Looking back on achievements of CollectieveKracht in 2025

Knowledge exchange platform CollectieveKracht, one of our SEICA projects, celebrated several big achievements in 2025. For example, the first Citizen Collectives Monitor became a reality! In addition, as part of the ECCO consortium, we secured substantial funding for research into the roles that citizen collectives play in societal transitions. CollectieveKracht organized 5 in-person events and 7 webinars, expanded the knowledge base with over 50 items, and welcomed the 500th citizen collectives’ member.

Watch the recap in less than 3 minutes:

Join our research group with ECCO PhD position

Research project ECCO (Empowering Citizen COllectives in societal transitions) has currently 10 PhD positions open. Professor Tine De Moor will be the promotor of the PhD position: Identifying prosocial effects of participatory decision-making in citizen collectives. This trajectory investigates whether citizen collectives function as “schools for democracy.” It explores how participatory decision-making within citizen collectives influences members’ civic engagement beyond the collective, examining whether democratic practices in cooperatives foster broader pro-social and democratic tendencies in society.

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Citizen Collectives Monitor maps the development, resilience, and challenges of Dutch initiatives

Dive into the data from the first Citizen Collectives Monitor by CollectieveKracht (Dutch publication). Based on information from 431 initiatives, the monitor shows how citizen collectives are increasingly developing into important actors in the public domain.

The first copy was presented on 8 December to Claartje Brons, Programme Manager for Democracy at the Ministry of the Interior. Brons: “When I visit citizen collectives, I see people who want to make a difference, who want to do something meaningful or good, and that happens across many sectors. It is a richness in the Netherlands that is very important and that we can tap into even better. The monitor can help us with that.”

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Paper on use of small LLMs in historical studies

Automation of certain parts of data collection and data processing in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities would enable researchers to skip some of the more painstaking tasks, leaving more time for the actual analysis and opening up the possibility to work with larger data sets. So, how can small Large Language Models (sLLMs) help? Marianne Groep-Foncke and Tine De Moor (RSM, Erasmus University Rotterdam) published a paper on this topic, titled: ‘Easily accessible (small) LLMs in historical studies: opportunities, limitations, pitfalls‘.

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Lecture on importance of community building and cooperatives

On November 13, Steunpunt Energietransitie Nijmegen organized the event ‘The Rediscovery of Community.’ As part of the program, Professor Tine De Moor gave a lecture in which she outlined what a “commons” society, one with a major role for communities, could look like. Do citizen collectives embody degrowth or postgrowth as a serious alternative to consumer capitalism and the neoliberal dynamics of our time?

Systemic change cannot be achieved through technology alone. You also need a different institutional logic.