As highlighted by the Conference on the Future of Europe, EU citizens at large feel that the interplay between national media discourse and political/cultural contexts affects the perceptions and reactions to global events differently. Language barriers exacerbate siloed thinking, the bandwagon effect, group thinking, and the lack of diversity in dialogue around issues of international relevance, creating “areas” of thinking entrenched into national and language gates and hindering the creation of a truly European public sphere. Such challenges to democratic participation disproportionally affect members of cultural and linguistic minorities within and across EU member states. The research and innovation roadmap of the MultiPoD project aims to radically improve the political dialogue at the European level through evolving knowledge graphs and generative, Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies that mobilise collective intelligence, bridge existing communication barriers, and yield a better understanding of the interdependencies between participatory processes, policy decisions and behavioural, thought and argumentation patterns in the public deliberation of international affairs. For this purpose, MultiPoD brings together experienced use case partners, as well as European networks engaged in fostering participatory, deliberative democratic processes, technology partners with a strong track record in multilingual language processing, and leading research partners, specialised in collective intelligence, argumentation theory, human-computer interaction and visual methods for supporting and analysing online communication.

Despite emotions being a driver of political choices, building democratically meaningful emotional narratives in politics remains an uncharted territory. Hence the main venture of ENCODE is to decode the meanings of emotions and encode them to policy-making strategies aiming for a positive emotional turn, breaking the cycle of depolarisation. To meet this ambitious goal, ENCODE builds its conceptual frameworks arising from a novel concept of affective pluralisation, as opposed to affective polarisation. This term serves to frame empirical research carried out in 6 geographically diverse European countries, representing both EU member states and candidates. This study will span desk research, sentiment analysis, biometric research, in-depth interviews, experiments and panel survey. Such triangulation of research techniques ensures the accuracy and validity of the findings. These are further encoded into main outputs: catalogue of best practice to tackle disinformation in social media, emotional gap maps, validated survey questions and democratic resilience heatmaps. These outputs are not expected only to enhance current scientific framework, but also are planned to underpin the future emotional narratives co-designed by diverse groups of citizens in innovations labs and further validated by Delphi expert panels and vignette experiments. This bottom-up approach anchored in citizen science ensures that policy-making strategy are in first place created by citizens and only in the next step discussed by expert teams who will elaborate policy-making strategies, the roadmap for their implementation, alongside future foresight scenarios which will be disseminated widely across EU and EU wide community of 1000+ members. This strategy creates emotional bonds between ordinary citizens, increases trust in governance and supports better informed political decision-making and communication.

ORBIS addresses the disconnects between ambitious ideas and collective actions at a large socio-technical scale. It responds to the profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy making institutions by providing a theoretically sound and highly pragmatic socio-technical solution to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful Deliberative Democracy in Europe. The project shapes and supports new democratic models that are developed through deliberative democracy processes; it follows a socio-constructive approach in which deliberative democracy is not a theory which prescribes new democratic practices and models, but rather the process through which we can collectively imagine and realize them. ORBIS provides new ways to understand and facilitate the emergence of new participatory democracy models, together with the mechanisms to scale them up and consolidate them at institutional level. It delivers: (i) a sound methodology for deliberative participation and co-creation at scale; (ii) novel AI-enhanced tools for deliberative participation across diverse settings; (iii) a novel socio-technical approach that augments the articulation between deliberative processes and representative institutions in liberal democracies; (iv) new evidence-based democratic models that emerge from the application of citizen deliberation processes; (v) demonstrated measurable impact of such innovations in real-world settings. The project builds on cutting-edge AI tools and technologies to develop a sustainable digital solution, and bridges theories and technological solutions from the fields of political and social science, social innovation, Artificial Intelligence, argumentation and digital democracy. The achievement of the project’s goal is validated through six use cases addressing contemporary issues at different scales and settings, experimenting with different civic participation and deliberation models, and involving diverse types of stakeholders.

NEUROCLIMA aims at establishing a mindset, articulated through processes, frameworks, services & interfaces for the support and establishment of systemic transformations and citizen engagement towards climate resilience by creating a nervous system, connecting policymakers, public institutions and citizens, based on innovative truly mixed Human-AI decision support. This nervous system will be explainable, trustworthy as well as reactive and proactive both to citizens’ concerns, environmental changes, and policymakers’ new proposals, creating a bidirectional relationship between citizens and public institutions. In order to achieve this, this nervous system will engage in rigorous research, by proposing monitoring mechanisms, in the directions of the EU Adaptation Strategy & the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. These monitoring mechanisms will monitor needs, pain points, expectations and dispositions as well as emerging trends and relevant themes that may affect directly or indirectly EU societies and help identify social and leverage tipping points. In order to facilitate meaningful change, listening to citizens’ expression, concerns and pain points but also the reasons why policies have been proposed, the project’s nervous system will lead to the proposal of engagement and assessment frameworks and toolkits, taking into account local and national specificities. In this way, a continuous dialogue between stakeholders will take place, helping shape new decisions but also foster trust and understanding towards rule-of-law institutions. Furthermore, the project will provide concrete recommendations of operational nature towards the facilitation of systemic change, accompanied with an ecosystem of tools, activities, services & interfaces that will provide guidance towards reaching the transformative tipping points for the establishment of more resilient EU societies.

SoBigData RI, with its tools and services, empowers researchers and innovators through a platform for the design and execution of large-scale data science and social mining experiments, open to users with diverse backgrounds, accessible on cloud (aligned with EOSC guidelines), and also exploiting supercomputing facilities. SoBigData RI will render social mining experiments more efficiently designed, adjusted, and repeatable by non-data scientists' domain experts by pushing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable) and FACT (Fair, Accountable, Confidential and Transparent) principles. SoBigData RI will orient resources from multiple perspectives: e-infrastructures and online services developers; big data analytics and AI; complex systems focussed on modelling social phenomena; ELSEC (Ethical, Legal, SocioEconomic and Cultural) aspects of data protection (as defined by the HLEG-AI); privacy-preserving techniques. SoBigData RI PPP will move our RI forward from the simple awareness of ethical and legal challenges in social mining to the development of concrete tools that operationalize ethics with value-sensitive design, incorporating values and norms for privacy protection, fairness, transparency, and pluralism.