A local chapter is a local community that promotes Decidim, discusses new features, exchanges knowledge on Decidim usages, and organizes itself to improve Decidim products. 

It’s a bridge between local and global Decidim communities, that allows Decidim users to exchange and contribute to Decidim in their own languages. 

To be recognised as such, a local chapter must: 

1. involve at least five active contributors to Decidim ;
2. have goals similar to those of the Decidim Association ;
3. be geographically based/anchored in a legal jurisdiction ;

1. Gather the people constituting your local chapter ;

2. Determine your common goals ;

3. Reach all the people that could be interested to join you in your territory ;

4. Select your chapter name ;

5. Apply for recognition on Metadecidim. 

1. Local Chapter governance must be democratic and open to everyone in the region.
2. Local Chapter takes sovereignty for promoting Decidim locally and organizing their community.
3. Within the rights and limits described below, local chapters have full autonomy to evolve their governance over time.

Decidim local chapter exists to further the goals of Decidim. They do so by engaging in a wide range of activities, which includes but is not limited to the following:

1. Represent Decidim in the local community. 

2. Create a space for sharing experiences around Decidim.

3. Create common resources within the community of practice (documentation, translations, trainings, etc.)

4. Advise and help people who are new to the community.

5. Disseminate the values of the project.

6. Encourage a good use of Decidim to guarantee the democratic quality of the local processes.

7. Promote the adoption of Decidim and open-source software locally. 

8. Organize events to share experiences and network.

9. Receive and spend funding to support local organizing activities (hackathons, workshops, training activities, practitioner meet-ups, conference attendance and other promotional activities). 

10. Receive funding to finance the development and/or maintenance of Decidim Association-managed (i.e. ‘core’) code; in these cases 100% of the funds raised must be transferred to the Decidim Association’s. 

When a local chapter is recognized as such by the Decidim Association, it has the right to:
1.Use the Decidim association trademark, with prior agreement from the Coordination Committee. 
2. Organize events around Decidim.
3. Be listed as an official local chapter on Decidim website.
4. Have a dedicated assembly on Metadecidim. 

Local chapters: 
1. may be legally incorporated as a non-profit in the country/region which they represent. 
2. If they provide services around Decidim, they should be Decidim non-profit partners and contribute 1.5% of the revenues they’re doing with Decidim. 
3. must define the delimitations of their community. 
4. must respect the social contract, regardless of their structure. 
5. must deploy a Decidim instance for publishing information and providing transparency about the local chapter.
6. must not have their own directory of companies and non-profit partners. 
7.Partners can be members of a local chapter, but not the other way around. 
8. The Decidim trademark belongs to the Decidim Association. Local chapters should consult with the Association about the uses of the trademark.

Under certain conditions, the Coordination Committee can decide to experiment with members of the association to create new forms of local chapters.

Those experimentations must be bound be written agreement, and could be formalized in the internal regulation if considered relevant. 

1. The Coordination Committee may, at any time, propose to revoke the status of Local Chapter from a group which had previously been given that status. 
2. This decision would proceed according to the regular rules of Coordination Committee meetings. If the motion to revoke Local Chapter status passes, the right of the Local Chapter to use the Decidim trademarks will be cancelled.