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About the project

Our purpose is to help transform societies into open, inclusive and democratic living systems where every voice counts, governments act transparently, and in which together we shape a common future.

In the coming years, we aim to enable millions of citizens around the world to participate in public decision-making regularly, transparently, and bindingly. at all political levels through Consul Democracy. We make digital democratic participation easy, accessible and affordable, and support transparent governments by offering open source technologies.

We steward the open source CONSUL DEMOCRACY software and we coordinate an international community composed of users, experts and developers. We assist public and civil society organizations run meaningful and inclusive digital democratic processes using our platform, and we adhere to and advocate open source principles of technological transparency, reusability, and shared governance.



The Community

The CONSUL DEMOCRACY community consists of platform users, developers, participation experts and others from government, civil society and the commercial sector. Roughly 500 public and civil society organizations use or have used the platform since its inception in 2015, implementing one or several of its five main features or customizing the software further, allowed under the Affero GPL version 3 license.

A indispensable part of our community are our Certified Companies, who implement the platform for their clients and give back to the project by way of code and modest financial contributions, and our Regional Partners, who play an active part in community building and spread CONSUL DEMOCRACY further in their regions. Cities and other local-level institutions make up the largest chunk of the user base, while regional governments make a good second.

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The Foundation

The CONSUL DEMOCRACY Foundation is at the heart of the international community and of the entire software project. The Foundation was founded in 2019 in the Netherlands and has two main objectives: 1) to develop and maintain the CONSUL DEMOCRACY open source software, and 2) to strengthen and assist the global community of users, developers and partners.

The Foundation consists of a small operational team consisting of a Director, a Network Coordinator and a Tech Coordinator, and a three-person board. It has its official seat in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Know more about The Foundation

Our partners

Not only users make up the CONSUL DEMOCRACY community. We actively work with:

Certified Companies

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.

There are two levels of Certified Companies, each with its distinct set of benefits and obligations.

CONSUL Captains

Software Supporters

What it means to be a Certified Company (pdf, ENG / ES)

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:

Why become a Regional Partner (pdf, ENG / ES)

Awards and achievements

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.