Decidim presentation by Guillaume Saunier from Voca.city
On Nov 20 Guillaume Saunier of Octree gave a preliminary presentation ofthe Decidim software package for implementing democratic processes to PDLA. Octree is a non-profit based in Geneva, Switzerland, which provides support to users of the Decidim platform for patcicipatory democracy through Voca.city organization.
Decidim is mostly used in Europe and other communities abroad, but is relatively new in the US. It is however used in New York City (See links below.) Decidim is typically used by democratic organizations to implement various participation processes, including but not limited to deliberative assemblies, participatory budgeting, debates, voting, etc. These are further embedded in process life cycles all the way from proposals, operations, final reports, etc. It also manages the various documents involved in the process, such as evidence, testimonies, etc. Decidim also supports some novel political processes such as having persistent civic panels each of which can handle political issues as they arise, but without having to re-create the panel. This type of panel can resolve problems quickly while still being representative, and without danger of regulatory capture by powerful constitutents.
Decidim is implemented as a software platform framework for implementing various participatory democratic processes. If installed (as a web service) it is typically configured using "templates" to implement the various political processes, such as a citizen assembly, or participative budgeting process, etc.
Voca.city can provide existing templates users can choose from, or users can build their own templates. (Incidentally, the existing Decidim template implementation for civic assemblies assumes that the support is on line, but the panels still meet in person.)
Governance of the Decidim open source project is itself done through Decidim, so the project people tend to be the first ones to test new features so as to act as quality and usability control.
Decidim is a free, open source software product, but Voca.city can be contracted to operate the service and provide technical support, with the cost (depending on service level) on the scale from $40/month for a shared governance space to $400 month for a dedicated platform customers who don't want to run it themselves. This platform can support an arbitrary number of political activities.
The system model operates as a base system with templates or plug ins. This is common in large business systems. The effort required to operate this sort of software can be high if you only want to use it one or two times, but if you want to use it many times, it reduces effort, costs, and process errors. (Voca.city also offers a lower cost ($40) access to a single process. For groups of people expect to run many participatory democratic processes, doing so manually can be prohibitively burdensome, and a system such as Decidim is almost certainly required. According to Guillaume, Decidim is currently in use at about 300 installations.
Decidim is built with a toolkit called Ruby On Rails, which is a common, stable, and reputable technology base for these sort of systems.
Decidim does have competitors, one of which is Consul Democracy (on which it is based) and likely others. These systems tend to be open source, so cost is not a factor. (Propriatary solutions are likely to be more costly.) More important are ease of use and availability of support, as well as large user and developer communities, so as to eliminate the risk of being stranded by the developer going out of business. This seems unlikely in the case of Decidim and Voca.city, given their relatively large user bases.
Decidim has a large user community and many community discussions can be found with a web search engine, but interestingly the most of the material is in Spanish. This is also the case with Consul Democracy: It seems this technology is more advanced in the Spanish speaking world. If PDLA were to try to leverage the experience of this community, a person with at least moderate Spanish fluency could prove very helpful. It is not simply a question of how to operate Decidim: The lessons learned by communities experimenting with novel democratic processes would shed much light what is possible and how to avoid difficulties.
The question PDLA needs to answer is what is our likely role in future deliberative assemblies: Are we likely to run them, or will they be operated by others. Ifwe expect to run several, a tool like Decidim needs to be seriously considered. Decidim is complex enough that it is difficult to evaluate from the documentation:
One or more trial for a small public would reveal how easy or difficult it is to use, and more importantly, how difficult the learning curve is. Some examples of Decidim in service below:
www.decidim.barcelona (Spanish only)
www.participate.nyc.gov
www.participons.ch (French only)
meta.decidim.org
participer.lausanne.ch (French only)
plantaformas.org (Portuguese only)