In May and June 2012 Arnau Monterde, coordinator of the program “Communication and Civil Society” at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (Open University of Catalonia) organized two workgroups:
I was invited to the first one to discuss with very valuable people as Gala Pin, Carlos Tomás Moro, Javier Toret, Débora Lanzeni, Carlos S. Almeida, Adrià Rodríguez and Cristina Cullell March. Our discussion has been recently synthesized and documented by Arnau, Adrià and the professor Ismael Peña-López as part of the following working paper which has been recently released:
The reinvention of democracy in the network society (in Spanish)
Abstract:
From the Arab Spring, through movement occupywallstreet or 15M it has been opened a new cycle of political network movements which propose many new elements regarding the political use of new technologies and the Internet to collective action. These new movements see the network not only as a tool or battlefield, but also as an organizational form, establishing a relationship that commonly has been linked to ethics and ways to do of hacker communities.
Moreover, the financial crisis in Europe is deepening blocking political institutions that have been building since the beginning of modernity. This crisis is expressed not only in the inability of these institutions to tackle the current economic, social and political, but also in its complicity with the mechanisms of financial dispossession. Such institutional crisis determines the need to exercise both a critical and process of invention and construction work that starts from the new technological possibilities and lessons of network movements, hacker culture and free software, which enable reinventing institutional and constitutional forms, and therefore also of democracy itself.
Pablo Aragón 