The ORBIS project was developed to address the disconnects between ambitious ideas and collective actions at a large socio-technical scale and respond to the profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy-making institutions, by providing a theoretically sound and highly pragmatic socio-technical solution to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful Deliberative Democracy in Europe. Its main aim is to provide new methods for augmenting citizen participation, fostering co-creation, trust and transparency in deliberative democracy at all scales, from the local to the national and European levels.
The project will define and support new bottom-up democratic models that are imagined and developed through deliberative democratic processes by fostering structured, inclusive and large-scale societal dialogue. These processes are inherently constructive rather than transactional and are built through strong civic engagement. ORBIS follows a socio-constructive approach to European Democracy, in which deliberative democracy is the process through which citizens can collectively imagine and realize new democratic practices and models. Its approach to developing cutting-edge sociotechnical solutions and addressing the need to reshape democracy by emphasising participation, transparency, accountability, and effectiveness, is human-centred rather than problem-centred.
Coordinated by Politecnico di Milano, the project includes partners from academia, the civil society, and the private sector.
