From November 2004 and October 2006 the Decide project was developed and tested in several European science centres and museums. One of these cocoons was Città della Scienza in Naples, the Italian city on which the volcano Vesuvio hangs over like a giant delivering lava flows and resoucerful bags of new ideas.
Città della Scienza didn't adopt Decide only, they even were a founding partner of the Decide project. That's why they went through a long test phase which took at least ten different steps of amendment and tweaks to give birth to the final prototype from the original card games named Democs, developed by NEF, the new economics foundation.
Decide's test phases in Naples addressed everybody: teenagers, adult museum visitors and teachers.Democracy looks like a high ideal not so out of hand, a floating bar we can grasp with little efforts. And Città della Scienza tested its new game with over ten participants each time. But they were too many, and democracy could turn up into confusion. Eventually they agreed to sort it with a number of participants spanning from 6 to 8.
After that period, Città della Scienza went a way beyond the test phase and exploited the potentialities of Decide format. They used the Neuroscience kit in official events like the European Day of Neuroscience, held on May the 9th, 2006. Later on they hosted a forum focused on Climate Change in which they call on politicians, citizens, institutions and NGO representatives to take part in a sort of decision-making process.Democracy underpins majority's statements, unlike monarchy that's supposed to let just one decide. This is the reason why Decide enabled Città della Scienza and its crew to link with many other museum institutions all over the world and share the delightful load of participative methodologies, whose Decide is a flagship.
Lately they readapted Decide to deliver a very detailed version on the Naples' garbage crisis between 2007 and 2008. This new experiment, played on students and people coming from sociological studies, gained a precious feedback and its evaluation was good. It gave the evidence of Decide's capabilities to face every kind of topic and to let anyone participate and get aware of what is going on out there.
FUND is a project funded by the European Commission (