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Deliberative Platform Design: The Case Study of the Online Discussions in Decidim Barcelona

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10540))

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Abstract

With the irruption of ICTs and the crisis of political representation, many online platforms have been developed with the aim of improving participatory democratic processes. However, regarding platforms for online petitioning, previous research has not found examples of how to effectively introduce discussions, a crucial feature to promote deliberation. In this study we focus on the case of Decidim Barcelona, the online participatory-democracy platform launched by the City Council of Barcelona in which proposals can be discussed with an interface that combines threaded discussions and comment alignment with the proposal. This innovative approach allows to examine whether neutral, positive or negative comments are more likely to generate discussion cascades. The results reveal that, with this interface, comments marked as negatively aligned with the proposal were more likely to engage users in online discussions and, therefore, helped to promote deliberative decision making.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.decidim.barcelona/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.gov.uk/petition-government.

  3. 3.

    https://www.yrpri.org.

  4. 4.

    https://decide.madrid.es/.

  5. 5.

    http://www.irekia.euskadi.eus/.

  6. 6.

    https://www.decidim.barcelona/api/docs.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Pablo Aragón & Vicenç Gómez

  2. Eurecat, Technology Center of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Pablo Aragón & Andreas Kaltenbrunner

  3. Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Antonio Calleja-López & Arnau Monterde

  4. ALabs.org, Madrid, Spain

    Andrés Pereira

  5. Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Xabier E. Barandiaran

  6. School of Social Work, UPV/EHU, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

    Xabier E. Barandiaran

Authors
  1. Pablo Aragón
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  2. Andreas Kaltenbrunner
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  3. Antonio Calleja-López
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  4. Andrés Pereira
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  5. Arnau Monterde
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  6. Xabier E. Barandiaran
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  7. Vicenç Gómez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pablo Aragón .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Afra Mashhadi

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Taha Yasseri

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 5.
figure 5

Discussion page of a proposal in Decidim Barcelona for building a municipal ice skating rink. The hybrid interface combines both conversation threading and coloring, i.e., positive and negative first level comments include green and red labels, respectively (the interface at that time colored the full text of positive and negative comments). (Color figure online)

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Table 1. Top proposals in Decidim Barcelona by the number of comments. An English translation is indicated in parentheses.
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Aragón, P. et al. (2017). Deliberative Platform Design: The Case Study of the Online Discussions in Decidim Barcelona. In: Ciampaglia, G., Mashhadi, A., Yasseri, T. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10540. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_22

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