Hiding rejected proposals is against Decidim's own social contract
For about every Decidim instance we have made, we have made a customization to show all rejected proposals after the proposals have been evaluated. There is barely any exception to this rule, this is a request from ALL the cities.
Many people do not notice they can filter the view and the rejected proposals are filtered out by default. Or they simply don't understand how the filtering options work.
We have heard furious feedback from citizens that claim the city is trying to hide information by hiding all the rejected proposals. The citizens really feel this is wrong and the city is not listening to them this way.
Decidim's Social Contract states the following:
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The platform, and its current or future configuration, development, deployment and use must ensure and maximize, at all times, the transparency, traceability and integrity of documents, proposals, debates, decisions, or any other object, mechanism or participatory process.
By transparency we understand that all data related to all such participatory mechanisms and processes are available for download, analysis and treatment, following the most demanding standards and formats to share information (accessibility, multi-format, etc.).
Transparency is a necessary condition for monitoring of participatory processes and mechanisms, but should never, in any case, be applied for the treatment of personal data or against the defense of the privacy of the people participating in the platform.
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Hiding the rejected proposals by default violates the following in these statements:
- Maximization of transparency - If people have to make a filtering choice themselves and know how to make the system to function as transparent, we are not maximizing transparency.
- Data is available for download analysis and treatment - This data is not available and visible by default. The user has to make a choice for the data to appear in the UI.
- Accessibility of the data - Even if it is not violating any actual accessibility requirement, the data is simply not accessible to everyone if they don't know how to get the data to show up. They think the city/municipality is trying to hide the data they don't want to show.
Technically this change is rather simple. It would just involve changing the default filtering criteria on this line:
Therefore, I suggest we show also rejected proposals by default in order to answer the citizens' concerns and in order to make Decidim comply with Decidim’s Social Contract.
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