Notes from Initial Working Group Meeting: 2/8/2021
Participants: Arthur S, Melanie M, Ryan H, Em B
Defining the process
If it’s already in motion, something more simple like Consider.it
What decidim does well is create a forum where people can make proposals
We’ve already gone through that process with theory of change
Start to think more just about the
Going all-in on Decidim means we could be constrained by the software
Have a working document that outlines what we want as a distributed network
Consider.it is good at comparing different options
But seeing all the profile pics on one end of a spectrum, it could also lead to a herd mentality
What’s the first online deliberative activity we want to engage?
PAA was a good example
Like the idea of having the network on a collaborative platform
Participation challenges:
We’re not trying to recreate slack and messages
It’s so hard to get people to participate - different timelines
Really hard to make a collaborative decision when we had to build out a participatory framework while doing
Brings to mind a Democracy Lab product
Using multiple tools
Only criteria is that they are open source
How do we bring people into the participatory process?
This is a shared challenge for a distributed network of volunteers
How do your prefer being notified?
Communications challenge
One of the issues is the communications are inconsistent
We don’t have one way to easily reach everyone
Knowing where to find information consistently is very hard
Decidim and open source
It’s one of the more restrictive licenses
Any changes you make, you have to include all prior licensing with them - you can’t do anything for your own purposes, you’d have to make it all available to everyone
It’s doable, but can place an extra burden on us if we are going to make customizations we have to make them in a way that’s releasable
Share alike and creative commons: any derivative documentation also has to be made available
Also include not just the steps of the process but also what the constraints are
Next steps:
Working document to outline what our goals are, etc.
One place to gather the learnings
Replies from the Decidim help desk
Examples like code for france
If there are points of the processes that fit imperfectly, maybe look at other tools
Anything coming up as a reason we shouldn’t go in on Decidim
