One critical prerequisite for the Brasil Participativo platform is to ensure universal citizen participation. This presents a significant technopolitical challenge in a country marked by pronounced social and educational disparities, where various segments of the population face obstacles in engaging with virtual environments. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in participatory platforms that enable organizations to engage with their communities effectively. These platforms facilitate two-way communication, allowing organizations to gather feedback, crowdsource ideas, and collaborate with their stakeholders. Building on the success and experience of the Brasil Participativo initiative, we propose to develop a boilerplate that will enable organizations to create their own participatory platforms easily.

The project will focus on creating a basic boilerplate that includes essential features such as user authentication, participatory spaces, user experience. The boilerplate will be designed to be scalable and extensible, allowing organizations to add additional features as needed. By developing a participatory platform boilerplate based on Brasil Participativo, we aim to empower organizations to engage with their communities in a meaningful and impactful way. This project aligns with our commitment to promoting transparency, inclusivity, and democratic participation. Some tasks necessary: Develop a customizable and easy-to-deploy boilerplate based on the principles and features of Brasil Participativo. Provide organizations with a tool to create participatory platforms tailored to their needs. Promote transparency, engagement, and collaboration between organizations and their stakeholder

Project Complexity: intermediate

Expected size of the project: 350 hours

Skills required/preferred: Ruby on Rails, open source community best practices

Deliverables: A fully functional participatory platform boilerplate based on Brasil Participativo. Documentation and user guides for deploying and customizing the boilerplate. Support and maintenance services for a specified period after the initial deployment.

Empurrando Juntas (EJ) is a powerful tool for social participation, designed to collect opinions and facilitate collaboration. By integrating EJ with Decidim, we can harness the collective power of multiple communities, enabling more inclusive and impactful decision-making processes.

Decidim provides a robust framework for citizen participation, offering features for public consultations, deliberative processes, and collaborative decision-making. By integrating EJ with Decidim, we can enhance the platform’s capabilities, making it easier for participants to engage and contribute.

One key benefit of integrating EJ with Decidim is the ability to leverage EJ’s artificial intelligence techniques for grouping participants based on their opinions. This can help streamline the decision-making process, enabling more efficient and effective collaboration.

Another advantage is the potential to expand the reach of both tools. By integrating EJ with Decidim, we can bring EJ’s powerful participation features to Decidim’s existing user base, and vice versa. This can help foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among different communities, leading to more diverse and inclusive outcomes.

Project Complexity: intermediate

Expected size of the project: 175 hours

Skills required/preferred: Ruby on Rails, open source community best practices, machine learning

Deliverables: A gem integrating the ej platform and Decidim.

Political digital participation encompasses various methods, ranging from conventional public consultations and polls to more innovative approaches like submitting and voting on proposals. However, one less commonly utilized method is mapping, which allows discussions and participation around geolocalized proposals and issues. In essence, this method enables engagement with local, territorial, and political demands and concerns within a geographical context. Despite being widely adopted in social media and other digital arenas, this feature is notably absent in Decidim.

This project aims to fill this gap by implementing a mapping component in Brasil Participativo. The envisioned functionalities include the ability to upload shape files for additional information, enabling the creation of proposals with geocoding, and visualizing proposals and other relevant layers on a single map. Each participatory space will have its own shapefile that can be viewed in isolation or overlaid with other participatory processes conducted on the platform. The functional requirements of this component have already been outlined, along with the necessary technical documentation to develop a plugin in Ruby on Rails, adhering to the Decidim architecture (plugin architecture).

Project Complexity: intermediate

Expected size of the project: 175 hours (we have the mentors also implementing part of the solution)

Skills required/preferred: Ruby on rails development. Optional: plugin architecture (development of a gem)

Decidim faces significant performance challenges when operating at scale, as it was originally designed for smaller user groups such as cities, councils, and districts. Despite employing a Redis cache service to enhance performance, numerous page loads still necessitate a substantial number of database requests, sometimes reaching up to 300. Additionally, database response times can become sluggish as the platform experiences growth beyond 1 million users, particularly during periods of high activity involving proposals and votes.

This project aims to address these performance issues by analyzing performance logs and implementing potential solutions. The focus lies on optimizing the application level, with anticipated outcomes including enhancements to the caching strategy, reassessment of database indexes, and refactoring of code logic that may contribute to slowdowns in response times as the platform scales. We will make available logs of the plataform in production environment with performance issues. Also, performance tools are being configured to give more performance data to the participant.

Project Complexity: hard/difficult

Expected size of the project: 350 hours (we have the mentors also implementing part of the solution)

Skills required/preferred: intermediate/advanced backend Ruby on Rails. Optional: execute and understand performance logs.

One critical prerequisite for the Brasil Participativo platform is to ensure universal citizen participation. This presents a significant technopolitical challenge in a country marked by pronounced social and educational disparities, where various segments of the population face obstacles in engaging with virtual environments. The primary objective of this project is to comprehensively assess the platform’s usability, language inclusivity, and accessibility. By identifying areas for improvement, the aim is to bridge the gap for traditionally excluded demographics, including those with limited internet access (often restricted to cell phones), minimal technological literacy, and illiteracy.

This project aims to identify possible gaps in the website usability with an extensive report after the assessment. The contributor is expected to evaluate tools for each of the aspects that should be checked (usability, accessibility, performance with low-end mobile devices, performance with unstable internet connection, and language inclusivity), understand relevant metrics and indicators, run checks on the platform and elaborate a document including their findings. The report should also include good examples to be followed and, if possible, suggest changes. This project does not expect nor encourage coding contributions, but they will be welcomed if time permits.

Project Complexity: intermediate

Expected size of the project: 175 hours

Skills required/preferred: User experience knowledge