Today we’ve published a new report with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, exploring how a future European civic tech hub could strengthen democratic participation across Europe.

You can read it online, or download as a PDF. 

Drawing on interviews with 19 civic tech organisations from 12 countries, we’ve wrestled with the opportunities and challenges facing participation and pro-democracy tech across Europe.

We’ve structured the report around three progress areas: increasing demand, strengthening supply, and optimising implementation. For each area, we identify both short term activities and longer term ambitions.

Recommendations

Jump to the recommendations section of the report

1. Increased demand

A recurring theme from our interviews was that the technical issues were only half of the problem. Many public authorities still need support to see participation itself as a valuable tool for better decision-making.

As a result, the report recommends that the hub should initially focus on practical support: helping people find existing resources, connecting them with networks, and showcasing successful examples. Over time, this can contribute to a broader shift where participation is increasingly seen as a normal and valuable part of governance.

2. Strengthened supply

A lot of our interviewees discussed the challenges they face as organisations building participation technology.

We heard that key barriers include procurement requirements, certification costs, and uncertainty around sustainable business models. The tensions between open vs closed source tech in the current market came up regularly, but we’ve tried to take a balanced approach.

Rather than treating open and closed source approaches as a binary choice, we think the hub can support a diverse ecosystem while reducing barriers to openness, collaboration and interoperability.

3. Optimised implementation

Here we’re trying to unite supply and demand.

We think there needs to be stronger links between civic tech practitioners, democratic innovators, universities and public authorities, alongside support for pilots in places where participation is less established. Longer term, we’d like the hub to explore approaches such as shared testing environments and procurement reform that would make participation technology easier to adopt and scale.

4.  Cross cutting themes

Finally, there are two cross-cutting themes that we wanted to recognise, even though they’re not central to our recommendations. 

The first is the importance of political buy-in. Successful participation processes require political leaders who are willing to engage with the outcomes, whatever they may be. The second is the growing impact of AI. Interviewees highlighted both the opportunities AI creates for participation technology and the new challenges it poses around regulation, platform governance and digital infrastructure. 

In summary

Overall, our conclusion is that the most valuable role for a European civic tech hub is to reduce friction across the ecosystem: helping authorities find trusted resources, supporting organisations to navigate barriers, sharing evidence of what works, and creating the conditions for participation to become a more routine part of democratic decision-making.

Read the full report, and watch our launch event.

Any questions, comments or feedback? Get in touch tictec@mysociety.org

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Photo by and machines on Unsplash