Making sense together: learning the ORBIS toolkit

Making sense togheter: learning the Orbis toolkit

This short training introduces you to ORBIS and its four main toolkits through four complementary video modules. The first video, by Politecnico di Milano, presents the ORBIS project: its goals, partners, and how it uses AI to support democratic participation. The second video, by The Open University, explains Democratic Reflection, a tool to capture and analyse participants’ perceptions and experiences in deliberative processes. The third video focuses on Bcause, also developed by The Open University, which helps structure and visualise complex public arguments. The fourth video, by I Copernicani, presents Polis ORBIS, showing how large-scale online conversations can be organised to identify areas of agreement and disagreement among participants. By the end of these four videos, you will have a clear overview of ORBIS and a practical understanding of how each toolkit can be used to design and support participatory and deliberative activities.

From voices to insights: the Orbis toolkit

By Politecnico di Milano

This introductory video presents ORBIS, a Horizon Europe project that uses AI to support – not replace – democratic deliberation. It explains how the ORBIS toolkit turns large volumes of public input into clear, transparent insights through four components: argument mining, feedback aggregation, explanation generation and policy recommendations. Through concrete examples, the video shows how policymakers, facilitators and researchers can use ORBIS to design more inclusive, informed and meaningful participatory processes.

Watch on Youtube

Democratic Reflection: real-time insights from live debates

By Open University

This tutorial introduces Democratic Reflection, an interactive platform that transforms live debates and video events from passive viewing into active, reflective participation. It shows how participants respond in real time through digital reflection cards, while the system captures their inputs and generates visual analytics on engagement, sentiment and key arguments. The video also walks through the event flow—from informational pages and surveys to live debate and post-event summaries—demonstrating how Democratic Reflection supports deeper understanding, inclusive dialogue and richer analysis for both organisers and participants.

Watch on Youtube

Bcause: structuring online debate with AI

By Open University

This tutorial presents Bcause, a platform that turns scattered online dialogue and raw transcripts into structured, meaningful deliberation using the IBIS argumentation framework. It shows how AI is used to extract positions and arguments from debates, apply argument mining to highlight claims and premises, and provide rich visual analytics—from thematic clustering to argument networks—that reveal the logic, conflicts and consensus behind complex conversations.

Watch on Youtube

Polis ORBIS: large-scale participation made simple

By Copernicani

his tutorial presents Polis ORBIS, an evolution of the Polis platform adapted for the ORBIS project and compliant with European standards such as GDPR. It shows how moderators can create and configure surveys, manage statements and moderation settings, and generate public voting links, while participants authenticate, vote (agree, disagree, pass) and add new comments. The video also explains how Polis ORBIS automatically produces reports with opinion clusters, levels of consensus and policy recommendations, turning large-scale citizen input into clear, actionable insights for decision-makers.

Watch on Youtube