Apr 18, 2025
Assembly online session
The Democratic Odyssey is a crowdsourced campaign advocating for a “permanent peoples’ assembly for Europe” by mobilising a wide-ranging and pluralistic group of actors, including academics, practitioners, journalists, institutional representatives and civil society. Inspired by the tentative efforts of past EU legislatures to institutionalise citizen participation, it seeks to go further.
As part of this journey, the Democratic Odyssey launched a pilot transnational assembly, designed to bring together a representative group of citizens in multilingual, transnational deliberations. This assembly is not a single event but a dynamic, evolving process that unfolds across multiple European cities, incorporating both in-person and online formats. Each stage of the journey serves as a stepping stone towards greater citizen involvement, planting the seeds for a more participatory European democracy.
The Online Gathering of April 3rd, 2025, was a critical milestone in this process. Taking place after the second in-person assembly in Florence (February 21–23, 2025), this session offered assembly members a valuable opportunity to further refine and consolidate the recommendations developed onsite. Participants revisited the proposals emerging from the Florence deliberations, clarified areas of disagreement, integrated additional perspectives, and worked toward stronger consensus. The gathering also allowed those who had not been present in Florence to engage with the evolving content, reflect collectively on the journey so far, and help build momentum toward the final phase of the deliberations in Vienna (May 2025).
This online space was designed to be inclusive and participatory, offering interpretation in Greek, and Italian. It allowed the 213 assembly members, who were selected through a civic lottery, to remain engaged beyond the physical meetings. By leveraging digital tools such as Miro and interactive methods, the gathering facilitated meaningful dialogue and collective sense-making, reinforcing the assembly’s role as an evolving, transnational, citizen-driven platform.
