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.
