2. Literature Review
2.3. Study Cases
Final part of the chapter is related with two study cases. As it was shown in Section 2.2, it is still big room for improvement in different aspects of the current applications of this thematic. Overall, this dissertation’s main goal is to insert geographical component to an application of this nature, and, in fact, the aim of this section is to show some cases where the spatial component has been forgotten and why it is crucial to attend to this matter. There is an important lack of geographic component in applications showed, understanding that geographical filtering must be an essential and very useful tool to movement for social change.
In order to prove how spatial tools can help and optimize this kind of applications, there is here exposed one case extracted form change.org. It covers an issue in a municipality (La Garriga, Catalonia, Spain) with the aim to change something thanks to support from users.
Furthermore, there is an example of a political party willing to prove their transparency in Barcelona: Guanyem11. Finally, the last section of this chapter introduces some hypothetical case where application described in this document can help different users.
11 https://guanyembarcelona.cat [accessed December 26th, 2014]
2.3.1. Picnic area case
Bordalla12 Association is an assembly of young people in La Garriga that started an initiative on 24th November 2014 against the construction of a picnic area in the municipality of Cànoves-Samalús. The council of Cànoves-Samalús approved a project for a picnic area in a rural environment, which affected neighbouring towns such as La Garriga, since to arrive to the picnic area it is mandatory to pass through this town. The initiative wanted to collect signatures to pressure Cànoves-Samalús’ council to give up this idea. In general terms, Bordalla’s reasons to create this initiative are the risk of fire, destruction of the landscape and project deficiencies on the sewage system.
Fig 15.- Image of picnic area project and suuroundings
By the time this dissertation has been written (January 2015), the initiative has achieved 490 signatures distributed in 134 different areas.
Fig 16 shows the participation among representative municipalities. There are 134 areas involved in the petition and this 8 representative municipalities represent around 66,50% of the total signatures. The other components of the list do not exceed 3 votes, being 89 areas with one vote. At first glance, it is very surprising the percentage of votes from La Garriga (53,06%). This issue can be a result of the arguments exposed before, or due to the fact that Bordalla is an association based in La Garriga. The second higher value in the chart is Barcelona with 31 signatures (6,33%); it is not surprising, since Barcelona has more population than the rest of the municipalities, but focusing on what amount of people represents this percentage for Barcelona (right column), percentage of signing population is the lowest of the figure. The rest of the items are municipalities from the same comarca
12 http://assemblealabordalla.blogspot.com.es [accessed January 16th, 2015]
county- (Vallès Oriental) where the picnic project area is located. As an anecdote, there is one vote from New York and another from United Kingdom (UK) being the only two signatures from outside Spain, demonstrating the internationality of change.org.
Fig 16.- Percentage of signatures per municipality (*) representative municipalities.
Fig 17.- Spatial distribution of Figure 16
Fig 17 represents spatial distribution of these 8 municipalities; only Barcelona is outside the comarca of Vallès Oriental. This map illustrates that the participation increases as the distance from the place decreases. From the eight highest values from the list (66,50% of the total), 57,95% are neighbouring towns, while 60,20% are municipalities from the same comarca (Vallès Oriental). Future work can be lead to find out which percentage of
Barcelona’s voters was born in La Garriga or are bonded with the town.
Attending to the percentages, it is possible to see that it would make sense to implement a new functionality in change.org in order to enable petitions to be sent to certain geographic limits, to increase diffusion. This new functionality does not need to replace the current methods of sharing petitions through social networks and mailing list, but it can be regarded as another channel to spread the petitions. As seen in the example above, it would represent, at least for local issues, a useful new feature.
2.3.2. Guanyem’s case
Guanyem11 is a new political party that is going to run in the upcoming municipal elections (May 24th 2015) for the city council of Barcelona.
In July 14th 2014 the following headline appeared in a newspaper13:
“ “Guanyem” quiere ganar los barrios preguntándoles.”
“ “Guanyem” wants to win the neighbourhoods by asking them.”
In order to achieve this proposal Guanyem used Appgree as a participation channel. In Section 2.2 the characteristics of this application were reviewed and the lack of the spatial component was pointed. Moreover, Guanyem understood that the decentralization of power is essential in order to achieve a better management and thus, there are created commissions in all the neighbourhoods of Barcelona that deal with local problems and advocated for participation, diffusion, transparency and collaboration.
The application described in this dissertation also regards decentralization and local management as essential to understanding better local social problems. (see Fig 22) The application described can provide the spatial component to Guanyem’s vision in order to understand opinions and problems at district level, instead of just having a general overview.
Furthermore, Appgree channels are public and users from anywhere can enter the Guanyem Barcelona channel and give their opinion and send their answers through the channel. Then, a question appears: does it make sense to take into account the votes of citizens outside Barcelona in policy-making affairs? It is not an answer with easy solution, but at least it is a question to consider.
13 http://www.diariounidad.es/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=321:guanyem-barcelona-aterriza-en-los-barrios-para-ganar-preguntando&catid=88&Itemid=573 [accessed January 16th, 2015]