Participa: Platforms for Civic Participation
Background
Compared to other democratic nations, the culture of civic participation and engagement in Paraguay is in its infancy, as the country transitioned from a 35-year-long dictatorship to a new democratic form of governance in 1989. In this context, a team of computer and social scientists launched the research project Participa with the goal of helping to strengthen the participatory culture in Paraguay. Participa geared toward developing and testing information and communication technologies (ICTs) for democratic processes. Through their research, Jorge Saldivar and the Participa team (Luca Cernuzzi, Cristhian Parra, Marcelo Alcaraz, Rebeca Arteta), have developed three different applications— Social Ideation, Participa Aware, and AppCivist, in collaboration with the Social Apps Labs of UC Berkeley— each allowing citizens to participate in large- and small-scale budgeting, planning, and public innovation processes.
Goals
Participa ultimately sought to contribute to the improvement of democratic life in Paraguay by encouraging its people to participate in public sector innovation processes, such as policy-making, participatory budgeting, and other civic services. Participa was supported through the PROCIENCIA Program of the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) of Paraguay.
To achieve its goals, the project harnessed ICTs to build three crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, and civic engagement platforms mentioned above — AppCivist, Social Ideation, and Participa Aware. Furthermore, Participa also sought to expand our understanding of the role ICTs play in fostering civic participation: (1) in general, and (2) specifically within Latin American countries, such as Paraguay.
Process
Running from February 2016 — December 2018, Participa consisted of several stages. First, systematic literature reviews were conducted to better understand how ICTs have been used for participatory processes, including (1) the types of processes that employ ICTs to generate civic engagement and participation, (2) the impacts these processes have, (3) the types of technologies used, and (4) the timeframes given for these processes.
Next, participatory design workshops were used to understand the experiences of community leaders in Paraguay who oversee participatory initiatives within the public sector (e.g., through town halls, etc.). Specifically, the researchers for Participa sought to determine how these individuals generated community involvement, how they communicated about the initiatives to those communities, and if they used technology to enhance these processes.
Next, a study was conducted on how social media — specifically, Twitter — are used by both citizens and candidates during electoral processes in Paraguay to communicate political preferences. Finally, these three preliminary studies (i.e., systematic literature reviews, design workshops, and investigation of social media uses in Paraguay) were used to inform the design and development of participatory software and applications (links to open-source software below): Participa Aware, Social Ideation, and AppCivist.
In order to determine the effectiveness of these participatory applications, each was validated through distinct case studies of participatory processes in different moments of the project’s execution; that is, these analyses were iterative and informed subsequent stages of analysis.
Of the three applications developed through Participa, AppCivist is still in use by various municipalities around the world for participatory budgeting and planning processes, including Vallejo, California; Louisville, Kentucky; Dieppe, Canada; and Sao Paulo, Brazil. AppCivist was also used to support a process of participatory planning in Asunción, Paraguay, for which over 350 people participated.
The remaining two applications — Social Ideation and Participa Aware — were primarily used as experimental prototypes in case studies of participatory processes in Paraguay. Social Ideation supported two processes of public sector innovation via Facebook plug-in: Voz y voto (Voice and vote), in which local political party, Patria Querida (Dear Homeland), launched an initiative to identify innovations and solutions for public services in Asunción, attracting 154 participants; and Participa en tu educación (Participate in your education) sought innovation and improvement suggestions for school attendance, teacher training, and education infrastructure in the Paraguayan public education system, attracting 67 participants.
Participa Aware, a mobile application, was tested through a small-scale process of public sector innovation, Revitalizando Asunción (Revitalizing Asunción). For this case study, 21 participants were asked for solutions and improvements to places of interest in Asunción, including neighborhoods, workplaces, and recreational areas.
Lessons learned
There were five main lessons learned about running participatory initiatives through ICTs, which have both specific implications for Latin American countries and implications for participatory democracy more broadly.
First, people seem to be more willing to participate when the topics affect their daily lives versus a broader theme, such as education.
Second, it is more effective to do personal promotion of these participatory processes through public figures than communicating the processes via impersonal ads on social media.
Third, it is not enough to provide a platform, application, or means to participate. Rather, you must engage with participants people day-to-day and be responsive — people expect feedback from the organizers of participatory processes regarding their topics and opinions, so you must be close to the participants throughout the process, not just at the beginning and end.
Fourth, you must communicate clearly the goal of the process and what you hope to achieve — it is not enough to ask for participation without explaining why this participation is important. People demand that they want to know what will happen with their proposal once the process as ended.
Finally, it is more effective to organize and deploy binding civic engagement processes — those that can have an impact on the life of the people. Rather than merely asking for participation, the preference is taking the input from communities, studying it, and implementing the most important issues raised.
Challenges
There were three main challenges impacting initiative.
First, given the aforementioned cultural and political climate in Paraguay, recruitment and participation were relatively low, as there was an apparently general lack of interest among publics to engage in civic processes.
Second, there were various technological problems that posed issues during the course of the Participa project; however, these did not impact the outcomes.
Lastly, there were challenges in managing the project from an administrative standpoint, which slowed down the progress of Participa at various moments.
Next Steps
While the Participa project has concluded, future steps will move beyond generating participation by looking at how to manage the volume of information that is generated through civic engagement processes. One of these next steps will investigate how researchers can use tools such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze the content generated through participatory processes, including the tools best suited for this level of analysis and how to make sense of what participants are asking for.
Additional materials and resources
Publications:
Saldivar, J., Daniel, F., Cernuzzi, L., & Casati, F. (2019). Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement: A Study on the Benefits of Integration with Social Networking. ACM Transactions on Social Computing, 2(1).
Saldivar, J., Parra, C., Alcaraz, M., Arteta, R., & Cernuzzi, L. (2019). Civic Technology for Social Innovation. Computer Supported Collaborative Work, 28(1-2), pp. 169-207.
Open-source software:
Other resources:
To learn more about current AppCivist initiatives, click here.
Contact
Jorge Saldivar, Postdoctoral Researcher, Social Link Analytics Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
Website: http://me.jorgesaldivargalli.com/
Email: jorgesaldivar@gmail.com