We're thrilled to welcome Carol Romero to We Make Commons, part of the community behind Decidim — the open source participatory democracy platform that started in Barcelona and has since spread to cities, regions, and institutions across the world.
Democracy as shared infrastructure
Decidim began as a tool built for Barcelona's city council to run participatory budgeting and citizen deliberation processes, and was released as open source from the start — a deliberate choice to treat the software underpinning democratic participation as a public good rather than a vendor product. Since then, it's been adopted by governments, universities, and civil society organizations well beyond its original city, each instance able to shape and extend the platform for its own community's needs.
Community as the product
Tools like Decidim only work as commons if there's a real community sustaining them — translating, documenting, supporting new institutions that adopt the platform, and making sure it doesn't quietly become the property of whichever organization happens to run the biggest deployment. That community stewardship work is exactly where Carol's contributions matter.
Why this matters for We Make Commons
Decidim is a reminder that digital commons aren't limited to developer tools or data infrastructure — they extend to the software that decides how democratic participation itself gets designed and run.
Welcome to We Make Commons, Carol. Glad to have you.