La Direction de l’Habitat, la Politique de la ville et la Citoyenneté de la Ville de Colombes a sollicité Open Source Politics fin 2020 pour une mission d’accompagnement de leur politique de démocratie participative.
Présentation de la mission d’évaluation de la démocratie participative de Colombes par Open Source Politics
Cette mission se compose de plusieurs volets. Open Source Politics a en premier lieu déployé une plateforme Decidim de démocratie participative. Nous avons ensuite accompagné la ville dans l’organisation du premier budget participatif sur la plateforme. Troisièmement, nous avons rédigé un rapport d’analyse du dispositif de démocratie locale comprenant des recommandations structurées pour le futur Dans ce but, l’équipe d’Open Source Politics a analysé les dispositifs de démocratie participative passés et présents, afin d’en tirer des recommandations structurées pour le futur.
Histoire de la démocratie participative de la ville de Colombes
Colombes est l’une des plus grandes communes du département des Hauts-de-Seine en région Île-de-France. Composée de 86 052 habitant·es, la ville rayonne ainsi sur l’ensemble du bassin francilien. En matière de participation citoyenne, une politique a été initiée dès les années 2000. D’une part, la ville de Colombes a instauré des conseils de quartier et le recueil de « diagnostic partagés » ainsi que l’organisation de balades urbaines. D’autre part, cette politique s’est accélérée avec le lancement du budget participatif en mars 2021.
La ville de Colombes a créé de nombreuses instances participatives dans le but de susciter la participation citoyenne. Il convient de citer à ce sujet les Conseils de quartier à Colombes, les Conseils citoyens, le Conseil communal des jeunes, le Conseil de Sages et l’Agora.
Les neufs conseils de quartier
Les conseils de quartier sont composés d’un bureau dont les membres sont élus pour un mandat de trois ans, par tirage au sort parmi les habitants qui se sont portés volontaires. Les conseils de quartier comprennent à ce jour trois collèges. Premièrement, le Collège des habitants se compose 14 membres. Deuxièmement, le Collège des associations se compose 5 représentants, dont 2 réservés aux associations des parents d’élèves. Il faut qu’elles justifient ainsi d’une implantation sur le quartier en question. Enfin, le Collège des élus est présidé par le Maire, vice-présidé par l’élu à la Démocratie locale et avec deux élus référents de la majorité et un élu référent de l’opposition
Les Conseils citoyens
Les Conseils citoyens font partie intégrante de la Politique de la ville. Il s’agit notamment d’instances de concertation qui existent dans les quartiers prioritaires de la politique de la ville, par impératif réglementaire. L’Etat réglemente effectivement leur composition et leur fonctionnement.
Conseil communal
Le Conseil communal des jeunes se compose de 35 jeunes d’entre 11 et 15 ans élus par les élèves des collèges de la ville. Il est à noter que l’élection se fait par binômes paritaires pour des mandats de deux ans.
Conseil de Sages
Le Conseil de Sages est une instance de participation citoyenne composée de Colombien·nes retraité·es. Il se réunit en séance plénière pour émettre des avis sur les sujets concernant l’ensemble des citoyen·nes.
L’Agora
L’Agora est “un lieu de consultation et d’émergence de projets citoyens” avec deux missions. D’une part, elle est l’instance centralisatrice des sujets de discussion au niveau de toute la ville. D’autre part, l’Agora sera l’outil de réalisation des états généraux ou assises que les différents services (Culture, Jeunesse, Sports).
Le lancement de l’Agora aura lieu quand l’actuelle situation de pandémie le permettra.
Le budget participatif à Colombes
Lancé en mars 2021, le budget participatif de Colombes donne “la possibilité aux habitants de Colombes âgés de 16 ans et plus, […], de proposer des projets d’intérêt général”. Les habitants ont à leur disposition une enveloppe d’investissement d’un million d’euros, dont 90 000 euros maximum pour chaque projet lié à un quartier, et 90 000 euros s’il concerne toute la ville.
Comment Open Source Politics a analysé la politique de démocratie participative de Colombes ?
Pour commencer, nous avons réalisé plusieurs entretiens avec des élus de l’actuelle mandature, des responsables passés et actuels de la démocratie locale, des responsables d’autres services de la Mairie et de personnes qui ont participé au dispositif de démocratie participative jusqu’en 2020. De plus, les personnes interviewées étaient informées que leurs réponses seraient anonymisées afin de libérer leur parole. Enfin, un travail de recherche dans les archives et un recours à la presse généraliste a permis de retracer l’historique de la participation citoyenne à Colombes. Ce travail historique a permis de retracer des initiatives citoyennes (balades urbaines, plan de circulation) parfois oubliées et de faire le lien avec l’évolution de la politique de démocratie participative.
Ce travail d’analyse a abouti sur la formulation de recommandations pour améliorer les dispositifs participatifs. Un schéma de démocratie locale a été élaborer pour synthétiser l’articulation entre les différentes démarches participatives.
L’organisation de la démocratie locale à Colombes
Le rôle d’Open Source Politics
L’équipe d’Open Source Politics se réjouit d’avoir contribué à ce travail inédit. Plusieurs chercheurs en sciences sociales ont été sollicités pour mener à bien ce travail. Notre objectif est de garantir la réussite d’une démarche participative. Dans ce but, nous avons développé une offre de services complète autour de Decidim. Pour plus d’informations sur Open Source Politics, prenez rendez-vous avec notre expert Paul Poinsot directement dans son agenda.
From 18 to 23 October, a quarter of the team was in Barcelona for Decidim Fest 2021, the Decidim community's big event where all the people who make software progress on a daily basis meet face-to-face (except in 2020, of course). It's a time to remember why we do what we do, and to remember the political charge of this work.
The OSP team at the Decidim Fest
Many of the conferences were held at the Canòdrom, a magnificent dog racing building that has been rehabilitated as a place dedicated to the democratic innovations of the city of Barcelona.
We have intervened twice:
Pauline and Virgil to present the work done on the online petitions of the Senate and the National Assembly. Watch the stream
Baptiste on the topic of RGPD compliance in the context of digital democracy. Watch the stream here
We have made a selection of excerpts that we found enlightening, intriguing or simply worthy of interest for our current debates. You can also find links to watch the speeches again 😉
Ernesto Oroza introduced us to El Paquete Semanal, to illustrate the history of circumventing internet censorship in Cuba. Inhabitants created a digital folder of cultural content to download, which allowed - and still allows - the population to watch films despite the low penetration and regular interruptions of the internet in the country.
For Carlos Diaz, there is a risk that countries will use the health situation to justify mass surveillance, particularly affecting politically radical people, migrants and activists.
Joana Moll presented several of her projects, which aim in particular to implement other ways of formatting resources and using them. She pointed out that any basic app can have any personal data, sometimes very sensitive data (e.g. Grindr knows if its users have AIDS). She concludes by saying that it is impossible for these companies to change on their own towards more ethical data management: since data exploitation represents 80 to 90% of Google and Facebook's turnover (a little less for Amazon, about 2/3), it is too much to hope that they will change.
For Oliver Escobar, one of the instigators of the Scottish Citizens' Climate Convention, there are several ways of looking at the constraints placed by participation mechanisms: if there is no institutional constraint imposed by the framework of the mechanism itself, this does not mean that there are no political constraints that can be put in place in order to influence public policy.
Carol Romero has announced great news for the entire Decidim community: an installer will soon be available! It will make installing Decidim easier for someone who doesn't know much about the Ruby on Rails technical stack. Enjoy!
For Lulú Barrera and the network of feminist activists of which she is a part, appropriating the tools for the internet to be a transformative space for gender norms is a top priority. In Mexico, where she lives, women struggle both online and offline, which reminded us of the modes of struggle of 15M in 2011 in Spain. This work of appropriation has allowed them not to stop struggling with Covid, but it has also allowed a diversification and democratisation of the legitimacy of the feminist voice.
Anasuya Sengupta explained to the audience the imperative of decolonising the internet, basing it on the fact that most content is in English, for example. One of the biggest digital projects, for example, has been the digitisation of books (by Google Books). The problem is that only 7% of knowledge in language form is in book format. She concluded by saying that in order to build everyone's internet, everyone needs to get involved!
Joan Donovan was looking at the influence of social networking algorithms and asked a very pertinent question given the news of the last few months: should we think of Facebook and Twitter as public places or as products? And if we approach them as products, how should we view the problem of hate speech on these platforms?
Cheikh Fall presented the projects he has been running for almost ten years throughout Africa. His main objective has always been to guarantee transparency, access to information for citizens, and to enable civil society to be watchdogs. From 2012 to 2018, the creation of AfricTivists allowed the launch of #GuineaVote, #BeninVote, #TogoVote, #BurkinaVote, #MaliVote... to encourage young people to participate in the transparency of electoral processes. He therefore works every day to educate African citizens in order to bring about a new type of citizenship that would have a different relationship with the Republic, with democracy.
McKenzie Wark, at the end of the day on Thursday, explained Yves Citton's four types of attention (loyalty, projection, alertness and immersion). For her, the structures that exploit our attention have an interest in encouraging certain types of attention, causing a deficit in the others. This imbalance then leads to negative reactions, including paranoid reactions. She thus wanted to point out the need to reflect on a real ecology of attention that would put forward a real balance between these four types, requiring a strict regulation of services aimed at capturing attention.
Go and see the whole intervention, it's worth it!
As in every edition, it was an opportunity for the community to meet again, to work on common projects, to see our Finnish and Spanish counterparts, but also to meet new ones from Italy and Switzerland.
From 13 to 15 November 2021, six members of our team went to the European Participation Days organised by the city of Amiens and the association Décider Ensemble.
Valentin Chaput, co-founder of OSP, came to share our experience of the Conference for the Future of Europe, the largest consultation ever conducted in the context of complex policy-making at European level. Alongside Judith Ferrando, co-director at Missions publiques and Dominik Hierlemann from the Bertelsmann Foundation, Valentin was able to highlight the practical challenges of multilingual participation through digital means. If we were to retain three elements from the discussion, it would be that :
Building such an approach requires anticipation and significant resources, as the slightest change to the platform requires a translation and proofreading phase with professional interpreters;
There is no digital tool yet that allows simultaneous oral discussion between several languages, but videoconferencing services are making progress. In the meantime, the use of written texts with automatic translations is a good alternative, as shown by the system put in place on the Conference's Decidim platform;
Multilingual "mini-publics" and citizen panels are beginning to multiply, with adapted facilitation methods that allow for inclusion, exchange and decision-making on a new scale.
Open Source Politics accompanied the European Commission on the Conference on the Future of Europe.
We also had the opportunity to host the 8th edition of our user club, in person - at last! On the programme: a workshop to share experiences on the challenges of participation by and for our community and presentation of the new Decidim x OSP products!
Finally, our team was particularly active in the workshops on youth participation - the theme of this year's conference - which appears to be one of the major challenges for participation and, more broadly, the future of our democracies. Three main ideas emerged:
More representativeness: Renewing the political offer, making it more inspiring and representative of the different publics that make up youth in order to regain their trust.
More ad hoc participation on topics in line with their concerns, their demand for impact, their time and mobility constraints.
More decentralisation of decision-making at the territorial level: more consultation (co-construction) and less consultation.
Many examples of approaches were shared by actors in the sector, such as travelling consultations, idea collection sessions in high schools, parliamentary simulations, participatory budgets for young people, etc. We were particularly inspired by the initiative shared by Laurène Lolo, founder of the association Cité des chances, which considers debate as one of the first factors of politicisation, and which therefore organises workshop-debates with young people in the run-up to elections in order to collect their proposals for change and transmit them to the candidates.
If participation is on the rise, it is taking place more widely outside the traditional circuit in order to make up for the shortcomings of the right to participation, which remains fragile - as Chantal Jouannot, President of the National Commission for Public Debate, pointed out. These three days in Amiens have inspired us, enabled us to meet and reconnect face-to-face with the participation ecosystem - and what a joy! But they also reminded us that there is still a lot of fighting to be done to enable our democracies to renew themselves.
The 6th National Meeting on Participatory Budgets was held on 8 and 9 November 2021 in Angers. This event was punctuated by numerous conferences and workshops on the challenges of participatory budgeting as well as the creation of a national network of participatory budgets (RNBP).
Discovering the achievements of the Angevin participatory budget
The first workshops enabled participants (elected representatives, agents, residents and service providers) to discover the achievements of the different editions of the Angevin participatory budget. We then went to meet the project leaders to better understand the process of a winning project. The diversity of the projects presented gave an idea of the inventiveness of the inhabitants of a commune: an anti-waste tent, collective urban composters, traps for Asian hornets lent to beekeepers and inhabitants, a solidarity café, etc.
Open Source Politics has been supporting the city of Angers on its participatory budget since 2018.
The event was punctuated by workshops and conferences between elected officials, public agents and civil society on the challenges of participatory budgets. The various stakeholders addressed the current problems of participatory budgets: the participation rate, representativeness in participatory bodies, inclusiveness, and the ecological transition. A summary of this work will be published in early 2022.
Finally, the 6th National Meeting on Participatory Budgets was a founding moment of the National Network of Participatory Budgets (NNBP). At the initiative of several cities, a first draft of the statutes was drawn up and debated before the audience present. The constitutive general assembly of the RNBP will be held in the first quarter of 2022. The network is open to all local authorities wishing to take part in it, regardless of the implementation of a participatory budget.
Open Source Politics warmly thanks the city of Angers for this privileged moment between actors of participatory democracy!
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