The project Bridge is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Servicio Espanol para la Internacionalizacion de la Educacion (SEPIE). Neither the European Union nor the National Agency SEPIE can be held responsible for them. -- Number: 2025-1-ES01-KA220-HED-000359236 --
The BRIDGE Digital Museum brings together good practices, educational proposals and images that inspire reflection and action
Social Challenges
Analyse social challenges to intercultural dialogue, social inclusion and democratic cohesion
Good Practices
Discover experiences that generate social impact
Educational Space
Access teaching guides, activities and materials for the classroom
Documentary Photography
Explore the social challenges in a visual, reflective and educational way
BRIDGE Main Challenge: A.6. Deficits in democratic participation, representation and inclusive governance
Across Europe, digital participation is often formal without being effective. Citizens submit input but rarely see how it shapes decisions. Commercial platforms control the gateways of public debate, while lack of devices, poor connectivity and low digital literacy exclude older people, non-native speakers and low-income groups. Tokenism leaves decision-making bodies far less diverse than society.
INNOVADE is a Horizon Europe project (2025-2027) that co-creates inclusive, secure e-participation tools in Living Labs where citizens, researchers, developers and municipalities work together. Its five-stage co-creation process and red-teaming methods produce a GDPR-compliant Digital Democracy App, toolkits, a Digital Democracy Score and policy guidance, to be piloted in Geel, Thessaloniki and San Martín de la Vega.
INNOVADE (Innovative Democracy Through Digitalisation) is a 36-month Horizon Europe project coordinated by Beyond the Horizon ISSG with ten partners, including the University of Paderborn and DFKI in Germany. It responds to participation that is 'formal but not effective' by co-creating e-participation tools in Living Labs along a five-stage process. Outputs include a Digital Democracy App, toolkits, a knowledge base, a Digital Democracy Score and policy briefs. Pilots are planned in Geel, Thessaloniki and San Martín de la Vega.
Digital transformation risks deepening exclusion and disinformation unless participation tools are inclusive and safe. Citizens experience a gap between formal participation structures and real influence on decisions; privileged groups dominate consultations (tokenism), while people without devices, good connectivity, digital skills or language proficiency are left out. In Germany, migrant origin and class compound these barriers.
The BRIDGE diagnosis for Germany reports a mismatch between the diversity of the population and the homogeneity of decision-making bodies; participation is perceived as 'formal but not effective'. E-participation built on commercial platforms and top-down design reproduces these inequalities and erodes trust in institutions.
INNOVADE addresses Challenge A6 (deficits in democratic participation, representation and inclusive governance) by co-designing e-participation tools with the very groups at risk of exclusion, embedding accountability loops and requiring binding institutional commitment so that citizen input visibly shapes policy.
Living Labs take citizens, municipalities, researchers, developers and legal experts through five stages: understanding, framing, ideating, evaluating and testing. Red teaming, Q-sorting and role-based sessions expose exclusion risks. Results feed into the Digital Democracy App (proposals, opinion mapping, collective rewards), toolkits and the Digital Democracy Score; 'totems' in libraries add a physical access point.
INNOVADE project website: resources, Living Labs, Digital Democracy Score
Interactive digital resource
The official portal is the entry point to all project outputs. The Resources section lists the public deliverables linked to the Key Exploitable Results (reports, toolkits, factsheets, newsletters); the Living Labs section documents the co-creation workshops held in cities such as Paderborn, Geel and Thessaloniki; the Events and News section records consortium activities, and the Digital Democracy Scoring section gives access to the DDS assessment tool, available free of charge. For teaching, the site is useful as a case study of a Horizon Europe democracy project in progress: students can follow how deliverables evolve between versions, compare Living Lab reports and examine how the consortium communicates with citizens, policymakers and researchers. A newsletter subscription is offered for updates.
Teaching staff, Students, Researchers, Professionals, Policy Makers, General Public
INNOVADE Zenodo community: deliverables, Living Lab reports and datasets
Digital publication
The Zenodo community hosts the project's open-access publications: the D2.1 Interdisciplinary Knowledge Base on Digital Democracy (over 1,270 downloads), the D3.1 White Paper 'The Futures of Digital Democracy' with four scenarios for 2035, the D4.1 Digital Democracy Preference Toolkit, the D4.2 state-of-the-art report, the D5.1 report on access inequalities, the D1.2 Living Labs Methodology, the final reports of Living Labs 2 to 5, the policy brief 'Holding Democracy Together' and datasets (FIMI incidents 2020-2025, digital democracy applications registry, survey data on digital futures). These materials can be used directly in seminars on political science, public administration, law, computer science and media studies, for example to compare scenarios, analyse disinformation cases or study co-creation findings. Licence terms should be checked in each record's metadata.
Teaching staff, Students, Researchers, Policy Makers
D1.2 Living Labs Methodology and Living Lab Final Reports (LL#2 to LL#5)
Manual
The methodology guide explains the co-creation approach used throughout the project: a five-stage process (understanding, framing, ideating, evaluating, testing), the public-private-people partnership principle, and techniques such as red teaming, Q-sorting for prioritising governance requirements, role selection (citizen, researcher, 'guardian' of rights) and expert moderation to support participants with little technical confidence. The Living Lab final reports document how this was applied in practice, including participatory audits of existing tools such as Decidim and Pol.is (LL#4), stress-testing of app functions against exclusion barriers, participant satisfaction surveys (LL#5: 4.64/5 overall) and qualitative findings such as the rejection of social scoring. Together they form a blueprint teachers can adapt for a Living Lab exercise with students.
Teaching staff, Students, Researchers, Professionals
D3.1 White Paper: The Futures of Digital Democracy
Digital publication
The white paper uses storytelling to present four possible scenarios of how digitalisation could change society and governance by 2035. It draws on the interdisciplinary knowledge base and on surveys about the futures of digital democracy, and it has been downloaded more than 550 times from Zenodo. Because of its narrative format it is particularly suited to classroom use: students can read the scenarios, identify the assumptions behind each one, discuss which actors gain or lose power, and relate the scenarios to current debates on platform regulation, AI in the public sphere and European digital sovereignty. It can be paired with the knowledge base (D2.1) for a more evidence-based reading, or with the FIMI incident dataset to ground the disinformation scenarios in documented cases.
Teaching staff, Students, Researchers, Policy Makers, General Public
Digital Democracy Score (DDS) and D4.1 Digital Democracy Preference Toolkit
Interactive digital resource
The Digital Democracy Score is a prototype tool, accompanied by a methodological document (D2.2), that measures and evaluates the level of digital democracy of an institution; it has been piloted in training sessions and webinars and is available for use free of charge via the project website. The Preference Toolkit examines what citizens and governments expect from e-participation applications and offers a framework to compare those expectations. For teaching, the two resources support an applied exercise: students select a municipality or university, assess it with the DDS, identify exclusion gaps and propose improvements, then check their proposals against the preference findings. Policymakers and administrators can use the same tools for self-assessment before introducing digital participation.
Teaching staff, Students, Professionals, Policy Makers
INNOVADE webinars and video materials (YouTube channel)
Educational videos
The project's YouTube channel collects recorded webinars, tutorial videos and presentations from joint events, including training on the Digital Democracy Score. Presentations from joint events had been downloaded more than 1,030 times by March 2025. The videos are designed to support participants with low levels of digital literacy and to explain the project's concepts in an accessible way. They can be used as introductory material before a seminar session, as flipped-classroom input, or as examples of how a research consortium communicates with non-expert citizens. Combined with the written deliverables, they give students a multi-format overview of the project.
Teaching staff, Students, Professionals, General Public