EMPATIA - Enabling Multichannel PArticipation Through ICT Adaptations
Period:
	January 1, 2016 to March 31, 2018
Duration:
	27 months
Abstract
	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.
Funding Body
	Comissão Europeia - Horizon 2020-ICT-2015, 687920-EMPATIA-RIA
Partners
	- Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Portugal (coord.) - One Source, Portugal - D21, Czech Republic - Brunel University London, United Kingdom - Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy - Zebralog, Germany - Associação In Loco, Portugal - University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Researchers:
	Ana Raquel Matos Ana Santos Carlo Milani Cristina Carnevali Giovanni Allegretti (coord) Isabel Ferreira João Arriscado Nunes Kalinca Gutierrez Copello Marco Meloni Michelangelo Secchi Michele Silva Paolo Spada, University of Southampton Sheila Holz Sofia Antunes Stefano De Marco, Universidade Complutense de Madrid Vanessa Duarte de Sousa
Website
	http://empatia-project.eu/
Keywords
	participatory innovation, digital social innovation, open source software, collective awareness platforms, crowdsourcing