The European Decido project held a co-creation session at the Rio Ebro Campus in Zaragoza to raise awareness of the project and address the challenges it will have to face in the coming months. Francisco Sanz, Executive Director of Ibercivis, was in charge of leading the meeting and explaining what Decido is. The European project, with 14 partners, began in March 2021 and will run for three years. Ibercivis is a member of the project consortium together with the Government of Aragon, which acts as a third party of Ibercivis through its investee company SARGA.
An important part of the Decido project is co-creation, i.e. joint and collective creation by citizens. Xavier Uriarte from Tecnalia, another of the Decido partners, explained this. And this co-creation involves people from different fields: social (citizens, NGOs), personnel who intervene directly in disasters – police, firefighters, health personnel, volunteers who take part in direct intervention such as a fire, a flood or a power cut. And the political actors, who are fundamental to this project.
Susana Barriga from Aragón Open Government spoke about citizen participation, and the importance of having a very diverse conversation, with different professional profiles, origins, socio-economic levels, as collective intelligence emerges from this variety of participants. What LAAB Laboratorio de Aragón Gobierno Abierto does is to help those who are in charge of managing the participatory process, providing a methodology, accompaniment in the process and the project report.
Barriga also focused his speech on how they work in the Aragón Open Government and how they disseminate the processes of citizen participation to reach the largest possible number of actors.
The session also served to learn about the Flexpart tool, which is used to track particles and also simulates the physical processes that affect particle dispersion. For example, it will make it possible to predict where smoke will move when a fire breaks out. Regarding the use of this tool, the next step is to enter data and information to start making simulations. “We want to know if this smoke is going to affect the population,” said Francisco Sanz. The session was completed with an exercise on the tool to get to know its peculiarities and possibilities.