The document discusses a technopolitical approach for the design of civic technologies. It summarizes research on how conversation threading impacts online discussions using the example of the Spanish news platform Menéame. It then describes the participatory design process of Metadecidim, an instance of the Decidim platform, which allows citizens to participate in deciding how the civic technology evolves through online and offline discussions. The document advocates for a technopolitical approach where citizens participate in shaping the design of civic technologies to promote more democratic outcomes.

1. A Technopolitical Approach
for the Design of
Civic Technologies
Pablo Aragón
Universitat Pompeu Fabra / Eurecat

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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Hello, World!
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PhD Fellow at the Artificial Intelligence and
Machine Learning group in Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Data Scientist at the Big Data & Data Science group
in Eurecat, Technology Centre of Catalonia.
Researcher at Decidim Team (Barcelona) and Participa
Lab - Medialab Prado (Madrid).
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Outline
● Affordances in online discussion
Conversation threading in Menéame
● Technopolitical approach
Participatory design in Metadecidim
● Final remarks
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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Outline
● Affordances in online discussion
Conversation threading in Menéame
● Technopolitical approach
Participatory design in Metadecidim
● Final remarks
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Emergence of platforms for
democratic processes which
engage a large number of
citizens in politics, e.g.,
● Debates
● Petitions
● Crowdlaw
● Accountability
Platform democracy
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● What civic technologies do I use
regularly? (including social media)
Open discussion
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Gdańsk (Poland)
● Platforms’ affordances (the
totality of possibilities they
offer) are often seen as
technical features.
● By definition, any technical
feature in a platform for digital
democracy has strong social and
political implications.
Platform neutrality
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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
● What civic technologies do I use
regularly? (including social media)
● What aspects of these technologies
affect me? Which ones frustrate me?
Open discussion
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Conversation threading (or not)
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Hierarchical
Messages are
arranged close to
their replies in
a tree-like
structure making
reciprocal
interactions
explicit
Linear
Messages are
presented in
order
(chronological)
regardless of
reply
relationships

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Related work
Online forums
● Threaded discussions are more effective in
building communities than traditional talk
(McVerry et al, 2007)
Chat platforms
● Hierarchical view mitigates the "co-text loss"
problem (Fuks et al, 2006)
● Hierarchical view improves coherence within the
discussion but receives lower ratings (Smith et
al, 2000)
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Related work
Email services
● Hierarchical view provides better local context
(Venolia et al, 2003)
● Linear view is generally accepted by most users
(Whittaker et al, 2011)
Online Social Networks
● Facebook change from linear to hierarchical
favoured participation but decreased depth
(Bendor et al, 2013)
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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
● What civic technologies do I use
regularly? (including social media)
● What aspects of these technologies
affect me? Which ones frustrate me?
● How have I decided to develop/deploy
discussions in civic technologies?
Open discussion
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Research gap
● The type of representation strongly affects communication
● To the best of our knowledge, the differences between
using a linear view or a hierarchical view have not been
yet investigated on a large and mature community of users
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Menéame, a unique case-study
● The most popular
Spanish social news
platform (Digg clone)
● Massively used in
grassroots movements
and political
discussion
● The original linear
interface was replaced
by a hierarchical one
in Jan 2015
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Question
How are discussion network structures
affected by the usage of
linear/hierarchical
conversation views?
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Dataset description
72,005 stories and 5,385,324 comments (2011-2015)
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Threads represented as network trees
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https://www.decidim.barcelona/processes/1/f/1/proposals/1094

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Threads after and before the change
Thread in 2013 Thread in 2015
(linear view) (hierarchical view)
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Framework for online deliberation
Deliberative discussions measured through the network
complexity(Gónzalez Bailón et al, 2010)
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Metric for online deliberation
Network complexity of
a discussion measured
through the h-index of
the thread structure
(Gómez et al, 2008)
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Statistical analysis of platform effects (Malik et al, 2016):
“The design and technical features of a given platform which
constrain, distort, and shape user behavior on that platform”
Regression discontinuity design
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Jan 2015 Jan 2015

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Deliberation (h-index) increases notably with conversation
threading (Jan 2015)
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Effects on online deliberation

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Conclusion
RQ: How are discussion network structures affected by the
usage of linear/hierarchical conversation views?
With the hierarchical view, the discussion network structures
are rhizomatic:
● Emergence of sub-discussions
● Larger levels of online deliberation
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24. #PDFCEE19
April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
● What civic technologies do I use
regularly? (including social media)
● What aspects of these technologies
affect me? Which ones frustrate me?
● How have I decided to develop/deploy
discussions in civic technologies?
● How did you engage people in online
discussions?
Open discussion
24

25. #PDFCEE19
April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Outline
● Affordances in online discussion
Conversation threading in Menéame
● Technopolitical approach
Participatory design in Metadecidim
● Final remarks
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Decidim Barcelona
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https://decidim.barcelona

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Decidim
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https://decidim.org/

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Gdańsk (Poland)
“Politics is about how we
decide, how that power is
exercised, and by whom”
Lessig, L. (2006). Code version 2.0. Available
at http://codev2.cc/download+remix/
A lesson not to be forgotten
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Gdańsk (Poland)
Metadecidim, a technopolitical approach
Platforms are not neutral.
Affordances are extraordinarily
able to affect their social and
political nature.
Who decides how we decide?
From a technopolitical approach,
participatory design, as done in
Metadecidim, favours the
democratic nature of digital
platforms.
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How to govern the code
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https://meta.decidim.org/
We have our own instance of Decidim to decide how to evolve Decidim
as a project (new features, bugs, support forum…) #EatYourOwnDogFood

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How to participate beyond the digital instance
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https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/eix-comunitat/
We have regular meetings to take decision in a participatory manner

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Gdańsk (Poland)
How to address challenges in an intelligent manner
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https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/eix-lab/
We have regular research seminars to bring knowledge from experts
and to co-design solutions (e.g., e-voting, dataviz, e-voting…)

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Collaborative documentation (AsciiDoc+GitHub) and training for
administrators, citizen participation technicians, participants…
How to share acquired knowledge
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https://docs.decidim.org/ https://edu.decidim.org/

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How to learn more about (Meta)Decidim
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We celebrate an Annual Metadecidim Conference… join us in 2019!

35. #PDFCEE19
April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Outline
● Affordances in online discussion
Conversation threading in Menéame
● Technopolitical approach
Participatory design in Metadecidim
● Final remarks
35

36. #PDFCEE19
April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
● What civic technologies do I use
regularly? (including social media)
● What aspects of these technologies
affect me? Which ones frustrate me?
● How have I decided to develop/deploy
discussions in civic technologies?
● How did you engage people in online
discussions?
● Do I participate as a developer of
civic technologies?
○ Yes. How are decisions made?
○ No. Would I like to participate
in their development? How?
Open discussion
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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Böttcher, L., Woolley-Meza, O., & Brockmann, D. (2017). Temporal dynamics of online
petitions. PloS one, 12(5), e0178062.
Chan, C. L., Lai, J., Hooi, B., & Davies, T. (2017, September). The Message or the
Messenger? Inferring Virality and Diffusion Structure from Online Petition Signature
Data. In International Conference on Social Informatics (pp. 499-517). Springer, Cham.
Dumas, C. L., LaManna, D., Harrison, T. M., Ravi, S. S., Kotfila, C., Gervais, N., ... &
Chen, F. (2015). Examining political mobilization of online communities through
e-petitioning behavior in We the People. Big Data & Society, 2(2), 2053951715598170.
Fuks, H., Pimentel, M., & Pereira de Lucena, C. J. (2006). RU-Typing-2-Me? Evolving a
chat tool to increase understanding in learning activities. International Journal of
Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 1(1), 117-142.
Gómez, V., Kappen, H. J., Litvak, N., & Kaltenbrunner, A. (2013). A likelihood-based
framework for the analysis of discussion threads. World Wide Web, 16(5-6), 645-675.
Hale, S. A., John, P., Margetts, H., & Yasseri, T. (2018). How digital design shapes
political participation: A natural experiment with social information. PloS one, 13(4),
e0196068.
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References

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Gdańsk (Poland)
Hale, S. A., Margetts, H., & Yasseri, T. (2013, May). Petition growth and success rates
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Malik, M. M., & Pfeffer, J. (2016). Identifying Platform Effects in Social Media Data. In
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Schmidt, J. H., & Johnsen, K. (2014). On the use of the e-petition platform of the German
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April 4-5, 2019
Gdańsk (Poland)
Squartini, T., Picciolo, F., Ruzzenenti, F., & Garlaschelli, D. (2013). Reciprocity of
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References

40. Dziekuję
Thank you
@elaragon
https://elaragon.wordpress.com
pablo.aragon@upf.edu
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