Build out a civic engagement platform - Decidim.org

[elburnett]

Reimagine Civic Engagement: Be the tech expertise behind municipal reforms

What problem are you trying to solve?

Civic engagement in Portland, Maine (a small problem, we know). To be more specific: the true problem is a lack of experience with and concrete examples of how civic engagement can be both an accessible process that people actively engage in and something that people actually like doing. By building a prototype of a tool that's already in use in several cities in Europe, this Decidim deployment would offer a way for people to get a "taste" of a new type of civic engagement.

In less than 140 characters explain your idea?

The charter commission is coming up. A dedicated political group - People First Portland - is looking to engage constituents in a participatory, open process for developing a platform for the charter commission. But that group does not have the technical expertise to build out a civic engagement software like Decidim.org, which is an open source civic engagement tool developed for this very purpose. You can read that group's thoughts and plans here.

Who will benefit from your project? Can you tell their story?

I'm a teacher and want to make sure the charter commission keeps the interests of our schools in mind. I want to help share my priorities, without going to events in person. I also want to be sure that I'm engaging in an environment that's respectful and created for civil discourse; I don't want to get into shouting matches on Facebook with my students' parents. I'd like a place that's easy to engage, openly share my thoughts, hear what my neighbors are thinking, and follow progress on the municipal charter.

I'm a political activist who wants to engage as many people as possible in the city, without relying on platforms like Facebook, whose algorithm is geared toward ad sales and commerce. We need an open, collaborative way to reach people that both respects their privacy (nearly all social media sites do not) and provides a safe and easy way to share their thoughts about the city.

Is there any data, research or code available for your current idea?

All of the Documentation is here: https://docs.decidim.org/en/
A brief overview is here, as well: https://docs.decidim.org/en/whitepaper/decidim-a-brief-overview/

Are there any Drawbacks to choosing this path?

It could take a lot of time to administer it effectively. And if the group can't get users involved.. then it's not that helpful!

What would success look like?

OpenMaine is the first US-based organization to use this tool, which helps create a new participatory framework in Portland, giving us a model for civic engagement that is encoded into the charter commission process.

What help do you need now?

Validation! Research.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Checking out the Decidim documentation: https://docs.decidim.org/en/

Please remember to find us at openmaine.org and sign up for our Slack, etc. And feel free to email us: hello@openmaine.org

[elburnett]

Questions to ask:

• Who are the first users?
• What's the first most important content?
• Does the platform itself do what we want it to do?

[elburnett]

@curtisk & @congdon: Would this be a prototype? Would we be able to hand off the data if needed, to the city?

[dfithian]

I was able to start up a local instance of this and fill out some instructions. I am using a company laptop and the security policy doesn't allow me to use Ruby so I had to build it inside a Docker container, but the setup steps inside the Dockerfile I think are what we'd need to do to get it running. I created a repository called decidim-example, and if anyone would like to follow the steps in the README linked below please do!

https://github.com/OpenMaine/decidim-example#README

[dfithian]

I went through most of the admin panels and took screenshots to try to capture how much work a non-technical person (or group of people) would need to do to administer the site. I found the appearance section where a designer could help with changing the layout and color scheme. In addition, that person could help with the newsletter design.

Other than that, there seems to be some technical work needed to set up a mail server and image upload, but most of the site seems to work okay without much configuration.

https://github.com/OpenMaine/decidim-example#administration

[congdon]

So great that you've done all this. Thank you!

I'm confused why this package includes a mail server. Is there not an option to use existing email infrastructure? The README says this: "This doesn't include a mail server. If we want to send newsletters or signup emails we need to hook in to an email server." But the interpretation of that is not clear to me.

I guess I need to look more at what decidim does and doesn't do. And we should scope the goals of this project.

[dfithian]

I think we could definitely use an existing one!

[congdon]

I think I don't mean an email server proper, but other 'email accounts'. What is this tool doing that it needs (internally or externally) a mail server?

I sort of get it that 'it needs to send email', but haven't thought through what it means that this would come from a dedicated domain, etc. The overhead of a mail server seems like more than we would want to manage (irresponsible of us to manage something like that in our current state, where we don't tend to have longevity of participation to ensure that we could keep the resource going).

Again, I think we need to step back and think about what functionality we are trying to / need to provide here.

[dfithian]

I see. There are a few email needs:

• Registration signups - not only for ordinary users, but for organization admins the only way I was able to log in was to look through the logs for the content of the invite email and use the invitation link to sign up, so this seems big though if there are only a few organizations I suppose we could look through the logs on behalf of the admins we create.
• Notifications for users on things they are participating in.
• Newsletters sent by admins to users - this seems big if we are building a civic engagement platform!

I'm not very knowledgeable in terms of email servers. Is it possible we could hook into a Google or Yahoo mail server? Probably not. I tried to get postfix working but didn't spend a lot of time on it. Another option would be to try to use the email server of the organization we are setting up in the platform, however they tend to send their newsletters.

If it was unclear from any of the above the configuration of the email server is a from address, host, and port (usually 25 for email servers, I think).

[dfithian]

It seems like Google has a free SMTP service we could use: https://www.siteground.com/kb/google_free_smtp_server/

We would need to set up our own GMail user.

If someone else wants to try, feel free, otherwise I'll try to test this when I have time.

[curtisk]

Dan, thanks for all the lead work you've done here, this is great! I will try and catch up this weekend; Hooking into an SMTP server should be easy enough, but I agree that we should possibly start scoping what we want this to accomplish on the first pass as Claire mentioned