Decidim: Free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations | Hacker News Reader

Decidim: Free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations

decidim.org

175 pointsbased236 comments

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.

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).

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.

Polls aren't going to be a pretty close reflection of what a community thinks except in the exceptional circumstances that people that have jumped through hoops to register for a politics website are broadly representative of the type of people who actually lived there. (Make a "vouch for" system and you pretty much guarantee an echo chamber dominated by the best organised local political faction). And small, local websites don't need farms to attract trolls and see trolls drive out the non-trolls.

Polls aren't certainly the best possible reflection of what a community thinks if there is no perfectly representative a sample of participants. But it can be a good aproximation. Electing representatives is a kind of poll, so is HN itself. Participants vote here and there, factions balance out, you get some unstable equilibria that does the job of reflection part of what a community thinks and it often helps a community take better decisions than what a few (interested and absolutely politically factioned) politicians usually do.

Here's a Reddit like fourm: https://www.talkyard.io (I'm developing it) with a Single Sign-On API, so ... I suppose it'd be possible to connect it with a login system that checks one's crypto identity?

... Like Reddit and HN, with improvements: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... (sorry for promoting my own thing ... I don't know any other seemingly okay open source Reddit alternative though)

Interesting, that there's "lots of" discussion software, but not yet any single login system like the one you describe. (?)

> need a real physical ID to get [a crypto key]

How can that work :-) People would submit their national ID number or full name, and get back a crypto key, and there could only be one key per national ID? How can one know that the one that submits the ID number, is the person him/herself? Maybe by looking up the person in the country's telephone directory, and sending a snail mail or making a phone call to verify?

What if there was an open-source verified-real-life-identity + crypto key login system, which could be connected to all different discussion software with a Single Sign-On API?

> I suppose it'd be possible to connect it with a login system that checks one's crypto identity?

https://telegram.org/blog/passport, for example.

> People would submit their national ID number or full name, and get back a crypto key, and there could only be one key per national ID?

Usually, with a KYC service, people submit photos of their identity documents, and sometimes also video of themselves vouching for the document (as if you were having an asynchronous conversation with a notary public.)

Later, if someone else comes along and tries to register the same credentials and also presents the same level of evidence, you get a human arbitrator involved and ask each party to present more evidence, e.g. another primary identity document, or an actually-notarized letter of identity claim, etc. The same sort of things you give the police in an identity-theft case.

Thanks for explaining

Nextdoor does postcard based verification so you know people are in your neighborhood. There is still some name calling, but no bots or pure trolls.

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

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

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/ - the first installation, used by Barcelona.

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

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

* https://participa.somenergia.coop/ - Som Energia, a spanish electric cooperative

More installations at 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.

https://github.com/decidim/decidim

https://try.decidim.org/

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.

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.

The project lists a few cities that are using it already, and some of them are fairly large -- e.g. Barcelona, Helsinki, and the Lille metropole. The only European countries I've lived in where I'd imagine local politicians would be less receptive are Malta, Czechia, and Hungary - but I could easily imagine their respective voters demanding it. Perhaps local politics are less cynical in Europe than elsewhere?

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

[0]: https://yrpri.org

> 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)

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.

I'm one of the developers of Your Priorities and we really like Decidim also and have worked with their team in the past :) For Your Priorities, you can see a full list of features here in our Open-Source github archive: https://github.com/CitizensFoundation/your-priorities-app

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.

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.

Hello! I have a team decision making tool (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) 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)

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

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.

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.

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.

Software like Decidim or CONSUL [0] are meant to be used by the city council or maybe at the regional or even national government level, like is the case of CONSUL. If you really want Citizen Participation having real decisions made in the platform are key to the success, and for that you need high level political support. In the case of Madrid City Council, who wrote CONSUL, citizens have already decided what to do with 260M euros, have voted for the remodelling of one of the main squares in the city and several other spaces, have had their input in the writing of local ordinances, etc. You can see that in action at [1].

[0] https://github.com/consul/consul [1] https://decide.madrid.es

The idea is that if you have any big organization where you want to make decisions (like a City, a Cooperative, an Asociation, a Foundation, an Union, a Politica Party).

Who gets and controls membership (aka verification or authorization) is a decision made by this organization:

* Sending a SMS code to users to verify that their have a valid cellphone

* Allowing users to upload a photo or scanned image of their identity document

* Sending users a code through postal code

* Allowing users to go to to a physical office and check their documentation

* Checking some information through other systems (as a Municipal Census on the case of Municipalities, Cities or Towns)

* Having a list of valid users emails

More information regarding verifications at https://github.com/decidim/decidim/tree/master/decidim-verif...

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

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.

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.

I guess just a trend. Saw this a few months ago https://www.humaaans.com/

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

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

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

Anything could be interpreted in any conceivable way.

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.

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