EN 
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SCHEDULE
15 – 17 September
Munich, Germany
PRACTICAL DEEP DIVE
IMPROVING PARTICIPATION
OPEN SOURCE, OPEN GOV
AFTERNOON WITH AI
DAY 1
15 SEPT
Location: Town Hall
Start: 14:30
14:30
Doors open and registration
15:00
Word of welcome by city of Munich
16:00 – 18:00
Munich city site visits
18:00
Networking & drinks
19:00
Collective self-paid dinner at Bavarian restaurant
DAY 2
16 SEPT
Location: Landeshauptstadt Munich (Municipality of Munich), Agnes-Pockels-Bogen 33, 80992 München.
08:30 Doors open
09:00
Registration: Tea and coffee, badges and goodies
09:30
Welcome and introductions, housekeeping
10:00
Word of welcome by Munich municipality
Speaker: Laura Dornheim (CDO, State Capital München),
Judith Greif (Co-Referentin IT-Department, State Capital München)
10:30
SIMON STROHMENGER
Where We Are Now: Updates on the CONSUL DEMOCRACY project
(CONSUL DEMOCRACY Foundation)
10:45 KEYNOTE + Q&A
ROMAN HUBER
Democracy Starts Local: Why Participation Matters More Than Ever
(Mehr Demokratie)
More info
Description: Democracy is under pressure. Across Europe and beyond, declining trust in institutions, growing political polarization, and rapid technological change are challenging established democratic systems. At the same time, citizens are increasingly seeking meaningful opportunities to shape the decisions that affect their daily lives. In this keynote, Huber explores why local democracy and citizen participation are becoming more important than ever. Municipalities are not only the level of government closest to people’s everyday concerns; they are also laboratories for democratic innovation: from citizens’ assemblies, digital participation platforms such as Consul Democracy to new formats like “Democracy Fitness” and “Sprechen und zuhören”. Drawing on decades of practical experience in direct democracy and citizen participation, the keynote will also address a crucial question: What conditions are needed for participation to succeed? Effective participation requires more than tools and processes. It depends on a shared democratic mindset among citizens, public administrations, and political leaders — one that values openness, mutual respect, transparency, and a genuine willingness to listen and learn from one another.mons Network
11:20
According to the user
Words from municipality representatives and CONSUL DEMOCRACY users Flensburg, North Ayshire, Montes de Oca, Nova Gorica and Nairobi.
12:00
Lunch
13:00 – 13:30
JULIA THOMASCHKI
Democracy Fitness
(Mehr Demokratie)
13:45 – 15:00
FIRST SESSION SLOT
Practical deep dive
Communication and digital participation: experiences from Montes de Oca and Málaga (Spanish, translated)
More info
Speakers:
Massiel Villanueva Ilama (Municipio de Montes de Oca), David Aurusa (Enreda Coop)
Description:
Esta charla presenta la experiencia de dos casos de uso de la plataforma CONSUL DEMOCRACIA en el ambíto hispanohablante: Montes de Oca, Costa Rica, y Málaga, España. A partir de este caso reales, la sesión abordará cómo la combinación de un diseño participativo poderoso y una estrategia de comunicación bien planificada es clave para activar, ampliar y sostener la participación ciudadana.
Improving participation
Workshop: Score Your Platform: Applying the Democratic Value to Evaluate Digital Participation
More info
Speaker: Alexandros Melidis (GFOSS)
Description: How democratically effective is your participation platform beyond feature checklists? This hands-on workshop introduces the Co-creation of Democratic Value (CDV) Framework, a seven-dimension scoring tool that evaluates platforms across co-design, co-agenda setting, co-production, co-governance, co-analysis, co-evaluation, inclusion, and integrity, shifting focus from technological presence to actual power distribution.
Open source, open gov
Open Source Adoption in Local Governments: Lessons from a Case Study of CONSUL DEMOCRACY and Four Other Tools
More info
Speakers:
Nicholas Gates (Open Forum Europe)
Description:
This talk presents exciting research from a new Open Source Observatory (OSOR) study on open source in local governments, examining five mature European case studies of local government open source collaboration, including CONSUL DEMOCRACY. The session will present all five case studies and the findings of the broader report, surveying its findings on the collaboration dynamics for open source software adoption and reuse in local governments.
Afternoon with AI
CONSUL & AI:
Making the Platform More Inclusive, Accessible and Effective
More info
Speakers: John Munro (Cosla), Maja Cimerman (Danes Je Nov Dan)
Description: The CONSUL DEMOCRACY community is harnessing LLM and analytical algorithmic models to enrich the participation platform. The so-called Civic Assistant project will include features like auto-translation, image suggestion, and analytical tools like semantic clustering. This talk will present the project, stipulate how the AI features will enhance participation on the platform, and outline the release of the Civic Assistant’s features.
Break
(30 min)
15:45 – 17:00
SECOND SESSION SLOT
Practical deep dive
Using Digital Platforms For Elections: Experiments from Bavaria and Scotland
More info
Speakers:
Maria Hörtrich (Digital Ministery Bavaria), John Munro (Cosla)
Description:
Digital platforms have been used for many forms of participation in politics, except elections. This session focuses on two pilot projects
— Bayerischer Jugendring for U18 Wahl in Bavaria, Germany, and the Glasgow Youth Council Election in Scotland — i
n which digital platforms are being used as a voting tool in local and youth elections in Scotland and Bavaria respectively.
Improving participation
Mainstreaming Participation: Setting the Conditions for Meaningful Citizen Engagement
More info
Speakers: Timothy Kiprono (Public Finance Institute), [other speakers to be announced]
Description:
This session presents the findings of a comprehensive learning project on Mainstreaming Participation, which focuses on the blockers and levers of mainstreaming (digital) citizen participation in public decision-making and on training a selected cohort of participants to become trainers on the topic themselves.
Open source, open gov
In Munich: Open Source and Digital Sovereignty in Citizen Interaction
More info
Speakers:
Zaim Sari and Klaus Müller (IT Departement Munich)
Description:
In this interactive workshop, we will explore the crucial role of open source in the context of digital sovereignty and citizen interaction. Open source software increases transparency, fosters trust in public services, and strengthens public control over digital technologies. But how can we actively involve citizens in the development of software solutions? How can they contribute their needs and concerns directly, thereby creating a stronger sense of ownership and identification with the solutions provided? These and other questions will be at the heart of this workshop.
Afternoon with AI
AI for Better Citizen Participation: Testing New Tools for Cities
More info
Speakers:
Carina Hausladen (University of Konstanz, Germany),
Tobias Weinmann (Demokratie Today)
Description:
This live demo session presents two AI-powered tools that enhance digital participation. The first showcases how artificial intelligence can support participatory processes on the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform through the project planning and design phases. The second presents FairFeed, an LLM-based research prototype for participatory budgeting. Instead of ranking proposals by popularity, it curates the feed based on a citizen’s own stated interests and reserves visibility for under-exposed ideas.
17:30
Bavarian networking @ Biergarten
DAY 3
17 SEPT
Location: Landeshauptstadt Munich (Municipality of Munich), Agnes-Pockels-Bogen 33, 80992 München.
Start: 09:00
09:00 – 09:30
Tea and coffee
09:30 – 10:00 SECOND KEYNOTE + Q&A
SOPHIE BLOEMEN
A Sovereign Europe: Digital Commons as the backbone of Digital Public Infrastructure
More info
Description: US and Chinese tech and economic hegemony has for decades meant that Europeans don’t have much digital autonomy; they are forced to use the digital services and infrastructures controlled by Silion-Valley- or Shenzen-based Big Tech, with increasingly harmful effects on social life, public health, and democracy. A move to a more Europe-controlled system is needed, with room for ethical business models, collaborative governance, open source and open standard — a move to Digital Commons. This keynote sheds light on what is happening, or needs to happen, on a policy-level in the EU and on national and local levels, to reverse the dynamics of a broken system. Free and open source software (FOSS) has an important role to play in this trajectory. FOSS is more than just free and open; open source systems could — and do already — put into practice some of the key elements of a digitally autonomous Europe.
10:15 – 11:15
FIRST SESSION SLOT
Practical deep dive
The Nairobi Model: CONSUL with AI-Mediated Multi-Channel Civic Feedback
More info
Speakers: Sruti Bandyopadhyay (Worldbank), Patrick Ang´asa (Nairobi County Government)
Description: While implementing CONSUL DEMOCRACY, Nairobi attempts to solve two main problems: web-only platforms exclude the majority of residents in cities like Nairobi; and multiple platforms need to be presented to the user as one. This session addresses designing an architectural solution for these problems, shares first-hand experiences from the implementation process, and showcases the early results from platform deployment, both from a technical and institutional perspective.
Improving participation
Evaluating the Inclusiveness and Quality of Digital Participation Platforms
More info
Speakers: Anna Mikhaylovskaya (University of Groningen), Erica Celine Yu and Cesare Maria Dalbagno (Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences), and Nicolien Janssens (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Description: This session presents current research on digital democracy from three European universities, while addressing three main research questions: • How can we evaluate the inclusiveness of digital participation platforms? • How can we assess the quality of deliberation on digital participation platforms? • What can digital participation platforms learn from citizen assemblies as a widely adopted democratic innovation?
Software developer special
How to Contribute to the Open Source CONSUL DEMOCRACY Software Project?
More info
Speaker: Javi Martin (Rock&Ror)
Description: This hands-on workshop will dive into the practical workflow of contributing code to the CONSUL DEMOCRACY open source software project. Core maintainers of the code repository will present key coder conventions used followed by a step-by-step approach of reporting issues, resolving issues and making pull request.
Open source, open gov
Consul and API’s: Interoperating Participation Platforms and Communication Tools
More info
Speakers: Tilman Hampl (Municipality of Würzburg), Sabrina Wehrend (Municipality of Lübeck)
Description: How can we bring participation to where people already communicate? How can we improve the accessibility of participation platforms? These questions underlie the innovative approach by two German cities, Würzburg and Lubeck, connecting participation tools like Consul to other participation tools and to messenger apps like Whatsapp through custom-built APIs, shared standards and common user interfaces. Participants will learn how standardization can improve accessibility, transparency, and usability while preserving local flexibility and innovation.
Break
(30 min)
11:45 – 13:00
SECOND SESSION SLOT
Practical deep dive
How German Public Administrations Improve Participation Quality and Inclusiveness
More info
Speakers: Rebecca Palm (Municipality of Siegburg), Annick Poirot (Municipality of Flensburg).
Description: In this session we will hear from representatives from two German municipalities using Consul, Siegburg and Flensburg. They will introduce municipal strategies using emerging technologies and innovative design to reduce administrative burdens, reach underrepresented groups and create more inclusive engagement formats.
Improving participation
No Either–Or: From Platform Conflict to Workable Outcomes— Participation Without Forced Consensus (75 minute workshop)
More info
Speaker: Dominik Gallenberger (University of Innsbruck)
Description: Digital participation platforms like CONSUL DEMOCRACY scale engagement—but many processes also fall into ‘consensus or collapse’: dissent gets smoothed over or the process deadlocks. This 75-minute workshop introduces a transferable method to reach legitimate, implementable outcomes without forcing agreement.
Open source, open gov
Open Source Participation Infrastructure: Towards a European Digital Commons
More info
Speakers: Timo Väliharju (COSS), Lukas Salecker (deliberAIde)
Description: Across Germany and Europe, citizen participation solutions are developing in parallel across different platforms, communities and regions. While this diversity is valuable, it also raises questions around fragmentation, interoperability and long-term sustainability. This session introduces Voxit (open source) and DeliberAIde (steward-owned tech-startup) as European initiatives exploring participation as shared digital public infrastructure, and reflects on how different tools and approaches — including platforms like CONSUL — could evolve within a better connected ecosystem of collaborating projects, outside of and independent from US-dominated structures.
Afternoon with AI
How AI Can Improve the Design of Citizen Participation Processes
More info
Speakers: Giulia Fellin (Offene Gesellschaft), Lotichius (Wer Denkt Was)
Description: Artificial intelligence can support participatory processes throughout their entire lifecycle — from project setup to citizen contributions and final evaluation. In this workshop Offene Gesellschaft and Wer Denkt Was will interactively demo their AI toolboxes that can support cities in planning and structuring citizen participation processes from the initial idea to full implementation, and provide an efficient system for capturing, clustering, analyzing, and visualizing citizen contributions from participation processes.
13:00 – 14:00
Lunch
14:00 – 14:30
JULIA THOMASCHKI
DEMOCRACY FITNESS 2
14:30 – 15:00 KEYNOTE + Q&A
Joe Mathews
Democratizing under Authoritarianism: How California Is Experimenting With Democratic Innovations
More info
Abstract: While the Trump regime is beefing up its oppression and authoritarian-like rule, California, in the meantime, is implementing democratic innovations. Three such experiments are the focus of this keynote: the first-ever citizen’s assembly in Southern California; LA Rewrite, a co-creation process to rewrite the Los Angelos local constitution, and Engaged California, a CONSUL-like digital platform for structural and online citizen participation in state decision-making. This keynote will dive into these innovative projects, explain how they came about and how they are developing, and share insights into some of the tensions between the California trajectory on the one hand, and the US trajectory on the other.
15:00 – 16:00
CONSUL DEMOCRACY: Moving The Ecosystem Forward
More info
Speakers: Joe Mathews (Democracy Local), Iris Cabrera (Usabi) Jannik Pfister (Hertie Foundation), Klaus Müller (Head of Open Source Program Office, State Capital Munich)
Description: What are the ideas and strategies that will move the CONSUL DEMOCRACY ecosystem forward? We end the conference in collective spirit by giving the floor to our partner organizations and board members, who represent both government, tech and civil society. They’ll present their work and identify some of the crucial challenges of scaling the CONSUL ecosystem, and propose forward-looking ways to overcome them.
16:00 – 17:30
Open End with drinks and live music