Enriching citizen proposals with Contextual Knowledge

Over the last few months, the MultiPoD consortium has been working on the integration between Decidim and the webLyzard Visual Analytics Dashboard, creating a more connected and informative participation experience for citizens. As part of this work, the Open Source Politics (OSP) team developed a new sidebar widget for Decidim proposals. The widget is designed as a flexible integration point that can host different technologies and services. Within the MultiPoD project, it has been used to embed the webLyzard Dashboard, one of the key components of the project’s technological stack.

The integration creates a seamless workflow between citizen participation and knowledge exploration. When a participant submits or views a proposal in Decidim, the proposal’s content is analysed by the webLyzard Dashboard. Drawing on the proposal’s title, description, and contextual metadata, webLyzard identifies the main topics and concepts addressed in the text and uses them to retrieve relevant information from external sources.

The resulting recommendations are displayed directly within the proposal page through the sidebar widget developed by OSP. Rather than presenting generic search results, the dashboard offers a curated collection of related content, helping participants explore the broader context surrounding the proposal. For example, a proposal discussing social housing as a response to rising housing costs may surface related news articles, reports, policy documents, and online discussions connected to housing affordability, rental markets, and urban policy. This allows participants to discover evidence, alternative perspectives, and complementary information without leaving the Decidim platform.

By transforming proposal text into a gateway for contextual knowledge, the integration enriches the participation experience and supports more informed deliberation. Participants can move seamlessly between expressing their ideas and exploring relevant information, creating a stronger connection between civic engagement and knowledge discovery. From a technical perspective, this development contributes to the integrated workflow envisioned in MultiPoD tasks “Open-Source Hybrid Deliberation Space”, “Open Architecture to Interconnect Communities”and “Visual Analytics Dashboard to Explore Public Deliberation Processes”. During this phase, the consortium specified the platform’s layered architecture and delivered the first prototypes connecting several core components of the ecosystem, including the Decidim participation platform, the Democratic Reflection second-screen feedback tool developed by The Open University, the webLyzard Visual Analytics Dashboard, and the Storypact Editor.

The proposal-aware webLyzard integration represents an important step towards creating richer and more informed democratic participation processes. By connecting citizen-generated content with relevant external knowledge, participants are better equipped to understand issues, discover evidence, and engage in meaningful deliberation. The integration will continue to be evaluated and refined during the upcoming pilot activities and throughout the second reporting period, helping to further strengthen the connection between participation, knowledge discovery, and democratic reflection.