Plus de 150 étudiant·e·s de l’UPEC ont eu la chance de pouvoir participer, à l’automne 2021, à la première Convention citoyenne étudiante, sur le thème de l’alimentation. Directement inspiré de la Convention citoyenne pour le climat, ce dispositif pionnier a été accompagné par Open Source Politics depuis le début : on a donc décidé de prendre la plume pour vous en raconter les coulisses !
Un chantier en trois étapes
La méta-délibération, ou la construction collaborative de la Convention
La méta-délibération, c’est quoi ? C’est la toute première phase de construction de la Convention. Entre octobre et décembre 2020, il a fallu définir les règles de la délibération de la convention, pour éviter des discussions désordonnées et sans résultats. On parle donc ici de “processus de formulation de mesures communes”, de “règles de gestion du dissensus”, de “modes de validation collective des arbitrages assurant leur légitimité”… C’est un enjeu central du dispositif.
Tous les vendredis, les étudiant·es de master en sciences politiques à l’Ecole Internationale d’Etudes Politiques (EEP), accompagné·es par leurs enseignantes (Emilie Frenkiel et Sylvie Thoron), se réunissaient par visio-conférence pour échanger entre eux, recevoir des intervenant·es sur les enjeux de la délibération et ses outils. Parallèlement à ces rassemblements en ligne, les étudiant·es pouvaient soumettre des propositions sur la plateforme Decidim du Living Lab.
À l’issue de cette méta-délibération, l’EEP et le Living lab AlgoPo ont donc lancé la première Convention citoyenne étudiante, consacrée à l’alimentation, thème à l’intersection des enjeux environnementaux, sanitaires et de développement local. Elle s’est déroulée sur deux mois, du 23 septembre au 20 novembre 2021.
La Convention citoyenne étudiante, pour penser le renouvellement du système alimentaire territorial
Pourquoi deux mois ? Tout simplement pour laisser le temps à différents groupes d’étudiant·es d’enrichir les propositions.
D’abord, du 23 au 25 septembre 2021, c’était au théâtre de Fontainebleau que les étudiant·es pouvaient suivre des interventions de scientifiques et de professionnel·les sur le thème de l’alimentation, puis faire émerger des premières propositions dans le cadre de 4 groupes thématiques (Production, Approvisionnement, Consommation, Déchets). En alternant les séances de travail en sous-groupe thématique, les séances de travail en groupe thématique et les séances de travail en plénière, on s’assurait de la diversification des séances de travail et on favorisait du même coup la délibération (arbitrages, mise en commun, confrontation et partage d’idées) à différentes échelles.
Ensuite, du 25 septembre au 18 novembre, la plateforme numérique Decidim du Living lab Algopo a recueilli les observations, commentaires et amendements d’autres étudiant·es sur les propositions formulées par les étudiant·es lors de la première phase. Cette phase intense a notamment permis de solliciter les avis d’étudiant·es de formations spécialisées sur le sujet de l’alimentation, afin de bénéficier de leur expertise.
Enfin, les deux derniers jours de la Convention étaient consacrés à la mise en forme et à l’adoption des diverses mesures préconisées par la Convention citoyenne étudiante. C’était également le moment de célébrer la fin de cet intense travail collaboratif, qui a finalement abouti à 49 mesures précises, chiffrées, sourcées et argumentées.
L’application des mesures, l’engagement dans la durée
Une fois les 49 mesures adoptées, c’est une phase compliquée de la Convention qui s’ouvre. Le dispositif en lui-même est en effet terminé, mais il est nécessaire de s’assurer que les mesures sont transmises aux institutions concernées, et que ces dernières les ont intégrées à leurs circuits de prise de décision politique. Beaucoup de mesures issues de dispositifs délibératifs restent ainsi lettre morte, faute d’un suivi efficace et d’une pression importante sur les décideurs publics.
Ici encore, c’est un groupe d’étudiant·es qui s’est chargé de rencontrer les différent·es élu·es concerné·es, de leur présenter les mesures et de leur en décrire l’intérêt pour leur territoire. Ils ont également pris le temps d’échanger avec des agent·es public·ques en charge de l’application potentielle des mesures, avec qui iels promettent de rester en contact dans l’objectif de maximiser l’adoption institutionnelle du travail de production normative fourni dans le cadre de la Convention citoyenne étudiante.
Faire la part belle aux étudiant·es
Les étudiant·es étaient évidemment au centre de ce dispositif, dans toutes ses composantes. Ce sont elles et eux qui ont construit le dispositif de A à Z via la méta-délibération, qui ont facilité les débats, animé une partie des tables rondes, restitué les discussions. Ce sont bien sûr des étudiant·es qui ont participé à cette Convention, en jouant le jeu de la familiarisation progressive avec un sujet complexe et des contraintes importantes, puis en s’accordant sur des mesures détaillées qui permettraient de bousculer le système alimentaire pour le rendre plus soutenable.
C’est donc, au final, un double objectif qui était recherché – et atteint ! – par ce dispositif délibératif. Un objectif pédagogique d’abord, auprès des étudiant·es participant à la Convention. Iels en sortent enrichis d’une expertise thématique sur l’alimentation et d’une sensibilisation approfondie aux méthodes d’intelligence collective, de prise de parole efficace et d’écoute active. Un objectif professionnalisant ensuite, pour les étudiant·es qui ont encadré ce dispositif avec leur dynamisme et qui ont pu apprendre la facilitation, l’animation, la prise de notes et la synthèse de discussions en temps réel. Tou·tes en sortent grandi·es, et OSP aussi ! C’était notre première expérience avec des étudiant·es en présentiel. On a adoré, évidemment.
Et Open Source Politics alors, dans tout ça ?
Cela fait déjà plus de deux ans que nous accompagnons le Living Lab Algopo, aujourd’hui co-dirigé par Pierre Valarcher et Emilie Frenkiel, d’abord pour sa création et aujourd’hui dans le développement des multiples projets qui sont lancés dans ce cadre. Pour la Convention citoyenne étudiante, Open Source Politics a donc contribué à son cadrage, à former les étudiant·es facilitateur·trices et à animer la Convention en présentiel. On a également fourni la plateforme Decidim qui a servi à la méta-délibération et à la phase en ligne de la Convention. Suspense : pour la deuxième édition, on vous prépare plein d’expérimentations !
On a hâte que la deuxième édition de la Convention citoyenne étudiante, cette année centrée sur le numérique, rende ses conclusions. Elles seront certainement passionnantes et devraient même permettre de nourrir nos réflexions internes.
Comment penser l’ébranlement qu’a suscité le passage, aux XIXe et XXe siècles, d’un monde d’empires, gouvernant par la différence ethnique et religieuse, à un système d’États-nations, imposant une uniformisation culturelle et une conception exclusive de la citoyenneté ? La manière dont a émergé la construction intellectuelle qu’est l’Etat conditionne-t-elle encore les évolutions sociales actuelles ? C’est la tâche à laquelle s’attelle Jean-François Bayart, spécialiste de sociologie historique et comparée du politique, dans son nouveau livre, “L’énergie de l’Etat”.
Nous aurons l’honneur de le recevoir le lundi 9 mai à 18h30 au Liberté Living Lab, que nous remercions pour son partenariat, afin qu’il nous présente cet ouvrage et engage une discussion collective autour des thèmes qui y sont abordés.
Nous réunissons deux discutant.es expérimenté.es pour approfondir ces questions et partager des solutions :
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.
In 2011, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards will take to the streets to protest against political inaction in the face of the economic crisis that is shaking the country. Trade unions and political parties remain paralysed in the face of this movement of unprecedented magnitude. For weeks, the Indignant people camped out and organized a mass protest alone.
In this moment of effervescence, an unprecedented reflection is emerging, renewing the relationship between politics and technology. The organization of the multiple actions of the Indignant via digital tools feeds this reflection by founding an argument that is now almost classic: Digital technologies allow citizens to organize themselves, to make their own decisions and to set their own objectives..
Apart from the classical instances of representation and expression of citizens' interests, the different tools developed by the 15M activists have enabled them to coordinate countless demonstrations and punch actions. They have created horizontal operating structures; they have succeeded in thinking about citizen engagement through the co-construction ofdigital networks.
This was a cardinal point in the development of these technologies; it was necessary to include all citizens. from the design stage. Give the maximum of guarantees of transparency, equality and accountability was on everyone's mind. The integration of these democratic principles at the beginning of the technical elaboration directly favoured thecritical and strategic use digital tools at the service of collective political action; what activists are still calling today thetechnopolitics.
Decidim, spearheading technopolitics
It is this spirit that presides, in 2016, over the creation of the Decidim project. The instigators of this project, for many of the researchers and former 15M activists, were determined to connect citizens via a tool dedicated to collaborative decision-making. The challenge was not to reproduce the 15M within the institutions more than to introduce citizens to these debates; in short, the aim was not to reproduce the 15M within the institutions more than to introduce citizens to these debates, It was necessary to create a pedagogical tool that would facilitate the engagement of citizens and make them want to go further in the quest for their own political autonomy.
In this militant intellectual context, Decidim has presented itself as the digital tool that translates technopolitics into practice by aiming at the progressive empowerment of citizens.through a Strictsocial contract and deeply democratic principles enshrined in the platform's own code of ethics.
For Open Source Politics, the stakes are high; it is a question of to preserve and spread the deeply pedagogical state of mind which founds the creation of the software while allowing its appropriation by actors who may have different objectives from 15M activists. We therefore work daily to ensure that the digital platforms we are launching introduce people to technopolitics by providing spaces for expression and discussion, mediated by a framework and objectives that are either agreed upon or left open.
Spreading a new digital culture
This is precisely what we wanted to illustrate on Decidim Day on 12 September. This day of workshops, plenaries and round tables organized by our team was a great opportunity to explain the term technopolitics to unaccustomed French ears, as well as to illustrate our own conception of this idea.
We therefore sought to to infuse the various reflections raised by technopolitics in our own event. The inaugural plenary was to address two different approaches to the relationship between technology and politics; one with a regulatory focus developed within the National Assembly by Paula Forteza, the other built patiently and in a decentralized manner by Santiago Siri and the Democracy Earth team.
Three courses then directed the exchanges in different directions. We had the opportunity to questioning the place of the State and communities in the construction and support of digital commons, but also the relevance of the diffusion of technopolitics in the business sector and the emergence of new forms of industrial governance. A dedicated round table also discussed whether it was possible torole-play that citizens occupy and embody during participation processes. Fundamentally technopolitical, this discussion was able to get to the heart of the matter. What kind of pedagogy, what kind of accompaniment to bring citizens to grasp political issues through technology?
All this encouraged us to also discuss the emergence of a French network of local authorities generalist, in order to open up technopolitical thinking to other actors from other backgrounds. Broadening the discussion to examples of international digital tools has also contributed significantly to the completeness of the views on the subject. Finally, as pedagogy should be seen as inclusive and aimed at the widest possible audience, Open Source Politics wanted to propose workshops on the theme of "The Pedagogy of the Internet". accessibility, e-inclusion, synthesis and self-governance.
Technopolitical issues
Shipyards Decidim and OSP
Processing of massive data sets and synthesis of queries
Since 2017 we have been investigating the application of automatic language processing to text and data corpuses resulting from consultations. Read our articles on this subject on Medium part I and II.
Digital inclusion and accessibility
Open Source Politics is a member of Mednum, the digital inclusion cooperative.
Digital Identity
- OSP is developing a France Connect connector for Decidim which will be available this fall 2019.
- Decidim allows the implementation of contextual identity verification systems for the action carried out by the user (vote on a participative budget) customized.
Representativeness
Decidim is one of the only platforms to offer a draw module.
Decentralization and data security
Decidim already offers a number of guarantees for the data that the platform generates (API, cryptographic fingerprint of proposals etc.).
Within the framework of the European Decode project, Decidim has been able to experiment with blockchain technology for electronic signatures.
The critical positioning of technopolitics allows us to think and build our participation strategies and the development of Decidim according to current issues (inclusion, decentralized decision-making, etc.). It also encourages us on a daily basis to reflect on cutting-edge issues on the subject of citizen participation and to continually questioning us on the purpose of Decidim as it is conceived and developed by OSP. The Decidim Day was a success, partly because it was an opportunity to demonstrate our method and to invite our partners (present and future) to take their full part in this method, which is constantly evolving.
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