Deliberative and participatory processes currently lack full legitimacy due to the exclusion and marginalisation of several vulnerable communities. iDEM aims at addressing the barriers in deliberative and participatory democratic spaces for marginalised and vulnerable communities. These barriers often result from limited skills in reading, writing or understanding a fairly complex language required for deliberative and participatory processes. Our vision in this project is to improve this situation by developing artificial intelligence and natural language processing models and tools to enhance the accessibility and inclusiveness of democratic spaces for the aforementioned marginalized groups. In the project, nexus is responsible for the research on barriers to inclusion of citizens with cognitive disabilities, migrants and older people and leads the work package on user-centered design and the piloting of the three use cases. iDEM will co-create the next-generation multilingual models aimed at (1) detecting possible sources of problems in understanding messages and biases 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 easy-to-read messages. To do so, iDEM will also build on the results of relevant past projects, and seek collaboration with related projects and relevant centres for democracy in Europe. The project is implemented by a consortium of 11 European partner organisations from 6 European countries.

Duration: 01/2024 – 12/2026
Team: Dr. Thomas Blanchet (Projektleitung), Dr. Carina Brumme, Volkan Sayman, Owen Wooden
Project partner: Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Spanien), CFS Consulting Franchise & Sales GmbH (Österreich), Organización de Entidades en Favor de las Personas con Discapacidad Intelectual de la Comunidad de Madrid (Spanien), The National Microelectronics Applications Centre LTD (Irland), Associazione Nazionale di Famiglie e Persone con Disbilità Intellettive e Disturbi del Neurosviluppo (Italien), Fundación Cibervoluntarios (Spanien), Actionaid International Italia ETS (Italien), Institut Municipal de Personas AMB Discapacitat (Spanien), Barcelona Ombudsman’s Office (Spanien), University of Leeds (Vereinigtes Königreich), nexus Institut für Kooperationsmanagement und interdisziplinäre Forschung (Deutschland)
Supporting provider: Horizon Europe