Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Mhmm. And,

Yes. Yes. Yes. It started now more than ten years ago when, myself and my, cofounder, Aline, when we were still studying in in, in Brussels, we started a company, as students, students who were, in love with the, the city they just moved to, to the, to our capital, to Brussels, but could also see like many things that didn't go too well in the city. And we had many ideas for our neighborhood and, and, you know, we wanted to kind of co create and co design some of the public spaces that we often experienced as residents ourselves. And then we went on this, on this initial exploration of how do we most effect effectively make our voice heard as a resident here in Brussels. And, it was a pretty kind of disappointing exploration in the sense that we could back then download like a PDF form on the city website, fill it out, send it in, and then, you know, in the best case, get thirty seconds to speak at a town hall meeting. And we we were like, in a digitally connected world, it feels like the way that cities engage with their residents can really be upgraded and can, can benefit from a way more modern approach to it. So then we got started on the on little prototype, and started working with First Cities and we're especially interested in engaging more, youngsters, especially young people, because at those town hall meetings on that Tuesday night, you always get to see like the same, the same 10 people. And typically you don't have many young people engaging. So that's how we get started with the first cities. Maybe taking a bit of a step back. The reason why, why Austin, ten years in now, we're we're I'm still super passionate about kind of what we're doing and feels still very much as if there's so much work to do is because I think governance altogether is one of the most effective ways to, make a positive impact in this world. The decisions that our governments make, they impact the lives of millions and billions of people. So if we can find better governance structures, power structures, better ways to make decisions, then, yeah, it's it's it has a fantastic impact. And, when we when we started out, one framework that I like to to think in is like, in terms of, how you can make a positive impact, One advice I've heard is, like, look for problems that are one, obviously solvable and which is clearly the case here. The technology is there. Two that are large, which is also the case. I mean, so many governments out there, public sector is huge. And three that are neglected. And I think very much, it has been very much neglected as a problem. How do we build better governance, better sit and true citizen participation? So, especially when we started out ten years ago, working with the public sector, working with government was, totally not done. Now there's like a civic tech and a golf tech, you know, spaces, but they didn't exist exist back then. So it's been also really interesting to see the field emerge and grow, which has been really good to see. But, that's kind of, yeah, how we initially started out.

Yeah. So GoVocal. So previously, we went under the name of of CitizenLab. We changed our names about two years ago. GoVocal, we, offer a digital platform for citizen participation. So for residents to have a say on local plans, local projects, local decisions. I'm saying local because typically we work with cities, municipalities, local governments. So we, work with about 500, cities and local governments worldwide, in in Europe, in North America, but also some work in Latin America and Africa. And how it works is for the residents, you've got different ways of making your voice heard. So they can go from sharing within, a local project, whether it's the creation of a new park or a mobility plan, sharing ideas, opinions, going into dialogue with other residents through commenting, voting, you know, like voting also for prioritization in participatory budgets. So there's all sorts of, tools to participate within the projects of the city. And then there's also more bottom up tools. For instance, through proposals, citizen proposals that you can come up with your own proposal, gather a minimum number of votes, and then the city will take your proposal into consideration and give feedback to you. So that is very much for the resident where the idea is really to keep things, pretty pretty simple and straightforward. And then most of the horsepower for the city really sits in kind of the the back office system where they have the tools to manage all their projects, to get a better understanding of what citizens have said, also using, sense making tools, to do easy reporting. And what we're right now very much focused on is how we build digital democracy and citizen participation really as part of the infrastructure of how Citi works. So that means it's not just one team or one person working on citizen participation, but it's something that is distributed, that is sitting within all the different departments. So from, like, the parks and recreation to the planning department, to the culture and youth department, getting all of them to use the platform for the different projects. So we're very much also focused on how in the back ends, in the in back of the system, how do you make people within government work together? How do you make that whole workflow of running a participatory project, you know, as simple and effective as possible? That's what we're really focused on because our whole theory of change, our change maker theory is like we partner with the governments and we need them as as the the ally. We need to enable them because it's from within that we gotta, you know, create change and together with them. So the more people within government that we can have, change their way of making decisions or running their projects, the more impact we will have with the residents in, in the second instance. So that's why we're very much focused on like, how do we facilitate the internal adoption and make it easier for, the government administrators to work with the platform.

Yeah. We we started out in in Belgium. So I'm from Brussels, Belgium, and, then from there to The Netherlands, and then to other European, European cities in The UK, and then since about two, three years or so. Also more in in North America and The US.

Yeah. So it depends on, of course, the the the the different there's multiple use cases, but, maybe I'll just share a couple of examples. I'll try to think of, like, different different geographies a little bit. Maybe let's start first in in in Europe, in Denmark, the city of Copenhagen. So they use GoVocal, exactly for what I was describing earlier with the proposals. So they launched what they call the Copenhagen proposal, and they launched with the platform to collect bottom up proposals from residents. There have been more than 20,000 residents in the last year who have been submitting a proposal or have been, voting on a proposal. And those proposals, as soon as they hit the threshold of 2,500 votes, they go to council. And it's been a very effective, one launch strategy because they managed to get in a very short period of time more than 20,000 residents on the platform, just because it's, like, very much focused on let's reimagine Copenhagen and, hey, you can have a direct impact. So it was very empowering. It's been a fantastic launch strategy because now they have all the different departments coming on board and they can start, you know, running their project with already a very active, and engaged resident base. But two, it has also been a a really good, illustration of direct impact that can be made. There have been some proposals already accepted and implemented. One, for instance, about, there's been a group of residents who proposed, a better better treatment and follow-up to, young people who grew up in abusive homes, so who had parents with drug or alcohol abuse, that they could get a treatment within ninety days. And this proposal got accepted and implemented. I think it's a great example of social change that really was initiated by the bottom up. And, it's very important for for cities to showcase those success stories because that is what is gonna give trust to the residents. If they see like, hey. Wow. You know, like, six months ago, this got proposed. Now this is happening. It it's it's, I think, a fantastic example of of change and what they do really well. And in general, what we really try to push for is closing always that feedback loop, always going back to the citizens saying like, hey, this is what has happened with, your proposal or with your idea. So that's that's, Copenhagen. Maybe, second one, we go to The UK, to the London Borough Of Newham, which is, yeah, in the center of of London. London consists of many different boroughs, and they have, a very broad kind of rollout of our platform. They have about 200 internal project managers from different departments using the platform and a very engaged resident, resident community of I think there's about, like, 25,000, 30,000 residents who are actively participating. And they have one flagship program called People Powered Places. And it's a program that goes in two year cycles, and they have 1,700,000, British pounds that they allocate to this this program in which they are first setting, like, priorities for the borough, then collecting ideas from the residents for new projects. Residents develop those together, those ideas to projects, assign like a budget tag to it, do a big vote on what are the projects that need to be implemented. And then there's like a whole follow through in terms of implementation and the residents are also being part of the, the co design. There have been more than 300 citizen led projects that have been implemented already. So it's also, I think, a really good illustration of, like, direct influence of residents. And what's really interesting is they, do at the end of each cycle, a very thorough review of, what's been the impact. And in the last cycle, they got to a percentage of, 89% of the residents saying that they feel much more connected to their borrower after participation in in this program, which is which was just a fantastic data point to also illustrate, like, the, yeah, the the the influence it can have if people have a say and if they can have an influence on decisions. So that's in UN. Maybe then a very last one. Let's maybe cross the Atlantic and go to The US, the city of St. Louis. They had an exceptional, big settlement fund of $250,000,000 They had like a sports team, an American football team that moved out of city of St. Louis, and they had to pay like a settlement fund through the city. And St. Louis, why this is such an interesting case is because St. Louis is a city that is historically pretty segregated. There is not a lot of investment going into the northern part of the city. Most of it is concentrated in downtown and southern parts. And the board of Alleman couldn't really agree on how they should allocate those $250,000,000 that settlement fund. So they said, okay. Power to the people. We're gonna do this in a very participatory way. And, they created the platform Speak Up St. Louis, where they took a very, methodological approach to assigning this budget. They first collect ideas on, like, how do you imagine St. Louis 2040? In second instance, they asked about what are the main challenges you're experiencing? Then they connected those ideas to the challenges, work with the different city departments to scrutinize the different ideas, develop them into projects. And again, have more than 15,000, residents from the city of St. Louis vote on those different proposals. What came out as the first proposal was actually more investment in water infrastructure, water main, which was for them surprising because it's, it's not kind of the most, or the sexiest idea if you see what I mean. Like it's something very much under the surface. But it was very interesting because it, it, you know, spoke to that citizens really know what is critical in terms of infrastructure for the city. And then they, after this voting process, they, the citizens were able to actually co draft legislation. So there was then finally a bill that got submitted and that got approved. The citizens also had the chance to, react to draft proposals, to draft bills. And what's been important is that through one having so many people participating, but two also having data on the representativeness of the citizens, this got very, very much, more quickly supported by the Board of Alderman, which was previously divided because they knew, like, hey, this is actually a representative sample. And I think that is also where really power lies of, civic tech platforms. If we are able to demonstrate, hey, this is not just the happy few, you know, that are participating, but this is a representative group of people, then of course, it's it really reinforces the chance that politicians, policymakers will listen, will potentially implement, some of those ideas. So, yeah, those are those are, just three examples and maybe one one last quick thing that I will say is something I'm really excited about right now that we're doing is we're working with, it's called the American Forum. It's, a group of of of organizations together with three different states in North America, in South Carolina, Nevada, and New Hampshire, purple states, wing states, where it is a cross partisan initiative to have, large scale deliberation on some of the biggest issues in those, three different states. So, a very, very important initiative, I think, because especially in The United States being so polarized these days, It's so important to show like, hey, we can find supermajorities. We can agree on so many things. It is possible to find common ground and and have it lead to action. You know, not not just like having talks, but actually bring it to state to the state government and, turning it into policy. So that's something I'm excited, excited for for for, 2026.

I think that given what we're seeing in the world right now, where there's, like, a a total shakeup because there's more and more oligarchies emerging, and we see that with rising inequality and concentration of power, that it leads to structural problems in society. I think that yeah. Better governance system, more distribution of power and through more citizen participation is gonna be pretty critical to find solutions to those structural challenges of of inequalities and concentration of power and and the corruption that comes with it. So, I'm feeling pretty hopeful about this, about like building more resilient and democratic communities, how important it is for some of the big societal challenges going from, you know, like, climate change, rise of of AGI and and and to, you know, all the the the warfare that we're seeing in the world. So I think in on the very big picture, I think that is what really also motivates me that it's about power redistribution. It's about a group of people collectively, you know, finding common ground and agreement to move things forward. And there's particularly one, to make it a bit more concrete, one one, research or one data point that I really like, because it it kind of confirms what I what I'm just saying. From the OECD in 2024, they looked at, like, what are the factors that influence trust in our institutions, in our governments that influences that most. And they found that actually the the the single biggest influential factor is whether people feel listened to or not. This, if I remember well, was about, like, 22% of the residents who don't feel listened to, they have a high trust in government, but that number jumps to 69%. If people feel heard, if they feel listened to it, they feel they can have an influence. So like the ability to actually what they call political efficacy. So the ability to be able to change and influence outcomes policies is is one of the most important factors to trust in each other and in our institutions. So that's why I I believe that in the coming years, we'll only see, yeah, more participatory approaches. I think also there's been really interesting work in the deliberative space and with assemblies, but at the same time, we've come to conclusion that, hey, this doesn't scale too well. So what is the magic combination of bringing more deliberation into digital participation and having that at times also combined with the, deliberative practices that we've that we've seen from assemblies. So I think we're still looking for some of those models, but I'm sure by '20 what was it? 2036, we should have we should have found the answer, hopefully already next, two years.

Right. But I'm a little skeptical of going too much for direct democracy because I think one of the threats of of, of of digital democracy is that it will lead to more of an individualization and like an atomization of, of of citizens in democracy. What do I mean by that? If we all kind of are being reduced to like, hey, we can vote directly on things and those things will be implemented. The power of a democratic discourse is that it has the ability to transform us and to change our perspectives. And I think we get to really build listening into the way we design digital democracy. And if it's, yeah, going to be too much like a sum of individual votes, then I'm afraid that it leads to more of a individualization, lack of empathy, lack of understanding. And I think that is what we need most at this in in these times is like, we are already being so much in our bubbles. How do we get different groups to connect with each other, to listen to different perspectives and get an understanding of it? So that's why I think the power of digital democracy will sit in like being able to better map different perspectives in the community. There's also no such a thing as de citizen. There are many different groups and it's about like showing really the diversity of opinions, showing minority voices as well. I think this will be really important that it's not going to be just a tool that also can be yeah, misused for going only in with like, hey, here is the majority vote and and and very, populistic rhetoric, but that it can also be used to actually get to more nuanced views and and more deliberative, ways of of coming to decisions.

Shared shared values and shared kind of maybe shared needs. I think that's also part of building the right participatory process that you bring people back to, hey. What are our shared values as a community and start from there? Because indeed, things get lost in words and then semantics and in, and in those things. But we're just reacting back to what you were saying on like the direct democracy. What I do think is a very good thing is when, citizens' power gets codifies. So when when citizen voices in in, decision making, when that gets codified. So for instance, an example is, the right for citizens initiatives and you say like, hey, so many votes. And then we commit to actually responding, council responding to proposals. I think that is great. And that is something we're seeing more and more often in, in many countries that there is more and more regulation coming around participation. For instance, in The Netherlands where, they initiated, I think it was last year or two years ago, the spatial planning act. All spatial decisions require a clear involvement of the citizens. For every decision being made, governments have to show how they engage citizens in their decision making. So I think those are really important, regulatory changes that will create also more of a of a culture of, democratic participation. So that's what I'm what I'm hopeful about.

I don't know what are your thoughts. So the question of, like, how the connection between what people say and what the final decision is? Like, the those are often misaligned?

of the software. And so I am there, and I'm what do I do? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I I think the, the good thing is that even though it might not always because it might sometimes there might be good reasons to not just go with the the popular vote, right, and to go with with what people are saying. But I think it's it's as much about good participation is as much about, explaining choices, explaining trade offs, making people understand why you're making specific choices. I think that is really, super important and really critical that, yeah, you show those trade offs and, in the end, I mean, in most cases, system participation is there to, to inform your decision. But again, there might be good reasons to go a different direction. It's about explaining why you had to make the decision. I think that is really, also when we think about trust, that is more important than just, hey. They've said this, so I gotta follow this. The problem is when there is no feedback, when there is no transparency on, like, hey. We said a, you decided b and there and kind of it's not clear why why, you know, the one doesn't follow the other. That's problematic. But I I think, like, really good feedback explaining choices, communicating those, that's where, really the magic sits. And of course, you should not if you know, like, hey, we're only considering three different options, then don't ask, hey, come up with your ideas to map all the different options out there. So it's also about like setting the right question at from the, from the get go, from the outset and making sure that people can really influence things. If you wouldn't consider certain inputs, then refine your question to, Hey, we're looking at those three, three different options. Give us your thoughts on those as opposed to, like, doing it too open ended. So that's something we are advising also governments on is looking for every decision. It's like, what is the right methodology to use and, and and what room is there to still influence the outcome?

And, And that is sometimes a challenge, of course, like, making policy takes time. That's why I think for sure why today we see civic tech being used by local governments. One big contributing factor is this, that you can have short feedback loops and that when you're redesigning a park three months later, you can design on decide on design the park. If you do, like, a new, new, I don't know, like, big policy and a new regulatory change has to take go through so many different steps that you lose people in the whole process. So that's why I think, yeah, local level, that's where the action happens and where you can give keep those feedback loops short, but it is a challenge for more national, international level. So the so that's for sure. I wanted to, but I forgot now. I want to react to something we were also discussed earlier. It will come back.

Yeah. With with the cities, the local governments, what it means, so they are directly using the platform. So they are the ones who are on their local platform saying, like, hey. These are the consultations or, like, the the projects that we're running. So we are working with them, and they are then engaging their residents in the local decisions.

yeah. Actually, I don't know. Yeah. No. But but yeah. It it is true. There is way less use in a way on, the national level. That's for sure. Something that we have done recently, about less than a year ago, is, in The UK, we have had, a large conversation. It was called Change NHS. It was about, like, the reform of the health care system for the next ten years. So that was in a national level was with hundreds of thousands of participants who so it was like very large scale engagement. And it was also interesting for us because we had learned from that, conversation that as you get to such a large scale, you know, engagement, we need to think about a different way to organize the dialogue. Because if you have, like, 12,000 inputs for a resident, it becomes impossible to navigate the conversation. So So something that we've been building is what we call, perspectives. And it's a new way of actually exploring the ideas and the inputs from other residents where you can, have, like, a a summary of what has been said already so that you can really identify where is the conversation happening and which different topics. And also the way that we present the different ideas and the inputs to the to the end user is based on mechanisms such as representativeness, but also what we call wise voices. So we we actually look in the contributions for perspectives as in, like, if I say, hey, take your example and then the education policy. If I say, hey, as a parent, I experienced this and that. I am kind of illustrating my position and my my my expertise. So we're looking for that. We're also mining for that in in some of the the text. Just something that we're that we just rolled out and I'm excited for, to have better ways of exploring each other's, ideas. In the end, it's really about mechanisms to listen better and to, to find more common ground by identifying, like, hey, where does attention sit? Where is the where is the conversation happening and pointing and uses towards this?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody everybody can go on there. I can, I can follow-up with, like, a little example of how this looks like? But, for any, yeah, let's say, ideation projects where people can come with ideas, it's it's open and people can explore, like, where is the conversation happening. So, yes, it's a better way to navigate the conversation really and to to listen better. So, yeah, I'm excited about that. But to to the point, because now it came back to me what I wanted to say earlier about your question on, like, hey, what happens if if, if policy makers are not listening? I also just wanna highlight that something we, we are seeing now, and it's obviously a global phenomenon that governments are working with decreased budgets. There's like everywhere austerity and there is everywhere like, Hey, we're, under budget pressure. And we see more and more of our, the cities and the councils that we work with actually also engaging their residents on those tough questions, what are ways that we can get to those funds? So what should we deprioritize in terms of investment? There's, very recently, I think in the last couple of weeks, Sterling in in Scotland, Sterling Council, they did a phenomenal job, like getting thousands of their residents to actually engage on how are we going to save money. Just to say, it's also it's a way to get also support, buy in and understanding from your community and your residents by not only presenting the easy things, but also the difficult questions. In The Netherlands, for instance, there's, everybody has to or every municipality has to, welcome a certain percentage of of asylum seekers. And there are often conversations on the platforms of Dutch municipalities happening around, should we open like an, a centrum for, to welcome, asylum seekers in our municipality? And it's interesting to always follow that because then you see that often the conversation goes really beyond not in my backyard thinking. And, in most cases, people are supportive for it actually, surprisingly. So, again, it's a way we we we read in the news and in the in big media, hey, you know, not in my municipality and and you read about kind of how things get boycotted. But if you look at, like, really the the majority of people, how what their attitudes are towards it, you see that often there is way more supportive behavior and and participation can be a good way to map that and to make that clear and to go beyond just the the loud voices, the loud voices who would otherwise complain. Again, you show the data, you show like, hey, look, this is a representative sample of our residents being for this and that reason in favor for this. So that that's what I think is also important for this many tough choices. And again, it's about explaining those choices, explain those trade offs. And that's where where participation can really help.

Yeah. I have studied, what's called, commercial engineering. So no political science, but I've always been very interested in, like, political systems, and I've always been fill following, like, politics very closely. So I've always been really passionate about about democratic functioning and and politics. But I don't have a I don't have a background in, political science. I come more from an engineering background.

Yes. Most of my life as in, like, I've I've, come here to the city when I was 18. I've I've I've actually, yeah, growing up, I lived on on the countryside in in in Belgium. And, for me coming to the big city and seeing like the diversity was pretty eye opening and and and I find it so fascinating. And again, that's why, you know, being here in the city and being constantly in all of, like, of of the city, I love the city, but I also felt like, hey, there's much more that we can do in the city and we can do much better. So that's why I, initially came up with, let's try to get a platform for Brussels so that we, you know, make things easier here, that we can communicate our ideas. Because we needed to hear also in Brussels, we've got, we just came out of a period of more than six hundred days without a government. Belgium and particularly Brussels comes with its complexities because if you get French speaking community, deaf speaking community, and, typically those two language groups, they form independently their own government and then they merge them. They put them together like a Dutch and the French speaking part. But this time they, yeah, they didn't accept each other's coalitions. And they have been into an impasse for a very long time. And I think it's just really interesting what has happened here because you feel that it drains the city and the community, and there's a need for renewed energy, more imagination, stronger DNA. It's a fascinating place to live in, I think Brussels, because there are no majority groups here. It's a collection of all minority groups. And it's a, it's an experiment also in living together with differences. When there's not just like one unified group, but there's so many different groups. How do you find, coalition social contracts between all those different groups? It's not always easy. And again, it's a matter of then thinking through, like, what is the right way to build a political system, to build a governance system? And I think we clearly have to do some work here in Brussels because it's the whole system of Dutch versus French is is too outdated. Also because a big part of the city and of of of our region, consists of non French or non Dutch speakers, with the European institutions, for instance. So it, urgently requires an update the way that we govern our city.

or maybe they did it. Typically, the the politicians, they get the final reports on what's been said, but they are not using the platform directly. And in most cases, it's for good reason because there's also just kind of this Chinese wall between what does the administration do and what is like the political level. And I don't think it would be desirable to have politicians directly using those tools. They, of course, again, need to be informed and get the results. But running the actual process is done by the is done by the administration, I believe, for good reason.

So we already talked about a couple of those those things. One is, yeah, scaling online deliberation, having better dialogues, when many people participate, having better ways to listen to each other, to find common ground. So the whole digital deliberation piece is something that we've been working on a lot and will continue to work on. We really want to to crack that because, again, I think many, especially local governments, they don't have the the the resources, the budgets to run an, an assembly. But there needs to be an alternative to still talk about those contentious issues, those difficult topics in a deliberative way. So, yeah, we're very much thinking about how do we bring more deliberation into digital participation and finding new methodologies to to listen better, to find common ground to bridge. So that's one. And then, yeah, two is, as also said, like really turning our platform into infrastructure, getting it connected to the different systems of that the cities work with, having really good reporting, having good ways of working together, between different departments. So there's kind of the non visible it's not visible on the public side. It's all happening more in the backend than in the management system that I think is super important because if you have good adoption there, from there, then you can get to really exciting projects. And lastly, something I would love to see happen in the coming years is, the way that we could also integrate different levels of government, because let's take Brussels as we were just talking about it. Brussels consists of 19 different municipalities that make up the region. And then you have our federal level, European level and so on. But so often it's not clear where kind of certain responsibilities sit. And I think as a resident, it would be great to have a a more citizen centric experience where maybe some of those levels can be integrated. So also to your point of, interoperability, you know, if we could have platforms that are interoperable and that as a resident, I can see, like, how I could engage in my neighborhood, in my city, in my region, in my country, in my on the European level, that would be, I think, the dream to have that kind of all combined so that you don't have to go to 10 different platforms or portals. So that's something I'm excited about as well. And I think overall, really a challenge is, I think we've got strong models for the, let's say the bigger cities, the mid size and large cities, because they have the resources and they do a lot of participation. For the small towns, it's more challenging because they don't have the time and resources always to, to work in a more participatory way. They sometimes also don't have the expertise. But there's obviously thousands of those small towns. So finding a functioning model to have them also like more rural areas work in a, in a more participatory way is I think a particular challenge. And the challenge there might be also that civic technology has matured over the past couple of years and the same for our platform. You know, it is super powerful, but it can also be daunting and overwhelming to a small town. So it's also for us a matter of like keeping things simple enough and thinking of those different levels with, they each have different needs. Like a national platform looks very different from like how a small town will use it. So I think we've come to this point that we need to think about it in in different ways, like different it will look differently for each of those different, governments. And the just one size fits all is not good enough anymore.

Yep. I would say, for sure, work with assuming that you work with governments, build a community and network between those governments. I think that's really where for us, a lot of the magic often happens is when we bring those different cities or governments together. So we do a lot of that. We do like monthly community sessions. And, actually last week we had both in The UK and one in Brussels here where we also flew in like cities from different European countries. And that's been, super fruitful to discuss like new ideas, to discuss challenges, to, yeah, to, to co design new things. So, I would definitely recommend to, to really as a civic tech organization to invest in that, you know, work closely with your end users, with with the governments. They have they have, always, yeah, just great perspectives to add. So that would be, I think, my number one advice to, everyone working in civic tech.

My pleasure. Thanks, Alessandro. It was a pleasure for me. Talking to you.