About the Decidim Pilot Project
Welcome to our Decidim pilot!
Decidim is a digital framework for participatory democracy. It helps big groups make important decisions, fairly, collaboratively, and transparently. It's basically an online representation of the democratic process.
What can Decidim do for us?
We are a distributed network of volunteer groups, each tethered to, and part of, Code for America. But it’s often unclear how Brigade members, leaders, or groups themselves can influence decisions about the Network. Our communication is fragmented: We have some people on Slack, some on our email list, some on Discourse, and others on social media. A lack of consistency in communication means we struggle to gain participation from members, when there are opportunities to participate.
Taking a cue from Code for France, this site is an exploration of a framework for making collaborative decision making more successful online.
What does it do?
In all honesty, we're still figuring that out and adding more pieces daily. But the highlights are:
- Proposals - Share your idea and invite feedback. Accept or alter amendments from other brigade members. Make changes.
- Collaborative texts - Want more input before making a proposal? Invite other people to help inform & refine your ideas.
- Voting - Decidim makes it easy to support proposals with a formal vote, or a personal endorsement.
- Assemblies - Create different groups and bodies. Make their roles, responsibilities, goal, and decisions transparent.
- Meetings - When we make decisions, our meeting room doors are almost always open - let's make it easy to find them.
Want to give it a spin?
We are trying to find real ways to represent the current Revisioning process and the CfA & brigade entities on Decidim. Right now it's just a handful of volunteers working on it (who would welcome your involvement!), but things are beginning to take shape:
- Proposals: Revisioning Pathways - The three pathways are presented as proposals in the Revisioning process. You can explore them, comment on them, and propose amendments as you see fit.
- Assemblies: NAC & the Participation Assembly - These are our first two official groups (eg assemblies) added to the system. Check out the upcoming & past meetings added by the National Advisory Committee. Or pitch proposal to the "Participation Assembly" about how to use the Decidim pilot.
- Collaborative texts: Participation Assembly proposals - Navigate to this proposal page and look for the "Access Collaborative Drafts" button. Join a draft in progress or create one of your own.
- Meetings: the Revisioning Forums - We are holding a series of public forums for the Network Revisioning Process. Check them out, register, and look at the past forums to catch up on what has already happened.
Have some questions?
So do we. Let's chat them out together. Right now most of this discussion is happening in the #decidim channel on CfA slack.
What doesn't it do?
While our friends at Open Source Politics are (very generously) hosting Decidim for us, there are several configurations that are not yet available to us. If the pilot proves useful and CfA decides to host our own Decidim instance - which is not a trivial task - we will then be able to do several things that we cannot do quite yet:
- Fully style this site with more familiar CfA branding
- Replace some default language, options, and text
- Explore an exciting selection of Decidim components and tailor the tool for our purposes
