During the last few decades, society has witnessed a crisis of representative democracy in Western countries and, specifically in Spain (weakening of the Welfare State, subordination to market forces, inability to deal with problems such as rising inequality or climate change). In addition there has been experimentation with some alternatives, such as grassroots organisations and new parties. On the other side, there has been the rise of cognitive capitalism. This is a system where the exploitation of information, knowledge, affects and social relations has become core to the generation of economic value, and it is opposed by the emergence of free software, knowledge and culture. Both these phenomena are deeply intertwined, and the project ‘Decidim’ is born right at their intersection, responding to the challenges and opportunities they open for democracy.
Under cognitive capitalism, the corporations extract social data in huge quantities and turn it into wealth and power over people and institutions, challenging democracy as we know it. New forms of platform capitalism (for instance Airbnb, Uber, Deliveroo) imply capillary exploitation of social wealth. However, non-corporate and collaborative forms of digital production exist too, and they make it possible to find alternatives; Decidim is one of those.
Decidim is conceived as a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy that is publicly supported and democratically designed. It is used for the internal organisation of consumers and producers’ cooperatives, it helps movements to design strategic planning, and it might also be used to coordinate massive strikes or other forms of social action. The modular nature of its architecture is also enabling these organisations to develop their own components and improvements (such as crowdfunding or membership management) and to plug them back into Decidim, expanding its potential.
Decidim fills the gap of public and common platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data extraction and market-oriented goals). Ultimately, the project aims to present an alternative to the existing model of digital economy sponsored by corporate digital platforms (Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, etc).
The key purpose of Decidim is to democratise collective life and processes, to potentiate equal participation, transparency and collective actions in projects, organisations, communities, etc. To achieve these goals, Decidim has been built as an all-purpose, combinatorial matrix for any kind of participatory process, useful for a huge variety of social and political realities. It makes easier for citizens and administrators to set up processes and to participate in them. Being a free and democratic software and using a modular architecture, anyone can study it, use it, modify it, release new versions of it easily and improve it.
The Decidim licence includes a social contract that settles a series of conditions oriented to guarantee that its deployment and use respects standards that support democracy and citizens’ rights. As a project, it is governed by a democratic community involving citizens, public and private sector actors, and academia, called Metadecidim. It represents a solid citizen community and ecosystem of knowledge, practice and decision-making. In this sense, the project embodies the vision of democracy it wants to help to build.