Decidim course begins: speakers at the Fest and Decidim Awards 🎒

Discover the first speakers at the Fest!

Autumn is approaching, and with it comes Decidim Fest (4-6 November). The official festival programme will be released in a few weeks, but first we would like to announce the first confirmed speakers for this edition, which is dedicated to digital public infrastructures and is part of BCN Open Tech Week in collaboration with Barcelona City Council and Mozfest.

This year's keynote speaker is Dr Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and professor at Princeton University, who is an expert in how science and technology define the world, exploring the relationship between innovation and inequalities, knowledge, power, race and justice.

The event will also feature Robin Berjon, a technologist specialising in digital technology governance. His work focuses on building democratic governance of technology so that our digital sphere begins to work for the public good. During the Fest, he will participate in a round table discussion dedicated to the open web.

Stay tuned to our social media channels, where you will soon be able to read the programme for this very special edition.

Save The Date

Monthly Devs & Design Calls

Working group meetings are back to kick off the academic year. If you are having trouble installing the software, would like a step-by-step introduction to doing so, or have suggestions for new interaction and user experience procedures, these meetings are for you. Join the conversation and help improve the community!

👉🏽Meetings for the community of developers and implementers: https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/eix-comunitat/f/149/meetings/2094

👉🏽Designer community meetings: https://meta.decidim.org/assemblies/eix-px/f/79/meetings/2043

News Corner

The Decidim Awards are here 🏆

The Decidim Awards are an initiative to recognise and celebrate the most active participants in the Metadecidim community.

Their aim is to highlight the collective effort behind the growth of the platform and reinforce the democratic and collaborative spirit of Decidim with symbolic recognition during the annual Decidim Fest. The categories are:

• The person who has contributed most to the translation of the code and the platform.

• The person who has contributed most to the documentation on how to install and configure Decidim.

• Module of the year (to be decided through an open process within the community).

• The person who has attended the most events organised by the community.

The category dedicated to the module of the year will be decided through an open process within Metadecidim, where participants will be able to submit their proposals starting in October. The final vote will take place during the festival and will close before the ceremony to be held on Thursday, 6 November.

The other categories will be defined according to the platform's metrics, one week before the festival so that the winners can be announced.

Roadmap prioritisation 📍

As approved at the last General Assembly, we are beginning to implement the agreed protocol for the general prioritisation of the roadmap. This means that we are closing the process for new features and will open a new space in the last week of September to make proposals and vote on which improvements should be prioritised for inclusion in the 2026 projects. Start thinking about what you want to include!

Talking to NGI Commons about Decidim 📚

The NGI Commons team interviews Nil Homedes, Executive Director of the Lliure Decidim Software Association, to discuss how the project is leading the way in digital commons to function on a large scale as public infrastructure.

Decidim, as a digital commons, is collectively governed, openly licensed, and jointly developed by a global community, ensuring that its digital infrastructure remains publicly accessible, transparent, and adaptable for shared civic use.

Read the interview here: https://commons.ngi.eu/2025/08/04/decidim-and-the-spirit-of-a-digital-commons-community/

We're attending the OGP Summit 🪁

From 6 to 10 October 2025, we will be attending the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit 2025, which will take place in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

The event brings together experts, institutions and communities from around the world to exchange experiences and best practices related to digital rights, digital civic spaces, transparency and the promotion of democracy and balance between public authorities, citizens and the private sector.

Nil Homedes will participate in the session: Participation as a cross-cutting theme: lessons learned and the way forward. Tuesday, 7 October at 3:30 p.m.

More info here: https://spain.ogpsummit.org/p/#/overview

In the Spotlight

At Decidim, we like to recommend interesting articles, resources and materials about our community and the open source ecosystem. In this edition, we focus on the Democracy Innovators Podcast, a series of podcasts that share stories about civic technology, interviewing experts who are working on new forms of participation. We recommend some episodes where colleagues from the community talk about Decidim and other initiatives.

• Valentin Chaput about Open Source Politics. A decade of digital tools & the next generation.

• Guillaume Saunier & Lucien Langton about how Voca helps to distribute the participatory tool Decidim.

Also, don't miss the latest report “Funding Europe's Open Digital Infrastructure: The Economic, Legal, and Political Feasibility of an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF)” from Open Forum Europe.