Management and roles of the Technical Office

Currently, the Decidim Association's Technical Office is made up of two people: a senior developer and a person dedicated to management and administration tasks. Indirectly, there are other people who have been able to dedicate working hours to the project thanks to alliances with the Barcelona City Council and Localret, who are responsible for hiring these people.

For its part, the regulations regarding the Coordination Committee state that its members must be volunteers who do not receive remuneration for carrying out the functions of their posts, and that they themselves are responsible for ensuring the democratic quality of the project. However, the needs of the Decidim project have meant that the Coordination Committee has taken on administrative and management tasks. All of this entails a heavy workload, which has been sustained mostly on a voluntary basis and has overloaded the team.

These tasks assumed by the Committee are tasks of coordination and management of the Technical Office and of the project in general. They are mainly translated into: Management of grants, representation of the Association at events, design and dynamisation of assemblies and medium and long-term strategies, coordination with public administrations, contracting management, coordination of the technical office, and other tasks derived from the day-to-day running of the Association. Until now, many of these tasks have fallen to a person who is not contracted to do so, i.e. there has been a general coordination role in an invisible way.

The Association now has resources for three new roles, for which job vacancies have recently been advertised:

• Designer (part-time)
• Fundraiser (part-time)
• RoR junior developer (full time)

The arrival of these people will entail further coordination tasks, without associated remuneration, which for the time being will be taken over by the Committee and, above all, by the Committee's presidency.

This discussion is aimed at addressing the functioning of the Technical Office (TO), the roles within the TO, its functions and powers, as well as its relationship with the coordination committee.

Questions for the debate

• What are the roles and responsibilities of the TO?
• What should be the accountability mechanisms of the TO?
• What roles should exist within the TO?
• What are the functions and powers of the overall coordination?