Building an open infrastructure for civic participation
*What the deployment of Decide Madrid can teach us on creating a participatory culture to effectively engage with citizens.
The challenge for Decide Madrid has been less about getting participation and more about getting the right kind of participation
Good article on some of the challenges of citizen participation platforms. (Based on experiences from Decide Madrid / Consul).
The article suggests looking to open source software for examples of building participatory infrastructure. I get where that's coming from, but given OSS participation is often rife with problems, it might not be the best example. Or maybe it is, for exactly that reason?
I feel it is slightly a classic tech view of the world - that we can look to open source to figure out how to govern the real world.
Related: free software governance, What could governance online look like?.
Funny how it mentions things like 'conversions' - e.g. getting a citizen visiting the platform to vote on a proposal.