Introduction

Understand the basics

Deploying Decidim means taking account of all the activities that play a part in the configuration of the platform and the deployment of the participatory processes. Acquiring knowledge in administering Decidim enables control over fundamental matters such as:

  • configuring a participatory process

  • creating an assembly and managing its members

  • opening an initiative space

  • moderating the contents of the platform

  • managing associated legal texts, such as the privacy policy

  • managing access rights of administrators

  • monitoring and verifying participants and their organizations

None of these aspects are strictly technical but they do involve a series of political decisions over how you want your instance to work, what messages and contents it contains, what the moderation policy should be, and overall how you want your participatory platform to function. This is why it’s essential to understand the socio-technical implications of the Decidim platform’s administration and management.

To understand how Decidim works, you first need to distinguish between spaces and components.

  • Participatory spaces are the channels that citizens can participate through: participatory processes, assemblies, initiatives and conferences.

  • Participatory components are mechanisms that enable interaction between participants and the participatory spaces: meetings, pages, proposals, surveys, etc.

Therefore, all participatory spaces can incorporate several components, such as meetings, proposals, surveys, or results.

Spaces and components

So, administrators configure participatory spaces by defining and configuring the components they’re going to need. It’s important to bear in mind that these participatory components and the various functions are repeated in the various spaces, offering many opportunities when it comes to configuring the various spaces. This simplifies learning as once a space is configured, it’s then easier to configure others.

This documentation section provides a full description of how to configure the Decidim platform for any kind of organization and how to configure, manage and administer your various participatory processes. A description has been given in tutorial format, to help with understanding administration tasks, following Decidim’s literal fields and enclosing screenshots to facilitate their interpretation.

Administering the Decidim platform is quite intuitive and don’t require specific IT knowledge. The administrators of a Decidim platform, in other words, those with the necessary authorization for managing the platform, can configure the platform in a general way (images, information pages, etc.,) and manage the various participatory processes (configuring, editing, analysing and concluding).

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