EMPATIA: Lessons Learned (In the first Semester!) Michelangelo Secchi (Scientific Coordinator of EMPATIA) CES – Center for Social Studies Coimbra michelangelosecchi@ces.uc.pt
@ DSI4EU: Shaping the Future of Digital Social Innovation in Europe Brussels 29th of June 2016
Empowering Participatory Budgeting The EMPATIA project seeks to radically enhance the inclusiveness and impact of Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes, increasing the participation of citizens by designing, evaluating and making publicly available an advanced ICT platform for participatory budgeting, which could be adaptable to different social and institutional contexts. EMPATIA aims at producing the first ICT platform capable of fully encompassing both the decision-making cycle and the implementation cycle of PB.
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What is EMPATIA? “Empatia” (“Enabling Multichannel Participation Through ICT Adaptations”) is funded under the Commission's Horizon 2020 CAPS programme. The EMPATIA project is managed by a multidisciplinary consortium of partners: experts on PB research (CES, UNIMI), experts on ICT integration (OneSource, D21), experts on evaluating technological and societal impact (UBRUN) and implementers of PB processes (ZebraLog, InLoco and D21).
The partners in the EMPATIA consortium will: •
Research on leading ICT interventions in European PB processes definition of a logical framework;
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Develop a prototype digital platform for PB management;
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Testing in the context of Pilots in Portugal, Czech Republic, Italy, Germany;
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Disseminate both key findings and the technology itself
The EMPATIA platform will be released as open source and all extensions and improvements to previously existing opensource software will be returned to the community as commons.
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Objectives Inclusion:
Channels Integration:
using ICT to reduce barriers to citizen participation in both the decisionmaking and implementation processes, including barriers related to digital skills, language, education level, visual impairment, location and time availability.
using ICT in such a way that online and in-person processes fit seamlessly together, and that PB activities are integrated with other governance innovations and existing e-government tools.
Deliberative Quality:
Replication & Adaptation:
using ICT to enhance the quality of PB deliberation by improving the flow of information, enabling the exchange of alternative proposals, and using advanced voting algorithms to more rapidly achieve consensus.
using ICT to pave the way toward the diffusion of a next generation of PB processes, which can meet the highest standards of deliberation, selection, and implementation in other contexts and at greater scale.
Enhanced Evaluation:
Efficiency: using ICT to streamline and optimize the investment of time and resources by facilitators and technical staff, so that they provide maximum support to the PB process for each unit of time and budget they commit.
by using the EMPATIA platform to record the whole PB process it becomes possible to build extensive open datasets of PB processes, for monitoring and self-assessment purposes and for supporting more methodical research studies on PB.
Transparency:
Marketability:
using Open Data to enable the two-way flow of meaningful information between government and citizens. At the same time, relate the process to a larger framework of open data related to general budgetary issues of the local administration concerned (both in terms of provisional as well as executed budget).
the exploration of sustainable and ethically consistent business models, to accelerate and amplify these innovations.
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THREE PILLARS 1) Social goals (empowering inclusive dimension of participatory budgeting, increasing deliberative quality)
SOCIAL GOALS
3) Service provision (between commons and the market)
(INCLUSION, DELIBERATIVE QUALITY)
2) Research (bridging btw social sciences and civic tech, generation of open data, 5 enabling systematic monitoring/evaluation)
1) Challenges and Opportunities of Digitization of Partcipation Opportunities
Challenges
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Scaling-up: ICTs allowed the implementation of PB in municipalities and regions with large populations.
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Including new publics: Flexibility of ICT vs. the rigid time constraint of off-line participation.
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New epistemic possibilities: The integration of multiple sources of information, including public and community open datasets, can provide a more detailed and accessible base of information to support the public deliberation. In particular, collaborative, geo-referencing and natural language analysis technologies can be adopted to mitigate redundancies and misinformation.
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Processes compartmentation: On-line participation and off-line participation follow two parallel paths, creating conflicts instead of collaboration. Misaligned and scattered choices: Individualized participation through ICT reduces the alignment with complex long-term planning and urban development strategies. Vote vs. deliberation: The availability of ICT solutions to collect votes and preferences emphasized the vote stage of PB against the deliberative component of the process, flattening PB on its quantitative dimension of aggregation of preferences. Security issues and deceitful uses: The chance to directly influence public expenditures can generate deceitful or abusive behaviors in PB. ICT vulnerabilities increase this risk, which is limited in face-to-face interactions. Non-interoperability: ICT solutions for PB management have a low level of standardization and a low capacity to interact and exchange data with existing technologies.
Solve the apparent trade-off: •
Inclusiveness vs Deliberative Quality •
Multiple processes in multiple channels: The possibility to manage in parallel a plurality of networked participatory processes expands the possibility for institutional engineering.
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Easier Dissemination and Replicability
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Complex Systems of Multi-Channel Participation Channel Ferramentas Colaborativas
• A Channel of engagement is defined as a combination of messages and participatory processes designed to encourage a specific behaviour in a (specific) target public.
Ferramentas de Concertação
Multi- Channel Democratic Innovation
• Multi-channel democratic innovations are institutions that integrate messages and participatory spaces targeted to different segments of the population in a system specifically designed to increase and deepen citizen participation in the political decision making process.
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Ferramentas de Elaboração
Demandas Individuais
Demandas Coletivas
Rethinking the use of technology for building a participatory system around PB (Madrid, Canoas, Lisbon) Ferramentas Colaborativas
Ferramentas de Elaboração
Ferramentas de Concertação
Demandas Individuais
Demandas Coletivas
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EMPATIA API (inter components)
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External Tools
External Tools
Orchestrator
Analytics
Content Management
Projects (2ÂŞ cycle)
Multichannel Participations
Notifications
Voting
Files
Logging
Questionnaires
Community Building
Authentication
EMPATIA API (public interface)
Platform Tools Web User Interface
Proposals validation
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Analytics
Voting
Collaborative proposals
PB publication (final)
Discussion (validated)
PB publication (draft)
Ideas (public)
Adapting the Tools to the Context
Forum (public)
2) Research: Building Bridges between Disciplines
Social Participation
Open Government
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New Public Management
Free Culture
Path Dependencies
Efficiency Oriented‌
ICT
Social Empowerment
Democratic Innovations
Inclusion Oriented‌
Social Sciences
Space for Dialogue Between Different Visions
EMPOWERMENT
Theatre of the Oppressed
Participatory Budgeting
Citizen Assembly
Electronic Town Meeting
Forum Online
Consultation on ESP
Mini Publics
Citizen Jury On-line pools
Gamified Customer Services
EFFICIENCY
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OPEN DATA: Value for research, monitoring, evaluation
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3) Service Provision and Value Creation 1) A matter of consistency between goals and means Market opportunities: A new market for collaborative economy could be developed around ICT services for citizen engagement.
2) The market of Participation 3) The issue of sustainability and 'The Valley of Death’ behind the corner 4) Possible models: consultancy and customization services, training, personalization features, SaaS related services, etc.
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Stagnated Market Paradigms: The persistence of traditional market approaches in the sector of ICT solutions for participation and social innovation on PB.
EMPATIA: Lessons Learned (In the first Semester!) Michelangelo Secchi (Scientific Coordinator of EMPATIA) CES – Center for Social Studies Coimbra michelangelosecchi@ces.uc.pt
@ DSI4EU: Shaping the Future of Digital Social Innovation in Europe Brussels 29th of June 2016