Wiki

Precedents

Similar civic-infrastructure initiatives in other cities and regions. Uitwijken.nl is not the first attempt at society-owned digital infrastructure for local life — each entry below is running, studied, and instructive about what works and what to avoid.

Grouped by what they prove. See Governance for how ownership models map onto Uitwijken's design.

Open-source participation platforms

Decidim — Barcelona, then global

What: Decidim — open-source civic participation platform. Ruby on Rails, AGPL (decidim/decidim).
Origin: Barcelona en Comú, 2016. decidim.barcelona is the reference deployment.
Scale: hundreds of municipalities including Helsinki, Mexico City, NYC Civic Engagement Commission, Milan, Lisbon, Zurich, several Dutch pilots.
Why it matters: proves a municipal commons software project can become international infrastructure. AGPL, meta-governance via the Decidim Association, residents-first framing.
Caveat: participation-first (voting, proposals), not neighborhood-social-first. Uitwijken's differentiation is the day-to-day civic/social layer underneath; Decidim-style features could plug in on top.

Consul Democracy — Madrid

What: CONSUL Democracy — open-source participation software (consuldemocracy/consuldemocracy).
Origin: Madrid, 2015 — Decide Madrid (use case).
Status: still deployed in many cities; Decide Madrid itself waned with political turnover.
Lesson: a platform tied to one administration's identity is vulnerable when politics shift. Uitwijken must be cross-party legible from day one.

Polis / vTaiwan

What: Polis — deliberation tool that surfaces consensus across factions rather than maximizing engagement. Open source: compdemocracy/polis.
Origin: Taiwan's g0v civic-hacker community, 2014 — vTaiwan.
Use cases: Uber regulation, alcohol sales, youth policy — each produced implementable consensus (case studies).
Why it matters: the only widely-adopted civic-tech primitive that actively reduces polarization. Candidate for buurt-level consultations with genuine disagreement.

Commercial engagement platforms

These prove the market exists and municipalities are willing to pay — but the closed model has limits an open alternative can exceed.

Commonplace — United Kingdom

What: Commonplace — place-based engagement platform used by UK councils and developers.
Status: commercial, closed source.

Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab) — Belgium → global

What: Go Vocal — Belgian-origin civic engagement SaaS, used across EU.
Status: commercial.

Iceland: deliberation at city scale

Better Reykjavík

What: Better Reykjavík — long-running participation platform for Reykjavík residents, operated by the Citizens Foundation.
Tooling: the foundation maintains open-source platforms — Your Priorities and Active Citizen.
Why it matters: one of the longest-running examples of city-scale deliberation with documented outcomes; foundation-owned, not municipally captured.

Fediverse and governance infrastructure

Metagov

Metagov — research collective studying online governance. Govbase catalogues tools and projects. Useful source for governance design literature.

SocialHub

SocialHub — primary forum for ActivityPub implementation and fediverse governance discussion.
Why it matters: the ActivityPub ecosystem has mature practices around defederation, consent, and cross-instance moderation. Join the conversations early rather than reinvent.

Civic fediverse instances

social.coop, eupolicy.social, various municipal experiments. None yet at Uitwijken's proposed depth of municipal-data integration.

Smaller-internets framing

Uitwijken sits inside a wider shift from "fix the whole internet" to community-scoped digital infrastructure — miniverses on structural, value, design, and community layers. Mozilla Foundation / co—matter call this the post-naive internet era (Oct 2025).

Adjacent post-naive projects worth naming alongside the civic-tech precedents above:

Subvert — cooperatively owned music platform (post-Bandcamp acquisition). Structural-layer precedent for platform co-ops.
Metalabel — collaboration and revenue splits over competition. Value-layer precedent.
Trust (Berlin) — IRL hub plus decentralized-governance experiments. Community-layer precedent.

The point: islands that interconnect are more honest than another universal-platform play.

Dutch precedents and adjacent projects

Worth studying before building — Dutch-specific language and design vocabulary already developed here.

Buurkracht — buurt-level energy and sustainability initiatives.
Buurtwerkplaatsen — Amsterdam buurt-tech network.
PublicSpaces — Dutch coalition for public-values digital infrastructure (manifesto).
Waag Futurelab — Amsterdam-based public-research institute, frequent partner for civic-tech work.
SIDN Fonds and NLnet — Dutch funders for open and societally relevant internet projects. See Funding.

What this changes in the pitch

Lead with structure, not features. Funders and gemeentes have seen many neighborhood apps. Few have seen one designed as Ostrom-style commons from day one. See Governance.
Interconnection is credibility. Uitwijken is stronger positioned as one node in the post-naive / civic-tech ecosystem than as a clever local startup.
Stop apologizing for small scope. Post-naive builders accept the internet of today and carve islands. A pilot is the point, not a stepping stone to "the Dutch Facebook."

Open questions for follow-up

Decidim Association statutes and meta-governance model — worth a closer read before proposing an Uitwijken governance structure (meta.decidim.org).
Which European municipalities are actively running Polis-based consultations beyond Taiwan?
Federation paths: could Uitwijken federate with Decidim instances for cross-cutting consultations?
Citizens Foundation (Reykjavík) — open-source stack reuse vs. fresh-build trade-off.