Stadtidee Aarau — Switzerland's First City-Wide Participatory Budget Using the Method of Equal Shares
Switzerland
Aarau's first city-wide participatory budget (2023-24) used the Method of Equal Shares to allocate CHF 50,000, funding 17 of 33 …
Lithuania · Vilnius · See the Lithuania profile
Since 2018, Lithuania's Debunk.eu has used AI to scan roughly 30,000 articles a day across 2,500+ web domains in 26 languages, triaging hits to about 5,000 vetted volunteers, backed by Lithuania's Defence and Foreign Ministries — though no independent impact evaluation was found.
Debunk.eu (originally the Demaskuok project) was founded in Vilnius in 2018 by Viktoras Daukšas, combining an AI-based content-scanning tool with a network of vetted volunteer analysts known as "elves" to identify and respond to disinformation targeting Lithuania and the wider Baltic region.
According to Debunk.eu's own account and an independent Wikipedia summary of third-party reporting, the platform's AI algorithms scan roughly 30,000 online articles per day across more than 2,500 web domains in 26 languages, searching for keyword patterns and over 600 known propaganda and disinformation narratives. Machine-flagged content is triaged by a volunteer network of around 5,000 trained "elves," with about 50 collaborating directly with the core analysis team, enabling identification and rebuttal of suspected disinformation within roughly two hours. The project has received funding from Lithuania's Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defence, the German federal government, the German Marshall Fund, the UK Foreign Office, and a €315,000 Google Digital News Innovation grant, and coordinates with state communications officials in real time.
No independent, peer-reviewed evaluation of the platform's actual effect on disinformation belief or spread was found; the available figures describe monitoring throughput and volunteer scale rather than measured downstream impact, and the organisation's own materials do not disclose model accuracy, false-positive rates, or an external audit of its classification method.
Read the full analysis: https://debunk.eu/about-debunk/
Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.
Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
Switzerland
Aarau's first city-wide participatory budget (2023-24) used the Method of Equal Shares to allocate CHF 50,000, funding 17 of 33 …
Poland
Wieliczka's 2023 'Green Million' pilot allocated a PLN 1,000,000 citizen budget using the Method of Equal Shares, a proportional algorithm …
United Kingdom
Under a Scottish Government–COSLA framework requiring at least 1% of council budgets to go through participatory budgeting, researchers evaluated NLP …
Spain
Warwick, QMUL and Alan Turing Institute researchers built four NLP/ML tools — recommendation, interest grouping, summarisation, aggregation — for Madrid's …
Open full copilot Grounded in cited practices — always check the sources.