Decidim

In 2011, Spain's 15M movement swept the country — young people occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol chanting "They don't represent us." Part of that movement later won political power in cities including Barcelona, but ran into a real problem: having campaigned on "participatory democracy," how do you actually get citizens to participate? Barcelona's city government first ran a fork of Consul, an open-source platform built in Madrid, starting in 2016, then tore it down in early 2017 and rebuilt from scratch as Decidim — Catalan for "We Decide," built on Ruby on Rails. Its first pilot drew forty thousand citizens, generating roughly eleven thousand proposals of which eight thousand were accepted; in the years that followed, a large share of Barcelona's city budget went toward implementing them. In 2019, Barcelona's government formally transferred the Decidim trademark and control of the codebase to the Decidim Association, an independent citizen-run body — what the project calls "recursive democracy," where even the governance of the platform itself is decided democratically. By 2023, Decidim's own estimate put roughly four hundred city governments, regional governments, and civil society organizations using it; another study counted 311 running instances across Spain and nineteen other countries, with the Metadecidim community at around five thousand registered members. The platform's core module has more than eighty language files covering about sixty languages — one of the rare civic-participation platforms worldwide that systematically supports multiple languages (fewer than a quarter of comparable platforms do). But results have been uneven: Zurich's Wipkingen neighborhood scaled a participatory budget from 40,000 to 540,000 Swiss francs citywide the following year, while Lucerne's LuzernNord district — deployed top-down and available only in German — actually widened the digital divide instead of narrowing it. In Badalona, near Barcelona, the entire participation process stopped after the mayor was removed by a vote of no confidence in 2018 — a reminder that what the software can do and whether an institution is actually willing to give up power are two different things. In 2023, the UN-affiliated Digital Public Goods Alliance certified Decidim as a digital public good; users now include Mexico City's open government team, Spain's Som Energia energy cooperative, and the Mozilla Foundation.