Madrid Decide

Acerca de Madrid Decide

En septiembre de 2015 en nuevo Ayuntamiento de Madrid lanza el portal Decide Madrid, una página para la participación ciudadana. Así se abre un nueva vía de participación basada en la democracia directa. Esta herramienta tiene vocación de ser un eje transversal a los procesos de participación que se desarrollan en la ciudad, una línea de participación más al servicio del proyecto político de participación en Madrid.

This web, under the motto “La ciudad que quieres será la ciudad que quieras” ii is integrated into the new Open Government Portal of Madrid (see Figure 1). The portal consists of the following sections:  Participation (Decide Madrid): A space to discuss and decide the city model (debates, citizen proposals, participatory budgets, collaborative laws, etc.).  Transparency (upcoming): A 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 (upcoming): Open access to databases owned by the City Council of Madrid. Decide Madrid is based on Consul, an application software under an open source AGPLv3 licenseiii . The code of Consul is maintained in the GitHub repositoryiv of the City Council. In this study we have analysed the two functionalities of Decide Madrid: debates and citizen proposals.

Home

La configuración de la página principal ha cambiado varias veces. (Imágenes? explicación?). Esta configuración es de especial relevancia como espacio de recibimiento del ciudadano y distribución del tráfico al resto de la página. (Hablar de algoritmos??) GIF evolución home:

Desde la página principal se accede a procesos participados puntuales de la ciudad (Plaza España, Presupuestos Participativos) y a un proceso constante y distribuido de participación a través de debates y propuestas. En el presente documento nos centramos en este proceso de participación.

Debates

Debates have been conceived to let any user open and participate in any discussion on any topic. Debates are presented as separated threads and users can discuss among themselves by commenting the initial post or the nested comments. Both posts and comments are also positively/negatively voted by other users. These votes and the corresponding scores are stored to serve as input of the sorting algorithm for debates and comments. The user accounts of the City Council politicians are highlighted to boost their participation in public discussions and to establish a direct communication between citizens and representatives. Pablo Soto, councillor of the Area of Citizen Participation and Transparency and responsible of the platform.

Proposals have been designed to allow citizens to publish petitions, receive support from other citizens and then force a public voting of the entire population of Madrid. Citizen proposals are regulated in Madrid since September 2015v and the process follows these steps:

 1. Generation: A user publishes a proposal. 

 2. Support: Users from Madrid are able to sign the proposal by clicking the corresponding “Support” button. In order to verify that proposals are only signed by users who truly belong to Madrid, users interested in supporting proposals have to complete the census verification form in their account settings (see Figure 4). To advance to the next step, proposals must be approved by more than 53,760 supporters (2% of Madrilenian citizens  FP7 – CAPS - 2013 D-CENT D2.4 Data Visualisation: From Citizen Data to Wisdom of the Crowd Page 6 of 43 older than 16). Also, proposals can be commented and comments can be voted following the same structure of debates, as showed in Figure 2. 3. 

4. Decision: Once a proposal receives the required number of supporting citizens, it gets announced on the web portal to increase its visibility among citizens. After 45 days the proposal is moved to a specific voting area of the web in order to be approved or rejected by verified users. 

5. Making: If the proposal gets approved in the previous step, the Government of the Madrid must accept the decision and execute it. To this end, the Government will produce technical reports on its legality, feasibility and cost, taking into account the affected sectors. All reports will be published to ensure the proper development of the proposal. Every action of the above process can be performed both online (through the web portal) and offline (in the Citizen Support Offices of Madridvi).