Call for Contributions: ‘Digital Democracy: Bridging Theory and Practice’, 3rd Conference of the European Network for Digital DemocracY (EDDY), September 21-22 (Vienna)
Arianna Novaro
[apologies for cross-posting]
The European Digital DemocracY network (EDDY) aims to bring together academics and practitioners actively working on or with digital democracy, to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange.
After two successful editions in Rotterdam and Paris, EDDY is proud to announce its third in-person conference, ‘Digital Democracy: Bridging Theory and Practice’ (EDDY-2026), taking place at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien), on the 21st and 22nd of September, 2026.
The event will feature contributed talks through an open call (see below), a range of social and interactive sessions (networking, round-table discussions, demo sessions, etc.), and a variety of academic and non-academic keynote speakers, including Manon Revel (Google Deepmind), Graham Wetherall-Grujic (The Innovation in Politics Institute, Vienna). In addition to the two-day conference, we are also organizing a tutorial day (September 23rd) on various topics and methods relevant for the science of digital democracy.
We are opening two tracks for selected contributions at the conference: the talks track and the demos track. If you are an academic or a practitioner whose work is related to digital democracy, we invite you to create an account in OpenReview and submit an abstract (max. two pages excl. references, font size >=12) on this page, by June 3rd, 2026 (the call opens on March 2nd). You can submit to either of our tracks:
Talks track. Selected talks will be given 15-20 minutes presentation time in the program, depending on the number of high quality submissions. There will be no proceedings associated with the conference, so you are welcome to submit work that has been previously published by other conferences, journals, and so on.
Demos track. Selected demos will take place in parallel during a dedicated session, where you will be given access to a table and internet connection (‘bring your own laptop’ setup). Participants of the conference will be able to freely roam and join the different demos.
We welcome contributions from both academics and practitioners on any of the following topics, in relation to digital democracy: online deliberation, liquid democracy, the public sphere, apps and tools for online decision-making, machine learning, crowdsourcing, the digital divide, participatory budgeting, computational social choice, digital identities, social media, popular will, secrecy vs. publicity of votes and opinions.
We particularly welcome submissions by students and early career scholars or practitioners.
Contributions will be selected on the basis of their connection to EDDY’s goals, with an eye toward the conference’s multi-, cross-disciplinary target audience and the diversity of projects and contributors. Depending on the number of submissions, some contributions may be selected for a poster presentation instead. Notification of acceptance is expected by June 17th, 2026.
This event is made possible thanks to the support and funding of the Commission Democracy in Digital Societies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Competence Center for Applied AI and Scientific Computing of the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
For more information, see the conference webpage or write to con...@eddy-network.eu to contact any of EDDY’s core committee members: Jan Maly (Vienna University of Economics and Business), Arianna Novaro (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University), Frederik Van De Putte (Erasmus University Rotterdam), or Shefali Virkar (Vienna University of Economics and Business).