To achieve its goals, EUComMeet has experimented with several design innovations, supported by technological tools. They have been implemented into an online deliberative event, which represents the core project’s activity, with about 350 citizens from 5 countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland). The main event consisted of several deliberative mini-publics, running for about 10 days each in Spring 2023. It was preceded by a pilot experiment with students of high schools and universities in Autumn 2022. An online platform, renamed “Convivium”, which integrates tools for the project’s design innovations, was specifically developed for EUComMeet minipublics.
The first design innovation consisted in developing a multi-level process, where people could gradually raise awareness of multilevel contexts. Accordingly, the mini-publics changed their composition during the deliberation days: first, they were composed by citizens from the same city, then by people from two cities of the same country, and finally by people from different countries. To support interactions among European citizens, the “Convivium” platform integrated a machine translation tool.
The second innovation concerns the mode of interaction, to allow participants to experiment with forms of dialogue that require different skills, motivations, and types of communication.
Accordingly, the mini-publics alternated live interactions in video conferencing (synchronous sessions) with text-based forums (asynchronous sessions). To make this possible, the online platform integrated video- and text-based platforms into a single Participatory Space.
A third innovation experimented with different modes of moderation, to assess the potential of automated systems, as compared to human facilitators. Minipublics where thus randomly assigned to either automated or human facilitated discussions. To support this design innovation, the platform implemented a chatbot, renamed “Meety”, which was “trained” to launch the agenda of discussion, as well as the rules of the debate at specific intervals of time.
Finally, EUComMeet has sought to examine the dynamics of group interaction between people expressing different attitudes and opinions on a salient topic like climate change. Accordingly, there were different types of mini-publics, ranging from polarized groups, composed of people with diverging attitudes to like-minded groups, made of people sharing the same views, through cross-sectional mini-publics, where a variety of opinions on climate change, including neutral ones, were represented.
The main deliberative event represented the core project’s activity (the Make it Happen phase), with all other project’s tasks conceived as preparatory (Lessons Learned and Fill the Gap phases) or follow-up activities (Hindsight&Foresight phase).
The Lessons Learned phase collected aggregate data on deliberative events and the observers’ survey of selected cases, to get an overview of past deliberative experiences, as well as citizen and elites survey data. It also provided literature reviews on identity, polarization, and reflective judgements. These activities served the purpose to identify likely gaps in deliberative processes to be filled with the design innovations and technological tools developed for the main deliberative event (Fill the Gap phase). The Hindsight&Foresight stages of the project provided practically oriented reports, based on the analyses of the main event’s outcomes, to inform the organization and design of deliberative events.
