Decidim Working Group: Participatory Processes at CfA

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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
  • Just do something that’s not too