That makes total sense. Speaking of youth participation: what kinds of issues, or forms of participation, seem to resonate most with younger people in your experience?
Through the interviews I have been doing, I have noticed that compared to just a few years ago, when climate breakdown was the issue, the fear that things would go really badly if we did not act, focus now seems to be shifting.
There is still a lot to do, of course, and I do not mean that climate no longer matters. But more and more, the feeling seems to be that climate breakdown is not the root problem, but an effect of something deeper.
And what lies underneath it, in the way younger people are talking about it, is the economic and cultural system itself: capitalism on the one hand, and patriarchal society and all that comes with it on the other. So the analysis seems to be deepening. Climate is still there, but it is being understood as part of a wider systemic crisis.
As you know from our discussions on the platform, we are integrating questions about AI into all the interviews, partly because it came up organically in the FOSDEM interviews and partly because Sirin wants to incorporate it into the data presentation she will do in Cluj.
Some people think AI could make it easier for citizens to interact with institutions — for example by summarising policy discussions or helping people draft proposals. Others worry about ethics, privacy, and the ways technology can centralise power.
So from your perspective, what role, if any, could AI play in civic participation in the future?
I think both sides are true.
At the moment, and I do not think this is going to stop soon, we mostly see AI being used by those already in power to strengthen and centralise their power even more.
On the other hand, when I think about participatory processes, inside organisations, communities, local groups, networks, and so on, I always recommend having facilitators. A facilitator is someone who designs or at least watches how people are contributing and tries to make sure that everyone can participate actively.
What I think we will increasingly see is AI acting as a kind of facilitative agent.
For example, it might notice the people who are contributing less to a conversation on a platform, or even at an in-person event, and encourage them to contribute. It could say: these are still the open questions, or ask why someone has not yet spoken. It could also help with synthesis. One of the big problems in large-group participatory processes is that you often get a lot of divergent thinking. AI could help highlight where there is already convergence, and what issues still need to be explored more deeply.
It might even suggest that a specific expert be invited to clarify a topic.
So I think we will see more of that, and I hope we do.
So if I understand you correctly, AI could assist meaningfully with facilitation and synthesis, but not with the things that require human judgment. Is that right?
Hopefully, yes.
Let me put it this way: what I increasingly think matters, in sociocracy and in other participatory methods, is not so much “wisdom” — which is often associated with elders, experience, and so on — but intuition.
I am not even sure I like the concept of wisdom very much anymore. I like intuition more.
And I think intuition is one of the things human beings still have, at least for now, and AI does not really have, because AI works with probabilities. So yes, that is where I would draw an important line.
That is really interesting. I have not heard anyone put it that way before, but it makes sense to me.
If AI were integrated into facilitation or mediation, are there safeguards or design principles you would want to see in practice?
I am not a major AI expert, but I have colleagues working with it. One of them, whom I interviewed, is working on AI for accessibility in a museum. What I learned from that work is that you can build something that is universally good if you begin from the needs of people with specific impairments, visual, hearing, physical, and so on. In other words, accessibility needs to be a core design principle.
Then, of course, there is the issue of extractivism in a broad sense: extracting data from users. AI was trained from the beginning through the illegal extraction of books and articles, so we already started from a non-ethical position. And now it is even worse because it is in the hands of big corporations.
So training AI on people’s data raises major concerns, and then there is also the extraction of physical resources, the energy, water, and infrastructure required by data centres.
So for me the key principles are accessibility, data ethics, and the broader material footprint.
I want to shift gears now and move to the more meta-level interview questions, about our project and the research-practice relationship. As someone who works directly with these kinds of processes, do you think the goals of the INTERFACED project, what we are trying to understand, are in sync, or not in sync, with what you see happening in real participatory processes?
I have asked myself that question too.
I see positively the fact that an institution, in this case the European Union, or the European Commission, wants to understand how people participate, or would like to participate, so that this might inform how the democratic system improves over time.
Because democracy is itself a kind of technology.
What do you mean when you say that democracy is a technology? That is a very interesting phrase.
I mean that democracy should not be understood as the final system, the one stable system that replaced autocracy or something else and is now finished.
The reality is that there are many different democracies, and that democracies can change and improve over time, or become worse, as we are seeing now.
If we compare a democratic system to software, then just as software can be changed, by rewriting code, replacing something, adding a feature, democracy can also be redesigned. We can add something new. We can implement, for example, a citizens’ assembly. We can imagine replacing one political chamber with a body of randomly selected citizens.
Even changing the quorum for a referendum is changing the democratic system. It is editing the code of the software we use to collaborate and make decisions in large groups like nation-states.
So in that sense, I think it is good that institutions are trying to understand how people want to participate.
At the same time, civil society is still often one step ahead of institutions. It is important that institutions listen, observe, and integrate what people are already doing in practice.
If you look at the different waves of social movements over the last twenty-five years, the No Global Movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, Ende Gelände, Fridays for Future, Black Lives Matter, there has not been much listening, observation, and integration from institutions in terms of understanding how people want to participate in today’s society and politics.
And I think that contributes to this sense of detachment, this distance between institutions and citizens.
Have there been moments since you came on board the project where the research perspective has felt especially useful for you as a practitioner and activist?
Yes.
Just running the interviews, just sitting for an hour and listening to people talk about how they experience themselves inside collectives, how they see themselves as part of a larger whole, how the relationship between the individual and the collective works in terms of identity, practice, ethics, tools, and so on, that has been very interesting in itself.
Given your academic background as well as your practical one, do you think there are aspects of participatory work that academic scholarship either misunderstands, overlooks, or does not ask the right questions about?
It is a bit difficult for me to answer, because I have been out of university for a few years now. But there are two things that come to mind.
The first goes back to my master’s thesis, which was on populism. When I started reading the academic literature, I was not fully satisfied with what I saw. I quickly realised there was a dominant liberal understanding of populism in academia: that populism is generally not a good thing, even if it can sometimes point to something not working in the liberal-democratic system.
The approach I ended up taking in my thesis was closer to a post-Marxist understanding of populism. It recognised that populist movements can be problematic, but it also tried to look at the emancipatory or innovative possibilities that might exist, especially in relation to left populist movements.
So that taught me that academic common sense about a phenomenon may need to be questioned. Instead of simply asking, “Is this bad?” we might also ask, “Is there something happening here that is actually politically interesting?”
The second thing is more recent. My partner has just started a PhD on deliberative democracy from a transfeminist and decolonial perspective. We were talking the other day because she had met with another researcher, and they were discussing how much conversation there is, or is not, between more critical branches of research and mainstream approaches to deliberative democracy.
So I think there is still a gap in how certain participatory practices are critically assessed.
I think you already answered this partly, but I have one more question. Based on both your own experience and your experience in our project, what should researchers or practitioners pay attention to when designing interfaces between citizens and decision-makers, or citizens and other citizens, in ways that genuinely help voices be heard and amplified? In a way, it is almost a user experience design question.
Yes, and it is a very interesting one.
What I often see from institutions is something like: “We want to hear your opinion. Here are a few options. Thank you for your time. Bye.”
Maybe that was enough forty years ago. Nowadays, people want to see their impact.
And I think that has something to do with the fact that political parties are much weaker than they were fifty years ago. Maybe parties used to function as the interfaces through which people could participate in politics. They no longer do that in the same way.
So whenever there are interfaces for participation today, I think people are more than willing to use them, but they want to see whether their voice is actually heard, and how it is integrated into action.
How to do that is extremely difficult. It is hard to think about how the current system can reform itself in order to better listen to people. And because this is so difficult, many participatory processes and movements end up happening outside the current institutional democratic system, or in opposition to it.