Our Expertise

We support municipalities, public institutions and NGOs with our expertise in involving many people in decision-making and discussions online.

Innovative Concepts for Online Participation

Democratic decision-making needs to be more flexible, dynamic, transparent and accross differnet media. We develop concepts catering to the individual needs and goals of our partners such as public administrations and institutions, political parties, companies, media outlets and civic organisations. Our aims is to harness the opportunities of online participation and decision-making in the field of civic participation, urban planning and development by adapting to different target groups while keeping the need of an active moderation to a minimum.

Development of Open and Innovative Software Solutions

Since 2009 we realise innovative participation projects by continually refining and developing our open source software Adhocracy to meet the individual needs of our users. This is why our softwar is actively used by up to 50.000 users daily. We additionally develop other software solutions with a strong focus on participation, such as map-based software. We chose to publish our code as free software under an open-source license (AGPLv3) to build trust in civic engagmenet through transparency, independence and openness.

Cross-Media Approach

Modern participation and decision-making processes rely on interleaving various media, methods and communication channels: online as well as locally on-site. We advise and conceptualise participation processes across mutliple media. Thanks to our network and pool of proficient and qualified partners we can offer the realisation of online as well as on-site participation processes from the start to the end.

Moderation and Community Management

We offer a full and comprehensive community management support for our partners. This ranges from a daily active moderation of discussions in participation projects to full editorial and communication support for the whole participation process: creating editorial content, communication with all participants through social media and newsletters, etc.

Research on Online Participation

Our goal as non-profit organisation is to innovate democratic participation and decision-making. To this end we do research within various interdisciplinary networks of academics and practitioners as well as national and international research projects (BMBF, EU-H2020). In 2009 we founded the Reserach Network Liquid Democracy (FoLD), as an initiative to research the implementation of participatory software in the context of public government, politics and civil society. We are also board member of the Fortschrittkolleg NRW Online-Partizipation of the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf.

Evaluation and Analysis of Participation Processes

We offer impact-oriented analyses and evaluations of participation processes on the basis of various data sources such as usage statistics, webanalytics, user surveys and content analysis. We examine and review the implemented tools and methods regarding their impact and goals. We also publish important insights of our analyses and research in specialist journals and on conferences.