New York participatory budgeting has grown to a point that we needed better tools to facilitate the conversations that were happening across the city. We have grown from 4 city council members to 36 and now the people have voted (to dedicate agency?) to participatory budgeting. We looked at what was available and Decidim was the tool that met our aspirations in NYC. Part of what makes Decidim so powerful is that it adds a level of abstraction to the work separating out the steps of a process and the activities associated with the process. That’s part of the information architecture, so that not only you are saying what is happening at each step but different parts of Decidim behave differently depending on when you are doing or depending on what step in the process you are in. The fact that that’s customizable really allows Decidim to be moulded to how we are doing our work and not our work to be moulded.

Francisco Tena Pipeline to Power, working for NYC Civic Engagement Commission