Brasil Participativo — Agrupamento Semântico de Propostas Cidadãs com IA para o Plano Plurianual Federal

Brasil Participativo is the Brazilian federal government's official digital participation platform, launched in 2023 by the Secretaria-Geral da Presidência da República (SGPR) together with the Ministério do Planejamento e Orçamento (MPO), built on the open-source Decidim framework. Its first major use was collecting citizen contributions to the 2024-2027 Plano Plurianual (PPA), Brazil's federal multi-year budget plan.

Because manual classification of proposals at this scale is infeasible, the government sought a way to turn large volumes of unstructured citizen input into data that public servants can act on, applying AI-based semantic clustering to make participation processes usable for policy work.

The PPA process registered roughly 1.4 million platform accesses, more than 8,000 formal proposals and about 1.5 million votes; the platform was subsequently used for Brazil's National Climate Plan consultation, which drew around 50,000 contributors, and for the National Youth Congress process. A 2025 study applied BERTopic combined with seed words and automated large-language-model validation to more than 10,000 proposals drawn from these three processes.

The study reports that the resulting topic clusters were coherent and aligned with the government's official policy taxonomies while requiring minimal manual expert effort. The government has paired this technical use of AI with an explicit governance step, publishing a 'Guia de Uso Ético de Inteligência Artificial' (Ethical AI Use Guide) directly on the platform.