M – cognocracy : building participatory democracy through the electronic voting and mobile ICT

Abstract

To many people, the exercise of democracy and participation in politics has become a synonym for election, an event where ordinary citizens are the leading actors only on the voting day, once every two or four years. This causes the decrease of citizen participation in the world, bringing about what has been called the crisis of political parties. The use of information technologies and communication technologies (ICTs) and new ways of participation in city governments through the exercise of the so-called Participatory Budgeting (PP) are an effective means to reverse the apathy of citizens. But in order to obtain the desired effect, these new ways of participation must have two characteristics. The first one is to reach the greatest number of citizens, who should be able to exercise their right to participate in a simple and safe way; and the second one, that they somehow summarize the citizen preferences through results that represent them. This paper presents a new way of citizen participation called m-cognocracy, that using mobile communication technology and mathematical aggregation operators Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA), provide a new model for citizen participation in the government of cities.