Best practices for hybrid participation: capturing every voice, online and offline

This session will be held in English, with subtitles available in your preferred language.

Community engagement has become increasingly digital, helping local governments reach more people than ever before. Yet some of the most valuable conversations still happen offline: at community meetings, through paper surveys, during workshops, or in conversations with staff in the field.

The challenge is no longer deciding between online and offline participation. It's finding a way to connect them into one coherent participation experience.

Join this live session to discover how local governments are moving beyond digital-only participation.

Learn why hybrid participation is becoming essential, see a live demonstration of dembrane with co-founder Evelien Nieuwenburg, and hear directly from the City of Ostend about their experience capturing and analyzing community conversations.

Together, we'll explore how participation teams can connect online and offline engagement, reduce manual work, and build a more complete understanding of what their communities are saying.

What you'll learn

• Why hybrid participation matters: Explore how participation teams are combining online and offline methods to create more inclusive engagement processes.
• How to capture conversations at scale: See a live demonstration of dembrane and discover how conversations, meetings, and interviews can be transformed into searchable, analyzable participation data.
• How to connect every source of feedback: Discover how participation data from different channels can be brought together in one place for analysis and reporting.
• What this looks like in practice: Hear directly from the City of Ostend about their experience capturing and analyzing community conversations.

Can't make it live? Register and we'll send you the recording so you can watch on your own time.

Speakers

Wietse Van Ransbeeck
CEO & Co-Founder, Go Vocal

Wietse has spent over a decade helping local governments build stronger cultures of participation. He is an Obama Leader (2025–2026) and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe alumnus, and leads Go Vocal's mission to make public decision-making more inclusive and participatory.

Evelien Nieuwenburg
Co-Founder & Growth Lead, dembrane

Evelien is the co-founder of dembrane, a platform that helps organizations capture, understand, and learn from large-scale conversations. During the session, she will demonstrate how Dembrane helps teams turn community dialogue into actionable insights.

Representative from the City of Ostend
Participation Team, City of Ostend

Sharing practical lessons from using dembrane to capture and analyze community conversations as part of Ostend's participation efforts.

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