Individual interest, engagement and legitimate participation is dependent on individual context and scope. Let me explain this with some practical examples:
As a home-owner one might wish to participate in decision making about the maintainance of the collective entrance or roofing of its dependent apartments. As a street dweller one might wish to participate in decision making on the public lightning, detailing of public green spaces, etc of one's own street. As a neighbourood inhabitant one might want to participate in decision making about the neighbourhood events and festivities, local car parking policy etc. Thus particular subjects are relevant to individuals within several nested scopes of organisation arount their own personal situation.
An individual also appears to play roles within multiple participative contexts. For example as a parent of a school-going child, one might like to ligitimately participate in several layers of decisionmaking on the happenings in a particular schoolclass / schoolyear / schoolbuiling / educative organisation. Participate as a member of a sports team / sports association / sports federation; as member of a religious community; as an employee of a professional organisation and possibly as trade union member; as a member of a political party; etc. So legitimate participation seems dependent on the context where someone has a particular participative identity and organisational scope.
Decidim started out as a platform buildt for participative processes in municipal govenment. It's interface has been buildt mainly from this organisational perspective. Participation from a citizens perspective has organisational plurality. A citizen can't actively participate in all organisational contexts and scopes and needs to devide its attention to subjects according to personal importance, responsability, competence, etc. A federated form of Decidim might possibly become more user centric and assist citizens in the selection of the participative proceses one wishes to engage in.
Could Decidim be structured and designed in a way where it would be possible for citizens to ultimately have information and opportunities for participation presented dependant on their (selected and approved) inclusion in several personal contexts, tenants and instances?
My proposal would be to discuss the desirablility and technical feasability of permitting users of a (possibly both multitenant and federated) decidim platform to be organised into multiple citizen centred contexts and scopes.
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