How will democracy work in the 21st century?

How a permanent Citizens' Assembly in Paris passed a bill into law

A French civil servant who facilitated the historic process explains what happened, from start to finish

Another Democratic Future | Substack

DemocracyNext brings you stories, research, and reflections on the global deliberative wave. Click to read Another Democratic Future, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

What Happens When You Have a Choice? : A Breakdown of The People's Assembly and Blacksky's Vision for Democratic Tooling

Blacksky’s foundation is built on self-governance and self-determination. We took learnings from Black and Brown revolutionaries with our belief that everyone has the ability and the self-efficacy to do the things that are best for their community, but we also realize that that ability is something that is not seen as a right that everyone should be able to experience. Due to this, we sought out to create a solution, at least in the digital space, specifically for Blacksky.

Home - LogiVote

Complete Solutions for a Campaign Management System and for Digital or Online Voting

Plurality

A book by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and the Plurality Community exploring how technology can support and strengthen democracy.

One year on: The momentum behind Jigsaw’s Sensemaking AI

How our suite of AI tools is helping public leaders bridge the gap between individual voices and concrete policy decisions

Democracy Needs AI That Listens

From Taiwan's deliberative experiments to our own AI policy - featuring jdd-kami, the Civic AI that fits in a carry-on

Denizen / Change from within

Meet our community, attend our events and get our latest ideas delivered

How May the ‘Anthropocene’ Enable and Constrain Cybersystemic Governance? The ‘Anthropocene Problematique’

A growing awareness of the need for cybernetics and systems thinking (cybersystemic) in praxes of governance to improve human-biosphere relationships in the Anthropocene has become apparent. Nonetheless, mainstream governance informed by linear-causality seems to perpetuate an increasingly inadequate paradigm of dominant first-order/systematic thinking in governing complex interactions between humans and their natural environments. This conundrum is explored through the second-order lens of a systemic inquiry, using an integrative literature review. We discuss limitations of the Anthropocene metaphor and make the case for a reframing of our situation (humans’ co-evolutionary dynamic with the biosphere) as the ‘Anthropocene problematique’. This reframing as a systemic-duality offers more conducive affordances for trajectory-shifting cybersystemic governance to emerge. Aligning with a body of literature evidencing the influence of language on human cognition, we argue that by joining up the strengths of both ideas, ‘Anthropocene problematique’ may form a conceptual device amenable to changing worldviews and guiding practical action in governing human-biosphere relationships. We suggest a conceptual framework for practitioners to design and enact purposeful systems of cybersystemic governance with potential to improve situated Anthropocene problematiques. This framing and theoretical proposal are motivated by a need for shifts towards a social purpose of healing human-biosphere relationships in current governance systems in the Anthropocene-world.

Simocracy — AI digital twins at the governance table

Simocracy is an experimental platform where humans build AI digital twins of themselves — Sims — and send them into governance, deliberation, and capital allocation. Not to replace the human. To represent them.

From ZK-first to AT Protocol — our path to DDS | Agora Citizen Network

We've been building Agora — a platform for public deliberation using Polis-style clustering — for a while now. Along the way, we've written about what we think about Nostr, AT Protocol, Polis, Community Notes, and protocol interoperability. Those posts are somewhat outdated now. This one describes w...

Technological Metamodernism | Hilma Church-Turing | Substack

Click to read Technological Metamodernism, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares

Two substantial technological advances have reshaped the public square in recent decades: first with the advent of the internet and second with the recent introduction of large language models (LLMs). LLMs offer opportunities for a paradigm shift towards more decentralized, participatory online spaces that can be used to facilitate deliberative dialogues at scale, but also create risks of exacerbating societal schisms. Here, we explore four applications of LLMs to improve digital public squares: collective dialogue systems, bridging systems, community moderation, and proof-of-humanity systems. Building on the input from over 70 civil society experts and technologists, we argue that LLMs both afford promising opportunities to shift the paradigm for conversations at scale and pose distinct risks for digital public squares. We lay out an agenda for future research and investments in AI that will strengthen digital public squares and safeguard against potential misuses of AI.

Talk to the City

Talk to the City helps large groups of people coordinate by understanding each other better, faster, and in more depth.

Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy

Demos is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank. We produce original research, publish innovative thinkers and host thought-provoking events.

Using collective dialogues and AI to find common ground between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders | Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

New Project to Tackle the Challenge of Scaling Democratic Innovations | CoP CC on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy

The “Missing Link” between Research and Society

Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI

DemocracyNext's new paper on Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI

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DemocracyNext is an international non-profit, non-partisan research and action institute.