Citizen participation and machine learning for a better democracy

The experiment will test whether machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) can effectively cluster similar proposals and recommendations from'like minded citizens' on the Consul digital democracy platform. This should make it easier for citizens on the platform with shared interests to find each other and work together. The experiment will generate insights on whether this increases the number of citizen proposals that receive sufficient support from other citizens to trigger further action by local governments. NLP allows computers to understand, interpret and extract key information from human language. Around the world digital democracy platforms are engaging new groups of people and empowering citizens to contribute to policy making.