Two weeks ago Emmanuel Macron, the French president, announced the results of the “Grand Débat” or “Great Debate,” a two-month process of intensive public consultation that garnered nearly two million comments online along with 10,000 local meetings and a series of citizen assemblies. The initiative was in response to France’s...
In just the last two weeks, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has gained half a million new Twitter followers, zooming from 1.6M to 2.1M. On Instagram, another platform where she excels at sharing interesting glimpses of her life as an activist-turned-newly-successful-politician, Ocasio-Cortez now has 1.6M followers, putting her in...
How a radical experiment in participatory democracy came to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
The first-ever participatory budgeting process at the county level has not gone off without a hitch, but it is still going on.
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.
A discussion of play, meaning, smart cities and civic life with Eric Gordon, professor and director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.
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...
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...
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...