Decidim software platform for democratic participation
Decidim is a software framework for citizan participation in democratic processes. These processes can involve elections, sortitions, referenda, initiatives, and other processes, or even multiple independent processes, as the system is configured on an ongoing basis. The public participates in the political activity topics using smart phones, computers, etc.
The Decidim system gradually developed after the May 15 2011 political movement in Spain, and the resulting Podemos movement. These movements viewed the existing political system as oligarchic and unrepresentative, and volunteer software developers started software projects to enable more participative democratic processes. Madrid developed a system called Consul, which was copied and further evolved in Barcelona under the name of Decidim. As of 2023, Decidim is used in over 450 organizations in 30 countries
Decidim was created from Consul (Madrid) by 140 software contributors, and was publicly released in 2016. It is maintained by Decidim.org as an open source project at https://github.com/decidim. The software design is managed democratically by a group of 5000 participants. Since Decidim itself is used to manage the Decidim project, the developers and other project participants have direct experience with the quality of the system, and this experience is used in the further development of the system. The system is also used by universities for governance experiments, and this is also used to further evolve the system. This results in a large number of "plug ins" and third party ad-ons that expand the Decidim eco-system.
Decidim is typically used at the level of a city, such as Barcelona, Helsinky or Graz, but also some smaller cities such as Pamplona (Population 200,000). It can be also be used by other types of organizations. To set it up, a system administrator sets up governance bodies, governance processes, participants, issues, security systems, etc. This typically requires an operating staff (depending on project size), or just a trained consultant in a simple case, though the software itself is free.
The dynamic configurability of Decidim, when combined with sortitioned assemblies as well as other features, permits an unprecedented agility in democratic governance. The great flexibility of how to set up political processes makes Decidim resemble a musical instrument: There are vastly different creative ways you can solve a problem. As the rate of social, environmental, and other changes is accelerating, it would be very interesting to see how an agile participative democracy performs compared to a traditional representative system, especially in rapidly changing emergency situation. Systems such as Decidim may be enabling technologies for completely new democratic governance models, evolving at the rate of software applications. Stay tuned...
For more information:
decidim.org
Decidim book (Decidim, a technopolitical network for participatory democracy)