Joanna Podgórska-Rykała is a university professor at the University of the National Education Commission in Kraków, TRiSS Visiting Scholar at Trinity College Dublin, and Coordinator of the Research and Analysis Department at the Foundation for the Development of Local Democracy. Graduate of law (2019), political science (2011), and administration (2011), PhD in political sciences (2016), habilitated in political science and administration (2024). Fellow of the French Government Scholarship Program – SSHN at the Université Paris VIII Vincennes - Saint-Denis: Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris (France, 2025); Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy, 2022-2023) and the fellow at the University of Silesia in Opava (2020, Czech Republic). Awarded the Scholarship of the Polish Minister of Education and Science for Outstanding Young Scientists (2022-2025). She specializes in democratic innovation, deliberative democracy, public policy, and local government. She is the author, co-author, and editor of more than 130 publications, including the most recent Deliberative Democracy, Public Policy, and Local Government (2024, Routledge); Deliberative Innovation According to the Decision-Makers: A Clash between Perceptions and Reality (2025, Brill Publishers).

Assistant Professor (Post-doc) in the research team 'Democratic Innovations' at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She is interested in the institutional consequences of citizens' panels. She obtained her PhD with distinction from the University of Warsaw, where she studied alternative forms of collective space governance in Polish cities from 2008 to 2017. She holds a Master's degree from the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw and a Bachelor's degree from the Interdisciplinary Research Institute "Artes Liberales."

She has collaborated internationally on projects such as LIVEWHAT, funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, where she participated in research on institutional and civic responses to economic crises in nine EU countries. She has conducted a number of research workshops and classes on ways to engage society in the regeneration of degraded areas with rich heritage, including the “Urban Acupuncture” project with Aalto University in Helsinki and “Regeneration of Cities on the Polish-Czech Border” with the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. She is a co-author of the curriculum for the socio-urban specialization at the University of Warsaw. As part of the Social Consultation Team of the Polish Sociological Association, she developed a handbook for conducting social consultations (2011), preceded by a series of systematic action research studies. She is the author and editor of monographs and reports dedicated to issues of social participation and intersectoral co-governance of space.

E-mail: ewa.zielinska@amu.edu.pl

PhD student at Adam Mickiewicz University in the discipline of political science and administration. They defended their master's thesis in political science on the first climate panel in the United States at the University of Vienna. In 2019, Magni stayed in Berlin for the International Parliamentary Scholarship of the German Bundestag. They have so far observed the Washington Climate Assembly, the Polish nationwide citizens' assembly panel on energy costs, and four citizens' assemblies held in Polish cities. In their dissertation, Magni focuses on the processes of agenda- and scope-setting for deliberative minipublics and their consequences for public policy-making. Before deciding to continue their academic education in doctoral school, Magni was a civil servant, and later an activist.

PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences in the field of political science and administration. Graduate of International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism. His master's thesis focused on Polish foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During his student activities, he dealt with the topic of civic participation using Oxford debate tools. In his doctoral thesis, he will focus on analyzing the impact of citizens' assemblies on public policy, democratic institutions, and political debate in Europe as part of the Weave Unisono Integrating Deliberation for Impact (i4i) grant.