Before we get started, could I ask you one more time to say on the recording that you consent to this ethnographic interview being recorded and used for research purposes of our project, INTERFACED?
My name is Valentin, and I consent to be recorded.
Thank you, Valentin. I read about you and watched some of your YouTube videos in preparation for this, but for the purposes of a more complete interview, could you briefly introduce yourself and talk a little about your journey? You started out as a political scientist, right?
Yes. I’m 38, and in France I studied political science. After that, I worked for a few years as a political adviser, first to a local mayor north of Paris, and then to a member of the Senate. So I was very much inside political life.
About ten or twelve years ago, I started reflecting on how digital technologies could be used to reinvent, or at least improve democracy: digital democracy, participatory democracy, those kinds of questions.
So around ten years ago, together with other co-founders, we created Open Source Politics, or OSP. At OSP, we have deployed, maintained, and developed different platforms and tools based on open-source software. You mentioned Decidim, but there have been others as well.
Over the years, we have supported a large number of projects, more than 200 different clients, ranging from small local authorities and medium-sized cities to the European Commission, and in some cases clients outside Europe as well. For example, the participate.nyc.gov platform in New York, where you are based, uses Decidim, and we also advised them on how to use it.
So our work combines both IT services such as providing open-source tools either as SaaS or on-premise software, and consulting, in many different forms: from framing participatory processes to, in some cases, analysing or evaluating the process and the contributions it generates.
For almost ten years now, we have been working in this field. We are one of the actors in the civic tech sphere.
Thank you. As I mentioned, our project is called INTERFACED, and among the project partners we have a lot of lively internal discussions about what that word actually means.
So when I say interface, in the context of civic life — as a kind of connection point between citizens and power, or citizens and institutions — how would you define it?
What strikes me is that digital technology always creates some kind of interface. Even between us right now, we are using a video-conferencing tool as an interface in order to see each other and interact.
And more broadly, participatory democracy itself creates an interface between elected officials, civil servants, the population, and different stakeholders.
What is interesting is that every interface comes with both constraints and opportunities. That is exactly why, at OSP, we place so much emphasis on open source. We believe that the way these interfaces are designed has a real impact on the outcome of the conversation.
That is why we promote open-source software like Decidim, but also, more generally, open discussion, even beyond the strictly digital aspect. So yes, I think interface is a very good and very interesting word for exploring participatory democracy and civic technology.
Do you think that a digital interface, platforms, apps, participatory tools, is simply a way of mediating communication? Or does something about it actually shape or transform how people can access power and institutions?
I think the main purpose of these tools is to address a very practical problem. If we want active participation from citizens, the obstacle is often time, space, or both.
For example, if you have a city of 500,000 inhabitants, there is no way everyone can physically gather and each speak for three minutes on a given topic. Nor do you always have the physical spaces where people can meet and deliberate together.
So digital tools create an interface that helps solve those two problems. They make it possible for very large numbers of people — sometimes millions — to contribute.
Of course, much depends on the topic and on how the process is designed, because some issues attract more participation than others. But last year, for example, we saw a record-breaking petition in France on one of our platforms, with more than two million signatures in a short period of time.
Which platform was that?
It was the platform of the National Assembly. There was a petition there against a new law.
Without a tool like that, there is simply no way to gather so many people in such a short time, to mobilise them, bring them into agreement around a shared position, and potentially have an impact. In that sense, digital tools clearly create an opportunity.
Now, do they automatically empower citizens? Probably they can, but it also depends very much on the people in charge. If decision-makers do not use them well, if they do not respect the rules they themselves set for participants, or if they do not take into account what comes out of the platform, then it remains just a tool.
In that sense, it can be distorted or used in a non-performative way.
I think these tools are not neutral. The choice of tool is political, and the way it is used is political as well. The tool itself is still just a tool, but depending on how it is developed and used, it can become a very powerful one.
That makes sense. In a democratic or participatory process, what does access to power mean to you? Is it influence over decisions, agenda-setting, oversight, or something else?
I think it depends, because there are many different kinds of processes. And sometimes a platform can support all of those things.
It can be about agenda-setting, as in the case of petitions. It can be about finding the best possible answer to a complex problem. It can be about identifying the best projects, based on popularity, comments, or endorsements from the population.
So yes, it can mean many different things. It can also simply be about bringing people together to discuss, deliberate, and improve their understanding of a complex issue. Or it can be about setting the agenda, or shaping the options that are available. I do not think it is limited to one single form.
All right. In your work with Decidim and Open Source Politics, what are some examples that stand out to you where citizens effectively interfaced with power through non-electoral participation?
What is interesting is that Decidim can be used in both a top-down and a bottom-up way.
On the top-down side, we have supported many public consultations on a wide range of topics. One of the most innovative examples at the time was the Citizens’ Convention on Climate in France in 2019. There, 150 randomly selected citizens worked on the issue and developed proposals. At the same time, we used the platform so that anyone else, civil society organisations or individual citizens, could also contribute ideas. There were limits on the number of ideas each person could submit or support, but still, it created a form of collective intelligence responding to a top-down invitation to participate.
On the bottom-up side, one of the strongest recent examples was the very large petition last year in France, which had enough impact to change the legal process. It led to this controversial bill being referred to the Constitutional Council, the closest equivalent we have to a supreme court in France.
I think we have some very good examples.
At the local level, we have also done a lot of participatory budgeting, which is a very concrete way for citizens to influence how their neighbourhood, their street, or their school develops, how public money is used and how collective decisions shape those spaces.
There are many different approaches, and many different kinds of success. But if I had to highlight a few examples, I would mention the petitions and the Climate Convention, because the latter really was a milestone and one of the first initiatives of its kind in that field.
You have been involved in civic tech for quite a long time now, right?
About ten years, yes. A bit more.
Yes, that is a long time, more than a decade. I’m curious about your broader historical perspective. How have the tools that enable this kind of non-voting civic participation evolved over time? And I’m especially interested, as we all are, in the Covid and post-Covid period, because of how much that transformed life online for many of us.
Yes, of course.
What I always find interesting is that, at the very beginning of what came to be called civic technology, the term itself was being used quite broadly. I think it came from a report by the Knight Foundation in the US around 2013. At that time, the category included many different kinds of tools, even things like Uber and Airbnb, because they were understood as peer-to-peer tools for connection and sharing. They were being considered part of that civic-tech landscape. Obviously, that is not what we usually mean by civic technology today.
If we focus more specifically on citizen participation, democratic innovation, and institutional transparency, which is also very important, what is striking is that ten years ago we still tended to think of Facebook and Twitter as the public spaces of the internet. They were seen as places where revolutions could begin, where large-scale political discussion could happen, and where people could engage publicly on almost any issue.
And when we started Open Source Politics, that was before the first election of Donald Trump, before Brexit, which of course had a major impact in Europe, before Cambridge Analytica, and before the transformation of Twitter into what it later became. A very different landscape.
Over those ten or twelve years, I think we have learned that dedicated tools are important because they can recreate a public space that is protected from advertising.
We should mention also all the mechanics that can be harmful to public participation.
I think these dedicated tools have improved in that sense. The problem is that they may still be too elitist. We have seen thousands of people use them, but it is still only a minority of the population, almost everywhere. It remains difficult to bring certain groups of people to these tools. That is always a challenge. We have some answers, but it is never really enough.
And yes, we definitely saw an acceleration during the Covid period, because before Covid many people did not take these tools very seriously. Then, during Covid, they suddenly realised they needed them, because it was no longer possible to organise public gatherings in schools or in any physical infrastructure. So we needed video conferencing, forums, voting platforms, all of it.
There was a real change. Ten years ago, I think we were probably also a bit naive about what technology could bring.
Then Covid came, and that was a paradigm shift. More people, and especially more institutions, began to see the need for civic-tech tools.
And now I think we are at another turning point, because of AI, which is again changing the landscape and the forms participation can take. We have already seen a lot of spam accounts publishing on these platforms, and they are becoming more and more sophisticated. We cannot always know whether something comes from AI, from a spam account, or from a real user. Of course there are ways to check, asking for identification, or requiring specific forms of verification, but those solutions also create new barriers to participation.
There have really been different periods, and it has been interesting to watch that evolution.
At the same time, the core structure of the tools is not radically different from what we were doing ten years ago: proposals, surveys, meetings, votes. But now the use is more mature, perhaps more profound. We know better how to use them, and the main difference is that more people and more institutions are now using them.
As a kind of historical follow-up, because then I want to ask you about AI, do you remember any digital civic tools or participatory formats that had a kind of boom during Covid, but then did not really stick around afterwards? Things that seemed promising at the time, but were maybe limited to the pandemic moment?
What we saw with the tools we know and work with was that during Covid they were often used in order to reflect on broader social change, almost on changing the model of society itself. There was a great deal of energy around that, and a lot of interest in using these tools for those purposes.
But I think much of that energy faded once people returned to what felt like normal life.