Officially launched on 9 May 2021, the Conference on the Future of Europe is an emblematic political exercise and an unprecedented step in the history of digital democracy.
This is the first time that such a participatory process has been organised on a European scale. Based on the open online participation of citizens in all their diversity, the work of randomly selected citizens' panels and deliberative plenaries, the year-long process is the most ambitious we have seen to date.
It is a great honour for the Open Source Politics team to have contributed for several months to the preparation and implementation of the participatory platform that is at the heart of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
The context
Why Decidim?
As of 2019, the European institutions and Member State governments have expressed their desire to involve citizens in shaping the future of Europe. After a comparison of all existing platforms, the European Union chose Decidim. Renewing a long-standing commitment to open source software, this choice was natural as Decidim shares in its conception the democratic principles of the Conference: transparency, integrity and inclusion.
The participatory platform
Several companies in the European Decidim ecosystem have been working on the implementation of the participatory platform. Among them, Open Source Politics was called upon almost a year ago by the Commission services to help the institutions design the participatory modalities and prepare the development of new features. Launched on 19 April, the platform has already collected several thousand contributions. Written in any of the 24 official languages of the European Union, they are automatically translated to make discussion possible on a continental scale.
This platform is the central hub of the Conference. It is through this platform that ideas and events on the ten identified themes are shared and debated. In addition to these contribution spaces and decentralised events, the platform will be enriched in the future by the broadcasting of the Conference plenaries and the presentation of the citizen panels.
The Conference for the Future of Europe
At this time of unprecedented change, citizens expect more than ever a democratic, coherent and efficient Union, capable of actively addressing Europe's current crises and challenges.
In response to these challenges, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council are jointly launching the Conference on the Future of Europe to give citizens a decision-making role in European policy-making.
On 10 March 2021, a joint declaration between the European institutions was signed, setting out the contours of this project. The results of the conference are expected in spring 2022.
We need to make this debate as lively as possible. In these times of COVID, this means experimenting with digital platforms as much as possible. With this platform, we offer the tools to give everyone the opportunity to actively engage in this debate and we will ensure that these ideas feed into the analysis and conclusions of the Conference. It is their future, therefore it is their Conference.
MEP Guy Verhofstadt
Preparing the conference platform
Several OSP services are involved in the implementation of the Conference on the Future of Europe.
The Advisory Team
Our consulting team organised several design workshops in spring and summer 2020 to choose the Decidim functionalities that are placed at the heart of the platform. We have been coordinating the actors involved in the preparation of the platform for a year, which gives us the opportunity to collaborate with Swedish (Digidem Lab on workshops and trainings), Spanish (Codegram on early developments) and Romanian (Tremend on all technical issues) companies.
The Product Team
Our product team is involved in the specification of new developments and coordination with the Decidim community. User-created events with summary reports, multilingual management, customised graphic identity, home page carousel, new proposal evaluation systems... all these advances will benefit all Decidim administrators and users.
The Moderation and Translation team
We have set up a dedicated team of four people to provide real-time post-moderation of the platform and rely on language experts to ensure interaction with users in all languages. Our moderation team has also been responsible for integrating all the platform's content into the 24 languages.
It is particularly stimulating to exchange on a daily basis with partners from all Member States and from several institutions on the organisation of the future steps of the process and the preparation of analyses based on the artificial intelligence tools developed by the Commission's research centre.
The platform is just waiting for you. You can find all the events created and all the ideas already submitted, but also add your own and discuss them with citizens from all over Europe. Visit futureu.europa.eu!
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