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In 2015 Ada Colau, an activist with no experience in government, became mayor of Barcelona. She called for a democratic revolution, and for the last two years city hall, working with civic-minded coders and cryptographers, has been designing the technological tools to make it happen.
Their efforts have centred on two things. The first is opening up governance through participatory processes and greater transparency. And the second is redefining the smart city to ensure that it serves its citizens, rather than the other way around.
The group started by creating a digital participatory platform, Decidim ("We Decide", in Catalan). Now the public can participate directly in government as they would on social media, by suggesting ideas, debating them, and voting with their thumbs. Decidim taps into the potential of social networks: the information spreading on Twitter, or the relationships on Facebook. All of these apply to politics — and Decidim seeks to channel them, while guaranteeing personal privacy and public transparency in a way these platforms don't.
"We are experimenting with a hybrid of online and offline participatory democracy," says Francesca Bria, Barcelona's Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer. "We used Decidim to create the government agenda — over 70 per cent of the proposals come directly from citizens. Over 40,000 citizens proposed these policies. And many more citizens were engaged in offline collective assemblies and consultations."
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:10PM (4 children)
What if your account needed to be verified - e.g. to get a Decidim account you had to go to the DMV (or wherever) with your driver's license to make sure it's connected to a real person? That would mean you would have to forgo some measure of anonymity to participate in the civic forum, but is that necessarily a bad thing? No reason you couldn't still hide from the public at large behind a pseudonym, but the administrators would know who you are.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:18PM
Other than your vote, what other act of political contribution can be done anonymous?
There are a few I can think about where you can hide in the masses. (Or not much masses but still go unnoticed.) E.g., going to listen to a city-hall meeting, join protests and rally's, ...
But sending in proposals, talking to politicians, joining your town's civil advisory committees (if that exists where you live), ... all things that this platform tries to make easier. None of those are anonymous.
(And you can argue that in the surveillance state, the ones that were as joining protests aren't any longer)
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:29PM (2 children)
No problem. Your identity is verified, but the provisioning process is anonymous. You could walk into a privacy booth, be handed a couple of 256 bit IDs to vote. The IDs are not associated with a citizen at all, and they don't need to be. All you need to do is control who can be provisioned, and who cannot. With 256 bit IDs, good luck with brute forcing votes.
This would allow people to see a full list of votes, and they could cryptographically verify the integrity of their vote.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @09:00PM (1 child)
Hmm, can it defeat rubber hose cryptanalysis when Vinnie needs to borrow your ID the next day?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday May 22 2018, @09:25PM
Yes. You give the "extortion" ID to Vinny. The one where whoever he sends to the voting booth is met by police at the exit.
Like VeraCrypt (Formerly TrueCrypt) with their Matryoshka containers.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.