Where can safe(r) spaces be implemented?

The Safe(r) Spaces framework is designed for hybrid democratic spaces, where digital and physical environments interact and where platforms such as Decidim sit at the centre of participation workflows. These spaces include:

• Structured participation digital platforms – e‑democracy tools with an emphasis on Decidim and civic or institutional platforms used for proposals, consultations, participatory budgeting, and assemblies.

• Social and community media spaces – channels used for organising, discussion, mutual support, and outreach around processes that may be hosted on Decidim or similar tools.

• Physical meeting spaces – workshops, assemblies, rehearsals, and cultural programmes that are entangled with digital tools for coordination, streaming, documentation, or decision‑making.

The playbook treats these settings as sociotechnical assemblages: settings as whole environments made up of the rules, tools, relationships, and everyday practices that shape how people take part. All of these elements work together to open up participation or block it, and they can also create conditions where people feel safe or, on the contrary, harmed or excluded. Decidim is a key reference point for this, because it is an open source software with a lively community united through a social contract, and it is committed to more transparent, accountable and traceable democracies.  As such, the design aspires to make governance choices visible, from participation flows and permissions to moderation rules and data practices. However, the practices and ideas in the playbook travel across platforms. In this sense, the playbook is less about prescribing one tool and more about how any space, online, offline, or hybrid, can be reconfigured to enable democratic capabilities, with Decidim often providing the backbone for documenting, debating, and archiving those configurations.