Demosplan Core Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Build vs. buy vs. fork for civic-tech / public participation: demosplan-core is a working implementation of the domain behind formal public consultation — statement capture, categorization/clustering, document publication, procedure phases, participant roles, map/geo layers, and export of decision records. It's a concrete scoping baseline for anyone building a "Statements / consultation" feature, letting the team size effort against reality rather than a whiteboard.
• Roadmap and feature prioritization for regulated products: use the package as a feature inventory. It separates legal table stakes (phases, roles, audit-relevant records, accessibility) from differentiators, and surfaces the compliance-adjacent work (retention, GDPR-by-design, BITV/EN 301 549, eID) that typically gets under-scoped.
• Architecture and stack decisions: important nuance — despite the framing, this is a Symfony/PHP monorepo, not a Laravel package. That's a real input to the "adopt vs. wrap vs. reimplement the concepts" decision, and to whether your team's stack is compatible.
• Procurement, licensing, and maintenance model: NOASSERTION plus an 11-star public repo means the decision is less "should we composer require this" and more "is the DEMOS ecosystem (not this repo) the right base, and who supports it long-term?" Drives due diligence on the underlying EUPL-style copyleft license and vendor/partner availability.
• NFR backlog inputs: it's a template for GDPR, accessibility, and public-sector audit requirements, which can be lifted into your own NFRs whether or not you adopt any code.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You're scoping or building a citizen participation / formal consultation product for German or EU public administration (Bauleitplanung, Umweltprüfung, and adjacent procedures).
• You need a reference implementation or selective fork base for statement and procedure workflows — not a drop-in library.
• You have in-house Symfony/PHP capacity and are comfortable owning a monorepo.
• You want to benchmark data model, permissions, and procedure state machines before writing your own spec.

Look elsewhere when:

• You need a conventional, versioned package with a stable public API and active community — this is the opposite; 11 stars and NOASSERTION should be read as "reference material," not "dependency."
• You're building a lightweight general-purpose feedback or survey tool — the domain model is heavy and opinionated, and the workflows assume statutory process.
• You're outside DE/EU public sector, or legal cannot accept an ambiguous license without a commercial partner to de-risk it.
• Speed to market on a general product matters more than domain fidelity.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

To executives: demosplan-core is a publicly funded, working implementation of a legally mandated consultation workflow used in German public administration. We are not proposing to adopt it as a dependency. We are proposing to use it as a reference architecture, which buys three things: (1) a de-risked feature scope sized against a real product rather than estimates; (2) avoidance of re-learning compliance, accessibility, and audit requirements the hard way; (3) a credible build-vs-buy baseline we can take to procurement or to a delivery partner. The two risks — ambiguous licensing (NOASSERTION, needs legal review) and a small public maintenance footprint — both argue for study and selectively fork, not ship-and-depend. Note also that it's Symfony, not Laravel, so this is a domain decision, not a stack commitment.

To engineering: treat this as a Symfony/PHP domain model and workflow reference. Most valuable for the statement data model, procedure/phase state machines, and role/permission design. Do not plan on it as a package dependency: no stable public contract, minimal public activity, monorepo structure. Recommend a time-boxed 2–3 day spike to extract the data model and a workflow map into our own spec, plus a parallel legal and architecture review before any code is copied.