Resources

This is repository of public resources about Decide Madrid. It serves as a central repository for anyone who wants to study the platform and its incredible trajectory. I exclude academic articles because those are easier to find on search engines (unless they are from people who were involved).

Dissemination articles from the project (new ones coming out)

Civic tech platforms that enable citizens to participate in decision-making activities in their city are becoming more common. Yet, they still face many challenge.

In this article on opensource.com, I argue that opening cities require developing an infrastructure to cultivate and nurture a participatory culture, something that open source has done for decades and which contributes to its sustainability.

This article reflects on two important contributions of MediaLab Prado to the development of Decide Madrid and participative technology in general.

I've written a short article with Roser Pujadas on the role of invisible infrastructure that Uber tries to create and how it affects our cities.

This is part of our larger work on the digital economy, of which you can find an academic article here.

Participation is key to understand our contemporary societies. Despite its prevalence, it remains insufficiently theorised in certain context. One such context is crowdsourcing, which has been proposed as a way to resolve so called ‘wicked’ problems. Crowdsourcing has tended to hold implicit rational and universal epistemologies: the more participation the better. Using resourcing theory, we look at a civic platform implemented with the ambitions to change social relations within the city of Madrid. We propose a processual view of participation which evolves in time taking and being given different qualities as schemas are enacted and resources created. The platform we analyse was supposed to engage citizens to become participative members of society in the definition of public policies. When this does not occur, alternative resources are designed to palliate the deficiencies of the platform. We contribute to the literature on participation and urban policies by arguing that participation, however it is designed, will necessarily favour some at the expense of others, challenging its often implicit universalist and rationalist assumptions.

Useful resources to study Decide Madrid

From people involved in thinking about participative democracy

(2021) Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy, by M. Arana-Catania, F.A. Van Lier, Rob Procter, Nataliya Tkachenko, Yulan He, Arkaitz Zubiaga, Maria Liakata

Primary sources of Decide Madrid

Medialab Prado's own design work

Other interesting sources