We spoke to Joan Batlle Montserrat, Responsible for Technology and Digital Rights at the Commission of Digital Innovation at the City of Barcelona, to know more about Barcelona’s approach towards humanising technology.
What form does user-centricity take in Barcelona’s work?
In Barcelona, the e-Government Department is moving all local services to digital. While doing this, we are trying to understand the needs of our users. We want to make things easier for them, and that means that all our digital services must respond to three core aspects.
The first is to provide clear information. What is this service for and why should you use it? We try to make every service understandable. Secondly, we need to understand our users. Who is the service designed for? To whom is it useful? And thirdly, the service needs to be accessible.
How do you involve people in this process?
The City Council has a strong department working on citizen participation, and they use an open-source platform to launch and manage participatory processes, it’s called ‘Decidim.Barcelona’. The platform is very popular and is working at more than 100% of its capacity.
The platform hosts a lot of different processes, some are at the scale of the whole city, others are tailored to the neighbourhood level. The latter are more dynamic and directly affecting people. Citizen participation is about discussing with people issues that directly impact them.
You need to get close to people, which means that you need a plurality of places, of public facilities, that are close to citizens and activities that are tailored to the specific needs of that area. One living lab in a city of a million and a half residents does nothing. You are just giving yourself a pat on the back, but you can’t call that user-centricity.
In Barcelona, we used to say that we are a city of networks, because of all these public facilities, like public libraries, community centres and ateneus de fabricació, ateliers of digital production, that you can find in each city district and neighbourhood. For the past 25-30 years, we did citizen participation by collaborating with associations distributed on the territory and linked to specific sectors. Through elected representative, these organisations have a say in the issues that the city council is discussing.
How has this changed?
In 2018, the Barcelona City Council launched the Decidim.Barcelona digital platform. This opened a door to a more direct citizen participation that complemented what already existed. Since its launch, we started organising projects, topics of discussion, and we changed the internal rules of the city council to integrate public consultations in our everyday work. We learned a lot.
We also created a Meta-Decidim involving researchers, activists, and associations to discuss how the platform should evolve. What we learned is that the platform works best when it is paired with events in the neighbourhoods, assemblies, and face to face discussions with people.
In addition, in the current mandate, we created the lab of democratic participation. It is like a living lab for working with citizens on how local and participatory democracy should be exercised and evolve.
You mentioned accessibility as a core aspect of user-centricity in Barcelona. How do you see accessibility transfer to the digital age?
Colleagues from the Dgital Communication Department, the Municipal Institute for People with Disabilities, and the e-Government Department work together in a commission to guarantee accessibility of digital services.
Of course, the first level of accessibility is to make any service understandable for people. We could come up with the neologism: ‘intellectual ergonomics’, making public services comfortable and convenient for all kinds of residents.
A second level of accessibility is making digital public services as easy for people with disabilities as for anyone. On one hand the city promotes the public digital services that perform well, but it also inspects, checks for compliance and if needed, takes corrective actions towards those who do not perform so well. We also organise trainings and distribute guides to help departments and colleagues be prepared in terms of accessibility in digital public services.
Why has Barcelona joined the UserCentriCities project? What are you hoping to get from it?
Under the leadership of Deputy Mayor Laia Bonet, we are working on a new concept to understand digitalisation in cities: humanising the technology. It means making an ethical use of technology, which means making a use of technology that solves the problems of the people, which means listening to people and understanding their issues.
Our next step is to come up with a way to measure our progress towards humanising the technology, towards putting people at the centre of technology. So, we started looking at what others were doing to develop indicators that could measure this.
That is how we found UserCentriCities. The Lisbon City Council invited us to participate, and we finally decided to join. For us it is interesting to collaborate and learn from this project to identify user-centricity indicators, because finding indicators that can give you an accurate view of your progress is challenging.
Why is it important to develop such indicators?
Indicators have different uses. You have to use indicators to measure your work, but you can measure different things with them. The value of indicators is to measure what you are doing compared to your end goal.
Indicators are also necessary to do benchmarking, which can be used to understand what others have done to achieve your same goal and use this knowledge to improve your own strategy or action plan.
Indicators and benchmarking give you insights you can use to better design your future actions. This is how we learn: you observe, you analyse, you ask questions about the process and the results, and you can take inspiration from others.
Has your work been influenced by UserCentriCities? What are the next steps?
First of all, the project has made us more conscious of the Tallinn declaration. I also feel confident that the project will help us find solutions for part of the digital strategy in Barcelona.
Through the project, we already analysed different questions related to user-centricity – for example, accessibility, comprehension, findability, quality – and now we have to figure out how we can develop a small number of effective indicators to measure these.
We are interested in seeing what other cities in the project are doing. And we are looking forward to use benchmarking as a tool that helps to identify what works, to analyse it and to adapt it to our context.
In the future, we hope to achieve a more widespread use of the methodology. The more cities we will involve once the methodology is developed, the more best practices we will identify and learn from.
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