Participatory platforms are now widely used across Europe for consultations, participatory budgeting, petitions, and deliberation. However, despite this growth, civic tech ecosystems remain deeply fragmented: platforms are isolated, data is locked into silos, and citizen contributions rarely travel across institutional levels or over time. This fragmentation limits transparency, weakens democratic legitimacy, and prevents collective learning at scale.

This talk presents the Democracy Data Space, an open, interoperable infrastructure designed to reconnect participatory processes across platforms, institutions, and territories while preserving local autonomy and data sovereignty. Inspired by European data space principles and built on open standards, this initiative explores how interoperability can enable traceability of citizen contributions, federated identity, shared governance rules, and cross-platform democratic intelligence.

We will share:

The political and technical problems caused by today’s civic tech silos The core architectural principles of a Democracy Data Space How open protocols and federated data spaces enable democratic traceability Early experiments, governance challenges, and next steps for this european data space for democracy This session is aimed at open-source developers, civic tech builders, data space practitioners, and anyone interested in building public digital infrastructure for democracy.