The EMPATIA project seeks to radically enhance the inclusiveness and impact of Participatory Budgeting (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.

The EMPATIA platform will be released as open source and all extensions and improvements to previously existing open-source software will be returned to the community as commons.

Inclusion:

using ICT to reduce barriers to citizen participation in both the decision-making and implementation processes, including barriers related to digital skills, language, education level, visual impairment, location and time availability.

Deliberative Quality:

using ICT to enhance the quality of PB deliberation by improving the flow of information, enabling the exchange of alternative proposals, and using advanced voting algorithms to more rapidly achieve consensus.

Efficiency:

using ICT to streamline and optimize the investment of time and resources by facilitators and technical staff, so that they provide maximum support to the PB process for each unit of time and budget they commit.

Transparency:

using Open Data to enable the two-way flow of meaningful information between government and citizens. At the same time, relate the process to a larger framework of open data related to general budgetary issues of the local administration concerned (both in terms of provisional as well as executed budget).

Channels Integration:

using ICT in such a way that online and in-person processes fit seamlessly together, and that PB activities are integrated with other governance innovations and existing e-government tools.

Replication & Adaptation:

using ICT to pave the way toward the diffusion of a next generation of PB processes, which can meet the highest standards of deliberation, selection, and implementation in other contexts and at greater scale.

Enhanced Evaluation:

by using the EMPATIA platform to record the whole PB process it becomes possible to build extensive open datasets of PB processes, for monitoring and self-assessment purposes and for supporting more methodical research studies on PB.

Marketability:

the exploration of sustainable and ethically consistent business models, to accelerate and amplify these innovations.