frequent questions

 
  • Extisting Decidim providers, participation specialists, cities, neighbourhoods, cooperatives, associtations and movements. Voca helps reduce the technical support.

    if you simply want to launch a decidim platform but have no technical skills, reach out!

  • voca is built around decidim to make it more accessible.

    in short, voca would be nothing without decidim, while decidim would be fine without voca.

    however, decidim is still a bit cumbersome to install for non-technical persons, and participation requires a lot of experimentation, time, and energy in itself.

    voca aims to provide a simple way to setup decidim platforms for everybody and enable them to focus on what’s essential: participation.

  • we believe our biggest challenge as a specie facing climate emergency is to access tools to redesign our governance together.

    we think decidim is better than paper ballots, teletext, or facebook to do this, so we want to make it easily accessible to everyone.

  • we don’t and don’t intend to make profit out of this. The alpha was self-funded by the project’s initiator, Octree.

    we just launched our Open Collective: we welcome others to co-fund our initiative if they find an interest in voca.

    at some point though, we’ll have to pay the hosting, maintenance, and support fees. Several plans will be available.

  • because we’re concerned by a pattern seemingly unaddressed: the core of an open-source community rarely ships a stable product to market on its own, because this requires other systemic postures than being an effervescent, creative, contributive core.

    we believe an extra layer can offer this long-term support and stability and should be held by a distributed, purpose-led, inclusive group of Decidim providers working together. We also believe keeping this open is the best way to avoid a private commodification of Decidim.

    alongside that, we happily invest efforts in the community when we can.

  • no, it’s not.

    it’s a system built around Decidim images to stabilize and scale it safely. You can see how it works on GitHub.

  • we’re always interested in hearing ideas, but we have limited funding to make them a reality.

    If you have funds get in touch, or support the project on Open Collective.

  • yup, sure. As long as it stays under the same license and respects decidim’s social contract it’s fine.

    however building a service this big is quite some work, so in order to make it better for everybody, we encourage you to contribute instead, or to support the Decidim project.

  • voca has been initiated after decidim fest 21 by octree: a sustainable startup studio based in Geneva, Switzerland. Their legal status is a not-for-profit company.

    however, voca is not a product from octree, it is a project held by a collective.

  • We should talk first. If there are decidim specialists already present in your country we might collaborate, it’s always better ! Drop us a line.

couldn’t find the answer to your question? Drop us a line at hello@voca.city.

 

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