Decidimos.cl
A deliberative exercise A deliberative exercise
Roles:
User Researcher
Developer
Facilitator
After a social uprising in Chile, the work for creating a new constitution started. Decidimos.cl is the result of a research project that looked to inform the writing of the document by bringing the voices of female scientist to discuss the role of knowledge and propose an initiative to Constitutional Convention.
Decidimos.cl
Date
July 2021 - January 2022
The Pitch
Decidimos is a virtual space for asynchronious participation and deliberation, facilitated by team members and structured in participation modules.
Technologies Used
Ruby, Decidim, PostgreSQL, Zoom, Miro Board.
Team
Javiera Barandiarán, Sebastián Ureta, Maite Salazar, Pedro Tello, Camila Torralbo, Pedro Poblete Lasserre.
Partner institutions
Millenium Scientific Initiative, iBio, Red de Investigadoras, Global Studies UC Santa Barbara, CECTS Universidad Alberto Hurtado.
The Process
Ideation: July 2021
The team approached me for a previous experience implementing a smaller participatory process using Consul, a citizen participation tool for an open, transparent and democratic government. The team wanted to implement something similar, but they hadn't decided yet neither the scope of the participation, nor whom to get involved.
The ideation process consisted of three workshops with four objectives: 1. Identify and map stakeholders; 2. Empathize and understand the needs of the users; 3. Define what deliberation means in virtual spaces; 4. Define possible interactions.
Having a better understanding of what they wanted, the team went looking for partners and the design and implementation aspects of the platform were put on hold.
Building: October 2021
In order to shorten development times, but increase the possibilities of participation, another participatory platform was chosen: Decidim. Similar to Consul, Decidim is an open source digital platform for citizen participation, but with a higher level of complexity for managing multiple participatory processes.
Decidim was deployed in a cloud service managed by the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a static landing page was created to serve as an outreach tool.
Managing: November 2021 - December 2021
A content team was in charge of designing the participatory processes that were going to be implemented in the platform, and later helping the participants to carry out the participation process. My role during this time was to serve as webmaster and train the content team in the usage of the platform.
Minor changes to the code of Decidim were made, but the core of the platform was used as it came.
Facilitation: January 2022
At the end of the participatory process, a synchoronious workshop was planned for wrapping up the discussions and give opportunities for a final reflection from the participants. I was asked to help design said workshop and co-facilitate it.
The final results of said wokshop were collected and presented to the Constitutional Convention.
The Impact
The themes discussed in this participatory process were part of the final draft of the constitution, and the process was deemed as a success by the team.
The process is currently being shared in a series of short podcast episodes.
