Overview of Advisory Board Members
Dimitri Lemaire
Director of PARTICITIZ, Inventio Group
Dimitri Lemaire is the director of PARTICITIZ, the democratic innovation department of Inventio Group. Particitiz specializes in citizen deliberative panels and develops innovative mechanisms for political-citizen interaction. Dimitri studied Environmental Management in Buenos Aires before returning to Europe. Passionate about politics and citizen participation, he became adviser to the Vice-President of the European Parliament in charge of Citizens’ Participation. In 2014 he founded Inventio Group, a company offering event and democratic innovation solutions to political institutions. Since then, he has conceptualized and coordinated numerous citizen panels at local, regional and European level.
Dirk Peters
Senior Expert, DG REGIO, European Commission
Dirk Peters studied law and political science in Bonn, Munich and Aachen. Since 1991 he has been working at the European Commission, first in the Directorate-General for Agriculture and since 1994 in the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Development (DG REGIO). Throughout his career, Peters has been in charge of European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and Interreg programs and supervised Interreg programs at internal and external borders (e.g. Euregio Meuse-Rhine, Saxony-Poland, Bavaria-Czech Republic) from 2000 to 2005. Between 2005 and 2018, Peters worked in the legal unit of DG REGIO. Since then, he has been working for the two units dealing with cross-border cooperation on internal and external borders.
Liesbeth van de Wetering
Civil Servant, Municipality of Groningen
Liesbeth van de Wetering is a sociologist and civil servant at the municipality and province of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her heart goes out to building a strong democracy, by combining rigorous thinking with clever experiments and actions. She is passionate about forging the bond between the system of our representative democracy and community/deliberative democracy. Some of her work at the municipality includes the “Cooperative Council Groningen”, which won the Innovation in Politics Award 2019, and other participatory experiments with co-creation, participatory budgeting, random selection, digital panels, and the right to challenge.
David Farrell
Professor at MRIA, School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin
David Farrell’s current work is focused primarily on deliberative mini-publics. To date he has advised and/or researched six government-led deliberative mini-public processes in Ireland, the UK and Belgium. He has also previously been a member of the Stewarding Group of the Scottish Citizens’ Assembly and the research leader of the Irish Citizens' Assembly. His most recent books include: The Oxford Handbook of Irish Politics (co-edited, Oxford University Press, 2021), and Deliberative Mini-Publics: Core Design Features (co-authored, Bristol University Press, 2021). In 2021 Professor Farrell was elected Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research.
Wolfgang Himmel
Founder of Translake GmbH and Co-Founder of the School of Participation
Wolfgang Himmel likes to support meaningful expeditions towards a good future. He founded Translake GmbH (www.translake.org) and in 2020 he transferred it to his daughter. He brings his longtime experience to transnational, transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral innovation, cooperation and participation processes in a European cross-border region. He worked with communal and regional administrations, enterprises, social partner organisations, schools and neighborhoods in fields such as climate change, demographic change, mobility in the cross-border labor market, or event-planning. Now he is an independent facilitator, lecturer at universities and co-founder of www.school-of-participation.com.
Vera Sacchetti
Design Critic and Curator
Vera Sacchetti (Lisbon, 1983) is a Basel-based design critic and curator. She specializes in contemporary design and architecture and serves in a variety of curatorial, research and editorial roles. She is currently program coordinator of the multidisciplinary research initiative Driving the Human: Seven Prototypes for Eco-social Renewal (2020-2023), which supports transdisciplinary research on sustainable futures; and co-initiator of the Design and Democracy platform (2020–), which maps the intersections and overlaps between design and democratic systems and practices. Sacchetti teaches at HEAD Geneva, and in 2020 joined the Federal Design Commission of Switzerland.