First steps with Decidim
Decidim is a digital platform
for citizen participation
Installing Decidim
You can install it yourself or find someone to help you with tech support.
The right tool for you
For big or small organisations, discover how Decidim can cater to your needs.
Decidim in your city
If your city is thinking of deploying participatory policies, find out how you can convince them to do it.
Is Decidim the right tool for you?
Decidim’s flexible features are designed to serve both small and large collectives, public and private organisations, with hundreds or thousands of potential users.
Explore all featuresBacked by technology, democracy and experience
City of Helsinki
We evaluated seven different kinds of participatory budgeting options to find the right platform to support...
Read the case study
Code for Japan
Decidim provides customize-friendly architecture so that we can adapt it to our domestic situation.
Read the case studyRead more case studies on our blog
Who’s behind the platform?
Metadecidim is the community that collaborates in the design of the platform and the development of the project. Together we design and create new features and report bugs for continuous improvement of the platform.
The Decidim Free Software Association is a democratic association for the governance of the Decidim community.
Almost every participatory process that has come to our table, we have been able to solve it using Decidim's business rules. As a tool, it is a very strong one. However, the part that seems strongest and most important to us is its community, both developers and those who use it for participatory processes. Coexisting with them has made us appreciate the challenges involved in implementing participatory democracy in the real world.
Alejandra González
Open Government of Mexico City
With the implementation of Decidim in Som Energia we have generated a kinder space for participation. We released the tool in 2018, hosting the General Assembly of the Cooperative and months later we debated the Image Redesign and collaborative development of the School of Som Energia, among other participatory processes. In a few months, more than 3,500 participant people have registered, 5 participatory processes, 3 assemblies operating and more than 1,300 votes in the last General Assembly vote.
Yaiza Blanch
Som Energia
Part of what makes Decidim so powerful is that it adds a level of abstraction to the work separating out the steps of a process and the activities associated with the process. That’s part of the information architecture, so that not only you are saying what is happening at each step but different parts of Decidim behave differently depending on when you are doing or depending on what step in the process you are in. The fact that that’s customizable really allows Decidim to be moulded to how we are doing our work and not our work to be moulded.
Francisco Tena
Pipeline to Power, working for NYC Civic Engagement Commission
FAQs
What do I need to install Decidim?
Installing Decidim is easy but you need some knowledge and technical requirements. See the documentation for installing Decidim.
I have ideas for new improvement features. I want to have a better understanding of the project. What can I do?
You can collaborate in multiple ways. One of them is through the Metadecidim community. If you want to propose new features, go here. If you have detected errors and want to notify them, go to this process. If you want to actively participate in the Metadecidim community, you can attend Community Meetings. Register as a participant of the community and participate with us. If your thing is the code, come to Github. If you are a researcher, you might be interested in coming to the LAB Metadecidim Seminars.
How can I become a member of the Decidim Association?
Now the people involved in the project can be partners. Here we explain in detail how you have to do it
What does it mean that Decidim is for free, "libre" and open source?
Decidim is a platform for citizen participation made by the people and for people. Its source code is open and can be inspected, modified, and enhanced by anyone. The Decidim software is covered by the AGPL license. That means that you can use it, modify it and redistribute derived versions of it as long as you respect the AGPL license.