Tackling civic participation challenges with emerging technologies

3. The role of emerging technologies in tackling citizen participation challenges

The idea of deploying digital technologies to improve democratic governance and institutions is hardly new, even dating back to the 1970s (Schrock, 2019[40]). Digital technologies are contributing to expanding the opportunities of citizen participation by supporting existing in-person mechanisms and enabling new forms and channels of interaction between citizens and governments. Technology is regularly used by public authorities at all levels of government to collect and analyse citizen inputs, to inform them about participation opportunities, to provide learning materials, online voting and follow-up on the implementation of the results of participatory and deliberative processes (García and Al., 2023[41]). For instance, numerous local governments in the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal regularly use digital tools to involve citizens in participatory processes such as participatory budgeting or urban planning (see Box 1). The OECD defines this trend as Civic Tech, meaning “the use of digital technologies to reinforce democracy by enabling the public to be informed, participate in decision and policymaking, and increase governments’ responsiveness and accountability” (OECD, forthcoming[42]).

The benefits of digital technologies for citizen participation can be clustered around (OECD, forthcoming[43]) (Nesta, 2021[44]):

• Scope: technology can help reach out to a larger number of individuals, in broader geographical spaces.

• Interaction: technology can innovate in how the public participates, by for example enabling asynchronous participation or non-textual forms of interaction.

• Efficiency: technology can help public authorities design and implement participatory processes, and better manage inputs received.

• Impact: technology can augment and amplify the results of participatory or deliberative processes beyond a small group of participants.

Emerging technologies are redefining the civic tech field

The emergence of technologies provides the opportunity to reflect on the original promise and set the right expectations for the new generation of technology. This reassessment can build upon previous experiences where digital tools prove the most effective, as well as expand to new horizons offered by emerging technologies. As part of this technological process, the OECD identified four phases of the Civic Tech development since its inception in the 2000s (Knight Foundation, 2013[45]; Mabi, 2017[46]; Rumbul, 2019[47]; Political Watch, 2022[48]; Modekurty et al., 2019[49]) and finds that emerging technologies are bringing civic technologies to a new dimension.

Table 3. Civic Tech – timeline of development

Phase	Key trends	Key dates
2004 – 2008 Inception	New phase of e-Government with interest in using ICTs not only for internal operations but also for citizen-facing projects. Precursory Civic Tech initiatives, mostly developed by civil society actors, with a more pronounced focus on transparency and monitoring. Civic Tech based on open data, visualization tools, and georeferencing technologies.	2004: TheyWorkForYou (UK parliamentary monitoring website) – mySociety; publication of OECD report “Promise and Problems of E-Democracy” (OECD, 2004[50]) 2006: OpenCongress (US monitoring tool) - the Sunlight Foundation 2007: Change.org (online petition platform) 2008: Ushahidi (Kenyan crowdsourcing platform) 2008: Washington DC hosts the first open government data hackathon, leading to the creation of 47 apps
2009 – 2015 Growth	Amplification of a government culture shift developing in relation to the open government movement. Creation of a global community around Civic Tech, through conferences and networks. Steady rise in Civic Tech launches, with a stronger focus on participation and representation. Civic Tech based on online forums, mobile applications, wikis, surveys, and data analysis.	2009: Launch of Ciudadanía Inteligente (Chile) 2009: Open Government directive by the Obama administration 2009: Launch of Code for America 2012: g0v civic hacking movement (Asia) 2012: Launch of Code for All 2013: People’s Assembly (Estonia) 2014: Launch of Pol.is and its first case study (Chinese Taipei) 2015: launch of TICTeC, one of the leading Civic Tech conferences 2015: peak year for project launches according to the Civic Tech Field Guide’s timeline: Consul (Spain), Make.org, CitizenLab, LabHacker (Brazil), etc.
2016 – 2022 Consolidation	Maturing of the Civic Tech field: slowing down in project launches, replication of successful tools, structuring of private sector, calls from the field to reflect on the impact of initiatives. Further institutionalisation of Civic Tech, with initiatives originating from civil society or private actors now integrated by governments and Civic Tech ecosystem working more closely with institutions. Context in which public perception of technology has become more negative.	2016: launch of participation platform Decidim in Barcelona 2016: participatory drafting of the constitution of Mexico City (Change.org) with 280 000 online participants. 2016: Civic Tech Hackathon organized by the French Presidency during the OGP Summit 2017: government technology company OpenGov acquires Open Town Hall; OECD Recommendation of the Council on Open Government (OECD, 2017[18]) 2019: All OECD countries have a dedicated entity to lead and co-ordinate digital government, and 88% have “open by default” requirements for government data (2020[51]). 2019: Launch of ACTE (industry trade group for digital participation platforms in Europe) 2020: online WirvsVirus hackathon in Germany, with over 28 000 participants in 48 hours 2021 – 2022: Conference on the Future of Europe uses automatic translation
2023 - A Fourth Age of Civic Tech	Post Covid-19 pandemic, which accelerated the digitalization of many public services and interactions with government. Emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual realities renew interest in the civic tech ecosystem.	2023: The “Civic Tech Field Guide” reaches 8000 projects 2023: Brazil launches its federal platform for participation based on Decidim 2023: Citizens.is experiments with ChatGPT-4 in Iceland 2023-24: Adoption of AI tools by civic tech actors (Make.org, Bluenove, GoVocal) 2024: French Citizen Convention on End-of-Life experiments with GenAI

Source: Author’s own elaboration based on (Knight Foundation, 2013[45]; Mabi, 2017[46]; Rumbul, 2019[47]; Political Watch, 2022[48]). (Modekurty et al., 2019[49])

To assess the promise of emerging technologies for the civic tech field and for democracy, the OECD suggests a pragmatic approach by looking at how emerging technologies could help solve the main challenges faced by participatory and deliberative processes previously described in section “Citizen Participation and deliberation face challenges”.

Box 1. Good practices in Netherlands, Portugal and Spain

In the Netherlands - The OpenStad platform is an open-source tool that allows cities to promote community engagement through online voting, consultation, and participatory budgeting. Recently, the city of Enschede piloted a new version which is embedded in the official government website to integrate participation in the usual channels of communication of the government.

In Spain – Initially developed by the Municipality of Barcelona, Decidim is an open-source and highly customizable software. It allows governments, organizations, and communities to tailor their digital platform for participation to adapt it to their own context when facilitating consultations, debates, budget planning, and collaborative proposals.

In Portugal - Participa.gov is a digital platform deployed by the National government to allow citizens submit ideas, share opinions, and take part in decision-making processes.

Source: OECD, Observatory for Public Sector Innovation – Case Study Library (2024), https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations

Artificial intelligence can help augment participation and amplify deliberation

Artificial intelligence systems (AI) introduce new and significant opportunities to support citizen participation. AI can help governments increase the efficiency and scope of their participatory efforts, while supporting citizens in reaching consensus in large online conversations while maintaining the quality of exchanges. Nevertheless, the use of AI tools should aim at supporting human capacities on both the citizens and government sides, and not at replacing humans (Acemoglu and Johnson, 2023[52]). In other words, automated or predictive decision-making enabled by AI systems should not replace citizen participation efforts. Finally, policymakers and practitioners should focus on using AI tools to enable high quality large-scale participatory processes, instead of adopting such tools to uniquely improve the efficiency of information processing.

The main area of opportunity relies on AI’s ability to make sense of large amounts of information. Governments usually face the challenge of analysing large amounts of qualitative inputs received in online or in person consultations. For example, in 2019, the French Government organised a national consultation on government priorities (Grand Débat) that gathered 1.9 million submissions through an online platform (French Government, 2019[53]). The ability of AI systems, and in particular of natural language processing (NLPs) models, to make sense of large amounts of textual inputs contributes to analysing and summarising citizen input. Concretely, AI systems can map or predict trends, cluster opinions and ideas (Arana-Catania et al., 2021[54]) (Berditchevskaia and Baeck, 2020[55]), detect outliers (Schneider and Sanders, 2023[56]), help navigate sentiments or divergences around a sensitive issue or rank content based on participants’ preferences. AI can help public officials and civil servants understand and visualise citizens’ priorities and opinions on the issues at stake, support them in translating large amounts of inputs into actionable recommendations that are representative of the participants’ views and enable faster summary of deliberations or consultations.

Recent studies show the potential of AI to support consensus-making among large groups of people. In the United Kingdom, researchers trained a large language model (LLM) called the Habermas Machine to facilitate divisive discussions on topics like migration and climate change. This AI moderation model helped generate more agreeable and inclusive statements, leading to broadly accepted outcomes without disregarding minority viewpoints (Tessler et al., 2024[57]). AI-enhanced deliberation could help scale deliberative democracy by facilitating large online conversations or supporting human facilitators in finding common ground on complex issues. The combination of LLM capacities to summarise and process large amount of information in different languages and build consensus could also enable transnational or multilingual deliberations, setting the path for regional or global deliberations (Miller, 2024[58]).

Case study: Deliberative technologies like Pol.is can help understand citizens’ voice and scale deliberation

How does Pol.is work?

Pol.is is an AI-powered open-source software designed as a “system for gathering, analysing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning” (The Computational Democracy Project, 2024[59]). Pol.is – as other tools like Remesh or Cortico – is part of a relatively new field of deliberative technologies which focuses on tools that facilitate inputs collection, reactions and responses to given questions or statements. Participants contribute to discussions by responding to prompt questions through short text statements, or comments, which are then sent out semi-randomly to other participants to vote on by clicking agree, disagree or pass. It uses an algorithm that clusters opinions and identifies “consensus and divisive statements”, becoming a useful tool to reach consensus on controversial policy issues.

Figure 1. Pol.is visualisation of major opinion trends after a consultation

Source: https://compdemocracy.org/Case-studies

Actors

Pol.is is maintained by the Computational Democracy Project, a nonprofit organisation based in the United States and has been implemented by several public authorities in countries like Austria, Germany, the United States, and Uruguay. In 2023, the Finnish Future Fund Sitra experimented with Pol.is to conduct a national-wide consultation process on citizens’ policy priorities and opinions (Sitra, 2023[60]). Different public authorities in the Netherlands including the Province of South Holland, the Municipality of Groningen and the Ministry of the Interior in partnership with research organisations such as Tilburg University have an ongoing a pilot to experiment with the use of pol.is at the national level as a way to better involve citizens in the digital era.

Table 4. Pol.is (or other deliberative technologies) can help address existing challenges

Type of challenge	Concrete difficulties faced by the participatory ecosystem	Possible solution using an emerging technology
Impact	Challenges related to the analysis of inputs received.	Cluster mapping can help policymakers visualise citizens’ inputs, map opinions on complex topics, supporting uptake of citizen participation outcomes.
Isolation	Gap between process (and its outcomes) and the wider public	AI can amplify the impact of a Citizen Assembly by combining small in-person and massive online deliberations.
Resources	Insufficient time and resources in government	AI can scale deliberation by multiplying small, representative groups with the help of AI moderation AI can help governments summarise and address inputs more efficiently

Source: Author’s own elaboration

2. Case study: Panoramic AI can connect Citizens Assemblies to the broader public

How does Panoramic AI work?

PanoramicAI1 is an online platform powered with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to make complex subjects accessible to everyone. The objective of PanoramicAI is to make the results of a deliberative process, including the learning materials, hearings, as well as deliberation of the members, accessible to a wider audience, in an easy and interactive manner. Built as a search engine format, the tool allows users to ask questions to which it answers in a bullet-point style synthesis, citing all the original sources. Panoramic uses artificial intelligence (RAG model, which means Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to first understand the intent of the request, then identify the pertinent information in a large database, to finally generate an answer from the information collected adapting it to the initial query. Panoramic guides the user by providing suggested questions or topics to explore. For example, it invites users to start the conversation by asking for more information about the deliberative process, to select one of the main topics of the Assembly, or to ask any of the following questions: “What are the conclusions of the Citizens' Convention?” or “How were religious arguments included in the deliberations?”. Panoramic provides the original source for each answer and invites the user to further explore the different resources.

Actors

This tool was developed by a civic tech company (Make.org) and implemented in the context of the Citizen Convention on the End of Life organised by the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE)2.

Figure 2. Panoramic AI used to bridge Citizen Assemblies

Source: Author’s own elaboration

Table 5. Generative AI can help address existing challenges

Type of challenge	Concrete difficulties faced by the participatory ecosystem	Possible solution using an emerging technology
Impact	Challenges related to the analysis of inputs received. Low levels of impact	It can support uptake of recommendations by the media, civil servants, and public authorities It can make the results of the process (recommendations and deliberations) easy to navigate.
Isolation	Gap between process (and its outcomes) and the wider public	GenAI can connect Citizen Assemblies with the broader public by making its content more accessible, appealing, and easy to re-use.
Inclusion	Technical and complex language.	GenAI builds on original sources and helps the public navigate technical language whilst keeping links to original sources to facilitate fact checking and avoid oversimplification.

Source: Author’s own elaboration

Box 2. Additional examples of AI being used to improve citizen participation

GoVocal - Using AI to make better use of citizens’ inputs in online consultations

Municipalities across Europe like Leuven (Belgium), Linz (Austria) and Cambridge (United Kingdom) are using the online platform developed by the civic tech startup GoVocal to consult their residents. Recently, GoVocal started integrating machine-learning technologies to help civil servants process thousands of contributions and use these insights efficiently in decision-making. Concretely, civil servants with access to the back-office can use a dashboard where inputs received in a participatory process are classified and organised by clusters to visualise emerging topics, summarise trends, and group similar contributions by theme, demographic trait or location. The use of the AI sense-making tool allowed the project team to save 50% of the time required to properly process and summarise the inputs provided by the community.

Source: GoVocal (2024), case studies, https://www.govocal.com/case-studies

Blockchain and other distributed technologies can support online voting and shield participation from undue influence

Several characteristics of blockchain technology offer potential benefits for citizen participation (Ubaldi et al., 2019[14]).

• Disintermediation: A central intermediary or governing institution has traditionally been required to establish trust and mitigate risk among a set of independent parties that seek to enter into a transaction or agreement with each other. While these centralised bodies have effectively fulfilled their function throughout large parts of human history, they have at times grown opaque, complacent, inefficient and costly to run.

• Resilience: If properly designed, blockchain offers the promise of stronger resilience against cyberattacks and IT system frauds than centralised systems, thanks to its decentralised nature which prevents single point of failure that is common to centralised databases. As information is replicated simultaneously and kept in sync on all users of the network, if part of the network becomes faulty, there will always be another part that ensures continued availability of the system.

• Immutable: The association of cryptography, consensus protocols and collective/decentralised bookkeeping in principle guarantees that transactions are recorded irreversibly and permanently. In other words, there can only be one single version of the data/information that is visible to all participants in the network, although there is yet no way of authenticating the veracity of data/information protected in the blockchain.

The primary use case of blockchain for democratic processes is electronic voting. The possible benefits are increased security and resilience for distance voting as a way to create trust in the process and its outcome. This is particularly relevant to support voting elements in non-electoral processes (such a participatory budget or a petition) where authentication is less strict than electoral ballots. For example, doubts about the authenticity of petition signatures have been used by politicians to undermine demands from citizens (Peixoto and Steinberg, 2019[61]). Blockchain-based solutions could support distance voting with solutions to i) cast a vote, ii) audit the votes, or iii) enable voter registration or authentication (Park, Specter and Narula, 2020[62]). Blockchain technologies might be more beneficial for authentication purposes (digital identity3) to be used in online voting, but as of now, cases remain anecdotical and further experimentation and research should be undertaken to clarify the clear added value for blockchain technologies to be widely deployed in democratic processes.

Case study: Vochain and other blockchain tools can support secure non-electoral voting

How does Vochain work?

Vochain is a digital ballot protocol using blockchain’s decentralized technology (Tendermint) to enable “open source, decentralized, verifiable, tamper-proof & anonymous voting” (Vocdoni, 2021[63]). Vochain enables anonymity and vote security thanks to a cryptography protocol called zero-knowledge proof which allows the ballot organiser to check that a vote is from someone in the census but without revealing its identity (Vocdoni, 2021[63]).

Vochain was used in a non-binding local referendum in Bellpuig (Spain) where citizens were asked about the future of the town’s funeral services. In total, 1095 residents (31.67% of eligible voters) cast their vote using Vochain as the voting protocol (Vocdoni, 2021[63]). This voting protocol is embedded in the digital democracy platform Decidim as a secure online voting module and was tested during an internal election at the Extraordinary Assembly of the Decidim Association (Haarseim, 2023[64]). It has also been used by civil society in Belarus in 2024 to counter censorship and surveillance from the Government. Another blockchain-based voting system, Voatz, was used in the Mexican Federal Elections in June 2024, for expatriate voters who signed up for remote voting.

Actors

This technology was developed by Vocdoni (a private company) and has been deployed by different organisations from public authorities such as the Bellpuig Council, private organisations like the FC Barcelona, by civil society in Belarus, and by non-for-profit associations such as Decidim.

Table 6. Blockchain can help address existing challenges

Type of challenge	Concrete difficulties faced by the participatory ecosystem	Possible solution using an emerging technology
Trust	Low levels of trust	Blockchain can provide a secure and resilient digital voting system, supporting public trust in participatory processes with voting mechanisms
Integrity	Vulnerability to undue influence or policy capture by interest groups	Blockchain can provide a resilient voting system to protect from malicious actors whilst providing a secure authentication system to avoid manipulation of results by automated machines (bots) or organised campaigns.

Source: Author’s own elaboration

Box 3. Additional examples of Blockchain being used to improve citizen participation

Groningen municipality in the Netherlands

Blockchain technology has been implemented in the municipality through (at least) six pilots from 2016 to 2019, including a proof of concept for a digital vote-counting system during local/national elections.

Legislative citizen bills in Brazil

Mudamos is a mobile application leveraging blockchain technology that enables Brazil’s citizens to participate in lawmaking by proposing their own bills and signing onto one another’s proposals using verified electronic signatures.

Source: GovLab (X), Mudamos: the citizen initiative app, https://congress.crowd.law/files/mudamos-case-study.pdf

Virtual and augmented realities can improve the design, accessibility and experience of participatory and deliberative processes

Virtual and augmented realities (VR/AR) are most often associated with the entertainment industry where it has achieved modest success. Virtual and augmented realities could also represent potential benefits when applied in the context of citizen participation:

• Developing empathy: VR allows people to develop empathy, improve attitudes and increase prosocial behaviours than less immersive tasks such as watching a video (OECD, 2024[17]). In the context of participation, it could be used to bring real-life evidence into the decision-making process. For example, participants could experience the difficulties of people with disabilities to use public transport and reflect this experience into the design of public spaces. Developing empathy or understanding the standpoint of minorities can be positive in participatory processes to develop more inclusive policies and services that take into account the voices of usually underrepresented populations.

• Training and learning: A recent report by the European Commission concluded that education could become more effective and inclusive using VR/AR as it can enhance the educational experience with immersive interactive experiences, visualisations, and different kinds of communication (Hupont Torres et al., 2024[16]). In the context of a deliberative process, VR/AR could be used to improve the learning stage, which could be of particular benefit for topics that require imagination or empathy such as climate change or urban design, whilst decreasing costs related to travel for in-person learning.

• Digital twins: VR digital twins are used to model complex systems, often in urban planning, architectural design, manufacturing and training. In the context of participatory and deliberative processes, digital twins could increase citizens’ experience by enabling immersive visualisations of cities/communities for a specific short-term check, to more long-term visualisation and simulation of complex policy decisions modelling possible consequences of certain policy choices.

3. Case study: CoHeSIVE enables participatory design through immersive technologies

How does CoHeSIVE work?

Codesigning Healthy Public Spaces via Immersive Virtual Environments (CoHeSIVE) is a methodology for urban co-design using an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) technology. CoHeSIVE helps “citizens and designers participate together in an urban design discussion to understand individuals’ preferences for new, not yet existing design scenarios and corresponding design implication” (Evers et al., 2023[65]) . CoHeSIVE creates an immersive virtual environment where users can modify it in real time by using a Head-Mounted Display (HDM), resembling goggles, and a gaming engine. Users can move around and interact with the space and its objects as they would in the real life. Immersive environments and digital twins provide users with an infinite canvas for urban imagination and creativity.

Figure 3. CoHeSIVE as an interface to co-desing public spaces

Simulated environment from eye-level perspective with user interface to select among options a) or b)

Source: (Evers et al., 2023[65])

Actors

This technology was developed by a consortium of research institutions (Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University, Utrecht University and TMC Utrecht) and piloted for a research project on the Municipality of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The pilot consisted of a simulation of a future station plaza of downtown Eindhoven.

Table 7. Virtual reality can help address existing challenges

Type of challenge	Concrete difficulties faced by the participatory ecosystem	Possible solution using an emerging technology
Design	Unappealing processes Difficulty to engage	A virtual interactive canvas can enable dynamic processes supporting design and tangible proposals in urban settings. It can increase empathy and build new forms of evidence by creating virtual scenarios to experience specific situations or places - helping citizens connect with different realities. Helps participants deal with trade-offs or to select among different suggested scenarios.
Inclusion	Technical and complex language.	VR/AR can empower participants in processes where technical knowledge is required to better articulate ideas and suggestions by enabling more visual ideas and creative exercises.

Source: Author’s own elaboration

Box 4. Additional examples of VR/AR being used to improve citizen participation

Citiverses – ITU

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) launched the CitiVerse Initiative - a virtual environment that integrates real-world cities into digital spaces, helping local and regional governments visualise traffic, mobility planning, energy management, and pollution control. The objective is to make cities more inclusive and sustainable by enabling new forms of citizen participation.

Metaverse Seoul (Korea)

Metaverse Seoul is a Metaverse platform where citizens can access a wide array of administrative services as avatars that represent them in a three-dimensional virtual space. Citizens can navigate the 3D virtual space of Metaverse Seoul to access Seoul’s wide range of administrative services, including economy, culture and tourism, education, and participate in city administration. Virtual spaces have been built into the platform as a participatory space where all citizens can get together and interact in an enjoyable environment.

Source: (Seoul Metropolitan Government, n.d.[66])

Notes

← 1.  Accessible here: https://panoramic.make.org/about

← 2.  The Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life gathered 184 randomly selected citizens to debate and deliberate on whether the French framework on end-of-life support was functioning or if it should be amended. More information can be accesses here: https://airtable.com/appP4czQlAU1My2M3/shrX048tmQLl8yzdc/tblrttW98WGpdnX3Y/viwX5ZutDDGdDMEep?blocks=hide

← 3.  For more information on digital identity, please refer to OECD’s G20 Collection of Digital Identity Practices: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/fr/governance/g20-collection-of-digital-identity-practices_75223806-en