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.
- How the gig economy shapes us
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.
- Slides from a conference on institutionalising participation
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
Example of tooling applied on Decide Madrid to organise discussions
(2016) The open source city as the transnational democratic future, by Gutiérrez
(2018) Aragón, P., Bermejo, Y., Gómez, V., & Kaltenbrunner, A. Interactive Discovery System for Direct Democracy
(n.d.) Videos on 15M, by proyecto15Mcc
(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
Example of technical report on one of the winning citizen proposals
diario.es, official city council blog, features many articles on Decide Madrid (as this one does)
Official data on participation on datos.madrid.es
Medialab Prado's own design work
(In Spanish)Teaching and investigating citizen relations with Decide Madrid by Padilla and Malo de Molina (2018)
(In Spanish) Digital analysis of Decide Madrid by Saulière Diez Escudero, and Abellán (2017)
(n.d.) Webpage of ParticipaLab, heavily involved in thinking about how to design participation
Residencia Hacker, by CivicWise, proposals for participative budgeting
BetaDemic, early document anlysing the process of participation
Other interesting sources
(n.d.) archive.org is an essential tool to visit the platform through time
Consul Foundation, Foundation which develops Decide Madrid
Consul Community, developed by Vanessa Tonini, support site for developers and users