Decidim: Focus of Our 2024 Summer Sprint

Today is the last day of NOVA Web Development's Summer 2024 development sprint, and the last day that our three wonderful PRIME interns, Sawyer Buchanan, Ankhil Davaatseren, and Anand Nachani, will be with us.

They were tasked with investigating and experimenting with the Decidim platform. Decidim appears to be the web technology that most closely aligns with our primary goal of using technology to serve humanity instead of harming it by putting people and planet before profit. It also appears to be the platform providing us with a possible business plan - providing support for it - that could give us a path to becoming a viable business. There is so much more I could say about Decidim, but it has been a long time since I have made a post, and I want to get this one out the door today, so suffice it to say that the book released at the beginning of this year, Decidim, a Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy is a must read for anyone interested in the intersection of computing and social justice.

This is the second time we have used a Summer sprint to explore Decidim. I first wrote about it at the end of Februrary 2021 in a post titled Decidim: People's Software for Democratic Participation and Goals for NOVA Web Development "Decidim Summer 2021 Sprint" describes what we hoped to accomplish when we started down this path.

Two main factors contributed to our decision to resume work with Decidim this year:

1. We have a community partner committed to using Decidim to help organize its work.
2. We have a new member with the skills and experience to provide the level of professionalism we need to make Decidim support a viable option for us.

The DNOVA Council

The DNOVA Council is an initiative of the Democratizing NOVA project which in turn is an initiative of the Next Systems Studies Program at George Mason University. I am currently serving on the council as a representative of NOVA Web Development. My friend and colleague from the solidarity organization SECOSOL, Johanna Garay, is also serving on the council as a representative of that organization.

Having an organization whose mission is aligned with what Decidim was created for using it as a tool to help fulfill that mission will provide NOVA Web with just the kind of real world experience with the platform that it needs to ready it to provide Decidim support more broadly.

Tony Phillips Joins NOVA Web Development

Each time the coop "reboots", we start off with a group of bright, motivated, but inexperienced high school students together with their aging (very old now, in Internet years, if truth be told) teacher, yours truly. If the co-op is going to become a viable business, we need to overcome several internal contradictions, the most fundamental of which is developing our skills, both tech skills as web developers and business skills to run a business.

Enter Anthony Phillips a 40 year old back-end web developer with years of experience and a military pension. Tony was attracted by NOVA Web Development's guiding principle of wanting to "help build the world we want to live in", and found us looking for a web tech job that would allow him to do that. He brings the skill and experience that we will need to be able to support a platform like Decidim professionally.

Heading To Liberia

I leave tomorrow for a ten day stay in Monrovia, Liberia, where I will be working with the eight members of Jetro Web Development on development plans for their co-op. I promise to post from there with updates on what we're doing.

In solidarity, Jeff Elkner