Agora is a Nextcloud app for participatory democracy, inspired by Decidim and built on Nextcloud Polls. It enables communities, organizations, institutions, and citizen groups to collaborate on proposals, debates, consultations, petitions, projects, and formal decision-making processes in a transparent and structured way.
Agora 1.7.5 introduces the largest evolution of the participation and voting system since the creation of the project.
The former support mechanism has been replaced by a unified Support & Voting Engine architecture. Deliberative participation and formal voting now share the same foundation while remaining adapted to different democratic processes.
Supports are no longer limited to simple "for" or "against" interactions.
During the deliberation phase, administrators can now select different participation models:
- 👍 Binary support (Yes / No)
- ⚖️ Ternary support (For / Abstain / Against)
- ⭐ Star rating
- 🔢 Score voting
- 🧠 Majority Judgment
- ✅ Approval support
- ❤️ Reactions
- 🔥 Trending participation
- 💬 Pure discussion mode
This allows each inquiry, proposal, project, or option to use the most appropriate participation mechanism.
Agora now includes a much more complete voting toolkit for formal decision-making. Available voting methods include:
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🏆 Condorcet voting
- Schulze
- Copeland
- Minimax
- Ranked Pairs
- Kemeny-Young
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📊 Borda Count
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🧠 Majority Judgment
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✅ Approval Voting
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📝 Ranked Choice Voting
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⚡ Quadratic Voting
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⚖️ Token / Weighted Voting
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🔄 Phased Voting
This enables organizations to move beyond simple majority voting and adopt decision methods adapted to their governance needs.
The new engine architecture provides:
- Shared support and voting framework
- Flexible configuration templates
- Cross-option and per-option voting modes
- Multiple presentation layouts
- Configurable voting parameters
- Future extensibility for additional democratic methods
Agora 1.7.5 introduces a major redesign of the support system.
The internal support architecture, storage model, and participation engines have been significantly modified.
- Perform a complete Nextcloud backup
- Backup your database
- Backup your Agora application data
- Test the update in a staging environment whenever possible
Administrators upgrading from previous versions should carefully verify:
- Existing supports
- Participation statistics
- Templates
- Inquiry configurations
- Custom integrations
Although migration scripts are provided, a full backup is strongly recommended before any production upgrade.
Do not upgrade a production instance without a verified backup.
- 💬 Comments and discussions
- 👍 Flexible support systems (binary, ternary, star rating, score, majority judgment, approval, reactions, trending, discussion-only)
- 🗳 Advanced voting methods (Condorcet, Borda, Majority Judgment, Approval, Ranked Choice, Quadratic, Token/Weighted, Phased)
- 🧠 Majority Judgment support
- 🏆 Condorcet methods (Schulze, Copeland, Minimax, Ranked Pairs, Kemeny-Young)
- 📊 Borda Count
- ✅ Approval Voting
- 🧩 Custom inquiry families and types
- 🧾 Multiple inquiry formats (proposals, debates, petitions, projects…)
- 🏛 Collective decision-making tools
- 📂 Categorization and filtering by family or location
- 🔒 Privacy-first architecture — all data stays on your Nextcloud server
- 🔗 Integration with Forms, Polls, Deck, Collectives, and the Nextcloud ecosystem
- 🏛 Collectives design UX
- 🗣 Real debate features (structured replies, multi-thread discussions)
- 📜 Structured debate and consultation workflows
- 🧰 Templates for democracy, university, company, and custom use cases
- 🧱 Scalable architecture and modern UX
Agora introduces ready-to-use templates to quickly bootstrap participatory spaces for different contexts:
- Template 1 – Option-based workflow — Ideal for consultations and decision-making with predefined options
- Template 2 – Thematic / structured template — Designed for democracy initiatives, universities, companies, and custom organizational workflows
📄 Instructions: agora-template-instructions.md
🧪 Example: agora-template-instructions.json
🙏 Thanks to contributor: LexioJ
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Nextcloud 31+
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PHP 8.1+
Install directly from the Nextcloud App Store.
git clone https://github.com/vinimoz/agora.git
cd agora
make setup-dev \\\# Dev environment
make setup-build \\\# Runtime environment
npm run build \\\# Compile JS
make appstore \\\# Full build
occ app:enable agora
| Family | Creation | Edit Inquiry | Edit Group | Group view | Group view 2 | Inquiry Type | Grid View | List View | Option Debate | Option Tree | Template |
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| Document | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 👤 User Guide | Complete user manual with step-by-step instructions | 📖 USER_GUIDE.md |
| 👤 Admin Guide | Admin manual with step-by-step instructions for template and customization | 📖 ADMIN_GUIDE.md |
| 🔧 Template Guide | Template configuration for administrators | 📘 template_guide.md |
| 🔌 API Guide | REST API documentation for developers | 🔌 API_v1.0.md |
| 📋 Template Schema | JSON schema for template validation | 📋 Agora-template-schema.json |
| 🏛 Democratic Guide | Democratic voting guide | 🏛 Democratic_vote |
1.8 — Lottery 🎲 1.9 — Process & Workflow 🔄 2.0 — Rights & Permissions 🔐
This project is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — see the COPYING file for details.
Developed by ViniMoz
Icons by Material Design Icons
Thanks to all contributors and community members helping shape participatory democracy on Nextcloud.
- Report bugs or request features: GitHub Issues
- Community support: Nextcloud Help
Please read our Code of Conduct to ensure collaboration in a positive and respectful way.
All contributions are welcome! Whether you're fixing bugs, improving documentation, or adding new features, we appreciate your help in making participatory democracy more accessible.