Valentin Chaput – Decidim: democracy and tools for citizen participation by OPEN SOURCE POLITICS

Interview with Valentin Chaput – Decidim

Walid : welcome to this new episode of Projets Libres! Today, we’re going to talk about free software and participatory democracy. It all started when I was contacted by Sarah Krichen who works at Open Source Politics and who offered me to talk about a software called Decidim. As a free software writer, I was interested in Open Source Politics. So I started looking at the company’s website and the Decidim software website.

And it seemed fascinating to me and so I suggested that we do an interview about it. So here we are today with Valentin Chaput who is one of the founders of Open Source Politics. I hope you’re doing well to begin with.

Valentin : I’m doing very well, thank you and it’s a shared pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Presentation by Valentin Chaput

Walid : I’ll let you start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about your background and how you came to work in this sector now.

Valentin : Very good. Well yes, I’ll try not to be too long. So my name is Valentin Chaput, I’m 36 years old. I have a more political background, if you look at the name of our company Open Source Politics, since I studied political science, I worked in local and national institutions, and I decided 8 years ago to get out of that world, the classic political world, the classic institutional world. And at the time, I became more interested in digital, and I tried quite quickly to bridge the two. So I did a little training to learn the basics, the basics of code and especially the understanding of what happens behind a software.

And it so happens that through this training, I began to develop a project which was to be able to follow the writing of laws in real time and contribute to it. So it’s a project that ultimately wasn’t done in this form. Others have tried, have done great things, including Regards Citoyens. From there, in fact, it gave me the opportunity to meet a number of people who were in this emerging field called Civic Tech, that is, the use of technologies for civic engagement, citizenship, democracy, democratic participation and the transparency of institutions.

And so one thing leading to another, with those with whom I had the best contact, we actually decided to join forces. At the time, we created a meetup in 2015 that was already called Open Source Politics. And the idea was simply to welcome all the people who had projects in this field and to try to discuss, to collaborate on it and to publicize them.

And we had an important focus, which was that we wanted to work with free software because it seemed obvious to us in this issue of collaboration between us, but also more broadly in an issue of transparency since our subject was political life, public life.

It seemed completely natural to us that if there is a link with decision-making, we need to know how it goes. So we really had an approach to auditing code. We saw that there were other software programs that were starting to exist in France and elsewhere in the world and we said to ourselves, since it exists elsewhere, we are already going to try to get out of it rather than reinvent it. And so we turned to free software and we had several free software and in fact the first one we used was DemocracyOS, a software that was created in Argentina between 2012 and 2014.

So in 2015-2016, we started using it. A first local authority, which was the town hall of Nanterre , called on us, in fact in the form of an association, to try to help them deploy a platform. It was the permanent agora of Nanterre, participez.nanterre.fr. From this experience we realized that it was bound to interest other public entities in particular and so in order not to lose our associative and militant energy, we decided with three partners to set up a company, Open Source Politics, and to remain involved but obviously to leave the management of the DemocracyOS association which lived for a few more years to other members of the association so that there would be a distinction between a commercial activity and a more associative activity.

And we started to devote ourselves to free software, the commons and democracy.

What is Civic tech?

Walid : What we call Civic Tech, I guess that when you start to enter this environment, it is not yet called Civic Tech. Is it mostly proprietary software?

Valentin : So Civic Tech is a term that was created in 2013 in the United States. But at the time it didn’t necessarily mean just that, since for them it was a bit synonymous with everything that cooperative platforms were. And so in the first maps of Civic Tech that come out in studies, they put Airbnb and Uber in it, because suddenly it’s disintermediation. And so it allows people to organize themselves to take a taxi, to book a room. And so obviously that’s not what we wanted to do at all.

And so then there was a definition around 2015-2016, when we started to talk about this subject and to a certain extent prevail in France with others, we focused more on everything related to Open Government, so there is also a whole very specific field. And finally, this is a component on which most of the companies that have survived to this day have been built, that is, tools that are used by governments, that buy them and then deploy them for interaction with citizens. Then there is another aspect that is more of an organization, also more civic, civic, by definition, and perhaps a little more militant too.

And we have always tried to find a balance between the two, so to keep a foot in civil society and at the same time to be a supplier, a service provider for public institutions in particular. In fact, before the 2017 presidential election, there was a fairly simultaneous rise of many solutions. I think it also met issues that were already in terms of technical maturity.

You have to remember that we were just before and during Brexit, the election of Trump, Cambridge Analytica, so we didn’t yet have an overly negative view of social networks, of what they brought and on the contrary began to take a step back. We had this idea that the future was tech entrepreneurs, there was a fairly solutionist vision among many people and us in fact, and in particular me through my past experience in local authorities. I worked a lot in Aubervilliers , which is the city where there are the fewest people who vote for many reasons, so I knew that there was no point in having a new technological gadget, it was better to tackle the heart of the problem of participation and tell yourself that digital tools were going to be a relay, an additional tool in a wider range to try to involve citizens.

And so in France there were indeed starting to be a number of solutions that could do a lot of different things, there were projects, for example at the moment we hear a lot about Jean Massiet with his show Backseat which is on Twitch and which finally became politicized… and finally who has made political explanation shows on YouTube and Twitch. That’s when he started doing it. There is an open democracy association that was also structured at that time and which involved many actors in citizen participation, and in particular digital participation. And then there is a series of platforms that have started to emerge.

Most of them were homeowners. And we arrived in this ecosystem saying that it couldn’t be like this how it happened. And we’ve partnered with other players, with Inno3, which is a firm that works on, I think he’s already interviewed in the podcast, Benjamin Jean.

Walid : yes, Benjamin.

Valentin : With Regards Citoyens, with a few people who were at Etalab. And in fact we thought we wanted to show that there was another scene around free software. And then we built our tools little by little by readapting what had been done in Argentina with DemocracyOS, in Taiwan with g0v and the whole organization of Audrey Tang, who is also a rather interesting character to study, who is the Minister of Digital Affairs, and who started by doing citizen hackathons, which we tried to reproduce in France in 2016-2017.

And one thing leading to another, as we were looking for tools that started to sell them to institutions and other organizations, we got closer to what was being done in Spain, with first Madrid and then Barcelona, and then that’s what put us on the path to Decidim. And so always with this little free and citizen participation.

Walid : Can you just tell me a little bit about this community you’re working on, a little bit Civic Tech or OpenGov, how it’s structured? Are there gatherings like for example, I don’t know, for free software in general, we have gatherings like FOSDEM or trade fairs. How does it actually work? How do you fit into all this?

Valentin : In a way, it’s maybe a bit of advancing age, an old man’s remark, but there was an obvious boiling around 7-8 years ago, again around the preparation of the 2017 elections. It’s time for primaire.org, for MaVoix, so for movements that try to change the rules of the game with digital tools. At that time, some economic players began to emerge, including Open Source Politics, but there were still many activists, pioneers around Solus.

Inevitably, there is one point in an observation that we made a few years later, those who survived three or four years later, it is because they set up a company and they created an economic model and the others ended up running out of steam with a few exceptions. But there is a professionalization of this scene. And in the end, there has never really been a second wind as strong as what we experienced at that time. And so today, there are always a few initiatives that emerge from time to time. So there, for example, in the last election cycle, what was able to emerge, which is Civic Tech, was the Elize application, for example, you may have heard of it, which allowed you to compare programs in a rather fun way on an application. A few flaws but there you go, with a certain media impact.

But there wasn’t such a strong movement with dozens of projects, hundreds of people participating in hackathons every two months. That’s what we organized in 2016. This emulation may have disappeared a little. We find a bit of the logic of Civic Tech in Open Data approaches. In a way, we can say that, I would like to link everything that was done during Covid, with the Covid Trackers and company, which were suddenly citizens who organize themselves to use public data and provide a new service, for me it’s a bit of civic tech too, that is to say that there is a purpose that is intended for citizens and there is this idea that technology can enable this empowerment, skills development and broader information sharing.

And so there is not necessarily a lot of gathering. So what exists, I have already mentioned them, is Open Democracy , which is a bit of an association that federates part of this ecosystem. We have sometimes been a little critical in the past because they didn’t have this open source dimension that was in their foundation, but gradually they have also transformed themselves on the subject. They continue to organize a certain number of events, but it’s true that there isn’t a huge boiling around the subject, as we have had Nuit Debout and many other movements that have also built and constituted this ecosystem again 7-8 years ago.

Walid : If we start talking about Decidim now and then we’ll talk about Open Source Politics precisely to see how you fit into it, how you contribute etc. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Decidim? What political environment allows the emergence of solutions like Decidim?

The history of Decidim and the political environment of the time

Valentin : In a way, this whole environment, even if there have already been solutions before, but this whole environment was also born a little bit from the year 2011 with the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements and in the context of Spain, the Indignados, what they call May 15.

And so what happened is that this generation that mobilized in 2011 in Spain, in fact, came of age a few years later. In 2015, in the local elections, citizens’ coalitions, which were most often supported by Podemos, but in the case of Barcelona for example, it was independent of Podemos, won almost all the major Spanish cities in the municipal elections, so Madrid, La Coroña, Valencia, Barcelona.

In these movements, there were many free software activists who were looking for a way to renew democracy through digital technology. So there is a first consolidation that is being done around the Madrid City Hall, which is opening a place called the Medialab Prado, which is building a team and creating a platform called Consul. This platform, its first version, is Decide.Madrid.es.

And from this platform, a small community is created, above all in the Spanish-speaking world. And the idea is that, since everyone has the same need at the same time, Madrid’s investment will benefit everyone else. It’s really a logic of mutualization that is very strong. We started using Consul in 2016-2017 in France for participatory budgets with some local authorities, social landlords, etc.

And then quite quickly, Barcelona also tries to contribute to Consul and what happens is that they don’t agree because obviously they have divergent roadmaps. And since Madrid is responsible for most of the management of the project, they do not accept that there is a divergent path. In addition, there were already relations at the time, it’s always a bit complicated, but already at the time it was still quite hot between Catalonia and the central government in Madrid. And so Barcelona decided to launch its own project, Decidim, which means “We decide” in Catalan on a slightly different logic.

Whereas Consul is ultimately a fairly centralized software, that is to say that we can do a participatory budget process and a call for ideas, etc. And so it’s quite simple, but it also includes a lot of parameters that are specific to Madrid’s specifications. Decidim will make a completely modular system. From the start, it’s a construction game. We can create as much space as we want. We can do 15 participatory budgets in parallel if we want. We are free to have several geographical areas on the same platform that coexist. So there is a certain abstraction in the Decidim software, which is one of its strengths. Sometimes it also leads to a bit of complexity, but that’s one of the important issues. And very quickly, this is also the Catalan logic, their challenge is that the platform can be used not only in Barcelona but also for the organization of the neighborhoods of Barcelona, but also for the cities of the community around Barcelona, but also for the departments, etc. So there’s this very, very modular logic and what they say to themselves in Barcelona is that it’s important for them not to have something too monolithic and this is reflected in the fact that from the start there is a community of actors around Decidim.

First of all, there are obviously agents who are integrated into the Barcelona City Council who will launch the project with the strong support of the elected officials. There is a very strong academic and academic community from the beginning of Barcelona and therefore the local universities, in political science and all that, immediately contribute and are associated with the conception of Decidim because there is a very, very strong political background also behind Decidim. We’ll come back to this with the social contract, etc. Everything that could be written around it. But to stay on really this community that founds Decidim. They also have the decision not to develop it internally, probably they couldn’t do it, not to depend on a technical service provider and therefore not to go looking for a big firm, a big agency that will develop everything, but they rely on several service providers in the context of a multi-awarded public contract, several lots, and there are some who are in charge of the maintenance of the core of Decidim, others who will develop certain features, others who will work on the design, etc.

And so from the outset there are several economic actors, several public and academic actors, and then, as it was obviously a political movement behind it, associations and citizens involved in the government. So from the beginning it was made to be a collaborative tool and it was ultimately imposed by the initial architecture of the project. And so very quickly, it is a community that manages to get something out of the ground quickly and gradually open up to others, first of all other authorities in Catalonia. And then, in fact, we quickly spotted them, in particular through Francesca Bria, who intervened, who was in Barcelona for a few years and who designed their entire strategy of opening up data, of policy around digital technology. It went far beyond the tools, with a strong intellectual positioning.

And since she had to give a lot of conferences, we met her at a conference in France, and we heard about Decidim like that. And just when we were starting to be confronted with the limits of Consul, which was a little too centralized, not easy enough to adapt, we came across Decidim and we realized that in fact Decidim brings together all the equation that we have been trying to solve since the version of DemocracyOS in Nanterre. That is to say a software and a community that is moving forward and opening up and that is dynamic, is supported by public money, so there is a certain sustainability of the software that is assured and again it goes very, very fast. Especially at the beginning the first versions of Decidim, every month, every two months there are really fundamental things that are added. And we have been integrating into this since 2017. We are probably the first player outside Catalonia to join the Decidim community.

And then there you go, then we can tell the rest of the story, but if we really go back to the creation of Decidim, there is this very strong political will that has been documented. That is to say, there is a white paper that details why Decidim was built, what it should do, what vision of participatory democracy it serves, and in the same way there is a social contract, it is something that has also been discussed a lot, which defines what are the good uses of Decidim.

And so obviously it’s free software, anyone can use it, adapt it. As a result, at the heart of the software, there are a number of principles, particularly around the protection of personal data, the somewhat unalterable nature of citizen participation. We can’t censor content on Decidim, we can’t rewrite certain things, we can’t write proposals or rewrite them or correct them in the place of the citizens, etc.

So where other software will be more permissive for administrators, perhaps more practical also for administrators who will be our end customers, Decidim include, and especially at the beginning it was quite rigid, a certain number of principles that cannot be derogated from and that really define a political and philosophical vision that they called technopolitics: a critical and very strategic use of digital tools.

Decidim features

Walid : Today, what are the main features of Decidim?

Valentin : So Decidim is a tool that is built with spaces and functionalities. So in fact, the spaces are your major participatory approaches. And so, there are steps that will be what we call consultations, that is to say that it will follow a schedule. We are going to create a space and say, in my city, I have a participatory budget, from such and such a date to such a date, people put ideas in place, from such and such a date to such a date, the administration evaluates them, from such and such a date to such a date, we vote on them, from such and such a date to such a date, we put them in place. But another approach can be simply a questionnaire and so in my organization, from such and such a date to such a date, I open a questionnaire, from such and such a date to such a date, I publish the summaries. So there is really this idea of temporality and therefore of a top-down approach.

We have another type of space called assemblies, which are more horizontal spaces for organization. Typically, these are neighborhood councils, they are working groups where all of a sudden we will be able to call on the same features, I will come back to this. But there is no precise calendar defined by an authority that says it’s from such and such a date to such and such a date, we do something. Here it’s a bit continuous, when you need to have an agenda, the agenda can run for years. And finally there is another important space, which is that of initiatives that are in fact petitions, so there is an ascending space, that is to say that the rules of the game are set, but then it is the contributions of citizens and the collection of signatures that will ensure that these proposals are discussed further. And so in, then there are two or three other small types of spaces, but the main ones are really those, and within these spaces we’re going to be able to call on features.

This is the strength, the richness of Decidim, is that we can also combine them as we wish. And so these functionalities, there are proposals, so we can make a call for ideas, but obviously we can modulate it, we can decide that there are votes, we can decide that the proposals are geolocated or not. We can decide to associate categories or documents attached to our proposals. We can decide that the proposals are only proposed by the administrators and that the participants are just there to comment on them, to prioritize them. We can mix all that. And then we can have proposals at stage 1, then we select only 10% of them at stage 2, by a vote or by a technical evaluation.

So proposals, we can twist them in all directions, then we have questionnaires, so it allows us to make a whole range of questionnaires, simple choices, multiple choices, matrices, etc. We have votes, particularly oriented towards participatory budgets. So there we have an envelope and we say I have 500,000 euros in my municipality which will be allocated by a participatory budget and people can vote for 5 projects from the list.

There are all the voting methods around it. We will have modalities of agenda of meetings, and with this logic that participation is done online but also offline. So we’re going to announce meetings, and especially at the beginning we didn’t have all the video calls yet, etc. It was really physical workshops.

Then we will come and report on these workshops and make contributions to them on the platform which will themselves be able to be commented on, enriching the agenda of the next workshop. And so there’s all this logic there. And then there are other features that are more of a documentation page. A module that is important, which is a module for monitoring achievements. The first use of Barcelona was to build a municipal action plan. They had 10,000 proposals that arrived on their platform and then they had an evaluation of what was feasible or not, etc. And then they gradually put them in place and after 3 years, in 2019, at the end of their mandate, they were able to justify that 90% of what had been discussed on the platform had been put in place. So it’s a very, very, very strong use case. And so they have this module that allows them to visualize by major theme, by major district, what has been done, to what degree it has been completed, what have been the successive stages of implementation.

That’s really all of it, it’s also one of Decidim’s strengths. And so all these modules, we can use them as we want, we can use them in private spaces where there are only certain users who have access, or in public spaces open to all. And so there is a certain flexibility in the organization, which means that we can have single-initiative platforms with just a questionnaire and a survey for three months, or approaches with five themes in parallel, simultaneous, then three months later a participatory budget, then petitions, then etc. and then has an API, some open data. So again, it’s quite powerful and it allows you to design a lot of approaches. Often what we say when we accompany new users is we try to understand what they want to do and then there are sometimes several ways to do it in Decidim: we try to find the best one. It is a software whose vocation is in a way public action.

Decidim’s public and private users

Walid : And yet in fact when you talk about it, the question I ask myself is is it used in the private sector? I think typically, for example, it could be used in companies, in unions, stuff like that.

Valentin : So it was mostly used by the public and there are some choices of architecture and functionalities that also reflect this origin in the relationship of an institution to its citizens. Whereas in the private and associative sectors, we have obviously already experienced it: we had carried out very interesting projects with Emmaus, with companies, EDF, Decathtlon, and finally a few.

What we have observed is that very often organizations have a slightly more advanced need for control, in a certain way, of access rights, etc. and rather look for either the intranet, which Decidim cannot completely do because we don’t have a directory of all the users according to which departments they are in the company, etc. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow for a horizontal organization either. And so we talked about that because there are free software projects that came to us and said, well, we found Decidim, we’d like to use it. And in fact, after a little discussion with them, we realized that it was not the tool they needed. Instead, we should have looked at Loomio or other tools that are adapted to smaller communities, but where everyone has all the rights. We have much more shared rights, whereas Decidim is still very hierarchical. There are administrators, space administrators, it has to respect a certain schedule or a certain sequence of features etc. It is still a tool that is designed for institutions.

It can be used in private or associative structures, but it is sometimes a little too rigid for its needs. But it doesn’t matter, there are others that exist and do different things. And so there you have it, I think it’s better than being decided that it works very well for something, rather than sometimes it spreads out. We had this temptation at a certain point to develop additional features, but we realized that in fact it was going to distort it.

Decidim governance

Walid : I have a question, something I would say that is quite topical in free software. I would like us to talk about the governance of Decidim and in particular how the software roadmap is managed and what is done to be sure that this software will always remain free software?

Valentin : So we’re going to pick up the story where I left off, which is 2016-2017, the software starts to be deployed, starts to be spotted and used first in the French-speaking world by us, and then elsewhere, in Europe and around the world.

Then came 2019, which was an electoral deadline in Barcelona, and it was the questioning of the mandate of Adda Colao and his entire coalition. And in fact, the decision that was made at that time, to ensure the sustainability of the software, or at least a first phase, was to take the project out of the town hall. A Decidim association was created with permanent staff who obviously always worked in conjunction with the city hall, but the Barcelona city council ensured multi-year funding for this association and the release of its administrative organization chart to prevent the successors from deciding to cut everything in the event of an electoral defeat.

That’s a bit like what happened in Madrid with Consul. As I said, the project was really internalized. They lost in 2019, a large part of the resources were cut and Consul only revived through his community and via an association that was then formed in the Netherlands and which does not have the same strength as Decidim. It put a bit of a stop to the software.

Whereas Decidim, thanks to this, has been able to continue to expand. Obviously, we had to define a new governance around the project. And so everything happens on a Decidim instance, since the world is well made, we use our own tool. So there is an instance called meta.decidim.org, on which we will find both what is of the order of the somewhat statutory governance of the project, and an embryonic roadmap, in any case the gateway to the technical roadmap of the software. So for the governance aspect, the association has a Board of Directors who is elected from among the members, etc. There are a number of changes to the association’s somewhat important texts that are put on the platform and discussed. There is also a small collaborative text editing function on Decidim. It turns out that there are a number of events around the Decidim community, so there are texts under discussion on the platform and so everyone can come and contribute their stone and their son.

Walid : Is it international? How are the members of the Board defined, for example?

Valentin : So that’s actually it has gradually become international. At the beginning it was very Catalan-Catalan. Quite quickly they understood that they still had to put English in all their discussions. Now, in the latest version of the Board, there are also members of the international community who are there. On the other hand, the members of the Decidim community, to date, are natural persons. And so, we have a person from Open Source Politics who is on the board of the Decidim association, but it is not Open Source Politics who is in the association.

We are more of a partner of the association, and we will come back to it later, but as a result, we participate in its financing too. And so this governance goes through a certain number of governance highlights as in any association, and everything is transparent and documented on the platform. So that’s for the real governance aspect of the project, ensuring its sustainability, its means of development, etc.

And then next to that there is the technical roadmap. There, the Decidim platform allows anyone to come and declare feature proposals. We’re going to say that I don’t think it works, we should do it like this, or I have such and such a need but I don’t have funding, or on the contrary such and such an institution has asked us to develop such and such a feature. And there, suddenly, the Decidim association has a role in defining what will go into the core of the software and what must be developed as an external module.

And so that’s quite fundamental because obviously what goes into the heart afterwards is maintained by the association and its service providers where the modules must be maintained by the community. And so if we go to decidim.org we have the list of all the official features and all the modules that are a little bit accepted by the community but managed as external modules.

This roadmap, there you go, it is reviewed regularly. I think recently… because obviously then everything moves to Git and more technical software. I think that recently they have noticed that there is again a little too much cumbersomeness in the operation of Decidim to really allow for a very collaborative roadmap. So I think these are things that are still evolving. But until then, what we have to understand is that it remains the Barcelona City Council that has provided most of the funding, at least on the community side, governance etc. And since this year there has been a reflection that goes beyond Barcelona, it no longer depends on Barcelona because there is a good chance that there will be another political majority that emerges in the next elections. And as a result, there is also the desire to have a stronger sustainability over time and the association, which for a very long time was composed of two members and a few volunteers, realizes that the project has become too big for it to be enough. So we have to go and get funding.

There are debates at the moment about what is the right funding ratio between public, private and philanthropic. And so it’s interesting. But all this is happening, discussion as a roadmap on a dedicated instance of Decidim. And there is an annual event that usually takes place around mid-October every year and brings everyone together in Barcelona. It’s called the Decidim Fest.

Walid : Two things. The first one I’d like you to elaborate on a little bit, you said that you have a legal entity that is on the board, and that you, then, are a partner behind it and that you finance. I’d like you to talk about that. And the second question I also have, before I forget, is whether European initiatives such as Next Generation Internet, NLNet, etc., are or could be avenues for funding as well?

Valentin : So the Decidim association, now in governance, is made up of natural persons. So in this case, we are a member of the team who is on the board. But apart from that, legal entities, like Open Source Politics and other companies, because now there are equivalents of Open Source Politics, we have a few others elsewhere in the world. The association did not necessarily want to hear about private service providers around the software.

In any case, it did nothing to ensure that we could actively participate in the governance and financing of the project. So there was obviously a role as a technical service provider, but it didn’t go much further. And it’s changed a little bit in the last year, a year and a half. And so what has been put in place is the idea that to be an official partner of the Decidim project, you have to commit to donating part of your turnover generated with Decidim. And so I find that complicated because Decidim is only in the process of being labeled to be recognized as a public utility and to allow, especially in the French legal framework, a company like Open Source Politics to donate to it, etc. And so in the meantime, well, we invoice the Decidim association for missions to ensure this financing of an amount that corresponds, in this case, to 3% of the turnover generated with Decidim.

Open Source Politics is the largest company in the Decidim community, so we have the highest share rating, but it’s something that the other companies that exist in Switzerland, Austria, Finland, the United States, Japan are also committed to. This financing is done by legal entities, while governance is more on the side of individuals.

On the second part, indeed for the moment, the financing has been largely done for the important milestones of the fault of the road by the Barcelona City Council, through several successive appeals, and more indirectly by the other user institutions. So today there are almost 500 organizations in the world that use CDMs and some of them have started to fund developments. So some of the developments are very specific to their use case. In France, we can obviously think of people who wanted to connect France Connect to Decidim, things like that, so again it’s a bit intermediate since it can be of interest to several entities.

We obviously have developments that have been paid for by institutions, and in particular Decidim was used between 2020 and 2022, will be used again soon by the European Commission. And so there have been a lot of developments that have been funded by the European Commission, in particular the accessibility of the software has been significantly improved by this means, the management of events, and in particular online events, because it fell during Covid, was largely financed by the European Commission. The way to manage machine translations is also a need that came from the European Commission. That was really to meet a client’s very precise specifications.

And as for funding and calls for projects or calls for funds such as Next Generation Europe and others, or the Internet, from the Commission, for the moment it has not been the subject of any significant funding to my knowledge, but it is something that is being studied. I know that I met people from NGI not too long ago who were asking questions about how to support Decidim and it’s true that for a year, a year and a half, there has been this question that is a little more significant in the community of how to ensure the sustainability of the software, Not over the next twelve months but really over the next ten years and how is it sure that it develops and that there are clear rules for the members, that there are no free-rider riders in the organization etc etc. Anyway, there is really this stake that is becoming stronger and stronger. For the moment, we are still allowing us to design additional resources, so that’s what’s positive.

Who are the users of Decidim?

Walid : Who are the users of Decidim actually? Basically, you were talking about the European Commission etc. Who currently, a little known, uses Decidim so that people like me who don’t know them get an idea of the adoption of the software?

Valentin : So the paying users of Decidim are a lot of institutions and so if we give telling examples, there is indeed the European Commission that has launched steps around Decidim. For example, we work with the National Assembly, the Senate or the Environmental Economic and Social Council. If you want to officially submit a petition to these institutions, we have adapted Decidim platforms for the occasion. Since it is petitions, it is a little more widespread. We are still talking about the Decidim instances with the most users in the world. We are at more than 500,000 people who have signed petitions in the Senate. I think that all these institutions together have close to a million people in France. You have to be in France because you have to have a France Connect account, in this case for these platforms, not far from a million signatures on petitions that were on Decidim platforms, which is not necessarily very visible.

And then there are institutions of all sizes, we work with cities of 20,000 inhabitants, large cities, Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Lille, Angers, Nancy. There are a number of local authorities, departments, Loire-Atlantique, Loiret, Touraine. There are a number of them who use Decidim platforms. Each time it’s white label, so it’s not necessarily always visible, but it’s really a use for local authorities.

It was used at the national level by the Ministry of National Education for consultations, which were more consultations aimed at the teaching community. And here, for example, at the moment, with the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT), we have an approach aimed at city contracts that define urban policy. Through the relays of the prefectures, the inhabitants of these political districts of the city can express themselves on the future of these districts.

And so it’s used at all scales and elsewhere in the world, the city halls of Helsinki, Geneva, Rio-Japan, New York City, with whom we’re also working on a participatory budget, use Decidim for these approaches. And then there are some uses that are more in cooperatives, I know that in Spain there is a cooperative, a bit like the Spanish Enercoop , which uses Decidim for all its members, its members who are also its customers. But it is overwhelmingly public actors and so it really comes in all sizes.

Perhaps listeners have already seen and used Decidim platforms, without really knowing it.

Walid : You mentioned a lot of French institutions, I was wondering if this funding was… well how to put it… If there was a users’ club or a club that allowed co-financing, as is perhaps the case for other free software, between all these institutions in fact, let them get together to decide to finance this or that feature through you, for example.

Valentin : Exactly, so that’s been our ambition since day one, it’s often been quite complicated to set up, but we’ve managed to do it on small things so far, we’re talking about co-financing first. Now we’re doing it because we have… We realize that we have about ten customers who really have very, very similar needs. And so we’re in the process of bringing them together, it takes a little more time, but we’re working on the specifications, in the workshop with everyone, to then be sure that everyone agrees on what needs to be developed. We don’t know yet how much everyone will play the game, but there are a few big institutions in it, so we can expect them to put some money on the table, and it will always be less than if they had to develop the feature on their own.

So this logic, they are more and more receptive, it requires a little time and organizational work. And on the other hand, in parallel to that, we have had a user club since almost the beginning of the use of Decidim, so here we came back from doing the tenth meetings of this user club. Depending on the year, we did it once or twice, two events a year. It’s more of a meeting where we talk about the news, the issues that stand out in this community of users. Sometimes a little funding, development, but we are rather on a stratum a little above the sharing of good practices, problems. Then, we specify with dedicated workshops.

When the state does things backwards

Walid : And at the state level, who are the interlocutors? Is it the DINUM? Who is it at the level of the State?

Valentin : So at the state level, it’s a little more complicated.

Personally, I believe that the State has done things a little backwards at each stage. The State has begun to take an interest in these subjects, as in 2015-2016. We remember the Lemaire law, which was ultimately a pioneering experiment and which has never been equalled. And at the time of the Lemaire law, there was only one fairly good platform on the market, which was a proprietary platform.

So a bit by default, they chose this platform, which then became a bit of a reference, since they wanted to do the same thing as the Lemaire law. At that time, there was a reflection on how to bring out solutions that the State can use. And there were discussions with the ancestor of the DINUM and in particular the EtaLab team who had tried to organize this overview of what existed.

At that time we were much smaller players, we and our competitors, and so we refused to work for free, that is to say to say well we’re going to develop stuff for you and then maybe in the end you’ll use it. We said, well, no, we can’t survive if it’s under these conditions, so what was done was that the decision was to let the free market unfold and so each administration did what it wanted. There was not necessarily a centralization of the subject and so there were a number of discussions on the criteria that had to be put around these platforms to be able to homologate them or have them validated by the state and there was obviously a big debate on whether it should necessarily be free software or not. At the time, since it was only us who made free software, we didn’t win that battle.

What happened next was that gradually, the State found itself regularly calling on platforms and therefore having to ask itself each time the question of pooling, rationalizing, learning from previous experiences. And so there is a structure that has developed, which is called the Interministerial Center for Citizen Participation, the CIPC, and which has been intended both to support the State administrations in the design of participatory approaches and also in the choice of appropriate digital tools. So there was a kind of catalogue of the tools that existed. And then gradually it converged towards the idea that we had obviously been defending for quite a long time, to have a framework agreement, an official public contract so as not to depend on last-minute and not necessarily very transparent solutions for the use of these tools.

And so, it turns out that in 2021, there was finally a framework agreement with four contractors, so we are part of it with three other publishers. The logic was a bit like what they call the turnstile, that is to say that one platform out of four is managed by each of them. And that was the context until today. It didn’t work out very well because perhaps the period was not very propitious, there were fewer participatory approaches at the state level. And above all, we noticed recently, you may have seen it happen, there is an application called Agora which was launched by the State, which is managed by the same teams from the International Participation Centre and the DINUM, etc.

And which is therefore a form of recentralization of citizen participation with a tool developed by IT service providers of the State, for the State, and therefore in the end there is less and less chance that there will be recourse to platforms that are nevertheless the winners of a call for orders. It’s a bit strange because this decision, which leads to a new tool managed by the State, they should have taken it 6 or 7 years ago, in my opinion. They didn’t do it, they let several structures develop, they got into a public procurement game and in the end it’s to break the public market almost today. In any case, on the use of platforms, it’s a bit paradoxical.

We’ve always said for years, especially when comparing it with what was done in Barcelona and in a way what was done by the European Commission, that the French state had done things backwards and that it didn’t really satisfy us intellectually and in terms of the logic of this community that is so rich and so interesting around Decidim. It cost a lot of public money as it went along, and it didn’t really improve existing software that is free and benefits everyone.

The Open Source Politics business model

Walid : If we now move on to Open Source Politics, your business model is to provide services around Decidim, but also to do generic or specific development around Open Source Politics. Is that right? In part, I don’t know if you have other activities other than CDs by the way?

Valentin : Yes, so we actually do our business model is based on services, so the contribution of skills that are either technical or strategic consulting. And so on the technical side, there is a whole palette.

We can help people install Decidim, we can manage it for them, we can maintain it, adapt it graphically, functionally with specific developments. It’s quite rare, even if it happens to us, it’s quite rare that we make developments on Decidim ourselves because they interest us. Because basically our business model is not that, it’s to find customers who need something and develop it for them or have it developed by others through us.

So that’s for the technical part. And then for the consulting component, it goes from the design of the approaches, the training of platform administrators, the facilitation of workshops, the restitution through syntheses, methodological follow-up. There is a whole range and then it is a bit à la carte depending on the needs of the communities, their internal resources or not, etc.

And then little by little, indeed for a while at the beginning, we used several software that I mentioned, then very quickly Decidim imposed itself, so then we only made Decidim. And then little by little we realized that Decidim was not intended to meet all needs, and so we used others.

So we have deployed expertise on other citizen participation software that exists, for example Pol.is which was initially used in Taiwan and which is now being used quite widely again in recent weeks, especially at the moment in Finland or Terra Nova, the Think Tank that is using in France for a consultation on the Police. So that’s a software on which we also have skills.

We have added a skill around Metabase , which is another free software that allows you to analyze data. So we analyze Decidim data through this software in a fairly powerful way and potentially we can analyze other data. For one of the steps we had to take, there was a very, very strong need in terms of questionnaires and settings that made us favor the use of LimeSurvey.

So in fact, our job is to be, to master free software oriented towards the needs of public actors or actors focused on the commons and to offer a whole range of technical and methodological services for the best possible use of these tools and if possible also community interaction around them.

We are starting to work on other software that has nothing to do with Decidim, that want to be inspired by the Decidim community.

Development and maintenance of Decidim

Walid : So you said at one point that you were developing or having developed, do you ever have Decidim people finance features directly, for example?

Valentin : In fact, what’s happening is that today in the Decidim community there are between 5 and 10 companies that are generally more technical dev companies and that sometimes have a little bit more methodological skills, but in the end, the hybrid nature of Open Source Politics is quite rare. Conversely, there are many consultation firms that exist but do not have technical skills in the tools.

So really this duality is quite rare, including within the Decidim community. And so we mean that we’re not necessarily the most powerful dev team in this community because at times there are either very advanced, very technical things that will really touch the heart of the software and so there is a logic to it that it’s the main maintainers of the software who develop it through us, therefore in the form of subcontracting. And then from time to time, we simply because we don’t have enough time or too many constraints or because we have to work from a module that has been developed by the community and we have to modify it a little, improve it, adapt it. Well, there is no logic in taking control of the module and changing it and then managing the maintenance of the module. It is better that it is the entity that developed the module, in the end, that continues to improve it based on our specifications. There is a good understanding, a good community of all these Decidim service providers. It happens quite regularly that we have things developed by others. But we defined them together.

Walid : That was one of my next questions which was, if you develop features for the core of the tool, how does the maintenance work? Are you the one who must commit to doing the maintenance or is it that from the moment it has entered the heart of the tool, the maintenance is done by the community maintainers of the tool?

Valentin : If it’s in the heart, it’s maintained by the maintainers. If it’s an authorized plug-in but not in the core, it’s up to us to take control of it.

Walid : And so, there’s a new version of Decidim coming out. So the modules you have developed, do you update them as and when customers ask for them, for example? Don’t you commit to ensuring that with each new version of Decidim all the modules will be updated automatically?

Valentin : It’s a little more complicated than that. Indeed, the master of Decidim for a very long time has tended to evolve very, very fast, much too fast for us to keep up. What we did was that once or twice a year we waited for a slightly more major version to happen and we caught up on three or four versions at once. And occasionally if we needed a feature, we could backport it and reuse it in a lower version. But in general, we were waiting for that. What happened is that there was a deep redesign that had never happened since the creation of the software, which took almost a year and a half, and is being released in the fall of 2023. All Decidim components have been redesigned on style. As a result, for more than a year, all the functional changes that were proposed were frozen, did not enter the heart. So there are a lot of things that have been developed as modules and now what’s going to happen is that after 0.28, so this redesign version, there will be a 0.29 that will reintegrate modules, well reintegrate into the core a lot of things that have been developed as modules but that are of interest to the core. And so there is this somewhat strategic issue.

So we do, once we defined that there was a version that was a bit of a reference to which we wanted to switch. What we do is that we do indeed have this role, this work of updating the specific modules of our customers. And so we also have a reference version of Decidim at home and so it was a work that was done over time since we learned to do it at the end of the measure. At the beginning, Decidim was obviously much less complete, so there was almost one version per customer, which was very quickly unmanageable for us. So we had this logic of creating this reference version and today 80% of our customers use this same version so we can more easily upgrade them from one version to another since there are quite few external modules.

And conversely, as a result, we still have about fifteen customers who have very specific versions of Decidim and we are forced to update each of their specific modules when we upgrade them and we are still a little forced to do it so there are some customers who may be a little late but overall the logic is that everyone Climb up. And so that’s something we’ve only been doing for a few years… well really one or two years maximum is that we start to distinguish the maintenance cost for those who are on a standard version and those who have customization because indeed we realize that we can quite easily get the development of a software, of an additional feature, financed, especially if it is really requested by the customer, But on the other hand, the maintenance cost behind it, he has a hard time accepting it. And so there are two ways to do it, either we increase the price of the initial development to anticipate a slightly longer maintenance, or we still manage to increase the price of maintenance. So it’s a work in progress. It’s not always easy because as we often depend on public contracts, we are sometimes committed to our prices for quite a long time, but there is indeed this challenge of ensuring the continuity of the master’s degree through the official maintainers and additional modules.

Decidim’s future challenges, as seen by Valentin Chaput

Walid : We’re coming to the end of the interview, I would like to ask you what do you think are the big challenges for Decidim in the years to come?

Valentin : Well, you see, there’s one that we’ve already discussed, which is that the sustainability of the software must be ensured, in particular its financing, its plurality of funding sources, and that there are always more and more players around the table. That’s important.

There is a second aspect, which is the fact that today, Decidim, because of its modularity, because of the fact that big minds have thought about what to put in it, there is a tool that is a bit complex. In terms of public access, it’s complicated if you have to click on several pages, read things, then access, there is always a lot of information on the screens, you have to create accounts before participating, etc.

This is not necessarily up to date with the expectations of a certain number of users, who are used to having much more ergonomic, much simpler interfaces, which perhaps go less far in what can be done, but which are much easier to use. And so there is a challenge to simplify Decidim without giving up its ability to generate complete discussions. And so that’s very difficult, but our customers are tackling it because they have very specific needs now and so we’re really working on it. The overall ergonomics of the software.

And then I think that afterwards there are always obviously a certain number of features that we can add to do more things differently, have even more voting options, even more ways to associate with projects, etc. But what will be more interesting is to see how Decidim can dialogue with other tools. So today there is an open API that allows you to retrieve data from Decidim, but there is not yet an incoming API that allows you to retrieve something, for example from a cartographic information system, and reintegrate it into Decidim. And that’s a development that is starting in the community to try to have a kind of middleware that will be put between Decidim and other services. This is an important project.

And then well, obviously there is everything that revolves around artificial intelligence which, at first glance, has a fairly strong impact on this sector of activity because from the moment we collect a lot of material we have to analyze it behind it. And so on the one hand, there is a fairly obvious use of synthesis that will come from artificial intelligence, and then on the other hand, there is undoubtedly assistance in the generation of proposals or content on Decidim that can also come from there. For the moment, there is, for example, a feature that allows you to compare proposals with proposals that have already been submitted on the same theme. And so for now, it’s something pretty basic that’s done on keywords. But in the future we can imagine that we will be guided a little in our writing of contributions by what is already in the corpus or by semantic aids, etc.

There is also the fact that there are more and more expectations around the fact that you can submit an oral or video contribution and that they are automatically translated into the software in writing in a resource that can then be used for analysis, etc. So there are many things to do in this area. And in a way, it’s a problem that’s going to affect all of these technologies.

There is an observation today that, apart from perhaps petitions which, on a news moment, can generate strong traction. For example, one of the last big petitions we have known is the petition that called for the dissolution of BRAVEM, it is an intervention brigade that is in the news during the demonstrations against the pension reform. We had 250,000 signatures in a week or ten days, so we can see that we can make a little volume with tools like that.

But it’s true that the exercise of participatory budgets, the exercise of public consultations in general, we are limited to a few percent of the population who participate despite significant communication efforts. And so today, unfortunately, it’s not yet tools that are massively adopted and that’s probably because we have to overcome this ergonomic barrier to reach the world a little more. And so that’s really an important issue for the future.

Op-ed / the last word

Walid : I’d like to leave you the last word, do you have a word to say before we leave?

Valentin : Yes, I think that’s really the message of our free software community and especially the one used by public actors, is that it’s important that public money finances public code and so that’s something that we try to explain very widely around us. And what’s interesting is that there are more and more institutions that realize that it’s something strategic, important. And so, do not hesitate to join us and also relay this message which is carried by many other organisations at the European level.

And what is important, we must take care of this software so that it can continue to exist.

Walid : That makes a very good final message. I’m delighted to have been able to do this interview with you because it’s a very important subject that you see myself, I didn’t know at all or I didn’t put an interest in these subjects at all, whereas it’s eminently important, especially in the current state of our democracies, so it’s really very, very interesting. I hope the listeners liked it and if that’s the case then here you are once again, as usual, around you.

And feel free to leave comments. Subscribe on the platforms to be aware of the next episodes. Again, I have very different episodes coming in the coming weeks and months. So it will be a great pleasure to be able to offer them to you. Valentine, listen, thank you very much.

And then good luck. And then the pleasure of talking to each other again maybe in a while to see where we are on Decidim, but on Open Source Politics.

Valentin : thank you Walid for the invitation and see you soon. Thank you Walid for the invitation and see you soon.

Walid : goodbye.

This episode was recorded on October 13, 2023.

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.