Propose new features
Designing Decidim together
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The act of submitting a proposal on a public platform can be intimidating for some people. Various reasons, be it fear of backlash or personal comfort, lead to the hesitance of potential contributors. This bottleneck restricts the diversity and quantity of the proposals.
Describe the solution you'd like
Let's offer an anonymous submission option. How this works is simple enough: when a user starts the proposal creation process, it stays the same. The divergence happens after.
For users who don't have accounts and wish not to create one:
Currently, these users get a popup asking them to log in. With this feature, they will get an option: either log in or proceed anonymously. If they choose to go anonymous, the proposal form will indicate that their submission will be anonymous.
For users with accounts but who prefer to publish anonymously:
They'd see the typical proposal form. But, in the last section where they usually get the option to submit as a group, they'd also get an option to submit as an "Anonymous User."
Describe alternatives you've considered
A clear and concise description of any alternative solutions or features you've considered.
Additional context
Risks:
Risk of Abuse: Anonymity could be exploited for posting misleading or inappropriate content.
Community Trust: Anonymous proposals might not get the same level of trust from the community.
Data Management: Keeping track of anonymous proposals while maintaining a level of traceability presents a technical and ethical challenge.
Does this issue could impact on users private data?
Possibly a funded one
Funded by
OSP and our clients ❤️
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We have also constantly been asked about this particular feature, now it came up once again in discussions.
There is a fundamental limitation about Decidim that it does not allow any anonymous participation in the form it has been built today. It is quite a common need and today cities are circumventing this by collecting ideas by paper or by email and then entering them on the platform anonymously on behalf of the participants. But it seems quite counterintuitive that to support such use case, you need a lot of manual labor and potentially papers (in the paper collection case) if you want to support a digital system to do what they want it to do.
For these types of needs, I would also like to see some kind of pre-vetting feature for the anonymously submitted data, so that the city could more easily filter out any spam or offensive content before it even enters the platform. This way we could avoid the unwanted consequences of opening a form online that publishes content directly to highly valued domains (i.e. it's an open call for spam if this is not done).
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