Open Calls
Youth-Led Monitoring for a Resilient Digital France
YLM-RDF - Youth Workshop on Digital Resilience (Paris & Strasbourg, September 2026)
This is the part where you get to talk back
Think about the last time you had to deal with the state online. Renewing a document. Applying for aid. Booking something you needed booked. Chances are, at some point, it didn’t go smoothly. Maybe the site crashed. Maybe the form assumed you had a printer, a scanner, fibre internet, and forty free minutes in the middle of a Tuesday. Maybe you gave up and called someone, only to be told the phone line had been replaced by a chatbot.
Somebody decided that would be an improvement. We’d like to know what you think about that.
That’s really what this call is. Not a survey. Not a box to tick. An actual invitation to sit in a room, say what’s true, and have it matter.
Why we’re doing this
France is in the middle of a huge shift: almost every public service is being redesigned to work “digital by default.” On paper, that sounds efficient. In practice, it lands very differently depending on who you are, where you live, and whether the system was built with you in mind.
We noticed something simple and, frankly, a bit infuriating: the people this shift affects the most, young people, people in under-served neighbourhoods, people without a stable internet connection at home, are almost never the people asked how it’s going. Reports get written. Roadmaps get published. National targets get set. And the ones actually clicking through the broken forms are rarely in the room.
We call that the consultation gap. This project exists to close it, one honest conversation at a time.
What Youth-Led Monitoring for a Resilient Digital France actually is
YLM-RDF is a project run by HDRI, a youth-led organisation based in Paris, and it’s not an abstract research exercise. It’s built around two real workshops, one in Paris, one at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where young people go through France’s digital public service roadmap piece by piece and say, plainly, what’s working and what isn’t.
We ground the conversation in evidence: our own research team briefs participants on what the data already shows before anyone starts talking, so the discussion builds on facts, not just frustration (though a bit of frustration is welcome too, it’s usually where the truth lives). From there, small groups take over. That’s where the real material comes from.
Everything that comes out of those rooms gets written up into something with teeth: the 2026 Youth Declaration on Digital Resilience. Not a PDF that sits in a drawer, a document we hand directly to the national and European institutions responsible for the very policies being discussed.
Who we’re looking for
Honestly? You, probably.
We’re looking for 50 young people in each city, aged 16 to 30, who currently live in Paris or Strasbourg or somewhere nearby. That’s the only real requirement.
We don’t care if you’ve never written a policy brief in your life. We don’t care if “European Parliament” sounds like somewhere you’d never normally set foot. We care that you’ve lived some version of the story above, a form that didn’t work, a service that assumed too much, a system that made something simple feel exhausting, or that you just care enough about people who have to show up and say so.
You don’t need to prepare anything. You don’t need to be an expert. You need to be willing to talk, and to listen to fifty other people doing the same.
A practical note, because we’d rather be upfront about it: participation is completely free of charge, and we’ll have a welcome coffee and coffee breaks ready for you throughout the day. What we can’t do, because our budget comes from a European Commission grant and every euro of it is accounted for, is to cover travel or accommodation. So this call is really for people who can get to Paris or Strasbourg on their own, please don’t apply if a long trip is involved, much as we’d love to have you.
What the day actually looks like
No lectures. No sitting quietly while someone reads slides at you.
You’ll get a short, clear briefing on what our research has already found. Then you’ll hear directly from people working on the ground, in Paris, someone involved in digital inclusion locally; in Strasbourg, a keynote from the Council of Europe’s Youth Department and a session with the European Parliament itself. After that, the room becomes yours: working groups, real debate, and a document taking shape in real time, built from what you and everyone else in that room actually said.
By 17:15 or 17:30, depending on the city, you’ll have helped write something that’s going in front of the people who make these decisions. That doesn’t happen very often. We think it should happen more.
The two workshops
Paris — Thursday, 24 September 2026, 14:00–17:15
An afternoon built around digital public services and digital exclusion in Paris’s urban and QPV neighbourhoods.
Strasbourg — Monday, 28 September 2026, 13:30–17:30, at the European Parliament
An afternoon that opens with a keynote from the Council of Europe’s Youth Department, continues with a session hosted by the European Parliament, and moves into the same hands-on deliberation.
Ready to apply? → Link will be provided
Fifty spots per city. We’re reviewing applications as they arrive, not all at once at the deadline, so if you’re thinking about it, don’t sit on it too long.
Want the bigger picture first?
Fair enough, you shouldn’t have to take our word for all of this. If you’d like to properly understand what YLM-RDF is, why HDRI started it, and what actually happens to the Declaration once it’s written, read more about the project here: please give a link to the page of the project.
We started HDRI because we got tired of watching decisions get made about young people without young people anywhere near the room. This is us doing something about that. There’s a chair for you in it, if you want it.
This project receives funding by European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) in the framework of the EURECA Plus 2026 project, which is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or ECAS. Neither the European Union nor ECAS can be held responsible for them.
