I'm going to hand you this.
Hello.
And now we welcome Carolina.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for going to that show.
Wow.
I'm going to start by saying I'm really nervous and excited at the same time.
It's my first for them.
Both as an attendee and as a speaker.
So I'm really grateful for all of you to stay for that for that talk.
So I'm going to tell you to take you in this session on a journey on how we went from being a local project
in the city of Barcelona to building an international community that is still growing.
So the journey didn't finish yet.
And this is I thought that I could share some of the learnings and the challenges that we've been facing along the way.
So before I start, have anybody here heard of the city before?
Could you raise your hand?
Oh wow.
Amazing.
Great.
So that's cool because I wasn't planning to get into the details on how the platform works.
But I will say that the city means a digital platform for citizen participation.
Or we could also define it as a tool for organized the governance of any organization greatly.
So how it started?
We need to go back to 2016 at that moment.
There was a new government in the city of Barcelona.
From now, with the perspective of time, I could say that this was an activist government.
Because we came from that period if you remember from 2011 and 2012,
you remember like the global wave of protest about especially in Spain.
They were very huge with a 15-end movement and then the acknowledged movement.
But there were also other countries that were taking people in the streets.
The streets were claiming a real democracy.
So when some of these activists in the squares came into the institution,
and they brought to the table a radical democracy model to implement in the city,
and also a way of doing a free software with an open collaboration model
from the first moment really.
So you have seen here like the first version of the platform.
At that moment, it was thought they were planning only to release the city,
as a software for the city of Barcelona.
It's in Catalan, but you can already infer that they will bring in full accountability
from the first day.
They wanted to give back meaning to the word participation for citizens of Barcelona.
So soon after they figured out that they could rewrite the whole code
to make it reusable to any other cities that were starting to show interest
in how Barcelona was leading this new political project.
So in fact, the first idea of having a community around the project
started with a hackathon organized by the city council.
It was two days, there were like 100, 200 people attending there,
and the idea was to invite residents really anyone interested to discuss the new features
and prioritize them that the new version of the software should have.
So after two days, we came up with 100 proposals,
and they mostly, most of them they were implemented in the roadmap.
So after releasing this first reusable version,
another city is in the metropolitan area,
started to use in the platform,
and we created this installation of the city,
which is called metadata city.
We have this record city in the project,
because in the end we are building a software for governance.
So we used it for eating our own dog food.
We opened a space for receiving feature requests,
and discussed them.
This was still a very local community,
but it was really intense in activity.
We were having community meetings every two weeks of two types.
What we called the meeting labs,
which were more like an academic seminars,
or oriented to put the project in dialogue with other open source communities.
For example, we had this lab to study and to learn from other governance models
from projects like WordPress, Wikipedia, Drupal.
So that kind of also sent the signal that we were there
and we wanted to collaborate with our peers.
And then we have like the some meetings,
which were more open gatherings,
oriented to anyone really interested in political participation.
So we had journalists, we had designers,
also developers,
but it was not the main focus.
We were divided by different work areas,
and we were concommunication strategies,
and these kind of things,
all documented in metadata city.
And which is what is this we that I keep referring to,
and I think this is a key point in our case,
because also it was a project from a public institution,
the professional team that needed to lead the project
and create the community,
wasn't really formed by public servants.
There were two or three,
but then they hired like people from different organizations,
like we were having researchers from the university,
or myself,
I was coming from a Catalan municipality association.
There were people working in facilitation field.
So each of us had like a connection network,
that facilitated the fact that we were creating this community
around the project.
So a few months later,
some guy in the room called Virgil Deville,
he was working for a French company called open source politics.
So he came, I don't remember Virgil,
if it was an email or a message,
but he said hey,
I discovered your code in GitHub,
we think it's very cool,
and we are already building services.
We have a group of the code base and offering
to municipalities in France.
So at that moment,
we realized that we needed to start a structure in the community,
and thinking about the legal entity that we were going to need,
because of two main factors.
We knew that the project was going to have an international reach,
and on the other hand,
local elections in Barcelona were coming again.
We knew that we could lose institutional support,
and financial support if government changed.
So we started the first governance process in the community.
It was a long one, 18 months discussing in different aspects.
What do we wanted to become?
And after several phase-to-face meetings,
we decided to create a non-profit association called
the Free Software Association.
This was already in 2019.
At that time, this association,
the only thing it had,
it was a fiscal number,
no funding, no staff,
nothing,
but that was really important first,
because the government won again the elections,
and we were able to sign an agreement
to distribute the governance of the code
that was in the repositories of the city council,
and they were seated through the association,
that from that moment,
it was like a little representative of the organized community.
So we gained some resilience there.
This is what the agreement was about,
the code is going to be maintained,
and also the community is going to be damaged by this association,
and also define some other details like the production composition,
and something like that.
So then the pandemic came in,
COVID was in the only thing that spread out.
Suddenly, a lot of organizations,
we were locked down,
but a lot of organizations needed digital tool
to keep being operative and making decisions.
So they decided to adopt the city,
we were keeping,
we were having a lot of requests for help,
for installation,
for offering services,
feature requests,
a lot of use cases for any kind of organizations of four types.
We were only used to the local governments
and then the European Commission came and said,
hey, we're going to use your infrastructure
to launch a conference for the future of Europe,
and we want this, this, this and that.
And then a church, a Lutheran church from Germany,
say, no, we are also discussing internally,
how do we want to rethink ourselves with our community?
So we're using the city,
and we need this, that and the other.
So we were having effectively a growth crisis,
like, okay, what the hell is going on?
Because this is the theme I was telling you about
from the moment the association was created,
started to shift its focus to the Barcelona needs,
because Barcelona community was also growing.
They were carrying big processes of participatory budgeting.
They needed all the people they could get.
So we were like two people in the city,
and I was an external and trying to figure out,
okay, how do we navigate this moment and finally,
two years later of this period,
we get to sign like an agreement
with the regional government of Catalonia,
that recognized the association and the project
is self as a digital common to be preserved,
because in at least in Catalonia they were already used
like 200 municipalities,
and this gave a little bit of air to the staff of the association.
We could hire a maintainer,
which was the basic thing to do,
and someone to support with the administration
activity of the association.
So another thing was that one of the economic helps that we got
from this agreement that came from the Barcelona City Council,
suddenly failed at the end of the year.
They say, hey, do you know the 15,000 users that you were counting on?
So it's a shame, but for political reasons,
we can not afford to give you this money this year.
So this was really like a moment of crisis,
or we survived or we disappeared.
And because the city was able as well to build an ecosystem
productive group of companies that were already offering services
on top of this infrastructure,
we could put in place what we called the policy,
the partnerships policy,
and they give back a little amount every year
from the gains they get for offering services on top of the city.
So that was really a life-saver.
So, okay, that was the story.
This is how we ended having a great big community.
Right now the city means being used in 30 countries
around the world, mainly in Europe and Latin America,
but also in Japan and some places in the states.
And we keep using Meta-Decidivas
that the main reference of the project
to organize both the governance of the code or the roadmap
and the governance of the community.
On the code side or the technical contributions,
we set up some spaces to back reporting.
We keep that space for proposed new features.
And of course, you can, we are trying to assemble
a little community of designers around the project.
And also we are encouraging this kind of module approach
for the architecture to be resilient enough
and to cover all the needs of the use cases that we have.
On the known code contributions, of course,
we also have this site to co-create the documentation,
this is demonstrated to more than 30 languages.
We only maintain Catalan Spanish English
and then the community does the rest.
And we keep organizing these kind of meetings
that have been also crucial in building this international community.
Because this is all about building community
is getting to know people having established
a personal relationship.
So of course, we can not afford to do offline meetings
or face-to-face meetings all the time
because there is people from around the world.
But the city in face is our annual conference
and it's the big opportunity to get to know the newcomers
and meet again with existing members in the community.
We've been also experimenting because we use the city
for the most asynchronous spaces for the liberation
and discussion.
We've been experimenting to integrate with metrics.
We use element to have some rooms
and to be able to coordinate quickly
if we're going to launching a new release.
So there is a room to coordinate the translation
and these kind of things.
And so far, so good.
And right now on the governance side of things,
we are just starting.
I think it's today that finishes the step two of agenda setting
and there is already a drafting committee.
We need to write the internal regulations.
I will explain you later why.
But yeah, this was something that we had pending from 2020
and now we find a moment to start working on that.
And having a more transparent way to make decisions
because this is something that always is problematic,
when you want to scale the governance and make it democratic.
So some lessons from that.
I'm sure that not, I mean, in our case because we went
from public investment, I know it's a peculiar
but I would highlight and I think that some of you may relate.
The fact that this activist government was really bold and brave
like launching this political project was really inspiring
for everyone and not for particular radical organizations.
But you can get some of the genuine intentions,
no when you see them.
So for us was really key in the extension of the project.
New York City, other big cities, the city of Mexico.
I am quite sure that if it wasn't because we had
Barcelona flagship, maybe it would be more difficult.
The second one, this is a pain point.
Public money, public code, okay, to that.
But public procurement is a complete nightmare.
I'm sure many of you are familiar with that.
But our entire development model is based on public contracts
and external companies.
That means we keep rotating companies.
We keep discussing and training new developers
because the city, I guess, is a really complex software.
It does a lot of things but it has a steep learning curve.
So we are desperately finding or looking for new ways
to at least the roadmap one part being having it internalized
and not being dependent all the time on external sources.
Third point, of course, I already said,
in person meetings are really crucial for building this community.
And that doesn't mean that having a global community or a big community,
you have to have a global governance.
We are already seeing this kind of local chapters appearing
and functioning very well.
This is a community for the municipalities of the province of Barcelona.
It is run in fact by the provincial government,
which is offering services for that municipalities.
And they are using it as a social network,
social professional network.
They share different experiences.
It's a community expert of practice that is working is working really well.
Same on Japan.
But in this case, this is run by an open source community code for Japan.
They were the ones that discovered the project
and they are doing this advocacy work of showcasing the different instances
around the country.
Then we have different from France.
The same open source politics, which is today,
one of the main partners of the city.
They also put in place a community instance.
More oriented perhaps to discuss their own roadmap necessities.
But then also communicate with us.
And as a final example,
I will showcase the last big addition to the community
that was the federal government of Brazil.
And I mean it as a federal level.
They are deploying the city to discuss the strategic policies
for this mandate of Lula.
And they are heavily organizing through telegram.
They had several channels.
But they put in place also an instance of the city
to start organizing themselves.
So on the challenges side,
of course, financial sustainability.
I'm sure this is a shared challenge for any open source project.
We are trying to diversify.
If you want to know more, my colleague Neil will do a talk tomorrow,
specifically about our financial plan.
So if you're interested, then defining our role
in the economic ecosystem because as an association,
we don't want to compete with the companies
providing services around the city.
So we need to go to see how big it can become.
This ecosystem.
And then if we need to limit ourselves in some aspect.
This leads me to the third point,
which is we started to, we started being a local software
from a city and very tuned for the necessities
of a local government.
But now the city means being used for any kind of all kinds of organizations.
So in the association, we are thinking,
maybe we need to do a step back.
We need to work more at the infrastructure layer
and let the economic, the partners and the productive ecosystem
build the last application to any organization
and to cover all the needs in our community.
More in the political side because we are a political project.
How do we avoid participation watching?
We already had some debates in the community.
In the Chile, Estaiido movement some years ago,
the government of Pignera back then tried also to use the same.
How do you avoid that?
Because in the end we have a GPL, a fair GPL 3.
So it's free software.
You can do whatever you want with that.
But at the same time, we are a political community.
So this is still an open debate.
How do we manage it?
And related to that is we think in our social content
as a political community.
The city has a social contract which means a set of basic principles
that anybody that joins the community can meet to comply with.
Like always be transparent, the content needs to be traceable
and the integrity of the information needs to be guaranteed
in this kind of things.
But maybe we need to amplify or rethink our social contract.
We are doing now the internal revelations
because we had a debate last year about what is happening in Palestine.
For example, and the need that we had to position ourselves
with the violations of human rights and this kind of things.
And we already noticed that it's easy to have political affinity
when you are a small community.
But now that we have this kind of global rate,
we knew that it's not that easy to be on the same page.
So this is one of the reasons that we are having more clear rules
on how is this going to be managed.
And last but not least, the city was born on a 1st of February.
So this means that it's today is the birthday project.
We are eight years old.
Yay.
So we will be going to celebrate with some
the city members in the room.
So you are more than welcome to join us if you want.
And thank you very much for your attention.
Any questions or comments?
Yep.
Okay.
I try to repeat the question.
So do I have any tips to build trust from the government
when you intend to launch a project like that?
Yeah.
I mean, we try to design this software with some democratic principles
in the software.
It's not that easy because then you start to see in different use cases.
But from the perspective of a government.
It all starts with accountability.
We find this is a key point.
The scene has a specific component, which is called accountability.
And it lets you to submit proposals from part of the citizens.
But then the citizens is completely informed about any change that they
propose a suffered like they were converted to a specific project.
They were, I don't know, I managed by administrator and they edited.
So the fact to keep having this traceability in the participation cycle.
It's what builds more trust in our experience at least in Barcelona.
This is something that.
And of course, having binding political processes that really interest people,
not discussing irrelevant things for example in Barcelona.
We had this huge problem about how do you say.