The third generation of the Web (or Web of Data) makes it possible for citizens, groups, and governments to experiment with new forms of democratic practices. Linked Democracy draws from the analogy with the Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm to explore new ecosystems connecting people, data, knowledge, and democratic institutions in the digital era.

The goal of this workshop is to address questions such as: How to model the interactions between people, data, and digital tools that create new spaces and forms of civic action in the digital era? How to analyse the emerging properties (e.g. action-guiding rules) and knowledge in these contexts? How we design socio-technical systems that effectively leverage data and knowledge for deliberation and collective decision making? Can we design the meta-rules of emergent participatory ecosystems?

This workshop will bring together researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Web science, social sciences, law and philosophy to discuss on how democratic practices can benefit from recent advances in AI and the Web of Data. Linking data, for example, already offers tangible benefits to services, companies, and customers. We envisage that linking people, data, and knowledge could also improve the openness, inclusiveness and effectiveness of democratic systems.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Linked Open Data
• Socio-technical systems
• Crowd-civic systems
• Large-scale deliberation systems
• Collective decision making and rationality
• Crowdsourced legal reform and policy making
• Multi-agent systems and coordination
• Knowledge management
• Emerging institutions and action-guiding rules
• Democracy and citizenship theories
• Blockchain technologies, AI, and governance

 
Image credit: Adapted from ‘Acropoli banner’ by Massimo Telò, derivative work from ‘The Acropolis as viewed from the Mouseion Hill’, by Christophe Meneboeuf (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)