The European Commission's official online platform for citizen participation in EU policymaking. Citizens can submit, comment and vote on proposals, in all 24 EU languages.
The European Commission's official online space for citizen participation in EU policymaking, launched on 15 February 2024 as a follow-up to the Conference on the Future of Europe.
Citizens can submit proposals, comment and vote on others' contributions, and thus take part in open online pan-European debates on key policy topics. Depending on the topics / debates, the platform can also allow for citizens and civil-society organisations to promote and report local events linked to a debate (shown on a map).
The Citizens' Engagement Platform is one of three gateways of the revamped "Have Your Say" portal, alongside Public Consultations and the European Citizens' Initiative.
Technically, it is built on the open-source platform Decidim, customised by the Commission.
| Website | |
| Contact | |
| Company | European Commission |
| Country | EU |
| Multilingualism | Available in all 24 official EU languages, with real-time automatic translation of contributions and comments shortly after publication. |
| GDPR | Full |
| Accessibility compliance | Partial |
| Hosting | EC cloud |
| Licensing | Open source |
| Maximum Users | As an indication, the same Decidim-based Conference on the Future of Europe platform handled over 5 million unique visitors and tens of thousands of contributions. |
| Analysis and synthesis of participants' contributions | Hybrid human–machine analysis: automated text-mining tools developed by the Commission's Joint Research Centre perform keyword-based categorisation, clustering of related contributions, near-duplicate detection (to identify campaigns and lobby influence) and, where possible and relevant, argument mining; sentiment, and emotion analysis. Human analysts continuously validate the machine analysis and produce the published summaries and reports. |
| Data ownership | The Commission (DG COMM) is the data controller; contributions are public and visible to all; platform content is also published as open data via API/download to foster reuse of public-sector information. |
| Moderation tools | Post-moderation model: contributions are published first and moderated afterwards. Tools include automated flagging of problematic content (misinformation, hate speech, manipulation attempts) for human review, duplicate-contribution removal, and a strong policy against spam and malicious activity; users can edit contributions for 30 minutes and withdraw contributions. |
| User authentication | Custom registration |
| Deliberative potential | Asynchronous multilingual online debates (propose/comment/endorse/vote), event reports from offline meetings feeding the same debate, and direct connection to European Citizens' Panels where 150 randomly selected citizens deliberate in small groups and plenaries with facilitation to produce policy recommendations. |
| Scalability | Designed for EU-wide scale (27 Member States, 24 languages) and proven at that scale during the Conference on the Future of Europe. Decidim itself is used from local to national and international levels. |
| Support provided | FAQ section; a toolkit for organising engagement events and a step-by-step guide for Citizens' Panel simulations; promotion guidelines ("Promote Citizen Engagement" page); newsletter; technical helpdesk by the Commission's IT team; API and open-data documentation. |
| Data storage | In the EU, on servers of the Commission and its contractors. |
| Licensing notes | The underlying software, Decidim, is free and open source (AGPL v3.0); the Citizens' Engagement Platform itself is a Commission-operated instance, not distributed as a product. |
| Security | IT security governed by Commission Decision (EU, Euratom) 2017/46; access to personal data restricted on a need-to-know basis; pseudonymisation of participants in the analysis pipeline (unique user identifiers); anti-spam and anti-manipulation measures with continuous moderation. |
| Originally Published | Last Updated | 28 Oct 2026 | 30 Oct 2026 |
| Related project & activities | European Citizens’ Panels |
| Related organisation(s) | JRC - Joint Research CentreDG COMM - DG for Communication |
| Knowledge service | Metadata | Participatory and Deliberative Democracy |
| Digital Europa Thesaurus (DET) | democracyparticipatory democracy |
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