Applying for GOVERNANCE 21-2020 Developing deliberative and participatory democracies through experimentation

Research Network
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We have been invited as partners in a consortium to apply for the call GOVERNANCE 21-2020.

The coordinator is the Hellenic Mediterranean University from Greece and there are 12 other partners. The project is entitled “Making the Citizens Voice Heard” (VOICE) and the main idea is to:

“understand the opportunities for developing democracy in the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, to make use of its empowering technology and to consider how these changes can shift the current mainstream balance point between democracy and representation. The approach taken is an experimental and bottom-up one; we wish to identify, develop and implement pilot approaches with a clear citizen engagement dimension and a multiplier effect, and then to lay out atop of this, a detailed theoretic framework providing better insight on what ‘more democracy’ can eventually mean and how it can manifest.”

In February, @alberto drafted an idea of how we could contribute (you can find it here). The entire proposal and the WP descriptions together with the budget was taken care by the coordinator and we have now been given the (almost) final version. You can find it here.

We will be using the SSNA to respond to the objective of “technology research” to understand and illustrate how technology can empower and diversify the proliferation of democratic practice. The topic is very close to both POPREBEL and NGI so we could build upon the existing community already on the platform.

On the other hand, there is not a lot of space for negotiation at this point and we weren’t asked for a lot of input in the process.

The total budget of the project is 3 million eur. It is quite fixed as we are a lot of partners. We have been attributed approx. 160k. Duration: 36 months.

We are not leading any of the workpackages, but we have PMs allocated for all 5 WPs (20 PMs in total). The only task that we are leading is T4.4. exploitation of results and we have only one deliverable, related to this task and the follow-up of VOICE.

A part from the budget to participate in the consortium meetings, we don’t have extra budget for travel to organize the usual onboarding events. We weren’t asked to have them either, but as this is an important part of our “standard” workpackage, I will get back to the coordinator and suggest we revise this in the negotiation phase if the project is approved.

If you have any thoughts or comments please let me know as soon as possible since the planned date for the submission is this Friday.

@nadia @johncoate @matthias @amelia @noemi @hugi …

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I think it is not a good idea to be accountable for ssna, without having enough resources and autonomy to be able to generate the data on which to do it. And too many partners = probability of a messy consortium. I think I will have to sit this one out.

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Very cool! Look forward to seeing how this develops.

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Yes, that seems likely. @marina, how do you see it happening that we do a SSNA with 160K?

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consensus after the meeting: make standard wp offer for ssna based tool to increase value added from events in terms of better documentation and better networking for participants ping @hugi

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ties in to what we discussed with chris today- no? @MariaEuler

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This makes sense, and I would be ready to lead some work on this if we get it.

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do you have a basic writeup of what you discussed doing around this?

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im thinking 60% tech dev. The rest for coding/ssna visualisation, facilitation& documentation during events, admin and report writing.

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I will have a look and adapt it. When do we need it?

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it is not urgent as we cannot really use it in the case described above, but would be good to have it soon.

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… and paying Albertino :slight_smile:

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… and 5% of the budget for tech maintenance and operation, as discussed recently. That would ideally apply regardless of how much this project can be tweaked to our other needs, as it is something that should be baked into every future project we apply for, as per our recent decision at the company’s mgm board meeting. (For @marina to keep in mind for future applications.)

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yes clearly. was implied in the whole ssna thing?

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oh id figured that would be in that 60%. Just lumped together anything involving code in there :unicorn:

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because you, you know, it’s all the same thing. lol. should have been clearer.

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once we have the description of this type of workpackage and the tasks, we can also create a corresponding budget and agree on the minimum requirements under which we don’t go.

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ok. I am boyguessing (ask Hugi :))) that it will land at about 150K + Admin overhead + 30K for travel.

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The proposal was finally submitted, with additional budget for travel allocated to us. I’m not a fan of getting into consortia like this, without being included much in the process of writing. In future such situations will be avoided and in this case, if the project gets approved, we will further negotiate in the phase before signing the agreement.

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if you need help with negotiation ask.

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