Decidim Fest 2022 was held at Canòdrom this week. In this edition we focused on the Future of the Internet to discuss the democratic challenges of the digital society. In addition, Decidim Fest 2022 was included in the third edition of Biennial of Thought, which is held this week to reclaim public space and transform Barcelona into an agora for civic debate.
On the first day, we had talks and panels on the role of Decidim for the democratic city (including experiences from Kakogawa, Monterrey, Brussels, New York and Barcelona), sustainability models of democratic technologies, the power of lobbies in Internet regulation or the privatization of digital infrastructures. In my case, I participated as a panelist, along with my colleague Luce Prignano, in a session on disinformation in which Carl T. Bergstrom (University of Washington) presented ideas from his insightful book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. The session, moderated by the journalist and researcher Nereida Carrillo, was really exciting and and we ended up discussing the role of the for-profit economic models of many Internet platforms in the rise and spread of bad content online. The second day’s sessions were more focused on Decidim, including an open assembly and different workshops that were proposed and democratically selected by our community.
Pablo Aragón 