The minga is an Andean community practice of action for the common good, similar to the tekio in Mexico or the mutirão in Brazil, which involves the solidarity and commitment of everyone. With a minga, it is possible to solve what is needed among all. That is why we propose Minga_Lab, as a meta-platform for participation in public affairs, to enable and enhance the participation capacities of communities at different levels.
A platform as a toolbox, which takes up the experiences developed by the new spaces for citizen participation that cities have today, but also the rural contexts that are invisible and excluded from participation, which can be enriched by a global vision of what happens there.
MINGA_LAB seeks to enable the possibilities of reflection, experimentation and design of participation processes with communities, organizations and institutions. It is a proposal that promotes initiatives oriented to the development of actions in the field of political and social tasks for democracy. It is a meta-platform of community participation, a shared habitat for political action that integrates various functions:
- Streamline the social participation of people, groups and organizations from different territories through collaboration with other experiences that are developed in the same field of action.
- Complement links with similar proposals to disseminate, document and support initiatives and processes of political participation in the region.
- Reinforce the sense of belonging and incidence of the communities in relation to the policies that are developed in their territories.
- Integrate and build collective intelligence that puts at the disposal of political action the knowledge, experiences and tools coming from academia, technology, culture, public work, activism and communities in the territory.
- Weave the different layers of participation through a graphic ecosystem of communities, social organizations and institutions.
- Promote multilayered political participation: deliberation, decision making, policy design, network building and organization, content production.
Participatory principles where we start are:
- Political participation must occur as a scenario that implies probabilities of diverse nature and complexity and that must start from the reality of people in their own contexts of life, personal, geographic, cultural, etc.
- It is necessary to talk about forms of participation of people in conditions of marginalization, precariousness and social and gender exclusion, therefore, any platform should only be a vehicle for the empowerment and facilitation of processes located in different territories.
- We start from the need to design participatory processes that do not reproduce patriarchy or colonization through their narratives, practices, methodologies or tools.
The phases to be developed during the ICD workshop are:
- Phase 4: Design of matrix of meta-platform functionalities (during the ICD laboratory)
- Phase 5: Development of the crowdsourcing platform for the design of public policies (during the ICD laboratory)
- Phase 6: Development of the articulation of the network of initiatives, map and co-laboratory: synergy and exchange processes, forum, bridge space between needs and capacities (during the ICD laboratory)
Desirable collaborators profiles:
- People involved in communities, collectives, movements, etc.
- Front-end developer
- Back-end developer
- Content producer
- Artists
- Activists and tdefenders of the territory
- Mediators with experience in citizen innovation projects.
Medialab-Matadero Madrid