ICTlogy
Ismael Peña-López, lecturer and researcher
Information Society, Digital Divide, ICT4D
Ismael Peña-López, lecturer and researcher
Information Society, Digital Divide, ICT4D
I am Ismael Peña-López.
I am Director of the School of Public Administration of Catalonia.
I was Director General of Citizen Participation and Electoral Processes at the Government of Catalonia (2018-2021)
and professor at the School of Law and Political Science of the Open University of Catalonia (2005-2018).
I have also been senior researcher at Open Evidence and
fellow director of Open Innovation at Fundació Jaume Bofill.
My main areas of work are the impact of ICTs in society (e-Readiness, the digital divide), especially in development (e-inclusion, ICT4D), and educational (e-Learning, digital competence) and political (e-participation, e-democracy) institutions.
When working with the idea of the citizen participation ecosystem from the point of view of a national government, one of the basic questions is how the Administration should nurture and facilitate such ecosystem. There are, at least, two approaches that have been traditionally explored.
Although I had been long interested on gender studies, during December 2018 and the first months of 2019 I began to actively search for documents that dealt with the issue of gender (discrimination, inequality, etc.) on citizen participation. I found out that there was quite a lot of literature on gender and democratic institutions, but nothing specifically on gender mainstreaming in participatory processes.
So, at the Directorate General of Citizen Participation and Electoral Processes we decided to do our own research and project on the issue. With the valuable help of Fundació Surt, and after an initial training, we analyzed public procurement, the facilitation of events, the evaluation processes, information and communication protocols, etc. under the light of gender mainstreaming.
The result was triple. First, the aforementioned analysis and evaluation; second, a set of internal protocols to improve our own work; third, a ...
26/09/2020
Some people use to believe of citizen participation as something that is at odds with policy-making. That is, that citizen participation complicates the execution of policies and delays results.
The reality is quite far from this —considering, of course, that one is committed with quality policy-making and actually aim at having an impact with the policies that one is pushing forward.
Although there is an increasing number of instruments that can be called citizen participation, most of them have the following scheme:
These three apparently innocent steps are key to driving improvements —not delays— in policy-making.
First, the Administration just cannot "have something in mind". If one is not telling anyone, any crazy idea might be passed along and put into practice. But if the information is going to be public, and made widely available for public scrutiny, planning becomes a must. Thorough diagnosis, analysis, planning and design are a requisite for any kind of citizen participation initiative. In this train of thought, citizen participation ...
27/12/2020
No hay un proceso canónico de creación de conocimiento. Encontraremos, desde la epistemología hasta el management, multitud de formas con las que explicar cómo la Humanidad baja del árbol y, una vez en pie, convierte una rama en una herramienta para mejorar su existencia.
Sin embargo, sí podemos definir dos direcciones opuestas en las que sucede esta creación del conocimiento, que la filosofía ha categorizado, a grandes rasgos, en racionalismo y empirismo. El racionalismo comienza haciéndose una gran pregunta, ...
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