Sustainability, governance and partnerships of Decidim

Hi everyone! Thank you for all the contributions to this debate, which in my opinion is the most critical of all, because unfortunately sustainability is a recurrent challenge for free software projects.

I think it’s important, as Maite mentioned, to have an idea of what budget would the Association need to maintain a stable team. Last year we did this exercise with the coordination committee. To sustain a small team, between 7 (minimum) and 11 (ideal) people, we need aprox between 250k and 400k euros per year.

How can the Association obtain resources from all the economic activity generated around Decidim?

The partnership policy should be a strategy to be further developed, and iterated if needed. As I see it, it is about fostering a symbiotic relationship between the core project and the ecosystem it generates around it.

It would be good that most of the service providers were partners, especially those that build their business model entirely on Decidim.

As partners are those entities that are contributing to the commons to sustain it, it is natural that the Association promotes collaboration with its partners in a preferential way (more on this below).

To make the partnership policy work we don’t need to have a large number of providers, since it’s designed based on the number of services that Decidim's user organizations hire.

Back to the numbers, partner contributions (assuming that the current ecosystem remains stable) could cover at least 30% of the financing.

How can we expand the number and type of actors that can support the project, beyond Catalan institutions? In particular, would it be possible for public institutions, NGOs, etc. that are users of the Decidim SW to support the project?

As I mentioned, the partnership policy makes it easier for Decidim's user organizations to contribute to the main project _through_ the service providers. We could work to improve how we convey to organizations the importance of taking care of a digital commons.

As Xavier said, an alternative would be that user organizations become members, but in the case of public institutions this changes the rules of the game, since they’d automatically become part of the governing bodies. Therefore, the Association would be subject to a similar dynamic to the current one. It would also be governed by public procurement law. And being a project born of public funding, we have already learned the problems it generates. Still, it would be an option if we are willing to go down that road.

Regarding the signing of agreements w/public institutions, let’s keep in mind that for them it is tremendously complicated to find a way to give funding, since the process is subjected to political balances and bureaucratic circuits. As an example, the current agreement with the City Council and the Generalitat took more than 2 years to materialize. But depending on the potential funding we could obtain, I’d explore the possibility of signing agreements with other governments, prioritizing those where Decidim is consolidated as a democratic infrastructure.