New proposal: EURENDA (LC-GD-10-1-2020)

Guys, an update: we are in a consortium called EURENDA for Area 10, topic 1: European capacities for citizen deliberation and participation for the Green Deal (LC-GD-10-1-2020), RIA. The leader is The Democratic Society, so our old friend (recent Bruxellois) Anthony Zacharzewsky.

The architecture of the project is: a number of deliberative processes happening in Europe (at the city, region, or country level), and a “core” of services supporting these processes and doing research on them.

Finally today’s call clarified a possible role for Edgeryders. I am positioning it as a data analysis partner (@amelia and myself in the lead), with two possible extra roles:

  • Tech support (platform-agnostic) to the deliberative processes that want it. @hugi to lead this team.
  • Data exchange for pulling it different sources of evidence within one corpus and one graph.
  • An English-only online debate on deliberative democracy and how people are using it in the context of climate change. This would be closer to the normal Edgeryders role. Here the leader would be @nadia or @johncoate, I imagine.

Making an explanatory document here.

No action required for now, but prepare to negotiate PMs.

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Who else is in the consortium? And would they participate in the debate forum or would we be more on our own?

No one we know. I guess we would be on our own… don’t think we have the traction to pull them all here.

Exciting! Thanks for that, right up my alley.

Ok, sure

I am very interested in the subject. How much or how little I participate remains to be seen, based on how this unfolds.

@johncoate @hugi @amelia and all, thanks for support, it means a lot. We are sprinting, so I am going to do all the writing myself, not worth trying to coordinate. Where you can help is to support @marina in preparing internal budgets and negotiating with the coordinator.

Unfortunately, DemSoc works on MS Teams (really?). But I have our working documents also on our Drive, here. Most relevant to budgeting are the descriptions of the two WPs we are going to be involved in, WP5 (especially) and WP3.

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And another thing: I wrote some docs with material that goes into sections 1 and 2 + WP descriptions, but we are still missing tables:

  • risks + mitigation
  • Technology Readiness Levels
  • other?

@marina, can you please set up these docs? I think it makes sense to have “generic” documents, and then copy-paste the relevant items in different proposals. I will add new risks (for example, in EURENDA there is a high risk of junk data coming from the deliberative processes).

@hugi, can you update the TRL doc based on recent work on Reddis, RyderEx etc.?

Ok, I have added on the Drive (in EURENDA folder) this document which is our standard description of the TRLs. @hugi you can work directly on it.

Risks and mitigation doc is also copied from the standard documents to EURENDA folder, it can be further worked on HERE. Works @alberto?

What do you need me to do?

See Alberto’s comment:

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Perfect! Thanks.

The draft budget is here. I need you all to check the numbers according to the current descriptions of the WPs and either change directly in the spreadsheet or add a comment.

Since no one did anything yet from other partners budget related, would be good to finalize this soon and send it over so we’re in a good position to negotiate.

So, please @amelia help me refine the research question in EURENDA (and ATSI, a different project in the same batch). The drive is here. The research activity is discussed in the document called “WP5/WP3 Methodology from EDGE” and referred to in Task 5.2.

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@hugi I need your help here. The call says this:

Actions should include several deliberative processes, each of them implemented in a significant number of Member States or associated countries and complemented by a European online multilingual deliberative platform.

This translates into Task 5.1:

Task 5.1: Technical support. Lead: EDGE. M1-M36
We provide a help desk supporting deliberative processes on the ground. This includes strategic choices (which tools suit best the problem at hand?) as well as humble tasks like installation, configuration, personalization, GDPR compliance. This task is based on an up-to-date review of the available tools.

Apparently this is too bottom-up for the call. So, we should say something like: we offer a turnkey solution which is “a European online multilingual deliberative platform”, like Decidim (hear hear). But we also allow ourselves some flexibility, and still loop in processes that refuse to use “our platform” via the data interchange activity of Task 5.3.

Can you rephrase this task in a way that fits the call text better, and demonstrates technical expertise?

I would also like to have a “meta” paragraph explaining the logic behind the task, to be used for sections 1 and 2.

How does this relate to the email you sent me from Eloïse? From what I gather, offering that turnkey solution wouldn’t be on our table at all, and that our job is rather to consolidate the data and provide the opportunity for ethnography. Is that correct?

Yes, correct. It it has to be turnkey, we let them do it. But, as it says in the email thread, today’s meeting actually decided to buy “flexibility”. So it’s looking like: offering a solution, but also being ready to support non-standard tech choices.

The other thing to do is integration. For example – especially if there is a “mother” EURENDA Decidim instance – ingest the conversational data from there onto edgeryders.eu, and conversely exposing the debate on the Decidim instance, like we do on https://exchange.ngi.eu/

So, what can I do now? I’m a little confused about how to contribute. It’s a bit tricky to understand what our contribution will be in terms that are specific enough for a proposal text. Should I limit it to the ethnography backend, content consolidation, and viz?

The objectives to secure are:

  • everything ethnographic goes to edgeryders.eu for coding, AND
  • edgeryders.eu hosts the conversation of task 5.2, but we can still expose it on other online assets, including Decidim.

Plus, yes, ethnographic backend and graph viz.