February 14th 2025, by Lukas

We’re super excited to make this jump!

Set in motion by collaborations on open civic participation tools with the The Association of Dutch Municipalities (VNG) and the OECD, we now see a clear path forward. Going open source can improve the quality of our tool, while we can also benefit from developments in the open source movement more broadly, such as in infrastructure, knowledge sharing and a sense of community. We believe this can amplify Dembrane's impact in strengthening democratic participation globally.

What does this mean concretely?

ECHO's code is open source, but we provide enterprise-grade hosting and support for organisations who want a hassle-free experience - for current clients: that means the only thing that changes is that you have a bigger community working to make the ECHO better. To those contributing to Dembrane financially: Your subscription and sponsorship helps us continuously improve the platform while making democratic tools accessible to all - whether you use our hosted solution or run ECHO yourself.

Please note:

• If you modify ECHO and provide it to users over a network (like a web application), you must make the source code of your modified version available to those users.

• Any derivative works you create must also be licensed under AGPL.

• You must provide access to the complete source code, including your modifications, to anyone who receives the software.

We’re just getting started

The Dembrane Team

Built with Care in Europe

Published February 14th, 2025