Architecting Civic Engagement: Consul Democracy and Munich
summary
Munich runs unser.muenchen.de on Consul, moved its instance from on‑prem to a public HNA cloud overnight and keeps paying a vendor while sponsoring the Consul Democracy Foundation; the city launches a participatory budgeting pilot with 1 million euros and expects 7–10% participation. Consul reports over 500,000 registered users in Madrid and 200+ municipal deployments worldwide. Claim: open source enables a rapid cloud exit strategy and easier vendor swaps; the migration and ecosystem model are already operational.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction and speakers
- 0:44What is Consul Democracy
- 1:29History and global spread
- 2:54Munich’s Consul instance
- 4:20Political factors behind adoption
- 7:16Moving to the cloud
- 11:33Funding the foundation
- 13:42Regional partners and ecosystem
- 15:31Decentralization challenges
- 18:47Vendor independence and future
- 21:38City of Munich’s perspective
- 23:45Cloud provider choice
- 25:12Impact and participatory budgeting
- 29:47Closing remarks
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