Strategic directions 2026-2027
1. Reduce technical and functional debt
As part of our roadmap for the next 2 years, the community has prioritised the strategic direction to reduce technical and functional debt in the platform. Over eight years, Decidim has grown through experimentation and iteration, resulting in some features that were never fully consolidated or broadly adopted. Some of these add unnecessary complexity to the codebase and user experience.
By addressing both types of debt, we aim to simplify the architecture, improve performance and stability. Reducing technical debt means cleaning up legacy code, removing dependencies that slow down maintenance, and making upgrades easier. Reducing functional debt means retiring unfinished or redundant features and, if necessary, replacing them with more coherent, widely useful solutions. For example, the old collaborative drafts feature were replaced with a simpler co-authorship mechanism for proposals, maintaining the same participatory value while reducing code and UX complexity.
2. Expand integrations and interoperability
In this strategic direction, we focus on enhancing Decidim’s API capabilities to support write operations. By opening up secure write endpoints, the platform will empower richer integrations and automated workflows. For example, municipalities and organizations could automatically push new proposals or collect results from external tools, rather than relying solely on manual entry.
Practically speaking, this will enable seamless collaboration between Decidim and external systems (think of connecting a chatbot that submits participant ideas directly into Decidim), and it will also simplify building custom modules that require data creation or updates. As these capabilities mature, administrators and implementers will benefit from streamlined workflows, reduced duplication of effort, and stronger integration with the digital tools they already use.
3. Build a consistent experience
In 2026, we’ll focus on consolidating the design system, which serves as the single source of truth for developers and designers, ensuring that all buttons, forms, menus, and pages follow a coherent logic and behavior. At the same time, we’ll carry out a thorough review to identify and fix the UI inconsistencies, both on the frontend and admin, that have built up over time, bringing full visual and interaction consistency to the platform.
This direction is also about the continuous improvement of accessibility, as applying the design system for a new feature doesn’t automatically make it accessible, and it requires additional research and testing work even when using accessible styles, components and patterns. We’ll expand testing sessions with real people, and collaborate with the Design working group to formalize a replicable UX research methodology that empower both the Product team and the wider community of contributors to use these tools.