We are continuing Building a Free Internet of the Future, a monthly series of interviews with recipients and consortium members of NGI Zero (NGI0) grants. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, free hardware and free standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
For this last month of 2024, we talk to Carolina Romero who works on Decidim, “a digital platform for citizen participation with free, open and secure technology and democratic guarantees.” Romero is a technologist with two decades of experience in information technology projects and one of the co-founders of Decidim, and is currently the product manager of the NGI0 project that Decidim began in June 2024.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What does “Decidim” mean and what is the political significance?
Decidim means “we decide” in Catalan, reflecting its aim to go beyond traditional consultative participation, where feedback is gathered at most and little else happens.
From a political standpoint, this carries significant weight. In fact, the very definition of Decidim – an open, free digital infrastructure for participatory democracy – hints at this. By “participatory democracy” we mean a system of governance where individuals engage as equals.
The term stems from the Latin pars capere, meaning “to take part,” emphasising that people claim their rightful share of power as equal members of a political community. This share must be equally distributed among everyone. Furthermore, participation also encompasses the autonomy to shape social and political life, fostering the ability to create, coordinate and commit to a thriving collective existence.
In June 2024, you were granted the NGI0 Commons fund. How does this fit in with your principles and activities?
This is our first time applying for a grant of this kind, so the process has been filled with some uncertainty. However, when we came across the call for proposals, it was clear to us that our project aligned perfectly with its focus: helping to reclaim public ownership of the internet and making it healthier and more open, both as an infrastructure and as an ecosystem.
For the Association, it’s important to work on software improvements that may not be the most flashy, trendy or immediately appealing but are absolutely critical for ensuring a robust and secure framework. This is particularly vital as Decidim increasingly serves as critical infrastructure for many organisations. Thanks to the NGI0 grant, we’ll be able to thoroughly review functionalities that aren’t working as they should and make significant strides in improving accessibility, among other things.
What do you do on a day-to-day basis?
The Decidim Association oversees the platform’s core codebase and manages the governance of the community surrounding the project. Daily tasks range from technical work, carried out by the product team and maintainers (refining the roadmap and coordinating contributions to the code repository) to facilitating and energising the project’s ecosystem.
How do governments, public institutions, social organisations and companies, which are in 30 countries across four continents, use Decidim’s infrastructure?
The functioning is actually quite decentralised and autonomous in many cases. Many of the services are provided by companies of the ecosystem to organisations that may not have the resources, or perhaps even the interest, to actively engage in the project’s governance. For instance, the government of Brazil began using the platform two years ago as part of a political initiative to make Decidim the digital participation infrastructure not only for the federal government but eventually for its municipalities as well. Essentially, it has been a way to test whether an architecture initially designed for a local government can meet the demands of larger-scale administrations.
We’re also in regular contact with our official partners, companies that provide a variety of services based on Decidim, from software companies offering installation and maintenance services to facilitation and engagement companies that use Decidim as part of their tech stack. These partners are official because they contribute a percentage of the profits generated through their services back to the association, helping sustain the commons.
As a last example, we collaborate with other open-source communities, such as Codeando México or Code for Japan. These communities, in turn, foster and promote local networks within their regions.
Your services are used around the world, by many types of organisations and social groups and with different cultural backgrounds. How does Decidim address diversity in its participatory processes?
Cultural factors are crucial to consider because perceptions of what constitutes a high-quality and democratically sound process vary greatly depending on the cultural context. For instance, in countries like Finland or Sweden, where public trust in institutions is relatively high, some features of Decidim that aim to prevent misuse or abuse by the “authorities” managing an instance can seem surprising or unnecessary. This contrasts sharply with what activist groups in Belarus have shared with us, where ensuring participants’ privacy is an absolute necessity.
In another example, a community member working to promote Decidim in Cameroon explained that the main challenge there is connectivity, similar to what some communities in the Amazon face. The priority in these cases is enabling the platform to function with low connectivity or even offline.
How do we address this? Primarily through communication and by actively gathering feedback to incorporate into the roadmap. Over time the platform has evolved to become even more flexible and customisable than it was initially. In fact, the modularity of its architecture is what has allowed organisations from vastly different contexts to adapt it to their specific needs. This is why it’s becoming increasingly clear to us that the role of the Decidim Association is to build and maintain a shared, basic digital infrastructure that is flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of its users.
Reports indicate that about 5.7 billion people (72% of the world's population) now live under authoritarian rule, a trend measured over two decades. Could Decidim be a tool for people who have to cope with these types of regimes?
This is, in fact, one of the most politically stimulating challenges for us. Let’s not forget that many of the innovative democratic practices that gave birth to this project emerged in 2011, when people gathered in public squares to denounce that we were not living in a real democracy.
In a context of relative democratic normalcy, it’s easy to find use cases for Decidim, particularly within institutional settings. However, one of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves recently is why social movements and civil society organisations haven’t adopted the tool to the same extent. In a world where freedoms and rights are increasingly being rolled back in many places, we feel it’s urgent to also be of service to self-organised civil society.
We suspect that some of the reasons are purely technological. For example, there’s currently a relatively steep technical learning curve for a collective to easily set up its own instance, which creates a clear barrier to access. This is something we want to work on next year to reduce as much as possible. Privacy and security for participants – principles embedded in the project's ethical code – are also areas that we want to further improve.
We’re also reflecting on how to prevent “participation washing” by authoritarian governments that attempt to project a democratic image while acting otherwise. We've already faced a precedent with the government of Chile under Piñera, which requested support services during the social uprising while simultaneously repressing its citizens in the streets. This situation sparked a debate within our community about how we should position ourselves in such cases.
Do you have a special souvenir from the Decidim adventure? Why is it significant for you?
I must confess that I’m not particularly fond of keeping or collecting objects, but there’s one poster and a true story that I hold dear, and a premonition of my own journey with this project. The poster announced a conference in Barcelona where Arnau Monterde and Xabier Barandiaran (both later co-founders of the project) were speaking. I found their technopolitical ideas so inspiring that I remember thinking, “I’d love to work with these people someday.”
A year later, I heard that the Barcelona City Council was developing open-source participation software. I started looking for the right contact to interview and to find out whether the software could be extended for use in other municipalities. The name I was given was Arnau Monterde. That marked the beginning of not just a great friendship but also a collaboration that led to the complete rewriting of the code, making it reusable for any organisation.
The rest is Decidim's history. But every time I look at that poster (which I recently hung up at home), I smile and think to myself, what a journey – and what’s still to come!
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).