ParticipateDB

What is Adhocracy? Adhocracy is a freely usable participation software with which people can be digitally involved in decision-making processes. Implemented as a software library, Adhocracy offers various participation modules with which a wide range of process types can be implemented: From surveys and brainstorming to joint text processing. Depending on requirements, these modules can be combined to form complex participation processes. Why Adhocracy? Participation in political and social processes is essential for an active civil society and a stable democracy, because only through participation can we arrive at decisions that work for everyone. Adhocracy brings participation processes into the digital space and can, if necessary, meaningfully supplement existing analogue participation possibilities. In this way, Adhocracy diversifies the formats and ways of participation and thus offers the possibility to meet the most diverse needs. It is thus possible to involve fellow human beings, members or employees in decision-making processes simply, efficiently and independently of time and place, and ultimately to make better and more socially acceptable decisions to meet. Adhocracy is Open Source Adhocracy is released under an open source license , so that all users benefit from the progress made in each project. Thus, synergies in the areas of security, innovation and the feature set of the software are made possible that also lead to cheaper development costs. Of most importance to us is that an open source approach allows for transparency of the software solution, which is key whenever software is used for political means. The code of all projects based on Adhocracy can be downloaded free of charge at Github . Curious? Subscribe to the Newsletter and check out our Publications and Press reports

CitizenOS is an open-source collaborative software designed to facilitate crowdsourcing through channels for idea proposal, discussion, editing, and voting. The platform offers options to delegate votes, use digital signatures, and promote follow-up opportunities. More features: - document interaction with inline discussions, voting, and argumentation - versioning - participant authentication via social media, national digital ID, or mobile ID - decision-making using vetos, mini-votes, yes-no voting or custom options - category assignment and hashtags - DDoc generation Its user base includes governments, non-profits, and businesses. CitizenOS is available in English, Estonian, and Russian. Introductory video Rahvaalgatus.ee , a platform enabling Estonian citizens to propose, discuss, and vote on legal initiatives addressing the national parliament, is built on CitizenOS. The Estonian government is obliged to recognize petitions that have collected at leasts 1000 digital signatures. Submitted proposals and their status in legislative procedure can be tracked on the platform. On Rahvaalgatus.ee A presentation introducing CitizenOS is on Slideshare . CitizenOS was founded in 2015 and is based in Tallinn, Estonia.

co-ment is a Web 2.0 application that allows users to put texts online, submit them to comments and update them in a collaborative way. From the about page , its key features are: A powerful and ergonomic interface to create, navigate and process marginal annotations. A simple workspace where you can manage user rights and versions of texts. Other capabilities listed on the features page : The import module of co-ment is compatible with many document formats to let you import your existing texts into the site. You can create new texts or edit your previously uploaded ones through the text editor integrated into co-ment. To organize your text, choose between 3 languages: the extended pandoc flavor of markdown (recommended), HTML or RST . You can edit your text, taking in account modification proposals from commentators for example. co-ment allows version management. You can switch back to a previous version any time and visualize changes between any two versions. When you create a new one, you can keep the received comments or discard them. Create a working group easily around a text or a set of texts. Invite your contributors on the fly and give them a common role or give some of them a specific role: observer, commentator, moderator, editor or manager. Usage examples can be found on their use cases page. As of 2012, tool ownership and development has been transferred from Sopinspace (company has been liquidated) to Abilian, based in Paris, France.

From the website: A comments-oriented theme, designed to make it reasonably easy to publish short, ‘commentable’ documents in a convenient, accessible, degradable way. From a blog post about the theme from one of the original developers, Steph Gray: You define a commentable chunk within a section (in WordPress terms, a post within a category) Chunks within a section have ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons linking them together, plus a drop down menu at the top powered by the Drop Down Post List plugin , to make it easy to get between pages The comment form is to the side, rather than at the bottom, and floats (in modern browsers) so it’s easily accessible at all times. Comments are listed at the bottom in the conventional way. The footer contains RSS feeds for comments on the chunk itself, all comments and all chunk content, making it easier for readers to keep track of the discussion or even grab chunks of the document to mashup in new ways. I’d recommend the excellent Subscribe to Comments plugin so commenters can get email alerts of new comments added to the thread. There’s a print stylesheet to make the content print in a plain, simple way; and for geek appeal, it seems to work more or less OK on an iPhone. An online demo can be viewed here (archived copy). The Commentariat Wordpress Theme is developed by the UK Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills ( DIUS ). Update : The Commentariat Wordpress Theme tool has been discontinued. In order to access its website, view an archived copy of the site.

From the website: CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. […] Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. Use it in combination with multisite, BuddyPress and BuddyPress Groupblog to create communities around your documents. CommentPress Core makes your document available to a wider readership through a focus on accessibility; it uses valid, semantic markup; it allows navigation around the page with the keyboard and all functionality works with or without Javascript. As far as we can tell, this makes it compatible with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. All comments require a name and e-mail (the latter is not published publicly) to be submitted and appear in a threaded view. There is also an option for the commenter to submit their website if desired. Example usages of CommentPress can be found here . CommentPress Version 3.8.x (also known as CommentPress Core) is available for download at the WordPress Plugin Directory which also contains the tool’s documentation. CommentPress was originally developed by Eddie Tejeda (Institute for the Future of the Book), and has been updated with the help of Christian Wach, Giant Chair, the Writers Centre Norwich, Trinity College (CT), and the Digital Thoreau project at SUNY Geneseo.

From the website: CommentWorks® is ICF International’s Web-based software solution for analyzing, sorting, tracking, summarizing, and responding to public comments. Using CommentWorks®, federal, state, and local government agencies and private companies can streamline the labor-intensive process of accepting and resolving public feedback and integrating these comments into projects and programs. Over a dozen federal departments and agencies, as well as states and companies, have relied on CommentWorks® to manage and analyze hundreds of thousands of comments on their regulations, guidance documents, environmental analyses, and other types of reports and projects. CommentWorks is developed by ICF International Inc., headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia (US).

From the about page (archived copy): Digress.it is a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. Digress.it is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length. Blogs aren’t bad for having conversations, but comments tend to get unwieldy, and can feel unmoored when the original post is long. To solve this, Digress.it lets you run blog-style comment threads — digressions, if you will — off of individual paragraphs. To do this efficiently, we’ve re-jiggered the conventional post-discussion hierarchy of blogs, moving the comment area from beneath the post to beside it (floating to the right) — hearkening back to the age-old practice of scribbling in page margins. We see great possibilities for educators, literary groups, political or civic activists, legal scholars, and pretty much anyone who wants to do a communal close reading. […] Digress.it has its roots at the Institute for the Future of the Book with a project called CommentPress [now renamed CommentPress Core; ParticipateDB entry ]. Digress.it represents a re-envisioning of the project with an emphasis on creating a public space where people can publish documents and encourage thoughtful discussions. Digress.it is open-source and available on "Github"https://github.com/eddietejeda/digressit. Digress.it is developed by Eddie Tejeda, Ben Vershbow, Joss Winn, Alex Bilbie, and Jesse Wilbur. Update : digress.it has been discontinued. In order to access the site, view an archived copy .

From Wikipedia (retrieved May 14, 2015): GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management ( SCM ) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub provides a web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It also provides access control and several collaboration features such as wikis, task management, and bug tracking and feature requests for every project. Key features of Github involve code review, modification comments, control over branch permissions, task assignment, and customizable community guidelines. Additional features can be found “here”: https://github.com/features. Users can follow and view 75+ million projects on the site. A tutorial video for Github can be found here . GitHub, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, CA ( USA ).

Collaborative document writing solution from Google.

According to Wikipedia : Google Wave is a self-described “personal communication and collaboration tool” announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a “preview release” of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite twenty to thirty additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009, these users have around 25 invitations to give. Features Google Wave was a new Internet communications platform. It was written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface used the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added or removed from the wave at any point during a wave’s existence. Waves, described by Google as “equal parts conversation and document”, are hosted XML documents that allow seamless and low latency concurrent modifications. Any participant of a wave can reply anywhere within the message, edit any part of the wave, and add participants at any point in the process. Each edit/reply is a blip and users can reply to individual blips within waves. Recipients are notified of changes/replies in all waves in which they are active and, upon opening a wave, may review those changes in chronological order. In addition, waves are live. All replies/edits are visible in real-time, letter-by-letter, as they are typed by the other collaborators. Multiple participants may edit a single wave simultaneously in Google Wave. Thus, waves can function not only as e-mails and threaded conversations but also as an instant messaging service when many participants are online at the same time. A wave may repeatedly shift roles between e-mail and instant messaging depending on the number of users editing it concurrently. The ability to show messages as they are typed can be disabled, similar to conventional instant messaging. The ability to modify a wave at any location lets users create collaborative documents, edited in a manner akin to wikis. Waves can easily link to other waves. In many respects, it is a more advanced forum. It can be read and known to exist by only one person, or by two or more and can also be public, available for reading and writing to everyone on the Wave. The history of each wave is stored within it. Collaborators may use a playback feature to observe the order in which it was edited, blips that were added, and who was responsible for what in the wave. The history may also be searched by a user to view and/or modify specific changes, such as specific kinds of changes or messages from a single user. Update : As of August 2010, Google Wave’s development was discontinued. The tool was shut down in April 2012.

From the website: Hackpad is a simple tool to capture, organize and share knowledge so you and your team can focus on getting things done. Hackpad eliminates confusion by clearly indicating who wrote what, and what changes were made. Application areas include collaborative note taking and shared documents. In 2014, Hackpad was acquired by Dropbox, Inc.

MixedInk is a democratic, collaborative writing tool that lets groups of all shapes and sizes weave their ideas and opinions into a collective text. It was used during phase 3 of the Open Government Dialogue.

From the website: One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises, collectives and activist groups have better things to think about than obscure legal clauses. The One Click Orgs platform will give you: * A constitution written in plain english * An official legal structure so your group can open a bank account * A list of group members that’s automatically kept up to date * A voting system to help make group decisions * A record of every decision that’s been made * Easy ways to modify the constitution as your group develops There are three versions of One Click Orgs: One Click Co-op – In partnership with Co-operatives UK and NESTA the “One Click Co-op” was launched in June 2013. This is the world’s first fully-online co-operative and has been approved by UK regulators. The platform permits members to contribute agenda items, browse archived minutes and participate in votes electronically. One Click Association – We’ve launched a platform enabling small UK-based community groups to form an Unincorporated Association, submit proposals and vote. It’s completely free. One Click CLG – We’ve developed a platform that provides Companies Limited by Guarantee with electronic voting and membership management. One Click Orgs is open-source and its source code is on “Github”: https://github.com/oneclickorgs/one-click-orgs. From the about page : One Click Orgs is a non-profit based in London UK. The project was founded by the think tank CIRCUS foundation in October 2008 and constituted as a free-standing project in December 2008. The founding meeting was held in public at the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin. The platform is written in Merb and released under the AGPL open source licence.

Project Madison was an online tool for collaborative creation of policy documents. It was shut down on February 10, 2019. From the website: It started with two age-old questions. First, what if government documents were opened to everyone for discussion, collaboration and improvement? And second, what if elected officials listened to and learned from that public collaboration, treating all users equally? Our answer is Madison. Born from an all-night hackathon, the beta version was first deployed by Congressman @DarrellIssa to crowdsource the # OPEN Act, an Internet-protecting alternative to SOPA and PIPA . And it worked, representing the first time a Member of Congress had crowdsourced a bill and actually introduced user-generated improvements to the legislative process. Madison has grown up since then, becoming open source software free for anyone to use while opening policy documents previously off-limits to individuals and the Internet community. With more development work and your help, Madison can become a free turnkey solution so that anyone can both unlock the policy documents they want and advance the truly open, accountable government they deserve. Project Madison is being developed by the Open Government Foundation . Version 2.0 of this project is available on Github .

According to the website, TWiki is, a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform, and web application platform. It is a Structured Wiki, typically used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base, or any other groupware tool, on an intranet, extranet or the Internet. Users without programming skills can create web applications. Developers can extend the functionality of TWiki with Plugins. TWiki fosters information flow within an organization, lets distributed teams work together seamlessly and productively, and eliminates the one-webmaster syndrome of outdated intranet content. Revision control, access control, templates and variables are a few among TWiki’s many features. A comprehensive list of TWiki features are available on the website homepage . Wikipedia on TWiki’s plugin architecture: TWiki has a plugin API that has spawned over 300 extensions to link into databases, create charts, tags, sort tables, write spreadsheets, create image gallery and slideshows, make drawings, write blogs, plot graphs, interface to many different authentication schemes, track Extreme Programming projects and so on. Created in 2008, Foswiki is a fork of TWiki. It was launched due to disagreements about future of the TWiki project. Interview with TWiki CEO , Jitendra Kavathekar, and CTO , Peter Thoeny

From the website (translated with Google): Wikilegis is “a virtual collaborative environment where citizens can directly contribute to the process of discussion and drafting of bills of national interest. The Wikilegis allows citizens to draw their own version of the legislation, or even make suggestions for amendments to bills.” Upvotes and downvotes are used to show support for or against bills, and both open and concluded bills are viewable on the platform . To contribute, participants are required to register. Wikilegis was launched in 2009 as a part of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies initiative, e-Democracia . The portal also hosts other e-participation tools, such as Audiências Interativas and Expressão . From the article “Participatory Lawmaking in Brazil” in the U.S. General Services Administration’s Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter: [L]aunched by the Brazilian House of Representatives, the e-Democracia project aims to engage its participants in the lawmaking process in order to achieve concrete legislative results. Relying on the use of social media, combined with offline legislative events (e.g. committee hearings, conferences), the initiative is intended to reach a broad public that includes citizens, parliamentarians, civil servants, researchers, nongovernmental organizations and interest groups. […] Finally, considering that in the legislative process much of the relevant discussion takes place during the drafting of a bill itself, the website provides users with the “wikilegis” area. In this collaborative environment, users can elaborate their own version of a bill or suggest amendments to existing bills while simultaneously discussing and qualitatively evaluating bill proposals. Conceived as a free software solution, the platform may be appropriated by state and municipal legislatures as a tool to increase citizen participation in their own lawmaking processes. How does it work? The GitHub page is available here .