Monthly Devs & Implementers call · March

Participatory Texts feature

People asked about the Participatory Texts feature, that was in the Roadmap in the Decidim Fest. It was mentioned that this is currently an ongoing development, that will be available in the next release (v0.31.0).
The official new name of this component will be called "Collaborative Texts", and it is an optional module within Decidim.

More information about this can be found in the following links:

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim/pull/14137

• https://www.figma.com/proto/zylWKruMtBsrxSYb8SpcR4/Lot-1?node-id=3109-11204&node-type=canvas&t=GpiGkK5TYd9mhTt9-0&scaling=min-zoom&content-scaling=fixed&page-id=2905%3A22755&starting-point-node-id=3027%3A10863

• https://decidim-reviews-3.dev.pokecode.net/processes/ample-theorist/f/71/documents/31

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim/issues/13972

v0.30.0 status

We mentioned about the status of the v0.30.0.rc3: This is currently in production in Meta-Decidim and the idea is to iron out the last final bugs and then perform a final release.

Rails upgrade status

People asked about the Rails updates status. We mentioned that we already have various PR's covering the update from Rails v7.1 to Rails v8.0. The main change is the deprecation of the secrets.yml API, which has been migrated to Environment Variables as the main configuration as of 01/04/2025.

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim/pull/13268

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim/pull/13267

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim/pull/13947

We are working towards having Decidim using Rails v7.1, we will do the next release (v0.31.0) mostly related to the Rails update (and whatever else might get before of that, like the "Collaborative texts" module).

WhatsApp Bot

People asked about a possible WhatsApp bot integration.

It was mentioned about that we are working with BSC with improving the GraphQL API. Once this is completed, it would be feasible to do these kind of external integrations (with WhatsApp or any other platform).

Previously Whatsapp would grant partners access to their API who then sell access via a contract depicting rate limits and other metric forms, which were unfortunately came at a cost.

We need to research a bit about how the WhatsApp ecosystem actually work for these kind of features. We will talk about this topic in the next meeting.

Rails UJS status

It was asked about the JavaScript frontend situation, if we have plans for going from Rails UJS to something more modern like Stimulus or Turbo currently recommended by Rails: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/

Our roadmap is that once we have Rails 7.2 (with v0.31.0), we will start with the UJS removal so we can actually update to Rails v8.0.

Dependencies

Related to the last topic, we mentioned that we need to do a round of checking out our dependencies and see if we found anything that isn't maintained, to start planning an exit strategy (we should refactor the code with a new dependency, or rethink this feature, or internalize the code so we can maintain it).

We mentioned that this was already the case with other dependencies on the past and then we discussed how projects such as wkhtmltopdf (unmaintianed) could help. Project details: https://wkhtmltopdf.org/status.html

Barcelona Open Data

Barcelona doesn't have the Open Data updated since September 2024. We need to look into updating this taking into account the participation year of 2025.

Local Installation

People asked about how to make Decidim work locally. It was pointed out a video made recently can help with this (only avaliable in Spanish): https://docs.decidim.org/en/v0.29/install/manualhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVUq1nYmF4M

Open-Data viz demo

Diego who attended the meeting mentioned that he wanted to apply to the Aina Challenges from BSC. An example of research that could be used to help:

https://decidim-topics.vercel.app/

Aina Challenge

More information about the challenge can be found here:

https://projecteaina.cat/lab/concurs/es/