Digital Democracy in Barcelona
By GABRIELA STUPARU
Barcelona is well known around the world as being a major tourist destination thanks to its geographical position and cultural heritage and as one of the world’s economic and trade fair centres. Moreover, Barcelona is one of the leading cities in terms of digital democracy as the City Council has recently launched different initiatives with the aim of improving democracy by building a more open, transparent and collaborative city with its citizens input.
The opening up of the democracy started to become an important issue in Spain after the Indignados Movement (2011) that was claiming for a real democracy. This is why a citizen wild coalition, named Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Commun) was created in Barcelona. This coalition ran for the
political election. They won and Ada Colau became the Mayor of Barcelona in 2015. From this moment, a radical experiment has been implemented: changing the government with its citizens, “update” it so that it could integrate a collective intelligence. In order for this to become a reality, a
bottom up approach, a bottom up movement was necessary and was implemented by Barcelona City Council through the development of Decidim.Barcelona platform.
Decidim.Barcelona is an online platform for democratic participation where citizens can become more involved and can decide what they want for their surroundings. It is a digital tool through which the city council can reach and take into consideration more easily its citizens opinions, views, concerns
and needs. To be able to do so, Decidim.Barcelona provides two different ways for citizens to be able to take part in the co-production process via: Citizen Initiatives and Participatory Processes.
Citizen Initiatives represent a means by which citizens intervene so that the City Council carries out a specific action of general interest within its municipal competence. To create a new citizen initiatives, there are some online as well as offline steps that have to be followed. Once the citizen initiative has passed the technical validation granted by the City Council, the process of collecting signatures begins. Besides, Decidim.Barcelona also offers additional information related to the status of the initiative: opened vs. closed. Furthermore, it rankes the initiatives in different categories: more signed, more commented or more recent and presents them in two different colors: in green for the published one and in red for the discarded ones. For the online voting, citizens need to be over 16 years and need to have been previously registered into the platform. To register, there is a double verification process: a residence information verification and a SMS verification are needed to be done to make sure that the respondents and/or voters are residents of the city.
The Participatory Processes are delimited time period meetings held to promote debate and/or the contrast of arguments between citizens or between citizens and the municipality. There are different three ways for citizens to engage in the Participatory Processes: through proposals, discussions and/or meetings. Citizens can come up with, support or change an existing proposal. Moreover, they can also share their opinion or meet during public meetings for offline discussions.
What’s interesting in Decidim.Barcelona is the way in which the two approaches, the online and the offline, are being used in both co-production processes. While the Citizen Initiative is almost using in its entire process an online interaction between the participants via comments or votes, the Participatory Processes are much more complex because they include among others: preliminar meetings with expert agents and face-to-face meetings with citizens. Besides, via the online platform citizens can appoint themselves to an offline meeting and they can even have access to the previously
face-to-face reports meetings in order to be informed about the outcomes of what was already been discussed. Anyone can access this information via the platform and this actually ensures that the openness and the transparency of the information, which were one of the city council’s objectives, are actually reached.
The 40,000 already engaged citizens on Decidim.Barcelona are showing that there is a real desire from the part of the people to participate, to being involved, to really feel that their imput is valuable for the City Council. Even if there is still an under-represention of the people who usually participate in these co-production processes as household income correlates with engagement on Decidim.Barcelona, this tool is still a unique example of digital common good for democracy. By using this platform, Barcelona City Council shows that its citizens voices do matter and that they are commited to build a better democracy for the well-being of everyone. Decidim is the technopolitical tool that is helping Barcelona City Council to build the democracy of tomorrow, but, the effectivenness of this digital platform remains in the ability of the municipality to reach a broader part of its population, to actually boost its citizens interest to get more involved in the co-production processes.
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