Who is behind the project?

We are based at the tech department of [TCF e. V.], a member-funded non-profit civic innovation lab. Fordem is a member of Vernetzung Bürger:Innenbeteiligung in Germany and an active member of the Iranian Woman Life Freedom movement.

Fordem short-term goals:

Fordem is a tool for the development of any community as it can be adapted to the respective needs and contexts. In our first version, we aim to assist Iranian political activists in networking, deliberation, and participation stages of their mobilization along the ongoing Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

Furthermore, we are invested in implementing Fordem in communities in Germany suffering from a democratic gap. Our main focus there is Heilbronn, a city with more than 54% of the population with migratory background but only 5% of the seats in the municipal council.

Our long-term goal is to adapt Fordem for various democratic needs of every community around the world and to connect these communities to an interconnected and transnationally aware whole.

Fordem is an open-source platform, it is developed in direct collaboration with civil society, has a crypto economy that gives back to the users if any profit is generated e.g. when news agencies pay to use the survey results (yes, it's not free for those!), provides the users with community building and organization tools, and is hosted and managed by a non-profit federation.

Activists will have the possibility to: (Diaspora in case of Iran)

• Identify themselves through a pseudonymization process done by trusted 3rd parties
• Create and interactively flesh out their multifaceted profiles
• Connect with like-minded people and groups
• Organize events and meetings
• Collaboratively ideate
• Utilize various social functions to find the social choice
• Find and form representative groups for more elaborate democratic processes e.g. deliberation

Data

Everything is treated according to the GDPR. We do not store or keep PII without users' explicit request. Furthermore, the Data generated by the users will in part go on chain using smart contracts or stored on a federated system. That said, using different licensing techniques we ensure for-profit organizations pay for their usage of the output and the profit goes back to users who generated the value as well as to the further development of the platform to reflect the users' needs.

Further Reading

• Organisation & Component Overview (EN)
• Organisation Organisation & Component Overview (فارسی):  * Our Values & principles - https://github.com/tcfev/fordem/issues/57 * Protocols - https://github.com/tcfev/fordem/tree/main/.assets/.protocols UI Design (WIP)