Watch this video. This video shows some of the pillage & destruction that razed the city of Valparaiso, Chile, earlier this week. Chile has been through forty days of mayhem, involving violations of human rights, riots, rallies, & fire. Amidst the chaos [thread] ... 1/14
those who didn't care about politics (narcos, organized gangs), pillaged commercial districts. The country is now in a state of chaos, where uncertainty, unemployment, human rights violations, fear, and capture, loom large.
But... also ...2/
But... also ...2/
During the first week of protests (Oct 18-23), we built & launched an online participation platform (chilecracia.org) to help prioritize dozens of public demands. Chilecracia has received over 7 million preferences from 120k people. 3/ 
In Chilecracia, citizen demands are organized in a deck (just like cards). People help sort the deck collaboratively (using pairwise clicks). Chilecracia launched with 90 proposals (4005 pairs). Now it has almost 200 proposals and nearly 20,000 pairs 4/
We seeded the platform on October 24 with the pair: "New Constitution" & "Minimum Wage Increase." Since then, a process for a new constitution was agreed in Chile at dawn on November 15. A minimum wage guarantee was is in congress, together with other wage proposals 5/
But Chilecracia quickly brought interest from other countries. A Lebanese student from my course at Harvard wanted to put together Lebanocracia, so we help her build lebanocracia.org which launched Nov 16 6/
Lebanocracia.org has collected over 240k preferences. It highlights many judicial, institutional, and environmental issues, such as: judicial independence, recovery of public funds, fighting corruption, & waste management (see lebanocracia.org/results) 7/
Today we have a new "cracia," GeorgiaCracia: georgiacracia.org. Georgiacracia is in the hands of a Georgian Harvard student. Tbilisi has also been in turmoil, first in the summer & now again, & she wanted to help. (also, look at the beauty of Georgian script). 8/
There are now "cracias" in the works for other countries. Groups of people are starting to produce lists & we are helping with the tech. "Cracias" use modular software components built by @datawheel, so we can share components easily between them. 9/
Politically, the platforms are not binding nor pretend to be. Their goal is to provide a first wave of playful online participation. In fact, in all places they trigger a similar sequence of questions (Representativity? Bots? How many clicks I make? Who is behind this? etc.) 10/
What's more interesting is that "cracia" platforms work in the opposite direction of social media. Instead of providing freedom for people to write whatever they want, they constraint interaction & funnel collaboration, even among people from different party lines. 11/
In fact, in Chilecracia we received massive participation from the left & right (based on self-reported data). This participation revealed agreement on some issues (the diagonal), but also, sharp differences on others (upper-left & lower-right corners) 12/
More importantly, "cracias," are not static surveys, but platforms, that we can use to run new content frequently. In Chile, we updated the content weekly for the first 4 weeks. Now we are working on new content (but we will keep it quiet🤫until it is time to release it) 13/
Our goal is to continue working collaboratively on other "cracias." There is a wealth of data and lessons that can be generated through these participation processes. As a nugget, here is a network I built using the first million preferences collected in Chilecracia. .. 14/
