FOSTERING A CIVIC NETWORK AS A DIGITAL COMMONS

Michele Restucciasnark - space making

The City as a CommonsNovember 6, 2015 - Opificio Golinelli, Bologna

We will share our experience in managing and promoting the use of a local web platform for civic purposes, Comunità, included within the Bologna city web site, named Iperbole, which has been conceived and announced as a digital commons.

As community managers of the platform, the three of us have been engaged in many dimensions of such process.

We will present our insights and challenges, pointing to two questions: could it be considered a digital commons? What should we work on to let it grow as a commons?

We are here for...

1994 - 2015

The city of Bologna first established its own web-site Rete civica Iperbole in 1994, along with other services as connectivity and e-mail address, for letting its citizens access the Internet.

In December 2014, coherently with the results of the participatory process ofthe city's digital agenda, the city web-site has been provided with two newareas joining the homepage (www.comune.bologna.it).

Servizi Online (https://servizi.comune.bologna.it) offers a personal access to several public services as welfare, mobility, taxes, etc., and Comunità (www.comune.bologna.it/comunita) is a web platform for civic and collaborative initiatives within the 'Collaborare è Bologna' policy.

Our role

snark, an independent public processes design group, joined the Iperboleteam, made of municipal offices staff, contractors and researchers, since thedeveloping stages of Comunità, to define and run community managementactivities specific for the platform.

We identified a proposal for a peer-to-peer platform aimed at hosting bothspontaneous practices and those resulting from calls, policies and projectspromoted by the city government and similar actors.

This concept was aimed at allowing all the relevant civic and collaborativepractices to be hosted, and having the users taking care of the platform as acommons.

How does it work?

Joining Comunità requires individuals to undersign a charter that, along with the terms and conditions of use, make them responsible for the maintenance and the growing of the platform itself, defining it as a commons.

Comunità and Servizi On line are accessible with different digital identitysystems: FedERa, provided by a local government-owned company (the onlyone allowing a complete use of Iperbole's services), as well as those providedby social networks as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Linkedin.

Comunità has been described as a civic network for the city of Bologna,translating the name of the city website (Iperbole Civic Network), and tryingto provide an effective metaphor: it’s a network made of and for civic andsocial initiatives.

The platform appears and works as a social network: individuals have to usetheir own name, and are able to create, manage and browse contents(profiles, posts, projects, etc.) as within Facebook, and most of the uses arehorizontal and transparent.

On the one hand users, both individually and for their own organizations canautonomously publish contents.On the other hand they can access to tools as public consultations,questionnaires and send proposals for taking care of urban commons (withinthe specific city regulation).

Spreading and connecting

Since December 2014 we worked both off-line and on-line to promote the knowledge and the use of Comunità, to find improvements and development requests, and to engage both the community and the administration in the process of taking care of the platform as a commons.

We held meetings and workshops involving city government offices, individuals and private organizations. The underlying principle has always been to understand what was already happening within the local community, and to find the viable metaphors for on-line interactions.

We undertook the effort to punctually investigate the contents as soon as they are published to promote connections inviting users to get in contact.

On the whole we either met or remotely assisted more than five-hundred individuals, holding about one hundred meetings.

Co-designing the platform

When the platform has been launched, a public consultation on the Charter has been opened to the users. Due to the contents (creative commons licensing, community management, etc.) and the timing and the stage of the platform, just twenty users contributed.

Then we began a series of focus groups to analyze the platform use and to find out a set of priorities.

In april we held a public workshop to review and co-design the platform's homepage.

In May a new version of the homepage has been released, built around a timeline of contents, and provided with a footer with informative contents as a guide and a FAQ page, as well as new features.

Our efforts have also been oriented at designing new functions for social and civic oriented policies, as they were requested by the city government offices.

It’s been possible through an intense relation with several city government offices, in particular with the one managing initiatives developed within the city's Regulation on collaboration for urban commons, which is hosted in a specific page offering two web forms to present proposals.

Since July 2015, a specific procedure has been made available to those organizations (about 1.000’s) that have to confirm their accreditation within the city government register for social and civic engaged actors, whose status is officially recognized by the government itself. The procedure makes the register management more transparent and fast, as well as such organizations more accountable.

Insights

After a few months, we decided to invite a few organizations at public presentations, to have them presenting their own projects, activities and needs, letting them interact and discuss with those attending. This format proved to effectively complete the on-line experience and to provide new opportunities for collaborations.

Those who join the platform are interested and active: 100 out about 2.000 users (by end of September 2015) created contents, and an un-measurable number of users commented and interacted somehow.

So far it is possible to say that Comunità is mostly used as a square (one of the more frequent metaphors employed by the users themselves).

A co-design process requires a deep understanding of the available resources.Some proposals made within the consultation on the Charter haven’t been implemented so far, specifically those requesting to change the Creative Commons license from the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 to the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. The workshop for co-designing the homepage has been accounced as the first of a series of four, but given the timing of developments and available resources, the staff agreed on a less structured planning.The source-code has been released within the GitHub platform, but the local developing community haven't been succesfully engaged.

We use to the metaphor of the trading zone to describe our current role as community manager: we are perceived as necessary to make users and stakeholders collaborate, and to practice a proper negotiation between different needs, costraints and requests. This could contribute to slow down the creation of autonomous communities within the platform.

Comunità as a digital commons?

So far we can report a positive assumption of Comunità as a digital commons by its users and many stakeholders.

Despite that, we tried to find a way to understand what was missing to let it grow as a commons.

We decided to analyse the platform according to the framework proposed by Mayo Fuster Morell (2014) for Online Creation Communities: we looked at the community control over the infrastructure governance, and at the openess of resources and of the communities that created them.

In fact on the one hand despite the co-designing process, the governance of the platform itself lies still within the city governement offices involved, and even the more proactive users missed the momentum to discuss the issue.

On the other hand, what we reported on contents licesing and on the source-code re-use underlines a limited access to common pool resources, and the communities defined around specific themes didn't succeed in emerging as autonomous groups.

“The resource could not be produced or preserved without the community. In other words, the “production” of the community is a precondition for the possibility to produce the resource.” (Fuster Morell, 2014)

Two opportunities

Opening the governance of such infrastructure isn't an easy process given its technical and design features, but a sustainable and gradual process to widen such governance has to be pursued.

Considering the actual engagement on the platform by its users, is to 'recruiting' one by one a group of users already publishing accurate contents and pointing out potential unfair uses, discussing with them first how to create such a group and how to and to reward them.

Further stages of a community governance for the platform could positively tap on such experience and users.

Which solution could allow to host and foster thematic communities has been a long standing question for our group.

During the last few months we tried to ease collaborations between organizations and users with common interests or practices, generally speaking, most of them didn't seem motivated to go further in interactions as they didn't share a common need.

Recently we had a intense conversation with some members of a local association, already active in the platform, that is developing new welfare solutions for individuals, characterized by a peculiar care for the quality of the experience they provide to those receveing their support.

They were concerned for the deteriorating quality of their 'supply chain': a growing number of careless donations and the emerging of a lack of accountability within some organizations.

They realized that they need their own 'charter of values' to be developed and shared with their stakeholders and all those concerned, and want to use the patform to promote such effort and to shortly begin to work on it.

We realized that such a task could be the proper trigger to create an active and committed community, that could use the platform to collaborate in order to achieve a shared results. The leading association could be backed by our group for engaging other subjects and going trhough the process stages.

We are committed to use this process as a test, to let them grow as autonomous group that care and maintain their own space within the platform, that could be a post or a project.

If the process will succeed, the following steps will be to replicate it and to move this community to use the platform as a tool to foster their practices, and hopefully co-design and to manage their own 'room'.

Thank you!

Michele Restucciasnark - space making

www.snarkive.eu

The City as a CommonsNovember 6, 2015 - Opificio Golinelli, Bologna