Interview with Lucien Langton and Guillaume Saunier

Automatic Transcription, it may contain errors.

Alessandro Oppo: Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast. Our guests today are Guillaume Saunier and Lucien Langton. Sorry again for my pronunciation, and welcome!

Guillaume Saunier: Nice to meet you.

Lucien Langton: Hello, pleased to meet you too.

Alessandro Oppo: You work at a company called Octree, right? I'd be delighted to tell us something about it. What is it exactly?

Guillaume Saunier: Sure. If you want, Lucien can get introduced to Octree first, and then I'll talk about the civic tech project we have called Voca.

Lucien Langton: Of course! Well, first of all, thank you for your friendly invitation. Really happy to share our work here and answer your questions with you. So Octree is a co-op which is based in Switzerland and has existed now for about ten years. Our aim is to launch different digital commons - different products based on open source software and open source governance in the fields of basically social and ecological transition.

We have different projects concerning different aspects of this. Some projects are about mobility, others are about waste management, etc. But one of our projects is around an existing platform called Decidim, and our main product around this - the name of this project is Voca - and that's why we're here to talk about civic tech with you.

To introduce myself briefly, I'll let Guillaume speak about Octree more, but perhaps I can just introduce my background. I come from interaction design and interface design, and it's been since about 2018-2019 that I've been working on design aspects of civic tech, especially the product design of building civic tech with an approach focused on digital commons. That's where I come from.

Guillaume Saunier: Yeah, and I joined Octree four years ago to work on partnerships, fundraising, and handling the external community communications from Voca's perspective.

Voca is a civic tech project that we have been working on since the past three or four years now. It was officially launched two years ago and comes out of our work that we've been doing for public institutions in Switzerland - the State of Geneva, the Canton of Geneva, the City of Lausanne, the City of Neuchâtel, the Canton of Valais - so the French-speaking side of Switzerland.

From that experience, we decided to build a SaaS product that is based on Decidim. We've been exploring a lot around what this product should be.

Today, Voca is mainly aiming at distributing and simplifying Decidim, removing barriers to entry for public institutions of course, but also really focusing on bringing this product and technology to civil society actors. When I say removing barriers to entry and simplifying, I mean what you said - making it easier to use and making it more targeted towards the needs of the participants and organizations that are doing participation work, and also trying to bring the cost of using Decidim to a point where not only public institutions can afford a decent platform.

Alessandro Oppo: When you had the idea of that simplified version of Decidim, how did it happen? Also, if you remember when and how you got to know about Decidim in the first place? Because you come from UX design, you come from a more financial/economic background, I don't know exactly, so how did it happen?

Guillaume Saunier: Sure. I can talk about the idea, and maybe Lucien can tell a bit of the story of Decidim and Octree. I think the idea really came out of our experience working with public institutions and also the experiences we've seen around Decidim.

We saw that it started out in Barcelona, but then many large European cities were able to install this technology. However, the technology remained very cumbersome in the sense that you had to train people, you have to train the team, you have to have a budget for consulting work, and you had to really dedicate resources to that product.

Obviously, keeping the product inside those large public institutions prevents, in our opinion, and hinders the ability for civil society, associations, organizations - any type of nonprofit or mission-driven organization that already has participation at heart and already uses methodologies of participation, already has frameworks of collective decision-making but doesn't have a tool for it.

So we thought: what if we can make the tool fit their needs and not make it an extra layer of work, not make it a financial burden to their activity, but really make it something that can help them achieve their goals? Then we can hope for larger adoption and distribution of Decidim at scale, where different types of organizations can use the product.

Lucien Langton: Concerning how we started working with Decidim, actually it was a contact - a client and friend who came from academia and political science in Geneva, who started working as a participatory expert for the State of Geneva. They simply contacted us asking if we knew about the project Decidim in 2018, if we could install it. We had to look at it, and since the beginning, one of our core skills at Octree is handling Ruby on Rails code. Decidim is based on Ruby on Rails. It's not easy to find engineers who can handle Ruby on Rails, but this was our case, and it seemed interesting enough that we gave it a try.

That was the first Decidim platform in Switzerland, so it was set up in 2019. Then in the next three or four years, a lot of different Decidim platforms popped up in Switzerland - about eight in total now. Some of them are managed by us, and some are managed by another actor who is also part of the Decidim association, so we can really collaborate together.

I think the really switching point in the story is that, as I mentioned in the beginning, we're a co-op and we're really rooted in self-organization and distributed governance. We discovered Decidim and thought, "Hey, this looks like tools like Loomio or other tools that teams can use to make decisions more collaborative and transparent."

So our hypothesis was: okay, if we really want widespread democracy in society, perhaps we should not focus only on structures which are already held accountable to hold democratic frameworks - such as public institutions, cities, neighborhoods, etc. - but we should probably investigate how we can backport civic tech tools to more community-oriented structures. Basically, that's the work we've been trying to do with Voca - to bridge this gap in the civic tech field between tools like Loomio and classic civic tech like Citizen Lab, Consul, etc.

Alessandro Oppo: At the moment, what is possible to do with Voca? Is it simplified only in terms of design and UX, so you can do the same things that are doable with Decidim, or is it less functional?

Guillaume Saunier: Basically, when we say "simplifying," I'm going to go a little bit into how Decidim is organized for listeners to understand what we mean by simplified.

Decidim is structured around participatory spaces, and those participatory spaces each have a function - like a process, an assembly, or consultations. When you get a Decidim installation, you have access to all those spaces, and then inside those spaces you can activate the different functionalities of Decidim - which are voting, proposals, shared calendars, etc.

What we're doing is that rather than offering the entire scope of spaces and unlimited amounts of processes with unlimited amounts of votes you can run and unlimited amounts of assemblies - which we have seen can be very overwhelming for users - we're splitting those spaces into individual spaces. Each individual space will answer a specific need.

So if you are hoping to run a participatory budget, rather than having a platform on which you can run three, four, or five participatory budgets while you're also running citizen assemblies and neighborhood councils, we will only provide you with the space and the parts that allow you to run that participatory budget process.

Maybe you can start to imagine why having all those spaces at once can be very interesting for a city of a few million people, but for an organization that just wants to do an experiment or have a standardized process that they run every year, we think it's just more targeted to their needs and less overwhelming in terms of functionalities and options.

Lucien Langton: Thank you, I think that was really well summed up. What's really important is that we also learned a lot from experiments with customers. One of the people and projects we've been working with is Mautic, which was an open source project. Mautic is basically marketing automation software, but it's open source and managed by a community of contributors worldwide. They didn't have any tool to organize their community and have clear governance.

This is a case where typically Decidim can really be of use to a large community which really needs clarity in order to simply function and have clear operations. However, they can't really meet in person because half of their contributors are from India, Africa, the United States, etc. So Decidim seems perfect for this type of use case.

I think we're at a turning point where we'll see a lot of initiatives and tech co-ops which are still grounded in a country or city or community, but you also have a growing number of international decentralized communities which really need to organize themselves. That's an interesting development.

Alessandro Oppo: Do you have other case studies that are interesting?

Lucien Langton: You know, I think in the frame of the question, since we're trying to design an open source digital common, there are several design constraints which help us test our approach. One test is with open source online communities such as Mautic, but we also tested in other contexts which are really different.

We have a project where we're bridging civic tech with the humanitarian field in Tanzania. That was a whole other challenge because people in Tanzania don't even have computers - they only have smartphones. We needed to enable participation at large scale in a country which is not known for its democratic processes, and anonymity plays a large role also in who will participate and how.

Guillaume Saunier: Yeah, and it's interesting because they're also trying to solve how to distribute participation and tools for participation in different regions. We're working with a humanitarian organization based in Norway, and they have the ambition to use participation to better understand the needs of populations that are affected by their programs. We're running a pilot in Tanzania.

The constraints are the lack of connectivity, low-tech devices, and the fact that even if people have phones - people have smartphones but they don't have desktop computers or laptops. Interestingly enough, they also don't have email addresses, and all those platforms like Decidim are based on login with email.

So the first challenge was to get people on the platform and create an account without an email, without a desktop or laptop, and with low connectivity. The solution we implemented is a chatbot based on WhatsApp. Participants only use WhatsApp to interact with Decidim - they do not go on the Decidim platform. They can if they want to, but they're not really required to.

They can join a process through WhatsApp - it's one phone number, one WhatsApp number, one WhatsApp profile per process. They join that process and then they get sent information and calls to action. Call to action can be reading some news, writing a proposal, or voting on proposals. They interact through the chat, and their profile in the Decidim instance is just based on their WhatsApp phone number, and it's anonymized so that the organization administrators of the platforms don't know which profile belongs to whom. They just know that a profile is participating; they don't know who that profile is.

One aspect of distributing this is that the objective of that organization is to be able to implement these processes across their different country offices and not keep the administration of it at headquarters - not like a top-down approach - but really have the local offices use the tool in their context. Obviously, they all have very different contexts, but they're all in sub-Saharan Africa or some Asian countries or a little bit of Central America and the Caribbean like Haiti.

So that's one case study. Another one I can quickly mention is how we are helping participation professionals - people that actually work in the field of participation. Those are labs, co-ops, or companies that have as customers a city or government or regional organization that are mandated to run participatory processes and have been sometimes doing it for twenty years - running participatory budgets, citizen assemblies, all those kinds of processes.

They're usually also asked by their customers to provide a digital tool with their process or use some digital component. What we figured out is that up to today, they have to manage with a set of different tools - they're going to use a survey tool here, maybe have a webpage to communicate, then maybe use spreadsheets there. They really don't have a digital tool that is tailored for them and answers their needs and what they do on a day-to-day basis.

So we are exploring with two participatory offices here in Switzerland on how to build a way of using Decidim that is adapted to them, so they can launch a process for their customers. This also means they can add some value to their usual practice and also offer a digital solution to their customers. They can add a new practice to the work they've been doing and rely on a tool that is designed with them in mind, not just having to use whatever they can find.

Alessandro Oppo: I was wondering about this lack of technology and in some way also lack of knowledge. How did people experience using Decidim with this WhatsApp approach? Do you have any feedback from them?

Guillaume Saunier: I'm going to be pretty honest - it is quite challenging for multiple reasons. First of all, as I mentioned, there is building trust in people's ability to share their opinions, even if it's not about the current government or something like that. It's just opinions about a humanitarian actor that's helping them, asking them what they're feeling and needing.

We're also running a process on peace and peacebuilding during elections because Tanzania is going through elections this year, and there has been a lot of violence. This makes building trust even more difficult, even though you tell them it's anonymous. In a country where when people share their political opinion they might disappear or something happens to them, it is the biggest challenge.

The second challenge is more technological. This is a pilot project, and we're obviously facing some issues. Sometimes people don't receive messages, so there have been some technical difficulties, but I think this is part of any type of project.

The third challenge is training the local teams - local people that work in the field - to build a mindset where they are communicating with rights holders through WhatsApp when they have had the experience of only communicating back to headquarters and writing reports. It's a new skill, so it takes a fair amount of time as well.

But we are overcoming all those challenges, and it's getting better. I mean, I think the platform is gaining users every month. Every time we go out there and share the WhatsApp chat, the numbers of participation are actually quite interesting and higher than I would have imagined for the first pilot. Because there's also not so much friction - you just send a WhatsApp message and you participate. Once you build that trust, you can scale it up a bit.

It takes time to go to all the villages to share the number, and it doesn't work on someone's phone because they're doing something else, but once it's installed and functioning for a few weeks, people do participate.

Lucien Langton: If I may add, it's quite interesting what Guillaume mentioned about how introducing a tool like Decidim actually requires change in habits. We see this also with public administrations. This change is introduced, and I would say - of course it's not always easy to manage - but it's almost a success metric because it means that the tool actually introduces change in the way people work, relate to citizens, relate to end users, interact and collaborate together.

Of course it doesn't work in every city, but in a lot of cities we see that dynamics are actually changing because there's this new tool. I think it's a nice metric to keep change management in mind when introducing civic tech.

Alessandro Oppo: I really like the WhatsApp approach because it's easier for people to participate. Otherwise, there's this sort of cognitive load when you have to use a new tool, and sometimes it's challenging and usually people just don't participate.

How many municipalities or organizations are using Voca now? Can you share some numbers?

Guillaume Saunier: On Decidim implementations, I think - I don't have this number on the top of my head - but something around 300 platforms have been installed worldwide, maybe more. I'm not sure.

For us at Voca, we run like five Decidim platforms in Switzerland plus we have about another ten customers that use the smaller, simplified version of Decidim. I know there are just simplified processes and standalone processes. Voca has only been launched for a few months, so we are still experimenting, but we're getting good feedback from the first customers.

I'd say it's fair to say that during the past two years we've been in this experimentation process because we really acknowledge the fact that civic tech is still an emergent field. Even if there are leading actors that are trying to sell really hard - like Granicus to public administrations or mass market products like in the States - in the northern hemisphere, we really believe that things are quite fragile. Perhaps one indicator of this is how fragile they are also democratically in countries, especially like the United States.

So when Guillaume was mentioning that our aim is to simplify the use of Decidim, we also have the aim in parallel - and what we do on the concrete level - is to broaden and deepen the use cases of Decidim. We also build modules around Voca, and this is why the WhatsApp chatbot is one of the modules. We also have another module around participatory cartography, which is used by cities but which is also used by remote indigenous tribes in Brazil.

We have many use cases which are starting to build bridges between different contexts where people need to use Decidim, and this is quite an interesting product design field research in civic tech because it really enables us to find the right balance between specificity and tackle the right features that people need, and at the same time have the right level of simplification.

Alessandro Oppo: I really like the modular approach. Which modules have you already developed, and which others do you want to develop?

Guillaume Saunier: We have a lot of specific modules that we did only for one or two clients, but the main modules we support now are three modules:

We have the chatbot module, which at the end of the day is actually an API so that you can build interoperability between Decidim and other civic tech tools. It's not restricted only to WhatsApp - it can be emails, Discord, Telegram, Slack integrations. It's designed this way so that's one module around reaching out to participants.

The other module is called Decidim Geo, which is a participatory cartography module. This one is quite interesting because it enables large-scale data gathering. In some contexts - not only urban contexts in the northern hemisphere but let's say for biodiversity preservation - it's really useful to be able to pinpoint on a map large-scale data from participants about resources.

The third module is one which is really useful, actually, which is called "Spam Jail," and it basically enables you to set a simple set of rules in order to filter unwanted messages and spam on platforms. It's designed so that you can't use it to basically censor content and preserves as much as possible the freedom of the user which has an account on the platform, but still you can enable certain rules like banning certain keywords or domain name extensions, for instance, so that it pre-filters out certain types of content.

Perhaps the last one is really a practical use case, but actually it offers a really nice testing ground on what limits can be the ethical framework of a tool like this while maintaining to ensure that the debates stay democratic. You don't have moderation beforehand but only reactive moderation - you avoid censorship. So it's kind of an interesting use case.

For Decidim Geo, the interesting part is that when you look at the design aspect of civic tech, you have two categories of civic tech. One category is built on an abstraction of what democracy is like - so you have processes with steps and buttons to submit proposals and grids to show proposals, like Decidim. The other approach in civic tech design is about having everything on the map - like Neighborland - so you have an interactive map and everybody can participate directly on the map. Decidim Geo enables us to test the bridging between these two categories of designs.

Alessandro Oppo: Are the modules that are developed for Voca compatible with regular Decidim and vice versa?

Lucien Langton: Yes, they are compatible with other Decidim versions. We are active members of the Decidim community, so our aim is to act as an easy entry point to Decidim - an easy access distributor of Decidim. Because you can say Decidim is free software so it's easy access, but as long as you don't know how to install a platform, it's not that easy. A lot of people who are really concerned with this - activists who are handling a lot of different aspects - they don't necessarily feel at ease spending days setting up a Ruby environment.

Alessandro Oppo: I like the fact that the modules work on both platforms. Very interesting also what you said about democratic processes - the abstraction and the other way of having everything on the map, so different ways of visualizing problems and having maybe a different kind of participation.

Do you have any other modules that you would like to develop, or are you struggling with some problems?

Guillaume Saunier: I can extend a bit on what we're doing in terms of distribution because we're developing modules for that. This is part of what we're doing in Colombia but also in Tanzania and Switzerland - we are building a tiny module that for now we call "the Generator."

It allows users - participants - to directly connect to a Decidim platform and generate a process or generate another smaller Decidim platform on their own without having to request access. You can generate a standalone Decidim from an existing Decidim and just add it to the URL.

We started this with our customer in Tanzania, where they wanted to have associations, organizations, and communities of the city have their own Decidim space. The uptake of that has been limited because organizations feel that they're putting work to advertise on another website from the city because they don't feel like it's their website - they don't feel like it's their space because it has the colors of the city everywhere.

So what we did, and later enhanced in Colombia with a partner, is that now communities from the main platform can launch their own private space in which they can change the colors and their logo, but they don't need to ask permission from us or from the city or from anyone to do it. They just fill out a form and generate that standalone participatory space. That's the module we're working on right now. For now it's just "the Generator," but maybe we'll have a better name soon.

Lucien Langton: I guess there's a lot to say, but basically one of the challenges this could help tackle is to bridge top-down participation - such as the ones already performed by public institutions - and bottom-up participation - such as the ones already done everywhere by associations and social workers. So the idea is to find the right balance between these two modes so that they can trust each other and coexist with enough autonomy.

Alessandro Oppo: Would you like to share something related to your personal life - where did you grow up, what are your hobbies?

Guillaume Saunier: Sure. I live in Switzerland now, in the mountains. I don't live where Octree is based, but I grew up in France, in Paris.

I would say that personally, I give a lot of energy and put a lot of effort into this project because I do think that a project like Decidim is a tool that, if it becomes widely adopted by communities, associations, all those groups that are constantly struggling in defense of their rights and whatever thing they are fighting for, it's a project that can help structure and build agency.

For me, it's a tool that helps communities build agency in order to achieve better outcomes because we can use some of the tools like archiving processes. It's a difficult one because for people that are doing so much, telling them that they also need to spend time archiving seems terrible. But if we can make this archiving process - the fact that we have everything written down, the fact that we can trace actions taken, we have transparency on the decision-making process - that allows us to have more agency in negotiating and pushing back against whatever state or corporate or whatever power that we have to gain back control from.

Lucien Langton: I was born in San Francisco but I grew up in France. I wasn't at all a fan of technology initially - not really, actually. But I didn't start to work with technology until design school, where I figured out that there was really a strong lack of designers in technology. By designers, I mean people who can defend a critical viewpoint and not just design shiny new objects to buy.

I feel like the intersection of activism, design, and civic tech - particularly around the notion of digital commons and alternatives to standard capitalism - is quite an interesting place to question a lot of current aspects of society. I'm pretty grateful that our work at least enables us to ask these questions, first of all for ourselves, and to have these discussions with civic tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs and researchers like yourself. So thank you!

Alessandro Oppo: Thank you! It's always nice to talk about this kind of topics because sometimes it's hard to find people to talk about civic tech that people don't really know about.

Do you have any message for people in the civic tech space - people that are exploring, finding solutions, experimenting?

Guillaume Saunier: I'll give one quick message for the civic tech space. I think there are so many areas of collaboration, so many things, so many projects that we can work on together building bridges. I'm on the partnership side and I always want to figure out ways to partner and collaborate with organizations in the civic tech space.

My final thought would be that with all the talks going around AI, let's not forget that governance is made by humans and that AI governance is a real subject. For that, I bet you could organize an assembly on a platform powered by Voca! But concretely, let's not forget that we're not going to automate governance away from humans. Humans need to collaborate and have transparent, accountable mechanisms in order to ensure a safe society for everyone.

Lucien Langton: Yeah, we're not going to outsmart ourselves out of governance. We need to tackle these issues on the human side.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah, I'm also quite scared by the black box that could maybe govern better than many politicians that we have now, but in the short term and in the long term I would be very worried about the possible outcomes.

So thank you both!

Guillaume Saunier: Thank you!

Alessandro Oppo: I'm actually curious to try Voca to see how it works.

Guillaume Saunier: Sure! We can book another call if you want.

Alessandro Oppo: Absolutely!