The ECI feature on Proca was designed to help campaigners embed a European Citizens’ Initiative – the EU’s official participatory democracy mechanism – directly on their campaign websites. It allowed supporters to sign a transnational petition that could invite the European Commission to propose new EU laws if it reached the required thresholds across the EU.
Proca’s co-founder and CEO, Xavier Dutoit, was one of the developers behind the groundbreaking new tech that powered the first ever successful European Citizens Initiative, which was followed by a dozen others.
Because of recent changes in how the European Citizens’ Initiative is regulated and administered by the European Commission, tools like Proca cannot directly facilitate signature collection anymore. The official ECI rules now require all online signature collection to go through the complex and clunky European Commission’s central online system, which means independent campaign tech like Proca can’t offer an alternative ECI widget in the same way it did before.
What the ECI tool used to do:
- Let supporters sign a European Citizens’ Initiative directly within a campaign’s website embed.
- Collected structured support data, shared totals, and helped campaigners mobilise transnational backing.
- Worked with coalition campaigns and distributed widget instances for partner organisations.
