Identifying opportunities related to a “write” API in Decidim

The association, but also our friends at Mainio tech are working on various improvements to the API. One of them is a “write” API to Decidim. For the non-techies, what this means is that you can use an API in order to write data into Decidim from other places without interacting with the Decidim interface. To be even clearer, here are some of the things it would allow to do (from least to most extreme):

• Evaluate ideas in a spreadsheet and then, with the click of an activation of a script, import all of the answers to ideas into Decidim.

• Use an external AI API to check if proposals match the rules of the platform and then automatically send reports if they don’t.

• Interoperability between two Decidims or even with other participatory platforms.

• Put a microphone in the middle of a public square with a sign for people to speak proposals into it. Proposals spoken are then transcribed and the data is sent to Decidim for other people to see.

• We can reinvent a brand new interface for Decidim and just use the OG Decidim as a database.

We have a bunch of use cases we haven’t even explored, but opportunities seem to be immense. We suggest to organise this workshop in order to imagine some of these opportunities, identify where the APIs need to be improved and what can we develop in the next few months to turn this new type of APIs into new types of experiences for administrators and users.

Format of the workshop:

• quick presentation of the technical parts

• quick presentations of some of the things we already built related to these APIs

• imagining all together what other things we could build, and creating early descriptions and visualisations for these concepts

Language of the session: English