Ahead of speaking this week in Barcelona, I spoke to a few people in Spain about the situation regarding open data in the country. One of those people is Ricard Espelt, a member of Nuestracausa, “a group of people who wanted to work on projects like MySociety [in Spain]”. The group broke up and Ricard now runs Redall Comunicacao. Among Ricard’s projects is Copons 2.0: an “approach to consensus decision making”.

This is what Ricard had to say about the problems around open data, e-democracy and bottom-up projects in Spain:

I think there are three points to bear in mind when we to try to analyse how the tools are changing politics & public administration:

• The process of the governments to review data, so it will be easier to use data for all the citizens. Open data.
• The process of the governments to involve the citizens in the decisions. E-democracy.
• The action of the citizens (individuals or groups) to engage other citizens to work for the community. Is a good way to make lobby and influence in the decisions of the governments.

Spain, like other countries, has been developing all these points with different levels of success. Continue reading →