Enabling Multichannel Participation Through ICT Adaptations [EMPATIA], 2016-2018

Para uma descrição completa do estudo, http://www.apis.ics.ulisboa.pt/catalogo/APIS0064.Participatory budgeting (PB) represents one of the most successful civic innovations of the last quarter-century. 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 itself 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 EMPATIA project seeks to radically enhance the inclusiveness and impact of PB processes, increasing the participation of citizens by designing, evaluating and making publicly available an advanced ICT platform for participatory budgeting, which could be adaptable to different social and institutional contexts. EMPATIA is a 24-month project that seeks to design, evaluate, refine and widely disseminate such a platform as an open-source public good. EMPATIA aims at producing the first ICT platform capable of fully encompassing both the decision-making cycle and the implementation cycle of PB whose integration is considered indispensable by literature as the main driver of the self-sustainability process. Three Pilots with citizens of three diverse PB communities - the municipalities of Lisbon (Portugal), Ričany (Czech Republic) and Bonn (Germany) - will implement, analyse and validate the EMPATIA platform.