Public, libre, commons: On the logics, logistics and locations of democratic participation in the digital age

Abstract

This paper tells the story of Decide Madrid (Decide), a civic tech platform designed by Madrid’s municipality in 2015 in the spirit of the autonomous and hacker philosophies that spearheaded the Spanish Occupy or 15M movement. We develop a biographical account of Decide to show how the design of the platform was modified over the course of four years to accommodate shifting ideas of how digital infrastructures can channel, both online and offline, the social energies and technical rationalities of political participation. In particular, we identify three design assemblages of democratic participation: the public, the libre and the commons, whose orientations and configurations sometimes share, and sometimes diffract, different logics, logistics and locations of where and how democracy ought to be activated in the digital age. We further show how over time these modulations cultivated a view of democratic culture as an experimental process.