to cross traditional sector boundaries.
It is good that public service workers are being granted greater flexibility. But there are two main limitations to this move to greater genericism. The first is that multi-tasking in an era of cost cutting can look a lot like deprofessionalisation. Within social work, for example, concerns have been expressed about the downgrading of social work posts (by appointing brokers in their place, say) and the resulting loss of professional skills and knowledge.
A second limitation is that skills training continues to be sectoral, failing to catch up with the move to genericism….”

The merits of participatory budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Hollie Russon Gilman at Aljazeera America: “For many Americans, government just isn’t working. In 2013, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the top identified U.S. problem. A recent survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans rate the health of our democracy as weak — and unlikely to get better anytime soon. But in small corners throughout the United States, democratic innovations are creating new opportunities for citizens to be a part of governance. Collectively known as open government or civic innovation, these projects are engaging policymakers, citizens and civil society and proving the skeptics wrong.
One particularly promising innovation in participatory budgeting, or PB — a process to directly empower citizens to make spending decisions on a defined public budget. PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation. Since then, PB has expanded to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including several in the U.S. Starting in 2009 in Chicago’s 49th Ward with a budget of just $1 million, PB in the United States has expanded to a $27 million-a-year experiment. Municipal leaders from Vallejo, California, to New York City have turned over a portion of their discretionary funds to neighborhood residents. Boston recently launched the first youth-driven PB. Nearly half of New York’s City Council members are slated to participate this fall, after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a cornerstone of his campaign. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a new manager of participatory budgeting who will help coordinate Council districts that want to participate. The White House recently included federally supported participatory budgeting as part of its international Open Government Partnership commitments.

Wants and needs

In PB, citizens are empowered to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals and vote upon where to spend public funds. The decisions are binding. And that’s important: Making democracy work is not just about making better citizens or changing policies. It is also about creating structures that create the conditions that make the effective exercise of democratic citizenship possible, and PB is uniquely structured to do that.

Chicago has been a particularly insightful petri dish to study PB in the U.S., mainly because the city is an unlikely candidate for democratic innovations. For decades its Democratic machine retained a strong and continuous hold over city government. The Daley family held the mayoralty for a combined 12 terms. While discretionary funds (known as “menu money”) are allocated equally — but not equitably, given different needs — to all 50 wards, the process of spending this money is at the discretion of locally elected aldermen. From 1972 to 2009, 30 Chicago aldermen were indicted and convicted of federal crimes ranging from income tax evasion to extortion, embezzlement and conspiracy. Clearly, Chicago has not always been a model of good governance.
Against this backdrop, PB has continued to expand in Chicago. This year three districts participated. The Fifth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, decided not to continue the process again this year. Instead, this year the ward had four groups of residents each allocate $250,000. The alderwoman noted that this enabled the transparency and engagement aspect of PB with fewer process resources — they had only 100 people come out to vote.
Different versions of PB are aimed to lower the current barriers to civic engagement. I have seen PB bring out people who have never before engaged in politics. Many longtime civic participants often cite PB as the single most meaningful civic engagement of their lives — far above, say, jury duty. Suddenly, citizens are empowered with real decision-making authority and leave with new relationships with their peers, community and elected officials.
However, PB is not a stand-alone endeavor. It must be part of a larger effort to improve governance. This must include greater transparency in public decision making and empowering citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. The process provides an enormous education that can be translated into civic activity beyond PB. Ideally after engaging in PB, a citizen will be better equipped to volunteer in the community, vote or push for policy reform. What other infrastructure, both online and off, is needed to support citizens who want to further engage in more collaborative governance?  …”

How Helsinki Became the Most Successful Open-Data City in the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Olli Sulopuisto in Atlantic Cities:  “If there’s something you’d like to know about Helsinki, someone in the city administration most likely has the answer. For more than a century, this city has funded its own statistics bureaus to keep data on the population, businesses, building permits, and most other things you can think of. Today, that information is stored and freely available on the internet by an appropriately named agency, City of Helsinki Urban Facts.
There’s a potential problem, though. Helsinki may be Finland’s capital and largest city, with 620,000 people. But it’s only one of more than a dozen municipalities in a metropolitan area of almost 1.5 million. So in terms of urban data, if you’re only looking at Helsinki, you’re missing out on more than half of the picture.
Helsinki and three of its neighboring cities are now banding together to solve that problem. Through an entity called Helsinki Region Infoshare, they are bringing together their data so that a fuller picture of the metro area can come into view.
That’s not all. At the same time these datasets are going regional, they’re also going “open.” Helsinki Region Infoshare publishes all of its data in formats that make it easy for software developers, researchers, journalists and others to analyze, combine or turn into web-based or mobile applications that citizens may find useful. In four years of operation, the project has produced more than 1,000 “machine-readable” data sources such as a map of traffic noise levels, real-time locations of snow plows, and a database of corporate taxes.
A global leader
All of this has put the Helsinki region at the forefront of the open-data movement that is sweeping cities across much of the world. The concept is that all kinds of good things can come from assembling city data, standardizing it and publishing it for free. Last month, Helsinki Region Infoshare was presented with the European Commission’s prize for innovation in public administration.

The project is creating transparency in government and a new digital commons. It’s also fueling a small industry of third-party application developers who take all this data and turn it into consumer products.
For example, Helsinki’s city council has a paperless system called Ahjo for handling its agenda items, minutes and exhibits that accompany council debates. Recently, the datasets underlying Ahjo were opened up. The city built a web-based interface for browsing the documents, but a software developer who doesn’t even live in Helsinki created a smartphone app for it. Now anyone who wants to keep up with just about any decision Helsinki’s leaders have before them can do so easily.
Another example is a product called BlindSquare, a smartphone app that helps blind people navigate the city. An app developer took the Helsinki region’s data on public transport and services, and mashed it up with location data from the social networking app Foursquare as well as mapping tools and the GPS and artificial voice capabilities of new smartphones. The product now works in dozens of countries and languages and sells for about €17 ($24 U.S.)
…
Helsinki also runs competitions for developers who create apps with public-sector data. That’s nothing new — BlindSquare won the Apps4Finland and European OpenCities app challenges in 2012. But this year, they’re trying a new approach to the app challenge concept, funded by the European Commission’s prize money and Sitra.
It’s called Datademo. Instead of looking for polished but perhaps random apps to heap fame and prize money on, Datademo is trying to get developers to aim their creative energies toward general goals city leaders think are important. The current competition specifies that apps have to use open data from the Helsinki region or from Finland to make it easier for citizens to find information and participate in democracy. The competition also gives developers seed funding upfront.
Datademo received more than 40 applications in its first round. Of those, the eight best suggestions were given three months and €2,000 ($2,770 U.S) to implement their ideas. The same process will be repeated two times, resulting in dozens of new app ideas that will get a total of €48,000 ($66,000 U.S.) in development subsidies. Keeping with the spirit of transparency, the voting and judging process is open to all who submit an idea for each round….”

Is Your City’s Crime Data Private Property?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Wisnieski at the Crime Report: “In February, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) announced it was moving into a new era of transparency and openness with the launch of a new public crime map.
“Crime analysis and mapping data is now in the hands of the city’s citizens,” reads the first line of the press release.
According to the release, the MPD will feed incident report data to RAIDS (Regional Analysis and Information Data Sharing) Online, a nationwide crime map operated by crime analysis software company BAIR Analytics.
Since the announcement, Minneapolis residents have used RAIDS to look at reports of murder, robbery, burglary, assault, rape and other crimes reported in their neighborhoods on a sleek, easy-to-use map, which includes data as recent as yesterday.
On the surface, it’s a major leap forward for transparency in Minneapolis. But some question why the data feed is given exclusively to a single private company.
Transparency advocates argue in fact that the data is not truly in the hands of the city’s residents until citizens can download the raw data so they can analyze, chart or map it on their own.
“For it to actually be open data, it needs to be available to the public in machine readable format,” said Lauren Reid, senior public affairs manager for Code for America, a national non-profit that promotes participation in government through technology.
“Anybody should be able to go download it and read it if they want. That’s open data.”
The Open Knowledge Foundation, a national non-profit that advocates for more government openness, argues open data is important so citizens can participate and engage government in a way that was not possible before.
“Much of the time, citizens are only able to engage with their own governance sporadically — maybe just at an election every 4 or 5 years,” reads the Open Knowledge website. “By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making.
“This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full ‘read/write’ society — not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance, but being able to contribute to it.”.
Minneapolis is not alone.
As Americans demand more information on criminal activity from the government, police departments are flocking to private companies to help them get the information into the public domain.
For many U.S. cities, hooking up with these third-party mapping vendors is the most public their police department has ever been. But the trend has started a messy debate about how “public” the public data actually is.
Outsourcing Makes It Easy
For police departments, outsourcing the presentation of their crime data to a private firm is an easy decision.
Most of the crime mapping sites are free or cost very little. (The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com charges between $600 and $2,400 per year, depending on the size of the agency.)
The department chooses what information it wants to provide. Once the system is set up, the data flows to the companies and then to the public without a lot of effort on behalf of the department.
For the most part, the move doesn’t need legislative approval, just a memorandum of understanding. A police department can even fulfill a new law requiring a public crime map by releasing report data through one of these vendors.
Commander Scott Gerlicher of the MPD’s Strategic Information and Crime Analysis Division says the software has saved the department time.
“I don’t think we are entertaining quite as many requests from the media or the public,” he told The Crime Report. “Plus the price was right: it was free.”
The companies that run some of the most popular sites — The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com, Public Engines’ CrimeReports and BAIR Analytics’ RAIDS — are in the business of selling crime analysis and mapping software to police departments.
Some departments buy internal software from these companies; though some cities, like Minneapolis, just use RAIDS’ free map and have no contracts with BAIR for internal software.
Susan Smith, director of operations at BAIR Analytics, said the goal of RAIDS is to create one national map that includes all crime reports from across all jurisdictions and departments (state and local police).
For people who live near or at the edge of a city line, finding relevant crime data can be hard.
The MPD’s Gerlicher said that was one reason his department chose RAIDS — because many police agencies in the Minneapolis area had already hooked up with the firm.
The operators of these crime maps say they provide a community service.
“We try to get as many agencies as we possibly can. We truly believe this is a good service for the community,” says Gabriela Coverdale, a marketing director at the Omega Group.
Raw Data ‘Off Limits’
However, the sites do not allow the public to download any of the raw data and prohibit anyone from “scraping,” using a program to automatically pull the data from their maps.
In Minneapolis, the police department continues to post PDFs and excel spreadsheets with data, but only RAIDS gets a feed with the most recent data.
Alan Palazzolo, a Code for America fellow who works as an interactive developer for the online non-profit newspaper MinnPost, used monthly reports from the MPD to build a crime application with a map and geographic-oriented chart of crime in Minneapolis.
Nevertheless, he finds the new tool limiting.
“[The MPD’s] ability to actually put out more data, and more timely data, really opens things up,” he said. “It’s great, but they are not doing that with us.”
According to Palazzolo, the arrangement gives BAIR a market advantage that effectively prevents its data from being used for purposes it cannot control.
“Having granular, complete, and historical data would allow us to do more in-depth analysis,” wrote Palazzolo and Kaeti Hinck in an article in MinnPost last year.
“Granular data would allow us to look at smaller areas,” reads the article. “[N]eighborhoods are a somewhat arbitrary boundary when it comes to crime. Often high crime is isolated to a couple of blocks, but aggregated data does not allow us to explore this.
“More complete data would allow us to look at factors like exact locations, time of day, demographic issues, and detailed categories (like bike theft).”
The question of preference gets even messier when looking at another national crime mapping website called SpotCrime.
Unlike the other third-party mapping sites, SpotCrime is not in the business of selling crime analysis software to police departments. It operates more like a newspaper — a newspaper focused solely on the police blotter pages — and makes money off advertising.
Years ago, SpotCrime requested and received crime report data via e-mail from the Minneapolis Police Department and mapped the data on its website. According to SpotCrime owner Colin Drane, the MPD stopped sending e-mails when terminals were set up in the police department for the public to access the data.
So he instead started going through the painstaking process of transferring data from PDFs the MPD posted online and mapping them.
When the MPD hooked up with RAIDS in February, Drane asked for the same feed and was denied. He says more and more police departments around the country are hooking up with one of his competitors and not giving him the same timely data.
The MPD said it prefers RAIDS over SpotCrime and criticized some of the advertisements on SpotCrime.
“We’re not about supporting ad money,” said Gerlicher.
Drane believes all crime data in every city should be open to everyone, in order to prevent any single firm from monopolizing how the information is presented and used.
“The onus needs to be on the public agencies,” he adds. “They need to be fair with the data and they need to be fair with the public.” he said.
Transparency advocates worry that the trend is going in the opposite direction.
Ohio’s Columbus Police Department, for example, recently discontinued its public crime statistic feed and started giving the data exclusively to RAIDS.
The Columbus Dispatch wrote that the new system had less information than the old…”

#Bring back our girls

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
The Guardian: “The abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria has lead to campaigns calling for their rescue, on social media and offline all around the world.
After Nigerian protestors marched on parliament in the capital Abuja calling for action on April 30, people in cities around the world have followed suit and organised their own marches.
A social media campaign under the hashtag #Bringbackourgirls started trending in Nigeria two weeks ago and has now been tweeted more than one million times. It was first used on April 23 at the opening ceremony for a UNESCO event honouring the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt as the 2014 World Book Capital City. A Nigerian lawyer in Abuja, Ibrahim M. Abdullahi, tweeted the call in a speech by Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Vice President of the World Bank for Africa to “Bring Back the Girls!”

Another mass demonstration took place outside the Nigerian Defence Headquarters in Abuja on May 6 and many other protests have been organised in response to a social media campaign asking for people around the world to march and wear red in solidarity. People came out in protest at the Nigerian embassy in London, in Los Angeles and New York.

A global “social media march” has also been organised asking supporters to use their networks to promote the campaign for 200 minutes on May 8.
A petition started on Change.org by a Nigerian woman in solidarity with the schoolgirls has now been signed by more than 300,000 supporters.
Amnesty International and UNICEF have backed the campaign, as well as world leaders and celebrities, including Hilary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai and rappers Wyclef Jean and Chris Brown, whose mention of the campaign was retweeted more than 10,000 times.

After three weeks of silence the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed to find the schoolgirls on April 3, stating: “wherever these girls are, we’ll get them out”. On the same day, John Kerry pledged assistance from the US.”

You Are Here

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

you are here: “Every day for the next year, we will make a map of a city in which we have lived.
Each of these maps will be an aggregation of thousands of microstories, tracing the narratives of our collective experience. We will make maps of the little things that make up life — from the trees we hug, to the places where we crashed our bikes, to the benches where we fell in love.
Over time, we will grow this to 100 different maps of 100 different cities, creating an atlas of human experience.
We hope that by showing these stories, we empower people to make their city — and therefore the world — a more beautiful place.

You Are Here is a project of the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab.

MAPS: https://web.archive.org/web/http://youarehere.cc/#/maps “

The "Accessibility Map"

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Webby 2014 Nominee: “Project Goal is to make information about accessible venues accessible to people.

About venues where people with disabilities can engage in sports and recreational activities, and live full lives without any barriers or stereotypes.

The Solution

To develop a website where everyone can not only find accessible venues in each city, but also add new venues to the website’s database.
Creating the accessibility rating list for russian cities to get an idea how accessible a particular city is, will draw the local governement’ s attention to this problem.
The foundation of the website is an interactive map of accessible venues in Russia, which can help people with disabilities find locations where they can participate in sports, take classes or recreate.
All you need to do is choose the necessary city and street, and the map will show all the accessible venues in the city.

The Result

After a few months of operation:
— over 14 000 venues
— over 600 cities
— millions of people with disabilities have become able to live full lives

Project’s Website: kartadostupnosti.ru“

Sharing in a Changing Climate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Helen Goulden in the Huffington Post: “Every month, a social research agency conducts a public opinion survey on 30,000 UK households. As part of this households are asked about what issues they think are the most important; things such as crime, unemployment, inequality, public health etc. Climate change has ranked so consistently low on these surveys that they don’t both asking any more.
On first glance, it would appear that most people don’t care about a changing climate.
Yet, that’s simply not true. Many people care deeply, but fleetingly – in the same way they may consider their own mortality before getting back to thinking about what to have for tea. And others care, but fail to change their behaviour in a way that’s proportionate to their concerns. Certainly that’s my unhappy stomping ground.
Besides what choices do we really have? Even the most progressive, large organisations have been glacial to move towards any form of real form of sustainability. For many years we have struggled with the Frankenstein-like task of stitching ‘sustainability’ onto existing business and economic models and the results, I think, speak for themselves.
That the Collaborative Economy presents us with an opportunity – in Napster-like ways – to disrupt and evolve toward something more sustainable is compelling idea. Looking out to a future filled with opportunities to reconfigure how we produce, consume and dispose of the things we want and need to live, work and play.
Whether the journey toward sustainability is short or long, it will be punctuated with a good degree of turbulence, disruption and some largely unpredictable events. How we deal with those events and what role communities, collaboration and technology play may set the framework and tone for how that future evolves. Crises and disruption to our entrenched living patterns present ripe opportunities for innovation and space for adopting new behaviours and practices.
No-one is immune from the impact of erratic and extreme weather events. And if we accept that these events are going to increase in frequency, we must draw the conclusion that emergency state and government resources may be drawn more thinly over time.
Across the world, there is a fairly well organised state and international infrastructure for dealing with emergencies , involving everyone from the Disaster Emergency Committee, the UN, central and local government and municipalities, not for profit organisations and of course, the military. There is a clear reason why we need this kind of state emergency response; I’m not suggesting that we don’t.
But through the rise of open data and mass participation in platforms that share location, identity and inventory, we are creating a new kind of mesh; a social and technological infrastructure that could considerably strengthen our ability to respond to unpredictable events.
In the last few years we have seen a sharp rise in the number of tools and crowdsourcing platforms and open source sensor networks that are focused on observing, predicting or responding to extreme events:
• Apps like Shake Alert, which emits a minute warning that an earthquake is coming
• Rio’s sensor network, which measures rainfall outside the city and can predict flooding
• Open Source sensor software Arduino which is being used to crowd-source weather and pollution data
• Propeller Health, which is using Asthma sensors on inhalers to crowd-source pollution hotspots
• Safecast, which was developed for crowdsourcing radiation levels in Japan
Increasingly we have the ability to deploy open source, distributed and networked sensors and devices for capturing and aggregating data that can help us manage our responses to extreme weather (and indeed, other kinds of) events.
Look at platforms like LocalMind and Foursquare. Today, I might be using them to find out whether there’s a free table at a bar or finding out what restaurant my friends are in. But these kind of social locative platforms present an infrastructure that could be life-saving in any kind of situation where you need to know where to go quickly to get out of trouble. We know that in the wake of disruptive events and disasters, like bombings, riots etc, people now intuitively and instinctively take to technology to find out what’s happening, where to go and how to co-ordinate response efforts.
During the 2013 Bart Strike in San Francisco, ventures like Liquid Space and SideCar enabled people to quickly find alternative places to work, or alternatives to public transport, to mitigate the inconvenience of the strike. The strike was a minor inconvenience compared to the impact of a hurricane and flood but nevertheless, in both those instances, ventures decided waive their fees; as did AirBnB when 1,400 New York AirBnB hosts opened their doors to people who had been left homeless through Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The impulse to help is not new. The matching of people’s offers of help and resources to on-the-ground need, in real time, is.”

On the barriers for local government releasing open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter Conradie and Dr. Sunil Choenni in Government Information Quarterly: “Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and innovation, the release of Public Sector Information as open data is getting increased attention on various levels of government. However, currently data release by governments is still novel and there is little experience and knowledge thus far about its benefits, costs and barriers. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how they influence data release, i.e., to find determinants for the release of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted workshops, interviews, questionnaires, desk research and practice based cases in the education program of our university, involving six local public sector organizations. We find that the way data is stored, the way data is obtained and the way data is used by a department are crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude with the lessons learned based on our research findings. These findings are: we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid releasing data for its own sake, and take small incremental steps to explore data release.”

Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Klint Finley in Wired: “This is the decade of the protest. The Arab Spring. The Occupy Movement. And now the student demonstrations in Taiwan.
Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped up in countries that are at least nominally democratic, but so many people are still unhappy with their elected leaders. The problem, Mancini says, is that elected officials have drifted so far from the people they represent, that it’s too hard for the average person to be heard.
“If you want to participate in the political system as it is, it’s really costly,” she says. “You need to study politics in university, and become a party member and work your way up. But not every citizen can devote their lives to politics.”

Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them.

That’s why Mancini started the Net Democracy foundation, a not-for-profit that explores ways of improving civic engagement through technology. The foundation’s first project is something called Democracy OS, an online platform for debating and voting on political issues, and it’s already finding a place in the world. The federal government in Mexico is using this open-source tool to gather feedback on a proposed public data policy, and in Tunisia, a non-government organization called iWatch has adopted it in an effort to give the people a stronger voice.
Mancini’s dissatisfaction with electoral politics stems from her experience working for the Argentine political party Unión Celeste y Blanco from 2010 until 2012. “I saw some practices that I thought were harmful to societies,” she says. Parties were too interested in the appearances of the candidates, and not interested enough in their ideas. Worse, citizens were only consulted for their opinions once every two to four years, meaning politicians could get away with quite a bit in the meantime.
Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them. It operates on three levels: one for gathering information about political issues, one for public debate about those issues, and one for actually voting on specific proposals.
Various communities now use a tool called Madison to discuss policy documents, and many activists and community organizations have adopted Loomio to make decisions internally. But Democracy OS aims higher: to provide a common platform for any city, state, or government to actually put proposals to a vote. “We’re able to actually overthrow governments, but we’re not using technology to decide what to do next,” Mancini says. “So the risk is that we create power vacuums that get filled with groups that are already very well organized. So now we need to take it a bit further. We need to decide what democracy for the internet era looks like.”
Image: Courtesy of Net Democracy

Software Shop as Political Party

Today Net Democracy is more than just a software development shop. It’s also a local political party based in Beunos Aires. Two years ago, the foundation started pitching the first prototype of the software to existing political parties as a way for them to gather feedback from constituents, but it didn’t go over well. “They said: ‘Thank you, this is cool, but we’re not interested,’” Mancini remembers. “So we decided to start our own political party.”
The Net Democracy Party hasn’t won any seats yet, but it promises that if it does, it will use Democracy OS to enable any local registered voter to tell party representatives how to vote. Mancini says the party representatives will always vote the way constituents tell them to vote through the software.

‘We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time. What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.’

She also uses the term “net democracy” to refer to the type of democracy that the party advocates, a form of delegative democracy that attempts to strike a balance between representative democracy and direct democracy. “We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time,” Mancini explains. “What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.”
Individuals will also be able to delegate their votes to other people. “So, if you’re not comfortable voting on health issues, you can delegate to someone else to vote for you in that area,” she says. “That way people with a lot of experience in an issue, like a community leader who doesn’t have lobbyist access to the system, can build more political capital.”
She envisions a future where decisions are made on two levels. Decisions that involve specific knowledge — macroeconomics, tax reforms, judiciary regulations, penal code, etc. — or that affect human rights are delegated “upwards” to representatives. But then decisions related to local issues — transport, urban development, city codes, etc. — cab be delegated “downwards” to the citizens.

The Secret Ballot Conundrum

Ensuring the integrity of the votes gathered via Democracy OS will be a real challenge. The U.S. non-profit organization Black Box Voting has long criticized electronic voting schemes as inherently flawed. “Our criticism of internet voting is that it is not transparent and cannot be made publicly transparent,” says Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris. “With transparency for election integrity defined as public ability to see and authenticate four things: who can vote, who did vote, vote count, and chain of custody.”
In short, there’s no known way to do a secret ballot online because any system for verifying that the votes were counted properly will inevitably reveal who voted for what.
Democracy OS deals with that by simply doing away with secret ballots. For now, the Net Democracy party will have people sign-up for Democracy OS accounts in person with their government issued ID cards. “There is a lot to be said about how anonymity allows you to speak more freely,” Mancini says. “But in the end, we decided to prioritize the reliability, accountability and transparency of the system. We believe that by making our arguments and decisions public we are fostering a civic culture. We will be more responsible for what we say and do if it’s public.”
But making binding decisions based on these online discussions would be problematic, since they would skew not just towards those tech savvy enough to use the software, but also towards those willing to have their names attached to their votes publicly. Fortunately, the software isn’t yet being used to gather real votes, just to gather public feedback….”

Proudly powered by WordPress