Interface to participatory democracy

[loleg]

Open Data hackdays are seen to be closely connected to the topic of e-democracy, and hackathons in general are a chance to "participate" in some way. Whether the challenges are political or corporate interest driven, they expose the teams to datasets or platforms from the inside in hope to get early feedback or attention.

It could make sense for this project to potentially reorient towards being a gap-filler or extension to some of these open source platforms:

• https://github.com/decidim (see also decidim-hacks and govtech challenge)
• https://github.com/DemocracyOS
• https://github.com/consul
• https://github.com/argu-co
• https://github.com/liqd/

See also #100

[loleg]

An excellent quote from page 20 of Barandiaran et al 2024, analysing the impact of Decidim around the world, and how it relates to hackathons:

“Hacker culture, digital communities and knowledge commons Free/Libre and Open Knowledge does not stand simply as a commodity or a good that is accessible by means of legal and technical devices. It is followed and often preceded by certain forms of social relation, modes of production and the collaborative culture that is necessary to produce and sustain ... a practical belief on the capacity (both individual and collective) to challenge existing limits and to collaboratively explore how to break, re-assemble and build upon what is available. In doing so, communities are created around technical challenges, common infrastructures, collective resources and technopolitical struggles. In turn, these communities are faced with a myriad of governing problems and these are solved by a combination of recursive tools and democratic/collaborative procedures: from the mechanisms to solve disputes on Wikipedia, to the voting procedures of the Debian community, from forks to version control systems in software development.”

There is also a good introduction from our friends @puzzle about the impact that Decidim has in Switzerland.