In the context of Participatory Budgeting Image Source: AppCivist First Mockup http://appcivist-demo3.meteor.com/
Jul 08, 2015
In the context of Participatory Budgeting
Image Source: AppCivist First Mockup http://appcivist-demo3.meteor.com/
The Participatory Budgeting Story
Political process that lets members of a community propose and vote on how certain budget funds should be allocated
The Rise and Importance of Participatory Budgeting
Source: http://egovau.blogspot.com/2010/11/participatory-budgeting-big-in-europe.html
Proposal Making by the citizens
Both Online and in F2F Assemblies/Workshops
After Technical Validation, citizens Vote on Proposals
Winning Proposals become City Projects
City projects are then Executed
The Participatory Budgeting Story
How does ICT support Participatory Budgeting Today?
The Participatory Budgeting Story
Tools
• ICT tools for Participatory Budgeting are limited and scattered
• Information Overload in proposal making (e.g., redundancy) is usually managed by a group of “technicians” who manually organize proposals in a technical analysis phase (where more transparency is needed)
• Voting via simple Web Surveys, SMS and F2F in specific places (e.g., a bus tours the city in Lisbon). SMS is noted to be costly for small municipalities
• Proponents use everything from Flyers to Social Media to promote their proposals
The Participatory Budgeting Story
AppCivist for Participatory Budgeting
PB Paris 2015 PB SF 2015 Public Health
AppCivist Bundle of Services
Stories & Inspiration Proposals Deliberation Winning
Proposals Execution +
Configure Configure Configure Configure Configure
PB Paris 2014Dashboard
Campaigns
AppCivist SOC Architecture
Government
Citizens
Activists
Media
Activism Ontology
Executing Activism Assembly/ AppCivist ConfiguredSocial Activism App
Interactions
App. Development
Activism Process/ “Assembly”
Activism Enabling Service Registry
Assembly Composition
Engine
Refers to
Developer
Fig. 1. AppCivist Architecture.
dynamic task-allocation and management among participants.Further, the interplay between mobile and cloud computingentails assessing both cost and social effectiveness. We discussthe details of our next steps in Section V.
IV. USE CASES
Although we foresee the platform to be valuable in a varietyof social activism scenarios, we discuss two of them below ingreater detail vis-a-vis the categories introduced in Section Ito better illustrate the need and applicability of AppCivist.
A. The Starting Point: Dengue Torpedo
The Dengue Torpedo project (http://www.denguetorpedo.com) is an ongoing social initiativein Rio de Janerio, Brazil, Tepalcingo, Mexico, and Managua,Nicaragua, among others, for using crowdsourcing and localinvolvement to track and prevent the Dengue fever, whichis caused by mosquitoes. This is an initiative of the SocialApps Lab at UC Berkeley, whose researchers are activelyworking with the local activists in these regions. The ICTfunctionalities are currently developed in-house, and areenvisioned to leverage the AppCivist platform as it matures.The current and near future functionalities for DengueTorpedo include:
• Acting Collectively: Collaborative Mapping, where userscan indicate the location of dengue-related issues, such asstagnant water. This is currently based on Google Maps,but should be extended to plug-in, for example, OpenStreet Map for regions where map data of OSM is better.
• Mobilizing: Incentive-based Action, where users takeaction to eradicate the above issues (e.g., cleaning up thetrash) and are rewarded for their actions. These incentivestake the shape of both virtual badges as well as physicalgoods, provided by local benefactors.
• Deliberating: Assembly and Consensus-Making, so thecommunity can better decide how to proceed forward toas to best prevent future cases of Dengue.
• Communicating: Mobile Apps, which can use both dataand SMS networks to enable users possessing varioustypes of phones and service plans to contribute for thecommon goal.
B. A Foreseen Assembly: Droit au Logement
Droit au Logement (http://www.droitaulogement.org/) is a French organizationdedicated to fighting for the rights of all individuals tohave a place to live. More specifically, they work towardsinfluencing policy-makers to improve the condition of thosewho are homeless or live in sub-standard housing, includinginfluencing governments, banks, and companies managingof large residential properties. We envision AppCivist to beuseful in terms of the following functionalities to them:
• Mobilizing: Content Sharing, provided through a websitelinked to social media, where they can share successstoried and calls to action.
• Deliberating: Petition-making, provided through a systemthat would not only enable petition authors to create andcommunicate petitions, but crucially, enable mediaper-sons to track their progress, as well as the petitions’ target(e.g., government representatives), to officially respond tothem.
• Acting Collectively: Collaborative Mapping, using whichone can identify properties that are providing sub-standard living, or properties in good condition vacantfor a long time without being rented.
• Acting Collectively: Rapid Call-to-action, which willbe used, for example, to rapidly collect followers ofthe organization to come together for a demonstration.
Activists Developers
AppCivist Services Hub
AppCivist Service APIs
Deliberation
VotingProposal
Versioning
…
Composition and Configuration
Engine
Service Providers Registry
Hubs Network Engine
Social Activism and Participation
Ontology
AppCivist Hub Ontology
AppCivist Hub P2P Network
External Service
Providers
AppCivist Provided Services
Ontology API Registry API
AppCivist Assemblies Dashboard
AppCivist Citizens
Assemblies
AppCivist Assemblies
Citizens Apps
AppCivist OpenDataFrontend AppCivist: applications
Backend AppCivist: service middleware(development + integration)
External Services/Applications
Thanks for listening. Questions?
The AppCivist Team
Extra Slides