Section: New Results

AppCivist: Engineering Software Assemblies for Participatory Democracy

Participants : Valérie Issarny, Cristhian Parra Trepowski, Animesh Pathak.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are profoundly changing the nature of human social and environmental interactions. One such change concerns innovations in the way that citizens both interact with government institutions and engage in greater self-government through democratic assembly and collective action. Our research focuses on this transformation of politics, asking how new social media can contribute to new forms of democracy. The pervasive use of ICT suggests that they present an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the constraints of time and space that are generally thought to make the exercise of a more direct and engaging democracy at a large scale practically impossible. In effect, ICT challenge the assumption that citizens of large political units must be content with systems of representative democracy that typically produce a more passive and legalistic citizenship than an active and participatory one.

To consider this challenge, we undertake a pragmatic and modest investigation of how ICT and more precisely software systems can contribute to enabling direct democracy at a large scale. Our research has two immediate objectives. One is to engineer software that leverages the reach of the Internet and the powers of computation to enhance the experience and efficacy of civic participation. The second is to use the ICT software platform to induce the associational forms of a new digitally-inspired citizenship among residents.

Our research is multi-disciplinary in nature, bringing together anthropologists and computer scientists to coinvestigate how to build software systems that promote the development of such digital democratic assemblies and citizens. Our initiative is further rooted in the principles of social activism in that we want to provide citizens with new software systems that help them articulate projects, deliberate directly among themselves, and mobilize activities. A number of digital tools and in particular social networks and web-based content management systems already support aspects of social activism. However, these tools need to be customized as much as composed to become really useful for activists. To that end, we have set the principles of the AppCivist service-oriented software platform in [24] . AppCivist is built around the vision of letting activist users compose their own applications, called Assemblies, using relevant Internet-based components that enable various aspects of democratic assembly and collective action. Starting from a social science perspective, we identified the following high-level categories of functions for AppCivist Assemblies: Mobilizing people, Co-creating proposals, Acting collectively, and Communicating.

Following, we have concentrated on developing the first instance of AppCivist for Participatory Budgeting (PB), as a representative use case of participatory democracy. As a result, we are able to account for various initiatives in citizen participation, including lessons learned from existing PB campaigns worldwide since their emergence in Brazil in the late 1980s. Research contributions more specifically relate to [22] :

State of the art survey and analysis of software systems that contribute to enabling participatory democracy, which lacks an adequate bottom-up approach to digital proposal making. Such an approach would allow groups of citizens to self-assemble on the basis of common interests and enable the resulting citizen assemblies to initiate ideas and elaborate on them using convenient assemblies of software services.

State of the art survey and analysis of digital tools oriented towards Participatory Budgeting, where leveraging ICT to enable truly urban-scale participation in PB campaigns remains unrealized. AppCivist-PB utilizes the concepts of citizen assembly and software assembly to address this challenge.

AppCivist-PB software architecture enabling citizen and software assemblies, which following the design of AppCivist introduced in [24] strictly adheres to the principles of service orientation. In that framework, citizen assemblies allow registered users and groups of users to self assemble into higher-level groups to coordinate idea generation and to elaborate proposals through versioning. In a complementary way, software assemblies adhere to the well-known principle of service composition, configuring software services and components oriented towards the implementation of functions supporting participatory democracy.

AppCivist-PB prototype permits an early assessment of the effectiveness of AppCivist-PB in supporting actual urban-scale PB campaigns, such as the one of Paris in 2015. In addition, the prototype provides an opportunity to experiment with developing service wrappers to integrate third-party services (e.g., Etherpad.org) into its software assemblies. In the near future, we intend to automate this integration as much as possible, building on our background in the synthesis of mediators [13] , [12] .

This research is carried out in collaboration with the Social Apps Lab at CITRIS at UC Berkeley in the context of CityLab@Inria and Inria@SiliconValley.