Awesome

Participa

Introduction

Citizens’ participation in the democratic life — either local or national — is one of the most urgent and challenging issues of today’s societies. Motivated by the efforts of the governments of Iceland, Finland and United States, an increasing number of elected authorities and political leaders have begun to take actions toward more inclusive, transparent and participatory administrations.

Boosted by the World Wide Web, online civic-engagement practices have been appearing all over the world seeking to involve citizens in public consultations, deliberation, and decision-making processes oriented to address issues of public interest, such as law reforms, policy making and innovations in the public sector. In this context, innovative ideas and valuable opinions are more likely to appear when the group of participants is large and diverse.

Understanding that the largest virtual communities today are to be found in popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus, Participa is a concrete effort toward bringing internet-mediated civic participation tools closer to these large online communities. Apart from reaching wider and larger sources of information, we aim at reducing as much as possible the participation barrier, enabling people to take part on modern civic engagement initiatives by using familiar technology, such as social networking services.

By providing a flexible and generic model, Participa enables public institutions, politicians, and elected authorities to efficiently organize, run, and harvest the information generated during civic participation initiatives. It also allows to enrich and complement already existing initiatives with opinions generated within social network communities.

It is social network "agnostic" making possible to reach different social network communities simultaneously, favoring inclusiveness and diversity. It can be used as a stand-alone application or it can be integrated with existing tools.

Model

Participa exploits the power and advantages (user-friendliness, worldwide connectivity, real-time information sharing) of social network services to reach and engage social network communities into online civic participation initiatives. It leverages, almost, its full operation on the native and ubiquitous features of social networks: posts, comments, votes (rt, likes, +1), and hashtags. In particular, hashtags play an important role since they are the mechanism used by Participa to identify, collect, and classify the information generated within the consultations. Because of this, it can only work on hashtag-supported social networking sites, like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Currently, only Twitter is supported.

In participa's model the consultantions (ideation, deliberation) are structured in a hierarchical model composed of three elements: initiatives, campaigns, and challenges. The initiative is the container of the consultant details. There, the organizer, whoever public institution, elected authority, politician, civic organization, defines the name and description of the consultant, as well as, the hashtag that will be used to identify the information generated within the consultant and the social network in which the consultant will be run. Initiatives are composed of one or more campaigns, which are the phases or stages in which the consultant process is divided into. Finally, campaigns contain challenges, which are the questions, topics, or issues to be discussed in the consultantion.

Workflow

Participa's operation is divided in four simple steps, as it is outlined in the following picture.

• A public institution (politician, elected authority, civic organization) creates an initiative, its corresponding campaigns and challenges, and the hashtags to be used (step 1).
• The initiative's organizer (a public institution in this case) "deploys" the initiative in one or multiple social networks (step 2).
• Citizens, which are users of the social networks where the initiative was deployed, engage by publishing posts containing the hashtags of the initiative and the hashtag of the challenge willing to "solve" (step 3).
• As soon as Participa finds posts containing the hashtags of one of its registered initiative, it collects and processes them. Through a tabular-based dashboard the answers are presented to the initiative's organizer (step 4). In addition, participa can be programed to sinchronize its content with a remote platform.

Participa in action!

The California Report Card (CRC) is a jointly coordinated effort between the Data and Democracy Initiative of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) of the University of California, Berkeley and the Lt. Governor of California Gavin Newsom.

By employing a web-based application, it engages citizens in discussion about public concern issues. Specifically, CRC allows, in a first phase, to grade six timely topics and, in a second phase, to propose ideas that merit the attention of the state government. The left side of the following picture illustrates the alphabetical pad used in the grading phase, while the right side illustrates the user-interface of the ideation phase.

Participa is currently being used to enable citizens of California to participate in CRC directly via Twitter. In this case, The California Report Card and #careportcard were defined as the initiative and the initiative hashtag, respectively. The two phases of CRC, "grading issues" and "proposing new issues", were set as the campaigns of the initiative. The six CRC issues were configured as the challenges of the grading campaign, while the request for new issues was defined as the challenge of the proposing campaign. Each challenge was associated to a unique hashtag. Finally, Twitter was chosen as the social network to deploy the initiative.

On the left of the next picture, it is represented an example of grading a CRC issue via Twitter. Basically, it is simply required to post a tweet with the grade — C in this case —, the hashtag of the initiative, #careportcard, and the hashtag associated to the issue, #affordcolleges. The right side of the picture illustrates how participants can propose new issues through Twitter. Specifically, they send a suggestion together with the hashtag of the initiative, #careportcard, and the hashtag of the challenge, #newissue.

Additional information on how to take part of CRC through Twitter can be found here.

Installation

1. Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/joausaga/participa.git

2. Go inside the repository folder and execute pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies

3. Create a mysql database

4. Rename the file participa/settings.py.sample to participa/settings.py

5. Set the configuration parameters of the database in settings.py

      DATABASES = {
          ...
              'NAME': '',
              'USER': '',
              'PASSWORD': '',
              'HOST': '',
              'PORT': '',
          ...
      }
   

6. Run python manage.py migrate to set up the database schema

7. Create a Twitter application and give it read and write permissions

8. Rename the file cparte/config.sample to cparte/config

9. Set the parameters of your recently created Twitter application in cparte/config

       [twitter_api]
       consumer_key = YOUR_TWITTER_APP_CONSUMER_KEY
       consumer_secret = YOUR_TWITTER_APP_CONSUMER_SECRET
       token = YOUR_TWITTER_APP_TOKEN
       token_secret = YOUR_TWITTER_APP_TOKEN_SECRET
   

10. Load initial settings python manage.py loaddata config_data.json

11. Install Rabbit MQ broker. Unix installation instructions

License

MIT

Technologies

1. Django Framework 1.7
2. MySQL database and its corresponding python package
3. Tweepy a python-based Twitter API client
4. Django Admin Bootstrapped App
5. Django Bootstrap3 App
6. Google API Client
7. Celery
8. Celery for Django
9. Rabbit MQ

Let me know

If you use participa, please write me a short message with a link to your project. It is not mandatory, but I will really appreciate it!