Participa Lab: Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia 2017

From November 6 to 18, I attended the Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia workshop at Medialab Prado. While last year my participation consisted on mentoring groups, this year I joined one of the projects as a collaborator. In particular, I was in a team with Amy X. Zhang (coordinator and creator of the early prototype), Julio Reyes, Berenice Zambrano, Alejandra Monroy, Ramla Ayadi, Abhishek Srivastava and Daniel Curto-Millet to extend Wikum, a collaborative tool for summarizing large discussion threads. This was done to explore how to solve this issue in Decide Madrid, the civic tech of the City Council of Madrid. For this purpose, we investigated potential users (profiles, interests and needs), which led us to develop the following features:

import function for discussions of proposals from Decide Madrid,
multilingual version (English and Spanish), and
multiple social functions for the evaluation of summaries.

The final prototype was evaluated with different participants (citizens, researchers, developers) to demonstrate that Wikum can be used effectively in exploring the main ideas and generating conceptual trees from the discussions of Decide Madrid. Interviews with participants revealed a particular interest in reducing the time required to understand discussion threads and the need to expose minority views in each conversation. Furthermore, the event was an excellent opportunity to attend the presentation of the book Paisajes Insurrectos by my unforgettable colleague Rossana Reguillo, to participate in La Serrería Digital (radio show on Emisora Escuela M21), and to get to know such emblematic spaces in Madrid as La Tabacalera or the hacklab of La Ingobernable.