Termine

Digital Democracy is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of approaches to make democratic decision making processes more engaging and interactive by utilizing digital instruments such as online citizen participation platforms. In contrast to traditional democratic systems, such online platforms aim to leverage citizen expertise by providing an open collaborative environment with novel interaction possibilities.

The successful design of digital democracy platforms and procedures presents a multidisciplinary research challenge; a particularly pertinent area is the theory of collective decision making (aka social choice theory).

In this talk, I demonstrate how concepts and techniques from social choice theory can be employed to aid the design of online participation platforms and other digital democracy tools. I argue that insights from computational social choice, an active research area at the intersection of computer science, economics, and political science, are particularly relevant for this endeavor.

Markus Brill is an assistant professor of computer science and a DFG Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Leader at TU Berlin in Germany. Before that, he has spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (UK), and two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Duke University (USA), where he was funded by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He obtained a Ph.D. in computer science from TU München in 2012. [Poster]