Insights from our meetup with Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta from Sitra.

What does it take to move civic tech from promising pilot to democratic infrastructure? Few organizations are better placed to answer that question than Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. Sitra is an independent public fund supervised by the Finnish Parliament, and it uses the returns of its nearly €1 billion investment fund to anticipate and build for Finland’s societal future.

At our recent meetup at the Democracy Garage in Copenhagen, we had the pleasure of hosting Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta from Sitra’s democracy team. Between 2022 and 2026, Sitra ran more than 120 civic tech pilots and built capabilities for innovative adaptation through educational sprints across the Finnish public sector. In 2025 it launched the Finnish Voxit open-source community, bringing together participation practitioners and open-source companies to steer the development of the tool together. Voxit is a fork of open-source Pol.is platform that uses statistical clustering to help thousands of citizens find common ground on divisive issues.

The backdrop is what The OECD report on trust 202 Sanna-Kaisa called the “Finish paradox of participation in society”: Finns report high trust in their institutions, yet low trust in their own ability to influence them. Voter turnout is declining, political parties struggle to attract members, and while citizens prefer anonymous, mobile-friendly digital participation, decision-makers still strongly prefer face-to-face discussion. Sitra’s civic tech work is about closing that gap.

These are the six lessons from the evening that stuck with us.

1. Sell the participation tool to decision-makers, not just citizens

The democracy argument of empowering citizens and broadening participation comes naturally to civic tech advocates. But Sanna-Kaisa was clear that it isn’t enough. The harder and more important task is articulating how these tools benefit the representatives’ decision-making work. Civil servants and politicians need to see what the data brings and what is their role in relation to it: better-scoped and anticipated problems, earlier warning of public concerns, and legitimacy for the most difficult decisions. Sitra has spent years on this articulation work, including drafting “seed statements” to lower the barrier for politicians to engage with the discussions at all.

2. Set honest expectations: civic tech shines at agenda-setting

Digital participation often carries an unspoken promise that input equals influence. Sanna-Kaisa’s advice is to form a promise: tell participants from the outset exactly how much they can influence, and when. What kind of park would meet the residents’ needs and encourage them to spend more of their free time there? What strategic priority areas should the municipality’s future strategy address? The path from input to actual decision is often long or even indirect, and if participants expect immediate impact, the disappointment will erode the very trust the tool was meant to build.

3. Statistics build trust where generative AI raises questions

One detail surprised several attendees: Sitra’s platform of choice doesn’t use generative AI. It clusters opinions using dimension reduction and principal component analysis, plain (if advanced) statistics, to reveal “uncommon ground” – areas of consensus that polarized debate tends to obscure. The clustering is transparent and reproducible, but the interpretation remains a human task. The technology informs decisions; it doesn’t make them. At a time of justified skepticism toward algorithmic black boxes in the public sector and digital public sphere, that design choice is a strength, and a lesson for anyone deploying AI in sensitive contexts. 

The same philosophy extends to privacy: collect minimal data, build no personal profiles, and prioritize anonymity, even if it means accepting small trade-offs like imprecise participant counts when users switch devices.

For those wanting to dive deeper into this topic careful considerations for the use of AI, research and experimentation is done collectively in e.g. the European Voxit open-source community.

4. Organic reach won’t get you representativeness

If you put up a participation website and wait, you get the usual suspects. Sanna-Kaisa was blunt about this: organic traffic is not enough for representative samples. What works is plugging into channels people already use, such as school communication portals to reach youth, combined with targeted social media advertising or using media partnerships. This is how campaigns like “What do you think, Finland?” engaged thousands of citizens on topics ranging from the country’s future to AI in the public sector, and how a broader digital consultation could feed directly into President Alexander Stubb’s face-to-face security dialogue with young people in Helsinki.

5. Impact arrives late, and looks different than you expect

How do you measure democratic impact? Sanna-Kaisa called it one of the hardest parts of the work, because tangible results often surface long after the intervention. She shared a telling local example. A digital discussion about public mental health and substance use services set out to understand why people weren’t using the services. It turned out that stigma was the decisive barrier. Based on the results of local digital discussion on Voxit, a multi-stakeholder roundtable decided not to tweak services, but to launch an anti-stigma campaign built on commitments from NGOs across the area. The impact was real, it just landed somewhere nobody had planned for at the start.

6. Stop launching isolated waves, build European muscles

A very forward-looking idea from the evening was a European Civic Tech Hub. Europe’s civic tech landscape has advanced in isolated national “waves”, with each country piloting, funding, and sunsetting its own tools. Sitra’s proposal is to pool resources, improve interoperability between platforms, and strengthen European technological sovereignty in the process. The European Voxit community, which aligns technical and ethical priorities across countries, is an early step in that direction.

Looking Forward

Sitra’s lessons mirror our own experience at DemAI: technology alone doesn’t strengthen democracy, the surrounding craft does. The expectation-setting, the outreach strategy, the human interpretation, the patience with impact. And increasingly, that craft needs to be European, not just national.

A massive thank you to Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta for joining us and sharing Sitra’s learnings so openly. We look forward to continuing the dialogue.

Want to be part of conversations like this? 

We regularly host meetups at the Democracy Garage with practitioners building the future of democratic technology, so follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the loop. And if your organisation wants to put these lessons to work, whether to better understand your citizens, members, employees, or customers, we are ready to help you leverage civic tech to get there. Just reach out to us!

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