📣 The Assemblies Space

An assembly allows you to create a group for members of an organization who meet periodically to make decisions about a specific area. The assemblies can be private or public. If they are public, it is possible to participate in them (for example: adding items to the agenda or commenting on the proposals and decisions made by this body).

They differ from them Consultations in that they are not structured in phases. Thus, the functionalities displayed behave in the same way throughout the duration of an assembly. The functionalities that can be deployed are the same as those in consulations, this is why we will highlight the notable differences between Consultations and Assemblies.

Examples: A general assembly (which meets once a year to define the main areas of activity for an organisation and its executive bodies through a vote), an advisory council on equality (which meets every two months to make proposals on how to improve relations between men and women within an organisation), an evaluation commission (which meets every month to monitor a process) or a guarantee body (which documents incidents, abuses or proposals to improve decision-making processes).

Filling out the assembly information

In order to guide you through the configuration of an assembly, we show you step-by-step the fields on the back-office which correspond to the elements as the appear on the presentation pages of an assembly. Those that require an explanation are described.
NB: In previous versions of Decidim, we called these spaces "Agoras".

To create an assembly, you must go to the "assemblies" tab. You will then access the page for managing assemblies. Press "New assembly". An assembly will be created which can be modified in the sub-menu "Information" of the assembly, or by clicking on the "Pencil" icon on the assemblies management page.

General information

In the first box, entitled "General Information", you can set the Title of your assembly, its sub-title, its URL, a hashtag, a summary, and a description for your assembly.

For the summary, it is important to write a fairly short text and to take into account its presence on the homepage. This is the second piece of information the user will see after the title of the participatory process. It is therefore important to ensure that the content is relevant and fairly general.

The description is the main content for presenting the context, objectives and form of your participatory process. It should therefore be made as clear and as attractive as possible (neither too vague nor too long). As the text editor is still limited on Decidim, here are some tips to successfully do this:

You can put titles to make the text more structured and more clear for platform users.
You can also put hyperlinks to reference the resources of your choice. These can include platform pages/content such as a charter, FAQ, or a direct link to the proposal submission or survey response form.
You can embed an image by dragging and dropping it from your desktop or from a webpage. Warning: it is not possible to choose the size and the position of the image (ask us if you have any questions).

You can also edit the objective of the assembly's activity, its composition as well as its internal organization. Below, you can see the different texts set up on the presentation page of th eassembly.

Duration of the assembly

You then need to configure the duration of your assembly in the "Duration" box. There, you can enter the date of creation of the assembly, the date of its incorporation onto the platform (if the assembly existed before the platform), the lifecycle of the assembly (if it is necessary), the closing date of the assembly and the reason for its closure.

This information on the duration of the assemblies space will be available to the user in the box on the right side of the assembly presentation page (see below).

Images

The following box, entitled "Images", allows you to customize the images of your assembly. The homepage image is the thumbnail on the homepage of your platform. The platform constantly adapts the image to the size of the screen, always keeping the center of the image as a reference. Therefore, it is advisable to choose large format, relatively square images (e.g. 800x800 px with the essential elements around the centre rather than on the edges).

The header image corresponds to the image in the banner space including the assembly's title, hashtag and subtitle.

Filters

The "Filters" box allows you to choose whether or not to activate the application scope. Previously set up in the "Settings" tab of the administrator area, these allow you to associate one assembly to a particular scope of application.

Metadata

The metadata allows users to be informed about the scope of the assembly. This is displayed on the user space in a box on the right side of the presentation page.

Here you can let the users know what is decided by the members of the assembly, how decisions are made, the scale of the assembly (municipal, regional, national, European, etc.), the initiating group, the organisation zone, and the participants of the space. On the user space, this information is displayed as follows:

Members

You can enter the members that make up your assembly. and reflect its organizational structure. They can be registered users on the platform or not. This list will be displayed in a tab of the assembly.

Here you see how the list of members is displayed on the public page of the assembly

Visibility

The "Visibility" box allows you to link your assembly to a "parent assembly".

This feature allows you to form sub-assemblies within the same assembly (for more information on the parent assemblies, please refer to the last section of this article).

⚠️ To avoid display errors respect the following two conditions :

do not select the assembly that you are working on;
do not select a sub-assembly girl from the assembly you are working on;

The "Highlight" button allows you to pin the assembly to the top of the page in the index page for all assemblies and display it as the first thumbnail on the platform's home page. You can also turn your assembly into a private one by checking "Private area". All users will be able to see the consultation but only users that you have added as private users to the space will be able to contribute. If you check "Visible by non-members", your assembly will be visible to all but only invited users will be able to participate (submit proposals, vote etc.).

Others

In the "Other" box, you can designate a creator for theassembly (city council, public or other), a type of assembly (government, task force, etc.), link consultations to your assembly if necessary, and also add links to the social networks of your choice. You can redirect users to your social network accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Github in the footer of Decidim. Warning: you only have to fill in the suffix /account name (not the whole URL https://twitter.com/nom-du-compte). These links will be displayed in the box containing information about your assembly.

Finally, you can choose whether or not to activate the "Show statistics" button.

Add private users

To add private users to an assembly, it is necessary to manually enter the members who will be part of the assembly. To do this, go to the "assemblies" tab in the administration area, then to " Private users ".

In this space you can consult the list of private users in the assembly, as well as their emails and the send dates and acceptance of invitations. For each member, you can resend an invitation by clicking on the " " icon.Resend the invitation" or delete their access to the assembly by clicking on the icon "Delete". To invite a new user to join the assembly, click on "".New user in the participatory space".

In this space, enter the Name and theemail of the person you wish to add to the assembly, then click on " ".Create". The user will then receive an email inviting them to log in or create an account on the platform. This invitation is valid for 15 days. However, the administrator of the assembly can resend an invitation to members who have not confirmed their account within this period, by clicking on the "Resend" icon.

Private users are the only ones who can participate in this assembly.

Create a sub-assembly

Decidim offers the possibility to create sub-assemblies if you wish, in order to clarify the settings of your different user spaces. As we have seen above, during the configuration of an assembly, the box "Visibility" offers the possibility to link the newly created assembly to another, by filling the field "parent assembly":

This feature allows you to organize your assemblies and make their organization more understandable for users. This is reflected on the user space in several ways. First of all, on the presentation page of the sub-assembly, an automatic link - above the summary text - refers to the parent assembly.

In addition, on the parent assembly's presentation page, the sub-assembly settings appear at the bottom of the page.

Finally, the sub-assembly settings allows for a diagram to be automatically displayed on the Assemblies homepage:

In the tab " assemblies"As we saw in the article "Create/Modify/Duplicate a space", several options are available:

Duplicate an assembly
Edit the information for an assembly
View sub-assemblies
Get an overview of the assembly on the user space

By clicking on the icon "Assembly"(3), you will access the sub-space below:

It is on this space that you can follow the assemblies you have previously linked to a parent assembly. In this example, the parent assembly is " ".[Example of a neighbourhood council follow-up] Quartier de la Gare", and the sub-assembly is "Sub-assembly". You can duplicate, edit and view the sub-assemblies created.