Juliane Feustel holds a master’s degree in communication research and phonetics, psychology, and sociology. Since September 2022, she has been responsible for third-party funding administration, personnel management, and various organizational tasks at the DIID.
Previously, she worked as a project manager for various language service providers.
Hannah Harmsen has been working as a student assistant at DIID since January 2022. She studies Bachelor Social Sciences at the HHU-Düsseldorf. She supports the members of the DIID in research projects, especially in the statistical field, and takes over various internal tasks, such as the administration of the members and the website.
She is primarily interested in deviant political communication and the formation of filter bubbles on the net.
Marco Wähner is a research assistant at the Chair of Sociology II at the HHU-Düsseldorf and a fellow in the NRW Forschungskolleg Online-Partizipation. Previously, he worked as a research assistant (WHB) at DIID, especially on the YOUniversity project. He studied German and Political Science (B.A.) and Social Sciences (M.A.) in Düsseldorf. In his master’s thesis, he investigated internet-specific resources as a predictor of political (online) participation.
His research interest lies in the determination of success and explanatory factors as well as the impact analysis of participation procedures on the municipal level.
Prof. Dr. Katrin Möltgen-Sicking has taught political science, sociology and intercultural competence at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration NRW since 2001. Since 2005, she has been a lecturer in project management at the University of Kassel. Her research interests are in the field of non-constituted forms of political participation at the municipal level, municipal integration policy and intercultural opening of the administration.
In 2012, she spent a three-month research stay at the Federal University of Porto Alegre (Brazil) to study forms of political participation at the municipal level in Brazil.
Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders has been Professor of Communication and Media Studies at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2011. She is a member of the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online World”. In research and teaching, she is concerned with public discourse and public opinion formation and examines the role of established mass media and online communication in this process.
In the context of DIID, she is interested in the deliberative quality and trajectories of online discourses in the context of political participation processes.
Marc Ziegele has held the junior professorship for communication and media science with a focus on “online political communication” at HHU-Düsseldorf since February 2018. At the same time, he is head of the junior research group “Deliberative Discussions on the Social Web” funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Previously, he was a research assistant at the Institute for Journalism at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and studied media economics at the same institute. His research focuses on participation and discussions of citizens on the Internet. In the junior research group based at DIID, he is investigating measures to improve the quality and impact of users’ public discussions about political media topics – so-called online public-political connection communication.
It also researches the causes and consequences of media trust as well as various aspects of citizens’ social web use at the interface of communication science and psychology.
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rosar has held the chair of Sociology II at the Institute of Social Sciences since 2010. Since 2015, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at HHU-Düsseldorf.
In research and teaching, he is primarily concerned with questions of political sociology, sociological inequality analysis and the methods of empirical social research.
Prof. Dr. Martin Mauve has headed the Chair of Computer Networks and Communication Systems since 2003. Since 2015, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at HHU-Düsseldorf. His research interests include secure and robust distributed systems, computer-aided group work, and the realization of participation using Internet technology. A particular focus is on highly scalable support for discussion and decision making.
Within DIID, his interests include innovative concepts for dialog-based online participation processes and their technical implementation in functional systems.
Katharina Gerl has been a research assistant at DIID at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2016. She studied Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and Political Communication (M.A.) at HHU-Düsseldorf. For her dissertation at the Chair of Political Science II at Heinrich Heine University, she studied the impact of digital media on political parties as organizations.
Her research interests lie in the areas of effects and acceptance of digital democratic innovations in politics and administration as well as of artificial intelligence for political opinion-forming and decision-making.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Conrad has held the Chair of Databases and Information Systems at the Institute of Computer Science since 2002. He has been a member of the Senate of HHU-Düsseldorf since 2015. In his research, he works on issues related to the analysis of large data sets, especially in image retrieval, time series analysis, clustering, and text mining.
He has been cooperating with practice partners for many years, especially in several BMWi-funded ZIM projects on opinion mining, extraction of product features important for users, and automated text summarization.
At DIID, he is interested in researching techniques for automated topic detection and content analysis of text contributions as well as the identification of argument structures, subjective evaluations, and emotions.
Prof. Dr. Barbara E. Weißenberger has held the Chair of Business Administration, in particular Accounting, at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2014 and is also Affiliate Professor of Accounting at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg. Her research focuses, among other things, on decision-making processes in accounting, including in the context of corporate management and controlling, but also against the background of embedding in compliance and sustainability.
In the context of DIID, she is particularly interested in the question of what impact the digital transformation has on decision-making and enforcement as well as intra-company cooperation processes.
Dr. Dennis Frieß is coordinator of the DIID. Since May 2019, he was coordinator of the NRW Research College Online Participation. From 2014 to 2019, he was a research assistant at the Chair of Communication and Media Studies III at HHU-Düsseldorf and a staff member at DIID. He studied Social Sciences, Law and Communication Science at the University of Erfurt (B.A.) and Political Communication in Düsseldorf (M.A.). His doctoral thesis focused on the analysis of deliberative online publics. His research focuses on political (online) communication, online deliberation, and online participation.
At the DIID, he is particularly interested in online-supported deliberation processes and the democracy-relevant expectations associated with online participation offerings.
Tobias Escher leads a BMBF-funded junior research group investigating the effects of participation processes on the quality and legitimacy of political decisions, especially in the context of the transformation to sustainable mobility in the local context. Previously, he supervised the DIID as well as the NRW Forschungskolleg Online-Partizipation at the HHU-Düsseldorf as scientific coordinator. He is a social scientist and holds a PhD from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He can also draw on his basic knowledge of computer science when assessing the possibilities and limits of digitization.
His research focuses on the evaluation of political participation online and offline. In particular, he addresses the question of the extent to which citizen participation contributes to higher quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has developed a teaching module on the theory and practice of online participation, from which, among other things, a project on student participation in teaching has emerged.