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 300 cities, regional governments, and local network 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:
Software developers
More than 150 software developers worldwide have contributed to the CONSUL DEMOCRACY main code.
Local partners
Local partners who are well-connected in their local context and help strengthen the community 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)
What it means to be a Local Partner
Certified Companies
Our trusted Certified Companies know the software’s code inside out and assist users with implementation, installation and customization.
Currently they are:
Work with us!
We are always looking for new partners, both Local and Tech partners, to extend our work in different parts of the world. Interested to find out more? We are happy to get in touch. Please shoot us an e-mail at [email protected].
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.
