Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies

Across Europe, attempts to engage citizens and social movements in democratic decision-making andcollaboration using digital platforms are still in their early stages. Most of these platforms lack featuresand have complex user-interfaces, which might leave many people unable to meaningfully participate inthe democratic process via the Internet. A few existing platforms have been specifically designed toengage users into large-scale Internet-based democratic process that goes beyond the limits oftraditional corporate social media. There are some bright spots, such as the large-scale usage in Icelandof Your Priorities for over four years. Yet, most of these initiatives did not succeed in supporting theprocess of large-scale collective action and participation by different communities. For more richinformation about the different needs of the communities in the pilots, see Deliverables in Workpackage1 and Workpackage 2.D-CENT is conducting pilots across Europe to accelerate the development of distributed alternatives toonline, democratic voting and deliberation. The goal is to develop a framework for the deployment ofdecentralized social networks for community-driven democracy which are both easy to use andproperly aligned with citizen motivations and digital rights. Some of the features will be specificallydesigned to link into existing formal structures of democratic power; other will purport to build thecapacity for the deployment of new democratic institutions, harnessing the network effects of digitaltools and real-time collaboration to solve real citizens' problems.