Motivations

We are in the midst of a transformation of democracy that involves many new channels of citizen participation in government, often outside of the more visible politics of electoral representation. These channels are designed to promote inclusion, high quality deliberation, better voting mechanisms, transparency, accountability, citizens’ involvement in politics and more generally improve democracy. However, when these channels are not properly integrated, they generate redundancies, inefficiencies, conflicts, exclusion, and missed opportunities.

Objectives

The EMPATIA project was created to address these challenges by designing coherent participatory systems and tools to evaluate and optimize them. The project was based on a constant dialogue between research and practice, this website describes what we did and the lesson we learned along the way. The EMPATIA project was composed of a multidisciplinary consortium of partners with extended expertise in digital and in person participatory processes.

Who we are

The EMPATIA consortium included partners with expertise in traditional and ICT-based participatory processes, both from an academic and a practical perspective. With more than 400 public events the EMPATIA also engaged a large community of researchers, activists and friends that contributed invaluable feedback to all aspects of the project.

partners & community page

What we did

The Empatia project had three main components, researching best practices, designing and implementing pilots, evaluating pilots and drawing lessons. During the course of the project we researched hundreds of existing practices, we implemented four primary pilots, and collected more than 5000 surveys.

Check out EMPATIA's reports