AppCivist: A Platform for Direct Democracy

Principal Investigator:  Professor James Holston
Software Developers and Design Researchers:  Cristhian Parra, PhD; Mitar Milutinovic, PhD
Funding: EIT Digital, the Social Apps Lab, and CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) at the University of California, Berkeley
Collaborators: Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Inria Paris (MiMove Research Team), Missions Publiques, Nexus & Technische Universität Berlin
unifesp.appcivist.org vallejopb.appcivist.org

AppCivist is a social and software platform for direct democratic assembly and collaborative decision-making.  It helps people tackle problems in their communities, contribute ideas for solutions, edit and vote on proposals, and follow their implementation. It features both modular functionalities and interoperable services.  The goal of AppCivist design and development is to enable participants to make better arguments for their proposals through versioning, visualization, and deliberation.  AppCivist encourages both on and off-line collaboration, using digital technologies to address problems of scale in processes of direct democracy for small and large communities.

To enable democratic assembly and collaboration, the AppCivist platform is organized around the following core concepts: Assemblies, Campaigns, Working Groups, and Contributions. People form Assemblies based on any kind of social organization, from small groups to entire cities.  Assemblies coordinate Campaigns which organize into Working Groups toward a specific goal.  Working Groups coordinate users’ Contributions toward that goal by developing, selecting, and making decisions about proposals for action to be implemented by the Assembly.

AppCivist has been deployed by the city of Vallejo (CA) for Participatory Budgeting and by the seven campus Federal University of São Paulo to produce its new strategic master plan.  It has also been used by the town of Dieppe, Canada, for Participatory Budgeting (2017), by Louisville (KY) for a pilot of Participatory Budgeting (2018), and by an urban association in Asunción, Paraguay, to plan parks collaboratively with residents (2018).

Participatory Budgeting in Vallejo, California

The City of Vallejo has used AppCivist since 2016 for its annual participatory budgeting campaigns and is currently in the 2019-2020 cycle.  Participatory Budgeting (PB) is an allocation process featured in more than 2000 cities worldwide.  PB commits a city to dedicate a percentage of its annual budget (often 5%) to implement projects that are proposed and developed by residents who then select those for funding through city-wide voting.  In Vallejo, the City has committed approximately $1 million each year to PB.  A key contribution of AppCivist PB Vallejo is to make proposal development both transparent and collaborative for on and off-line users.  It enables the creation of citizen and software assemblies that together implement a given PB campaign.  The partnership between the AppCivist team at the Social Apps Lab and the City of Vallejo won the 2016 UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.

Strategic Master Planning by the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp)

AppCivist is also being implemented by Unifesp as the digital platform for the production a new pedagogic master plan (PPI) for the university’s seven campuses and 25,000 members.  Public universities in Brazil are required by law to produce new master plans periodically.  Unifesp’s current administration became committed to the premise that fundamental to the mission of a public university is to use such internal planning processes as opportunities to experiment with democracy and thereby to promote democratic innovation.  Hence, it decided to use methods of direct democracy to generate its PPI.  Consequently, the university’s faculty, staff, and students will decide, and not merely consult, on the substance of the new master plan.  Using AppCivist to facilitate this planning process, it entails the elaboration of proposals, deliberation (consensus and dissensus), collaborative editing, jury selection through sortition, and voting on proposals during an 18-month period.  The project promotes a combination of face-to-face and digital assemblies.  The AppCivist platform features a collaborative editor (PeerDoc) with the capacity to create and compare amendments, among many other attributes. Unifesp’s implementation of AppCivist constitutes an remarkable opportunity to address basic questions of scale, power, community, membership, motivation, random selection, and competing kinds of popular and expert knowledge that have historically challenged processes of direct democracy.