Decentralised and privacy-aware tools for democratic participation D-CENT (Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies) is a Europe-wide project creating privacy-aware tools and applications for direct democracy and economic empowerment. It is an ecology of democracy tools for communities to share data, build collective intelligence, and organise. Lean UX development: from users need into features In early 2014 we conducted workshops with communities of users to identify their needs. These were translated into the first D-CENT Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) for the D-CENT platform to be piloted further with communities in Spain, Finland and Iceland. What does D-CENT do? D-CENT allows people to discuss and share content, engage in deliberation, collective judgments and voting. D-CENT is based on a distributed, federated and privacy-aware social networking architecture. The platform will include an ecosystem of open source tools for direct democracy and collective intelligence, including deliberation, collective debates, voting, citizen initiatives, collective creation of documents, political programs and laws, and collective selection and filtering algorithms. Pilots, Spain: Podemos and Guanyem Barcelona Spain is seeing the radical emergence of citizen-led political movements involving the whole society, since the rise of the social movement 15M. Different surveys show that there has been a constant support of the population to the new movement emerged and all its evolutions (such as the PAH, the “Marea Blanca” (white tide), the new political party Podemos, and the new wave of citizen municipal coalitions Ganemos). The new politics are characterized by a prioritization of a real and direct democracy, in the hands and voices of citizens. We are collaborating with Podemos and Guanyem Barcelona, an emerging municipal coalition of citizen movements and civil society. The Guanyem pilots began in October 2014. Building on the DemocracyOS codebase, a prototype was developed as a tool for online democratic participation in the drafting of Guanyem’s ethical code. D-CENT has tested DOS for two topic groups (Science Circle and Research&Development Circle) of Podemos and we will move on to larger scale pilots in collaboration with Laboratorio Democrático, a digital strategy Lab that is developing innovative tools for networked democracy. Laboratorio Democrático has launched the debate platform “Plaza Podemos” with 220,000 registered people. User interface The daily average attendance is 15,000 unique visitors, with more than 270,000 unique visitors and more than 2,625,000 page view during October. Pilots, Finland: Open Ministry and City of Helsinki In Finland, D-CENT will pilot new crowdsourcing tools with Open Ministry. They will help citizens involved in conducting Citizens Initiative campaigns to better organise their operations. The project will also test a newsfeed based on open decision-making data that will enable inhabitants of Helsinki to quickly engage into effective collective actions to respond to the issues that are being processed in the Helsinki City’s decision making bodies. The piloting began in November 2014. Pilots, Iceland: Improving eDemocracy tools The Icelandic Pilot uses the open source Your Priorities eDemocracy software that has been in lean user centric development in Iceland since 2008 by the Citizens Foundation and others. The Icelandic pilot will be focused on upgrading Your Priorities by adding functionality needed by the users of Better Reykjavík and Better Iceland. The plan is to package Your Priorities as a Docker application that can be installed in a D-CENT node for other governments, groups or citizens across Europe to easily deploy and use. Modular, distributed and open source The architecture of the D-CENT platform is modular and privacy-aware. It is based on open source software and open standards. The code is published on Github D-CENT principles • • • • • community ownership of social data security and privacy by design open standards access to knowledge and open source mass scalability D-CENT Multidisciplinary research D-CENT research has focused on data analysis of the organisational models from emerging social movements, and new economic models based on the commons. At technical level, an analysis of distributed social networking, identity eco-systems, social data stores and privacy-aware tools has been carried out. In the development of a socio-technical framework on collective intelligence, IN3-UOC and Barcelona Media have analysed global network-movements, creating data-driven insights for D-CENT. The Centre d‘économie de la Sorbonne, Nesta and Dyne investigated the most significant experiences of alternative currencies and digital social currencies in Europe. Lead-user commu- nities for pilots have been identified and a set of hypotheses to be tested have emerged clustered in the following trends: new municipal currencies; socially controlled commercial credit circuits; collective reward systems. These will be developed further through an iterative process with lead-users. The Digital Social Currency pilots will take place in Spring 2015. Launching to the public Since October 2013, D-CENT has published 13 reports that are public and available on our website.These reports include in-depth analysis and description of our research, methodology, technical architecture, use-cases, technical features and dissemination activities. In March 2014, the D-CENT launch event Democracy reboot: Re-imagining democracy and currency in Europe introduced the project to the wider audience. The event attracted high-level policy makers, academics, activists, communities and hackers. Twenty-three video interviews from the event have been published on our website. D-CENT team has attended various other events, including World Democracy Forum 2013, Open Knowledge Festival 2014, CAPS2020 Conference, the Internet Governance Forum 2014 in Istanbul, W3C20 Anniversary Symposium, and OUI SHARE FEST 2014, among others. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 610349. In short Full title: Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies Project acronym: D-CENT Starting date: 1 October 2013 Duration: 2,5 years (until May 2016) Budget: 2,5 million euros Website: www.dcentproject.eu Twitter: @dcentproject Vimeo: vimeo.com/dcentproject Slideshare: slideshare.net/dcentproject D-CENT 2nd year roadmap 2014-2015 SEP OCT 1. 2. NOV DEC JAN 4. 3. MAR 9. 5. 7. 8. Software Development APR MAY 12. 14. 19. 13. 15. 16. 10. 6. 1. FEB Piloting Launch of first prototype of decentralized social networking SEP 17. 21. 12. Software iteration 2. Spanish pilots Podemos 3. Spanish pilots Guanyem 4. DemocracyOS prototype 14. Bitcoin for the social good: pilots implementation 5. Spanish pilots ongoing 6. Finnish pilots 7. Finnish pilots ongoing 8. Icelandic pilots 9. Digital currency 11. Selfgovernance models of knowledge commons AUG 22. 18. Events 13. Open social web specifications and federation 10. Data portability and identity research JUL 11. 20. Academic research JUNE 15. Results of the data analyses 16. Open social web specifications and federation 17. Economic frameworks for implementing alternative credit schemes and digital social currencies 18. Large scale pilots on democracy and money across Europe 19. Crowd-sourcing open-data module 20. Future Fest, 14-15 March, London, UK 21. Web We Want, 29-31 May 2015, London, UK 22. D-CENT mid-term event, June 2015, Barcelona, Spain