The festival reaches its fifth edition.
The latest edition of Decidim Fest took place between 18 and 20 October, under the slogan Democracy, Technology and Collective Artificial Intelligence. Held at the Canòdrom – Center for Digital and Democratic Innovation, the annual meeting of the Decidim community raised questions such as: what is the deployment and implementation of AI? What opportunities does AI offer us to understand and think about 21st century democracy, understanding its collective dimension? Can AI be an instrument to strengthen democracies and people’s capacity to take part in the management of common things? Can AI help to build more democratic societies?
The festival opened with the Metadecidim Assembly on the afternoon of Wednesday 18 October, where the progress of the project and its sustainability plan were shared.
Thursday 19 October began with the institutional opening, with the presence of Jaume López Hernández, General Director of Governance and Institutional Relations, Innovation and Democratic Quality Programme, Andreu Francisco, General Director of the Localret Consortium, and Arnau Monterde, Director of Democratic Innovation at Barcelona City Council. This introduction was followed by the speech entitled Artificial Intelligence and Collective for Democracy, given by Carol Romero and Arnau Monterde, as representatives of Decidim.org, as well as Localret and Barcelona City Council, respectively. The programme continued with the proposal of four panels:
Decidim Stories: Use Cases Beyond Cities brought together three Decidim experiences in different contexts: that of the Brazilian federal government with Brasil Participativo, represented by Carla de Paiva Bezerra, Director of Digital Participation and Network Communication of the General Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil, that of the province of Guipuzcoa with Gi2030, presented by the researcher Antonio Casado,and that of EMVI Project, committed to enhancing the participation of migrants in the design and application of policies that affect them, implemented in Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovenia, and represented by Daryna Sterina, project coordinator in Germany and Romy Grasgruber-Kerl, founder in Austria.
Artificial Intelligence for Citizen Participation brought together two of the most relevant free software experiences in terms of democratic participation and its founders, Róbert Bjarnason (Citizens Foundation) and Xabier Barandiaran (Decidim) to reflect on the challenges, powers and limits of their interaction with AI.
Ethical Challenges for the Democratisation of Artificial Intelligence brought together researcher Sara Suárez (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, UOC) and activist Ashwin Singh (Queer In AI) to think about algorithmic justice and the ethics of AI.
Re Imaginations of the Future: Feminist Practices for the Defense of Human Rights in the AI Era proposed an exploration of data governance and AI from a feminist and decolonial perspective, with Nandini Chami (IT for Change, A+Alliance) and Rayén Jara Mitrovich (Radical Data).
The festival closed with the session on Friday 20 October, dedicated to the 6 workshops and 10 short presentations that were selected from the proposals received in the open call. A morning programmed from and for the community, conceived to exchange knowledge, opinions and experiences on the use of Decidim.
This year’s Decidim Fest was part of the European Capital of Democracy, which began in September and will last for a year. More than forty activities are planned around participation and democratic innovation, which will be presented in different parts of the city and the metropolitan region of Barcelona.The Director of Democratic Innovation of the Barcelona City Council, Arnau Monterde, will soon participate in the session Public Code & Technologies: Upcoming Digital and Democratic Challenges for Europe, which will take place in the framework of the Smart City Expo World Congress on 8 November at 9.15 am at the Fira Barcelona. You can check the rest of the programme on the ECoD Barcelona website.