Study and Definition of a governance model for Decidim
The goal of this project was to study the development process followed in Decidim, a plaform for participatory democracy which enables the creation of citizen participation portals , and to make explicit its governance model
The development of Open Source Software (OSS) usually follows a method that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency. Indeed, OSS is typically developed in a collaborative manner via online hosting platforms like GitHub. However, in practice, many OSS projects are not as open as they should.
The Decidim project is a platform aimed at creating participatory portals. The platform defines a social contract for democratic guarantees and open collaboration for the community around the project. Furthermore, the development of the Decidim project is overseen by Metadecidim,
another participatory portal devoted to allow anyone to contribute and discuss new features (or improvements) for the platform.
Governance rules help to prioritize and manage tasks, and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the project by clarifying how developers (and end-users) should collaborate. Despite their importance, these rules are usually implicit or scattered in the project documentation/tools. In this project we explore the explicit definition and enforcement of governance rules for the Decidim project.