Coladepez

Networks for Citizen Participation (CP-Network)

Structures for participation, debate, communication and action

The participation that is intended through citizen intervention for decision making should use social media only as a complement to communicate the results of participation built as an activity subject to specific objectives with a vocation of permanence, referenced by opinions sustained by documents, verifiable, recoverable and reusable for different purposes. In the social media a bias prevails: “we know, we can do everything” and “we all know how to do everything”. In other words, both the objectives and the process of participation in such networks is not built and there aren’t ways to build it from the virtual structure itself. It is not possible to attain goals, whatever they may be, through preaching, however formidable it may be, or through the propagation of categorical imperatives, however formidable they may be. The CP-Network is not the result of an appeal or a mandate, but of the understanding of what is sought and the context that guides the citizens’ activity.

Therefore, it is imperative to implement training processes in CP-Network, particularly at the municipal level, aimed at elected officials, technicians and civil servants; to train professionals who wish to be trained in the generation of network participation dynamics; to train researchers about the participation processes in online structures, among others.

CP-Network is a thermostat of the quality of a society’s democratic relations, whatever field it apples to. It opens the doors to nothing less than the democratic quality of decision-making processes, which implies a social reorganization of unpredictable consequences. According to our research, the repeated failure to reach a satisfactory temperature is almost always due to significant deficits in the design and execution of projects of this type following the points mentioned.

Since 1999, we have worked with virtual knowledge social media (VKSN), virtual structures of collective work online, designed on the above- mentioned principles, and managed by personnel specially trained for this task, in order to reach the proposed objectives.

This is the basic schematic composition of these networks:

– Debate Zone, where all members of the network express their opinions.

.- Context Zone. These opinions are confronted with the state of the art, whatever it may be according to the project, through the provision of documents, reports, interviews with experts, experiences, opinions, follow-up of R & D lines referring to the topics dealt with, relevant cases , critical literature, etc. This work is carried out by the network management team. But as it progresses, network members themselves see the essential value of their opinions, and then they are the ones who take on the management of the network by enriching its content aimed at the objectives set.

.- Recovery Zone. Internet is a numerical (digital) structure and the «natural» way of organizing information and knowledge (I&K) is chronological. In the case of the VKSN, its design allows recovery of the generated I&K in different ways, in order to work on it and transform it so it becomes part of the network knowledge management processes, either by developing new thematic documents, relationships and result maps, new strategies for decision-making, long-term process evaluations, strategic alliance orientation, relationships among network members based on input and interventions, etc. This work is also done, especially at the beginning, by the VKSN management team. These products, moreover, are usually made in such a way that they can be applied to other purposes or to other networks («repurposing»).

.- Results Dissemination Zone. In fact, it is the means of communication of the VKSN, where the outside is informed of discussion processes, the relevant documentation, outstanding interventions, the progression in decision making, etc. The main purpose of this communication media is to create peripheral networks that allow for increasing the impact and learning of the processes of each CP-Network.

Underlying this therefore is the organization of the flow of information that constitutes the foundation of what we call the construction of network participation.