Policy Context and Legal Framework

Since years it has been argued that the transition from municipal "bureaucratic models of government" toward "collaborative governance levels" is not only necessary but urgent. A changing socio-economical environment, which includes growing demands and challenges for local governments, reduced resources and capacity, and a diminishing legitimacy of political actors and institutions are encouraging this paradigm shift. One critical component of governance is Citizen Participation. By opening up the political processes to the very citizens... new reflective, creative and implementing power can be summoned. Internet can be leveraged to foster an improved and extended participation. Technologies and concepts (web2.0, mass collaboration...) for social networking and participation have been there for a while; it's just a matter of integrating them. So far, governmental initiatives have failed to fully exploit the collaborative potential of the Internet. The most celebrated experiences have been modest experiments with little real effect and almost no continuity or scalability. e-Participation poses serious conflicts of interests to political elites and civil servants, who would like to have more legitimacy because of citizen participation... but nevertheless want to retain their discretionary decisional power. These e-Participation experiences have cost too much and have brought too few change and benefits. In order to stimulate citizens' trust in e-Participation, it is necessary to promote experiences coming from Civil Society, which will still granting municipal authorities the privileged role they deserve regarding participation but will withdraw from them an "absolute" power and control. Our system, Kyosei-Polis, will provide e-Participation tools to any organization willing to involve citizens to work for the "common good". It will also help concerned citizens to find each other and facilitate mobilization and action, exerting pressure on local authorities to take participation seriously and to act accordingly. This may be the best strategy to expand e-participation’s reach and depth.

Implementation and Management Approach

The project is being managed following the decentralized approach usual in FOSS projects. Our team and contributors are scattered throughout the world and use several Internet tools to keep communicated (Skype, Zoho Project, Mingle, Confluence and JIRA). The Asociación Ciudades Kyosei is playing a leading role coordinating the work of the different actors and institutions involved in the project, which remains fully open to the contributions from every interested party. Each partner is responsible for its own costs. This approach has allowed us to develop the project with no central funding, and thus has helped us to keep its independent and nonpartisan character. We are, for example, establishing partnerships with several technical universities from Spain and Latin America. Their students are able to contribute to the project through their Final Degree Dissertations. This way, the base of developers is growing organically, and the development costs are being minimized. Similarly, partnerships with sociology and political sciences institutes, as well as regional governments, will be established as we approach the "pilot-testing" phases. We applied, together with the University of Alcalá (Spain), for a grant of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, to cover more efficiently our base activities, but our application got rejected... and we haven't so far been able to get the critical mass needed for the project to gain impulse on its own.

The main basis for the system were already presented in year 2006, at the European
Conference on e-Government (ECEG 2006) in our paper:
“Virtual environments for
citizen participation. Principal bases for design”  [Spanish extended version]

Technology solution

The Open Source approach has proved it can deliver high quality software systems of any complexity. We are developing the project as a full fledged Open Source initiative that will use the latest technologies (Java, Hibernate, Spring, AJAX, Ant, Eclipse, XP, etc.) to integrate web 2.0 concepts and tools in a participatory environment that is organic (directly linked to real geographies and organizations) and viral (its usefulness and usage will extend exponentially as more users utilize it). A complete set of tools, fully integrated and adapted to the necessities of municipal participation will be available for citizens, organizations and institutions. Special attention will be given to attaining "meaningful" and "goal-driven" participation. Integration of on-line & off-line phases and activities, innovative models for discussion facilitation, multiple levels of contributions and an extensive use of "massive collaboration" concepts to solve most of the challenges associated with e-Participation.

Impact

Innovation: From conception (using multidisciplinary research on Citizen Participation) and design (with our "participatory design") to its institutional approach for pilot-testing and utilization, the project is innovative. We hope this project will allow us to learn a lot and help the eParticipation field mature. Multi-channel issues: The Ciudades Kyosei project is not just a question of offline/ online multi-channeling. It is a question of considering and evolving institutional models and business models that guarantee the sustainability of the system in the social environments where it will operate. The most complicated eParticipation issues arise not because of multi-channel combinations, but because of cultural, organizational, legal, institutional, social and educational challenges and problems. At the end, this necessary transition from "hierarchical governing" to "collaborative governance" means that power balances will need to be re-arranged. This generates a lot of initial resistance, and that is the "real" issue: no real interest from the authorities means no real interest from the citizens. And that is what eParticipation is about.

Track record of sharing

A growing community of interested institutions and individuals is being established. The project has also been present in several forums and symposiums. A book titled "(e)Participation on the local level. Walking towards a collaborative democracy" is being written as a preparation for our participatory design exercise, which we hope will be ground-breaking on several e-Participation theoretical and practical areas. Its first chapter is available here.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1. By encouraging the development of independent FOSS projects and establishing partnerships between civil society groups, universities and government institutions to sustain them it is possible to get much better systems with much less investment.
Sadly enough, most of the european and spanish funding instruments to promote innovation in the (e)Participation field are not really working. They are aimed at the "usual suspects", like universities, associations and institutions big enough to comply with the very restrictive conditions imposed, create multi-national consortiums, etc. This is the way that research funding has always been distributed. The problem is that these kind of big institution are unable to be creative and spread real innovation in (e)Participation. And the EU and National Governments should recognice this, if they really want to promote (e)Participation. Do they, indeed?

The big money they spend will thus be mostly useless. And in the meanwhile, small associations like us will get their applications rejected, and won't be able to implement their bright ideas. It's a pitty, but that's the way it is. Anyway: it will take longer, but at the end what needs to be created will somehow get implemented. For sure.

Lesson 2. In order to evolve eParticipation from its current incipient state, we need to avoid the Top-Down perspective taken so far. Even Bottom-Up is not good enough, since the initiatives coming from outside governmental institutions usually are too disconnected from policy making processes. A new approach, combining Top-Down & Bottom-Up, and a new "From-The-Middle-And-Around" is required to get the best from every perspective.

Lesson 3. "Know your users" is the best recipe for success, and at best: "Make your users work with you from the beginning". The collaborative approach used for the development of free software needs to be extended to the "design" of the eParticipation software systems. This is the only way user’s agendas, capacities, interests, worries, etc. are properly taken into account.