Democracy Technologies: What is the idea behind the Re:Form project?
Robert Peter: To identify the main topics that need to be addressed by state-level reforms. We tackle questions like: how does the connection between municipalities, regions, states and the nation work? We have many federal levels in Germany – how does that affect governance, and how could it be improved? What is the logic behind public finance?
To do this, we’re building a large coalition of stakeholders from various government levels, from municipalities to federal ministries. We’re engaging in dialogue, identifying problems, and developing experimental solutions. Along with proposing ideas, we conduct experiments in the real world. In August 2023, we held our first big event with around 35 people from those administrations. We started to define the priority topics and kickstart our collaborative efforts.
We’re also developing mechanisms to scale successful solutions across different municipalities and even countries. One strategy we’re exploring is a collaborative approach where cities with proven solutions form a collective to implement and adapt those solutions elsewhere.
DT: How do you identify cities with proven solutions?
Peter: Every year, we award the “Locally Tried and Tested” Seal to some of the best local solutions around Germany. There were 7 winners in the 2024 edition. The idea is to make solutions public, and to provide a stage for solutions which could be adopted in other municipalities in Germany.
We have a polycrisis at the moment. We have a lot of fantastic solutions in Germany, but we also have around 11,000 municipalities, all working independently of one another. And when I say we have some great solutions, that could mean that for a specific topic, only a single municipality has implemented a great solution.
The Seal gives us a way of sharing these ideas with other municipalities. But we don’t just want to create a platform which gathers all of these solutions. In practice, people in administrations are busy, and they don’t spend their time searching best practice databases.
We do share the solutions on our website, of course. But we are also involved in organising the scaling up of the solutions. We approach other cities and ask: Do you want to implement this solution in your community? And then we work with people from different levels of the administration to find ways of collectively implementing the solution.
DT: Your background is in maths and data. How did you come to work in the field of political innovation?
Peter: I studied mathematics, but unlike most people with my background, I was a supervisory advisor for digital policy in the German Bundestag for a period. I worked there especially on topics about data, smart cities, and AI, always connected to the question “how can technology improve our society?” After leaving that post, I started to work at the Weizenbaum Institute, where my role was to translate between science and politics.
Then I got the chance to go to ProjectTogether and look at the question of how we can find out what kind of reform we need to not simply make things a little bit better but to change everything. We don’t want to replace democracy. But we want to change how it actually works in Germany. That’s why I co-initiated Re:Form.
DT: Is your work more focused on developing tools or on broader policy questions?
Peter: Both. We discuss what are the right tools to solve a problem. On the local level, particularly in smart cities, we explored tools to enhance civic participation and solve urban challenges. Regarding data and AI, the central question was how these technologies could serve the common good. I share Francesca Bria’s view that data should be treated as a communal resource, a common good used to inform societal decisions and design improvements.
We also emphasise the need to start by accurately defining problems before seeking solutions or blindly using technology. So if you want to change something, you don’t start with solving a problem. You start by defining the right problem. And we have to use data to describe problems more accurately, and to find connections that are maybe not obvious. For example, Microsoft’s analysis of search engine data during the pandemic revealed insights into societal well-being that could inform policy decisions.
DT: What kind of role does open data play in the Re:Form project?
Peter: One major challenge we have when it comes to data-based projects is that not all municipalities are equipped to manage their own data effectively, let alone share it with others.
The next challenge is that we shouldn’t use not just public data, but also private data. This is what Barcelona did. They used data from Airbnb, and from mobility services like Micromobility for their Superblock initiative. They were really the first city to demand data from private companies, and it was facilitated by a young and expert team within the municipality. Unlike the risk-averse culture often found in German administrations, Barcelona’s initiative focused on finding solutions rather than dwelling on obstacles.
The governance question here is: who can we trust to handle both types of data — open and private? While companies have their interests, our priority should be utilising both types of data to make better decisions to design our public spaces.
DT: Do you have any data-related projects in development right now?
Peter: We have the New Hanse Project, where Francesca Bria was involved once again. They conducted an experiment and proposed a method for designing a data intermediary at a local level. This type of data intermediary would adhere to a specific framework.
The idea is that if you have intermediaries in different cities like Hamburg, Munich, and Dortmund, they would all be connected and operate within the same framework. This would allow for the connection, comparison, and utilisation of data and data use cases across different locations, which might not be the default approach but could be beneficial for understanding needs on a national level.
This is the same structure we always work with. We come up with experiments and ideas, scale them, and then translate them into policy recommendations. After trying it out in three cities, we have a blueprint for a functional municipal data intermediary. We then approach the German government and say: You could do this, we already tested it.
What needs to change in the way German administrations currently work with data?
Although Germany does have a good number of knowledgeable personnel like data analysts and scientists, there still aren’t enough.
There have been attempts to fix this, for example by setting up small institutions like data labs in different parts of the government. But these data labs aren’t well connected, and there is no vision for how to connect all the data. And that means there is no clear plan for how to use all the data effectively.
As I mentioned before, we often start working with data by focusing on a specific problem, like environmental issues. Instead, we should first describe the problem and then find the data we need. This would save time, as currently, people spend too much time searching for data instead of using it. We need a better system that prioritises using data efficiently by making it easier to access and use.
