skip to main content
10.1145/2889160.2889221acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Engineering software assemblies for participatory democracy: the participatory budgeting use case

Published: 14 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The worldwide use of the Internet and social networking has transformed the constraints of time and space in human interaction: we can now be heard at a massive scale unprecedented in human history. As a result, information and communication technologies may enable citizens to undertake both government through direct assembly and collective action at a scale and an efficacy previously considered impossible. Our research concerns this opportunity to leverage a new sort of political life. We focus specifically on how software systems may enable participatory democracy, that is, the participation of citizens in democratic assembly, action, and governance. As an initial step, we have developed a service-oriented software platform, called AppCivist-PB, focused on a specific, yet representative use case of participatory democracy, namely, Participatory Budgeting (PB for short). PB is an allocation process used in many cities around the world through which they commit a percentage of their annual budget (often 5%) to implement citizen-proposed projects. In PB, residents of a city (or a higher level territorial organization), brainstorm, develop, and select project proposals that local government institutions are required to fund and implement. The key contribution of AppCivist-PB is to enable the cohesive creation of both citizen and software assemblies that together implement a given participatory budgeting campaign.

References

[1]
E. M. Andriescu, T. Martinez, and V. Issarny. Composing Message Translators and Inferring their Data Types using Tree Automata. In Proc. FASE, 2015.
[2]
E. Aragonès and S. Sánchez-Pagés. A theory of participatory democracy based on the real case of porto alegre. European Economic Review, 53(1), 2009.
[3]
M. Asad and C. A. Le Dantec. Illegitimate civic participation: Supporting community activists on the ground. In Proc. CSCW, 2015.
[4]
G. Baiocchi, P. Heller, and M. Silva. Bootstrapping Democracy: Transforming Local Governance and Civil Society in Brazil. Stanford University Press, 2011.
[5]
A. Bennaceur, E. Andriescu, R. Speicys Cardoso, and V. Issarny. A Unifying Perspective on Protocol Mediation: Interoperability in the Future Internet. Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2015.
[6]
A. Bennaceur and V. Issarny. Automated synthesis of mediators to support component interoperability. IEEE TSE, 41(3), 2015.
[7]
C. Boulding and B. Wampler. Voice, votes, and resources: Evaluating the effect of participatory democracy on well-being. World development, 38(1), 2010.
[8]
Y. Cabannes. Participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy. Environment and Urbanization, 16(1), 2004.
[9]
E. Ganuza and G. Baiocchi. The power of ambiguity: How participatory budgeting travels the globe. Journal of Public Deliberation, 8(2), 2012.
[10]
D. Held. Models of democracy. Polity Press, 1987.
[11]
J. Holston. Urban citizenship and globalization. In Global City-Regions. Oxford University Press, 2001.
[12]
J. Holston. Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton University Press, 2008.
[13]
D. R. Insua, G. E. Kersten, J. Rios, and C. Grima. Towards decision support for participatory democracy. Information systems and e-business management, 6(2), 2008.
[14]
M. Leighninger. Using online tools to engage- and be engaged by- the public. Technical report, IBM Center for The Business of Government, 2011.
[15]
P. Newman, M. Ferrario, W. Simm, S. Forshaw, A. Friday, and J. Whittle. The role of design thinking and physical prototyping in social software engineering. In Proc. ICSE-SEIS, 2015.
[16]
A. Pathak, V. Issarny, and J. Holston. Appcivist: A service-oriented software platform for socially sustainable activism. In Proc. ICSE-SEIS, 2015.
[17]
T. Peixoto. Beyond theory: e-participatory budgeting and its promises for eparticipation. European Journal of ePractice, 7(5), 2009.
[18]
C. Piech, J. Huang, Z. Chen, C. B. Do, A. Y. Ng, and D. Koller. Tuned models of peer assessment in moocs. CoRR, 2013.
[19]
R. Saadi, M. A. Rahaman, V. Issarny, and A. Toninelli. Composing Trust Models towards Interoperable Trust Management. In Proc. Trust Management, 2011.
[20]
R. Sandoval-Almazan and J. R. Gil-Garcia. Towards cyberactivism 2.0? understanding the use of social media and other information technologies for political activism and social movements. Government Information Quarterly, 31(3), 2014.
[21]
Y. Sintomer, C. Herzberg, and A. RÃűcke. Participatory budgeting in europe: Potentials and challenges. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008.
[22]
UN-Habitat. 72 Perguntas frequentes sobre Orcamento Participativo (Portuguese Version). Urban Governance Toolkit Series. 2009.
[23]
J. Van Dijk. Models of democracy and concepts of communication. Digital democracy: Issues of theory and practice, 2000.
[24]
B. Wampler and J. Hartz-karp. Participatory budgeting: Diffusion and outcomes across the world. Journal of Public Deliberation, 8(2), 2012.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Configurations of Digital Participatory BudgetingACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/363514431:2(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
  • (2024)What Can Interactive Visualization Do for Participatory Budgeting in Chicago?IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634331:1(415-425)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Contradicting Motivations in Civic Tech Software Development: Analysis of a Grassroots ProjectProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1109/ICSE-SEIS58686.2023.00021(157-163)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE '16: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion
May 2016
946 pages
ISBN:9781450342056
DOI:10.1145/2889160
Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 May 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. collaborative proposal making
  2. deliberation
  3. democratic assembly
  4. online participatory democracy
  5. participatory budgeting
  6. software composition
  7. versioning
  8. voting

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICSE '16
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)16
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Configurations of Digital Participatory BudgetingACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/363514431:2(1-28)Online publication date: 5-Feb-2024
  • (2024)What Can Interactive Visualization Do for Participatory Budgeting in Chicago?IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345634331:1(415-425)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Contradicting Motivations in Civic Tech Software Development: Analysis of a Grassroots ProjectProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1109/ICSE-SEIS58686.2023.00021(157-163)Online publication date: 17-May-2023
  • (2022)What design for Urban Design Justice?Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability10.1080/17549175.2022.2074522(1-22)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Selecting the Right Software for Supporting Participatory Budgeting in Local Government – Reviewing Suitable SolutionsElectronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia10.1007/978-3-031-04238-6_9(105-118)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2022
  • (2020)Social Participation Network: Linking Things, Services and People to Support Participatory ProcessesAdvanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops10.1007/978-3-030-49165-9_10(109-120)Online publication date: 16-May-2020
  • (2019)Universal Social Network BusACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/332333319:3(1-19)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2019
  • (2019)DEMOS: A Design Method for demOcratic information System2019 11th International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (KSE)10.1109/KSE.2019.8919427(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2019
  • (2019)Software engineering in civic tech a case study about code for IrelandProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1109/ICSE-SEIS.2019.14(41-50)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
  • (2019)Software Engineering in Civic Tech A Case Study about Code for Ireland2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS)10.1109/ICSE-SEIS.2019.00013(41-50)Online publication date: May-2019
  • Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media