This week Barcelona is celebrating the Open City Biennial of Thought (Ciutat Oberta), a festival of philosophy to debate the role of today's cities with the big challenges facing contemporary society. Among the many events across the fourth itineraries (Digital City, Democratic City, Diverse City and Habitable City), a very inspiring event was held yesterday at Fabra i Coats: Digital Cities, Digital Freedoms – Digital Commons, Ethical Standards and Free Software for Cities. This event preserved many ideas around digital sovereignty discussed on Tuesday and Wednesday at the DECODE project symposium, but with the purpose of visibilizing and strengthening the existing FLOSS communities in Barcelona.
In this event, we launched the DECODE pilots in Barcelona with a special emphasis on the Digital Democracy and Data Commons (DDDC). This was done in a panel with my colleagues Mara Balestrini, Guillem Camprodón, Antonio Calleja, Guy Samuel, and Oleguer Sagarra. In my case, I presented the work done by the team at Eurecat with BarcelonaNow, a system for empowering citizens with interactive dashboards for urban data exploration. This was also an excellent opportunity to host a workshop to promote the constitution of a community around the DDDC pilot and to receive very valuable feedback. The event concluded with a panel about Citizen Laboratories in the Digital Cities in which I had the pleasure to moderate Laia Sánchez (Citilab) and Mariona A. Cíller (SokoTech).