On Openslides

August 2026 | Brodie Friesen

Preface

From July 31 - August 2nd, I had the pleasure of joining seven other young New Democrats on a delegation to observe the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) convention in Chicago. While an incredible experience on all fronts, one of the major takeaways was that their resolution debate was going extremely smoothly. When we commented on it, we were assured this isn’t always the case, but even so, we discovered several factors that contributed to this. One of those was the website open on every laptop in the room- OpenSlides. 

From its GitHub repo: “OpenSlides is a free, web based presentation and assembly system for managing and projecting agenda, motions and elections of an assembly”. It is open source, containerized, and requires no software downloads on member devices, just a device capable of browsing the web and a central server with Docker installed. The National Technical Committee (NTC) of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) deployed it in advance of the 2023 DSA Convention, looking to solve the problem they’d faced with previous electronic voting tools where they would crash and burn the second somebody thought about letting more than 200 people vote. Since the successful usage of OpenSlides at the 2023 DSA Convention, the NTC has rolled it out to all interested chapters, with great success even when used by thousands of delegates.

Features

The OpenSlides suite has a comprehensive feature set for managing meetings. Adapted from the DSA OpenSlides overview are the below items:

• Agendas
• Create, publish, and modify agendas, including marking items as complete
• Voting
• Voting can be conducted responsively, with instant results (if desired)
• Both open and secret ballots are supported, with the option for tabulating paper ballots as well if needed
• Resolutions
• Resolutions can be submitted, amended, and adopted automatically, with the whole workflow reflecting in the agenda and record as amendments are voted on
• Records
• A full record of the meeting can be exported, enabling integration with traditional minutes and enabling consistency
• Group Management
• Subcommittees and permissions can be managed and delegated, enabling breakouts and observer members
• Progressive Stack
• No more pro/con mic and equity card needed- the progressive stack balances gender equity and for/against indications to ensure equity and accessibility. It also puts points of order/information at the top of the stack.

Ultimately, it addresses key pain points experienced during the 2026 NDP Convention (and corresponding youth convention) in Winnipeg, while eliminating mass ballot tabulation for executive elections and enabling the chair to more confidently test the floor or end debate to move more rapidly though long agendas.

Implementation

OpenSlides is easy to install and operate from the administrative side. While observing the YDSA discussions, I was able to spin up an instance on my remote server with a few commands and one configuration change. 

The following are tech recommendations for implementing OpenSlides in the CYND environment.

Prerequisites

• Identify branding and domain requirements
• OpenSlides needs to be exposed to the internet. This will likely require a VPS or server capable of running a Docker container, with a domain pointed at it for ease of access.
• CYND already needs a website, so OpenSlides can tag onto the domain as a subdomain. For instance, a top-level domain like “cynd-jndc.ca” could be “openslides.cynd-jndc.ca”. Alternatively, a subdomain such as “youth.ndp.ca” could be used, becoming “openslides.youth.ndp.ca”. The party’s NPD domain can similarly be used in this fashion.
• cynd.ca and cynd-jndc.ca are both available for registration, for $17 a year.

• Identify server requirements
• OpenSlides may be computationally expensive when accepting traffic from hundreds of clients. It may make sense to acquire a VPS from an affordable provider such as Contabo to act as a public server, which can either run the tool directly or serve as a tunnel endpoint for a locally-running service. The party may already have assets that could deploy the tool.

• Cost estimate
• If a server and domain both need to be acquired, the total cost annually to run the OpenSlides instance will be between $100 and $200 CAD. If the party has a server and a domain name, the cost is zero, as OpenSlides is free and open source software.

Installation

• Refer to OpenSlides GitHub documentation
• The OpenSlides repository contains an installation guide and documentation. It is fairly easy to follow for anyone familiar with Docker and the basics of system administration

Operation

• OpenSlides Training
• The DSA has many guides and tutorials on using OpenSlides that can be reviewed and developed into our training ecosystem. It would be a good idea to have several proficient individuals trained in administrating and using OpenSlides in any organization using it, to consult for user questions. 
• Training should be developed for both end users and administrators, covering the relevant usage of the service for each role.
• A 15 to 20 minute onboarding period should be scheduled at the beginning of a meeting to ensure participants can log in and participate in a demo debate and vote to learn the tool.
• Additionally, ensuring IT staffers are present or available at major conventions to troubleshoot the backend would be ideal.

• OpenSlides Pilot
• Conduct an evaluation of the full stack before general usage through a pilot program, identifying organizational, technical, and educational changes that would be needed before deployment to a wider group.

Meeting Preparation

• Agendas in advance
• Agendas, resolutions, reports, elections, and known motions should be entered into OpenSlides before participants arrive.
• Documents that delegates will need during debate should be attached or linked to the relevant agenda items.
• Speaker-list rules, voting thresholds, and participant groups should also be configured before the meeting.

• Participant verification
• Delegate or participant information should be imported in advance where possible.
• Voting rights should be checked against the official credentialing process.
• A process should be available at registration for resolving missing accounts, duplicate accounts, incorrect names, and incorrect voting permissions.
• Credentials should be distributed using a method appropriate to the sensitivity of the meeting rather than displaying shared passwords or publicly distributing administrator links.

• Meeting templates
• Once CYND has successfully used OpenSlides, a reusable meeting template should be developed containing standard participant groups, permissions, agenda structure, motion categories, voting settings, and branding.
• This would substantially reduce the work required to use OpenSlides for future meetings and help ensure procedural consistency.

Conclusion

In the lead up to and during the 2026 Convention in Winnipeg, New Democrats ranked and debated resolutions submitted from constituencies and stakeholders across the country. Prior to the convention, hundreds of resolutions were presented to NDP members for prioritization through the DOTS voting system, a process that was problematic in a few ways, but illustrates that New Democrats are ready to incorporate online voting into our democratic processes- but in that case, why did both the central party and Canada’s Young New Democrats resort to paper ballots and voting cards (and in some cases the infamous “equity card”) to decide the future of the party? Well, probably because they hadn’t heard of OpenSlides. The adoption of OpenSlides by Canada’s Young New Democrats would be a step towards a persistent, open source option for the NDP going forward.