Save the date: next Saturday, 27th April Luiss University will host the third EDU@LabGov community gardening session in Luiss Community Garden from 10 am to 13am.
The LabGovers (students of the Urban Clinic of LabGov) will work to make the last adjustments to the prototype of the project that they have designed during these months. This session represents a fundamental moment to put into practice definitively the topics they have discussed in recent months: urban agriculture, urban gardens, healthy nutrition, innovation, technology, justice, sustainability.
The students of the Urban Clinic of LabGov have designed and created an innovative solution to the problems created by the scarcity of knowledge about the state of well being in the cities. They have created two prototypes, one material and one immaterial: a multifunctional structure that will be installed in the city (in strategic points, by starting from the urban gardens) and a digital platform. Through those two tools they will be able to start an awareness/information campaign about the relevance of sustainable models of agriculture and nutrition in the cities and its importance for the individual and collective well-being. At the same time they will investigate the state of the urban well-being by collecting big data on this issue.
As always, this is not just a didactic moment but a collaborative practice born in the walls of the Luiss Guido Carli university and the results will be exported in the city.
If you are interested in following their work, follow our official social networks!
The fifth module of the Urban Clinic EDU@LabGov took place on Friday the 12th and Saturday the 13th of April into the Viale Romania Campus of LUISS University. The workshop has inaugurated the fifth module of the course. The module was dedicated to “Communication”.
The workshop hosted one important expert on these themes: prof. Paolo Peverini, professor at the Department of Enterprise and Management and Political Sciences in Luiss Guido Carli University, and he is expert in Marketing Communication and new media languages. Saturday, we hosted Chiara De Angelis, expert in information architecture and user experience design , who supported the LabGovers in drafting the communication plan for their project idea.
WORKSHOP
Prof. Peverini asked the LabGovers what communication plan they had in mind for their project.
After explaining their idea, prof. Peverini focused on how difficult it is to communicate a message. So, to try to effectively develop a message it becomes necessary to make the most of the cross-media effects. These effects show how the combined use of different media and the order of the media used to spread a message can cause a different reading of the same.
At the end of the workshop, Professor Peverini gave some suggestions to take care of the communication of our project. He emphasized how important it is to avoid a techno-deterministic approach, which dwells exclusively on the effectiveness of the medium. In fact, for Prof. Peverini, it is much more important to take care of the substantial and content aspects of the message.
CO-WORKING
Chiara De Angelis explained to LabGovers what are the essential elements that every communication plan should have. Based on the two examples and on the points that Dr. De Angelis highlighted, LabGovers divided into three groups to develop the communication plan for their project. It is important for them to place their project: this means underlining the fact that they are trying to transform the urban gardens into innovation hubs, by developing a new generation of digital gardens and a digital platform that will allow the urban gardeners and farmers to investigate the status of well-being in the cities. Another relevant feature for their path is the focus given to sustainability and in particular to the 17 SDGs of the 2030 Agenda.
After delivering their work, the LabGovers split into groups again to work on the user stories of their digital platform.
At the end of the exhibition, the LabGovers were divided into groups in order to create a prototype of the platform through an app, which allows you to link drawings and photographs between them through hyperlinks that can be placed on the photographs themselves. The result should therefore be a model of the platform that will be developed.
The last module ends like this but I assure you that it’s not over here.
The third workshop of the Urban Clinic EDU@LabGov 2019 took place on Friday the 15th of March into the Viale Romania Campus of LUISS University. The workshop has inaugurated the start of the third module of the course. The module was dedicated to “Urban Law and Policy”. Indeed, the Laboratory hosted three important experts on these themes: prof. Christian Fernando Iaione, lawyer Nico Moravia, and dr. Paola Marzi.
Prof.
Iaione, the scientific co-director of LabGov, teaches Urban Law and Policy and
Urbanistic Law at LUISS University.
Lawyer
Moravia is partner of the law firm Pavia-Ansaldo (administrative law department).
Dr. Paola
Marzi is an official of the municipality of Rome as Head of the office for the
Urban Gardens, and has a long experience on these themes since she has
participated in the drafting of the Regulation of Urban Gardens of Rome.
The
workshop was introduced by the speech of Prof. Iaione, who talked about his
experiences in the urban regeneration field. He exposed the project of
Co-Bologna (http://co-bologna.it/): the
program started 7 years ago and its effects were such as to spread his
principles in Italian cities like Turin, Rome and Reggio-Emilia, but also in
others parts of the world like New York, Amsterdam and Sao Paulo.
All these
experiences demonstrated how important is to rewrite administrative and
urbanistic legislation in order to face all the problems brought in the cities
by the changes of the third millennium. What is fundamental in this process is
the participative paradigm, that means involving as much as possible all the
different urban stakeholder in order to re-define the way of living the urban
centers.
Indeed, lawyer
Moravia showed how it worked in the roman context, by showing the case of the
Ex-Dogana: an un-used space, owned by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, brought back
to life by the efforts of four young entrepreneurs. The cohesion of legal,
human and economics competences, made possible to find a new and simple
solution, like a temporary leasing contract, and create what now is one of the
most important experiences of this kind in Rome.
One of the
sectors where the participative paradigm is more successful and better applied
is the urban garden’s one. Dr. Marzi explained how gardens are the place where
it is possible to focus all the energies and differences of a neighborhood, not
only as a place where plants grow, but as an instrument of social inclusion,
that generates wellness and new solutions to co-live the city by building up new
forms of community.
Co-Working
The 3rd
Module of the Urban Clinic LabGov EDU 2019 continued with the Co-Working
session, held on March 16th. The co-working session is facilitated
by Chiara De Angelis, Friends of LabGov’s ex-president.
The
Co-Working session took place in the LUISS Campus of Viale Romania and it started
at 10 am with Pasquale Tedesco’s testimony, expert of Confagricoltura (http://www.confagricoltura.it/ita/).
He talked about
the importance of the relationship between Earth and Nature and the fortune to
enjoy some products that Earth offers.
After this
inspirational session, Chiara De Angelis explained the Labgovers service
design, an important passage to complete and improve the idea that they’re
developing during this A.A. of LabGov EDU. For this reason, the LabGovers were
divided into groups in order to select the “personas” (consumer type) of their
product/service, basing on their previous research.
In the afternoon, the LabGovers developed the user journey map to describe the possible experience consumers might have through the platform that they are developing.
Save
the date: next Saturday, 9th March we will host the first EDU@LabGov
community gardening session in Luiss Community Garden from 10 am to 12am.
The
LabGovers will work with recycled materials in order to build a prototype that
they will install in Luiss and in the city of Rome. If you are interested in
following their work, follow our official social network!
During
the community gardening session, the LabGovers will put into practice what they are learning during the forms in the classroom
therefore it will represent ahead important footstep in the realization of
their project.
The assisted gardening is not only a didactic
moment but an activity of practical collaborative among the boundaries of the University
Luiss Guido Carli, that then the students will experiment on the field in the
city of Rome.
Stay tuned!
Save the date: Sabato 9 marzo si terrà
il primo community gardening della Clinica Urbana EDU@LabGov presso l’#OrtoLuiss
dalle 10:00 alle 12:00.
Durante la sessione di community
gardening i LabGovers, divisi dapprima in quattro gruppi sulle diverse aree di
lavoro, dovranno presentare i dati raccolti nel corso della settimana e
iniziare a dar forma al loro progetto. Inizieranno quindi un laboratorio di
auto-costruzione che, tramite l’utilizzo di materiali riciclati, li porterà a
realizzare un prototipo che installeranno nella città di Roma. Se volete
saperne di più rimanete connessi ai nostri account social ufficiali quel
giorno!
L’obiettivo
è mettere in pratica ciò che gli studenti stanno apprendendo durante i moduli
in aula, quindi rappresenterà un importante passo avanti nella realizzazione
della loro idea.
Il gardening assistito non è solo un
momento didattico ma un’attività di pratica collaborativa tra le mura
dell’Università Luiss Guido Carli, che poi gli studenti sperimenteranno sul
campo nella città di Roma.
The interest for citizens
co-production of public services is increasing and many digital participatory
platforms (DPPs) have been developed in order to improve participatory
democratic processes.
During the Sharing City
Summit in Barcelona last November we discovered the DDDC, i.e. the Digital Democracy and Data Commons, a participatory platform to
deliberate and construct alternative and more democratic forms of data
governance, which will allow citizens to take back control over their personal
data in the digital society and economy.
Barcelona is already known as
a best practice in this field: the city and its metropolitan area constitute an
exceptional
ecosystem in terms of co-production of public policies and citizen science
initiatives. The City Council has created an Office of
Citizens Science and the Municipal
Data Office, as well as the first Science Biennial that just took place in Barcelona
(from 7th-11th February 2019). At the same time citizen science projects
abound.
In this frame Barcelona is famous
to have launched in February 2016 Decidim.Barcelona (we decide), a project of
the City Council to give citizens the opportunity to discuss proposals using an
interface for group-discussions and comments. Decidim is indeed an online participatory-democracy
platform that embodies a completely innovative approach. First of all it is entirely and collaboratively built as free software.
As remembered by Xabier Barandiaran Decidim is
a web environment that using the programming language Ruby on Rails allows
anybody to create and configure a website platform to be used in the form of a
political network for democratic participation. Any organization (local city
council, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood or cooperative) can create
mass processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative
design for regulations, urban spaces and election processes. It also makes
possible the match between traditional in-person democratic meetings
(assemblies, council meetings, etc.) and the digital world (sending meeting
invites, managing registrations, facilitating the publication of minutes, etc.).
Moreover it enables the structuring of government bodies or assemblies
(councils, boards, working groups), the convening of consultations, referendums
or channelling citizen or member initiatives to trigger different decision
making processes. The official definition of Decidim is: a
public-common’s, free and open, digital infrastructure for participatory
democracy.
Barandiaran remembers also that “Decidim was born in an
institutional environment (that of Barcelona City Council), directly aiming at
improving and enhancing the political and administrative impact of
participatory democracy in the state (municipalities, local governments, etc.).
But it also aims at empowering social processes as a platform for massive
social coordination for collective action independently of public
administrations. Anybody can copy, modify and install Decidim for its own
needs, so Decidim is by no means reduced to public institutions”.
As of march 2018 www.decidim.barcelona
had more than 28,000 registered participants,
1,288,999 page views, 290,520 visitors, 19 participatory processes, 821 public
meetings channeled through the platform and 12,173 proposals, out of which over
8,923 have already become public policies grouped into 5,339 results whose
execution level can be monitored by citizens. […] It comes to fill the gap of
public and common’s platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which
private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data
extraction and market oriented goals)”.
But Decidim is more than a technological platform, it is a
“technopolitical project” where legal, political, institutional, practical,
social, educational, communicative, economic and epistemic codes merge
together. There are mainly 3 levels: the political (focused
on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies
and organizations), the technopolitical (focused on how the
platform is designed, the mechanisms it embodies, and the way in which it is
itself democratically designed), and the technical (focused
on the conditions of production, operation and success of the project: the
factory, collaborative mechanisms, licenses, etc.). In this way thousands of
people can organize themselves democratically by making proposals that will be
debated and could translate into binding legislation, attending public
meetings, fostering decision-making discussions, deciding through different
forms of voting and monitoring the implementation of decisions (not only the
procedures but also the outcomes).
Coming back to our
DDDC, the main aim of this pilot participatory process is to test a new
technology to improve the digital democracy platform Decidim and to
collectively imagine the data politics of the future. It was developed inside
the European project DECODE[1] (Decentralized
Citizen Owned Data Ecosystem – that aims to construct legal, technological and
socio-economic tools that allow citizens to take back control over their data
and generate more common benefits out of them); it is led by the Barcelona Digital City (Barcelona City Council) and by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of
Catalonia (Tecnopolitica and Dimmons), in collaboration with the Nexa Center of Internet
& Society, Eurecat, CNRS, Dribia, aLabs, Thoughtworksand DYNE.
The
pilot project was launched in October 18th 2018 and will end April 1st
2019, for a total of 5 months. It has mainly three goals:
to integrate the DECODE technology with the Decidim
digital platform in order to improve processes of e-petitioning, to
provide more safety, privacy, transparency and data enrichment;
to enable a deliberative space around data law,
governance and economics within the new digital economy and public
policy, in order to provide a vision oriented to promote a greater citizen
control over data and their exploitation in Commons-oriented models[2];
to experiment with
the construction and use of a data commons generated in the process, in order to
improve the inclusion of the participatory process itself.
The goals will be reached
through several phases that foresee also face-to-face meetings, inside the dddc.decodeproject.eu
platform. The infographic illustrates the phases:
The pilot project is currently
in its second phase. The first 1 was that of
presentation & diagnosis,
dedicated to the elaboration of a brief diagnosis of the state of regulations,
governance models and data economy. The diagnosis emerged from a kick off
pilot presentation workshop, the DECODE Symposium, aimed to imagine possible proposal to move towards a society where
citizens can control what, how and who manages and generates values from the
exploitation of their data; i.e. to imagine how use digital technologies to
facilitate the transition from today’s digital economy of surveillance
capitalism and data extractivism to an alternative political and economic
project. In this phase a sociodemographic
survey was also launched to collect information about the perceptions on the
digital economy and to design communicative actions to improve the
inclusiveness of the process.
The current phase (2) is that
of proposals for a digital
economy based on data commons, lunached considering the current situation of
data extraction and concentration and based on the diagnosis made on the digital
society in the first phase. During the Sharing Cities Summit for example a dedicated meeting took place, divided
into a talk and four group work sessions, one for each axes of the pilot
project (legal, economic, governance and experimental – see below). During this
workshop 64 proposal were collected and in the next phases they will be voted,
discussed and signed. The DDDC staff underlines that the process is
prefigurative since they are trying to create and practice data commons while
deliberating and talking about data commons.
In this
phase the results of the survey on sociodemographic data were also
analyzed with the aim to define, implement and experiment data use strategies
for inclusion in participation (these strategies can potentially be used in future
by platforms such as Decidim). The analysis is made by the Barcelona Now – BCNNOW.
The next phases are:
Phase 3 – Debate:
discussion on the proposals received.
Phase 4 – Elaboration
by the DECODE team and the interested participants
Phase 5 – Signing: collection of support for the
pilot project results using DECODE technology for secure and transparent
signature (based on encryption techniques and distributed ledger
technologies). Crucial phase: this technology, integrated with
DECIDIM, will help in the construction of a more secure, transparent and
distributed networked democracy.
Phase 6 – Evaluation: closing meeting and launch
of a survey to help in the assessment of the satisfaction or participants with
the process and with the DECODE technology
Legal
aspects, governance issues and economic topics are the three main axes
followed during the different phases, since they provide a differential
approach to discuss around data. A fourth axis is the experimental one,
dedicated to the use and definition of collective decisions around the database
resulting from the data shared during the pilot project. Il will become a kind
of temporary commons useful to improve the deliberative process itself, a
practice that could be incorporated in future Decidim processes.
At the end of the pilot project a participatory
document, with paper or manifesto around the digital economy will be released.
The importance of this kind of pilot project is
clear if we think to the huge amount of data that everyday every citizens is
able to produce… By now we live in a “datasphere”, an invisible environment of
data, quoting Appadurai, a virtual data landscape rich in
information, cultural and social data. Our data indeed constitute digital
patterns that reveal our behaviors, interests, habits. Some actors, especially
big corporations and States, can act upon this data, can use them to surveil
and influence our lives, through strategies such as ad hoc advertisements or
even intervention in elections (see the case of the Cambridge
Analytica
or the referendum
on an EU agreement with Ukraine) or generation of citizens rankings (such as
the Chinese case). These
“data misuses” can even influence and affect democracy. Nevertheless, if successful, the
knowledge and insight created by the datasphere may become a powerful managing
and intelligence tool and the debate about the so-called “datacracy” is indeed growing.
In this frame, and considering the little
awareness still surrounding the topic, the DDDC pilot project on the one hand
tries to stir critically consciousness and common construction in this arena,
on the other tries to provide the necessary tools to go in this direction,
improving Decidim and pushing forward the DECODE vision of data sovereignty.
