Deliberative democratic innovations, such as citizen assemblies and participatory budgeting, aim to move beyond aggregation of individual preferences to engage citizens in preference transformation and collaborative decision making. However the problem of scale persists in attempts to reach deliberative processes beyond discrete events.

The SOWIT roadmap sets out a plan and time for the development of the SOWIT (Social Web for Inclusive and Transparent democracy) deliberation platform. It is the outcome of the project’s first steps taken to address the critical challenges in citizen participation that confronts Irish and European societies.