Conference on the Future of Europe

The Conference on the Future of Europe was the EU’s largest ever dialogue process. For two years, all EU citizens could help shape the future of Europe by presenting and discussing their ideas on a digital platform, participating in hundreds of events and joining one of four panels where 200 randomly selected citizens were tasked with making recommendations based on 20,000 ideas received.

Digidem Lab was one of two organisations contracted in 2020 to design the digital platform dialogue, develop an outreach strategy and guidelines, and train hundreds of Europa Direct staff across the EU.

During the preparation phase, Digidem Lab’s role was to advise the European Commission, develop workshops to design the physical and digital participant space of the conference and produce a strategy and associated outreach guidelines, a toolkit and knowledge base used on site by the event organisers.

After the conference started, the mission continued with the moderation of the Decidim platform, further optimisations of the user experience and an ongoing analysis of participation. During the operational phase of the platform, quantitative analysis of participants’ contributions was produced through weekly reports in collaboration with consultants from another provider (Open Source Politics) and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC).

Digidem Lab was on site in Strasbourg and Maastricht for two weekends to facilitate two sessions. Another session was digitally facilitated from Sweden. After the last session, the consultants summarised their teams’ recommendations and participated in the panel evaluation process.