Infrastructuring Democratic Innovation: Networks, Platforms, and Observatories for Translocal Knowledge Work on “Deliberative Mini-Publics”

• In Event: Knowing Democracy

Abstract

Since around 1970, "deliberative mini-publics" have spread across the globe. Part of a larger movement to innovate democracy, this model comprises the convocation of small groups of randomly sampled citizens to deliberate a given issue with professional moderation in order to arrive at a considered and informed view of “the public”. Our paper investigates practices in which knowledge about this model of democracy is being made, how it is brought into circulation, and how it is translated with different situations and local cultures of politics. We put a focus on ongoing efforts in the field seeking to establish networks, platforms, and observatories that connect locally distributed work on mini-publics in order to allow for translocal learning and the formation of strategic alliances. We discuss how such efforts infrastructure locally distributed practices of democratic innovation. Mobilizing concepts such as “center of calculation” (Latour), “scopic media” (Knorr Cetina) and “space-making” (Löw) we elaborate the ways in which decisions on the design of observational frames, comparative schemes, data repositories, and maps have the effect to preconfigure the ways in which democratic innovation in general, and more specifically deliberative mini-publics, are understood and done within the translocal expert cultures that they seek to facilitate. We conclude that the design of networks, platforms and observatories establishes centers of “ontological power” contributing to the constitution of translocal knowledge spaces and shaping ongoing work for democratic innovation “at distance”. The study of these processes is thus of central interest for tracing the translocal dynamics of democratic innovation.

Authors

• Jan-Peter Voß, Berlin University of Technology

• Volkan Sayman, Berlin University of Technology

• Jannik Schritt, Berlin University of Technology