PERYCLES Kick-off Meeting

The Perycles Kick-off Meeting will take place on 12 March, 2025 at the House of Connections!

This event will bring together key participants to discuss the project's vision, goals, and next steps.

The program will include engaging discussions, networking opportunities, and a lunch on both days. More details, including the full agenda, will follow soon!

Programme:
March 12, 14:00–15:00
House of Connection, Grote Markt 21, 9712 HR Groningen, Netherlands

Are you interested in strengthening democracy through enhanced citizen participation? How can digital platforms help?

Andreas Nitsche – Democratic Self-Organization at Scale: Past, Present, and Future of LiquidFeedback

LiquidFeedback is a framework for deliberation and collective decision-making implemented as open-source code under the same name. The software is published under the permissive MIT license. The design of LiquidFeedback is intended to facilitate constructive debates and ensure fair representation of minorities. It is one of the most prominent implementations of transitive proxies, also known as liquid democracy. The founders of LiquidFeedback will present a comprehensive overview of the project's historical progression, current status, and future direction. They will recount the "Story of LiquidFeedback," elucidate the fundamental principles that guided their actions, and discuss forthcoming advancements in conjunction with the PERYCLES project.

What LiquidFeedback is: 

• LiquidFeedback 4.0 Introduction (Video)
  https://youtu.be/zs0GFopny64
• Liquid Democracy Explained (Video)
  https://youtu.be/VTL-5rC8AyM

Ulrike Hahn – Digital Democracy: From Theory to Practice
March 12, 15:30–16:30
House of Connection, Grote Markt 21, 9712 HR Groningen, Netherlands

Digital democracy holds considerable promise, not just in theory, but in practical applications. However, scaling digital democracy both to large groups of participants and to significant issues faces considerable challenges. Most of all, it requires an evidence base that we presently don’t have. The talk outlines briefly the many disciplines and perspectives whose input is required in this project, and then focuses on some key gaps.

Ulrike Hahn is a professor at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Cognition, Computation and Modelling. Ulrike Hahn’s research interests are categorization, similarity, language and language acquisition, and, first and foremost, questions of human rationality. Her research examines human judgment, decision-making, and the rationality of everyday argument.

About PERYCLES:

Civil society and public authorities from all levels of government are increasingly turning to digital democracy tools to improve citizens’ participation in democratic processes and the legitimacy of policy decisions. At the same time, digital democracy technology today is not yet fit to meet the lofty goal of providing an all-round democratic infrastructure that can re-empower citizens and make public administrations more relevant and responsive to the citizenry’s wills and needs. This is because digital democratic technology is currently developed and deployed while we still lack evidence-based methods to design, assess and validate it. We still lack the know-how to discern which specific technological solutions best foster inclusive, meaningful and scalable democratic participation, and under what conditions.

PERYCLES (Participatory dEmocRacY that sCaLES) tackles the challenge of developing such know-how, analyzing and testing platform designs on an open-source software for democratic deliberation that can be deployed at multiple levels of governance: from local, to national, to transnational.

To do so, we develop a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary approach to the design of digital democracy technology, which integrates methods and concepts from democratic theory, the social sciences and the computing sciences. The outcome of the project will be threefold: first, a set of methods to assess digital democracy solutions in a principled manner; second, readily available open-source implementations of digital democracy solutions that meet the identified standards; third, a library of best practices and recommendations for the design and deployment of online participation platforms, targeting digital democracy practitioners, citizens and decision-makers.