Keywords

5.1 The Future of Decidim

So far we have covered the historical development, the philosophical foundations, the political principles, community practices and technological stack of Decidim as a project. By the time you read this, some of the content will already be outdated. The Decidim network is open to creative evolution, like any genuine democratic network should be. It is open to question its foundations, to critically assessing its past and, particularly, to always interrogating its future and that of the societies we live in. It is not our aim here to define and close Decidim’s future, but to identify some of the challenges and opportunities that the project and the community will have to face in the coming years.

5.1.1 Decidim’s Past: Lessons for the Future

The experience accumulated along the history of Decidim brings forth a set of lessons at various scales. At the political level, we have often witnessed a mismatch between the technopolitical principles of democratic design and the political-institutional complexities, fears, resistances and limitations. While the functional possibilities for participation are enormous for Decidim, in most use cases, they always end up being reduced to a few, often low-quality, options where participants are restrained on the direct expression of their preferences (no support or voting mechanism are activated), open debates are absent or highly limited, etc. However, these fears and preventive limitations have started to change. The widespread adoption of Decidim by different governments has allowed the standardisation and wide adoption of some participation models, forms and practices (most notably participatory budgeting, but also strategic planning and citizen initiatives). But there is still a long way to go towards standardising powerful and high-quality participation models. At the political-institutional level, representative democracy has not adopted Decidim as a vehicle of their own dynamics (despite Decidim’s full potential to accommodate official council or parliamentarian dynamics) and has rarely given genuine decision space to participatory democracy in Decidim. This has often resulted from reasons of political will, and others from excessively narrow legal frameworks from higher-order political institutions (such as the Spanish government prohibiting referenda at municipal scales). In some cases, most notably Barcelona’s attempt to bring to a referendum the municipalisation of water management, Decidim have faced fierce opposition from big corporations, such as Agbar, mobilising legal and communicative resources to discredit, block or even sabotage direct decision-making capabilities.

There is also a tension between the technical and the political. The active and passive resistance within public administrations to adopt technologies like Decidim is significant: fear of change, heavy dependence on software solutions run by big corporations, difficulties on innovating in public procurement processes and the inability to envision new relationships with technology are among the most notable challenges. In this sense, the Barcelona City Council has been a proof of concept of how it was perfectly possible to introduce new forms of FLOSS into public administrations to innovate at all levels: technical, technopolitical and political. Others have gone even further by deploying the service in-house, resulting in a full digital sovereignty for participatory democracy. However, problems are still widespread with communication departments that heavily rely on traditional media and social networks and under-appreciate the strong potential of Decidim to become one of the primary communication networks between governments, public administration and citizens.

Beyond the arena of institutional politics, hurdles have been faced too. While some notable installations in cooperatives and collaborative economy projects stand out, there are very few use cases led by social movements or autonomous civil society groups. A proper analysis of this failure is still needed, but some hypothetical causes could include technical and financial difficulties for deploying Decidim infrastructure and training, lack of self-organising technopolitical features in Decidim (something we will address later in this chapter) or, finally, efficient technopolitical usage of other existing infrastructures.

At the purely technopolitical plane of Metadecidim, there remains challenges, such as improving the democratic governance of the project. This may be achieved by increasing the typology, quantity and quality of inclusive citizen involvement in decision-making, from software design to project strategy. A second challenge is to ensure the economic sustainability of Decidim and the community itself. Nowadays, the reliance on Catalan institutions remains a critical dependency that is progressively being dampened by a sustainability strategy involving donations, private partners within the community and external resources from global digital funds.

The brief history of Decidim has also taught us that some technical frozen accidents can bear important consequences, oscillating between the technical and the technopolitical plane. We inherited Ruby on Rails (RoR) as a programming language and framework from decide.madrid.es (whose software was latter called Consul). This was, and still is, a rather limitative choice. There are very few RoR programmers and the learning curve is very steep. Nevertheless, this decision had the effect of limiting the participation of large companies in public tenders, and to open opportunities for small-sized companies, of a more artisanal nature and with a more solid hacker and open culture. At the same time, this decision left out the FLOSS communities most likely to participate in a project of this nature (e.g. those coming from Python or PHP environments). This might be one of the factors, certainly not the only one, explaining the gender and origin inequality in development, with a substantial majority of code contributors coming from Western, young and male programmers (despite systematic efforts to compensate for it, like the DecidimFemDev initiative). The quantity of contributors to the code, however, is big (compared to other projects of the same size, often led by a single company and one or two main programmers). This is often interpreted as a problem in terms of consistency and continuity of development, but has also turned into a community virtue, resulting in a more democratic and participatory codebase that does not depend on a single individual or organisation.

5.1.2 The Challenges of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Complexity

In Sect. 2.4, we have addressed various theoretical and political aspects of the rise of artificial intelligence, including its relations to collective intelligence and to the political philosophy underlying the Decidim project. Now we can address more concrete details of the future relations that could be established between AI and Decidim.

AI as assistant. The potential of AI as an assistant expands to the three layers we have stated. Starting from the technical layer where artificial intelligence has already shown a notable increase in productivity and could also assume an increasing number of tasks on cleaning, testing and refactoring (as some GitHub bots already partially do). It is still to be seen how much artificial intelligence could facilitate and democratise the transition from design to coding. At the technopolitical level, assistance could not only help training and integrating newcomers into the community but also, and more importantly, on facilitating the configuration of the platform. The risks are also notable: this automatisation of administrative power will certainly hide political biases and could preclude a deep and autonomous understanding and appropriation of the platform. At the political level, AI systems may contribute to democratise the quality of proposal writing by improving language choice and structure, helping to synthesise or providing useful information or references or even facilitating collaboration. It may also guide participants through or help them imagine different legal, economic, ecological or social antecedents and future implications of their proposals.

AI as participatory automata. This is already a growing concern and will inevitably augment in the future. The increase in the quantity and quality of bots or automatic participants fuelled by AI can destroy entire democratic communities. This is particularly dangerous with commercial spambots and armies of digital automata at the service of a few. Avoiding such risks will demand a more intensive use of authentication methods for participants and developing detection methods. There are also opportunities to explore more creative uses of participatory automata that could enhance democratic quality and diversity, like their use to represent non-human agents (like animals) into a participatory space. In the midterm, such AI systems, exposed to personal control (from data to performance), democratic design and justice checks, might serve as delegates (always subject to recall and aimed at keeping specific forms of political activity alive) of participants.Footnote 1

AI as interface. The future of digital interfaces is nowadays oscillating between (and might probably converge around) augmented reality (AR) and AI-mediated voice interfaces. Many potential and practical uses of large language models involve their capacity to execute complex digital operations by means of linguistic (textual or voice) prompting: a paradigm change from command-based interaction to intent-based interaction where we don’t tell the computer what to do but what we want to get (Nielsen, 2023). If this paradigm shift becomes generalised, it will pose an important challenge to the way Decidim has been designed so far.

AI, alignment and regulation. We should not only think how AI will impact the project, but also how Decidim could impact AI. In this sense, the most promising entanglement is that in which Decidim is used to collectively govern the relationships between AI and humanity (or human communities). A spreading concern regarding the possible emergence of artificial general intelligence (or superhuman intelligence) is how we should align it with the good life of anyone and everyone (Bostrom, 2017). Stuart Russell (one of the most prominent figures of AI) has suggested that one way to ensure the alignment between AI behaviour and human goals is to use learning procedures where humans don’t directly specify the ultimate goal to the AI but provide feedback to stir it (Russell, 2019). This and similar approaches to the alignment problem can only be properly evaluated and enacted democratically, and Decidim stands as a unique interface to channel collective steering of AI. Moreover, calls for AI regulation might also benefit from using Decidim (like other big democratic challenges, e.g. climate crisis, have already done).

Artificial life and Decidim. Beyond the current hype of AI, alternative or parallel complex computational mediations might be envisioned to boost democratic processes. Some collective intelligence mechanisms are already in place on Decidim, but they make no use of the rich data and interaction possibilities that the platform affords. Drawing inspiration from life itself (not only from human intelligence), it is possible to envision multiple ways of implementing bottom-up artificial life techniques to enhance democracy (Barandiaran, 2019)—some kind of digital permaculture for the democratic life that grows in a Decidim platform.

5.1.3 Federation, Self-Organisation and Decentralisation

An important aspect of the future of Decidim has to do with its potential for increasing federated interconnectedness, decentralisation and capacity for self-organisation beyond the administrators/participants dichotomy—all forms of augmenting (autonomous) agency and distributing power while promoting collective coordination, organisation and action.

Federated technologies, exemplified by standard protocols like ActivityPub, have made significant strides in recent years. These protocols are increasingly prevalent among open-source communities for content sharing across different platforms. For Decidim, the first challenge lies in further developing technical forms of federation to enable seamless content sharing between instances. This presents not only a substantial technical opportunity, but also a chance to ensure infrastructure sustainability. Technical federation provides an opportunity to contemplate technopolitical federated governance models wherein content and supra-instance governance are shared, while exploring and experimenting with types of political federation, thanks to the interactions and agreements between instances. This may enable new models and scales of political governance (e.g. global intercity networks, multiscale organisations, etc.) with high potential for democratic innovation.

Decidim has grown in parallel to a radical trend towards a decentralised and cryptographically guaranteed democracy stack that includes identity management systems, voting systems, smart contracts and other digital infrastructures often assembled around the concept of DAO—Distributed Autonomous Organisation (Santana & Albareda, 2022). Some of these initiatives have failed (DuPont, 2017), others have grown already but provide only partial elements for a full democratic infrastructure like identification systems (Siddarth et al., 2020), others promise to deliver high-quality solutions,Footnote 2 but to our knowledge none has been put to practical use at the scale and extent of Decidim. Unlike other domains (typesetting, calculating, mailing, document sharing or even banking), attempts to (fully) digitalise democracy are recent, and decentralised architectures make fast innovation, prototyping as well as continuous, adaptive and recursive democratic redesign more difficult. The relatively centralised character of Decidim’s instance administration has been critical to its adaptive success. But at the cost of a high dependency and trust over the administrators of the platform and the integrity of the server. This makes Decidim (like any other human-driven institution or administrative procedure) vulnerable to very strong pressures or high-conflict scenarios. Ideally, democratic infrastructures should be resistant, by default, to these conditions, and the technical possibilities on this front are growing. Part of the future of Decidim may be tied to these projects. It already is. In this direction, Decidim has not only developed its own cryptographic and secure voting system (see Sect. 3.2.2) but has also facilitated an easy integration with other cryptographic and distributed free software blockchain-based tools such as Vocdoni.Footnote 3

Democracy cannot be contained within the strict limits posed by any administration. It will always spill it. In this sense, Decidim’s future will be determined by the way in which it expands its capacity to foster spaces of self-organisation within or through the platform beyond the specific spaces and components officially activated by the administration. The current potential of the platform for creative reappropriation of the democratic mechanisms by participants is poor. The biggest technical challenge to solve this problem is to progressively blur the boundary between participants and administrators. The self-convening of face-to-face meetings has been a great recent leap in this direction. Independently of administrators, participants can now call for meetings and self-organise them. They can also already promote and manage their own citizen initiatives. Expanding this possibility to online components could dramatically increase the potential of the platform. One way to do so could be the freedom to activate components like proposals, debates or blogs by participants on their profile page. This would avoid the intermediation of administrators and would give full autonomy of content generation to the participants, opening up the democratic power of a community from the moment Decidim starts to run. Another possibility to reduce the administrator-participant barrier is to support collective moderation distributed among participants by lottery, avoiding the involvement of administrators in content management and collectively assessing content complaints.

5.1.4 A Future of Democratic Quality

At the beginning of this book, we made clear that a project like Decidim might be necessary, but is certainly not sufficient for advancing democracy. There is no future for Decidim or for democracy without a deep transformation of the material living conditions, the social (and global) inequalities and the myriad of oppressive structures that are reproduced every day. Decidim should leave no room for techno-solutionism (the idea that social or political problems have technological solutions). It should equally debunk techno-fatalism. It already has. Decidim is an example of how it is possible to create and deploy a large-scale, radically transformative software project out of the platform capitalist model. An important challenge to any radical democratisation process (particularly when addressing struggles) is the problem of coordination of collective action. This is where Decidim should be ready to become a valuable infrastructure, which may then contribute to address the challenges of complexity and conflictuality of society.

In turn, the practical use of Decidim involves a set of present and future challenges. Using Decidim requires expertise, so its future success involves the capacity of the community and the association to provide appropriate technopolitical support and guidance. Equally important for this task is the development of intensive R&D+I programs that define and promote technopolitical standards to measure democratic quality (deliberativeness, inclusiveness, effectiveness, etc.). On the other hand, an immediate practical risk is that of being instrumentalised with the aim of patching up the democratic system without carrying out any profound transformations or, even worse, hiding lack of democratic quality with the platform: that is participatory washing. There are a number of technical provisions in place to avoid such a misuse of Decidim (such as the social contract or Decidim’s default configuration). But the leadership of the association and other institutions will be crucial to assess and denounce misuses (e.g. through observatories) and promote good uses (e.g. through quality seals). The aforementioned quality measurement indicators could also be very valuable for shaping these tasks and mechanisms. The open Decidim community (as a space of participatory governmentality) should always be the space where all of them are collectively conceived, evaluated, and established.

5.2 A Technopolitical Network …

We stick to the term network because it is still today easily understood in everyday language: many people in the Decidim community conceive of themselves as part of a network, and the word includes an explicit reference to work (as noted by Latour, 2005), to forms of peer production (Benkler, 2006), to production and channelling of collective energy as a complex living network (Kauffman, 2000). The key products here are three: software, a community and new participatory forms (e.g. processes and institutions). These are, respectively, the key technical, technopolitical and political materialisations of the project.

As we have stressed throughout the book, the key lies in the assemblage between the three, and its central element is Metadecidim. Metadecidim as a technopolitical network is a working process much more than a structure, oriented to democratically politicise and technically recraft both politics and technology. It is as diverse and hybrid as any complex contemporary assemblageFootnote 4 (a useful concept to think through the heterogeneity and partial autonomy of its elements): it comprises executing code (hundreds of thousands lines of code), workers (hundreds of them, distributed in different institutions, companies and associations), digital content (with hundreds of thousands of proposals, debates, comments in hundreds of Decidim instances), learning dispositives, hacktivists, caring procedures, feminist researchers, servers, developers, code repositories, reconfigurable tables and panels with post-its on a lab, international Telegram groups, notification feeds and spambot cleaners. Each of those can be plugged and unplugged from the assemblage, but their actions and interactions contribute to shaping the very network.

In turn, this technopolitical network produces software. And this product (that itself sustains the assemblage that produces it) can also be conceived as a technical or technological network, plugged to other software networks. As a Ruby on Rails gem in itself, Decidim is composed of gems, and each module (spaces and components) is a gem. When installed, the gems deploy the whole platform and bring with them an underlying network of software package dependencies from other free software projects (usually in the form of other Ruby gems that don’t belong to Decidim). We already explained how Decidim can be integrated with other tools to deliver a network of services (maps, calendars, video calls, pads, etc.). Moreover, as we have seen, the Decidim software defines and promotes politics as a complex, hybrid, networked process that brings together institutions with individuals, nested participatory spaces with collective agencies and debates involving votes or proposals with offline meetings. In terms of Decidim’s architecture, design principles such as the modularity, hybridisation and polymorphism increase the assemblage effect, while multi-tenancy and Federation intensify the rhizomatic nature of its connections and multiplications. Participatory spaces are assemblages of components and component types are assemblages of component tokens (specific proposals, debates, blog posts, hashtags, etc.) that generate a complex interaction network.

This constitutes Decidim as a political network, distinct from the informational and social networks that preceded it. In informational networks the key is information; in social networks, interaction; and in the political ones, decisions, commitments and collectivity. As has been stressed in earlier chapters, the centrality of collectivity in Decidim is present in a variety of forms, from the narrative of “we decide” to the architectural technicalities of design principles such as that of multiplicity of agency (exposed in Sect. 3.1.2) oriented to allow collective actors to operate in the platform along individuals or organising institutions. Seen from this light, Metadecidim is a technopolitical network because it deploys a political network such as Decidim to rethink and remake (otherwise, to politicise, in a democratising direction) both politics and technology, starting with the politics and the technology of its own community and, thereby, Decidim itself as a software.

But beyond the community, its potential as a political network must be understood in its context. As noted in Chap. 1, its way of reassembling politics points beyond neoliberal representative politics and its crises and connects with radical democracy movements, from the alter-globalisation and Occupy/15M to Extinction Rebellion. Decidim also goes against the dominant cognitive and platform-capitalist model of digitalisation. On the technical plane (as noted in Chap. 4), it works against the centralising, privatising, closing and fragmenting logics of that dominant model while working in a privacy-preserving and free commonalisation, reopening and federating direction. On the technopolitical plane, unlike corporate platforms, Decidim is highly configurable (as exposed in Chap. 3). The flexibility and modularity in the combination of spaces and components allows the design of participation systems adaptable to multiple needs, providing high levels of autonomy to organisations in the operationalisation of their democratic governance models. On the political plane (as noted in Sects. 2.3 and 2.4), it aims to go against the social dynamics typical of platform capitalism: against mechanisms of vigilance and influence from above (surveillance and surwilling), it aims to favour mechanisms of vigilance and influence from below (subveillance and subwilling); instead of mass communication, it fosters free multitudinous self-communication; and instead of individualism, corporate intelligence and inaction, it is oriented to potentiate collective and common subjectivation, intelligence and action. It also embodies and benefits from all this, via Metadecidim. This brings us to the type of social dynamic that this technopolitical network aims to produce: participatory democracy.

5.3 … for Participatory Democracy

In Chap. 2 we distinguished three models of democracy (representative, direct and deliberative) and suggested that the participatory model may encompass and recraft those three (make them strong, as suggested by Barber 1984). However, a radical reading of participation as pars capere inter pares, as taking part as peers, points towards a stronger form of politics and also towards an alternative form of society. Decidim is a software and a project oriented to embody and promote that vision.

We have shown how Decidim helps to rethink the intervention of citizenry and social actors (e.g. associations, cooperatives) into the public policy cycle, from the inception of a given policy to the long-term monitoring of its result. At the scale of public administration, Decidim helps to redefine the boundaries between the inside and the outside of those institutions, somehow remaking the geometry of government. The new forms of democratic innovation connected to the Decidim project point towards a reorientation (rather than a hollowing out or neoliberal transformation) of public institutions and technologies, towards alternative modernities, guided by the idea of the commons, creativity and multitudinous reappropriation of social life. That means defining, implementing and innovating in concepts and criteria related to democratic quality and public service, countering the more traditional principles of public institutions, such as representation, hierarchy and efficiency (in the traditional Weberian model) or privatisation, competition and optimisation (in the New Public Management model of neoliberalism), with the Decidim logic of bottom-up empowerment, radical democratisation and public value.

The public-common partnership underlying the Decidim project points in this direction, at least, when it comes to the development of Decidim as a project and as an infrastructure. The collaboration between Barcelona’s City Council (and, later on, other public institutions) and the Metadecidim community, as well as the continuous work of technoacracy by the Decidim Team (in fields that go from programming to legislation and from education to communication), is an example of the possibilities of such a public-common partnership, with its various limits and challenges.

Participation should go beyond public administration and the state; it should not stop at the factory gate or the commercial centre. Decidim did not only establish a prototype of public-common partnership but an economic ecosystem of services around the platform in which heterogeneous, quadruple helix actors, led by a partnership between the state and communities, have brought about digital commons accessible to anyone. The project has been able to mobilise incentives and commitments for such a variety of actors, becoming itself an experiment of democratisation and commonalisation in the economic field. The use of Decidim to make decisions within large consumer and producer cooperatives (such as Som Energia) and its adoption by several third sector initiatives is another example of how the project contributes (and can further contribute) to the democratisation of the economy.

As a digital platform for participatory democracy, Decidim has to face one of the greatest of democratic challenges: that of planetary autonomy and sustainability. In this sense, Decidim can become a crucial tool for potential transitions towards sustainable futures. Social movements, such as Extinction Rebellion, reclaim democratic assemblies as one of the key means to advance in this transition. In a similar (but state-driven) direction, public institutions have deployed Decidim for organising participatory climatic assemblies in places like Barcelona, Spain and France.

Here, again, is a good space to recall that we started this book with the acknowledgement that a platform for participatory democracy, collective autonomy, technopolitical democratisation, etc. is today a condition, but certainly not a sufficient condition for a strong and rich democracy. It will only succeed if it becomes part of processes of sociotechnical transformation that go way beyond it. Decidim was born out of a technopolitical trajectory that had as its cornerstone the 15M movement and the political cycle that came after it. A long hope is that we may find a necessary alliance with contemporary social movements (economic, ecological, feminist and technopolitical, among others). Decidim (or any other technology for that matter) is not and cannot be the subject of any democratic revolution; it can only contribute to it, to take part in it and to participate in the strongest sense. It is not enough that Decidim is an appropriate platform for that task; it also has to be appropriated.

5.4 Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the Age of Digital Intelligence

Metadecidim is a community that collaborates in the design of the platform and the construction of the project. It is also an instance of Decidim softwareFootnote 5 that enables (along with face-to-face events) the community to do so. The communities and practices that surround Decidim redefine it as it redefines them. The prescriptions inserted in the code are rewritten by the inscriptions inserted by actors in action. This process can go from unexpected uses to the actual redesign of the platform. This is the primary objective of the Metadecidim community.

Metadecidim implies several key innovations. The first is its condition as a technopolitical digital network and community: in both senses, Metadecidim is oriented to design Decidim as technology and to decide it as a project. This is a work of self-institution, as Castoriadis may point out. A second key innovation concerns how Metadecidim steers the project into technopolitical democratisation: on the one hand, Decidim is a technology and a project for the democratisation of democracy, aimed to bring existing democracy beyond the liberal representative model; for that it questions, incorporates and experiments with different visions and practices of democracy (as analysed in Chap. 2). On the other hand, Metadecidim is a space and process for democratising technology (concretely, Decidim technology) bringing it beyond the technocratic and the private model of software design, development and management. In the field of public administration, this implies a model of technoacracy opposed to technocracy.

This work aspires to ignite a “spiral of technopolitical democratisation” (Calleja-López, 2017): a recursive loop of deployment of technology and technologically mediated processes for furthering political democratisation feeding back with processes of democratisation of technology. This brings about a relevant political feature: it nurtures a recursive subject or participatory subject, which democratically shapes the (technopolitical) conditions for its exercise of agency in different fields of digital societies, and modulates itself as a recursive citizenry in the field of politics, a recursive worker in the field of work and so on. It also brings a relevant technological feature: a model of democratic or participatory software that goes beyond free software. Projecting this practical work into the future, Decidim outlines the vision of democratic stacks built upon participatory and appropriated technologies (from hardware to various types of software and AI, and digital objects such as data) that contribute to democratise both politics and society more broadly (Calleja-López, 2021).

Decidim as a platform for democracy is aimed at democratising the social field beyond technology and politics. The reflexivity of the project is thereby not static (like that of a mirror) but recursive and dynamic (like that of a fractal unfolding), growing by including itself and its own reflexivity into recurrent loops, upwards towards government and downwards towards governmentality, directed to transform the top(s) and the bottom(s) of an increasing number of social spheres, from technology and politics into economics, culture, education and others. The growing fractality and recursivity of technopolitical democratisation, and of Decidim as a project, embodies a deep sense of social, technical and political autonomy for itself and the societies we live in.

Note that neither reflexivity nor recursivity are perfect nor closed: autonomy is never complete and should never be understood as self-sufficiency. Moreover, in a globalised and interdependent world, no community can aspire to be fully autonomous. But there are at least three senses in which the aspiration for technopolitical autonomy is, despite unfinished, increasingly present in Decidim as a project: first, a negative sense of autonomy as subtraction from the alienating logic of platform capitalism or bureaucratic iron cages; second, a positive sense of autonomy as recursive self-determination in the technopolitical plane (on top of material and social conditions for which we also need to care); and third, an open sense of autonomy as the capacity to create new potentialities, to question the limits imposed by previous conditions and to sustain and to maintain an open future.

Moreover, Decidim’s project cannot be that of an increasing and never-ending spiralling digitalisation of participation towards some kind of democratic singularity. Autonomy also means to acknowledge our own interdependencies and limitations, psychic, social and ecological. It is impossible to participate in everything; there is no unlimited energy and time in personal or computational terms. Decidim is not a digital project; it is a technopolitical project that brings with it the limitations (and potentialities) of biological, social and technical bodies, those of materiality. The acknowledgement of these limitations, and the capacity for self-limitation, is also a fundamental part of autonomy. In the age of digital intelligence we live in, autonomy demands recognising that all types of intelligence, artificial and collective, are themselves constituted by and constitutive of material and precarious forms of collective living.

5.5 Choosing Decidim as Generative Democracy

As a coagulation of hundreds of Metadecidim debates, the movement recursivity includes this very text; and so recrafts thinking, action, and, crucially, the frequently forgotten (re)production. We began suggesting that this book aims to think through Decidim after we did take part in it. Actually, we were thinking through Decidim as we were doing it, and Decidim keeps making and thinking itself today. With this book we came to recapitulate and throw out several lines of flight that show how Decidim has aimed to retie technology, politics, economics, ecology and beyond, and that flight has the form of a living animal: it is the flight of a cyborg owl. The cyborg owl can be taken as an imaginary ode to our animal and our technical, increasingly post-natural and allegedly post-humanist condition. Yet this owl is not the symbol of a Hegelian self-reflective movement that satisfies itself in contemplation, but the owl that flies in the evening to bring, back to the nest, the provision to sustain a new day. It is reflective action and active reflection aimed at producing and reproducing flourishing forms of life.

At this point we want to recall the centrality of collective living. Earlier we pointed out how Decidim (that Catalan “we decide”) embodied a technological interpellation to us as a collective: to our collective self, a form of collective subjectivation. Then we noted that collective intelligence (human, animal, artificial or hybrid) shall be enactively understood in terms of dynamics of collective life (human, animal, artificial and, ultimately, hybrid). The same applied to collective action: flourishing personal and collective lives, their collective definition, construction and sustainability at various scales is one of the ultimate aims of (if not the ultimate aim of) collective action from the Decidim perspective.

It is worth highlighting that (as noted in a broad literature, from Latour to Stengers and from Haraway to Braidotti, with their many differences) approaching such a horizon today implies rethinking and reassembling the human and the non-human, the natural and the artificial, the individual and the collective, in ways that sometimes blur the old boundaries and always aim to promote equality and solidarity, justice, flourishing and sustainability. This may require that new actors be carefully, deliberatively and yet differentiallyFootnote 6 incorporated as co-constituting the demos (or demoi). Otherwise, it aims to reassemble them in democratic forms that avoid indifferentiation while going beyond patriarchy, racism, speciesism, coloniality, etc. and the various -isms that divide us as active, powerful collectives. Crucially, beyond capitalism too, be it qualified as informational, cognitive, platform or something else. Such rethinking and remaking is key for transitions between existing, possible and desirable forms of life, for tomorrow and the day after it. We believe future conceptions and enactments of Decidim may contribute to such endeavours.

As Bloch knew, this rethinking and remaking will require a logic of hope (perhaps also a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will, Gramsci style) able to consistently imagine and prefigure alternative societies. A logic of hope that makes us part of those societies and that makes us take part not only in the present but also in the futures to come. In an age of disbelief and despair, of hypermediatically narrated doom and collapse, this is a necessary step: to take part in the reimagining and recrafting of the future. Hopefully, Decidim and Metadecidim will help to such a recraft of our collective selves (and also our personal ones) along with our present and future worlds.

Through participation, Decidim has conquered its right to be. It has transited from a struggle to be born, functional, sustainable and participated, to a stage of a relatively mature well-being. It is still a deeply interdependent and precarious project, but autonomous nonetheless, in the sense we have just outlined. This passage from the struggle to be born to a relative maturity may prefigure a passage from participatory democracy to a foreseeable generative democracy. Whereas participatory democracy is more centred around the struggle to take (back) the pieces of sovereignty and power of which we have been deprived, the notion of a generative democracy is more centred on the joy of giving. At some point we might also transit from a society where the main social challenge is that of redistributing power to that in which the challenge is to generate potency, to create, exploring the virtues of plenitude and mutual gain. In this sense, no participatory democracy can fully succeed without a generative democracy, of which Decidim might also be taken as an example.

We want to conclude with a reflexive note. It is often the case that democracy is reduced to decision-making, or even to decision taking. This makes us blind to the fact that some things need to be made before a decision is taken. Decidim is one of them. We don’t only change the world by using technologies; we also change the world by making technologies. And sometimes changing technologies (and the way technologies are made) also remakes worlds. But far from any techno-determinism, Decidim expresses social forms that have yet to become worlds: struggles will be the signers of their fate. Inspired by the augmented event of 15M and its social formsFootnote 7 in the midst of a world of capitalist realism, Decidim aspires not so much to make democracy feel more real, but to make it be more real, and to collectively imagine and decide what that means. Beyond hope or fear, Decidim is a new weapon in the struggle for real democracy.

This book ends here. Decidim continues.