Who will speak at the fourth session of the Deliberative Democracy Lab

This time, participants will focus on digital deliberation: exploring how deliberation can be brought into the digital space while preserving its core nature — the collective search for common ground through the exchange of arguments and the careful consideration of different perspectives in an environment free from undue influence.

Ukrainian and international experts will share their experience of digital deliberation:

Maksym Semenchuk, Adviser to the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, will present the Ukrainian Civic Tech Lab initiative and explain why digital democracy needs a community of practitioners, specifically at the local level.

Mykhailo Leichenko, Director of IT Analytics at the Centre for Innovation Development (CID), will share the organisation's first experience of using Polis for digital deliberation with local communities. He will also discuss the conclusions reached by the CID team after analysing 53 international e-democracy tools.

Oleksandra Radchenko, Public Participation Expert at the EGAP Programme of the East Europe Foundation, will present the E-dem Unified Local E-democracy Platform and demonstrate how one of its modules is already serving as a step towards digital deliberation.

Estelle Ciesla, Research Consultant at Stanford University's Deliberative Democracy Lab, will introduce Deliberative Polling and the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, which enables thousands of people to participate in online deliberation. Participants will learn how this approach has been implemented in more than 50 countries.

Jess Scully, Executive Director of the RadicalxChange Foundation, will present five principles of effective digital deliberation and demonstrate why the value of this format extends beyond greater scale or lower participation costs.

RadicalxChange Foundation is an international community of programmers, researchers, artists, activists and entrepreneurs working to reimagine democratic and economic institutions and develop solutions that strengthen citizens' influence over the future. 

The Deliberative Democracy Lab is a platform for exchanging ideas and experiences to identify effective adaptations of international deliberative practices to the Ukrainian context. The Lab’s ultimate goal is to develop recommendations for the effective integration of deliberative democracy into Ukraine’s public participation system.