PokeCode

Architecture stabilisation and upgrade of New York City’s Decidim platform

Pokecode is currently responsible for the technical stabilisation and upgrade of Participate NYC, the Decidim platform operated by the New York City Civic Engagement Commission. The platform supports The People’s Money, New York City’s citywide participatory budgeting programme, which enables residents aged 11 and over to decide how public funds are allocated.

The project includes a comprehensive audit of the existing application, infrastructure and custom developments; the resolution of legacy technical debt; and the upgrade to Decidim 0.31. It also covers the alignment of the Ruby, Rails and JavaScript dependency baseline, the adaptation of custom modules, improvements to secrets and environment management, authentication review, CI/CD stabilisation, and progressive validation across development, pre-production and production environments.

Development of new Decidim core functionalities for Barcelona City Council

Pokecode has developed and maintained new functionalities for Decidim Barcelona and contributed them upstream to the official Decidim codebase. Our work includes improvements to meetings and venue management, waiting lists and participant reminders, administrative notification tools, the redesign and migration of taxonomies, and new administrative insights and monitoring capabilities.

These developments were designed in response to the operational needs of one of the largest and most mature Decidim installations. Rather than creating isolated customisations, we worked to transform those requirements into reusable functionalities that could benefit the wider Decidim community.

Managed Decidim SaaS for different types of organization (political parties, community projects, institutional projects and universities)

Pokecode operates a specialised Decidim SaaS service providing managed infrastructure, updates, backups, monitoring and functional and technical support. Each project receives dedicated test and production environments, allowing organisations to use Decidim without maintaining their own technical team.

The service supports European and international initiatives such as the Clean Clothes Campaign’s Fashioning a Just Transition Manifesto, which gathered contributions from workers, young people and civil-society organisations, and the OpenEU project. It also supports institutional and political organisations, including the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and the Italian Green Party.

This experience demonstrates our capacity to operate multiple Decidim installations reliably while adapting the platform to different languages, governance models, audiences and participation methodologies. It combines secure hosting and proactive maintenance with specialised support throughout the complete lifecycle of a participatory process.