Survey component improvements

1. Proposal summary

This document outlines a collaborative funding initiative to significantly enhance the Decidim Surveys component. We propose a partnership model where multiple Decidim partners co-fund a dedicated development sprint. This approach pools resources to deliver improvements that benefit the entire ecosystem. The goal is to finance a single, coordinated development team to implement a suite of prioritized features and technical upgrades.

🖼 Check this short pitch deck to see how this would look like in action.

2. Collaborative funding model

• Multiple funders contribute to a common budget. This reduces the individual financial burden while ensuring the work aligns with collective, ecosystem-wide needs rather than a single organization's agenda.
• A follow-up committee (comprising key funders) will be formed to approve final specifications and monitor progress.
• All developments will be contributed directly to the core Decidim codebase, ensuring long-term sustainability.
• A single, vetted development team will be contracted, preventing duplication of efforts and ensuring coherent, high-quality code.

3. Scope of work

• Description: Replace the current question creation interface with a new drag-and-drop form builder. This will allow administrators to rearrange questions, add sections, and manage survey logic more intuitively.
• Impact: Drastically reduces the time required to create complex surveys, improving admin productivity and experience.

• Description: Modernize the component's underlying JavaScript architecture, which currently causes significant performance degradation in the survey administration panel. When a survey contains more than a few questions, the interface becomes slow and unresponsive. 
• Impact: Restores a fast and smooth user experience for administrators creating and editing surveys of any complexity, while improving long-term code maintainability.

• Description: Redesign the interface for managing survey responses to provide administrators with a clear workspace. The current UI for two critical actions - deleting responses and controlling the publication state of responses (e.g., publishing/unpublishing for public display) - is unclear and prone to error. This improvement will introduce a consistent, intuitive UI with clear batch operation capabilities, visual status indicators, and robust confirmation dialogs for destructive actions.
• Impact: Makes survey data management safer and less error-prone for administrators.

• Description: Add a "Duplicate" function for questions within the survey editor. This will copy all properties of a question (title, description, type, answer options, display conditions).
• Impact: Saves significant time when creating surveys with similar or repeated question structures.

• Description: Expand the survey's versatility by introducing two new question types:
  • Dropdown: A space-saving select list for single-choice questions with many options.
  • Slide (Range Slider): Allows respondents to select a value on a visual slider (e.g., from 1 to 10). This is ideal for opinion strength, satisfaction scales, or Likert-style questions.
• Impact: Enables richer data collection and more engaging survey designs, meeting a wider range of participatory use cases.
  
  

4. Effort Estimate

The following is a high-level estimate based on initial scoping. Final costs will be confirmed upon team selection and detailed technical specification.

Budget calculation:

5. Next Steps

1. Initial coordination meeting: We invite you to a brief online meeting to present the proposal in detail, answer questions, and assess the proposal feasibility.
2. Steering committee: Interested partners will convene to finalize priorities and specifications.
3. Agreement and funding: A simple consortium agreement will be drafted, and funds will be collected.
4. Development sprints: The selected team will execute the work in 3-weeks sprints, with regular updates to the steering committee.