Understanding 10 EU public consultations in 2 hours

Brussels, we have a problem

Public consultations are at the heart of European law and decision making. The European Commission regularly asks European citizens and companies operating in its common market to voice their opinions on incoming legislation and directives. While the intent behind  this is noble (and desirable), the Commission and everyone working on processing these consultations knows that the process is broken.

We know this first hand because we worked with the analysts and consultants who are asked to process hundreds of pages of responses from these consultations, which often span 6-10 languages.And we also know the Commission is aware of the problem, because its very own Director for Strategy, Better Regulation & Corporate Governance admitted it in the letter he sent us.

The consultants working on these consultations use Excel and manual tagging of sentences, along with Google Translate to make sense of this multilingual data somehow. They try desperately to get some "insights" out of it but they are held against impossibly tight budgets and timelines. The quality and result of their work is therefore often incomplete and leaves much to be desired. 

This is a colossal missed opportunity. It not only erodes the public's trust in the EU (which is already evident in the rise of far right and eurosceptic parties everywhere across the continent) but also makes the decision and law making detached from the true desires of European citizens and companies. 

CrowdPrisma can be a solution

Just like when we helped the ECAH to analyse its gigantic public consultation of PFAS (pro bono of course), we'd like to offer our help to the Commission and any consultancy that is willing to use our product. 

Therefore, we collected 10 public consultations (spanning 20+ languages and 1300 pages) and analysed them with CrowdPrisma in under two hours. You will find the original consultation submissions and the produced dashboards below. 

The consultation themes range from microplastics and critical raw materials to heat pumps and medical devices. These represent fundamental issues for European citizens and companies, who took the time to voice their opinion on these issues. What did they get in return? A collection of responses, free to read to anyone, and two ridiculous charts.. That's it. From the billions of taxpayer euros, this is what you get back from the EU for taking the time and filling out the public consultation. This is the level of sophistication the EU is running on at the moment. We need to do better than this!

Please help us help you

Imagine, if instead of the above, everyone would be able to browse a dashboard like the ones we created and linked above. All responses from all sorts of beautiful European languages would coalesce into neatly summarized English themes and topics, quantified accurately and cross linked with other key parameters of the responder.

We tried to sell this vision to countless consultancies (who work on these public consultations) but it is extremely frustrating how slow the uptake of AI in this field and the willingness more generally to do things better. 

So please, if you know anyone in a decision making role either in the Commission or at a consulting firm who could benefit from our tool, reach out to us. As always, we provide very generous discounts from our prices if the data processed is for the public good. 

Don't just regulate AI, use it!

Unfortunately The EU is becoming a world leader not in inventing technologies but regulating them. Often out of existence. For instance, in the case of AI, a number of leading products are already unavailable in the EU due to its draconian rules on a technology (LLMs) that didn't even exist 3 years ago. We think it's too early to be so strict and careful with LLMs and the EU is losing out on huge amounts of productivity and efficiency gains if it shuns investment and adoption of these technologies.