Abraham Bernstein (Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zurich), Gianluca Demartini (School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland), Marco Stennbergen (Department of Political Science IPZ, University of Zurich) and Felix Uhlmann (Faculty of Law, University of Zurich) have received a Sinergia grant of 2'424'295 Swiss francs from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The Swiss consultation and the popular initiative are the most impactful participatory mechanisms of direct democracy: They allow the Swiss population to influence the outcome of the political process and to set the political agenda. The researchers in political science, law, AI and Computer supported cooperative work will investigate how technology-based crowd computing approaches can be used to strengthen the direct democratic mechanisms. 
In this project novel hybrid human-machine systems will be developed and tested in four environments as the classroom, democratic settings in Switzerland and Germany, and the Wikimedia community. The findings of the project «Large-Scale Political Participation: Issue Identification, Deliberation, and Co-creation» can promote democrativ innovation and empower citizens with AI to participate in democratic processes.

The project is supported by postdoc Cristina Sarasua (IfI, UZH) and PhD students Fynn Bachmann (IfI, UZH), Miklovana Tuci (IfI, UZH), Valeria Vuk (IPZ, UZH), Catarina Pereira (IPZ, UZH), Marlene Schürch (Law, UZH), Serdar Bayana (Law, UZH), Shuo Yang (UQ), and Shangqian Li (UQ).

Congratulations!