The Technical Plane: The Fabric of an Infrastructure

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of Decidim’s technical plane, which encompasses the codebase, documentation, legal aspects, research and training. Together they form a comprehensive framework for the platform’s development and implementation. We begin by describing its modular and scalable technical architecture, which favours collaboration in its development while simplifying the configuration and deployment of participatory mechanisms at various scales. Next, we explain the documentation system, designed to foster open collaboration, traceability and the avoidance of proprietary tools. We then explore how legal codes and the configuration of political institutions can impact Decidim, including its production, deployment and overall success. Furthermore, we emphasise the importance of Metadecidim LAB, a space for academic and citizen research, experimentation and innovation oriented to address challenges of Decidim and participatory democracy today. Lastly, we address the double educational dimension of the project, emphasising the significance of citizen capabilities and training for effective usage of Decidim, as well as the transformative potential of Decidim for reshaping education through its principles of technopolitical democratisation.

The technical plane of Decidim has multiple subdivisions, ranging from the purely informatic to the legal or pedagogical. Ultimately, it includes aspects that compose and define the new infrastructural conditions of network democracy, from regulatory norms to human capabilities, and including, of course, computer code. In this chapter we deal with some aspects of the project that, being technical and certainly important, lie beneath the technopolitical layer we have just described in the previous chapter. These deeper technical details act frequently as preconditions (and sometimes as target) of the processes and practices we have presented so far.¹

4.1 Development: Code Programming and Deployment

As we have already mentioned, Decidim is a free/libre open-source software built on the Ruby on Rails web development framework. This means that it is built on top of a complex stack of previously freed software, knowledge and programming techniques (as is typical of most free software projects). In order to open Decidim to free collaboration, and for the first time, the Barcelona City Council created a space on the collaborative platform GitHub and shared it to the world. The software is now hosted on its own repositories within GitHub, not those of City Council, and is independently managed by the Decidim Association and the community. Unlike other existing infrastructures, Decidim’s architecture is modular, scalable and easily configurable. It is not necessary to have advanced programming skills to use it as administrator because it has been designed to facilitate the configuration and deployment of processes, assemblies and participatory mechanisms from an administrator panel (another form of democratisation). These properties derive from the specific history of technical decisions and programming choices we explain here.

4.1.1 Modular Architecture

As noted earlier in this book, Decidim started as a fork of Consul,² the software launched by the Madrid City Council for its participation platform Decide Madrid.³ Consul is a full Rails application; this means that for each new instance a fork of the code must be created in a new repository, and the source code must be overwritten to adapt it as needed. This task can become cumbersome, especially if the volume of customisations is high, as was the case in Barcelona. As pointed out in the report “Proposed changes to Consul’s architecture” (Pereira de Lucena & Blanco-García, 2016),⁴ the typical, monolithic architecture of Ruby on Rails presents some limits in terms of code reuse and collaborative development. In the report, there were some proposals to modularise the development of Consul and thus improve its reusability by any organisation. After several conversations, there was no technical or political agreement between the Decidim and Consul teams to carry them out (see Calleja-López, 2017 for an overview of those disagreements and their roots). For this reason, it was finally decided to conduct a complete rewrite of the code, based on Ruby on Rails engines.⁵ Engines can be considered small applications or plugins that provide functionalities to the applications that host them. In this way, each new functionality or module required by the platform can be developed independently of the platform core, thus allowing great flexibility when it comes to generating a development ecosystem. Decidim also has a multitenant architecture, which means that a single installation enables as many active Decidim sites as needed. Therefore, an organisation can create participatory sites for its sub-organisations, and various organisations can share a server and reduce the maintenance costs of its instances. As a result of such technical decisions, Decidim soon became a fully independent project and fostered the open collaborative modularity that Consul did not provide.

As a result, Decidim has reached a vivid and diverse development and deployment. The code constitutes a digital common that anybody can reuse, fork, develop and adapt to their own needs. Furthermore, its development is modular, which means the code can be easily decentralised while remaining integrated and consistent. Every participatory component or space (as described in Sect. 3.2) is programmed as a module. Modules can be added, developed or adapted independently. The core modules are maintained officially, but there also exist open ecosystems of modules that can be used as plugins and are developed and maintained by third parties. There are currently more than 80 community-developed modules.⁶ These ecosystems expand and enrich Decidim’s basic functionalities in a decentralised manner. They complement the democratic governance of the project with a distributed form of do-cracy that is not limited by the decisions of the association or the product team: another form or result of practices of technocracy. Sometimes, some of these functionalities may be included into the core, if the democratic mechanisms of the community and the association, or those of the product team, certify the desirability of such incorporation.

4.1.2 Code Contribution and Collaboration

Decidim is maintained and developed by a growing socio-technological ecosystem that includes companies, foundations, associations, cooperatives and other institutions, as well as individual hackers and developers. The code is licensed under an AGPL v3 licence, which means that anyone can view, copy, modify and distribute the software as long as the same licence is maintained. All development, including feature specifications and bug fixes, is done openly through the (already mentioned) code publishing and collaboration platform GitHub. The language used is English in order to reach a growing, international community of developers. Specific programs, such as DecidimFemDev, have been oriented to incorporate female and non-binary profiles into such communities of development and co-production.

Several metrics of programming activity can be found on the project GitHub’s page.⁷ As of 15th June 2023 they show the following numbers: 135 contributors, 1265 stargazers (GitHub users who have flagged the project as interesting), 368 forks, more than 7600 pull requests (contributions to the source code) and 3357 feature requests or bug reports, of which 3065 have already been closed.

In GitHub everything is organised through different repositories:

• /decidim: the main code repository, with its libraries

• /decidim.org: the project landing website, which uses the static places’ generator Middleman

• /demo.decidim.org: the repository hosting a Decidim demo

• /Metadecidim: the repository for the code of the Metadecidim community platform

• /decidim-bulletin-board: a bulletin board that provides services to Decidim instances to allow them to run secure, end-to-end, auditable votings

• /documentation: the documentation repository, using the Antora documentation generation system

Regarding the product development flow, we use the model initially proposed by the free software project GitFlow,⁸ with some variations in the case of Decidim. A version control system of collaboration can be understood like an evolutionary tree with different branches representing different “species” of Decidim, some more stable or experimental, other temporarily alive just to test or develop a specific feature, that will be later merged into the main trunk. The most important types of branches in Decidim are the following:

• develop: this is the default branch instead of Master/Main (the initial branch that Git checks out locally when someone clones the repository), on which the other branches are integrated. We made this decision to simplify the release process after discussing⁹ it with the core maintainers.

• release/Y.X-stable: where Y is the major release number (0 so far) and X is the number of the minor version. It accumulates developments and features for the next stable version, published through GitHub releases and rubygems.org.

• fix/x: for bug fixing. These changes are backported, meaning that they will be available to the last two releases.

• feature/X: where X are different features that may or may not arrive to be included in a specific milestone of the main branch. New components or other possible features are developed in parallel branches until they are completed.

• refactor: for restructuring existing code.

New releases are published following the recommendations of Semantic Versioning,¹⁰ a scheme of presentation of versions of the software that uses a three-part number format: major.minor.patch. Each number component conveys specific information about the release.

• Major version updates (e.g. the version changes from 1.0.0 to 2.0.0) indicate significant changes that may introduce backward-incompatible features or require modifications to existing integrations.

• Minor version updates (e.g. the version changes from 1.2.0 to 1.3.0) include new features or enhancements that are backward-compatible with previous versions.

• Patch version updates (e.g. the version changes from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2) primarily address bug fixes and do not introduce any new features or backward-incompatible changes.

By adhering to Semantic Versioning, clarity and consistency in version numbering is ensured, making it easier for users and developers to understand the impact and compatibility of each version. As of 15th June 2023, 125 releases¹¹ have been published, of which 27 are minor releases and 98 are patches. No major version of Decidim has been released yet.

As a final detail on code contribution and collaboration, it is worth noting that the project has a software translation management platform that makes it easy to collectively work on translations. This is done through a service based on the Crowdin¹² platform and has allowed the platform to be translated into 53 languages. The Barcelona City Council has only assumed the translation into Catalan, Spanish and English. The rest of translations has been done by the community and international organisations that have decided to support the project.

4.1.3 Installation Deployment and Configuration

Decidim can be installed using the command prompt in any GNU/Linux server with the following installed services: PostgreSQL, Ruby, Node.js with yarn (JavaScript dependency manage) and ImageMagick. An automatic installation script allows you to deploy the whole dependency system, libraries, databases and other automatically required services in Heroku or Docker.

A specific platform settings are customisable through the fields of a form available in the administration panel: name of the portal, social network profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, GitHub), brief description, welcome text, default language, home image, organisation’s logo, favicon, reference prefix (unique identifier that will apply to the portal’s elements) and the organisation’s URL.

4.1.4 Integration with Other Services and Compatibility/Creation of Additional Services

Decidim is committed to providing a platform that is accessible and efficient for all participants, and the integration of digital services is key to achieving this goal. However, the dependence on large technology companies for secondary services is a concern, as it can lead to a decrease of participants’ privacy because of the insertion of tracking technologies such as cookies. Decidim is part of a global network of free and open-source software services and uses various integrated services of this ecosystem. By using such integration we can enhance the power of the platform while ensuring that it is not controlled by an external entity, that the data of participants remains private and secure and that it is possible to modify and adapt the software integrated with Decidim. Furthermore, the integration of digital tools such as maps and calendars is crucial in order to enhance the participatory experience. By providing easy access to these tools, participants can easily share and get information, making the platform more accessible and efficient. We here detail some of the key integrations of Decidim.

Active Job is an integration that allows Decidim to perform certain actions in the background, such as sending emails to participants when they register. This integration ensures that the platform can operate smoothly and efficiently, without slowing down the user experience.

The Bulletin Board integration is an application that allows Decidim to conduct end-to-end auditable votings using the Elections module. This integration promotes transparency and accountability in the voting process, as it allows for a verifiable and tamper-proof voting system. The Bulletin Board is based on Election Guard,¹³ an open-source SDK that aims to improve the security, transparency and accessibility of voting systems by allowing vendors to incorporate end-to-end verifiability and enabling organisations to conduct and publish post-election audits.

OpenStreetMap is an integration that allows Decidim to display meetings and proposals with geolocation. This integration provides a visual representation of the location of the proposal, making it easier for participants to understand and access the information.

Etherpad is an integration that allows Decidim to create collaborative, real-time writing boards. This integration promotes collaboration and transparency among participants, as it allows multiple users to work on a document simultaneously, track the contribution of each user (in different colours) in real time and record the history of the document.

Jitsi is an integration that allows Decidim to embed a video conference room in any meeting. This integration enhances the hybrid nature of meetings by enabling remote participants to engage in discussions, deliberations and decision-making processes, fostering inclusivity and augmenting participation.

Other integrable services include SMTP, to send email, integration and compatibility with calendar-management systems and automatic creation and updating of event calendars. It should also be mentioned the SMS delivery systems that are used mainly to verify participants by sending a verification code and a wide variety of authentication methods used by public administrations or different organisations to identify their participants (e.g. digital IDs, LDAP, etc.). The modular architecture and open API of Decidim allow integration with multiple open technologies, and this process is a key element that guarantees its continuous dynamism in development and in the generation of technological alliances with other free software projects.

4.2 Documentation: Decidim’s Documentation System

Documentation is a critical feature of many social processes, especially in public administration. It plays an even more important role in highly technical and complex projects, in software projects in particular. The main goal of good software documentation is to democratise access to the effective deployment and functioning of the infrastructure, rather than just access to its code. For this reason, documentation can be for a software project an asset as important as the software itself. This fact is even more true for a technopolitical community like Metadecidim. It has a strong requirement for collectively producing, maintaining, evolving and curating a large body of documents of different kinds: technical, theoretical, political, legal, etc..

In accordance with our social contract, documentation must be written “in the open” and published under a Creative Commons By-SA licence, collaboration must be fostered and contributions need to be traceable and carefully attributed. Many documents need translation to different languages and both technical and social forks (in other terms, divisions of the technology or the community) can be useful in some situations.

Another strong requirement for Decidim is that contributions to any document can be done with free software. Publication of any of our contents in a static website must also be possible without resorting to proprietary tools. At the same time, the Decidim Team is trying to minimise its use of corporate platforms that trade with user data, like Google Docs (which is still in use for practical purposes).

After some testing and research, Decidim has adopted a documentation methodology that follows three well-established trends in the technical documentation community:

• Single-source contents and multi-format delivery: our aim is to write content only once and (relying on tools and formats that facilitate its separation from a given format) reuse that content whenever necessary.

• Docs-as-code: by storing text in software source code repositories, we get a very mature versioning technology that provides integrity and traceability of contributions, multi-version documents and automatic checking and publication after edition, among other facilities aligned with agile principles. This is an application of the openness, transparency and trackability principle discussed in the (techno)political plane.

• Online first: we favour the web as our primary publishing format and medium, even if we also provide means to generate other formats, like PDF files.

The official documentation uses a light-weight markup language called AsciiDoc.¹⁴ It is similar to Markdown (a common markup language) both in syntax and spirit, but it is more expressive and sound for writing long, complex documents. Although often unknown to non-programmers, markup languages are plain text encodings of formatted text that (unlike Word or LibreOffice word processors) make it easier to write texts collaboratively and consistently in a simple and systematic manner. In short, a markup language makes it possible to treat rich text as computer code and take advantage of control version and the power of Git technology to coordinate collaborative contributions. The documentation repository is hosted with the rest of the computer code on GitHub.¹⁵

Unfortunately, a balance between easing complex collaboration and easing writing contributions is difficult to achieve. A highly open, reusable, collaborative and automated documentation poses a high barrier for non-expert contributors. This is particularly important when writing collaboratively or when entering complex cycles of revision, bibliographic management, etc. Complex documentation systems, although adapted to asynchronous long-term writing and update of documents, are not ideal for synchronous collaborative writing. For this reason, online word processors, like Google Docs or Etherpad, are often used to write non-technical documentation collaboratively in Decidim.

In our experience writing relevant documents for the project (technical, political and otherwise), we have established a set of conventions about what metadata store for each document and how to show it in a chart. We store, for each document, title, contributors, revision number and date, keywords, summary, history, distribution terms and how to cite it. Decidim has a sophisticated classification of contributions, inherited from the project FLOK Society—Buen Conocer (Vila-Viñas & Barandiaran, 2015), a means to acknowledge the multiple ways in which people can contribute to a document. The authorship levels are editor, author, contributor, participant and proofreader.

But it is not only self-generated documents that matter to the project. Importantly, the political, scientific and theoretical documentation that nurtures research and gives direction to it is also a very valuable collective resource to share. In order to organise and facilitate access to all this bibliographic material, we use the Zotero¹⁶ software and sharing cloud. The Metadecidim group¹⁷ in Zotero is publicly accessible and contains all the relevant bibliographic references of the Metadecidim Lab sessions (publications by invited speakers, background readings, etc.), theoretical collections, folders containing papers about Decidim or the set of bibliographic references cited in this very book.¹⁸ A private group also exists (Metadecidim-PDFs¹⁹) to share not only the bibliographic entries but the PDF files among researchers and members of the Decidim community.

4.3 Legal: Licences, Regulation, Procurements, Agreements and Statutes

Laws are a crucial form through which societies order themselves today. So are technologies. Technologies are a sort of “second constitution” of society (Winner, 1986) because, in many ways and for most practical purposes, code is law (Lessig, 2006): they contribute to shaping people’s ways of acting and thinking, both individually and socially, and thereby help to constitute ways of life. As we have seen, technologies are also shaped and reshaped by such ways of acting, thinking and living. Meanwhile, State laws continue to be essential in shaping society. Thereby, the connections between legal code and technological code are multidirectional, to the point of the blurring of their boundaries.

In this section, we will not attend so much to how a technology such as Decidim can affect legal codes through participation in politics (Chapter 2 has dealt with it in some detail) or embody a legal code in technology (as developed in Chap. 3). Instead, we will focus on the ways in which legal codes and the legality of political institutions can affect Decidim as a project, in its production, deployment and broader success. We also attend to how Decidim practices can aid to transform public administration on the technical plane.

The first way in which legal forms shape Decidim is through its licence: AGPLv3, Decidim’s licence, GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3).²⁰ This is one of the most important legal agreements of the project, set to ensure the free access to a digital common resource such as Decidim. Unlike other copyleft licences, the Affero one was designed specifically for online services where end-users don’t download and install the code on their computer but rather interact with a server where most of the code is executed. This licence implies that any participant in a platform that runs Decidim software (or any variation or future evolution of Decidim) has the legal right to access, audit, reuse and further develop the code that is effectively running on the server side. This is not only a fundamental legal guarantee of transparency in any democratic process, but it also implies the power of any participant, in case of strong conflict, to fork the platform and create a new one. All platforms that use Decidim need to provide a link to the code that runs on the servers.

The Affero GPLv3 is not the only copyleft/copyright licence that is relevant for the project, as we have repeatedly highlighted. Specific legally binding licences are used for the content of the platform, documentation and design (Creative Commons By-SA licences²¹) and for the data (Open Access Database Licence²²) which are oriented to ensure the freedom of participants and guarantee the cooperative and non-privatising nature of the democratic processes. We have already explained the technopolitical effects of these licences (see Chap. 3), suffice it to say here that there is a technical depth on the way such licences operate, and they are themselves the result of complex processes that involved not only legal experts but contributors and defendants of knowledge and culture commons.

When it comes to public administrations, a set of public contracts requires the maintenance of the code licence for all developments, as well as the use of open licences (GNU free documentation Licence GFDL²³) for all documentation generated during the contract. These contracts also included the social contract (see Sect. 1.1) to ensure that any new development complies with all the principles of democratic quality. This has allowed to generate new forms of software production from within public administrations in favour of free software, technological sovereignty through open-source development as well as the inclusion of democratic quality criteria in public contracts. In addition, this has generated a contagion when other administrations have reused these public procurements to make new development orders of Decidim, which had to include these legal codes (i.e. the licence and the social contract).

Throughout the project several inter-institutional and collaborative agreements have been generated to guarantee the following: (1) the extension of Decidim to other municipalities, (2) the shared governance of the code between the city of Barcelona and the Metadecidim community through the Decidim Association²⁴ and (3) the protection, defence and promotion of the Metadecidim community and the main repository,²⁵ oriented, in turn, to guarantee the quality of the project and its capacity to respond to the contributions of its international base.

Institutionalising Decidim requires incorporating it in the formal (frequently legal) norms, rules and codes of the institution in which it is deployed. That process is not without challenges. A paradigmatic case of the stakes involved is that of Barcelona. A key aspect for the institutionalisation and expansion of Decidim’s infrastructure and practices in the Barcelona City Council was its incorporation in the Citizen Participation Regulation (CPR) for the city. References to a digital platform and several new participatory mechanisms (especially, multi-consultations²⁶) were first incorporated in the CPR developed during the 2015–2019 mandate (the first ever to refer to a digital platform), then in a municipal decree and finally in a second CPR drafted and approved during the 2019–2023 mandate (June 2022) with some relevant modifications from the previous one. However, the story of the first of those Regulations is illustrative of the challenges of democratisation more broadly. The CPR drafted during the 2015–2019²⁷ mandate was heavily, legally attacked after the announcement of a consultation on the re-municipalisation of Barcelona’s urban water service, currently a multi-billion-euro business run by Agbar corporation. This attack was led both by private agents (a number of associations shadowy and primarily supported by Agbar) and by the State (afraid of anything resembling a referendum in a context of political conflict with the Catalan Independentist movement), through the High Court of Justice of Catalonia. These actors challenged various aspects of the CPR, especially matters related to multi-consultations, which could unsettle various aspects of the political and economic status quo. Ultimately, after the legal defeat of the City Council, a new CPR was drafted and approved in May 2022, including multi-consultations but requiring approval from the central Spanish government and pushing the minimal requirements from 15,000 to 88,700 signatures to get an initiative considered.

The CPR is a relevant norm because it updates the municipal regulation of 2002 and gives security and legal cover to the new processes, mechanisms and needs of democratic participation in the city and inspires others to do the same. Two general relevant elements of the regulation stand out from a technopolitical viewpoint: (1) The Decidim platform incorporates in its structure the different participation spaces covered by the regulation: processes, bodies, initiatives and consultation; they are included in, and adapted to, the regulation while taking into account the digital platform and its possibilities. (2) The regulation contains for the first time a specific chapter dedicated to the digital platform. This chapter details the characteristics and technical conditions that a platform that articulates citizen participation must comply with. For example, that it is open source or that there is full transparency in the processes of participation. In addition, the chapter establishes democratic guarantees for the platform, such as the minimum content it must have to ensure the quality of processes tied to it.

Finally, a key aspect in terms of the future sustainability, independence and self-governing capacity of the project, are the statutes of the Decidim association (see Sect. 3.4.3 for more details). Their most relevant innovation, perhaps pioneering in this sense, is that they include an explicit reference to the Metadecidim platform as an integral part of its democratic constitution.²⁸

4.4 Research: Laboratories, Innovation and Collective Intelligence

Decidim results from the knowledge of people who contribute to the project in its different axes. The Decidim Team and the Metadecidim community are formed by members with different abilities, who collaborate and deliberate to push Decidim further. This hybrid and multidisciplinary nature, typical of FLOSS communities such as Wikipedia, represents an instance of collective intelligence of the type outlined in Chap. 2. However, the mobilisation of the participants’ knowledge is not sufficient to guarantee that the project is innovative in relation to the state of the art. To this end, Decidim requires a space for academic and citizen research and experimentation to address the challenges and opportunities of both Decidim and participatory democracy: this is the Metadecidim Laboratories.

It is directly inspired by hacklabs, understood as collective technopolitical assemblies that critically and practically address problems circulating between society and the laboratory (Barandiaran, 2003). Unlike the traditional university laboratory or the techno-solutionist “lab” sponsored by Silicon Valley or MIT, Metadecidim Laboratories reflect the importance of design in technoculture and the practical ways of increasing social capacities for digital design, in relationship with increasing the level of participation (Sangüesa, 2013). These spaces are conceived as two intertwined layers: Lab.Metadecidim, the networked research space within the Metadecidim community, and the Centre for Digital and Democratic Innovation, an open and public-common space for critical R&D projects of free technologies for democratic cities and societies. Since 2020 the centre provides resources to Decidim and other free software communities, the Lab and to other ecosystems of democratic innovation in Barcelona.

4.4.1 Lab.Metadecidim

Lab.Metadecidim is an open and collaborative research network aimed at addressing key challenges in the development of Decidim and networked democracy. It is also a complex articulation of collective intelligence in and around the Decidim project. As noted earlier, it relies not only on the knowledge of the community but also of external experts. However, such knowledge is socialised and applied to the project, rather than remaining an elitist and abstract academic matter.

The network was launched at the same time Metadecidim community was born. The first Lab.Metadecidim activity took place at the First Annual Metadecidim Conference in 2016.²⁹ Between 2017 and 2019 Lab.Metadecidim hosted 17 sessions³⁰ on Decidim challenges and relevant problems of the networked democracy, such as “Democratic innovation guided by simulated models”, “Democratic governance of digital commons infrastructures”, “Digital ontologies of participation”, “Investigating new democratic governance models for new scales of cities”, “Strategies of engagement for democracy”, “Digital identities”, “Verification and democratic processes”, “Political gamification”, “Strategic planning and participatory budgeting”, “Feminist perspectives in Decidim”, “Participation technologies for public policies guided by citizen science”, “Citizen participation technologies for cultural management and production”, “Technologies for citizen participation for social movements and organisations”, “Administrative-legal validity for digital participation”, “Data visualisation for democratic participation”, “Radical democracy stories: narratives for citizen participation and networked democracy”, “Indicators for democratic quality” or “Participatory design for digital and democratic platforms”.

An objective of the seminars is to network with communities of experts in topics related to Decidim’s challenges. It also aims to contribute to globalising Decidim as a project. For this reason, the Lab.Metadecidim seminars involve experts at the local, national and international levels. Each seminar is usually made up of two sessions, separated by a coffee break. The first part begins with the presentation of the challenge and the research questions by a member of the Decidim Team (usually, a person who has contributed to design the seminar). Then, invited lecturers give 10–15 min talks to share their knowledge with the Metadecidim community. This is followed by an open debate with the attendees, including a group of local experts (primarily from the Barcelona metropolitan area) who are also invited to the seminar. After the break, the second part is aimed at generating, in a participatory, deliberative and informed manner, proposals for orienting or improving Decidim (and, sometimes, Metadecidim). The nature of the proposals (new theoretical approaches or technical functionalities, systems prototyping, bug detection, etc.), as well as the facilitation methodology, varies according to the specific needs of the issue at stake. In every session, videos of the talks and of the debate are recorded, and these contents are available at the Metadecidim site, to provide access to community members who could not attend the event.³¹

4.4.2 Centre for Digital and Democratic Innovation (Canòdrom) in Barcelona

In recent years, many cities have set up citizen laboratories to address a wide range of problems. Taking advantage of the trajectory of the Decidim project as a technopolitical device for democratic innovation, and Lab.Metadecidim as networked and participatory space for research, the Centre for Digital and Democratic Innovation³² was born in Barcelona in 2020 to address local and global challenges in an intelligent, participative and democratic way, with special attention to problems of governance, social innovation, free software, critical tech development and co-management of commons. The Centre is therefore an open, participative and networked space, offering knowledge, human resources, technology, legal support and funding for democratic and collaborative research and innovation beyond Decidim, but taking it as a tool and as a model.

The Centre is located at “Canòdrom”, a 1753 m² municipal historical building, within the Sant Andreu district. It includes shared public resources (working spaces for collectives, open spaces for workshops, auditorium for events and talks, tech infrastructure, a bar, etc.), open and managed with the resident projects and the public. The space is projected as an inter-institutional, public-common, critical R&D+I space. Furthermore, the laboratory aspires to serve as a pioneering node in a network of municipal laboratories of sociotechnical, democratic experimentation in Barcelona and beyond, covering a wide range of areas: culture, technology, economy, politics, etc.

The Centre is the physical space where the Decidim Team works on a daily basis, where the DecidimFest has been celebrated since 2020 and where most of the Decidim ecosystem that resides in Barcelona meets. Part of the physical space, tables and panels have been designed by members of the Decidim Team to foster recombinant collaboration.

Beyond Decidim the Centre has different missions for the long term, including:

• Offering services, resources and infrastructures for the development of co-decision, co-design and co-production projects

• To promote critical citizen research and synergies with academia, institutions, industry and society to face different urban problems

• To prototype models of critical technology, citizen science, sociotechnical innovation and co-management and governance of urban laboratories

• To generate a productive ecosystem of services around digital and democratic innovation

• To experiment with new functionalities and applications of Decidim, including its use in the governance of the Canòdrom community itself

• To nurture inclusive and intersectional (feminist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, etc.) approaches to all these missions

4.5 Education: Training, Empowerment and Mediation

As we have repeatedly insisted throughout this document, Decidim is a technopolitical project aimed to radically democratise society. One of the key modern tools for producing, reproducing or transforming society (especially, after the Enlightenment) has been education. Through education, people gain capabilities (sometimes, incapabilities too). In this sense, Decidim also relates to education. And it does so in primarily two ways: firstly, the potential of Decidim presupposes certain capabilities from users, who, for this reason, require specific forms of training, awareness and capacity-building, and, secondly, Decidim and its broader logics of technopolitical democratisation may contribute to transform education itself (with a virtuous twist).

Throughout the years, various materials and courses have been developed to facilitate a rich deployment and empowered use of Decidim. There are three fundamental profiles when it comes to educational materials and activities around Decidim: participants, administrators and educators. Each requires a specific type of educational path. The first training material on the project was designed for participants and educators of all ages and was focused on basic learnings on issues related to democracy in a digital society and how to teach them. The “Decidim training”,³³ which was designed in 2017, was linked to the Decidim vision and included lessons of two key types: the first set focused on raising awareness of how surveillance capitalism works and how to protect ourselves from it. This educational set touches on topics going from the way mobile communications work up to digital corporations’ data extractivism, as well as the resulting need to protect oneself and one’s own data in the digital realm. The second group of lessons was centred on emancipatory technopolitical possibilities for democracy, ranging from lessons on technological sovereignty and technologies for collaborative work to networked democracy. This second group included lessons on critical awareness raising and capacity-building for exploiting Decidim’s capabilities. For trainers and educators, the curricula included lessons on how to organise educational sessions and on how to teach these issues to kids and adults.

Later on, in 2018, a specific Decidim site³⁴ was set up in order for administrators to learn how to use Decidim in a rich way. This primarily implies learning how to use the software and, moreover, learning how to design good participatory spaces and processes. Since this site was set up, hundreds of administrators have received courses supported by it. This specific Decidim instance includes educational resources such as formative materials, meetings for offline or online courses, step-by-step tutorials, exercises, exploratory sandboxes and more.

Finally, more recently, the Athenaeum for digital democracy at Canòdrom has become a hub of training courses for citizens and administrators. The citizen courses entitled Atenea Cibernarium Canòdrom³⁵ are oriented to promote digital literacy among citizens. Unlike other digital training spaces (including others managed by the Barcelona City Council), these are centred in free software with a feminist perspective. The courses are oriented to actual or potential administrators of Decidim sites, including civil servants, as well as people generally interested in Decidim. They are adapted to various levels of familiarity with the platform, are primarily practical and are oriented to enable proactive and creative relations with the platform, while including some formative material on democracy and digital society.

These are preparatory courses, tools and trainings for learning Decidim and beyond. They are aimed to stir knowledge, equality and empowerment around the relations between technology and politics. However, the ultimate schools of such a technopolitical democratisation are the sites in which all of these lessons may be applied and lived: public institutions, social organisations and economic enterprises where they may be enacted, shifted, translated, questioned and enriched. Some of those sites are educational in the usual sense of the term. We talk of projects such as Decidim Schools, mentioned in Chap. 1, or others such as the Democratic Digitalisation project, promoted by the Directorate for Democratic Innovation and oriented to deploy free tools (e.g. Moodle, Jitsi, OpenOffice) against Big Tech platforms currently colonising primary and secondary education (e.g. Google Classroom, Windows Office). Education for enabling Decidim (and its vision) and Decidim (and its vision) for transforming education, reciprocally operate as a potential school of networked democracy.