This project mainly relied on a longitudinal ethnographic research design, with the addition of interview data, and public documents to study the development and deployment of one of the most ambitious open source civic tech platform at the time. As one of the first of its kind, and being open source, the platform involved digital activists at the forefront of change, joined by administrative staff, civil servants, design experts, and citizens. The data collection took part in Madrid, with the support of Madrid's public innovation lab.
The early theoretical work surveyed more than 700 papers to develop a framework from which to analyse the sustainability of the platform, particularly events that, on their own, would increase the overall sustainability of the project, but taken together, would hamper it. In this sense, we found that sustainability in open source was relative and not absolute.
The empirical work followed specific initiatives put in place to sustain the project, both its code and its deployment. As the project took participation metrics to equate sustainability with success (as is common in open source), most of the initiatives were geared towards such increasing participation. Nonetheless, the actors involved were deeply analytical as to the importance and non-importance of such measures, revealing the depth of complexity to promote alternative measures as valid signs of sustainability (e.g. promoting citizenship, democratising participation, etc.). The variety of initiatives put in place showed that such open source social projects, especially civic tech ones, face an interfacing dilemma: how to interface with the social (in this case, the city)? The ambiguity in the role of actors and their heterogeneity creates real difficulties: whose voice should be captured? Can participation be equal to all?
One possible solution is to enact different processes to create different communities. These, we found, relied on the passions and interests of actors, not as emotions, but as two organisational vectors that coordinated alternative and complementary ways of participating. This is often taken for granted in open source, but the passion to learn is (increasingly) meeting with interests (learning skills, financial interests as skill signalling, etc.). Each of these modes of participation effected different kinds of participation qualities, which lead to different kinds of democratic qualities. Passionate participation lead to participation more tied to the territory, more genuine in that sense. Interested participation (which may well have started as a passion) involved more technical and scalable qualities.
These results have been disseminated both in academic circles, as well as to practitioner, public bodies, and citizens. Working closely with the Madrid's public innovation lab, rules for participation board games were developed that formalised how participation could be sustained. The research involved engagement activities to help foster sustainable communities and analyse how open source democratic ICTs can be sustainable beyond their code. The possibility to engage directly with citizens, digital activists, and practitioners in general and throughout the project has been invaluable for the development of this research and its insights. Many articles were drafted and are currently under review in top-tier outlets that recount, as well as dissemination articles that showcase the project's findings (e.g. at opensource.com) and others that challenged more generally the influence of (certain) digital imaginaries over the development of our cities (e.g. at LSE business review). The results of the project have resulted in continuous participation to some of the most important conferences in the field and in key European university.
