The participatory democracy framework.

Democracy never felt so real.

Decidim is a participatory democracy framework, written in Ruby on Rails, originally developed for the Barcelona City government online and offline participation website. Installing these libraries will provide you a generator and gems to help you develop web applications like the ones found on example applications or like our demo application.

All members of the Decidim community agree with Decidim Social Contract or Code of Democratic Guarantees.

Code quality

Project management [See on Waffle.io]

What do you need to do?

Get started with Decidim
Contribute to the project
Decidim components
How to test Decidim engines
Create & browse development app
Technical tradeoffs

Getting started with Decidim

We've set up a guide on how to install, set up and upgrade Decidim. See the Getting started guide.

How to contribute

As a Translator

Decidim is already translated on multiple languages (English, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Italian, Finnish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Swedish, Russian and Ukrainian). You can help us at Crowdin, the translation service, reviewing these translations or proposing a new language to add to the platform.

As a Developer

In order to develop on decidim, you'll need:

Git 2.15+
PostgreSQL 9.4+
Ruby 2.4.1
NodeJS 9.x.x (with yarn as a package manager)
ImageMagick
Chrome browser and chromedriver.

The easiest way to work on decidim is to clone decidim's repository and install its dependencies

git clone git@github.com:decidim/decidim.git
cd decidim
bundle install
yarn install

You have several rake tasks available:

bundle exec rake development_app: Creates a development app which you can use to run an application with the gems in your path.
bundle exec rake test_app: Generates a dummy application to be used for testing.
bundle exec rake test_all: Runs the tests of every engine using the dummy application

Browse Decidim

After you create a development app (bundle exec rake development_app):

cd development_app
bundle exec rails s
Go to 'http://localhost:3000'

Optionally, you can log in as: user@example.org | decidim123456

Also, if you want to verify yourself against the default authorization handler use a document number ended with "X".

Browse Admin Interface

After you create a development app (bundle exec rake development_app):

cd development_app
bundle exec rails s
Go to 'http://localhost:3000/admin'
Login data: admin@example.org | decidim123456

Officially supported libraries

Library	Description
Admin	This library adds an administration dashboard so users can manage their organization and all other entities.
API	This library exposes a GraphQL API to programatically interact with the Decidim platform via HTTP
Assemblies	Permanent participatory spaces. Currently in beta as an optional feature, can be included by explicitly adding `decidim-assemblies` to the Gemfile.
Budgets	Adds a participatory budgets system to any participatory space.
Comments	The Comments module adds the ability to include comments to any resource which can be commentable by users.
Core	The basics of Decidim: users, organizations, etc. This is the only required engine to run Decidim, all the others are optional.
Participatory Processes	The main concept of a Decidim installation: participatory processes.
Dev	This gem aids the local development of Decidim's features.
Meeting	The Meeting module adds meeting to any participatory space. It adds a CRUD engine to the admin and public view scoped inside the participatory space.
Pages	The Pages module adds static page capabilities to any participatory space. It basically provides an interface to include arbitrary HTML content to any step.
Proposals	The Proposals module adds one of the main features of Decidim: allows users to contribute to a participatory space by creating proposals.
Accountability	Adds an accountability section to any participatory space so users can follow along the state of the accepted proposals.
Surveys	Adds the ability for admins to create arbitrary surveys.
System	Multitenant Admin to manage multiple organizations in a single installation

Technical tradeoffs

Architecture

This is not your typical Ruby on Rails Vanilla App. We've tried using Consul but we found some problems on reutilization, adaptation, modularization and configuration. You can read more about that on "Propuesta de Cambios de Arquitectura de Consul".

Turbolinks

Decidim doesn't support turbolinks so it isn't included on our generated apps and it's removed for existing Rails applications which install the Decidim engine.

The main reason is we are injecting some scripts into the body for some individual pages and Turbolinks loads the scripts in parallel. For some libraries like leaflet it's very inconvenient because its plugins extend an existing global object.

The support of Turbolinks was dropped in d8c7d9f. If you're interested in bringing turbolinks back, further discussion is welcome.

Following our license

If you plan to release your application you'll need to publish it using the same license: GPL Affero 3. We recommend doing that on GitHub before publishing, you can read more on "Being Open Source From Day One is Especially Important for Government Projects". If you have any trouble you can contact us on Gitter.

Example applications

Since Decidim is a ruby gem, you can check out the dependent repositories to see how many applications are on the wild or tests that other developers have made. Here's a partial list with some of the projects that have used Decidim:

OpenSourcePolitics / decidim-osp

readme