IGF 2018 WS #318
Public money, public code

Issue(s)

Organizer 1: Virgile Deville, Democracy Earth Foundation
Organizer 2: Antoine Gaboriau, Open Source Politics
Organizer 3: Valentin Chaput, Open Source Politics

Speaker 1: Carolina Romero, Intergovernmental Organization, Intergovernmental Organization
Speaker 2: Aiya Hsu, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
Speaker 3: Orianne Le Droit, Government, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

Moderator

Virgile Deville

Online Moderator

Antoine Gaboriau

Rapporteur

Antoine Gaboriau

Format

Panel - 60 Min

Interventions

We'll have interventions that will be shaped as returns of experience but also as a mean of formulating recommandations.
Carolina Romero will present Decidim, an open source participatory platform that has been funded publicly (by the city of Barcelona). She will present the project and explicit the role of the city of Barcelona in the process.
Aiya Hsu will present the transformations of the Taiwanese government during the last few years, notably through the g0v movement. Indeed, it adopted strong incentives in favor of open source projects in civic tech and put into action these incentives by structuring ways of financing these projects. She will explain us how and formulate recommandations.
Finally, Orianne Le Droit will be able to speak from a government side and explain what are the points that are remaining and holding back the adoption of such incentives, allowing the audience to better understand what still needs to be done in order to move forward on this matter.

Diversity

We will host in the panel 3 women.
C. Romero is Spanish, O. Le Droit. is French and A. Hsu is Taiwanese.
C. Romero is working for Decidim Product (city of Barcelona), Orianne Le Droit is heading the Mission Société Numérique (French digital innovation government agency) and A. Hsu is working for Open Culture Foundation (Taiwanese government).
All three of them are first-time IGF speakers.

Governments worldwide are spending around $150bn a year for custom-built software and mobile apps from external contractors and consultants. In recent years, a movement has progressively enlarged that promotes the use of open source software in government. Among the many arguments in favor of this growing trend are the facts that it allows governments to save money, but also that it fosters renewed trust between citizens and administrations. One sector seems to be primarily concerned with this transparency argument: civic tech actors, who directly want to improve the quality of the democratic life by developing specific digital tools.

We propose a workshop that aims to engage a discussion about the financing of open source civic tech tools by government. As Rufus Pollock said in a 2016 article, several ways of structuring sources of financing exists. We want to take advantage of the diversity of actors that will be participating in our panel to attempt to establish best models of financing. This, in order to launch a roadmap for the implementation of the measures that will have been identified as the most effective during the discussion. The discussion will be shaped as a panel.

We plan to give ten minutes to each participant in order for them to share their experience, and a moderator will engage with them in the second half (30 minutes) by trying to confront their ideas, underline how best governments could fund open source civic tech projects and more importantly take questions and recommendations from the audience.

We plan to leave 30 minutes to discussion with the audience, both online and offline. The online moderator will be integrating answers from the panelists to online questions and remarks as they are formulated.
The panel moderator will have to keep up a tight track of time so that at least 30 minutes are dedicated to discussion.

How can we structure the financing of open source civic tech tools by governement?

This proposal does not build on prior workshops in the IGF context, but it rests on the work that has been accomplished worldwide by the whole open source civic tech ecosystem in the last few years.

Online Participation

Participants will be able to ask questions and formulate propositions on a Sovereign (an open source civic tech tool) platform dedicated to this panel. These questions and recommandations will directly be addressed by the panelists in the 20-minutes discussion at the end of the session. The online moderator, Antoine Gaboriau, is used to managing Sovereign since he works for Open Source Politics, a company that plays an important role in developing Sovereign.