Sanna Ghotbi is co-founder and citizen participation expert at Digidem Lab, a democracy lab based in Sweden that works locally and globally to increase the power of those with least in local decision-making. She educates, facilitates and designs different types of participation processes together with cities and public institutions. For example aiding cities such as Gothenburg and Chicago with participatory budgeting, where citizens decide on how to spend parts of the institution’s budget.

Digidem Lab is also currently supporting the EU-commission in the Conference for the Future of Europe where 800 randomly selected yet demographically representative citizens from all member states are convening to listen to diverse experts and create recommendations on new EU policies around several major topics. The method used, citizens’ assemblies, is one that Ghotbi has studied and looks forward to developing in a more local context. She is part of a three year long research project, COLDIGT, that aims to generate new knowledge on innovative digital tools and approaches, in order to understand how they can support governance of complex societal processes in the Nordic region.

During the Nobel Week Dialogue Ghotbi hopes to discuss how we can redefine who an expert is and how we can shape cities based on collective intelligence.