Corey Chao

Head of Public Spaces Incubator at New_Public

New_Public is a nonprofit R&D lab building digital public spaces that connect people, embraces pluralism, and builds community. The two main strategies to achieve this are: helping local communities across America create more flourishing digital spaces and developing prototypes for digital conversation with public service media organizations. The organization works by partnering and co-designing with community stewards (moderators, administrators) and public institutions to serve and remove obstacles to power. 

Corey is Head of Public Spaces Incubator at New_ Public. Previously, through his work for the Harvard Bloomberg Innovation Training Program and the award-winning social impact consultancy Reboot, he has led strategy and design projects on topics ranging from participatory democracy, digital public space, movement strategy, and public sector innovation.  

Dr. Virginie Andre

Senior Analyst and Project Manager at Debunk.org

Debunk.org is an independent technology think tank and NGO that carries out disinformation analysis and runs educational media literacy campaigns in eight countries. Their team analyses false and misleading coverage regarding the migration crisis on the EU border with Belarus, COVID-19, NATO, hybrid warfare, energy politics, and monitors elections. Debunk.org took part in the Ukraine War Disinfo Work Group, which provides weekly reports on disinformation spread by the Kremlin about its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.   

Dr. Virginie is a senior analyst and project manager for “FIMI Defenders for Election Integrity (FDEI)” with Debunk.org. She is also an international senior expert and advisor in PCVE/CT, with more than 19 years of applied research and practical expertise. In December 2023, she advised EU member states on ‘Digital Safeguarding: Between Online Safety, Regulation, and Freedom of Speech’.  

Hannah Perry

Associate Director (Information Ecosystems) at Demos

Demos, an influential UK-based cross-party think tank, is leading a major trial of new technology in local democracy launched to bring people together to tackle contentious local issues and strengthen trust in local government.  The project, called ‘Waves’, will give thousands of local people the opportunity to shape local government policy on an issue affecting their area in a way that is cheaper, easier, and quicker than existing solutions. It is being delivered by a new coalition of partners, led by Demos, including New Local, a think tank and network of forward-thinking councils; technology innovators, CASM Technology; and digital democracy platforms, PSi and Remesh. The project will be launched in partnership with two trailblazing councils who are both embracing the opportunity to put the public at the heart of their policy making. 

Hannah co-leads Demos Digital, leading research programs, and experiments that inform and evaluate media, and digital and education policy-based solutions. She manages Demos’ new local digital democracy experiment, Waves, along with Demos’s information supply chain resilience program and network.  

Dr. Maria Dagioglou & Dr. Georgios Patasis

Post-Doc Researcher & Senior Researcher at Demokritos

The Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications (IIT) of NCSR “Demokritos” (NCSR-D) is one of the leading Greek research and innovation players in the field of AI. The d-A-logue project aims at creating an AI-driven platform to help young adults critically analyze information through Socratic dialogue and pre-bunking techniques to combat misinformation. Athena Research Centre, the Nation Centre for Social Research, and the World Human Forum are partners of the project, implemented in the auspices of the Special Secretariat of Foresight.   

Dr. Maria is a post-doc researcher at the NCSR-D working on human-AI/robot collaboration, AI ethics and human factors for AI design.  

Dr. Georgios Petasis is a Senior Researcher at the NCSR-D and an expert in natural language processing. He is the scientific coordinator for NCSR-D of the European research projects TITAN and AI4TRUST. 

Maria Presley

Vice President of Business and Innovation at Zinc Network 

Zinc Network is developing an integrated AI-powered tool that helps fact-checking organizations identify and counter emerging disinformation narratives through pre-bunking initiatives, combining predictive analytics for detecting viral disinformation with audience analysis capabilities. By integrating with existing social media platforms and incorporating real-time feedback loops for campaign performance, the tool will streamline the pre-bunking workflow, making it easier for small fact-checking organizations to respond rapidly and effectively to emerging threats.  

Maria is the Vice President of Business and Innovation at Zinc Network, with over 15 years working in support of democracy and good governance. Past accomplishments include supporting more than $500 million in fundraising and strategic partnerships, designing and leading the U.S. Government’s largest change management intervention globally, and overseeing the strategic development of dozens of campaigns and global development interventions.   

Michal Mazur

Senior Coordinator of Electoral Lighthouse and Young People Vote at Fundacja “Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej” (CEO) 

Fundacja “Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej” (CEO) is a non-governmental organization, aiming to increase youth engagement in Poland. CEO will enhance the existing Electoral Lighthouse tool to include a chatbot to answer election-related questions. This allows users to submit questions for politicians and incorporate new social and participatory functions to foster dialogue and engagement. CEO works with schools, teachers, and local communities. The project is carried out in collaboration with Tech To The Rescue, nomtek and I DESIGN.  

Michał is a Senior Coordinator of Electoral Lighthouse and Young People Vote projects at Fundacja “Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskie." He studied at the Faculty of Law and Administration and the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the University of Warsaw.   

Nick Gill

Chief Technical Project Manager at Sortition Foundation

Sortition Foundation and its partner organization, Sortition Europe, are not-for-profit companies dedicated to a single purpose: to build the movement for permanent, powerful citizens’ assemblies. The organization works with partners across Europe and the world to bring ordinary people together to make informed decisions about the issues that affect them. They also campaign to institute powerful citizens' assemblies as a vital component of a healthy modern democracy.  

Nick is a mathematician, working part-time for the Sortition Foundation, as the Chief Technical Project Manager, and part-time as a lecturer in pure mathematics at the Open University.  

Simon Strohmenger

Director and Advisory Board member  Consul Democracy Stitching 

To address low civic participation in Europe - particularly among underrepresented groups such as youth, migrants and low-income communities - Consul Democracy Stitching will develop a free, open-source Civic Assistant powered by LLMs. This AI assistant will enhance the widely used Consul Democracy platform, already implemented by over 200 municipalities. This supports administrations in designing participatory processes that are accessible, inclusive and impactful. Through features such as guided process design and AI-assisted proposal analysis, the assistant empowers governments to reach diverse groups effectively while reducing administrative workloads.  

Simon is the organization’s director and has been an Advisory Board Member since September 2020. He has a master’s in political science from the University of Munich.  

Zachary Greene

Associate Professor at the University of Strathclyde - Head of the ParliView Project

The ParliView project will develop a set of transformative government transparency platforms using large language models that enable citizens to summarize and explore the content of events within multiple European parliaments. The project aims to support citizens, particularly those from historically underserved communities by simplifying the political process and allowing citizens to engage with the major debates in parliament.

Dr. Zachary is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. His work explores the impact of political divisions within political parties and parliaments leveraging advanced AI tools for analysing and generating political content. He is the founder of the Strathclyde PLACE lab for the application of computational social science and jointly heads the ParliView project with a team at UCD Dublin.

Stephan Mündges

Coordinator and Operations Lead at the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN)

The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) supports fact-checking organizations to monitor media in over 20 languages and deliver targeted pre-bunking materials before misinformation spreads. The EFCSN is developing an advanced multimodal, AI-powered monitoring tool to enhance resilience against misinformation. The project will use real-time data analysis to monitor news cycles and video content, matching emerging trends to known disinformation narratives.  

Stephan is the EFCSN Coordinator and leading operations. Previously, he worked as the general manager of the Institute of Journalism at TU Dortmund University, Germany’s leading institute for university-based journalism education. He was also one of the coordinators of the German-Austrian Digital Media Observatory (GADMO) and served on the EDMO Executive Board. 

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