The Democratic Odyssey is a crowdsourced, decentralized and collaborative campaign developing a concept and strategy to institutionalise a permanent peoples’ assembly and participatory eco-system in the European Union.
By building on lessons learned from the Conference on the Future of Europe (COFE) and other deliberative experiments, we are organizing a randomly selected transnational peoples’ assembly as a prototype for an EU-wide European Peoples’ Assembly; showcasing how citizen participation can be enacted in all stages of the EU’s policy processes, from agenda setting and legislative initiative to co-legislation and even constitutional Treaty Change. Our vision is holistic: to demonstrate how to combine the design of transnational citizens’ assemblies with pre-existing instruments of citizen participation (such as European Citizens’ Initiatives) and how concretely to embed citizen participation and deliberation in the multi-layered ecosystem of representative democracy in the EU.
