The participatory democracy framework.

Free Open-Source participatory democracy, citizen participation and open government for cities and organizations

Decidim is a participatory democracy framework, written in Ruby on Rails, originally developed for the Barcelona City government online and offline participation website. Installing these libraries will provide you a generator and gems to help you develop web applications like the ones found on example applications or like our demo application.

All members of the Decidim community agree with Decidim Social Contract or Code of Democratic Guarantees.

Code quality

Test suite

See all

What do you need to do?

Official Documentation
Getting started with Decidim
Contribute to the project
Modules
Create & browse development app

Getting started with Decidim

TLDR: install gem, generate a Ruby on Rails app, enjoy.

gem install decidim
decidim decidim_application

We’ve set up a guide on how to install, set up and upgrade Decidim. See the Getting started guide.

How to contribute

See Contributing.

Modules

If you need to have some features that we don’t have yet, we recommend that you make a module. This is a Ruby on Rails engine with some APIs specific to Decidim (for registering with the menus, integration with spaces like Participatory Processes or Assemblies, with /admin or /api, etc).

As a base you can use these modules, although check first that the version is compatible with your current Decidim version. Also you should know that until v1.0.0 We’re under development and these internal APIs can change. We recommend that you extensively test your module.

See Modules page on Decidim.org.

Authorizations Strategies

One specific thing regarding these kind of applications is the authorization/verification logic. Here are some examples:

Other special verifications:

Following our license

If you plan to release your application you’ll need to publish it using the same license: GPL Affero 3. We recommend doing that on GitHub before publishing, you can read more on "Being Open Source From Day One is Especially Important for Government Projects". If you have any trouble you can contact us on Gitter.

Example applications

Since Decidim is a ruby gem, you can check out the dependent repositories to see how many applications are on the wild or tests that other developers have made. Here’s a partial list with some of the projects that have used Decidim:

Security

Security is very important to us. If you have any issue regarding security, please disclose the information responsibly by sending an email to security [at] decidim [dot] org and not by creating a github/metadecidim issue. We appreciate your effort to make Decidim more secure. See full security policy.

gudata/decidim