Pablo Aragón

This week the Smart City Expo World Congress took place at Fira Barcelona Gran Via from Tuesday to Thursday. This was a very special edition because of the co-located Sharing Cities summit which served to  launch the declaration of Cities’ Common Principles and Commitments for City Sovereignty regarding the Platform Economy. The stand of the Barcelona City Council presented different ongoing projects under the motto “The right to the (smart) city”. I contributed to this space by offering two talks. First, I presented the projects and research lines of the Laboratori d’Innovació Democràtica (LID) in Fábrica de Creació Fabra i Coats. Specifically, the talk covered different activities held at the lab since its inauguration in May: the operational sessions and research seminars of the Metadecidim community, the Participatory Science workshop, the curatorship of events for Biennal de Pensament #CiutatOberta, or the supervision of research projects on topics related to democratic innovation and Decidim.

The presentation also addressed the working sessions held at LID for the European project DECODE, coordinated by the Ajuntament de Barcelona, to prepare the Digital Democracy and Data Commons pilot, which will integrate and improve the capabilities of Decidim in order to collectively imagine the data policy of the future. Indeed, my second talk was a part of a presentation with Oleguer Sagarra, Antonio Calleja-López, Giulia Rocchi and Guillem Camprodon about the pilots of DECODE in Barcelona.