Common - Participatory Decision-Making System
= "platform for participatory decision-making, built for communities" [1]
URL = https://common.oneproject.org/
Description
"Common is the platform for participatory decision-making, built for communities, governments, and organizations that wants people to have a real role in the economic decisions that shape their lives. Common is built by One Project, a nonprofit advancing economic democracy.
Where most tools start at the vote, Common starts earlier: with a community grounding decisions in shared goals, so everything that follows is accountable to what they set out to achieve. From goal-setting through deliberation, voting, and tracked outcomes, Common supports the full arc of decision-making in one place.
Common was built because participatory governance is foundational to an economy that works for everyone, and running it shouldn't be this hard. Common replaces the disconnected stack of forms, spreadsheets, and voting tools, giving organizations one place for every phase and a transparent record that proves participation shaped real results. Each cycle builds on the last, so institutional memory compounds, community trust grows, and democratic decision-making gets easier over time.
Common is already live across six regions and five languages, with more than $2.4 million collectively allocated by the communities using it. The longer arc points toward a coordination layer for collective well-being, where communities directly govern land, labor, capital, and information. Decision-making is the practical entry point. The wider vision is what these pilots are building toward.
Implementing this vision has required grappling with the complexity of democratic processes themselves. As the platform's head of design, Raphael Arar has helped surface a recurring four-phase structure (input, review, decision, and sharing results) while recognizing that deliberation cuts across phases rather than functioning as a single step. Different decision types, such as direction-setting, selection, and ratification, surface different forms of disagreement, from value conflicts to binary opposition. A key lesson has been learning to treat complex processes as chains of smaller decisions rather than monolithic workflows."