In the context of Participatory Budgeting

Image Source: AppCivist First Mockup http://appcivist-demo3.meteor.com/

The Participatory Budgeting Story

Political process that lets members of a community propose and vote on how certain budget funds should be allocated

The Rise and Importance of Participatory Budgeting

Source: http://egovau.blogspot.com/2010/11/participatory-budgeting-big-in-europe.html

Proposal Making by the citizens

Both Online and in F2F Assemblies/Workshops

After Technical Validation, citizens Vote on Proposals

Winning Proposals become City Projects

City projects are then Executed

The Participatory Budgeting Story

How does ICT support Participatory Budgeting Today?

The Participatory Budgeting Story

Tools

• ICT tools for Participatory Budgeting are limited and scattered

• Information Overload in proposal making (e.g., redundancy) is usually managed by a group of “technicians” who manually organize proposals in a technical analysis phase (where more transparency is needed)

• Voting via simple Web Surveys, SMS and F2F in specific places (e.g., a bus tours the city in Lisbon). SMS is noted to be costly for small municipalities

• Proponents use everything from Flyers to Social Media to promote their proposals

The Participatory Budgeting Story

AppCivist for Participatory Budgeting

PB Paris 2015 PB SF 2015 Public Health

AppCivist Bundle of Services

Stories & Inspiration Proposals Deliberation Winning

Proposals Execution +

Configure Configure Configure Configure Configure

PB Paris 2014Dashboard

Campaigns

AppCivist SOC Architecture

Government

Citizens

Activists

Media

Activism Ontology

Executing Activism Assembly/ AppCivist ConfiguredSocial Activism App

Interactions

App. Development

Activism Process/ “Assembly”

Activism Enabling Service Registry

Assembly Composition

Engine

Refers to

Developer

Fig. 1. AppCivist Architecture.

dynamic task-allocation and management among participants.Further, the interplay between mobile and cloud computingentails assessing both cost and social effectiveness. We discussthe details of our next steps in Section V.

IV. USE CASES

Although we foresee the platform to be valuable in a varietyof social activism scenarios, we discuss two of them below ingreater detail vis-a-vis the categories introduced in Section Ito better illustrate the need and applicability of AppCivist.

A. The Starting Point: Dengue Torpedo

The Dengue Torpedo project (http://www.denguetorpedo.com) is an ongoing social initiativein Rio de Janerio, Brazil, Tepalcingo, Mexico, and Managua,Nicaragua, among others, for using crowdsourcing and localinvolvement to track and prevent the Dengue fever, whichis caused by mosquitoes. This is an initiative of the SocialApps Lab at UC Berkeley, whose researchers are activelyworking with the local activists in these regions. The ICTfunctionalities are currently developed in-house, and areenvisioned to leverage the AppCivist platform as it matures.The current and near future functionalities for DengueTorpedo include:

• Acting Collectively: Collaborative Mapping, where userscan indicate the location of dengue-related issues, such asstagnant water. This is currently based on Google Maps,but should be extended to plug-in, for example, OpenStreet Map for regions where map data of OSM is better.

• Mobilizing: Incentive-based Action, where users takeaction to eradicate the above issues (e.g., cleaning up thetrash) and are rewarded for their actions. These incentivestake the shape of both virtual badges as well as physicalgoods, provided by local benefactors.

• Deliberating: Assembly and Consensus-Making, so thecommunity can better decide how to proceed forward toas to best prevent future cases of Dengue.

• Communicating: Mobile Apps, which can use both dataand SMS networks to enable users possessing varioustypes of phones and service plans to contribute for thecommon goal.

B. A Foreseen Assembly: Droit au Logement

Droit au Logement (http://www.droitaulogement.org/) is a French organizationdedicated to fighting for the rights of all individuals tohave a place to live. More specifically, they work towardsinfluencing policy-makers to improve the condition of thosewho are homeless or live in sub-standard housing, includinginfluencing governments, banks, and companies managingof large residential properties. We envision AppCivist to beuseful in terms of the following functionalities to them:

• Mobilizing: Content Sharing, provided through a websitelinked to social media, where they can share successstoried and calls to action.

• Deliberating: Petition-making, provided through a systemthat would not only enable petition authors to create andcommunicate petitions, but crucially, enable mediaper-sons to track their progress, as well as the petitions’ target(e.g., government representatives), to officially respond tothem.

• Acting Collectively: Collaborative Mapping, using whichone can identify properties that are providing sub-standard living, or properties in good condition vacantfor a long time without being rented.

• Acting Collectively: Rapid Call-to-action, which willbe used, for example, to rapidly collect followers ofthe organization to come together for a demonstration.

Activists Developers

AppCivist Services Hub

AppCivist Service APIs

Deliberation

VotingProposal

Versioning

…

Composition and Configuration

Engine

Service Providers Registry

Hubs Network Engine

Social Activism and Participation

Ontology

AppCivist Hub Ontology

AppCivist Hub P2P Network

External Service

Providers

AppCivist Provided Services

Ontology API Registry API

AppCivist Assemblies Dashboard

AppCivist Citizens

Assemblies

AppCivist Assemblies

Citizens Apps

AppCivist OpenDataFrontend AppCivist: applications

Backend AppCivist: service middleware(development + integration)

External Services/Applications

Thanks for listening. Questions?

The AppCivist Team

Extra Slides