Participation Platforms
Tech Review Committee
To develop the 2023 ratings for digital participation platforms, we formed a review committee of six independent experts on digital participation technology from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North America and Western Europe. We chose diverse members with different genders and geographic locations to ensure they would bring different perspectives on what is most important and helpful for people in a range of contexts.
Katya Petrikevich, Participatory Factory, Czech Republic. Katya is co-founder and international director of Participation Factory, a social enterprise that helps communities improve governance systems and quality of life through better participation and robust data. She has conducted research on current trends in tech and innovation for the EU Commission.
Stéphane Dubé, Institut du Nouveau Monde, Canada. Stéphane has been active in civic participation since 1992. Currently civic-tech and special project director for Institut du Nouveau Monde, a non-partisan NGO based in Montréal, he advises public institutions on the design and organization of public participation processes.
Katharina Zügel, Décider ensemble, France. As the co-director of Décider ensemble since 2019, she is responsible for the annual European Participation Meeting, which brings together relevant actors in France and Europe, and the Civic Tech and Digital Democracy Observatory, a research project on the use of digital tools for participation. Between 2012 and 2019, she worked as a policy analyst for the OECD Governance Directorate on open government and citizen participation.
Caroline Khene, Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility (CCSR), United Kingdom, and MobiSAM, South Africa. Caroline is the principal researcher for and director of the MobiSAM and MobiSAfAIDS civic tech projects, and currently senior lecturer/researcher for CCSR at De Montfort University.. She is a founding member of the CSO coalition Imali Yethu (Our Money) in South Africa, which spearheaded the first open budget portal with the national treasury department, called VulekaMali.
Bess Lee, Taiwan. Bess is an advocate of open technology and has been active in civic tech since 2017 in both Taiwan and Japan. From 2017 to 2022, she worked as a staff member for the g0v Hackathon team (jothon) and coordinated community projects, such as the g0v CivicTech Prototype Grant, g0v Summit and information platforms for incidents (including “COVID-19 Info”). Meanwhile, she planned mechanisms to foster civic tech projects; in 2019, she initiated g0v School.
Matias Bianchi, Asuntos del Sur, Argentina. He is director of this think-do tank, focused on public innovations that foster more inclusive, equal and democratic societies in Latin America. Matias coordinates the consortiums ColaboraLat (dedicated to designing collaborative governance models for post-pandemic democracies) and CILA (Cities in Action, founded to develop civic infrastructure to achieve the UN’s millennium development goals. He is a political scientist by training, holding a master’s degree from the University of Oxford and received a Ph.D. from Sciences Po. Previously, he worked for the Woodrow Wilson Center and OECD Development Center, and led the Federal Institute of Government in Argentina. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona and researches democracy, governance and technopolitics.