Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EMPATIA (Enabling Multichannel PArticipation Through ICT Adaptations)
Período documentado: 2017-01-01 hasta 2018-03-31
Participatory budgeting (PB) represents one of the most successful Democratic Innovations (DI) of the last quarter-century.
In PB, local governments engage citizens in the decision-making process regarding the discussion, approval and execution of the public budget. At a time when voter turnout in Europe is lagging, and public institutions struggle to maintain trust and legitimacy within a framework of growing budgetary cuts, PB has proved to be a powerful tool for citizens to join in the essential tasks of governing, not only as voters but also as decision-makers themselves.
The emergence of a new generation of hybrid democratic innovations, where traditional face-to-face channels of engagement are combined with digital means of participation, expanded the opportunities and boosted the multiplication of participatory experiments in many European cities. At the same time, the hybridization of civic engagement introduces new challenges to the design and management of PB and other complex DIs. When different tools and channels for favouring social dialogue are not properly integrated in a coordinated and accountable manner they tend to generate redundancies, inefficiencies, conflicts, exclusion, and missed opportunities.
The EMPATIA project was conceived to tackle these challenges, aiming to radically enhance the impact of PB processes and other similar participatory innovations, by increasing the quality of citizens’ participation in the different phases of the decision-making process
The main goal of the EMPATIA project is to research, develop, validate and disseminate innovative methods and ICT solutions for the design and management of PB and other complex DIs, adaptable to different social and institutional contexts.
In PB, local governments engage citizens in the decision-making process regarding the discussion, approval and execution of the public budget. At a time when voter turnout in Europe is lagging, and public institutions struggle to maintain trust and legitimacy within a framework of growing budgetary cuts, PB has proved to be a powerful tool for citizens to join in the essential tasks of governing, not only as voters but also as decision-makers themselves.
The emergence of a new generation of hybrid democratic innovations, where traditional face-to-face channels of engagement are combined with digital means of participation, expanded the opportunities and boosted the multiplication of participatory experiments in many European cities. At the same time, the hybridization of civic engagement introduces new challenges to the design and management of PB and other complex DIs. When different tools and channels for favouring social dialogue are not properly integrated in a coordinated and accountable manner they tend to generate redundancies, inefficiencies, conflicts, exclusion, and missed opportunities.
The EMPATIA project was conceived to tackle these challenges, aiming to radically enhance the impact of PB processes and other similar participatory innovations, by increasing the quality of citizens’ participation in the different phases of the decision-making process
The main goal of the EMPATIA project is to research, develop, validate and disseminate innovative methods and ICT solutions for the design and management of PB and other complex DIs, adaptable to different social and institutional contexts.
The project has been carried out along five main lines of actions:
1) Research and analysis of leading ICT interventions in European PB processes:
a. Definition and validation of the methodological framework for the design and management of PB and other complex participatory processes and their integrating systems.
b. Collection and refinement of requirements for the EMPATIA Platform prototype involving stakeholders in pilots and experts.
c. Development and implementation of ethical guidelines and policies to be adopted during the creation of the platform, the implementation of pilots, in research activity as well as in the dissemination and exploitation of results.
2) Development of an open and free digital platform prototype (called EMPATIA Platform), flexible and customizable, aimed at supporting a variety of participatory processes and combining different channels of interaction between citizens and administrative institutions.
Two prototypes have been publicly released on
3) Rigorous testing of the methodology and of the platform applied to participatory processes in the context of:
a. 4 official pilot cities– Lisbon (Portugal), Milan (Italy), Říčany (Czech Republic) and Wuppertal (Germany) – where we collaborated with local authorities in the design and implementation of a PB process involving the local community in public decision making.
b. Other 14 case deployments in test settings and to support pre-existing democratic innovations carried out in other context than the pilots.
c. Role-playing game and participation simulator “Empaville” (i.e. “the city of EMPATIA”) and was conceived for simulating a gamified Participatory Budgeting process in the imaginary city of Empaville.
4) Completion of a thorough evaluation of results, distilling key lessons and introducing all needed technological and methodological corrections to the platform as well as to the participatory methodologies used in the pilots.
5) Dissemination of both key methodological and technological results targeting a wide number of different Primary Stakeholders at EU scale, in order to create enabling conditions for the replication of further PB cases that could adopt and integrate the methodology:
a. Direct engagement of citizens and public and private stakeholders in pilots and other applications in real cases or testing settings: at the time of writing, the EMPATIA platform has been used, experimented on, and validated in 19 cases worldwide, having more than 100,000 unique visitors, 40,000 registered users, and 40,000 unique votes/preferences collected.
b. Promotion of a multidisciplinary community of participatory practices involving networks of cities, practitioners, civic hackers, and other specialized publics at the international level: involvement of more than 1000 specialized stakeholders in 20 events organized along the action, and participation to 123 third party events.
c. 17 scientific publications in scientific journals, books and conferences.
1) Research and analysis of leading ICT interventions in European PB processes:
a. Definition and validation of the methodological framework for the design and management of PB and other complex participatory processes and their integrating systems.
b. Collection and refinement of requirements for the EMPATIA Platform prototype involving stakeholders in pilots and experts.
c. Development and implementation of ethical guidelines and policies to be adopted during the creation of the platform, the implementation of pilots, in research activity as well as in the dissemination and exploitation of results.
2) Development of an open and free digital platform prototype (called EMPATIA Platform), flexible and customizable, aimed at supporting a variety of participatory processes and combining different channels of interaction between citizens and administrative institutions.
Two prototypes have been publicly released on
3) Rigorous testing of the methodology and of the platform applied to participatory processes in the context of:
a. 4 official pilot cities– Lisbon (Portugal), Milan (Italy), Říčany (Czech Republic) and Wuppertal (Germany) – where we collaborated with local authorities in the design and implementation of a PB process involving the local community in public decision making.
b. Other 14 case deployments in test settings and to support pre-existing democratic innovations carried out in other context than the pilots.
c. Role-playing game and participation simulator “Empaville” (i.e. “the city of EMPATIA”) and was conceived for simulating a gamified Participatory Budgeting process in the imaginary city of Empaville.
4) Completion of a thorough evaluation of results, distilling key lessons and introducing all needed technological and methodological corrections to the platform as well as to the participatory methodologies used in the pilots.
5) Dissemination of both key methodological and technological results targeting a wide number of different Primary Stakeholders at EU scale, in order to create enabling conditions for the replication of further PB cases that could adopt and integrate the methodology:
a. Direct engagement of citizens and public and private stakeholders in pilots and other applications in real cases or testing settings: at the time of writing, the EMPATIA platform has been used, experimented on, and validated in 19 cases worldwide, having more than 100,000 unique visitors, 40,000 registered users, and 40,000 unique votes/preferences collected.
b. Promotion of a multidisciplinary community of participatory practices involving networks of cities, practitioners, civic hackers, and other specialized publics at the international level: involvement of more than 1000 specialized stakeholders in 20 events organized along the action, and participation to 123 third party events.
c. 17 scientific publications in scientific journals, books and conferences.
The underlying expectations of EMPATIA are creating and advocating processes of democratic innovation and engagement of citizen in decision-making; contributing to intensify participatory democracy practices as the PB, where citizens decide how to allocate part of a municipal budget. In particular, EMPATIA developed, tested and disseminated methods and tools aimed to expand the inclusive capacity of PB, improve the quality of public deliberation, and increase the transparency on the management of public resources.
Considered together, the goals pursued could contribute to incrementally restore mutual trust between inhabitants and their representative institutions.
EMPATIA had a direct socio-economic impact at the local scale of the 4 Pilots in Lisbon (PT), Milan Wuppertal (DE) and Říčany (CZ), as a direct consequence of PB implementation using the EMPATIA tools and methods. Subsequent dissemination and adoption of the EMPATIA platform, components and paradigms has extended this impact to other communities – in some cases improving PB processes already taking place regularly, and in other cases supporting the introduction of PB processes for the first time. Overall, the EMPATIA platform and methods have been used to engage more than 40.000 european citizens in public decision making processes regarding the expenditures of their municipalities.
The broader societal impacts are expected to be the elevation of societal awareness about complexity of public management. Under this perspective, the ultimate expected impact of EMPATIA is contributing to “fiscal civism” through making citizens transparently involved in the spend-and-benefit process. On the side of the public administrations, which open spaces for sharing with citizens’ decisions on public projects and policies, the ultimate goal is managing their spaces of social dialogue with more efficiency and effectiveness.
Over the duration of the project, the EMPATIA consortium could test all the hypotheses linked to its central research question, enabling at the same time a large debate within a variety of disciplinary domains. A “serendipity-oriented” approach was used, allowing the consortium to maximize unexpected lessons which emerged through the learning-by-doing experiences acquired, and provided the opportunity of constructing and establishing a network of actors, connected to the main aims of the project. This network of actors may ensure the long-term sustainability of the project outcomes and significantly increase its impact.
Considered together, the goals pursued could contribute to incrementally restore mutual trust between inhabitants and their representative institutions.
EMPATIA had a direct socio-economic impact at the local scale of the 4 Pilots in Lisbon (PT), Milan Wuppertal (DE) and Říčany (CZ), as a direct consequence of PB implementation using the EMPATIA tools and methods. Subsequent dissemination and adoption of the EMPATIA platform, components and paradigms has extended this impact to other communities – in some cases improving PB processes already taking place regularly, and in other cases supporting the introduction of PB processes for the first time. Overall, the EMPATIA platform and methods have been used to engage more than 40.000 european citizens in public decision making processes regarding the expenditures of their municipalities.
The broader societal impacts are expected to be the elevation of societal awareness about complexity of public management. Under this perspective, the ultimate expected impact of EMPATIA is contributing to “fiscal civism” through making citizens transparently involved in the spend-and-benefit process. On the side of the public administrations, which open spaces for sharing with citizens’ decisions on public projects and policies, the ultimate goal is managing their spaces of social dialogue with more efficiency and effectiveness.
Over the duration of the project, the EMPATIA consortium could test all the hypotheses linked to its central research question, enabling at the same time a large debate within a variety of disciplinary domains. A “serendipity-oriented” approach was used, allowing the consortium to maximize unexpected lessons which emerged through the learning-by-doing experiences acquired, and provided the opportunity of constructing and establishing a network of actors, connected to the main aims of the project. This network of actors may ensure the long-term sustainability of the project outcomes and significantly increase its impact.