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A Digital Public Infrastructure to Foster Participatory Democracy

A Digital Public Infrastructure to Foster Participatory Democracy

Digital participatory platforms are becoming more popular and a real option to increase democratic citizen engagement in policy and decision-making. Institutions and organizations now have more tools than ever to involve people directly, but in times of political polarisation and social fragmentation, a question arises: how to ensure these digital spaces stay open, fair, and inclusive, especially across linguistic and cultural divides?

Funded through the Horizon Europe programme, the MultiPoD project is building a multilingual, cross-cultural infrastructure for citizen deliberation, aiming to create a genuinely European public space. Its inspiration comes from the Conference on the Future of Europe (2021–2022), which brought citizens together to debate long-term priorities for Europe. MultiPoD takes that vision further by connecting existing communities and organisations in a collaborative environment, helping them shape policies in a more participatory way.

The project combines a federated, open-access digital space with AI-driven knowledge extraction and language models tuned to cultural contexts. This combination is meant to overcome language barriers and make inclusive discussion easier for diverse audiences.

The open-source “Decidim” platform

One of the core technologies supporting this mission is Decidim, an open-source platform for participatory democracy developed by a large global community. This public digital infrastructure in its own right, built on transparent, community-managed code and supported by institutions worldwide. Its flexible architecture allows a huge range of organisations—from city councils to universities, cooperatives, and NGOs—to run democratic processes like citizen initiatives, assemblies, surveys, and debates.

The platform has already reached more than 3 million registered participants and has been put to work in cities like Helsinki, Mexico City, São Paulo, and New York. Its recognition as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance shows its value as an alternative to corporate platforms, which often lockdown designs and harvest personal data.

Innovation to improve democratic quality

As part of the MultiPoD’s consortium, Decidim provides a stable, transparent base for participatory processes, helping define user needs, troubleshoot issues, and guide improvements. It will be integrated with complementary technologies like Weblyzard for richer proposal-building, allowing MultiPoD to build on a proven platform while adapting it to multilingual and multicultural needs.

Decidim leads the civic tech field in quality and ethics, and its comprehensive approach and commitment to democratic principles have a wide impact on democratic quality. Four elements stand out:

  1. Traceability: The platform enhances mechanisms to follow how a proposal evolves to inform about the progression of ideas, contributing to a more inclusive democratic and open experience.
  2. Hybridisation: It has the potential to lower the barriers that exclude people from political participation.
  3. Transparency: It is designed so that everything happening on the platform is visible, allowing citizens to be aware of the changes made.
  4. Accountability: Decidim allows citizens to follow in real time the implementation of proposals and projects that came out from the participatory process they took part in.

These values are vital for the foreseen pilots in Athens and Brussels, which will bring citizens and policymakers together to address urgent social topics. The pilots aim to demonstrate how multilingual, multicultural dialogue can build trust, reduce bias, and strengthen transparency. In the bigger picture, MultiPoD shows how a modern digital public infrastructure, built on ethical civic tech and robust AI, can help citizens co-create solutions to shared problems and renew confidence in democratic systems.

By combining an innovative and collaborative participatory platform like Decidim with new AI tools that bridge language and cultural gaps, the project is setting out to prove that digital technology can support inclusive, collaborative, and resilient democratic practices, not just for Europe, but as an example for the world.