Making democratic deliberation and participation more accessible: the iDEM project

Abstract

Deliberative and participatory processes currently don’t have full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities from democratic spaces. It is well documented that people with limited language skills, such as people with cognitive disabilities, struggle to participate in democratic processes. This happens in spite of the advocacy work of organizations which promote human rights. The iDEM project aims at addressing the barriers in deliberative and participatory democratic practices through a thorough intersectional analysis of conditions under which current structures and systems limit participation of marginalised and vulnerable communities. Specially those with limited skills in reading, writing or understanding a fairly complex language, which is often required for deliberative and participatory processes. iDEM will lay the theoretical foundations for the analysis of current marginalisation from deliberative processes of diverse under-represented groups due to a lack of language skills. It will adopt a user-centred approach for making participatory processes more accessible and inclusive, developing advanced natural language processing technologies (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to empower under-represented groups, with tools to facilitate communication and dialog in democratic spaces. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at: (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages for several European languages and audiences, (2) automatically adapting texts in those languages to be accessible and unbiased for these audiences, (3) providing AI tools for enhancing the generation of appropriate messages and discourses. iDEM aims to create more accessible democratic spaces in Italy and Spain with customised technology enhancing the participation and representation of marginalised groups by providing unbiased and inclusive technology.