2026-03-16 –, Room bUm Box
Decidim, once reliant on Barcelona’s funding, faced a 2022 crisis that spurred a Sustainability Plan to diversify income. Three years on, we share strategies, challenges, and lessons in securing funding from public, private, and philanthropic sources for FLOSS project sustainability.
Since its inception, Decidim has relied primarily on funding from the city of Barcelona, creating a dependency on this public organization. In 2022, following a funding crisis that nearly jeopardized the project, we developed a Sustainability Plan aimed at diversifying funding sources and reducing our dependence on a single funder.
Three years after implementing the plan, we have made significant progress toward our goal.
This session will reflect on our approach and key learnings. We will explain how we designed this plan, the challenges for sustainability that a FLOSS project faces, the learnings we have made during the process and the main actions we have taken
We will delve into the different strategies we have designed to attract new funders, especially from the private and philanthropic sector, as well as the challenges we face when it comes to receiving funding from public agencies. Finally, we will evaluate the successes and failures of this plan.
This is an ideal talk if you are interested in knowing the challenges that FLOSS projects face when seeking funding, want to learn which are the best strategies to diversify your sources of income and ensure a sustainable growth of your project.
Political scientist specializing in public policy, democratic participation, and technological sovereignty. He is currently the Director of the Technical Office at the Decidim Association and a member of Decidim's Product Team.