A Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy: The Future of a Collective Platform

This last chapter closes and recapitulates the book. It does so in several steps that recall both its title and the content of its various chapters. The first section outlines future challenges of the project: the way in which artificial intelligence opens new threads and venues for software development, design and participatory technopolitics, the potential for self-organisation and decentralisation of Decidim that is still to be explored or the challenges of deploying Decidim in different socio-eco-political contexts. We next recapitulate how Decidim must be understood as a technopolitical network at various levels and how that concept points to the type of participatory society that such a network embodies and promotes. We explain how the reflexive and recursive nature of the project boosts its autonomy and how interdependencies and limitations must also be recognised and taken care of. Furthermore, we end with a call to choose Decidim, to build lives and worlds in common and to complement the vision of a “participatory democracy” with the notion of a “generative democracy” as a form of collective potency, generosity and creativity.