Deliberative Platform Design: The Case Study of the Online Discussions in Decidim Barcelona

Abstract

Abstract. With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, many online platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatory democratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning, previous research has not found examples of how to effectively introduce discussions, a crucial feature to promote deliberation. In this study we focus on the case of Decidim Barcelona, the online participatory-democracy platform launched by the City Council of Barcelona in which proposals can be discussed with an interface that combines threaded discussions and comment alignment with the proposal. This innovative approach allows to examine whether neutral, positive or negative comments are more likely to generate discussion cascades. The results reveal that, with this interface, comments marked as negatively aligned with the proposal were more likely to engage users in online discussions and, therefore, helped to promote deliberative decision making.

(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona

“…According to Aragon et al [101], Decidim Barcelona is an "online participatory-democracy platform launched by the City Council of Barcelona" (p. 277) on 1 February 2016 as the main grassroots innovation experimental strategic initiative [155]. In parallel fashion, Metadecidim Barcelona [156] was launched in November 2017 as a watchdog, technopolitical research community positioned to monitor Decidim Barcelona and reflect on its work.…”

“…Despite the positive initiatives and irreversible transition toward GDPR, Decode may have created overly high expectations, as the initiative is perceived as "too experimental" (#I1,#I2,#I3,#I15). Metadecidim Barcelona [34,101,155,156] 1.…”

Can the power of platforms be harnessed for governance?

“…Crowdsourcing platforms may help to aggregate distributed citizen input (Bott and Young 2012;Brabham 2013;Aitamurto and Chen 2017;Liu 2017;Taeihagh 2017). Participation or deliberation platforms may foster citizen participation in policy deliberation (Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014;Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;Aragón et al 2017;Garard et al 2018;Sørensen and Torfing 2018;De Blasio and Selva 2019). Co-production platforms may enable public authorities to engage citizens in improving the delivery of government services (Linders 2012;Falco and Kleinhans 2018a;Janowski et al 2018) and multi-stakeholder platforms may allow diverse groups to engage in productive exchange (Steins and Edwards 1999;Selsky and Parker 2010;Adekunle and Fatunbi 2012).…”

“…Participation platforms have been developed to generate citizen discussion about specific problems and policies, particularly at the local level (Hilgers and Ihl 2010; Desouza and Bhagwatwar 2014;Aragón et al 2017;De Blasio and Selva 2019). With the help of information and communication technologies, local authorities have created online platforms to experiment with 'crowdsourced deliberation' and 'crowdsourced policymaking', intended to enhance the input, throughput and output legitimacy of such processes (Aitamurto and Landemore 2016;Aitamurto and Chen 2017).…”

Deliberation and Resolution on Wikipedia

“…This dataset is released publicly for the research community. 1 We employed a mixed-methods approach by analyzing this data quantitatively as a whole as well as qualitatively by selecting a random subset of 40 RfCs to manually inspect. To inform our analysis, we interviewed 10 of the most frequent RfC closers to understand their motivations and considerations when deciding whether to close an RfC.…”