In democracies worldwide, billions of citizens hold an untold number of interests, opinions and positions. Political reality on the ground is vastly more complex than our political symbols and categories allow us to express. Our political choices are artificially constrained by existing abstractions that either compress us into just two large...
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...
Last week, I spent a good part of Monday and Tuesday at a training workshop on the vTaiwan public engagement process and Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), the innovation lab inside the central Taiwanese government. It was organized by the New York City node of the g0v (pronounced “gov...
How a radical experiment in participatory democracy came to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
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...
In the midst of the signal failure known as the US electoral season, here’s something to be inspired about: a true story about rational deliberation on a national scale.
Last week the Ash Institute For Democratic Governance and Innovation published Civicist contributor Hollie Russon Gilman’s first book, Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America. What follows is a short Q&A with Gilman about her new book and what the future may hold for participatory budgeting and other...
Smart Participation is an experiment led by Cornell researchers to see how public comment processes developed at the federal level will do in local contexts.
The People's Lobby is run entirely online using the digital tools NationBuilder and Loomio.