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. Several divulgative texts have been prepared, as a way to inform and strenghten the "collaborative design" exercise. The book titled "Leo's wings. Citizen Participation in the XX century" (available here). All these research and divulgative materials should contribute on several e-Participation theoretical and practical areas. 

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.