In September 2015 the Madrid City Council opened "Decide Madrid", a portal to discuss and decide the city model through debates and proposals. Debates were conceived as discussion threads opened and commented by any citizen. Proposals were designed to allow citizens to publish petitions, receive support from other citizens and finally run a public voting of the entire population. The present work is the analysis of Decide Madrid conducted within the EU-funded D-CENT project in collaboration with the Area of Citizen Participation, Transparency and Open Government of the City Council. The goal of the study is to reveal insights that provide feedback for the refinement of the platform. First we address the distribution of activity over time and observed peaks of activity. In the first week, users could only debate and, once proposals were available, activity focused on them rather than on debates. This might be explained because citizens were engaged in the possibility of achieving tangible political goals instead of just debating as they daily do in online social networks. When this pattern emerged, the managers indicated that debates would be improved by the participation of political representatives. Our results prove the success of this initiative. We also identify the community structure of the platform through social network analysis techniques. We find a well-connected structure without well-defined clusters of users: users were not strongly clustered around preferences. However, our analysis detects a cluster partially isolated from the main component of the network: a community of trolls mostly focused on goliardic actions. Finally, we assess a computational model to quantify the degree of deliberation given the structure of discussion threads, and present the results in an interactive visualization as a way to better understand how discussion builds Collective Intelligence.

1. From citizen data to
the wisdom of crowds
Assessing the success of Decide Madrid
Pablo Aragón
Universitat Pompeu Fabra & Eurecat
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

2. D-CENT
Europe-wide project creating open, secure and privacy-aware tools for
direct democracy and economic empowerment.
 develops the building blocks of an open, decentralised, privacy-
aware Digital Ecosystem
 implements a distributed and standardised identity management giving
citizens control over their personal and social data
 enable real-time collective democratic deliberation and decision
making, sharing of open data, and social digital currencies for the
common good
 promote large-scale adoption of open standards, free software,
open data and open APIs
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

3. D-CENT
 builds on Europe’s largest experiments in direct democracy:
 Open Ministry crowdsourcing site linked into parliament in Finland
 The e-democracy website Better Reykjavik in Iceland
 Various platforms used by Spanish grassroots citizen coalitions.
 helps social movements developing next generation of public,
federated, privacy-aware architectures and tools for direct
democracy and economic empowerment .
 grows long-term alternatives to today’s highly centralized platforms and
power structures and promote …provide a positive vision of collective
intelligence in democracy in the XXI century.
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

4. Community engagement
and maximising
outreach
Blockchain ExperimentsSocio-economic
Impact & Evidence
Open standards
Tools
tools.dcentproject.eu
Large scale pilots
Barcelona, Madrid, Helsinki, Reykjavik
Multidisciplinary research
New citizen movements; economic models based on knowledge commons;
distributed identity systems; digital social currencies
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

5. Collaboration with the Area of Citizen
Participation, Transparency and Open
Government of the Madrid City Council.
Data Analysis of Decide Madrid in order to
monitor usage patterns, guide the
development of the platform and enhance
user experience in order to foster citizen
participation.
Open source technologies to enable the
integration of data visualization features.
Multidisciplinary Research
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

6. Open Government Portal of Madrid
In September 2015 the new City Council of Madrid launched the new Open
Government Portal of Madrid:
 Participation - DECIDE MADRID
Space to discuss and decide the city model (debates, citizen
proposals, participatory budgets, collaborative laws, etc…).
 Transparency
Space to review data related to the City Council management (name
and salary of the Mayor and councillors, government plans, contracts,
public agenda, etc…) and to request access to additional information.
 Open Data
Open access to databases owned by the City Council of Madrid.
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

7. Decide Madrid
Debates
Discussion threads opened and
commented by any citizen.
Proposals
Petitions published by citizens to:
 receive support from other
citizens through debates
 run a public voting of the entire
population
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

8. BetaDemIC
Research network to provide feedback
into Decide Madrid:
 Political Framework
 Communication
 Data Analysis (D-CENT project)
Growth Hacking Process

9. BetaDemIC Data Analysis
 Diffusion Campaigns
Which quantitative indicators can measure the impact of the
November advertising campaign on the platform activity?
 Community Structure
How can we characterize the structure of communities of users
around specific topics and/or profiles?
 Proposal Lifecycle
Proposals were available since mid-September.
What is the performance of this core functionality?
 User Lifecycle
How do users interact when they sign up?
 Online Deliberation
Deliberation is one of the key concepts for Decide Madrid.
Which metrics can quantify the level of deliberation in the debates?
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

10. Diffusion Campaigns
Activity focused on
proposals rather
than on debates.
Citizens were
engaged in the
possibility of
achieving tangible
political goals.
Debates with
representatives
improved their
performance.
Debate
Comment to debate
Proposal
Comment to proposal
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

11. Community Structure
Well-connected
structure without well-
defined clusters of
users: users were not
strongly clustered
around preferences.
A cluster is partially
isolated from the main
component of the
network: a community
of trolls focused on
goliardic actions.
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

12. Community Structure
The co-tag network is
a very dense graph
but relevant tags are
clustered in:
 Green nodes
mobility, health
and environment.
 Red nodes
civil rights and
social services,
 Blue nodes
neighbourhoods
of Madrid,
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

13. Proposals Lifecycle
Many of the most supported proposals were published in the first days of the platform
0-100 supports
101-1000 supports
>1000 supports
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

14. Users Lifecycle
Many users signed up
when new things
happen:
 Debates
 Proposals
 Debates with
representatives
Diffusion campaign
brought many people
who published new
proposals rather than
commenting old ones.
Debate
Comment to debate
Proposal
Comment to proposal
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

15. Online Deliberation
Representation and Argumentation as prerequisites for Deliberation
Gonzalez-Bailon S., Kaltenbrunner A., Banchs R. E. (2010)
The Structure of Political Discussion Networks:
A Model for the Analysis of E-Deliberation,
Journal of Information Technology, 25, 2010, pp 230-243.
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

16. Online Deliberation
Visualization Tool for Collective Awareness in a Platform of Citizen Proposals
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

17. Online Deliberation
h-index for quantifying Representation and Argumentation
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

18. Conclusions
Key principle: Citizens control their own data.
To turn citizen data into the Wisdom of the Crowds, citizens must also
own open, effective and user-friendly data visualization tools.
Join us!
 Democracy Lab
Workshops, hackathons and open
sessions for democratic participation
(23-27 May, Medialab-Prado)
 The Commons technology and the
right to a democratic city Conference
(27-28 May, Museo Reina Sofia)
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

19. More info at tools.centproject.eu
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona

20. Thank you
for your time
Website: www.dcentproject.eu
Twitter: @dcentproject
Vimeo: vimeo.com/dcentproject
Slideshare: slideshare.net/dcentproject
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme for research, technological development and
demonstration under grant agreement no 610349.
TICTeC 2016 Conference, 27-28 April, Barcelona