WeDecide: How the Green Party of Canada learned to create Sustainable Policy through Continuous Proposal Development

Description:
The Green Party of Canada (GPC) is a grassroots political organization that develops and promotes environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic policies that prioritize ecological health and social well-being.

It took four years, and several false starts, for the organization to adopt WeDecide to evolve a member-driven policy process from a two year physical meeting-centred process, to a fully online continuous process that has dramatically improved member participation and policy responsiveness. Decidim allowed the party to run an entirely transparent process, visible to the public at large, as a demonstration of participatory democracy in action.

The workshop will be an interactive discussion of the benefits, risks and challenges of moving a political party’s policy development onto the open internet, using decidim as a member portal for Continuous Policy Development and organizational transparency. The discussion will include operational and cultural aspects of change management.

Structure:

1. Green Party of Canada Case Study (70 minutes)

   • Continuous Online Policy Development, including

     • Continuous Participatory Processes

     • Multilingual amendments 

     • Friendly-amendment Workshops

     • Color-coded voting

     • Formal dissents

   • Organizational Transparency

     • Distributed Unit Self-Publishing

     • Young Greens Engagement

     • Running internal elections 

   • Organizational Change Management

     • Strategies and lessons from the introduction of decidim to the organization

   • Decidim in Operational Workflows

     • Meeting registrations with member authentication

   • Decidim as a Communications Strategy

     • Policy development as a Search Engine Optimization strategy

2. Question and Answer (20 minutes)

Outcomes:

• Review of new best practices for political policy development and member engagement

• Identification of innovations to simply operations and increase adoption

Language of the session: English

Logistical needs: Screen or projector

Number of people facilitating the workshop: 2, Catherine Jones, Policy Lead and Federal Councillor and John Willson, WeDecide Technical Lead and GPC Fund President