Alin, do I have your consent to record this interview as part of our INTERFACED project recordings?
Yes.
Okay, fantastic. Just as a brief preamble: because you have been involved in our project both as a practitioner — you were selected as a fellow because of your background, and you have been organising workshops and civic participation activities — and also as a collaborator working with us on the research team, I designed this interview to have two levels.
First, I would like to ask you some questions about your experiences and observations as someone working directly with participatory processes and communities. Then I have a few more meta-level questions about the work you have done with us in INTERFACED, and about how you think research and practice can intersect in projects like this.
So the goal here is to learn both from your on-the-ground experience of participation and from your perspective as someone who is helping shape the project. How does that sound?
All good. Okay.
We’ll start with your personal trajectory into participation work. I know we talked about this during the fellows interview, but for the purposes of this conversation, could you tell me a bit about how you first became involved in civic participation or organising work? What kinds of projects have been influential for you, and how do you think about civic participation today beyond voting?
I will probably answer a bit differently now. I do not remember exactly what I told you in the fellows interview: it was probably connected to some projects.
For me, it really starts in 2007, when Romania entered the European Union. I remember my grandfather telling us: now Romania is in good hands, and honey and milk will come to us as a country. I was only seventeen at the time, and I did not really know what the European Union was or what it meant. So I started to do my own research and try to understand it.
Then, the first time I voted, after I turned eighteen the following year, it was in the European elections. And I voted in an informed way, at least compared to before, because by then I had tried to understand what the European Union was. That was the first moment when I realised that I could actually do something, in a democratic system, let’s say.
That is my first memory of discussing this field seriously with someone: with my grandfather.
Then, after a few years, I started my career in communication. I remember doing campaigns for big companies, but at some point I wanted to use my skills for something good, not just to sell products.
That was the moment when I started volunteering in a project. It was in 2016, so ten years ago, in a project run by the European Commission in Romania. Because I already had those communication skills, and because I had this personal goal of using them for social good, I saw volunteering as a way to build a portfolio in this new field, the civic sector, civil society.
And it worked for me. I started with that first project, then moved to a national project, then to a European-level project, and so on. So within about two years, I was really involved in the civic sector.
That was the beginning for me. It started with my grandfather and Romania entering the European Union, then with voting, which felt like a normal thing to do, and then with this desire to do something useful for my community by using my own skills and starting my own projects.
Okay, fantastic. In our project, INTERFACED, we often use the term interface, since it is also the title of the project. We talk about interfaces between citizens and power: institutions, decision-makers, and so on. From your perspective as a practitioner, and as someone who started thinking about these issues at quite a young age, what do you think an interface is? What does it look like in practice?
Could you frame that again, please?
We have quite lively discussions about what an ‘interface” exactly means. But the basic idea is that it is a kind of space, or node, where citizens, ordinary people, can engage with or interact with power, decision-makers, or institutions. So from your perspective as a practitioner, what do you think an interface is? What can it look like in practice?
From my experience, it is connected to what I also aim for, which is a participatory way of doing democracy — in other words, participatory democracy.
Right now, I think that as citizens, we vote, and then we mostly observe. And if something goes wrong, we protest. But we do not really have many active ways to participate. The options may exist in theory, but they are not really activated by the system.
For me, the point is that citizens should take part, in a participatory way, in everything that is part of society, not just observe it from the outside. So if I had to give a direct answer to your question, I would say that an interface is participatory democracy itself: involving citizens in decision-making processes, rather than just letting them watch.
Okay. That makes sense.
If we zoom in a little more concretely, what are some of the places, spaces, or opportunities where these kinds of participatory processes can be created? Is this something that happens in person, online, in specific kinds of spaces, in specific regions, or between particular individuals? What would be an example of an interface, in your view?
I can answer by telling you what we are actually doing.
One of the main spaces we like to work in is libraries. We like to run participatory processes there because we believe that the people who go to libraries are different, in terms of intention, from those who, for example, simply go to school.
When you are in high school, you cannot vote yet because you are under eighteen, although you may want to prepare for that moment. And when you go to school, you go because it is mandatory. But when you go to a library, it is not mandatory. So there is already a certain attitude there, a desire to improve yourself.
We like to work with that existing need people have for self-improvement, and from there we try to connect it to the needs of the community. In a way, we transfer that energy from personal development toward civic development. So the library is one important space where we try to meet people and talk with them about civic life.
Another obvious space is educational institutions — universities and high schools, the more standard educational environments.
Then there is also the online world, because nowadays people spend a great deal of time there and are strongly influenced by it. We know that, so some of our projects are active online as well.
If I had to identify the first three spaces that come to mind, I would say: libraries, educational spaces, and online platforms.
Of course, if we want to run a participatory process in a more formal or structured way, following certain procedures, then we can also use dedicated participatory platforms. So it is not only a matter of going to a library and doing everything offline; we can also do it online through tools specifically designed for participation. That would be a fourth kind of space.
And it is not only about taking decisions or creating policy recommendations. It is also about starting a conversation: identifying needs, understanding people’s opinions, views, and perspectives, and creating places where they can discuss those needs and how they feel about certain issues.
In that sense, it is actually quite similar to what this project is doing: creating conversations and spaces where people can talk about their needs and their experiences.
Can you think of a concrete example, either from your own work or from elsewhere, where ordinary people or citizens genuinely influenced a political decision or outcome? And in that example, what do you think made it possible? What made the process work?
Yes. The most recent example that comes to mind is one involving a high school and its students.
We started a participatory project there, but we did not want to impose a topic on them. We wanted the project to be open, with the students themselves deciding what mattered most in their community.
That was actually a surprise for us. We expected that the young people would want to focus on opportunities of some kind, or something similar. But what they chose was to create a wildlife garden in the school yard, because they felt they did not have enough green space.
Starting from that idea, they followed the steps of the participatory project we had designed for them. We organised meetings with the local mayor, the municipality, and other relevant actors. And, long story short, they managed to convince the municipality to invest in the school yard and create the wildlife garden there.
So that is the example that comes most strongly to mind right now. And it was also a surprise for me, because I had not expected the students to choose that topic.
But in a way, that is the best thing that can happen in a participatory process: not choosing the topic yourself, but letting participants choose it, because then it reflects their actual needs.
Okay, that is actually a very nice segue to my next question. In your work with young people, what kinds of issues or forms of participation seem to resonate most strongly with them? This example is about green space and their immediate environment, but beyond that, do you see any broader patterns, either in what matters most to them, or in how they want to engage?
Yes. One of the strongest themes, definitely, is their relationship to digital spaces — social media, smartphones, and what they themselves describe as forms of addiction connected to them.
That was also a surprise for me. When I create something for young people, I try, once again, to provide only the process or framework and let them bring in the topic themselves. What surprised me was how honest they were. Young people can be very honest with themselves when the context allows it. And one of the things they identified very clearly was this issue of their own dependence on smartphones, social media, and digital life.
Based on that, we created a campaign together with them to address exactly this issue. So that is the first thing that comes to mind: what moves them are the problems they are actually experiencing in their own lives.
After that, I would say mental health issues — especially those connected to well-being, and often also linked to these digital addictions, though not only to them. Then there is the climate issue, which is also connected, in a broader sense, to their well-being.
So overall, I think they are very interested in questions of well-being in the broadest sense. From there, they are able to identify more specific issues that matter to them and that they want to act on.
And if you ask them, and if you create the right context, they can actually give a lot of insight into what is happening in their lives. That means they are aware of their needs and aware of the issues they are facing.
That is very interesting. Listening to you, it seems to me that things like screen addiction and its effects on well-being, on the one hand, and climate anxiety and concerns about the future, on the other, are different kinds of issues and may require different kinds of campaigns.
Is that also how they see it? Even though both relate to well-being, do they understand both as issues that require some kind of interface with institutions or people in power in order to bring about change? It makes intuitive sense to me that institutions can act on climate. But what do young people think institutions or decision-makers can do about screen addiction?
Yes. In relation to screen addiction, they clearly recognise that the platforms that are part of their everyday lives — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and so on — are not working in their favour. They see that the algorithm is part of what creates this kind of addiction.
So they can identify the problem, and they can recognise that while a campaign can help other young people understand what is happening, if you want to change something at a larger level, then you have to speak with the people who are in charge — the people who can influence how these algorithms work. So they are able to see the link between the issue and the structures that produce it.
When it comes to climate, from what I have seen, their focus is much more local. They want to solve the issues that are part of their own community, and they often have a lot of insight about them.
They know which places are polluting. They know where the municipality has made recent investments in green parks, or where it has not. They are informed about these things. But their understanding remains grounded at the local level. They do not usually try to speak as though they know everything about the national or European level.
And that is something I really like about them. They do not talk about issues simply because those are the issues one is supposed to talk about. They talk about them because they actually have knowledge and experience related to them.
So in the case of climate, they tend not to speak about it in abstract global or European terms. They speak about climate in the way they experience it in their own communities.
Just one more follow-up on the algorithm side of things: what kinds of interventions do they imagine institutions or people in power could make to help these platforms work better for them?
The first thing is age. They recognise that it was a mistake to start using these platforms so early. So age limits are the first issue they raise.
For example, they mentioned Australia, where there has been discussion about banning access for young people under sixteen, and they said they would like to see something similar in Europe. At the same time, they also pointed out that simply setting an age limit is not enough.
Right now, for example, the rule may say that you cannot create an account before the age of thirteen. But many of them created accounts when they were ten. So they are very aware that just writing “this is forbidden under sixteen” or “under thirteen” does not solve the problem.
Children will still find ways to create accounts, whether by using false information or by using their parents’ details. So from their perspective, the issue is not only setting an age threshold, but also finding ways to make those rules meaningful in practice.
They see early access as a bad decision, or at least as something that has had harmful consequences. So they want institutions and platforms to take age more seriously, but also to understand that young people can easily bypass the current procedures for creating accounts.
And although they did not speak very directly about parents in the beginning, they did talk about the complicity of parents more generally. Their point was that if children are still creating accounts while underage, this often happens because parents are helping them, or at least allowing it. So in their view, the issue is not only with the platforms, but also with the broader environment that makes early access possible.