Decidim summer news ☀️

The Open Call is closed and proposals have been selected! ☄️

After collecting all the proposals made by the Metadecidim community, we have announced those accepted to be part of the official program of Decidim Fest 2025.

The Community Day will happen on the last day of the Fest (6th November) and will be organised into five different thematic block topics around Decidim use cases, Artificial Intelligence, research and software as a service, features and modules and budgets.

Keep posted and check out the final proposals!

Check the proposals: https://meta.decidim.org/conferences/DecidimFest25/f/1981/proposals

News Corner

Pushing the boundaries of participatory democracy in France 🇫🇷

A citizen petition hosted on the official Decidim-based platform of the French Assemblée Nationale has sparked national debate and it’s pushing the boundaries of participatory democracy.

The petition calls for the repeal of the “Duplomb Law”, which reintroduces the controversial pesticide acetamiprid, despite environmental and health risks. This pesticide had previously been phased out due to its harmful impact on pollinators, biodiversity, and human health.

In just 12 days, it gathered over 1.6 million signatures, tripling the threshold (500,000) required to trigger a formal debate in Parliament and it's now the most successful e-petition in French legislative history.

Meanwhile, attention is shifting to the Sénat, which has a separate petition process that can lead to not just debates, but inquiries, oversight missions, or even draft legislation.

This shows how platforms like Decidim can bridge institutional and citizen participation, at scale.

Plantaformas: A Framework to Organize Assemblies in the Amazon 🍃

Our colleagues from Octree have been working to strengthen collaborative governance with a focus on environmental and climate issues in the Amazon region with the support of Voca and Nômade Technologias.

Together they developed a platform called Plantaformas where local citizens and ancestral communities from different cultures and realities can self-organize democratically.

A few days ago, the project organized a community assembly on digital sovereignty to generate proposals on free infrastructures, debate on technological alternatives and define a participatory route to take control of the digital infrastructure and challenge the dependence on Big Tech. You can read more about the project here.

Promoting participation in the migration society of Berlin 🌳

Our colleagues from Berlin mit allen Gestalten have a participatory space, enabled by mitgestalten Partizipationsbüro, to foster a more open, transparent and collaborative society by enabling residents to engage directly in local decision-making.

The 12 District Advisory Councils for Participation and Integration and the State Advisory Council for Participation are enshrined in the Act to Promote Participation in the Migration Society of the State of Berlin. It regulates binding measures to promote administrative and economic diversity as well as the political participation of people with a history of migration.

Each of Berlin’s 12 districts, plus a statewide council, has an Advisory Council for Participation and Integration. These bodies meet, discuss and make recommendations on integration and civic participation.

Participatory Budgeting in Saltillo 🗳

The city of Saltillo, Mexico, is implementing the participatory budgeting tool through the Participa Saltillo platform, developed with the open source software Decidim.

The process fosters a more transparent and participatory public management, strengthening the link between government and citizens.

Brasil Participativo among the finalists for the Gov.Digital 2025 Award 🏆

Brasil Participativo is among the finalists for the Gov.Digital 2025 Award, in the Open Government category!

This initiative, a Decidim-based platform, is the federal government's digital participation project. It brings together various participatory processes such as public consultations, conferences and collegiate bodies in the most diverse areas of public policy.

Decidim Recommends

At Decidim we like to recommend interesting articles, resources and materials about our community and open source ecosystem. In this newsletter we focus on a call for democratic, technological, and data sovereignty in the face of extractive systems.

• Democratic innovation for change: A participatory corrective to deliberative hegemony. Deliberative innovation helps us talk, but we need participatory power to act. To truly transform, democracy must center pluralism, policy, economy, and empowerment. It’s time to shift from discussion to disruption.

• Privacy, resistance, and the digital commons: Rethinking data extractivism.This thesis by Fátima Solera Navarro, explores how privacy and the commons intersect in resisting data and material extractivism under surveillance capitalism.

• Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure. OpenForum Europe proposes an EU‑wide Sovereign Tech Fund (EU‑STF) to secure and finance critical open‑source software that underpins Europe's digital infrastructure.