---
title: "Decidim"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decidim"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:22:56.601531+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Decidim Barcelona ===
A Decidim server was run by the City Council of Barcelona for a two-month trial prior to 2017, in which 40,000 citizens discussed their own proposals and proposals made by the council. The Decidim software allowed threaded discussion, labelling whether the initial comment on a proposal was negative, neutral or positive, and notification to participants.
The two-month trial included both online and face-to-face participation. According to Decidim, about 40% of the 39,000 individual participants did so face-to-face, and about 85% of the organisational participants did so face-to-face. There were about 11,000 proposals made on the Decidim server, of which about 8000 were accepted. The execution of the proposals was monitored during the following four years, spending about 90% of the Barcelona City Council's budget for 2016–2019.

=== Zurich and Lucerne ===
In Switzerland, urban development has legal requirements in relation to citizen participation. Use of Decidim in Zurich and Lucerne in 2021 and 2022 was studied by Suter and colleagues, based on documentary evidence, interviews with 15 people in Zurich and 17 in Lucerne ranging from municipality employees through to representatives of neighbourhood associations, and "participatory observations" (informal participatory events observed by the researchers). The researchers found that the effectiveness of Decidim varied significantly between the different cases, and argued that the "full potential" of Decidim had not yet been achieved in Switzerland.
In Wipkingen in Zurich, two local citizens' associations used a server running Decidim to run a participatory budget to spend CHF 40,000. The project, named "Quartieridee", had 99 submissions of proposals and awarded funding to eight proposals. The researchers found that overall implementation was dependent on significant financial resources and citizens' voluntary work; and had difficulties due to the municipality lacking legal procedures for implementing the citizens' chosen projects.
The project was scaled up to the Zurich city level the following year with the name "Stadtidee" and a participatory budget of CHF 540,000. Among the successful projects was a confrontation between a citizens' association, "Linkes Seeufer für Alle" opposed to a Kibag AG in relation to a plot of land owned by Kibag next to Lake Zurich. An effect of the Decidim networking was that citizens legally occupied the plot of land for several days.
In 2021, the LuzernNord area of Lucerne was an area with many migrants and people with low incomes, at risk of gentrification. A top-down use of a Decidim server by the local administration, in which citizens' associations were encouraged to participate, was found by the researchers to strengthen the digital divide rather than overcoming it. Limitation of the language to German and lack of confidence in being able to participate effectively were found to be specific effects opposing the effectiveness of the project.

=== Other municipalities ===
Based on nine in-depth interviews with officials responsible for Decidim, conducted in 2018 in some of the initial municipalities that used Decidim, online interviews in March 2019 with officials from 34 municipalities using Decidim, and data from the Decidim servers, the effectiveness of Decidim in terms of transparency, participation in decision-making, and deliberation (discussion of proposals) was studied by Rosa Borge and colleagues. It was found that the officials saw Decidim's role as primarily promoting transparency and the collecting of citizens' proposals, while having only a modest role in transferring decision-making to citizens and a minor role in encouraging online citizen debate.
Several municipalities' use of Decidim provided their first use of participatory budgeting.
The Borge et al. study also found, consistently with other research, that the participatory aspect of citizens making proposals and participating in decisions was obstructed in some cases by local civil society associations, since direct citizen participation was seen to be in competition with the associations' roles. Several municipal governments worked on the implementation of Decidim together with local associations, adding features to the software such as different weightings for proposals by individuals versus those by associations.
The use of Decidim and participatory processes was found to depend on electoral results in some cases: these ceased in Badalona after Dolors Sabater lost power as Mayor in June 2018.

== Recognition ==
In 2023, the Decidim software was recognised as satisfying the criteria of the Digital Public Goods Alliance as a digital public good that contributes to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

== See also ==
technological utopianism (Decidim sees itself as opposed to technological utopianism)
Wiki survey

== References ==

== External links ==
Official website