Decidim, a techno-political project, a digital platform for citizen participation in a democratic city, built in an open and collaborative way using free software.

It is a public infrastructure that falls within the scope of the commons. Public because it has an obvious institutional impetus and from the commons because the code is open and free; in other words, anyone can see it, use it, copy it or modify it.

It is a platform for coordinating participatory spaces and processes, which aims to extend and facilitate access to citizen participation, opening up new spaces for deliberation and collaboration for the co-construction and co-production of public policies.

It also wants to open up new spaces for direct participation and democracy, leading to disintermediation and cooperation between citizens, institutions and civil society organisations.

We have translated part of the Decidim administration manual (downloadable here), which summarises a lot of crucial information about the history of Decidim, its construction and its philosophy.

1. Principles

The Decidim platform has been built and developed on the basis of a set of principles that promote democratic exploration and innovation in the digital age as well as the possibilities for improving, opening up and developing policies for citizen participation and democratic forms of multi-level government (with a special focus on the municipal level). These principles are listed below:

Technopolitical hybridization

This is the key to avoiding what we call 'digital reductionism' (Calleja-López, 2017), a variant of technocentrism that focuses mainly or exclusively on the digital infrastructures and aspects of new forms of participation. This is without addressing the important innovations occurring in participatory practices, processes and culture through the hybridisation of digital and physical participation. A hybrid approach attempts to connect the spaces and activities taking place on decidim.barcelona with the spaces and activities taking place in the physical world, and considers the multiple variants that could be envisaged in order to encourage new forms of collective action.

Enhanced and multi-modal participation

The result of 'digital reductionism' is the encouragement of 'click participation' (Calleja-López, 2017), in which participation becomes a phenomenon circumscribed first and foremost by its digital aspect, and more specifically by its practicality, speed and non-interference with other actors and ideas. There is thus a need to bring out enriched forms of interaction between individuals on decidim.barcelona, as well as between individuals, the contents of the platform and hybrid participatory processes in a broader sense. This implies, on the one hand, enriching participatory processes with functionalities that go beyond simple voting (information and data visualisation, deliberation etc). On the other hand, it implies building hybrid processes (e.g. physical meetings connected to the platform), which make participation a multimodal, enhanced and comprehensive process, rather than a reduced and simply "clickable" one.

Transparency and traceability

With the exception of data that may affect the privacy of users, the details of the activity of participatory processes in digital media must be fully traceable and public if a new level of transparency of participation is to be achieved. Transparency of participation and traceability are necessary conditions for maintaining trust in these new processes.

Opening / publication

The principles of publication and openness refer first to the code and functionalities of the platform, then to the data and content of the processes and finally, more generally, to the processes themselves. This implies, in the first two cases, the use of the most demanding free standards and licences (e.g. Affero GPLv3 for the code, CreativeCommons for the content, Open Access Database Licences for the data). Decidim should be an open platform where anyone can see, modify and reuse the code on which it is based. In the case of processes, these principles are linked to others mentioned in this list, such as transparency and accessibility, and aim to make these processes as participatory and reusable as possible at different scales.

Cross-sectional participation

Building on many of the keys to the success of recent initiatives such as the 15M [the Indignant movement that began on 15 May 2011], the deployment and communication strategies of decidim.barcelona must be directed towards the search for legitimacy first and then participation, reaching out to as many social and political groups as possible.

Knowledge, technoscience and collective intelligence

New forms of participation must be able to benefit from the possibilities offered by both citizens' knowledge and data science (drawn from the participatory processes themselves) to improve decision-making and participation. Informed and expert participation, therefore, capable of catalysing social knowledge.

Collective participation in a network

There are a number of central challenges when aiming to improve participation based on digital technology. One of these is the ability of participatory processes to foster the collective in the face of current atomising trends, which often result from virtual, remote and disconnected participation. This implies the use of features that encourage interaction between users in collective processes, whether in person or on a platform.

Public-common orientation, re-appropriation and recurrent participation

The new digital infrastructures of democracy must be a space owned by, from, and for the commons. If democracy is to be promoted, the infrastructures themselves must be inherently democratic. This implies promoting an innovative, alternative model to the privatisation of the public sphere. To this end, Decidim must be a digital infrastructure of public-common construction, ownership and use. In other words, it must correspond to what we define as "technopolitical commons": a technology open to everyone's participation in its construction and management, managed by distribution and with models of collective production and free sharing. Compared to closed and exclusive platforms controlled by large corporations, Decidim is a democratic infrastructure for democracy.

Accessibility and technopolitical training

It must also be a public service, which is why it is essential to ensure that citizens have sufficient access and training to take part in and exploit the platform's full potential. Promoting its use by local populations as well as by excluded social groups is a crucial challenge. Decidim.barcelona and the digital participatory processes should be governed by more demanding accessibility standards (e.g. those of the Web Accessibility Initiative, WAI).

Independence, emancipation and affiliation

If social movements have demonstrated anything in recent years, it is the central role played by self-organised collective action in initiating and accompanying change processes. To this extent, decidim.barcelona and the processes using the platform should encourage social independence and self-organisation. Furthermore, institutional affiliation should be a prerequisite for the majority of the platform's processes, as it is a key element of its operational legitimacy in the medium and long term. In other words, social independence as well as bottom-up processes should be affiliated to public institutions.

2. Brief historical review

During its public presentation in September 2015, Decide Madrid, a digital participation platform launched by the Madrid City Council and based on Consul software, began experimenting with several participatory approaches such as public debates and citizen proposals. Launched by Barcelona City Council, the Decidim Barcelona project, which was also based on Consul with important modifications and adapted to new needs, was presented in February 2016. Its original objective was to coordinate the participatory process of drafting the Municipal Action Plan(MAP) as well as others that would arise in the city in the future.

This series of changes and adaptations led to a new technological need for the adaptation of a technology that would ensure the independence, diversity of local authorities and medium-term sustainability of the platform. A decentralised (scalable) and evolving development strategy was determined, which made the whole project capable of flexibility and long-term growth, but also of generating a strong development, design and support community at municipal but also (more importantly) inter-municipal level.

This led the Barcelona City Council to seriously reconsider the architecture of the platform and to undertake a complete rewrite of the software based on the principles and needs mentioned above. From this rewrite came the Decidim project, a generic, participatory democratic framework based on Ruby on Rails that any group, organisation or institution could use with minimal technical knowledge.

3. Open development and free software

The Decidim platform project has been developed with open source software (both in its initial phase with Consul and after the complete rewriting of the code) and all its development has been done in an open way, making it fully traceable and monitored from the beginning.

Its creation through free software means that the source code of the platform is licensed under the AGPL v3 (GNU Affero General Public Licence), which implies that the code must incorporate the possibility of being consulted, copied, modified and reused and that the same licence is applied to any work or product derived from it. This is one of the licenses that guarantee the most freedom and that put copyleft into practice. To this extent, it makes perfect sense for public authorities to make a clear commitment to this type of software, since it is through this type of licence that one can receive a "social return" on public investment.

Use this link to access the licence text file.

Copyleft refers to a wide variety of licences that can be applied to software, artistic and other creations. Supporters of copyleft see copyright as a means of reducing the individual's right to make and distribute copies of a work. A copyleft licence, in effect, uses copyright law to ensure that all those who receive a copy or derivative product can use, modify and even distribute both the original product and the derivative versions. In a strictly non-legal sense, copyleft is thus the opposite of copyright (Wikipedia, 2017).

The fact that the software has been developed in an open way means that the whole development process is transparent and accessible. In other words, everyone can see, from the beginning of the software development, every modification, every contribution, every developer involved, etc. Therefore, transparency is becoming a fundamental principle of citizen participation but also for software development.

All this was done on a platform built for open collaboration in software development: GitHub. This platform allows access to code and control of software development. GitHub is dedicated to hosting Git repositories; there are alternatives, for example GitLab.

4. Decidim Barcelona

Decidim Barcelona is the first instance of Decidim and remains the origin of the project. Decidim Barcelona was born out of the need of the Barcelona City Council to build a citizen participation process supported by technology for the Municipal Action Plan (MAP), with three main objectives: to build a transparent and traceable process, to increase participation through the digital platform and to integrate digital and physical participation.

This process aggregated more than 10,000 proposals and more than 160,000 votes in favour, with a final result of 71% of citizen proposals accepted and included in the MAP, within more than 1600 initiatives. Decidim was originally built exclusively for this process, but the need to extend it to other participatory processes was soon expressed. This is when the idea of the current Decidim was born: a participatory platform that makes possible as many participatory processes as one wishes, divided into steps and with the possibility of activating several functionalities at each step. A door has been deliberately left open to the development of new functionalities that could be quickly integrated into the processes (surveys, collaborative writing of texts, monitoring of results, etc.), as well as the integration of new participatory spaces such as citizen initiatives and participation councils. Decidim Barcelona hosts at the time of writing (May 2018) 12 participatory processes and already has 28,400 participants, more than 12,000 proposals, 5340 results, 930 physical meetings and 189,000 positive votes. The good results of the platform in Barcelona have led to its dissemination in several other municipalities, such as L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Sabadell, Badalona, Terrassa, Gavà, Sant Cugat, Mataró and Vilanova i la Geltrú.

5. The municipalities of Decidim

Decidim is a software that allows you to open as many platforms as you need, with a single installation.

There are many examples of such multi-tenant architectures in the software world, for example the free software WordPress for blog projects. This is particularly useful for institutions that want to provide Decidim as a third-party service. The case of the Provincial Council is particularly important as Decidim can be used with a single installation - i.e. it is maintained, updated and hosted by a single entity - by as many local authorities as desired. This reduces installation and maintenance costs and provides technological solutions for improving citizen participation to small and medium-sized institutions that would not otherwise have similar access to such resources.