Democracy that meets every EU citizen where they already are — on TikTok, in their inbox, on LinkedIn, in their letterbox.
Europe is larger, more multilingual and more institutionally varied than any other polity attempting digital citizen participation.
One consultation is addressed to all of them, in one register, at one moment.
Whichever one you pick, you have already picked who you can reach.
For shoes, that's fine. For an EU democracy, it isn't.
Each digital filter strips a layer of the audience the same way.
Different platform, same demographic — urban, digitally fluent, already engaged. That isn't a bug. It's the design philosophy of the tools.
A stakeholder describes what they want to ask EU citizens. Nothing else is required of them.
“We want public input on the EPBD revision — cost, comfort, climate. EU-wide, 6 weeks.”
AI intake and audience analysis — scope, depth, geography, partners — then one adapter per register.
A paper tick-box from Mária lands in the same weighted synthesis as a LinkedIn comment from Markus. The loop closing is the differentiator.
DG ENER wants citizen input on the next Energy Performance of Buildings Directive. One brief, nine interfaces — all live in this prototype.
#1 theme across every channel: heating cost is the lived experience of energy policy.
Browser-first participation platforms. The citizen has to come to them. Strong tools for those already engaged — invisible to everyone else.
High-quality but single-format, slow, expensive. One channel, one register — by design.
Multi-channel, but outbound only. Optimises for clicks, not for legible democratic input. No return path.
Five+ channels from one stakeholder brief — orchestrated, not duplicated by hand.
Paper letters and assemblies are channel adapters too, not a fallback.
Inbound aggregation across channels, weighted so the quiet voices aren't drowned by the loud ones.
No new technology is invented. The novelty is the orchestration and the inclusion model.
Every channel is a separately-maintained adapter with the same contract:
Adding a new register — say, a community radio adapter for a particular region — is a contribution, not a platform overhaul.
Stack: Node/TS orchestration · LLM via API · adapters in any language · all open-source.
Civic-tech contributors plug new connectors in — and over time, EU-rooted channels can replace the platforms we depend on.
Local radio · regional weekly · municipal Mastodon · any civic-tech custom adapter — all plug in via the same contract.
Same content model, no central relay. Channels syndicate to each other; the registry becomes optional discovery.
A federation of EU-rooted channels carrying participation, education and commerce — gradually substituting US-platform dependency.
The same infrastructure carries partner-university content — issuing micro-credentials per EU Council Recommendation 2022/C 243/02, recognised across Member States.
A citizen earns an “Energy Citizenship” micro-credential issued by TU Delft, and it lands on a Hungarian employer's HR system six months later.
We are the issuance trigger and the discovery surface. The trust chain is the Commission's — we are a conformant issuer client and we plug in. (see research/02-micro-credentials-wireframe.md)
ELM / W3C VC / OB 3.0 issuance · EBSI pre-production VC chain · OID4VCI/VP libraries · DEQAR-listed QA bodies.
Uniform Member State coverage of Trusted Accreditation Organisations (TAOs) in the EBSI TIR — forced by the end-2026 EUDI Wallet mandate.
Once levels 1 and 2 reach critical mass, EU-SME advertising on the same channels can sustain the network — and begin to repatriate marketing spend that today leaves the Union.
European digital advertising is a ~€100 billion per year market. The lion's share is captured by US-headquartered platforms — the working capital of European small-business marketing is, in net, a transfer to a foreign tech economy.
A municipal Mastodon that carries an EPBD consultation can carry a regional cooperative's invitation to a solar group buy. A community radio that broadcasts a citizens' assembly call can carry a Galician winemaker's seasonal ad.
Each adapter is maintained by an NGO, public broadcaster, civic-tech consortium or local outlet. The advertising revenue that the channel attracts is what funds the maintainer that keeps the channel running.
The economic-sovereignty argument is politically resonant but the academic-policy case is thin. Our current commitment: we will commission research with Bruegel / ECIPE / European DIGITAL SME Alliance before going public on revenue numbers.
We treat this section as a direction of travel, not a decided model. (see research/landscape.md §7)