How Civic Technology & Citizen Initiatives Reshape Democracy In France

“Future of Democracy” Conference — Reykjavik, Iceland

On May 21st, I had the great honor to give a lecture in Reykjavik on the democratic experiments currently happening in France and the inspiration we have received from the Icelandic constitutional crowdsourcing process.

Hey everyone!

My name is Valentin and I am a French activist and civic-tech entrepreneur.

In order to prevent you from quietly starting your after-lunch nap, let me start with a couple of questions!

Who in this room has ever been to France?

Great; and what is France famous for?

I mean, except for our cute accent?

What is the most famous political event in the History of France?

Yes, the French Revolution!

On this famous picture, members of the Third Estate, who had begun to call themselves the National Assembly, took a vow not to separate until a constitution of the kingdom is established.

Or perhaps we should say the French Revolutions…

Because we had quite a lot in our modern history!

• In 1789, we abolished aristocratic privileges.
• But it took more than a century of philosophical and bayonet fights to get a stable, secular and king-free Republic.
• In the meantime, we beheaded a king, overthrew two other monarchs, chose two emperors who both led us to military disasters, experimented pre-sovietic communism in Paris and gained the right for rich and educated men to vote, then the same right for every men, and after the Second World War we finally let women vote too.

You got my two points:

• 1/ we must never take democracy for granted…
• 2/ we the French people love the idea of getting on strike and leading revolutions.

To me, this is as a real paradox that nothing at all has happened in France, neither in 2008 when the economic crisis started, nor in 2011 when people were gathering in so many squares around the world.

Why did we remain so silent? It’s not a rhetorical question; we can’t find any satisfying answer.

Some say it is because our strong social system prevented the most of us from enduring extreme conditions during the crisis. But we got 60 % more unemployed people in the period!

Others think nothing can change this situation because our politicians from right or left are not sincerely interested in solving concrete problems but in managing their own careers. As an example, the chairman on the foreground of this picture has been an MP for 35 years! I was not even born when he entered the Parliament.

It is not specific to France, but current polls tell us that 80 % of the population consider we cannot trust our leaders… even though we are the ones who keep on electing them!

We often reduce Democracy to elections, which is a complete non-sense.

For more than two hundred years, we have relied on representative democracies because we could not find enough time, space and commitment from the citizens to enable a direct democracy. I’m not sure with the maths, but you can imagine it would be very long to let every Icelander speak on this stage!

Thanks to the Internet, we now have technologies to express ourselves and interact with each other in real-time.

Pia Mancini, the Argentinian co-founder of the open-source decision software DemocracyOS, perfectly described the issue during her TED talk in 2014: “We are 21st century citizens doing our best to interact with 19th century designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century.”

There are many ways to define civic technologies. I choose to understand it by the objectives it seeks: empowering citizens’ initiatives, increasing democratic participation, enhancing governments’ transparency. One might distinguish citizens’ bottom-up civic tools from both govtech (when the institutions are implementing platforms) and poltech (which are tools to run better campaigns) but I consider them all as solutions to improve our democracies.

As an activist and entrepreneur in the French civic-tech ecosystem, I can tell you that France is currently a very unique laboratory for democratic experiments. Here are 5 proofs of that vitality, either coming from the institutions or the citizens. I will be quick about each one of them, but I can give you further details in the Q&A session.

Let’s begin with the Government: last year, the draft of a new law was open to comments online before going to the Parliament.

Of course,

• 1/ this audience of 20.000 people was pretty qualified as the bill was dealing with digital issues, and
• 2/ everything in the draft has been modified by the National Assembly and the Senate,
• but it has to be celebrated as our first process of effective crowdsourcing of a law.

We are currently doing this again with a law on “Equality and Citizenship” and we can imagine that in a couple of years every new bill will follow the same process!

We can argue that it won’t really change as long as the same people are in office. Our electoral system gives strong advantages to the two main political parties and most of our politicians are

• 1/ white aged men
• 2/ local and national representatives at the same time.

That is where “the-primary-dot-org” intervene. Its motto says that “if not anyone can become President, the next President can come from anywhere”, and especially from outside the parties, as they only represent 0.5 % of the population. So laprimaire proposes to follow several phases to select a candidate through a mobile app, which is actually driven by a conversational bot on the messaging app Telegram. So 2016!

So far, 25 000 citizens have joined. It is not enough yet, but we are still a year ahead of the election.

On a more local level, change has already started! Here are 3 examples of how French cities improve citizens’ participation.

New democratic movements appear everywhere in France.

You probably heard about the most famous recent one: “Nuit Debout”. It started on March 31st, as people gathered on Paris’ Republic Square after a demonstration against the new Labor bill and claimed they wanted to stay and stand all night long. That is literally what “Nuit Debout” means. They came back the next evening, and the evening after… and in fact every evening for a month and a half in Paris and other places. According to Nuit Debout calendar, today is March 82nd!

By many aspects, it looks like the Indignados movement in Spain. There would be a lot to say about “Nuit Debout”. Some tensions appeared between the ones who want to give the movement a far-left platform, and others — especially among the youngest members — who do not refer to any right or left at all and simply want to create something new.

I’ve been there several times during the first two weeks. The good thing I saw on Republic Square is that many people are happy to experience new forms of democratic debates. To create a more direct or liquid democracy is really a temptation among participants.

For that purpose, a group of highly motivated citizens started the #MAVOIX initiative — which means “My Voice” — last year. It wants to hack the next parliamentary election in 2017.

The concept is to randomly pick in every constituency one person within a group of volunteers who has been following online courses on the way the Parliament works. If they are elected, these new Members of Parliament will follow the decisions of their voters, who can express themselves in real-time on a digital platform. The group already made some tests on DemocracyOS, on Loomio and on a blockchain experimental platform.

Actually this process is happening right now, this weekend! There is a new election in Strasbourg as the former MP just resigned. #MAVOIX presents its first candidate and it created this very innovative campaign poster: a mirror that reminds voters that no one can represent them better than themselves!

All these democratic experiments are really at the beginning. I don’t have any clue of what will be next year’s outcome. I am not even sure they are realistic solutions for the future of democracy.

But they are great food for our thoughts. I have been myself an activist in a big political party and I have been studying or working for local and national institutions during a decade. It gave me an accurate perspective

• on how much the system is rigged from the inside,
• on how much the gap between the people and the elites is growing,
• on how much my fellow citizens that are not well-off are tempted by extreme and not-so-democratic options. We have our own Donald Trumps in Europe…

My personal conclusion is that we must fight as much as we can against the egos in politics. I might be too optimistic, but the path I choose to follow is to experiment new methodologies, to focus on collective intelligence, to put some trust in bottom-up initiatives.

So, this is my #MessageToIceland: you have to be very proud of what happened here since 2009 with the “Pots and Pans revolution”, the Citizens Foundation and all the Constitution writing process. Even though it did not achieve all what you expected yet, there has been a cultural shift on the way we can organize and let citizens take part in a more open and deliberative democracy.

I have to say that what you did here in Iceland had a major influence on me, on many other French initiatives I just described and on many other countries. As you may know, the City of Mexico, Sri Lanka and Chile started their own crowdsourcing projects recently.

I keep in mind from yesterday’s talks that your mission has remained too unclear and mostly that you lacked of time. I would like to add Professor Lessig’s campaign about fixing the US democracy in this remark. It did fail too, but it was a great inspiration for a lot of us.

If we see ourselves as a global community of political thinkers and activists, we can iterate on the issues you faced and avoid making these mistakes again the next time a similar process happens here in Iceland or elsewhere.

Keep your creative energy! Because, for once in modern history, France did not start a revolution but has been following your paths.

For that, and even if I have no idea of how I should pronounce it in Icelandic, I really want to thank you!

I want to add special thanks to Elín Björk Jóhannsdóttir, Jón Ólafsson and Katrín Oddsdóttir for the perfect organization of this event & to Davíð Stefánsson and Eileen Jerrett for the invitation.