AI and Legislative Modernization Workshop with Balkan and Moldovan Parliaments
BY CHLOE LADD
POPVOX Foundation, in collaboration with the House Democracy Partnership and hosted by the Albanian Parliament, convened parliamentary staff from Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Moldova in Tirana from July 20 to 23 for a workshop on AI and parliamentary modernization.
The gathering built on the Digital Parliaments Project (DPP), a POPVOX Foundation global initiative launched in 2025 to support democratic institutions with data digitization, standardization, accessibility, and transparency through the use of AI. As part of the DPP, POPVOX Foundation has ongoing work with the Albanian Parliament digitizing its library and historical records. The workshop deepened that work with Albania, and opened the door to that same kind of partnership with four additional legislatures from the region.
The Timeliness of Parliamentary AI Adoption
In-person, teams from across the Western Balkans and Moldova gathered to share knowledge and learn together. All arrived from different starting points: some institutions had formal AI-use guidelines already in place, others had no official policy on AI use at all. Staff experience varied just as widely, from those who used AI tools daily to those who had only briefly interacted with an LLM before. And yet, everyone arrived asking the same underlying question: how do we act, not whether to.
The Workshop Details
Each team completed a facilitated self-assessment of its own parliamentary data, technical constraints, and realistic near-term AI opportunities. Conversations that followed throughout the week fed directly into the final roadmaps at the end of the workshop.
Participants discussed the pacing problem and AI fundamentals and engaged in hands-on work with ParlLink and an AI sandbox built specifically for the workshop that included tools like Codex and Claude Code.
Teams built working tools: a scheduling system, a legal research dashboard, an MP-support dashboard, each addressing a pain point staff already lived with. Building their own prototypes gives staff a concrete way to show what is possible, turning legislative imagination into legislative reality.
In a session focused on knowledge-sharing, the Albanian Parliament presented its own voice-to-text transcription tool, developed alongside Hansard secretaries who have worked in that office for two decades and built with their expertise. The tool demonstrated a solution to a need POPVOX Foundation has heard directly from its DPP partners in other regions of the world: AI-powered Hansard transcription and editing support that overcome limitations of commercial voice-to-text tools that cannot handle regional dialect and accent limitations.
Workshop Follow-Up
Teams left with a modernization roadmap tailored by POPVOX Foundation to their specific self-assessed needs and translated into their language. Yet, roadmaps and new use cases only tell part of the story. The value of the week lived as much in the space between sessions — in dinners and parliamentary hallway conversations — as it did in any single workshop session.
POPVOX Foundation was honored to be in the room, convening this work alongside the House Democracy Partnership and the Albanian Parliament as hosts.
Questions about the Digital Parliaments Project? Contact Chloe Ladd at chloe@popvox.org.