Propose new functionalities for Decidim software
#DecidimRoadmap Designing Decidim together
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We've had this situation happen several times. Platform admins would like to submit proposals after the idea gathering phase of their proposal has ended. A simple reason could be that some ideas were gathered on paper during a workshop during the last days of the phase, or that "ideas boxes" are present on the ground (for example when we do participatory budgeting in school) and the paper proposals are only gathered after the phase ends.
The solution in this case is to switch back to a phase where creating new proposals is activated for a brief time. This can be unintuitive to some admins and there is a risk that participants visiting the platform during that time get confused or try to create a proposal.
Describe the solution you'd like
I suggest to keep the "New proposal" button active and visible at all times on the admin side.
Describe alternatives you've considered
There could also be a checkbox in the component's configuration, either a step one
"Proposal creation by admin enabled"
Or a general one
"Always let admins create proposals"
But I can only think of a few cases where that would be useful, and it would add complexity to an already bloated Proposals configuration page.
Does this issue could impact on users private data?
No.
Funded by
Digidem Lab
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4 comments
Conversation with Pau Parals
This functionality goes against the social contract (Equal opportunities and quality indicators: Alongside the previously defined guarantees, the platform promises to ensure equal opportunities for all people, as well as for their proposals or other contributions the platform might host).
We have already in Decidim collective authorship after a meeting: once the meeting is closed, it can be related to a proposal and the authorship appears in the name of the meeting (since it is not an official proposal either, these are the ones that sell since the authorship of the administrator). This proposal can be uploaded by the administrator, for example.
The situation you describe should be foreseen in the participatory process phase (remember that the rules of the game should be clear and should not be changed to avoid frustration). Something like "final proposals" announcing that after the collection of ideas a phase of final proposals opens (with the criteria you describe). This is as simple as enabling a new proposal component and importing accepted proposals from the other component. This phase, however, would be for voting. I understand that for this particular case, you would do enough with the authorship per meeting.
Thank you for your quick comment @paarals.🙂 I understand your point, but I think "goes against the social contract" is strongly worded and absolute. Maybe "I can see some ethical implications" or something similar would have left more room for discussion?
To make it clearer, I added another common case in our processes in which participants can leave their idea on paper in idea boxes (for instance at school). It is therefore not rare that the boxes stay onsite until the phase ends and the paper proposals are then gathered and imported.
I think I understand your point about using "meeting" proposals but just like with normal ones, they can only be created when proposal creation is enabled. So I'm not sure how it solves it?
I don't understand either how creating a new phase and a new Proposals component since adding new proposals there would require to enable public proposal creation there as well.
Yes, no problem :). In this sense, the social contract tells us that everyone should have the same possibilities. Enabling the creation of proposals for admins and not the participant, goes against this equality of opportunity. Imagine a participatory process of Decidim where only the official proposals are activated, this scenario could give with this functionality. That's why I think it goes against the social contract (we shouldn't take it as a bad thing, on the contrary, it helps us to orient what functionalities we can incorporate)
Maybe, it looks like you need to enable collaborative drafts functionality. This allows you to have pre-proposals with shared authorship that can be edited at any time. It is precisely designed for the incubation of proposals and when the ideation phase ends, we promote them to proposals. This seems to make more sense than the alternative of making other component proposals. Here is info: https://docs.decidim.org/en/admin/components/proposals/collaborative_drafts/
It may also be interesting to link a verifier to get the impersonation done and thus maintain the authorship of the participant (if a student makes a proposal it would not make sense for it to be as official proposal). Here is info: https://docs.decidim.org/en/admin/participants/impersonations/.
Would you say that this could solve your problem? I see possibilities 😀
I would find this useful and not against the social contract. It would be more against equal opportunities if we deny specific people from submitting their ideas on paper.
This would be also useful for some other use cases, such as a re-voting between two projects that got exactly the same amount of votes in the PB voting. We had this happen once and we solved it by creating a re-voting between the two projects using the proposals component (using the support feature).
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