Five Years Later

O depósito foi em novembro passado, depois de quase desistir e de muitas reviravoltas. A defesa, naquele auditório vazio, mas onde já assisti aulas de Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen, Hellen Margetts, Richard Stallman, Wiebe Bijker... E, depois de conseguir voltar a ela e revisá-la, encontrei a parte que mais me interessa em mais de 250 páginas. Daqui pra frente minhas pesquisas serão sobre isso:

This type of participation based on big data about services requests, complaints, suggestions and use may be different on intention and content from direct participation processes. When a citizen contacts a service attention centre the message is usually one of complaint – “I cannot make an appointment with the doctor in the health centre” – while when she participates in defining priorities in, for instance, a participative budget process, the message more often takes the form of a suggestion – “the municipal government needs to hire more doctors in my neighbourhood”.  However when large sets of data of both requests, complaints, suggestions and patterns of use are aggregated and interpreted, the results for policy making and/or service improvement might be the same – “more investment in human resources in the health sector in region X”. 

Nonetheless, it is important to note that when governments decide to use citizen feedback to guide their service delivery and, as in the case of Rio, incentivize public servants in achieving performance targets for specific services, one must reflect on the role of this technology-mediated participation. Are citizens aware that their individual requests, complaints and suggestions about services are, aggregately starting to be used to restructure public services but also redirect public policies and investments? By placing efforts in improving electronic channels to expand participation regarding public services, public managers may be moving towards a model of participation that favours higher volumes of unmediated suggestions, since citizens may communicate directly with governments, instead of through organized social movements, not for profits, etc. or voice their opinion only during elections; the relationship to government may become individualized and then depolitized. Therefore, the role of interpreting citizens’ needs and priorities becomes more relevant and that responsibility might shift from civil society organizations and politicians to government technical staff.  

The 1746, for instance, is already guiding the city planning and investment processes when associating Departmental performance to the Municipality Target-Driven Plan, showing that this participation system may be going beyond a simplistic service attention centre. It seems inevitable that this type of participation system, with the aid of electronic means, requires the definition of protocols and standardization of categories for the participation process in order to transform the potential vast number of suggestions into input for policy-making. By doing so, it also becomes easier to be constantly transparent and continuously accountable about the inputs received and the actions taken upon them, closing the feedback loop.

Clearly, expanding electronic participation and feedback systems can foster service enhancement, interdepartmental collaboration, as well as technical decision-making and continuous accountability, less attached to the formal processes of elections. Nevertheless, more investigation needs to be carried out about whether citizens feel rightly interpreted and politically represented on this model of unmediated participation based on vast amounts of data. What needs to be further investigated is whether electronic feedback models may improve some of the acknowledged deficits of present representative democracy, such as political legitimacy, or may on the contrary worsen them.