---
title: "Decidim"
chunk: 1/2
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 describes itself as a "technopolitical network for participatory democracy". It combines a free and open-source software (FOSS) software package together with a participatory political project and an organising community, "Metadecidim". Decidim participants describe the software, political and organising components as "technical", "political" and "technopolitical" levels, respectively. Decidim's aims can be seen as promoting the right to the city, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre. As of 2023, Decidim instances were actively in use for participatory decision-making in municipal and regional governments and by citizens' associations in Spain, Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. Studies of the use of Decidim found that it was effective in some cases, while in one case implemented top-down in Lucerne, it strengthened the digital divide.

== Creation ==
A server called "Decidim" was created by the 15M anti-austerity movement in Spain in 2016, running a fork of the "Consul" software, when a political party derived from the protest movement obtained political power. In early 2017, the server was switched to a similarly inspired, but new software project, Decidim, completely rewritten, aiming to be more modular and convenient for development by a wide community.
Founded in Barcelona, the name "Decidim" comes from a Catalan word meaning "let's decide" or "we decide". Privacy and citizen-ownership of data was a key motivator to improve discussion and engagement that had previously been happening on social media.

== Software ==
Decidim uses Ruby on Rails. As of 2022, the software defines two structures: "participatory spaces" and "participatory components". The participatory spaces (six as of early 2024) include "processes" (such as a participatory budget), "assemblies" (such as a citizens' association website), "conferences/meetings", "initiatives",  and "consultations (voting/elections)". The participatory components (twelve as of early 2024) range from "comments", "proposals", "amendments", "votes" through to "accountability". Together these allow a wide flexibility in creating specific space–component combinations. The "accountability" component is used to monitor whether and how a project is executed.
As of 2022, three user levels are defined: general visitors with view-only access; registered users who have several participation rights; and verified users who can participate in decision-making. Users may be individuals or represent associations or working groups within an organisation. Users with special privileges are called "administrators", "moderators" and "collaborators".
As of 2022, four versions of Decidim had been released.
The Decidim software development strategy is intended to be modular and scalable. As FOSS, the software is intended to encourage both citizen and government interaction with each other and with decision-making power over the software itself, aiming at high levels of traceability and transparency.
Decidim software provides an application programming interface (API) for command line access.

== Technopolitical project ==
In the spirit of the Decidim software being free and open-source software (FOSS), a community of software developers, social activists, software consultancies, researchers, and administrative staff from municipal governments called Metadecidim was created for discussing and analysing Decidim experience and development. Metadecidim is seen as an intermediary component between the political level of Decidim, implemented on servers such as Barcelona Decidim, and the technical level of hosting the software source code and bug reporting structures. As of June 2023, Metadecidim had about 5000 registered participants.
The Decidim community has a text called the Decidim Social Contract (DSC) that defines six guidelines. The DSC defines the free software licences that may be used for Decidim software; it defines requirements of transparency, traceability and integrity of content hosted by Decidim software; a goal of equal access to all users and democratic quality parameters to measure progress towards equality; data privacy; and it requires inter-institutional cooperation of institutions implementing instances of the software, in order to encourage further development. The free software licensing is the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3 for code; the CC BY-SA licence is used for content; and "data" is published under the Open Database License.
Philosophically, the aims of Decidim can be seen as promoting the right to the city, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre. Metadecidim's self-description as "technopolitical" is seen as implying that the political implications of designs and choices of software are seen as significant, in opposition to the view that software is "value neutral and objective". Metadecidim sees Decidim as a "recursively democratic infrastructure", in the sense that the software, political and server infrastructure is "both used and democratised by its community, the Metadecidim community".
Decidim proponents see the combination of online and offline participation as fundamental: "From its very conception until today, a distinguishing feature of Decidim over other kinds of participatory democracy software ... was that of connecting digital processes directly with public meetings and vice versa."
Organisationally, the community formally established Decidim Association in 2019 and City Council of Barcelona gave control of the Decidim trademark and code base to Decidim Association. The effect was to combine public funds with citizens' association control of decision-making.

== Use of Decidim ==
In 2022, Borge and colleagues estimated that there were 311 instances running Decidim in Spain and in 19 other countries; while Borges and colleagues estimated that there were Decidim instances run by 80 local and regional governments and 40 citizens' associations in Spain and elsewhere. In 2023, Suter and colleagues cited Decidim's own estimate of 400 city and regional governments and civil society institutions using Decidim. The Open University of Catalonia, the University of Bordeaux and the University of Caen Normandy ran Decidim instances.