📡 Follow-up: Open Source Politics → Go Vocal

In mid-April we shared Decidim's response to OSP's acquisition by Go Vocal: democratic infrastructure cannot be proprietary. Two CIBC members weighed in afterward, one from inside Go Vocal and one from another European Decidim implementer.

Valentin Chaput's account from inside OSP, on why they chose Go Vocal:
• https://opensourcepolitics.eu/actualites/pourquoi-nous-avons-choisi-go-vocal/

From inside Go Vocal (personal view, not the company's): "It's quite sad that things didn't work out for OSP." OSP had been looking for a buyer since last year. The bigger picture, as they see it, is that "there's this tension between building ethically aligned tech / commons and being able to gather enough resources to deliver a good product for the cities we work with." There's space for both. Countries should never run democracy on proprietary tech, but "the city level is a good place for faster experimentation that private enterprises can deliver." The longer-term hope is that Go Vocal's work eventually waterfalls into the commons. "I really believe open source is the only path forward for stronger democratic infrastructure... but unfortunately the funding for this to happen is not there."

From another European Decidim implementer, a structural critique. "Valentin never shared with the Decidim community that his customers were for sale, which is a real shame." OSP "didn't let an ecosystem of Decidim implementers (technical and participation wise) emerge." They tried to do it all on their own, the team tired themselves out, and former customers are now saying the quality of service declined over the last few years. The cities that built on Decidim now "don't understand open source, don't get the difference between implementer and technology itself, and are hyper in demand from a very aggressive and competitive ecosystem." This implementer is now working with the Decidim association to offer a path forward to cities committed to the tech, bringing in participation experts as implementers on their own infrastructure. "France was one of the 'success' stories for Decidim, until you actually scraped under the surface."

Both views agree on the long arc. Open source has to win, and funding is what's missing. They diverge on the lesson. From inside Go Vocal, proprietary acquisition at the city level is a fair stopgap while the funding catches up. From the Decidim implementer, this didn't have to happen; OSP's structural mistake was failing to nurture an ecosystem of implementers, which made the team brittle when financial pressure came.

What would actually fund open-source civic infrastructure at the city scale? Curious to hear how others read this.