Victoria Palacin, Samantha McDonald, Pablo Aragón, Matti Nelimarkka
{"title":"Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting","authors":"Victoria Palacin, Samantha McDonald, Pablo Aragón, Matti Nelimarkka","doi":"10.1145/3635144","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation increasingly supported by digital platforms. Like any technology, participatory budgeting platforms are not value-free or politically neutral; their design, configuration, and deployment display assumptions and configure participant behaviour. To understand what kinds of configurations occur and what kinds of democratic values they hold, we studied 31 digital participatory budgeting cases in Spain, France, and Finland. These cases were all supported by the same technical platform, <span>Decidim</span>, allowing us to focus on the variations in their configurations. We examined the data from these cases and identified 25 different technical configurations and 15 participatory budgeting configurations. The configurations observed in our cases exhibit <i>individual</i> and <i>community-centred</i> assumptions about expected state-society interactions, as well as <i>open vs managerial</i> approaches to participatory budgeting. Based on these findings, we highlight a dilemma for civic technology designers: to what degree should platforms be open to configuration and customisation, and which political values should be enforced by platform design?</p>","PeriodicalId":50917,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction","FirstCategoryId":"94","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3635144","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, CYBERNETICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation increasingly supported by digital platforms. Like any technology, participatory budgeting platforms are not value-free or politically neutral; their design, configuration, and deployment display assumptions and configure participant behaviour. To understand what kinds of configurations occur and what kinds of democratic values they hold, we studied 31 digital participatory budgeting cases in Spain, France, and Finland. These cases were all supported by the same technical platform, Decidim, allowing us to focus on the variations in their configurations. We examined the data from these cases and identified 25 different technical configurations and 15 participatory budgeting configurations. The configurations observed in our cases exhibit individual and community-centred assumptions about expected state-society interactions, as well as open vs managerial approaches to participatory budgeting. Based on these findings, we highlight a dilemma for civic technology designers: to what degree should platforms be open to configuration and customisation, and which political values should be enforced by platform design?
期刊介绍:
This ACM Transaction seeks to be the premier archival journal in the multidisciplinary field of human-computer interaction. Since its first issue in March 1994, it has presented work of the highest scientific quality that contributes to the practice in the present and future. The primary emphasis is on results of broad application, but the journal considers original work focused on specific domains, on special requirements, on ethical issues -- the full range of design, development, and use of interactive systems.