An open concept for inclusive EU democratic participation — democracy that meets every EU citizen where they already are: on TikTok, in their inbox, on LinkedIn, in their letterbox.
🎞 Slideshow:
slides/index.html(self-narrated, ~11 min) · 🖱 Clickable mockups:mockups/index.html· 📚 Research:research/Live on GitHub Pages: slides · mockups
Every digital participation tool ships with an interface, and every interface silently pre-selects its audience — urban, digitally fluent, already engaged. Whatever platform you build, roughly the same 1% of EU citizens ends up at the bottom of the funnel. That isn't a bug; it's the design philosophy of the tools.
The Context Translator inverts this. A stakeholder — say, a European Commission policy unit — describes what they want to ask EU citizens, in plain language. An orchestration layer translates that one brief into many context-adapted channels: an academic expert email, a TikTok short, a LinkedIn long-form, a plain-language paper letter, a European Citizens' Panel. Each channel is operated by a real human partner — an NGO, an academic network, a postal service. Non-digital channels are first-class citizens, not a fallback: around 40% of EU citizens have low or no digital access, and they often have the most at stake.
And critically, the loop closes: every response — a paper tick-box from a Hungarian village, a TikTok poll tap in Lyon, a LinkedIn comment from Berlin — flows back into one weighted, comparable, traceable synthesis the policy-maker can act on. The novelty is not outbound translation. It's that the system is bidirectional.
| Level | What it adds | Where to read |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Participation | Multi-channel consultation orchestration, worked through the EPBD revision | slides/, mockups/, spec.md |
| 1.5 · Open network | The adapter contract is ActivityPub-compatible from day one: registry today, federation tomorrow, an EU-rooted social fabric long-term | research/03-federation-transition.md |
| 2 · Qualification | The same channels carry partner-university content and issue micro-credentials (W3C VC / Open Badges 3.0 / EBSI / EUDI Wallet) | research/02-micro-credentials-wireframe.md |
| 3 · Self-financing | Contextual EU-SME advertising on the same trusted channels funds the channel maintainers | research/landscape.md §7 |
Level 3 carries an explicit honest-framing caveat in the deck: it is the weakest evidence base in the proposal today and is treated as a direction of travel, not a decided model.
slides/ the pitch deck — self-contained HTML, generated narration, cue-synced audio
(see slides/README.md for the narration pipeline and playback modes)
mockups/ nine clickable interface mockups: stakeholder intake, five citizen registers,
panel organiser dashboard, civic-tech console, synthesis dashboard
research/ deep-read briefs behind levels 1.5 / 2 / 3
spec.md the working architecture spec
archive/ process history: the original hackathon prompt, the v1 deck, session notes
No build step. Clone and open slides/index.html in a browser (an internet connection is needed for the CDN-hosted runtime). Controls: ← → / space to navigate, F fullscreen, A cycles audio-sync modes (off → auto → section) — in auto the narration drives the slides; in section each keypress plays that cue's narration. The mockup cards on slide 13 open in new tabs with a "Back to slideshow" button.
This is a concept prototype seeking collaborators, born at the NSD "democracy for u & me" hackathon (2026). The mockups are static; the AI decisions, partner network and cost figures are illustrative. The design process itself is open: the design brief, research briefs, narration pipeline and earlier deck iterations are all in this repo.
See CONTRIBUTING.md. The most valuable contribution is exactly the one the architecture is built for: propose a channel adapter — a register and a real-world partner who could operate it. Issue templates are provided.