
Decidim: Free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations - based2
https://decidim.org/
======
Jedi72
This looks cool, I like the collaborative planning stuff, but all I really
want is a reddit-like forum where you need a cryptographic key to post. Make
it so that you need a real physical ID to get one, like maybe you need to go
see a Justice of the Peace to get one. Maybe each person could vouch for 2
others (who cannot themselves vouch for anyone, until they are certified.)
Anonymous posts could still be possible, but you still require that key, so
you're basically masking your identity. I would also suggest limiting posts to
10/day or similar so loud individuals cant simply drown out everyone else.

Merely knowing that everyone else on the platform is a real person from the
same state/country as you would be a massive improvement in the calibre of
online debate. No more claims of bots or troll farms! Polls taken on such a
site would be a pretty close reflection to what a community actually thinks.
Allow people to engage directly with their representatives (their profiles are
highlighted), in a sub-reddit/forum you KNOW can only be debated by people who
really live there (or perhaps filtered by, if you still want to allow external
participants.

~~~
atoav
It could be even easier. You know these prize contests where they give you a
flyer with a covered code like in a lottery ticket? Just send these directly
to households or give them to people who show you their id.

Only when you enter that key you are from then on allowed to post on certain
subforums.

This way you'd get anonymity and a fair certainty that the people taking part
at least lived there at some moment in time (which IMO also entitles them to
speak about local topics).

~~~
Jedi72
This could also be a good way to refresh keys periodically. And with the
scratch-off lotto ticket idea, you could anonymously assign keys using QR
codes, which would greatly improve the UX, AND mean you dont need to store any
details of the person. Nice idea.

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andreslucena
Hi! I’m one of the founders. It’s really a nice surprise seeing this published
here :D.

If you want to see the software on action you can use the demo here:
[https://try.decidim.org](https://try.decidim.org)

Decidim it’s a participatory democracy platform where any organization can
make decisions. There are Spaces (Participatory Processes, Assemblies,
Consultations and Initiatives), and Components (like Proposals, Meetings,
Surveys, Results)

At the technical level is made on Ruby on Rails. It’s a gem with multiple
engines. The main idea is to have a ecosystem of modules allowing it to grow
and handle the needs of any installation. It’s all open source with an open
development process (we discuss every issue on GitHub, use Crowdin for
translations, Gitter for chat, documentation made with Antora). GitHub:
[https://github.com/decidim/decidim](https://github.com/decidim/decidim)

It’s a project started by Barcelona (Spain) City Hall, but at the moment it’s
being used by more that 40 installations.

Some installations:

* [http://decidim.barcelona/](http://decidim.barcelona/) \- the first installation, used by Barcelona.

* [https://meta.decidim.org/](https://meta.decidim.org/) \- our own instance to discuss and make decisions about the software

* [https://participation.lillemetropole.fr/](https://participation.lillemetropole.fr/) \- metropolitan area of Lille (France)

* [https://participa.somenergia.coop/](https://participa.somenergia.coop/) \- Som Energia, a spanish electric cooperative

More installations at
[https://decidim.org/usedby/](https://decidim.org/usedby/)

If there are any more doubts you can contact us at hola [at] decidim [dot] org
or leave a comment here.

------
based2
[https://github.com/decidim/decidim](https://github.com/decidim/decidim)

[https://try.decidim.org/](https://try.decidim.org/)

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ekianjo
Cities hate accountability. It's not a systems issue, it's a "the kind of
people who are in power" issue. This being said such a system is probably a
good step in the right direction but I would be very surprised to see it
adopted in any kind of official governing body.

~~~
dbingham
Having been intimitately involved in politics at the city level for some
years, I think it's less of a "the kind of people who are in power" issue and
more just, people naturally disagree and get defensive. I think those who are
in power are often under sustained assault, in many cases by those who have a
less than full picture of the decisions made, and that makes them far _more_
defensive. Any one who has people yelling at them that frequently - and often
unreasonably - is naturally going to start writing off the yellers. Including
the ones who have a damned good point.

It's not an excuse, and in fact, it's a good argument for term limits and
regularly cycling those in power. But I don't think the kind of people who are
in power are naturally accountability averse. At least, not on the local
level. I think it's more just an effect of how we do government and human
nature. So it could, potentially, be solved by a change in systems and
culture.

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anticensor
How does it compare with YourPriorities[0]? What are its strengths and
weaknesses?

[0]: [https://yrpri.org](https://yrpri.org)

~~~
andreslucena
> How does it compare with YourPriorities[0]?

Your Priorities was one of our main inspirations at the beginning, as an open
source software that also had a strong relationship with the municipal level,
on their case Reykjavík (Iceland). The main differences are that on
YourPriorities a user only discusses Proposals and has one way of supporting
them, and on Decidim you have other kind of supports (for instance limiting
how many votes an user can made) and other features besides Proposals (like
Meetings, Results, Initiatives, Consultations, etc).

(Disclaimer: I know Robert personally since 2012 and he even came to our first
anual meeting on Barcelona at 2016.)

> What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths:

* Modular architecture: more than 15 community modules.

* Easy to upgrade (as a ruby gem)

* Multiple features: we try to allow any kind of participatory space (processes, assemblies, initiatives/petitions, consultations)

* Online / offline integration: through meetings with photos, documents, minutes and moderators with special permissions to create user accounts

* Multiple verification / authorization ways (SMS, sending a code through other ways, through municipal census on the case of cities, etc)

Weaknesses:

* At the moment could be difficult to install (it's a Ruby on Rails gem and generator so you need some Rails knowledge)

* Multiple bugs (working on them)

* UX and accessibility could improve

* No mobile app (yet)

~~~
robertbjarnason
Hi Andres & all :)

I guess the main differences with Decidim from the Your Priorities site are:
The client is a progressive web app built with Web Components. Users can
submit ideas as audio or video, not only text. AI features like a
recommendation engine, machine translations, voice-to-text & automatic
"toxicity" score calculated for all incoming content. We moved the API from
Ruby on Rails to Node.js in 2015.

------
lifty
I see several comments from user "andreslucena", who apparently is one of the
founders of the project, and they are all dead. Why did this happen? I am
totally confused.

~~~
andreslucena
I think it was because I just created the account and put too many links on my
first post. It seems the comments are coming back from the death.

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krisconstable
Hello! I have a team decision making tool
([https://decisiontree.io](https://decisiontree.io)) that also identifies
every team's goals and values in real time based on the success criteria of
each decision, so I'm quite familiar with this space, and the challenges.

While I've always loved the idea of using DecisionTree for participatory
democracy, one of the big things needed for such a system is one that does
known your customer (KYC), in a privacy centric way, and doesn't reveal the
identity to the app/vendor while still knowing their details (attribute based
encryption) such as age or location. There are a lot of services that could
use technology like this, especially the high-risk industries (cannabis,
cryptocurrency, and adult), so this year I've started a new company
([https://pgkyc.com](https://pgkyc.com)) to do exactly that. If Decidim or
anyone reading this would like to be one of the first apps on our platform,
I'd love to work with you, don't hesitate to reach out. (kris@pgkyc.com)

------
mitchtbaum
Is there a subreddit or other aggregator to talk about social software like
this?

~~~
erikb
you can try to find likeminded people on Mastodon (also currently on HN front
page, an open source, federated twitter clone) or scuttlebut (imo more
decentralized even, but quite focussed on solar punk in New Zealand) I guess.
Also the Pirat Party (actual political party in case you don't know) uses a
similar system IIRC.

And you can probably just start with the community around Decidim and work
your way outwards to a wider community by participating in discussions and
learning to know people.

------
astazangasta
While software tools are great the question of the user base is a more
difficult one. Should I just set up an instance for my city and go to? What if
there are 6 competing instances? Who gets membership? Who controls membership?
These questions seem fundamental to "start using decidim" and are unaddressed
by the site, which seems to present usage as similar to an individual trying
out a new text editor.

~~~
barandiaran
The most successful cases involve the city council setting up the platform for
all citizens, it is otherwise difficult to avoid overlaps and become the
"official" website. However, the software equally useful for other types of
organizations (NGOs, cooperatives, social movements) for them to coordinate
their action and decision making. It is already been used for that purpose.

------
ddebernardy
Anyone familiar with the software know how it fares compared to the heap of
commercially available options?

~~~
andreslucena
At the moment we're not aware of any comparison with the other options, but
one of our main points is being free and open source from the first day. We'd
love if anyone can make this comparison.

------
camdenlock
Unrelatedly: what's the deal lately with these faceless zombie figures being
featured prominently in designers' designs? They're everywhere, from smaller
Silicon Valley startups, to giant corps (Google), and now to services like
this.

~~~
victormier
I guess just a trend. Saw this a few months ago
[https://www.humaaans.com/](https://www.humaaans.com/)

------
oriol11
The issue is that this assemblies which would be akin to a digital newspaper
poll could be interpreted as legitimate sources of sovereignity.

~~~
slim
That's not an issue. That's a feature

~~~
notahacker
It's a bug if you've noticed the sort of unrepresentative and bizarre
conclusions drawn by easily-brigaded public polls.

------
paradoxparalax
Finally, The Future. I wondered that the Future was going to start in Iceland.
Still long way, Probably not starting in our lifetime. But is a hope. Humans
like to abuse nice things, but I still have hope, as WuZeTian pointed, history
is long and moves have infinite big and small consequences and a thousand
years is to early to see things Brighter.

