The system has many features, so in this section we will take you inside it. It’s highly customisable so what you see here can look completely different on each customised portal. We wont focus on the visual look since that’s very easily adaptable, we will look instead at the features.
Remember, there’s no one website for this, its a decentralized platform. You would run this system at your own subdomain ie vote.mycommunity.org
The whole point of this platform is to enable your whole community and specialized parts of it individually, to be collaboratively making decisions for the whole community.
So lets take a bit of a look:
First The home screen summarises for viewers whats going on inside the system
Images available for logged in users.
This is from our development platform., showing
309 Proposals (Referendums). Referendums are a key feature, enabling people to vote with a detailed understanding of each issues. They are highly customisable and can be done on the blockchain for complete decentralisation.
5 Assemblies (Assemblies are a key foundation and allow all manner of gatherings and sub communities run their own subsystems). Councils for example could make up an assembly along with other groups of the community.
19 Surveys (Lightweight easy versions of Referendums to get a general idea, they then evolve into proposals
976 Answers to Questions posed by the public that got answered
36 Debates (Another important feature leading up to proposals)
General Structure
Assembles (Groups of People) and Processes (Ways of doing things, these can all be customised) lead to all the things that can be done…. and every way of doing things can be done one way for some things and different ways for other things to suit each mission
Processes are broken into phases so that concepts can move forward in a structured time based fashion at a pace that allows everyone to understand the steps
Things that can be done
Initiatives– These are have their own admin and enable people to out forward ideas on how to better do things. Once these gain support they evolve eventually into Proposals
Components
Components are all highly customisable things that can be done. Each has their own relevant admin management.
Images available for logged in users.
Accountability
The Accountability Component is a module designed to enhance transparency and track the progress of projects and proposals within the platform to ensure that whats being decided happens. It allows participants to monitor the implementation status of initiatives decided in assemblies, participatory processes, or other spaces.
Budgets
This allows people to see and vote on budgets
The Budgets component is a module that adds a people to be involved in budgeting system for any other component within the platform. It enables participants to vote by selecting projects of their choosing. This component is designed to organize voting in the final phase of a participatory budget, but it can be used for other types of processes as well
Meetings
Meetings allow for real world and online discussions involving large groups, part of this is enabling quick polls ie Show of Hands to get a general idea of what people think.
Proposals
Otherwise known as referendums, these enable votes and detailed issue resolution and decision making by the public or organisation at large. They can be done on the blockchain or not, up to each administrator. Proposals can be endorsed and officialized by administration and can involve expert opinion and proxy voting (in development)
Sortitions
Sortitions allow for a selected or randomized group of people to give more detailed feedback about something. It is a module that enables the random selection of proposals from a set, ensuring unbiased and uniform distributions. This is useful for selecting candidates for a jury or for participatory budgeting proposals
Surveys
This component enables administrators to create and manage questionnaires for participants, facilitating private feedback collection. This tool is valuable for organizations seeking to gather structured input from their participants on various topics.
Unlike standalone survey tools, our surveys component is part of a broader platform designed for citizen participation and collaborative decision-making. This allows for seamless integration with other participatory tools like proposal submission, voting, and budgeting, creating a unified environment for democratic processes
Who uses this platform?
This platform is based on the Decidim.org platform. The Decidim.org platform has governments and councils running their own implementations around parts of Europe. Each one serves large municipalities and governments.
We are taking this platform and giving it a different approach, which is for it to be run by the people through hubs and not centralized control authorities
The hubs can choose if they wish to involve councils and municipalities but that would be a decision the hub makes collectively. Should councils either not wish to be involved or are excluded from the hub, then the accountability of those councils still remains on this system as a matter of public record.
In simple terms, the people control this system and use it to manage authorities, not the other way round.