Daniel Curto-Millet
Civic tech platforms that enable citizens to participate in decision-making activities in their city are becoming more common. Yet, they still face many challenge.
In this article on opensource.com, I argue that opening cities require developing an infrastructure to cultivate and nurture a participatory culture, something that open source has done for decades and which contributes to its sustainability.
I've written a short article with Roser Pujadas on the role of invisible infrastructure that Uber tries to create and how it affects our cities.
This is part of our larger work on the digital economy, of which you can find an academic article here.
My presentation for EGOS2020 in the sub-theme on 'Smart and Livable Cities (2): Urban Governance, Management, and Leadership'. This deck briefly describes part of my research on a crowdsourcing civic platform called 'Decide Madrid'.
#participativetech #opensource #democracy
What's this? How this page is organised Timeline of Decide Madrid The origins of Decide Madrid
This webpage serves as the open repository of public resources for the Marie Curie project 'Sustainability Beyond the Code'. I investigate the sustainability of open source beyond the technical spaces where open source projects are created. What happens when open source leaves the technical domain and comes into contact with the 'wild'? What forces does it stir? What questions does it ask of sustainability?
In particular, I study Decide Madrid, a Free and open source software on direct participative democracy. It is one of the most ambitious participative projects taken up by governments in recent times and so it's worth talking and reading about it.
Here are a few points why you should care about Decide Madrid:
You will find resources here talking about each of the above points, resources that I have found interesting in my years studying Decide Madrid. You will find, for example, an overview of some of the initiatives that particularly marked Decide Madrid and why they mattered most than others. There are many online resources that pay testimony to the complexity and ambitions of Decide Madrid, but these are often disparate. I try to tie them some together here. If you think there's something that should be in here, drop me a line.
By going through this page, my hope is that you can have a quick idea of the extremely ambitious objectives behind Decide Madrid, what problems they had to solve, and how they tried to solve it.
Note
This is still a work in progress. I'll be adding content on a weekly basis, with a first version ready by end of july.
A quick word about organisation. I'm really tired of multi-page, deep depth webpages, so this webpage is it. It's a summary of resources, so it will help me control the content creep that might take place.
Navigate through the table of content at the top of the page and the links at the beginning and end of each section to go back up to the table of content.
I go through some of the most important moments of Decide Madrid.
If you ask people when Decide Madrid was created, they will probably say in September 2015, which is the date the web site was launched.
* This is a good summary of many elements that went into the thinking when designing Decide Madrid. There are two other parts that continue to look at Decide Madrid's inception.But Decide Madrid wasn't born in a vacuum, the idea comes from somewhere, specifically the 15M.* The 15M was a testing ground for some of the participative technology that was being created at the time and became in the minds of some participants a key (if not the only) way to effect the democratic change they sought. Beyond urgent social demands, many participants thought that the cause of the problem was a lack of democratic implication on key political and societal questions. The reason for a lack of participation was historic: without information systems, it is difficult to scale recurrent citizen participation. This was not the case any more and indeed, many systems were developed to facilitate coordination and collaboration between the different assemblies. The 15M, thus, was the realisation that procedures could help right Spain's situation and prevent future such situations.
Decide Madrid is infused by another imaginary: that of open source. Some of its most prominent members were highly visible hackers before the creating Decide Madrid. Some had spent time in student groups disussing issues concerning open source. Others, had used open source technologies (e.g. Ruby language). Pablo Soto, one of the main proponents, had been taken to court by music majors for developing a p2p software programme. Between individual experience, through work, or within the 15M, many had felt and experienced the fruitful intersection between open source and society beyond its intellectual promise.
* I realise that (1) this trend may not be linear (e.g. past and current privacy violations that may encourage the exact opposite trend with rampant co-optation); (2) but I still think that, at least for the two last decades, open government principles have made some headway into the institutions are governed; (3) there is still a (much) long(er) way we can go in opening up organisations and institutions; (4) the participation of 'open' as an organisational vector propelled by fablabs and makerspaces during COVID-19 is a good recent example of its growing importance and capacity to participate.It is no coincidence that after the 15M, an important initiative grouped many Free Software and open source hackers with political theorists and sociologists. The purpose was to think about governance systems in an age where open principles are increasingly espoused.* This project, sponsored by Ecuador's plan of Good Living, had the suggestive name of Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) society. In Spanish, the project had an even more suggestive name: the “Good Knowing”. They organised and met to study how such a future society based on notions of commons and open knowledge (with open software) would look like. Suffice to say, for our purposes, that 'open' was more than just values (i.e. a preference for certain behaviours), it had a vision, processes to implement, and resources to create.
We can actually go further back when talking about the origins of Decide Madrid. Next week!
(Forthcoming) Digital Citizenship in White Paper on Digital and Complex Information: CSIC’s Strategic Roadmap for 2030 Corsín Jiménez, A., Wagner, A., Curto-Millet, D., Boni Aristízabal, A., Ellman, M., Ríos Insua, D., Mártinez Veiga, F. J., Martín Isabel, M. P., Degli Espositi, S., Turrini, M., Rodríguez Aguilar, J., , Eds. Zambrini, R., Ruis, G [Video (in Spanish)]
2019 From Matchmaking to Boundary Making: Thinking Infrastructures and Decentring Digital Platforms in the Sharing Economy, Pujadas, R., Curto-Millet, D., in Research in the Sociology of Organizations: Thinking Infrastructures, Eds. Kornberger, M., Bowker, G., Pollock, N., Miller, P., Mennicken, A., Nucho, J. R., and Elyachar, J. [pdf], [LSE Business Review]
2018 Ethics in crowdsourcing: Revisiting and revising the role of stakeholder theory, Creating and Capturing Value through Crowdsourcing, Eds. Tucci, C., Afuah, A., Viscusi. G., Oxford University Press, [pdf] We propose stakeholder theory as a way to evaluate ethical dilemmas in crowdsourcing.
2018 Guimón, J., Alcázar J.C., Curto-Millet, D., Rompiendo barreras y abriendo nuevos espacios: la innovación abierta en la economía digital, Eds. López López, A., Guimón de Ros, J., Salazar Elena, J. C., [[pdf]]()
2017 The Emergence of Openness in Open Source Projects: The Case of openEHR, in Journal of Information Technology, with Maha Shaikh We study how the concept of openness can change over time in an open source project. Different takes on what 'open' means co-exist within communities and take part in shaping open source projects.
2013 Curto-Millet, D. Sustainability and Governance in Developing Open Source Projects as Processes of In-Becoming, January, Technology Innovation Management Review, [pdf]
My research interest sits at the intersection between technology, organisation, and society. I'm particularly interested in digital technologies of participation such as open source, crowdsourcing platforms, and their organisation and societal impact.
Currently, I'm doing a post-doc (Marie Curie) at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC). My project studies the sustainability of open source beyond the code. The rationale behind the project is that we have paid too close attention to the sustainability of the software behind open source, to the processes and practices of coding. We have been less attentive to the social and organisational aspects of open source once the code gets deployed, leaves the lab, and becomes as much part of our lives as the trees in the sidewalks or the traffic algorithms.
Now that open source is increasingly visible, that it is a forceful political actor in the way our lives and our societies are shaped, we should pay attention to the ways that its sustainability is organised. This is, in a nutshell, what my project is about.
If you're interested in catching up, then send me an email and we can talk over there, old style, or you can tweet at me as well (though I'm slowly distancing myself from the incessant chirping).