Innovative and Inclusive Democratic Spaces for Deliberation and Participation

ongoing

Deliberative and participatory processes currently lack full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities from democratic spaces. iDEM will address this issue in the context of marginalisation and exclusion of people who need support to fully be able to read, write and comprehend language (around six million individuals in the EU and over 90 million people globally). iDEM will lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of current marginalisation from deliberative processes of diverse under-represented groups due to language skills and propose, implement, and evaluate inclusive deliberative and participatory spaces. It will adopt a user-centred approach for making participatory processes more accessible and inclusive, developing advanced natural language processing technologies and artificial intelligence to empower under-represented groups with tools to facilitate communication and dialog in democratic spaces. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages and biases for several European languages and audiences, (2) automatically adapting texts in those languages to be accessible and unbiased for these audiences, (3) providing AI tools for enhancing the controllable generation of messages and discourses. iDEM will innovate democratic spaces with customised, user-centric technology enhancing the participation and representation of marginalised groups by providing unbiased and inclusive technology. To do so, iDEM will also build on the results of relevant past projects, and seek collaboration with related projects and relevant centres for democracy in Europe.