Decidim is one of the biggest open source digital democracy platforms currently in use. Over one hundred cities across the world are using Decidim for a variation of citizen participation processes. The management and development of the platform is run by a democratic association, Meta Decidim, where members together prioritize what features they want to improve or develop next. In the Nordics, several cities in Finland, Sweden and Norway have strarted using the platforrm to run participation processes such as participatory budgeting, participatory urban planning and citizen proposals. Every year Decidim Fest is organized in Barcelona, the birth place of Decidim.
This year the COLDIGIT team were invited to present our work at the conference. Under a hybrid meeting form, much like the platform itself that facilitates both digital and face to face participation, we presented our work together with the municipality of Trondheim, one of our partners. We talked about the overall mission of our project and shared some of our findings so far. Our session was joined by representatives showcasing examples from the EU-commission, French parliament and Swiss municipalities. Among the other attendees were also representives for example Japan, the US and Dakar.
Taking part in the international digital democracy community is key for us as we intend for our research to build on a wider network of knowledge and needs. During the upcoming year alone we are going to study and interact with over one hundred user cases and tools, create a framework to measure participation through barriers and enablers and test new innovative approaches together with Nordic municipalities and public institutions. Stay tuned, as we will share more of our discoveries together with you. Feel free to get in contact if you have questions about our work (Mikko Rask, mikko.rask(at)helsinki.fi).
This post was written by Sanna Ghotbi from Digidem Lab.