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About this project
Local civic networking platform
Show list of needs
Task
|
Minimum | Optimum |
|---|---|---|
|
GROUP AND ORGANIZATION MANAGEMENT
Developing functionalities for organizations to manage their activities.
|
$ 982 | |
|
EVENT PUBLISHING
Developing applications for citizens and organizations to publish events.
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$ 974 | |
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TOOLS TO VIRALIZE CONTENT
Development features that will disseminate information published in CitYsens and 'infect' the use of the platform.
|
$ 737 | |
|
SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
Developing applications for configuring and managing the system.
|
$ 982 | |
|
GAMIFICATION TOOLS
Development of gamification features to encourage user involvement with the maintenance and use of CitYsens.
|
$ 1,730 | |
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PLATFORM BASE STRUCTURE
Programming features and basic data structures for the CitYsens platform.
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$ 2,947 | |
|
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Developing graphic elements and optimizing the visual design of CitYsens.
|
$ 982 | |
|
QA AND PREPARATION OF PILOT
System Testing and preparation of pilot projects to develop in the Valle del Henares.
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$ 1,228 | |
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COLLABORATION TOOLS EVENTS
Development of functionality for collaboration in the development of events and initiatives.
|
$ 1,473 | |
|
METHODOLOGICAL SUPPORT PILOT
Special methodological support for the development of pilot projects (outreach work, workshops, focus groups, body of knowledge development methodology, etc..)
|
$ 1,327 | |
|
TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR DEVELOPMENT AND PILOT
Technical support pilot projects and further development, applying adjustments based on lessons derived from them (faults, deficiencies and potentials detected)
|
$ 2,456 | |
|
PREPARE SYSTEM EXTENSION TO OTHER CITIES
Contacts and preparation of the widespread use of other municipalities CitYsens
|
$ 491 | |
| Total | $ 10,563 | $ 16,310 |
Necessary
Supplemental
General information
CitYsens is a civic platform for hyper-local networking that promotes and facilitates deep, inclusive and emancipatory participation.
CitYsens basic goals are:
- To empower citizens and groups to network independently with each other and coordinate actions, initiatives and resources to defend and promote their interests;
- To also strengthen government capacity to establish an ongoing, collaborative and fruitful dialogue with the citizenship.
CitYsens creation culminates the research developed in recent years by the Association Kyopol ('Symbiotic City ") in Spain and Latin America. CitYsens is being designed and built by a collaborative process actively involving future users, including citizens, social movements, the media, elected officials and government bodies.
Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign
The logo of our initiative says: "CitYsens: we all count”.
"CitYsens" is a word that expresses many things at once: Sensible City, City Sense, implying communication between citizens to facilitate connections with each other, building cities where "we all count".
Our goal is to make that promise a reality. To do this, CitYsens works as a "social network for Citizenship", a "common agenda" which is used regularly by people and institutions of all kinds to inform and be informed on civic and social initiatives developed in the city.
In CitYsens we can all find - and share! - information on civic and social events that will occur, are occurring, or that have already occurred in the city. It will allow us to collectively maximize their potential to produce positive effects.
CitYsens provides a connective infrastructure, a "civic neural system", for the city which allows all its inhabitants to think, imagine and act together with more vitality, effectiveness and empathy than is currently possible.
CitYsens supports the definition, planning and development processes of civic initiatives by providing tools, educational references and methodologies to promote "quality" participation: transparent, informed, documented, balanced and deep. This approach will transform our cities into collaborative cities that establish public policies and make collective decisions through processes of civic involvement of its inhabitants.
CitYsens should be recognized as an open, transparent, inclusive, non-partisan, collaborative and emancipatory space. A public, sustainable and replicable system managed by its users. A platform that is nice and easy to use, enjoyable and useful for its various user communities. It is 100% open source code and free, and its institutional and governance models guarantee its commitment to the common good.
In a nutshell, CitYsens is a "platform for collective learning". It fosters an environment where we can all nurture the commonwealth.
Why this is important
Our premise is that civic participation involves anything that enables, extends or deepens people’s ability to influence decisions and take part in actions that affect their lives; including the use of information technology.
Our project is based on an inclusive and emancipatory vision of participation. It not only seeks to strengthen the capacity of the government to establish a collaborative and ongoing dialogue with citizens, but also empower citizens themselves to interconnect with each other autonomously and coordinate actions, initiatives and resources that are necessary to address their civic interests.
We want to provide the tools necessary, yet unavailable, that will drive civic action and foster communication between representatives and those represented. Citizens, administrations and all types of organizations can benefit from the continued use of spaces for dialogue and civic mobilization.
Citysens has been created collaboratively, and its design is based on research and testing we have developed since 2004 in Europe and Latin America. The results of these investigations led to the publication of articles, monographs, teaching materials, educational videos, and finally, a PHD thesis. This research deepened our understanding of citizen participation and its challenges, and the possibilities of using ICT to promote it.
CitYsens aims to benefit the entire population of the cities where it will be implemented. We understand that not everyone can take part in everything, or engage with the same level of participation. CitYsens will prove relevant and useful to both active and engaged citizens and those who wish to participate more sporadically. In fact, it will also help those who just want to stay informed, and even those who do not participate at all, as they will be indirectly benefited.
Goals of the crowdfunding campaign
The sources obtained from the minimum funding will help build a first alpha version of CitYsens, which will include the essential functionality required to implement the first pilot experiences in a close environment. The funds received will also back up the work that is currently carried out by volunteer programmers, as, for a few months, we will be able to count on developers and designers who will devote their energy to creating CitYsens.
An optimal funding would however involve reinforcing the aforementioned pilot experiences by means of workshops and support. It would also enable CitYsens programming to continue at full speed during the first few months of use of the system, in order to quickly fix the mistakes that we spot and to be able to make improvements.
The pilot projects will take place in several towns of the Valle del Henares, a Spanish region in which we have special contact with social movements and where we have been implementing the Agenda Henares for some months now (http://agendadelhenares.org). We intend to use these experiences to further improve the system, by adapting its functionality to the needs identified.
While we implement the above pilot experiences, we will also prepare the gradual extension process of CitYsens throughout Spain and Latin American cities. Additionally, we will seek other sources of funding to ensure the future sustainability of the project.
The Goteo campaign is one of the first steps in the long journey we are aiming at. This is why we would also like to use this campaign to establish links with future “fellow travelers": people interested in co-building CitYsens and/or helping to implement it in their cities.
Kyopol Association has been working in the field of research and promotion of "electronic participation" for many years.
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We conducted our first research in 2004 in Catalonia, where we analysed how a number of Catalan towns were using the Consensus system. [Http://bit.ly/17dUgK9]
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In Brazil we got actively involved in Participatory Budgeting experiences and worked together with all types of local actors to discuss how they could use the Internet to improve their political impact. As a result of this research, we published an informative and critical monograph on citizen participation in the 20th century [http://bit.ly/14is42c], together with a reflection on the main axes of development of local e-participation systems [http://bit .ly/16pOgNx].
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In Guatemala, which accounted for a particularly hostile environment for participation, we carried out a number of experiences using ICTs for citizen participation and managing knowledge in the context of their particular system of “Councils of Development” .
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Finally, we have critically analyzed the work done by the EU in this area [http://bit.ly/HcKvjB] and worked on the creation of the “Agenda del Henares”[http://agendadelhenares.org], together with the social movements of the Henares Valley in central Spain.
The CitYsens project is the culmination as well as the implementation of all previous work conducted so far in this area.
Our team includes people with very different profiles and distributed worldwide (Madrid, Alcalá de Henares, Buenos Aires, London, Brussels, Kobe, Krakow ...). For further information on the team you can see slideshows of some of us at:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlaY8RS4DI3X4_bOeZ4d2j0X9Xv9GYmVv
Social commitment
Shared materials
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TEACHING RESOURCES, MANUALS, DESIGNS...
All the materials that we make will have, as all our products, a CC BY-SA licence, in order to be broadcasted as much as possible. We aim to create educational materials on techno-politics, to guide citizens on ways to promote positive change.CC - Reconocimiento - CompartirIgual
Licencia Creative Commons (bienes comunes creativos) con reconocimiento de autoría y a compartir en idénticas condiciones -
OPEN DATA
We plan all data generated by and for the CitYsens platform to be downloadable and reusable, so that other civic applications can generate social utility from them.Open Database License
Licencia de base de datos abierta, que permite compartir, modificar y utilizar bases de datos en idénticas condiciones -
WEB APPLICATION
Both the code developed for the application and the subsequent improvements will be shared in an open source.Affero General Public License
Licencia pública general de Affero para software libre que corra en servidores de red