Populate helps Barcelona to visualize and track progress of its city plan
Populate is a digital studio around civic engagement with base in Madrid, Spain. We work with organizations like ICIJ and the Barcelona City Council to help them design and build digital products. In this post we explain the project we did for the City of Barcelona around their city plan.
Can you imagine a government that tracks the implementation of their electoral program? This seems a no brainer, but we all know that political messages and action pivot around distant realities.
In Catalunya the regional legislation forces city councils to do something very similar. When a mandate starts they have to create, and share, the plan of projects they will carry out through the 4 year tenure. And not only share it, but also to update it along the mandate.
2016 brought to Barcelona a new city government that went even further: not only were they going to publish their city plan (PAM in its spanish acronym, from Plan de Actuación Municipal), but they were going to create it collaboratively through their brand new participation platform: Decidim Barcelona (check out the visual recap of the process).
PAM evolution and updates
Once they have reached the half-term, they have just published how the projects of the city plan are evolving. Internally, the city council has a cloud application that enables hundreds of city workers to update on the progress of their projects. This info is then synced with Decidim, the participation software.
At Populate we have designed and built the accountability module that enables to publish how results from participation processes are being implemented. You can browse the city plan and its progress information in Decidim.
Decidim Barcelona and Populate
Decidim is the open source participation software that the Barcelona City Council is building. It is an impressive example of how modern software should be developed in a public administration: open source, collaboratively and distributed, with coordination between various administrations, with an open and shared governance rules, with an ethics and social contract…
And with a procurement process that takes into account small and agile companies and even freelances. Populate is the designer for Decidim for 2018. More about this in our spanish blog.
Other Populate projects
At Populate we are also building Gobierto, an open government open source platform.
