Today’s societies experience a profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy making institutions. The EU-funded ORBIS project will address the disconnects between ambitious ideas and collective actions to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful deliberative democracy in Europe. It will shape and support new democratic models developed through deliberative democracy processes. ORBIS will develop a sustainable digital solution using advanced AI tools and technologies and connect theories and technological solutions from political and social science, social innovation, AI, argumentation and digital democracy fields. The project will validate the results through six use cases addressing contemporary issues, experimenting with various civic participation and deliberation models, and engaging stakeholders.

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.