Assemblies

An assembly is a group of members of an organization who meet periodically to make decisions about a specific area or scope of the organization.

Assemblies hold meetings, some are private and some are open. If they are open, it is possible to participate in them (for example: attending if the capacity allows it, adding points to the agenda, or commenting on the proposals and decisions taken by this organ).

Examples: A general assembly (which meets once a year to define the organisation’s main lines of action as well as its executive bodies by vote), an equality advisory council (which meets every two months to make proposals on how to improve gender relations in the organisation), an evaluation commission (which meets every month to monitor a process) or a guarantee body (which collects incidents, abuses or proposals to improve decision-making procedures) are all examples of assemblies.

The main difference between participatory processes and assemblies is that assemblies don’t have phases, meaning that they don’t have timelines.

You can see a real world usage of assemblies in Decidim Barcelona, where you can see the different Participation Organs, that are the regular spaces where the City Council meets with citizens and organizations to get feedback.

In this section, we’ll explain how we can configure an Assembly in Decidim.

List

To configure assemblies on the Decidim platform, click on btn:[Assemblies] in the admin sidebar menu. A list will appear with the existing assemblies if there are any:

Assemblies list

You can filter by the ones that are:

Published / Unpublished
Public / Private

Assemblies list filtered

You can also search by title and control how many elements are in the list.

You have 4 possible actions in this list after an Assembly is created:

Export: send by email the configuration for a given assembly. Can be imported in other Decidim installation.
Duplicate: to duplicate this assembly.
Configure: to edit the metadata and configuration for a assembly.
Assemblies: to manage all the children assemblies for a assembly.
Preview: how it will look once published.

New assembly form

Table 1. New assembly form: General information
Field	Type	Description
Title	Required	Title of the assembly. For instance, "General Committee".
Subtitle	Required	Subtitle. For instance, "Let’s decide our priorities together"
Order position	Required	Which order will it have in relation with the other assemblies. Having a lower number means a higher priority. For instance, if you have two assemblies, "Assembly a" with weight "10" and "Assembly b" with weight "0", then "Assembly b" will be first when ordering.
URL slug	Required	URL slugs are used to generate the URLs that point to this assembly. Only accepts letters, numbers and dashes, and must start with a letter. Example: if your domain is 'example.org' and your slug 'general-committee' then your URL will be https://example.org/assemblies/general-committee
Hashtag	Optional	Hashtag for Twitter
Short description	Required	A short explanation of what’s your participatory process about.
Description	Required	A long explanation of what’s your assembly about.
Purpose of action	Optional	Internal field that doesn’t get shown publicly. To be removed in a future version.
Composition	Optional	Internal field that doesn’t get shown publicly. To be removed in a future version.
Internal organisation	Optional	Internal field that doesn’t get shown publicly. To be removed in a future version.
Announcement	Optional	The text you enter here will be shown to the user right below the assembly information.

Table 2. New assembly form: Duration
Field	Type	Description
Date created	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy
Included at	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar. The date when this assembly was added to Decidim. It does not necessarily have to be the same as the creation date. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy
Duration	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar. If the duration of this assembly is limited, select the end date. Otherwise, it will appear as indefinite. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy
Closing date	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar. When this assembly closed. Expected format: dd/mm/yyyy
Closing date reason	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar. Why this assembly closed.

Table 3. New assembly form: Images
Field	Type	Description
Home image	Optional	Image that will be used in presentation cards of this assembly. Guidance for file: Has to be an image or a document. For images, use preferably landscape images that does not have any text, the service crops the image. Maximum file size: 10MB Allowed file extensions: jpeg jpg png
Banner image	Optional	Image that will be used inside of the assembly. Guidance for file: Has to be an image or a document. For images, use preferably landscape images that does not have any text, the service crops the image. Maximum file size: 10MB Allowed file extensions: jpeg jpg png

Table 4. New assembly form: Filters
Field	Type	Description
Scopes enabled	Optional	Check if you want to have Scopes filtering in this assembly.
Scope	Optional	Which Scope does this assembly belongs to.
Area	Optional	Which Area does this assembly belongs to.

Table 5. New assembly form: Metadata
Field	Type	Description
What is decided	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
How is it decided	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
Scope metadata	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
Promoter group	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
Organization area	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
Who participates	Optional	Information that’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.

Table 6. New assembly form: Visibility
Field	Type	Description
Parent assembly	Optional	What is the assembly that this assembly belongs to. For instance in Metadecidim, the Coordination Committee has the parent assembly of the General%20Assembly%20of%20the%20Decidim%20Association.
Highlighted	Optional	Check if you want the assembly to have more visibility in the Assemblies public list. It’ll also be visible in the Assembly Content Block in the Homepage configuration.
Private space	Optional	Check if this assembly should only be accessible by Private Participants
Is transparent	Optional	Check if this assembly is private but should be visible to all the rest of participants. This means that other participants or visitors will see it but they won’t be able to interact with it.

Table 7. New assembly form: Other
Field	Type	Description
Created by	Optional	Choose one of "City Council", "Public" or "Other". If it’s Other, you can specify the name of the organization that created this assembly.
Assembly type	Optional	Which assembly type is this assembly.
Related processes	Optional	Select other participatory processes that are related to this assembly.
Social	Optional	Which social networks profile does this assembly has. Can be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and/or GitHub. It’s displayed in the assembly metadata sidebar.
Show statistics	Optional	Check if you want to show the Statistics section.

After you’ve initially created your assembly you have a submenu where you need to keep configuring more information about your assembly.

Assembly submenu in admin

Here you can keep configuring your process:

Info: the same form that we explained in this page.
Components
Categories
Attachments
Members
Assembly admins
Private participants
Moderations

Assemblies types

For clasyfing the assemblies in different kinds, you can define Assembly types. These types can be filtered in the public assemblies page.

Filter by assembly type

New assembly type form

Table 8. New assembly type form
Field	Type	Description
Title	Required	Title of the this assembly type. For instance, "Consultative".

Settings

At the moment there’s only a setting for configuring the general behaviour of assemblies.

Assemblies settings

Table 9. Settings for assemblies form
Field	Type	Description
Enable organization chart	Checkbox	Whether you want to show the organization chart in the assemblies list.

The organization chart is shown in the bottotm of the assemblies page.

Assemblies organization chart

It allows a navigation in the assemblies tree, with the possibility to see the sub-assemblies that belongs to a parent assembly.

Assemblies organization chart filtered