Archive · 66 conversations
Interviews and field notes from people building new forms of democratic practice.
Alice Casiraghi is a systemic designer working on sustainability, circular economy, regenerative systems, and public services. She is a European Climate Pact Ambassador, teaches at Politecnico di Milano and created Climate Cards to educate on environmental impacts. Through her systemic approach, she
Paolo Spada discusses participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, and the long-term work of scaling democratic innovation. The conversation explores feedback loops, institutional design, political parties, online deliberation, empirical skepticism, and why participatory processes need stronger connections between citizens, public authorities, and wider democratic systems.
Antoine Vergne discusses Missions Publiques, random selection, and the challenge of scaling deliberative decision-making. The conversation explores citizens’ assemblies, global policy, legitimacy, institutional uptake, and how deliberation can move from local experiments toward processes that involve many more people without losing quality.
Giovanni Di Sotto discusses electronic voting, security, and democratic innovation through the experience of Multicast. The conversation explores digital identity, usability, transparency, institutional trust, accessibility, and the tradeoffs involved in designing voting and assembly systems that are both practical and credible.
Paul Zeitz discusses permanent citizens’ assemblies in the United States and the use of technology to scale democratic participation. The conversation explores civic power, institutional reform, participatory infrastructure, and how ongoing citizen bodies could connect public voice with decision-making beyond one-off consultations.
Ben Nelson discusses the Minerva Project, higher education reform, and the role universities can play in democracy. The conversation explores learning design, critical thinking, institutional incentives, global education, and why democratic societies need educational models that develop judgment rather than simply transmit information.
Cecile Green and Seth Frey discuss the Commoning Standard and the role of self-governance in democracy. The conversation explores commons, standards, collective rules, and how communities can document, compare, and improve self-governance practices without reducing democratic life to a single institutional model.
Sylvain Le Bon discusses Startin’blox, data spaces, democracy, and interoperability. The conversation explores open standards, decentralized digital infrastructure, civic technology, and how interoperable systems can give communities and organizations more control over data while supporting democratic collaboration across platforms.
Jorge Lagarto discusses LabX and human-centric design in the public sector. The conversation explores service design, experimentation inside government, citizen needs, administrative culture, and how public innovation labs can help institutions test better ways of designing policies and services with the people affected by them.
Wietse van Ransbeeck discusses Go Vocal and how participation can be integrated into everyday governance. The conversation explores civic engagement platforms, government workflows, institutional adoption, and the challenge of making public input useful for officials while keeping participation meaningful for residents.
Marcello Coppa discusses the Feel Community, the Govtech Forum, and how to accelerate public innovation. The conversation explores civic technology, public-sector reform, policy entrepreneurship, and the conditions that help new democratic and governmental tools move from isolated experiments into broader institutional practice.
Stefaan Verhulst discusses how governance improves when institutions learn to ask better questions, use evidence responsibly, and design decision-making around real public problems. The conversation connects democratic innovation with data, collective intelligence, institutional capacity, and the practical challenge of turning broad civic participation into decisions that governments can understand and act on.
