Testing Tech for Consensus in a Purple Town
How a radical experiment in participatory democracy came to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
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Merced County Participatory Budgeting Process Hits Snag, Plows Ahead
The first-ever participatory budgeting process at the county level has not gone off without a hitch, but it is still going on.
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Taiwanese Civic Tech is not Re-inventing Democracy, Yet
High-level collaboration between hackers and the government helped Taiwan to become the darling of the global civic tech community. But projects like vTaiwan still struggle to scale up nation-wide, and increase their scope outside digital economy issues.
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Eric Gordon on Valuing the Inefficiencies of Civic Life
A discussion of play, meaning, smart cities and civic life with Eric Gordon, professor and director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.
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Direct Democracy in the Digital Age: A Conversation with the Mayor of Seoul
For the past five years, the little co-op I co-founded has been working on a tool called Loomio. Workplaces, government departments, co-ops, and political parties around the world use Loomio to involve members and citizens in bottom-up decision-making. We focus on small groups, usually less than 500 people. At that...
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In Ecuador, Waorani Communities Use Open-Source Tools to Collaboratively Map Their Territory
Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon is shaped like a mechanical claw, or the open jaws of a craggy, prehistoric reptile. It grasps in its mouth roughly half of the land titled to the Waorani, one of the country’s indigenous nationalities. Peering down at the Google Earth view it’s...
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How Movements Organize Now: Notes on the Challenges of Rapid Growth
If you haven’t noticed already, we are living through a movement moment. Triggered by the election of Donald Trump and his combustive personality and policy moves, millions of Americans are in motion, forming and joining groups, rallying, signing and sharing petitions, and searching for ways to demonstrate their opposition. Thousands...
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Lessons from Fighting Swiss Right-Wing Populism
In early 2016, Operation Libero, an anti-populist movement co-founded by history student Flavia Kleiner, 26, successfully defeated an anti-immigrant Swiss ballot initiative. The “enforcement” initiative, sponsored by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party (SVP), would have ordered the deportation of immigrants in Switzerland for any criminal offense, no matter how minor....
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When to Bring a Petition to a Trump-Fight
Where online petitions help marshal an army of protesters or shift the media narrative, they will be more relevant and valuable than ever before.