Automatic Transcription: it could contain errors.
Alessandro Oppo (00:00) Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator Podcast. And our guests of today are Carol and Andres. And so thank you for your time.
Carol (00:12) Nice to meet you, thank you for the invite.
Andrés (00:13) Thank you.
Alessandro Oppo (00:14) And you are working on Decidim? You also co-founded Decidim? How it went? The story.
Carol (00:26) Please address.
Andrés (00:26) Okay, yeah, I'm gonna start with the story. Yeah, the long, the short story, I will try to summarize it. It's basically, I was contacted to work with a new city hall in 2015 on Barcelona. This was a new political party called Barcelona en Comú.
And it came from a protest that happened here in Spain on 2011, the Indignados, the 15M movements. Much of the party, especially like the founding line, came also from the housing movement. They were activists, Ada Colau. It was a measure at this time.
So they wanted to work with a participatory democracy and they didn't have much idea. So they called me to give them a hand. And we actually started with a fork from Consul, the City of Madrid platform, because they were just starting out also and we wanted to contribute with them. But then, we, after one year or so, We realized that their architecture didn't allow us actually to grow and do the things that we wanted to do. We also feel that, yeah, they could open up a bit the community. And in the meantime, like at this moment, we were only working with Barcelona, but at this time, Carol reached us. She said, yeah, I work. Well, Carol, if you want to join in.
Carol (02:08) Yeah, on my side, I come from working with public administration for almost 20 years for a local consortium of municipalities in Catalonia that aims mainly to facilitate the digital transformation of the city councils. And one of the areas was, in fact, citizen participation. We had actually another digital platform for participation, but this platform ran out of resources. and we were looking actively for other solutions, other projects that we could reuse for offering to the municipalities in Catalonia. And that was perfect timing because more or less at the same time I joined the project at 2016, one year later that the Barcelona team was working on the Barcelona platform.
And when we had the first conversation, it just felt like a natural match. I explained to them that we were looking for another digital platform, that they were building something with free software. And we might, we could collaborate on that. And yeah, and this is when we had the idea on having a reusable platform that could be. used by any other city. At first in area of Barcelona we didn't anticipate at all that this could become an international project at that time but yeah this is how it started and we signed an agreement and we started working on that.
Alessandro Oppo (03:52) And soon, OK, if you want to add anything else.
Andrés (03:54) No, no, one of the main things that we wanted to try at the technical level was all the modular aspects. We wanted to have different models, and this isn't something that console allowed us to do. So yeah, the idea is that we provided some models, for instance, participatory processes.
And inside of these participatory processes, you can have, for instance, proposals or meetings, debates, surveys, or whatever. And yeah, this allows the platform to keep growing because people can create another kind of spaces or components. And it's, think, one of the main aspects of the CD that allowed us to grow. as we are now is to have all this flexibility on the architecture and the technical level. It's a nice thing to have.
Alessandro Oppo (04:56)
Absolutely. And also the model aspect is very interesting also to me. And I wanted to ask you because soon there will be the Decidim Fest. but I mean, Decidim exists from, it's a long time. So yeah, how it was the journey up and down, I don't know if you, before maybe talking about the Carol (05:16) eight, nine years.
Alessandro Oppo (05:25) to the sitting fest.
Carol (05:27) You mean the evolution, right?
Alessandro Oppo (05:28) Yeah, like in all those years.
Carol (05:32)
Unless if you want I can go, but please interrupt me. Andrés (05:35) Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Carol (05:37) Yeah, I feel like we had like different stages of the project when we started in 2016, 2017 we were like really focused on the local community of cities that were starting using the platform and we started building really from the very first moment this community but it was very local of course and I would say that there was a turning point around 2000 late 2019 and definitely 2020 with the COVID pandemic and so on because this was really like, I mean, we already saw in 2019 an extension and a growth of the community and the use of the platform in France especially because there was this company that I think you had here as guests, Open Source Politics, they were very interested in what we were building and they jumped into the whole philosophy of the project and started implementing the platform around the different city councils in France. But in 2020, it was really like an explosion of organizations in different contexts and places, other open source communities like, for example, Code Japan, Codeando Mexico, in other places that they were able to the software and just started using it and at the same time we were starting to be more decentralized from Barcelona because the story here is that we started as a professional team linked to the Barcelona City Council in different formulas. example, Andrés had a contract, I had an agreement with my consortium, there were people from the university, but we were like a unique team in the Department of Democratic Innovation in the City Council. But then when we saw that the project was starting to grow internationally, we had this governance process in the community and we came up to the conclusion that we need to organize formally as a community. Mainly because first, Barcelona couldn't attend the necessities of other contexts beyond their natural administrative limits and then we were subjected to the political context, changing political context and we weren't sure if for the next elections the project would continue. under the umbrella of the city or not. So in 2019, we created this association, which is the City Inflation Software Association, that is now responsible for taking care of the codebase and managing the community. And we had this agreement with Barcelona. They see it as the control of the repositories and everything.
But at that time, 2019, 2020, this association didn't have any person working on it. It was just like their structure, you know? And at the same time, the growth of the project exploded in use and we started to get a lot of demands and petitions. And it was kind of a crisis moment, growth crisis moment. And from there, I think we managed quite well given the circumstances because we already had this active community also willing to help and to push for the project, for the common project. So I would say that from the last four or five years we achieved a certain stability. We are still a small team.
Maybe some people don't know, I think this is both as a compliment and as a curse for us because everybody thinks that we are like a really big team, we are just seven people in the association. But yeah, I think we are starting to work more in sync with the whole community and the ecosystem and still growing. So yeah, I'll just stop here. I don't know if Andrés wants to compliment.
Andrés (10:08) Yeah, just to complement, one thing that we knew from the beginning was that we wanted to have this community around the project. We realized that this is really important for being a resilient project, because if many people are actually using it and also contributing to the same code base, that would allow us to keep growing.
And this is something that we, I think, like, I don't know which year exactly, probably 2017 or something like that. Well, from the beginning, we created a process inside of SEDEAM.Barcelona, like the installation of Barcelona, where we say, okay, we are going to discuss about meta-SEDEAM, like the whole platform SEDEAM inside of SEDEAM. Then we realized that, okay, this process, it's really small and we need something bigger. bigger. So we went with our own installation of CD that is a meta-CD and that's like the governance place for the project. Here we decide both the governance of the association and like for instance where the elections for the coordination committee happen but also it's like the technical governance.
For instance, right now we are in a process of a strategic decision for the product, but we also will have a process for new features of the project. So this is one important aspect with the technical part of the community. But there is also the human part of the community, because we are people and we have bodies. So one thing that we have been doing is a yearly gathering. It's always been always on Barcelona at this for now. And it's called now the Sinead Fest. At the beginning, it was called the Jams. It was like, the yearly gathering. Most of the year happened of October or November and it's like two or three days a big conference where like lots of people come to talk about one day about the CDEM and two days about topics around the project, knowledge, governance, etc. And this year it's two months from now, no? Well, eight or nine Alessandro Oppo (12:44) Okay, end.
Andrés (12:51) One month, no? Okay, yeah, yeah, I'm really lost. Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll have to, okay.
Carol (12:53) We are already in October, yeah. It's crazy.
Alessandro Oppo (12:58) And I can imagine that maybe you will talk about new functionalities, new ideas related to the Sdim. yeah, the FES, like in one month. So would you like to share something or is it like a surprise?
Carol (13:08) during the fest. Yeah, I mean, we changed a little bit the dynamic, in fact, and this is going to be like the first year that we apply a fresh internal regulations that we approved in the last General Assembly. We decided that we wanted to have like more active participation from the community in the direction, in the strategic direction of the roadmap, because until now we had like an open space, more as a pool of ideas to improve the software, but we didn't get ready to manage it efficiently because there are like 800 proposals there. Most of them are in fact implemented, the dynamic of having something open without clear phases, it wasn't really useful. So we decided to open cycles of prioritization and discussion. Like everybody puts a focus on. thinking about what do we want to prioritize for the next two years. And now we started this project, this process about the more broad strategic directions. And during the first, the idea is that we'll have a session about gathering and agreeing on which are the two or three most strategic directions and then start proposing improvements aligned with that strategies. So yeah, it's a bit complex because I think that for the community part we have discovered Then it comes the challenge on how we match this with the contracts, the projects that we need to win in order to get the resources for implementing that. it's part of the game and having an open community participating in an open source project.
Alessandro Oppo (15:20) And I don't know, I wanted to ask if you have any module that you are developing because the CDM is modular. And so I'm very curious about this also because now there is AI and so everything is related to AI.
Andrés (15:42) Yeah, at the moment, I would say the two newest models that are actually like, we are finished them, and we are starting to do pilots and learning what improvements will come next are actually elections model and the collaborative texts. And yeah, we try to be really, how to say, asceptic about AI. Especially because, well, there are lots of things that we are not so sure about the current usage of generative artificial intelligence. I would say one aspect is all the money associated to actually using it. One other aspect that we see is the open source. We have a social contract. that one of the things that says about it is that everyone should be able to Yeah, the SIEM should be like a transparent platform and everyone should be able to actually read the source code with a free software license and so on. And this is something that most of the LLM's platforms don't provide.
But Carol, you want to mention about the say something about the models because she's like the head of product. So she has lots of things to say.
Carol (17:13) Yeah, I mean, question.
The question would be which model aren't you building because as you know, the same thing has a lot of models. We are actually in this process of, I mean, we could consider this platform is already like a mature platform in their functional aspect. So our mission now from the association is just like, okay, we had a lot of hypotheses, initial hypotheses eight years ago. This was a platform that was initially designed for covering the use case of a specific city and everything went there, like everything was in the main repository. But now seeing that we have sorry, I'm listening myself with a bit of echo. I'm not sure if you okay, thank you.
Alessandro Oppo (18:05) So.
Carol (18:08) So right now seeing other needs and different and a variety of organizations using the platform, we think that from the association we need to really maybe take a few steps back in the sense that build a lighter and more robust framework and core. and at the same time enable the fine tuning and even better personalization by other actors in the ecosystem. This is quite challenging because once you get something in a platform, it's not that easy to remove it. So Andrés mentioned elections and collaborative text. We actually have already some of these functionalities, but they are like in some cases half baked. And what we are trying to do is replacing these half-baked features with maybe simpler functionalities and modules that are really useful to anyone. The big goal here right now is trying to release the first long support stable version of the product because we really feel that with all the features that the SIDDIM has, it would be a good moment. for. releasing the 1.0 version and then maybe starting a new cycle of exploration of new features, experimentation with AI. We don't oppose AI as a concept, but we are very aware of the hype around it. We see some logical use cases regarding translations, transcriptions, and these kind of things. yeah, this doesn't sell like the same sexy thing that other people do, but yeah, we prefer to be cautious on that because we already had the blockchain hype and I'm not comparing, I think they are separate and different things, but yeah, we prefer to go slow and take care of things instead of move fast and break things.
Andrés (20:00) You
Alessandro Oppo (20:21) And this is the concept also, yeah, AI and blockchains, maybe they're not mature enough. I don't know. They will be probably in the future and there will be time to implement them if they are needed. And I wanted to ask you, like, if there is anything you're struggling at, like from a technical point of view, from another kind of point of view, I don't know, there is like a sort of maybe problem that you're not able to I don't know, maybe someone is listening and can have an idea.
Andrés (20:54) Mm-hmm. I think one thing that we have, at least at the technical level, is like this, how do say, like the combination of models. We don't know for sure which models will be available in a given installation. And this sometimes generates a problem because we are expecting that someone has, I don't know, the proposals models, but they may not have it. this could generate bugs and so on. like this is one thing that we have been struggling for a couple of years. So if anyone has experience on this topic, you can reach us.
Carol (21:45) Yeah, I agree, I agree completely. I mean, because we are just, we're now trying to work with an even bigger level of abstraction just because of that that I mentioned before that we need to step back a little bit and let others to finish the product itself. And it's sometimes, yeah, quite challenging to, yeah, to anticipate all the possible uses, no, of the of the base layer.
Andrés (22:17) Yeah, the other, like we have lots of problems. I think that we are still working on, not like for instance, not the documentation. Okay. Like we have like a big product that it's always evolving. And this means that the documentation is always lacking, you know, like one or two versions ago. And it's like an effort, you know, to, actually have like, you know, the screenshots updated and so on.
Alessandro Oppo (22:18)
and thank Andrés (22:42) and related to documentation and it's something that we would want to work with. No, we want to work, yeah, we don't have infinite resources. It's the problem of the white page. The CDEM, we allow administrators to configure a lot what they want to do, but by default, like you have an empty platform. You need to create and think about which kind of spaces you want to have. If you want to have processes or assemblies, if you want to have a proposal, which configuration for the proposals, if you want that participants can create proposals, how many proposals, they can vote it in this step or a new step, or new phase, and things like that.
Yeah, at least now we don't have it solved or at least the solution that we have, it's not optimal because you can read the documentation or play with the platform. It's like an effort for actually using it. Of course, we have all these companies in the ecosystem that can give you a hand explaining all this stuff and how to configured and giving you examples, but yeah, it's an effort.
Alessandro Oppo (24:14) And regarding the modules and maybe examples of how they have been used, like example of I'm also hearing some echo, I don't know why. So how was the Decidim platform used around the world if there is something that was particularly significant to you?
Andrés (24:43) Yeah, name dropping moment. Okay, basically our biggest installation, I think it's Brasil Participativo. It's like the platform for the whole country of Brazil. I think they have maybe 1.5 or probably 2 million participants registered.
And like they started doing some strategic planning processes, but at the moment they have like lots of processes. Another big installation is New York City where they have all the ideation phase of like the participatory budgeting that they do. And yeah, other big installation. of course, the European Commission is using the CD for the participatory. participatory citizen platform. And we also have the French government, both the assembly, how do you say, the deputy chamber and also the Senate using the city for their initiatives. So yeah, you can use it for like participatory budgeting, but also strategic planning processes.
and initiatives that are like petitions, know, like someone proposed something and then you gather signatures and yeah, this is like probably the three biggest use cases and like more mature models, no? I don't know, Carol, if you have many more name dropping to do. Carol (26:20) Yeah, I admit. like the weirdest name dropping in the sense of surprising use cases. I like to recall this use case from the Lutheran church. I don't remember if it was it was somewhere in Germany maybe Hamburg or but yeah it was a church that they were using the platform for. discussing like their community and their, I don't really know exactly, I guess religious matters. And yeah, mean, sometimes you learn about some instance because we routinely scan the internet just to find, or maybe someone write to us and, hey, I'm in Columbia in some indigenous community and we are putting this for the indigenous Congress in Colombia or something like that. So we really expect any use case or yeah, yeah I think.
Andrés (27:26) Yeah, the other use cases that we have seen is like, for instance, universities, political parties. Like here on Barcelona, there is also an agreement with lots of organizations, like cooperatives, associations, like neighborhood associations, something like that, that they are also using the platform. For instance, like weird stuff, not that we are like, Seeing is what the, how do you say, the Barcelona Federation of Neighborhood Association, like a big name. They were using the SEDEM for actually tracking down the restaurants that were using the terraces, like having tables outside. and they were actually using more space than they should be using. So they were using the SEDEM for tracking and denouncing this kind of usage of the public space.
Alessandro Oppo (28:34) Because I was thinking that a community is a community. if it is a political community, religious community or like a neighborhood, they still are a community made of humans. So as you said before, bodies. And I was curious if you, if you saw any difference in how, because maybe, I don't know, political party use the platform in a different way or like compare like from a neighborhood or if there were some differences in related to the different countries. don't know like some countries maybe they were you mentioned that I know that France has a lot of is using a lot of decim and I wonder like the other countries in Europe or in the world. You mentioned Brazil before but if you want
Carol (29:32) I mean, for sure, every context tries to adapt the platform for their cultural codes and the ways of understanding how democracy works there because there are nuances and differences. But something that has always been surprising to us is that, for example, the name. A lot of instances keep the name like decidim, which is a Catalan name. That means we decide. to see, for example, in Japan something the city in Kakogawa is something like shocking in a way. We know for example in Japan that they were struggling at the beginning with some of the concepts in the platform like assemblies. They really didn't get the idea because they don't understand maybe the assemblies are the same way we do. But I would say in general everybody just like embraced the architecture and the principles and the way we thought about deploying participatory democracy in the digital layer. I would say so, this is my feeling, but I don't know, Andrés, if you have another idea.
Andrés (30:52) Yeah, yeah, I would like to also point out one of the problems that we still didn't solve, but it's actually like a huge problem, is about the name of things. Like, for instance, like here we say participatory processes, because on Catalan, no, it's a process participatius, like it's like concept of you have like one a big space with different phases and each of these phases, for instance, you have like an information phase and then like a proposal phase and then a prioritization phase and finally like a results or whatever. But other countries or other places, this same thing, they say it's a consultation. or maybe, I don't know, the proposals. This is like a big building block of the CD. And so in places, they want to say that there are proposals, are maybe ideas or suggestions. the name of the thing that you are talking about, it's different.
And okay, yeah, we have a module for this that was made from the people of Finland. And how do you say that? Customizer module. And it's like a big module. Lots of people are using it, but it's not optimal because like, yeah, there are like lots of places where this proposal concept is used. And then like you need to translate and maintain all this. whole translations and especially if it's in different languages, it's like an effort also to do this. And this is something that it's a recurrent idea that the community has known, okay, how can we solve this issue? like, at least for the moment, I think that it's not a software issue, it's like a linguistic problem because I don't know, like, you know, like languages are like really difficult and I would need like some linguistic, yeah, academic, know, only thinking about this and making a proposal on how this can work on the different languages.
Alessandro Oppo (33:18) and I can imagine that different linguistic experts, will also call things in different ways.
Andrés (33:26) Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have like the meta problem.
Alessandro Oppo (33:31) Yeah, exactly. I think that in some way, maybe this is one of the reasons why we need to actually govern ourselves because we say something, but we all mean different things. And we have to sit down at the table to really understand what you mean when you use that word or when I use it.
Yeah, I don't know Carol if you have anything to add. Otherwise I have another question.
Carol (33:59) I was just going to mention because Andrés was mentioning the thing of the languages that we even had this discussion more from the gender perspective in the platform. because we try to keep the feminist approach to building software. And we had this lab webinar where we invited different feminist collectives to analyze the platform from this feminist point of view. And they already saw, like for example, the use of language was really very biased. So we tried to compensate, at least in Catalan, we are using the feminine plural as a generic plural. but this also sparked some discussions across other languages that noticed that and they were having also questions about the use of inclusive language. yeah, I'd say the way we name things, it goes beyond what you expect maybe in the beginning. It's a complex topic.
Alessandro Oppo (35:14) Wonderful the approach you had about inviting feminist collective. I mean, most of the people inside the civic tech that are working with technology are mainly men. I think that if we, I mean, now the city is a platform.
And now also there are other platform and I don't know like in 20 years, which platform there will be like which models with AI blockchain or I don't know. But I think that in some way we are building a sort of new world and it has to be built by all of the people, like not just half of them.
Carol (36:04) Yeah, and now that you say this, we also had this conclusion from this lab about also who is contributing to the code, for example, from the technical level. And we realized that, of course, most of them there were men. And we, in fact, had like four editions of grants for trying to promote the active participation of female or, you know, non-binary people contributing to the code. And some of them, in fact, I mean, it was a program like 12 weeks, I think, and it was a paid grant, so they could dedicate really time and they had this mentor time with some senior developer from the project, so they could learn how the seeding worked at the technical level. And some of them, a few of them later worked for the companies that are providing services on top of the CD. So it's something that you really need to be proactive and to facilitate. Unfortunately, we didn't have more funding for that, but this is something that we would like to continue doing.
Andrés (37:23) And also about the feminist aspect, one thing that we didn't do well at the beginning was regarding the speakers of the Decidim Fest. Well, people started to mention, yeah, we have this big issue where most of the speakers are actually men. And so I think that maybe five or six years ago, we started to do like this. how to say, active effort on like saying, yeah, one part of the speakers should be a woman or non-binary, no? And this is something that, yeah, you need to do, you need to do like the effort and like make lists and talk to people and say, okay, who can come here and talk to us and be interesting. And there are lots of people, but it's the easiest thing, especially on software and development, but also in open source. Open source has a really big gender gap. It's something that you need to think about it and search for strategies.
Alessandro Oppo (38:40)
Yeah, unfortunately, both politics and technology have more or less the same gender gap. And also when we started the podcast, the idea was like we want to make it balanced. But I have to admit that we failed. I mean, we can improve from this point of view. Yeah, the original idea was to make it balanced, maybe more proactive pro pro activeness could be could be something to do. And. I wanted to ask you now because we are talking about this gender and if you notice any maybe difference regarding contribution from different genders. Andrés (39:49) That's a good one. I would say, for instance, once we started with Friend Dev, one thing that they mentioned, one of the women that were participating was that we should have some kind of space where people could discuss and talk about it and be a bit more informal.
Carol (39:49) Yeah, that's a good question.
Andrés (40:18) And yeah, that's no like for instance, our main channels, no like on the meta community was about the especially the yeah meta-residue and GitHub, no, but they are like really cold places, no, to actually talk with people. And so with that idea in mind on how can we improve, no, new commerce and new people to yeah. to reach to us and have a closer connection, we started with Element Chat, matrix.org. It's like Slack, but free software. Also this year, we started to have the monthly developers and implementers community talks with monthly gathering that is usually the last Thursday of the month.
where everyone can join in and make questions and know about what we are working on this last month and the next month and so on. So it's like opening these kind of spaces. And this is something that came from this experience. Code-wise and feature-wise, I would say it's the same. The code, this is I couldn't find any difference. I know, Carol, if you Carol (41:48) Well, talking as a woman interacting with other developers. And given that I am not a developer myself, although I am the product owner of the project, I can assure you that I think this is something that, you mentioned before, I understand that this is widespread, not only regarding technology, but we are quite unsure in general. in public participating in public spaces. We check everything two or three times just to make sure that we are correct, that we are not making any mistakes. I'm not that sure if everybody from other genders do the same. But yeah, I would say that luckily I have this feeling we should check with the whole community. I have the feeling that we have a quite welcoming community and we don't have, you know, like.
We had some really isolated cases, I would say, but in general we have, although it's quite masculine dominated still, but they're quite welcoming. I wouldn't know what example to tell you in terms of references in contributions.
Alessandro Oppo (43:08)
Okay, I Yeah, because many times I wonder like Because I saw that in computer science there were mainly males. So I wonder like when there will be also women. Because I think thought that I think computer science is interesting. But at the same time, I also recognize that the way you teach something it changed a lot the subject. So I thought, okay, when there will be, I don't know, women that can teach computer science, then probably it will change completely. And so I was very curious about this, because in some way maybe this is happening now or in the next few years. And then I also had a question before about If you had any relationship with politicians, you mentioned some political parties that are using the platform. And so I was wondering like, what was their preparation regarding the platform? What was their goal? Andrés (44:32) Okay, this is for me, no? Well, at least from the beginning, Like, the main idea was having this huge strategic planning, no? about the Here on Barcelona, they had this project that they need to do that is called the PAM, no? municipal action plan and it's something that happened for the next four years, know, at the beginning of the turner and then like you discuss all the things that the government wants to do and then like this strategic plan it's yeah. is done by the government during this tenure. And one thing that this new political party that I was mentioning at the beginning, Barcelona Commune have done, is to gather up all these huge documents of, I don't know, 200 pages and actually split it in different proposals. So it's much easier to actually discuss. like this, I think were like 800 proposals was like the beginning of the first process on the city of Barcelona. And yeah, this is like one thing that I guess is something that lots of politicians struggle on like actually opening up. what they think that you want to do so people can discuss it and propose new things, improve it or reject it, maybe this proposal, because they say, OK, this idea that you have for changing this square is actually bad because we are not aligned with this. And I think this is something that politicians sometimes struggle and have fears about actually opening up. the governance or some part of the governance to the people. Or like on participatory budgeting, they say, okay, yeah, we will do participatory budgeting, but only, I don't know, maybe 2 % of the whole budget of the city and things like that. Yeah, go ahead.
Carol (46:50) Hmm. No, I was thinking more on the use case of the political parties. I don't know if you were also thinking about this, Alessandro, with your question, because we were hesitant, maybe at the beginning, about advertising the use of the SEDEM from different political parties that there are in general. But there is actually a very specific use case for them regarding like making these voting and elections and this kind of thing. So we've seen an increase, I would say, different parties using the platform for that.
And at the political level, yeah, I mean, we had these discussions on the community about where to draw the line in our relationship with different political or governments that we don't necessarily agree with. So, yeah, it's been like a very interesting topic that from time to time emerges in the community. had this example from Chile from the estallidos social in 2019 if I recall correctly that people were in the streets in Chile like reclaiming I mean denouncing the brutality of the police and so on and we had this approach from the Chilean government to implement the platform and trying to we had that feeling that they wanted to whitewash a little bit the participation and so on. So we had this open debate and we came to this conclusion about we are of course a free software project and The license states very clearly that you can do whatever you want with the code, but we are also a political community and we have positions, political positions, regarding the democratic or undemocratic practices of certain governments. And I think it's also important to maintain this aspect of the, this dimension of the project.
Alessandro Oppo (49:18) I can imagine that it's hard to maintain, to be in some way neutral, but at the same way also having principles and political ideas. yeah, I can understand because here on the podcast, sometimes there are technical solutions that I like, some that I don't really like. But I think, like on my side, when we talk about technology, said that in some way we are building a new world, but also we don't know which world will be created. And so we have to know the good project, but also projects that I don't know, from my point of view, maybe are contributing less to this new world. Like I'm thinking about the difference that there is between, let's say, Tech and GovTech, that sometimes is not very visible, but sometimes it is. But I think that is interesting both to understand what is happening in the world.
and so then we can decide what to change. And then I Carol (50:46) And no, just because you say this, we were talking with Andrés before the podcast that we also have this feeling that very often in the civic tech, mean, I know you make the difference between GovTech and Civic Tech, but even in Civic Tech, I have the feeling that most of the time the conversation, the discussion is so focused on discussing features and not what political implications those features have.
Because, I mean, it's like, okay, civic tech is more focused on tech than in the civic part. And I think we need to make an effort to remember that we are not just doing a technical platform that does things, but it's really designed with democratic implications in mind. And yeah, it adds complexity, but I think it's worth it. to have it always as a direction.
Alessandro Oppo (51:51) Yeah, I totally agree about the political aspect and that sometimes it's Sometimes people are too much enthusiastic about technology and Yeah, I totally understand this.
Andrés (52:09) This is something that I think that, yeah, as software developers, sometimes people ask questions like saying, okay, yeah, but like what they are actually asking about, it's like, okay, if I install the CD, like everything it's going to, you know, like Decidim as a solution, you know, like Decidim, it's going to solve all your democracy problems and that's not going to happen. like Decidim is a tool and you can make a democratic process and citizen participation with any tool, you know, like the important thing on democracy is not the tool or the technology, it's the people, you know, and like what normative and what process you build around these tools. And the tool will allow you to improve what people want to do. But it's always the important thing, it's the people, the tool, it's a secondary thing.
Alessandro Oppo (53:14) Yeah, absolutely. And also I realized that about the people, mean, we always talked during this about the tool and not about the people. I mean, Carol, you mentioned something about what you were doing before joining Destiny. But what is your background like? Also personal background, not just professional.
Carol (53:45) My personal background, I mean, yeah, would say that in fact, started, sorry that I come back to the professional thing, maybe the personal will arise. I started working with maps actually. My first, my very first job was digitalizing cartography. So I've been always in the digital realm, we could say. Yeah, and then, but I've been always interested, of course, in social topics. I studied social education as a main study university studies. So I've been always interested in this kind of social struggles and with an interest with social justice issues and so on.
But professionally, my career evolved more towards working in public administrations, always with digital projects, as I said, first with maps and then with citizen participation. to me when I discovered the CDM and the team behind it, again, the people behind it, to me it was like kind of a dream really because it had this activist component that I couldn't find in the public administration context. And at the same time it had this, you know, the digital innovation, the hackers, the You know what I mean, no? Like this kind of hunger for change things really from inside the institution. yeah, to me this was really like an epiphany moment we could say. I would say that's it. From the last eight years I've been devoted to the project and I hope many years to come.
Alessandro Oppo (55:52) And you, Andres?
Andrés (55:57) Okay, yeah, my background, history, personal history.
Okay, let's say I'm actually I didn't go to university. I'm a self-taught software developer. I would say first I started working with computers and then I realized that I didn't like all the big companies on the industry. So I went to the Linux way with free software and so on.
And in the meantime, I started getting involved with social activists, a social centers movement like squatter houses on Madrid. And there I joined and started a HackLab. And with the people from the HackLab, we created an association to actually work with all these free software, citizen participation, and so on, on 2010, 2011. In the meantime, all the protests that I was talking about, the Indignados, and we were starting with the association, and I was thinking about, yeah, we are going to go broke because if we are on the squares and we are not actually working, like finding clients and so on, it's going to be hard. But yeah, we managed to get by.
And yeah, afterwards, we started working with the political parties. And then when they joined the governments, asked, yeah, we want to do what we were doing with the political party with opening the participation and making people to actually have a voice for the governments. And yeah, that's how it went. And now I'm working with the Decidim Association. So yeah.
Alessandro Oppo (57:57) Wonderful. And I have a question that I wanted to ask before, but it's more about a future. And so we just said that the futures are not all. But I wanted to ask if there is some sort of federation system between the different SEDEM instances. Sorry. Okay.
Carol (58:28) We have it in our book. This is something we have in the Desiree book. And yeah, it's an idea that it's been around for a lot of time. We keep thinking how to do it. I think it's like natural thing not to have this kind of Federation Desiree instances. Maybe we need, as usual, the specific use case that lets us just like start working on the specific details on how this federation works. We already have some ideas on how to federate, for example, the governments here in Catalonia that are using the instances.
And it's in the roadmap, I wouldn't say like in the immediate roadmap because as I said, I would say that the primary goal is to stabilize and so on. But yeah, for sure, this would be something really cool to have on the city.
Andrés (59:35) I think there was a project from Open Source Politics that they wanted to do some kind of pilot around the Bordeaux municipal entity because they had this government that it's not only on the city of Bordeaux but also all the cities and towns that are around the actual city, like a supramunicipal government, we would say, Catalonia. This is like the only use cases that we could come up with. I would say it like one thing that we need before actually doing this whole federation, it's something that we are actually working on now, that it's all these features of the right API. Right now we have an API, well, since day one actually, that it's a GraphQL API that allows external developers to connect to any instance of the city that has this enabled. and actually gather this data from the platform that it's already public data. Our main idea here is to actually lower the barrier of entry so any developer can access the information quickly because we believe in open data, on openness, and so on. And something that we didn't have, but we are working right now. is to actually allowing also to external developers to create resources inside of the platform using this API. The idea is to make the platform more easy to work with different tools. And one use case that we have, of course, it's chatbots. Think about it on having, I don't know, maybe a telegram or a WhatsApp or a signal bot where people can talk with a platform and say, yeah, this is a nice idea. I want to comment on it or I want to create a new proposal and everything is or most of the interaction will happen through the mobile phone. So I think this is like one thing about the future that's thinking about the platform. as, okay, this is like a central place where things are happening, but all these different tools can connect to the platform and actually use the data and contribute new things around it.
Alessandro Oppo (1:02:28) Thank you for the explanation. I was sure that you had some idea about Federation, but I was curious to know the actual state. as I mean, the last question is if you have any message to the people that are doing what you are also doing, or maybe different aspects, like I don't know, people that are working on a civic tech project that are people that are working on participation, people that are working on communities.
I Carol (1:03:07) Yeah, would say that we love to connect. In fact, in each testing phase we get to know people from sometimes from other projects in the area from the civic tech field or if we go to conferences we get to meet those people and we are always keen to to talk about these issues that worry us as a community of people working on that. And I would say that the collaboration part is central for us and the openness and sharing everything. So, yeah, I would maybe say this. And yeah, and just highlighting the political aspect because the current geopolitical context I think it rings an alarm for all the civic tech community just to maybe, I don't know if we need to take a stand of building anti-fascist technology or something like that for being a bit provocative. But yeah, I think there are a lot of stakes right now and we should collaborate more than ever.
Alessandro Oppo (1:04:25) Absolutely. Please undress if you want.
Carol (1:04:29) Just sorry, because I don't want to forget that for taking the opportunity that let everybody know that we are going to have the Open Tech Week in Barcelona. So this year, the Sibin Fest won't be alone. We are partnering with Mochila. Mochila is having its Moos Fest in the same week. So we took the opportunity to gather and we are calling in fact all the open source communities, the techno political communities to to meet in Barcelona and having this moment of thinking together. yeah, I think it's nice if anyone that listens to this, this is going to happen between 3rd of November until 9th of November. So, everybody invited.
Alessandro Oppo (1:05:23) It would be nice also to participate. And do you have any message, Andres?
Andrés (1:05:31) Yeah, I would say that to people to actually try to gather with more people to work on the same problem because if you are only one person, it's really difficult to actually achieve something big. But if you have different people that can work with the different aspects of the same problem, yeah. that will allow you to actually think about the problem on a transversal way and taking into account things that you couldn't imagine because you're only one person with one experience and multiple people can have much better ideas.
Yeah, big brain of different people. And another thing that I say that, yeah, worked for us. is to actually be ambitious. At the beginning, we say things like, yeah, we're going to be the WordPress for democracy. This was a meme that we had on the team at the beginning. And I think that this allowed us to have the mindset of, yeah, we are going to to be big and we are not going to be like a small project here in Catalonia and so on. And with this thought in mind, yeah, all these different decisions that you need to make along the way are much easier because you always are thinking, okay, how can we keep growing? How can we, yeah, make the community bigger? How can we make the software more resilient and things like that, no?
Alessandro Oppo (1:07:23) So to use the collective intelligence and also collective energy to make it happen in some way. So thank you a lot. If you have any other question or like.
Andrés (1:07:29) Suggly, Suggly, Suggly. Yeah.
No. No. Carol (1:07:40) It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
Alessandro Oppo (1:07:43) Also for me, thank you. Thank you again.
Andrés (1:07:46) See you, Alejandro.
