COMPARED
Decidim is a free, open-source participation platform, started by Barcelona City Council in 2016 and now used by cities, regions and organisations around the world. It hosts whole participatory programmes: processes, assemblies, initiatives and consultations, participatory budgets, meetings, and tracking whether approved proposals are carried out.
True Causes is much narrower: one method, done well. It answers one question inside a participatory process, what causes this problem?, with a map the participants certify themselves.
| Decidim | True Causes | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A platform for running participation programmes | A tool for one step: finding causes |
| What people do | Propose, comment, vote, attend meetings, allocate budgets | Everyone writes causes alone; the group then judges one pair at a time: does this cause significantly influence that one? |
| What comes out | Proposals, votes, budgets, and their follow-up | A map of causes, deepest first, with every disagreement kept on it; then actions judged against the deepest causes, and the plan the room chose, if one won every comparison |
| Who runs it | Usually an institution, on its own server | Any group; hosted, nothing to install |
| Open source | Yes (AGPLv3) | Hosted, not open source. The results are open: a public room’s map, every claim (JSON) and every judged pair with its vote counts (CSV) can be read and downloaded without an account |
| Cost | Free software; hosting and setup are yours | Free up to 100 people per room; nonprofits free on approval; paid plans for organisations |
| Who can take part | Verification of participants, by several methods | Open link, invite, entry code, an email domain, one confirmed address per member, vouching, or the steward’s approval |
| Meetings | In person and online meetings, with registration | An optional video call per group (Jitsi), at Clarify and Structure; no accounts, not recorded |
| Discussion | Comments and debates | A short side discussion beside each card, each pair and each proposed action |
| Random selection | Sortition component | Groups dealt by lot inside every room |
| Moderation | Moderation of reported content | An optional AI reading before a card or turn posts; if it reads as an attack on a person, the author alone is told and decides |
| Notifications | In-app notifications and newsletters | Email invitations and reminders |
When an institution wants a permanent home for public participation, with many kinds of process under one roof and a record of what happened to each proposal.
As the diagnosis step of a process: before a city asks residents for proposals, let them map what causes the problem. A room's map can be embedded in any page, a Decidim process page included, and its data exported for the record.
Its other kinds of map fit later steps of the same process. Priorities ranks a neighbourhood's concerns before a budget round; Weighing options settles the criteria proposals will be judged by; Steps in order orders the work once a proposal is chosen. A room can also end with dated predictions about its actions, checked against what happened. Proposals, budgets and the record of what happened to each stay in Decidim.
Checked in September 2026. Product names belong to their owners. If anything here about another product is out of date or unfair, write to hello@mg.truecauses.org and we will correct it.
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