EN 
ES About the project
The Community
From 2016 onwards, governments and other public organizations from across the globe started using the CONSUL DEMOCRACY software, implementing one or several of its five main features or customizing the software further, allowed under the Affero GPL version 3 license. Currently the CONSUL DEMOCRACY community is made up of around 250 cities, regional governments, and regional and tech partners, with the Foundation at its very heart.
Our User community is particularly well-represented in Europe and South America. Recently, the first implementations have been done in Africa (Somalia) and Asia (Maldives). Cities and other local-level institutions make up the largest chunk of the user base, while regional governments make a good second.
The Foundation
The Consul Democracy Foundation was founded in 2019 to take over the role that the Madrid municipality had played up until that point: to develop and maintain the software on the one hand, and strengthen and assist the global community of users on the other.
The Foundation consists of a small operational team with a director and a network manager, and a three-person board. It has its official seat in the Netherlands.
Our partners
Not only users make up the CONSUL DEMOCRACY community. We actively work with:
Tech partners
Our trusted Certified Companies know the software’s code inside out, actively contribute to the repository on GitHub, and assist users with implementation, installation and customization.
Currently they are:
Regional Partners
Regional Partners are well-connected in their local context, assist public institutions with technical implementation and/or participatory processes, and spread the CONSUL DEMOCRACY project further. Currently they are:
- Framer Framed (Netherlands)
- Mehr Demokratie (Germany)
- COSLA (Scotland)
- Danes Je Nov Dan (Slovenia)
- Code4Romania (Romania)
Awards and achievements
- 2022 Open Government Partnership (OGP) recommendation as participatory tool
- 2020 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) collaboration: Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) module
- 2019 Inter-American Development Bank selection for Code for Development programme
- 2019 European Commission Sharing & Reuse Award. Category: Open source software with the biggest impact on businesses and citizens)
- 2019 Fukuoka Ruby Award (announcement in English)
- 2018 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) inclusion in Smart City Initiative
- 2018 Observatory of Public Sector Innovation recommendation as public sector innovation
- 2018 United Nations Public Service Award (Winners Fact Sheet by the UN)
How it all started
The CONSUL DEMOCRACY software was developed by the municipality of Madrid in 2015. It was directly influenced by the country-wide Los Indignados and Democracia Real Ya! street protests in Spain of May 2011. New local bottom-up citizen platforms emerged from these movements, including one in Madrid called Ahora Madrid, which subsequently won the local election that year.
From 2015 to 2019, several progressive and democratic policies were enacted, one of which was the development of a digital participation tool initially called CONSUL. The idea behind it was to empower citizens and include them directly in local decision-making processes. The city of Madrid still uses their platform Decide Madrid today.
