Components

Proposals are Decidim’s most important component. Proposals can be defined as any element of a strategic plan, a regulation, an investment plan, a change in legislation or any other minimum decision unit. Proposals may be made by any of the following types of creators: by the very organisation managing the platform (e.g. a local authority); by registered participants; they may originate from a meeting as a result of a discussion or collective deliberation or may be generated by an assembly or body or by an organisation registered with the platform. They may also be created directly or collaboratively and be subject to amends.

Proposals are defined by one or more authors, a title, a text content and a category. They may also include images, geo-location and accompanying files.

Once a proposal has been published it may be moderated (if someone labels it as such and defines the reason for moderating) and it can also be withdrawn by author/s themselves.

Proposals in the administration panel can be ordered under various criteria, can be commented on internally (without these observations being seen by the public), can be downloaded in JSON or CSV format (compatible with spreadsheet software), can be recategorised or moved to different spaces. In addition, proposals may be accepted, rejected or kept in an evaluating state.

Other features associated with proposals include:

Participatory texts are defined as an ordered collection of proposals that make up a document with complete text. Participation in the text stems from interaction with the proposals that form it. This component basically allows three operations:

Results are proposals (or amendments to proposals) which have ended up being the result of a decision taken in Decidim, whether directly (as a consequence of applying a voting system) or brought about by meetings, assemblies or the expert or political team in charge of a decision area through the platform’s management.

The results component allows official responses to be managed for all the proposals made: with the reason for rejecting or accepting the proposal and the result in which the proposal has been accepted.

Results collect metadata on the traceability of the proposals incorporated into the result, as well as the meetings where they were discussed and debated or created (by those attending these meetings) and the endorsements received.

The result-monitoring component enables results to be turned into projects or allows them to be broken down into projects or sub-projects. Each of these projects can be described in further detail and allows the implementation status to be defined, in sections which range from 0% implementation to 100%. The monitoring component also enables people visiting the platform to view the level of implementation (comprehensive, by category and/or subcategory), of the results and projects. Results, projects and statuses can be updated through a CVS, or manually by the administration interface.

Participants can endorse proposals. Such endorsements can be interpreted as votes, signatures, endorsements or in any other format that demonstrates a positive agreement in accordance with the political will itself.

There are several support/voting and management systems for this in Decidim. The simplest way is by activating endorsements, so that participants can issue a single endorsement for each proposal they wish, without any limit to the number of proposals that can be voted for. Alternatively, the number of votes can be limited (e.g. 10 per participant).

From the administration panel it is possible to configure the display settings for the voting results either during or solely after the voting period.

There is a special form used to vote for participatory budgets which allows participants to vote by "spending" an amount equivalent to the budget in question among the proposed projects. The number of votes is limited here by the selected projects’ accumulated spending amount.

Comments are a special component generally associated with another component (proposals, discussions and debates, results, meetings etc.) to enable a deliberative process on an issue or proposal.

Decidim’s comments system has been designed to encourage deliberation. First-level comments, with respect to the discussion’s subject matter, can be classed as: In favour, against or neutral. Comments can be embedded in subsection commentary threads and voted on. Decidim allows observations to be ranked by those in favour or against, in chronological order and by number of votes in favour.

This is a page with html content and a title that appears in the inner menu of the participatory spaces. It is possible to embed images, videos and rich text here.

Discussions and debates can be opened on questions and specific issues established by administrators or participants.

The surveys component allows to design and conduct surveys and to mappe out the results, processed and displayed for surveys that can be carried out in various participatory spaces.

This component enables users to convene meetings, add them to a calendar with geo-location, upload meeting minutes, debate, create proposals associated with meetings (stating the type of collective endorsement for the proposal), record the number of participants, upload photos of the meeting and categorise the meeting within a space.

The configuration settings for meetings include the following basic fields: Title; description; address; location; Location hints; start and end time; scope; category and maximum seating capacity.

It also includes the following advanced fields: nature (public, open, closed); organiser group; existence of reconciliation space; adaptation to people with functional diversity; existence of simultaneous translation; type of meeting (informative, creative, deliberative, decision-making, evaluative, account giving, etc.).

Meetings relating to a participatory space (a specific process or an assembly) can be shown on a map and be ordered by date or category. Besides, all the meetings can be shown in calendar mode, with the possibility of exporting them to a mobile phone calendar or other apps.

Some of the meeting component’s advanced features include:

Conferences are defined as a series of meetings having several specific features (interactive and downloadable programme, registration system, system for generating certificates of attendance and/or diplomas).

Decidim has a configuration and conference-page generator, which enables the creation of an internal website for holding conferences relating to a participatory process or another participatory space.

Configuration settings include:

Blogs are a component that allow news items to be created and displayed chronologically. Blog entries are another type of content and have to be associated with a participatory space. Blog entries relate to the classification system of the platform’s content. Comments associated with blog entries will be treated like the platform’s other comments, as described above.

Decidim has a function which enables a user to send a newsletter (email) to everyone registered with the platform who has agreed, under the terms and conditions of use, to receiving this information newsletter email. Personalised emails are sent out addressed directly to the name of the user in the language chosen by the user by default.

Participants will automatically and directly be able to unsubscribe through the email itself by clicking on a link in it and it will also be possible to track the number of visits generated by the newsletter.

The search engine allows participants to perform searches across all of the platform’s indexable content, both generally and specifically, by searching within a specific participatory process or inside its components (proposals, results, etc.), through advanced searches.

Pages that can be browsed and filtered from search results show contents according to their type and ordered by the priority they have been defined under (e.g. Showing first the terms found inside assemblies and later the participatory processes).

This component makes possible to select randomly a number of proposals among a set of proposals (or a category of proposals within a set) maximizing guarantees of randomness and avoiding manipulation of results by the administrator.