What communication strategy have you addressed at the City Hall of Orereta?

We have not invented anything, but when the City Hall or any other institution communicates it no longer does so in its style, or at least it should not. Those countless nominal lists of decisions he's made ... We try to unite values so that people go beyond a brand or party, making a story or political storytelling. To do this, the tools are basic, the tools of their own. We always say that politics is mediated, that is, that politics or the political system needs means to relate to citizens, because interaction is not correct. There may be direct and face-to-face communication in small and larger towns, but it is very limited. It needs means to reach the mass public. If you have communication responsibilities, you have something that can be problematic: lack of control of the message. On the basis of this reflection, we make a very firm commitment to the development of our own channels.

Have you created tools to meet these goals?

Public life, mainly. It is a channel owned by the City Hall, both in magazines and in web media. We have organized City Hall communications around this tool. In March 2020, we saw the importance of these types of tools when the state of alarm was established. If in this context you encounter great uncertainties, concerns and fears: isolating your parents and grandparents... We are trying to give security to this situation. The strategy adopted was to publish the news provided by the mayor every two or three days: “We bring medicines to people alone” or “we will make subsidies more flexible because many people have gone from one day to another in black to not collecting.” We spread similar messages and the channel served us. They are media with between 40,000 and 50,000 visits a year, with a large influx. Therefore, they have allowed us to make strong communication bets at critical moments.

The role of data in today's society is increasingly being talked about. How and for what purpose are data used in political communication?

The institutions are very much in line with the data collected by surveys and other sources. We conduct citizen satisfaction surveys to know what citizens think about policies, but we are quite clear what public policies we want to develop. We are therefore not engaged in data mining.

Does data processing and storage allow municipal governments?

Before putting our own date center, a lot of information, our websites and systems were stored on the servers of the French company OVH and burned. ARGIA then brought news on the subject. Many public institutions remain on the lookout. From one moment to the next, those basic instruments fell, and in our case, in addition, we had backups. We had to recover them, going to the old versions we had at the place.

So, this was a trigger for the following reflection: such a basic and strategic channel for us cannot be on the servers of others because we have no control over it. We started a setback and on our own servers we have been collecting data like our entire web ecosystem, email and telephony over the Internet. In addition, it has allowed us to escape Google services, set aside Google Drive and create our own cloud, a Nextcloud. We've basically been collecting all of our information on our servers.

But it's more than just a technique of collecting information, because it also has a symbolic element. The City Hall is governed by a political party, or in our case by two political parties. With a program you introduce yourself to the elections, you win, and there is a democratic pact. It is a program that sets the horizon of the Municipal Government for the next four years. So, you have tools like budgets and coordination meetings to monitor that you're delivering on what you've promised. Having in a place like Google tools so basic to fulfill democratic mandates would squeeze me a little bit. Is it going to keep what characterizes the will of a people outside the institutions of the City Hall? In all of this, there is a more political perspective.

In this sense, you have a project to create a center date. What is a data center and how does it work?

These are servers, modules that are physically visible and tangible. What happens is that instead of being thousands of miles away from home, they're installed in our city hall. This, in addition to the control of our data, means that all the knowledge remains in the city hall and in the staff of the public institution. Improved management capacity, information recovery etc.

What will be its character and development?

We want to do an extensive use test for various agents. All actors in society have a common need to share documents, messages or have a mist. We are thinking about how we can find a common solution to these common needs. Initially, two or three agents will be proposed to later analyze the possibility of extending this model to the municipality. We will be helped by the Free Technologies and Social Economy Network, which works on technical issues.

Do your own servers have advantages over those rented to companies?

On the one hand, that knowledge. On the other hand, from the point of view of the City Hall, the existence of its own communication structures is very basic. As former minister and sociologist Manuel Castells says, “every communicative structure is a structure of power.” Thus, if the public institution wants to create power, it must have its own instruments. Thirdly, the question of dependency: whether you are dependent on energy, food, technology ... What is your country project? As Jule Goikoetxea said, “democracy is the capacity to generate political and social reality”. So the city council creates and has to create a political and social reality. In addition, as in the tax system, it is necessary to try to redistribute, and to do so it is essential to have both its own instruments and technological sovereignty in as many areas as possible.

On many occasions there is an automatic tendency to hire servers to companies. Do you think that society and institutions think enough about the long-term consequences of transferring data to corporations?

No, of course not. And it's quite contradictory, because public institutions have a lot of legal advisers on their structures. This is normal, because any public institution must act with full legal certainty. What is not normal is that ideas such as “does not allow us to store certain types of files thousands of kilometres” are no longer heard from the mouth of legal advisers. Before or after that we will have to come up with that reflection.

What does it mean to have its own center date in both infrastructure and funding?

Its economic cost is not very high. For a small agent it can be more expensive and more difficult, and the need to hire servers is understandable. But in those common needs to which I have referred, are there hundreds of agents who have common needs, while solutions must remain individual or, on the contrary, must be common? If all of our neighbors have the same need, does it make sense for everyone to seek partial solutions on their own? It may be interesting to think together and to find a common solution. The price will not be more expensive and the advantages will be many.

There is great social concern about the energy crisis. Do servers consume a lot of energy? Is there any way to control it?

They do consume energy. Now they consume the same data center here as they do in Malaysia. Many times, when the debate on renewable energy comes up, I am also not very clear what the position is on certain issues. But at least let us not be hypocritical. If I do not want wind mills here, I will not ask you to put them in the mountain range of a small village in Malaysia.

From the point of view of control, measures can always be taken to ensure that consumption is as low as possible, or it can be combined with public policies for the placement of solar panels. We have recently launched an energy community in Errenteria.

The desire to develop own resources in the field of technological infrastructures raises initiatives. In the same neighbourhood of Gaztaño, several neighbours have installed their own servers, radio link networks and optical fiber. Does the City Council have a relationship with these projects?

It is the Maritxu network, which was discharged as an Internet provider in the corresponding body, giving this option to the neighbors. At the time they came to ask permission to place a node in one of our antennas, and in those terms we relate to each other. For the rest, we do not have any joint projects.