In October 2015 I enrolled in the PhD programme in Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra to investigate the role of digital technologies for facilitating democratic participatory processes. This project, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502), did not emerged from nowhere but as a deepening of my research activities in computational social science at Barcelona Media / Eurecat, my active collaboration with new platforms for participatory democracy like Decide Madrid and Decidim Barcelona, and my great interest in technopolitical studies at DatAnalysis15M and the D-CENT project.
Over four years, I have examined with my co-supervisors Vicenç Gómez and Andreas Kaltenbrunner the potential of computational and statistical methods to gain a deeper understanding of how interventions in civic technologies influence online participation. The framework, methods and results of this work have constituted my PhD dissertation: Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies. Last Friday, I defended this work to an examining board formed by Dr. Rosa Borge (UOC), Dr. Josep Perelló (UB) and Dr. Robert West (EPFL who provided me with very insightful comments about the implications and future work resulting from this research. Furthermore, they agreed on awarding this work with the mention “Cum Laude” 🙂
Dear friends and colleagues from very diverse disciplines and institutions like Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Eurecat, Oxford Internet Institute, (Meta)Decidim, Participa Lab – Medialab Prado, among many others…
A VERY SINCERE THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT
Pablo Aragón 
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