Lise Deshautel is a political advisor with more than ten years’ experience in EU and national policy-making, political campaigning and capacity building for citizen participation in climate policies in Europe. A former advisor to the chair of the French Climate Assembly, she co-founded the Knowledge network on climate assemblies (KNOCA) supported by the European Climate Foundation. She currently serves as an advisor to the president a major local authority in France.

Co-founder of Deliberativa, an association created in 2020 that promotes deliberative democracy and accompanies institutions and organisations in the design and implementation of deliberative processes. She has worked on Citizens' Assemblies and Citizens' Panels at European level, and at different institutional levels in Spain (Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia or Cantabria).

Co-author with Ernesto Ganuza of the book "La democracia es posible. Sorteo cívico y deliberación para rescatar el poder de la ciudadanía" (2020, Ed. Consonni).

She is part of the main international networks in the field, and has co-created Delib, the Iberian Network of organisations and individuals who promote and foster deliberative democracy.

Before dedicating her profesional life to deliberation, she used to work in arts management. She was selected by the British Council in 2009 to represent Spain in a programme on International Cultural Leaders.

Graduate in Political Science from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux (France). She holds a Master's degree in Arts Management from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.

She lives in Bilbao.

Damir Kapidžić is an Associate Professor at the University of Sarajevo and a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. His research examines how democratic and authoritarian politics are institutionalized in the context of ethnic conflict, power-sharing, and democratic innovations. He has advised several deliberative processes and citizens’ assemblies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, all of them in a post-conflict context with substantial elements of demographic diversity. He is a consultant on deliberative processes for the Council of Europe, a member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group, and editor of the book Illiberal Politics in Southeast Europe (2022).

She is the professorial Chair of Global Affairs at the EUI School of Transnational Governance in Florence and Emeritus professor at Oxford University. She chairs the Programmes on Transnational Democracy and Global Peace Tech, and convenes the EUI inter-disciplinary cluster on Transnational democracy in the 21st century including the EUI Democracy Forum.

She has been working for three decades on the ebb and flow of European democracy, focussing on the potential for horizontal trans-national engagement between peoples and political cultures as ‘demoi-cratic deliberation’. She participated in the COFE citizens’ panels as expert advisor and explores the use of immersive debating and teaching through the ”theater of recognition” to stimulate social imaginaries of participatory democracy (see play “Waiting for the Citizens”). Her last books are: A Citizen’s Guide to the Rule of Law - Why We Need to Fight for the Most Precious Human Inventions of All Time (with Adis Merdzanovic, 2021) and Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit (2019).

Her website: http://kalypsonicolaidis.com/

Yves Sintomer is a professor of political science, co-director of the master's in political science and member of the president’s board at Paris 8 University. He is Honorary Senior fellow at the French University Institute, one of the most prestigious French institutions, has an honorary degree (doctorat honoris causa), Liège University (Belgium), and is Associate member at Nuffield College, Oxford, Neuchâtel University (Switzerland) and Université Libre de Bruxelles.

He has been invited as a scholar or professor at prestigious universities such as Harvard, Yale, University College London, Tsinghua University and Peking University, Science Po Paris, Frankfurt University and Berlin Humbolt University, and Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).

His most recent book is The Government of Chance. Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2023. He has written on participatory and deliberative democracy, political representation, and German and French sociology. His writings have been published in 20 languages.

Dominik Hierlemann is a Senior Expert on citizen participation and European democracy at the Bertelsmann Stiftung and head of the project “Democracy and Participation in Europe”. He has been responsible for several pioneering citizen participation projects both in Germany and at the European level. He has set up the “Conference Observatory” and co-authored the recently published book “Under Construction: Citizen Participation in the European Union”.

Zakia Elvang is working from Copenhagen where she is the founder of and partner in the Danish consulting agency, We Do Democracy and leading the NGO and democracy innovation house in Copenhagen - Demokrati Garage.

Zakia is one of the main characters behind the growing Danish deliberative movement also in the role of moderating and leading several citizens’ assemblies. She has been the initiator of numerous democratic initiatives like the democracy fitness programme and the platform for democracy festivals in Europe. Zakia is one of the founders of the Latvian democracy festival and is helping democracy festival organisers from all over the world build their own festivals.

Nenad Stojanović is a professor of political science at the University of Geneva and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau / University of Zurich.

Since 2019, he has organised or been involved in a dozen of citizens' assemblies in Switzerland (see www.demoscan.ch) and leads the Swiss Research Centre on Democratic Innovations in Autumn 2024.

Teele Pehk is a deliberative democracy artist at the DD Center for Developing Democracy (based in Tartu, Estonia). She has introduced climate assemblies in Estonia to enrich decisionmaking around the environmental challenges of today. With three deliberative mini-publics in recent three years, Teele, along with her team, tries to integrate deliberative democracy into the ecosystem of an open society.

She is an experienced open governance advocate who has more than 15 years of experience from civil society and public sector. She is an active member in the global Open Government Partnership, Democracy R&D network as well as the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA).