How do we scale civic tech enabled citizen participation

Join us for an inspiring session exploring the frontier of "constructive" democratic technology.

As traditional mechanisms for citizen engagement struggle against polarization and an algorithm-driven attention economy, how can we build digital public infrastructure that actually brings people together?

Digital deliberation provides a new framework for our democracy. Rather than focusing on division, these tools allow us to map underlying consensus and foster collective sense-making across society.

In this meetup, we move beyond abstract theory to explore the practical ways the Finnish Innovation Fund (Sitra) has successfully deployed citizen participation at scale, and look ahead to the new European Civic Tech Hub.

We will dive into:

• The Power of "Voxit": How Finland successfully scaled this open-source platform across more than 120 societal dialogues, utilizing AI and statistical clustering to map "Uncommon Ground" and find consensus.
• From National Labs to European Impact: Insights from massive citizen dialogues—such as the "What do you think about AI, Finland?" campaign—and how they directly shape public sector rulebooks.
• The European Civic Tech Hub: How the ongoing work to build a centralized hub under the European Commission's European Democracy Shield aims to solve the biggest bottlenecks in civic tech adoption, from procurement to GDPR compliance.

About the Speaker & Moderator:
Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta (Speaker) is a Specialist and Democracy Team Lead at Sitra's International Programmes. She leads efforts to scale democratic innovations that support collective sense-making, actively working to bridge the gap between Finnish open-source success and the wider European digital ecosystem.
Michael Jensen (Moderator), Co-founder of DemAI, will host the session and guide the conversation, drawing on his expertise in democratic AI to bridge the themes of the presentation with our audience's questions.

Come prepared for a constructive dialogue on how we can learn from these approaches to build a more transparent, resilient, and connected democratic future in Europe. We look forward to seeing you there!