Mutual Support, Debates & Great Ideas for Improving the OH Participatory Platform

At Sharing Cities, an event in Barcelona this November, Platoniq shared some of the work and insights from working on OpenHeritage especially in connection to SDG 11. SDG 11 broadly defined is creating cities and human settlements that are more inclusive, resilient, safe, and sustainable. This was a perfect fit for the event and in alignment with the Sharing Cities programme which focused on platform labour, inclusion, and gender, and data commons. 

When we think about platforms, many have a one size fits all design regardless of who is using it and where. However, much of the overlap between OpenHeritage and Platoniq´s work revolves around co-creating spaces and tools on and offline for more accountability, transparency, wider participation and greater inclusivity. This can mean that often Platoniq tweaks and changes the Decidim platform in order to better serve different communities, places, and needs. One of the most important co-creations to have happened within Platoniq’s collaboration at OpenHeritage has been the new features developed on Decidim for the six OH labs. 

So far there have been four proposed tools or features. To see the proposals check it out here, on our Decidim platform for OH. These features were created to facilitate more creative ways for communities to interact both digitally and offline. More importantly, they were created with specific sites in Sunderland, London Prädikow, Berlin and Prague, Warsaw in mind. As a result they respond to very different contexts and places. 

Present at Sharing Cities, was Oliver with Decidim, The Game to play and workshop with the participants at the festival on participatory processes in their communities as well as  Design Justice Node Mediterranea to talk about inclusion and justice based design. A few members of Platoniq’s team have been active collaborators in getting the node off the ground and were able to shake things up at the event space to talk about intersectionality and the Design Justice principles.