Decidim Association General Assembly

Decidim Association General Assembly

Coordination Commitee (Pauline)

• Internacionalization of Decidim chapters

• Swiss chapter with a trademark agreement. *Open space today in the afternoon.

Design Group (Lucien)

• Since 2023, with the aim of having a space to discuss design issues, beyond its developer and theoretical background.

• Monthly calls.

• Working on a continuously mantained design system on Figma.

• *Open space today at 15:30

Devs & Implementers group (Tom)

• Collaborate with the larger ecosystem.

• Monthly meetings.

• Discussion on issues, features, bugs.

• Open to all, even if not devs, relevant for academic work, get to know how to Decidim works in the background.

• Metadecidim and Element channel.

Documentation & translation group

• Almost all documentation up to date.

• Andres and Lucien made multilingual contributions also available.

  • *French almost complete.

  • PT-BR in need of advancements

Internal regulations commitee (Ben)

• Review internal Regulations process so fat.

• A number of founding statutes were too high level.

• Vote and approval of first 4 articles in new internal regulation. Review of implications of approved regulations for DA governance.

• Process

  • Preparation (Dec. 1-31). Drafting Committee identified key areas requiring regulation.

  • Agenda setting (Jan. 9 - Feb. 1)

  • First deliberative cycle

    • Drafting (Feb. 1 - March 1)

    • Community deliberation (March 2 - April 9)

    • Revision and approval

• 4 articles

  • Scope of application

  • Decision-making process.

  • Technological governance

  • Internationalization.

• Lessons learned

  • It always takes more time than you think it will.

  • Virtual events, with guest speakers, brought a large group of participants and a shared vocabulary for discussion, established the tone for deliberative conversation.

  • Working in common (Miro-like) tool.

  • Committe burnout, on second draft.

• Implications of decision making process article

  • *Remaining efforts to communicate and implement new governance framework.

  • All CC work is conducted to its ongoing agenda in Metadecidm.

  • Any DA member can propose an item to the Agenda, confirmed with 10%.

  • Technical Office and CC members can also propose agenda items.

  • Addressed within 90 days, or vote to postpone it.

  • Urgent proposals, must be addressed with special CC session. Confirmed with support of 20% of DA via Metadecidim.

  • External Agreements. CC must be informed and given the opportunity to participate and or elect to open a broader DA participatory process.

  • General Assembly votes, any CC member can propose to delegate a decision/deliberaton

• Implications of technological governance article

  • *Inspired by participatory budgeting.

  • 2 phases:

    • Strategic direction-setting (alternate years).

      • TO prepares 3-10 strategic priorities and opens participatory process on Metadecidim.

      • DA members can vote on top priorities.

    • Features and activities priorization (annual)

      • Each DA member* can propose on Metadecidim up to two new features
        (*only two proposals may be submitted by members of the same organization)

      • Proposals are refined with support of Decidim Partners donated staff time.

      • (Missing step, sorry)

Community Debate

• GAFAM dependencies

  • Move away decidim infrastructure from big tech?, What is Decidim interoperable with?

    • We are witnessing a decline of democracy due to the allignment of far-right and GAFAM.

      • Build resistence to big tech, help people move away from GAFAM dependencies and their regime.

      • How to connect to GAFAMs to get them into Decidim, how to get them into collective and autonomous/community-led tech.

    • Criticism against big platforms, but still relying on some of them.

      • Network effect. For example, GitHub is the biggest “social network” for code, we could explore alternatives like GitLab.

      • 2 big issues:

        • Budget, zero euros for GitHub. Migration to other services would be costly.

        • Pains of migration.

      • Not only a technical thing, but a pain for the community.

    • In Brazil, to engage participation, we need to pay a lot of ads to get people to participate.

    • P

    • GAFAM are an oligarchy, as democrats, we have to propose an alternative. We need a killer app.

    • Defaults and documentation aspects in decidim which are not part of GAFAM. Identify what is easy and impactiful, it's not going to be easy, but we have to have some steps.

    • Many descentralized projects, like the Fediverse, have shown you can do things in other ways, you don't need to optimize and serve contents as quickly as GAFAM suggests, users can also.

    • Creating demoracy, creating altenatives to the control of technology.

      • It's all about access to resources.

      • Those who create alternatives struggle to have access to resources big tech has. It is an organizational question.

    • Negative dimensions of the question, to avoid relying away from American big tech stack. Microsoft owns GitHub for some years now, AI is not opt-in. Our codebase, comments, and documentation are used as training data.

    • A positive version, we can identify comrads, promote a codependent ecosystem with other free software projects.

    • Important debate, it does not have to be all or nothing. GitHub is never free, but it is the harder thing to

      • If Metadecidim is the village, and GitHub is the Factory, we could move it there.

      • Evaluate feasible changes with higher returns on sovereignty.

      • Optimistic in a not-long term to have options and alternatives in Europe.

    • We need a map of dependencies. Some sort evaluation of pros and cons of them. Draft an strategy to go over them.

      • Technical Office can map those dependencies, then have a deliberative process.

      • Devil in the details in EDIC, the way metrics are defined, Microsoft could still be scored higher, only 10% of punctuation s sovereignty, other metrics, like reliability, have more weight.

    • Request the TO a map of dependencies, and post them. A permanent project, of cost-benefit-risk analysis, there will always be risks, we could migrate some easier ones, but at least have a visible common roadmap of which are being migrated, which are more difficult and why.

    • In cases were there are no alternatives, make a plan of what it would take to federate them and which resources would be .

    • Very good idea to assemble a project of mapping dependencies, but not just as a technical project, but as a political statement, pressure governments and advance.

• How to become a rightful member with voting rights in the association?

  • 40 € per year to become a member.

  • Short survey and what you have , only prerrequisite is to have been previously active in the community.

• Ecological footprints

  • (not voted for discussion)