Sustainability, governance and partnerships of Decidim
Participatory process to define Decidim's management model and sustainability strategy
From 2019, a public-common governance of the code has been defined, thanks to the agreement signed between the City Council, the Decidim Association and the Localret Consortium. Representatives of these three entities become part of the Product team, and are responsible for overseeing the code.
The Product team is in charge of defining the software roadmap and responding to proposals for new functionalities made by the community in Metadecidim. It also ensures the coherence and technical sustainability of the software. The roadmap is done collaboratively in different ways:
- Through Metadecidim and the community (metaproposals)
- Through contracts with the association (ex: Vocdoni and the Voting module)
- Through the development contracts of the Barcelona City Council
Questions for the debate
- How can we ensure good collective governance of the code and the strategic direction of the product?
- What should be the role of the Association in Product, which bodies should be represented, which actors and what decision-making capacity should they have?
- What kind of improvements do we want to prioritise, and what criteria should be used to prioritise them?
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As I think everyone knows, the governance of the code is distributed among 3 actors, and just today the renewal of the agreement for four more years comes into force (this is great news because it means that the future of Decidim does not depend on the results of the elections this Sunday 28M).
As stated in the agreement, the product team must be composed of representatives of the three entities. In order for the product team to belong only to the Association, we should think about the scenario four years from now. The ownership of the repository remains with the City Council, and the cession of its management is temporary.
Anyhow, we can consider that two of the three parties to the agreement (Association and Localret) work for the interests of Decidim in its global dimension, and therefore belong to the technical office "de facto".
Completely in favor of specifying and better defining each role and its function. Obviously the team is in need of several profiles, as mentioned by Pauline or Lucien.
And it is VERY important that they are people who are part of the team. Unlike other projects, we cannot decide: neither the major part of the development budget (subject to political negotiations), nor the schedule (subject to administrative procedures), nor the team we are going to work with (subject to external contracts). This is quite a strain on the work dynamics, and in these 7 years we have seen it all. Developments that remain unfinished because the procedures are slow, external teams that are constantly changing and have to be retrained, companies that disappear straight away... in short, if with these means we have come this far, imagine how far we would get with a larger and more stable team! 💫💫
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