More self-organization, inter-comunication, and self-management

Xabier 01/10/2025 14:23

The main challenge in Decidim’s democratic quality is the power gap between admins and participants, since admins control when spaces open. This limits democracy to managed contexts. A solution is enabling participants to self-activate spaces or components. For example, giving each participant-profile a default blog where users can post, follow, and comment. Such features would foster self-organized participation, reducing dependence on administrators.

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Liked by Valentin Chaput and 3 more

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Valentin Chaput

Xabier

Joel Berenguer Moncada

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Ali González 02/10/2025 15:19

My two cents here, and I suspect what your answer is going to be 😁

But features between users are the first governments ask us to hide or eliminate, in LATAM at least. They don't even like having the conversations feature or the user notifications. So although I like the idea in concept, in practice I already expect that if it gets developed they'll ask me to remove it.

Xabier 02/10/2025 15:57

Well... this goes to the core of this project. Do we work for democracy, or do we work for (some of) our clients (governments that want to limit the self-organizing potential of their citizens)?

Right now there is a big instance of Decidim, that I am involved in, that needs more self-organization. And I can tell you many cases were different organizations and social movements have decided not to use Decidim because it is not democratic enough.

For those official in dubiously democratic institutions (clients) that you mention I always answer the same (maybe this helps you): If you fear self-organization and internal communication in Decidim and you decide to limit it, then you are exposing yourself to your participants choosing other platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp). This platforms 1. Are not designed to reach democratic quality outcomes, and 2. These platforms are militarized or fully co-opted by power structures much worst than those you want to avoid on your Decidim instance.

So, @basicavisual_ why do you think your argument is valid? Do you think we should not develop features that increase democratic quality only because some of your clients don't want to use it because they fear democratic quality? I am a bit surprised by your position 🥲

Ali González 02/10/2025 16:40

You are treacherously misconstruing what I said as if I don't have my fair share of weekly fights with govt officials about democratic quality and transparency. I did not say we should not develop this feature or to not increase the democratic quality of decidim, whose democratic features I have defended on another post. I said that even if it gets built organizations may not want it. It doesn't matter if I am there or not to tell them what to do, they still manage to take away features they don't want and we still need to somewhat be aligned. It is great you cite examples of organizations that do want the feature. This is a discussion on where the product should head, hopefully through bringing into the table what we see is needed from the frontlines. I appreciate the difference in contexts.

AH 02/10/2025 20:57 Edited

Many times this ideological debate amuses me that comes out of the powering entities of the project. Maybe it has come across before. I understand that Xabier's main goal is to produce debate rather than creating proper solutions, where I give you that, you have succeeeded.

\1. There is nothing preventing people using the commercial tools for democratic debates. They are not censoring any content that would count as proper politcal debate. Only if it comes to illegeal content (that Decidim allows 100%), it would be moderated.

\2. That does not really matter in the context of political or local debates. Decidim is largely dicated by forces that only sign a specific political ideology and want to silence all the voices that think differently. I think Decidim cannot praise itself of being a nonbiased political authority over any other platform, as it comes with a strong political bias aimed to silence the voices who think differently.

While I do agree that in the second point, we could argue something against the freedom of internet over the commercial actors, they provide solutions to people that enable them to bring out their thoughts and political ideologies to other people. Decidim also does part of that while it also allows people to post complete nonsense and even in some cases illegal content. It does not make the platform less authoritarian to allow people posting illegal content.

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