Building a platform for democratic decision-making
Democracy is struggling and is no longer able to handle the complex problems that are being increasingly created in our rapidly accelerating world. That is what authors Iman Stratenus and Alan Watkins argue in their book Crowdocracy: the end of politics, and why they suggest a new way of policy making; directly initiated, controlled, and governed by citizens, trusting and empowering the wisdom of the crowd. But how do you bring this theory to life? By creating a digital platform, Stratenus and Watkins suggest, called “The Crowd platform”. And that is what the PDEng ST trainees realized in just nine weeks’ time.
By combining theory with assignments coming straight from practice, the trainees of the two-year salaried postgraduate PDEng Software Technology (ST) program are prepared for their future elite careers in industry. Usually, the clients come from industry, for instance Bosch Security Systems, European Space Agency, and Philips Lighting. The challenge that authors Stratenus and Watkins came up with, however, was rather unique. Dr. Yanja Dajsuren, Program Director of the PDEng ST program: “This time, we really wanted our project to contribute constructively to the discussion on different perspectives of Western societies.”
She continues, elaborating on the collaboration with The Crowd Foundation: “Although we are not political scientists, a project assignment addressing current polarizing political landscape around the world was a thought provoking challenge to our seventeen trainees who came from twelve different nations with varying political systems. The Crowd platform built by our trainees supports a decision-making process with checks and balances aimed at involving everyone in finding solutions to the complex problems the society faces.”
Conceptual thinking
The assignment for the project team was clear: design and implement a platform which allows running a crowdocratic process in communities. This meant building a platform that enables the development of policy by every user, including taking initiatives, co-creating plans, budget and regulations, and voting. According to Arne Laponin, PDEng ST trainee and project manager, having non-technical clients helped in this process: “They focused on the non-technical aspects of the platform. We really had to keep in mind why we were creating this platform, what concerns we were solving. This sort of conceptual thinking helped our team to keep the end-users and their needs in mind.”
Technical choices
For Pranav Bhatnagar, the lead architect of the team, the non-technical requirements meant the architecture team had to be creative in translating them into technical solutions: “One of the most challenging non-functional requirement from the client was to make the platform extensible. To accomplish that we decided upon making a Web Service for Crowdocracy so that it is secure and can be extended to different native devices or can be allowed to third parties to use it in future, as a plug and play service.” The project team was free to make all of these underlying technical choices to create the platform. “This freedom allowed us to choose the most appropriate software for the platform, but also to make choices in favor of the learning process of our trainees,” says Dajsuren. “That, for instance, resulted in working with Django, which was new for most of the trainees.”
Bhatnagar explains another choice made during the project: “Having full liberty to make a choice on what technology to choose was challenging because the options were of depth of an ocean. However, keeping in mind the learning goals, core competences of the team, and where the field of Computer Science is leading us, we decided upon using Python. Python can be used for many computing exercises such as Machine Learning and Data Science, to mention a few, and mastering this programming language will definitely help us in our future careers.”
Learning hard and soft skills
To be able to achieve the objectives of the project, it was essential to master the needed technical skills. Team leader and lead engineer Ani Megerdoumian explains how they managed to do so in such a short period of time: “We identified the core process of Crowdocracy, and made decisions on what we are about to build. We then gave dedicated time to the developers to self-study and feel comfortable with technologies they were going to use, and just started working.”
Next to the necessary hard skills, the trainees also develop their soft skills while working on the projects. Valuable skills they will certainly need in their future jobs. The project leader and lead architect, for instance, are roles assigned to a different trainee per project. “That way, all the trainees learn to develop their managing and decision-making skills,” says Dajsuren. Laponin mentions another key skill they develop during the projects: “All of us learned that only through collaboration and teamwork can we create great products.” Megerdoumian agrees and adds: “We collaboratively learned to deal with ambiguity, communications within our team and with the client, and with giving and receiving feedback.”
Come to life
As with every PDEng ST project, this project was also concluded with a final presentation for the client. An exciting moment for which Iman Stratenus specially came to the Eindhoven University of Technology. During this final presentation, the trainees explained their work, substantiated their choices, gave recommendations for future enhancements of the platform with descriptions on how to build them, and most importantly, they showed what they achieved in the short period of time they had available; a working demo of The Crowd platform. In this demo the trainees showed how a user can take the initiative to submit a new policy, how this proposal can be discussed on the platform, altered by authorized persons, and ultimately how the community can vote on the final proposal.
Immediately after the final presentation Stratenus told the project team that he was very happy with the results he just got presented: “They really managed to identify the core aspects Crowdocracy and focused on implementing them. From what I have seen, this resulted in a very nice and simple working platform that follows the crowdocratic process from start to finish.” Asked about how he sees the future of The Crowd platform, he continues: “I believe the presented platform actually can be used to show that the Crowdocracy concept can work. By building this platform the PDEng ST trainees laid the foundation for the Crowdocracy concept to come to life.”