Deliberative and participatory processes currently lack full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities from democratic spaces. iDEM will address this issue in the context of marginalisation and exclusion of people who need support to fully be able to read, write and comprehend language (around six million individuals in the EU and over 90 million people globally). iDEM will lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of current marginalisation from deliberative processes of diverse under-represented groups due to language skills and propose, implement, and evaluate inclusive deliberative and participatory spaces. It will adopt a user-centred approach for making participatory processes more accessible and inclusive, developing advanced natural language processing technologies and artificial intelligence to empower under-represented groups with tools to facilitate communication and dialog in democratic spaces. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages and biases for several European languages and audiences, (2) automatically adapting texts in those languages to be accessible and unbiased for these audiences, (3) providing AI tools for enhancing the controllable generation of messages and discourses. iDEM will innovate democratic spaces with customised, user-centric technology enhancing the participation and representation of marginalised groups by providing unbiased and inclusive technology. To do so, iDEM will also build on the results of relevant past projects, and seek collaboration with related projects and relevant centres for democracy in Europe.

Democracy is facing challenges including loss of trust in EU institutions, disillusionment and declining interest among citizens, increasing political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives. We believe this can change if proper deliberative processes and tools are institutionalised that exploit the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and citizens’ post-Covid competences. We envision the next generation of digital deliberations as: grounded on solid democracy theory, multimodal (video, audio, text), usable and accessible, gamified (e.g. using skill points, scoreboards, missions, and avatars), mass, enabled by novel but also legal and ethical AI features (e.g., summarisation, moderation, fact checking, hate speech and toxicity detection) and easily adopted and institutionalized. In this context, the aim of AI4Deliberation project is to provide robust, ethical AI tools and comprehensive guidance to assist governments in institutionalising, using and evaluating multimodal, gamified, mass deliberations. The vision of the project is to equip governments with a theoretically solid and empirically tested set of AI-enabled deliberative processes, a comprehensive framework with practical guidelines, and an AI toolkit that will enable them to design, institutionalise, operate and evaluate transparent, ethical, inclusive, multimodal, gamified, mass citizens deliberations resulting in more active and inclusive citizenship and increased trust to rule-of-law based institutions by citizens. To achieve these ambitious objectives, the consortium brings together a team of world leaders in deliberative democracy, AI and LLMs (incl. vid-LLMs), argumentation mining, law and ethics, deliberation platforms (including video-based) while four large scale pilots will be conducted from city level to international discussing topics that include climate change and long Covid.

The project investigates the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe from an intersectional perspective. It aims to reveal the spectrum of irregularity in contemporary Europe and cast light on the everyday experiences of migrants with irregular, unstable and/or precarious legal status. I-CLAIM develops the concept of ‘irregularity assemblages’ to capture how migrants’ ‘irregular condition’ is produced by the interplay of immigration and asylum laws, policies and practice, wider labour market and welfare regimes, and political, media and public narratives. The irregular condition is shaped by migrants’ social position and positionality as well as by processes that occur at international, European, regional and local levels. This approach will inform our theoretical understanding, methodology and analytical framework and how the consortium organises its work. Moreover, it enables us to design, assess and validate detailed policy options and public interventions targeted at place-specific, sectoral, and intersectional criticalities and vulnerabilities experienced by a range of people in irregular situations in Europe. To achieve its overarching ambition, we will engage at all stages of the project cycle with relevant European, national, local and sectoral actors in six countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, The Netherland, Poland and the UK) through Country Stakeholder Groups (CSG) and a European Stakeholder Group (EISG). Moreover, we will organise a series of consultative and participatory initiatives to produce new knowledge, inform public and political debate, validate key research findings, and design policy recommendations.