UPDATE: Project details updated during the EPSA 2025-26 edition. Awarded Special Recognition for continuous improvement and long-term sustainability.
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.
Developments
The structural evolution of the platform has been driven by comprehensive organisational changes and formal institutionalisation, highlighted by the creation of the Decidim Association in 2019 and the formalisation of governance statutes to ensure democratic control and long-term sustainability. This foundation is supported by the establishment of the Metadecidim community, which acts as a participatory governance space for road map decisions and policy alignment, alongside the formation of the Committee for Public Institutions to seamlessly integrate institutional stakeholders into the core governance framework. To secure these operations, resource allocation and operational roles were significantly diversified, transitioning from a reliance on strict municipal budgets to a mixed model incorporating membership fees, grants, and strategic donations. This shift allowed for a substantial expansion of human resources, pairing a core technical team with dedicated community contributors and institutional staff tasked with managing localised participatory workflows.
Technically and socially, the platform has systematically integrated lessons learned and reassessed its target groups to optimise impact. The software shifted from a rigid, monolithic architecture to a modular Ruby on Rails framework, vastly improving overall scalability, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness for new adopters while reducing feature duplication. Concurrently, privacy and security features were enhanced to guarantee full compliance with GDPR and digital rights frameworks. To bridge the digital divide, the platform increased its focus on inclusivity by integrating multilingual support, adhering to strict accessibility standards, and championing a hybrid online and offline participation model. These technical adjustments are paired with local educational initiatives and civic tech literacy programmes to ensure a broad demographic reach. Finally, the project underwent a comprehensive redesign of activities and KPIs, expanded its evaluation metrics to track the raw number of active participatory processes, submitted proposals, accepted initiatives, and granular engagement metrics, all while introducing a formalised Sustainability Plan to reduce dependency on public contracts through agile, community-driven development cycles.
Long-term impact
The long-term impact of the initiative is anchored in the broad achievement of its core objectives, scaling rapidly to reach adoption by more than 450 organisations across 30 countries, including diverse municipalities, NGOs, and global universities. Transparency remains a fundamental pillar of this expansion, as every single administrative action on the platform is completely traceable, and public dashboards ensure strict institutional accountability. From a security and privacy perspective, the platform maintains absolute GDPR compliance, backed by open-source code that is continuously audited by the global community. This robust technical foundation ensures that the platform’s hybrid participation model and native multilingual support can effectively broaden civic access without compromising data integrity.
To maintain this alignment over time, structured stakeholder consultation and robust evaluation methods are embedded into the project’s daily operations. Governance assemblies and recurring Metadecidim community meetings provide a continuous channel for stakeholder input, establishing reliable feedback loops that directly dictate road map prioritisation and new feature development. The ongoing success of these consultations is continuously verified through clear evaluation methods, utilising the platform’s public dashboards and open audit trails. By actively tracking specific metrics – such as the total number of running civic processes, user proposals, active participants, and long-term engagement indicators – the association can dynamically measure the civic health and institutional impact of every deployment.
Adjustment in the objectives
As the project matured, it underwent a strategic reorientation and adaptation of its objectives, expanding its initial scope well beyond simple participatory budgeting to include complex assemblies, broader consultations, and structured accountability mechanisms. This shift accelerated the internationalisation of the platform and forced the rapid deployment of advanced multilingual support to meet growing global demands. To support this trajectory, the organisational structure scaled up from localised municipal oversight to an international community model, dynamically shifting resource allocation to sustain global growth, fund technical maintenance, and fulfil specific version support commitments outlined in the technical road map.
This growth has generated significant positive spillovers into other policy areas, strongly reinforcing open government practices and setting new transparency standards worldwide. The framework has been heavily integrated into broader digital transformation strategies and modern civic education programmes, while simultaneously influencing research and innovation ecosystems by attracting EU-funded projects centred on technopolitics and AI ethics. Furthermore, the platform is increasingly applied to manage localised urban sustainability policies, climate action plans, and regional mobility strategies. This expanding impact is reinforced by continuous, high-level political backing from the Barcelona City Council and the Generalitat de Catalunya, ensuring that the platform remains deeply institutionalised through the Decidim Association and its formalised democratic governance frameworks.