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Archive · 24 conversations in Participation
Interviews and field notes from people building new forms of democratic practice.
Sonia Bussu discusses how arts-based practices can bring emotions, imagination, and lived experience into democratic settings. The conversation explores deliberation, participation, facilitation, and the limits of purely rational formats, asking how creative methods can help people engage conflict, uncertainty, and collective decision-making more honestly.
Graham Wetherall-Grujić discusses the work of the Innovation in Politics Institute and the challenge of improving political discourse. The conversation explores democratic culture, recognition of public innovation, political communication, and how institutions and civic actors can create better conditions for constructive disagreement and practical reform.
Richard Bartlett discusses Loomio and the difference between horizontal decision-making and the habits of hierarchical society. The conversation explores facilitation, consent, group culture, online collaboration, and the practical work required for communities to make decisions together without reproducing domination or endless process.
Tomas Rakos discusses Participation Factory and warns against fetishising a single democratic method or tool. The conversation explores participatory design, institutional context, facilitation, and why meaningful engagement depends on choosing the right process for the problem rather than treating any one platform or format as a universal solution.
Andrew Gray discusses Suffrago and the idea of using the wisdom of people’s voices for politics. The conversation explores civic input, political listening, public opinion, technology design, and how democratic tools might help representatives and communities understand priorities without reducing participation to polling or simple voting.
Robert Bjarnason discusses the Citizens Foundation and how technology can support participatory democracy. The conversation explores civic platforms, idea generation, public consultation, institutional adoption, and the long-term lessons of building tools that let residents contribute proposals and influence decisions in practical local contexts.
Guillaume Saunier and Lucien Langton discuss Voca and the work of distributing the participatory tool Decidim. The conversation explores open-source civic technology, implementation, community support, institutional adoption, and the practical ecosystem needed to make participation platforms useful beyond a single city or pilot project.
Gianluca Sgueo discusses gamification and its potential to improve participation in democracies. The conversation explores motivation, civic learning, institutional design, and the risks of applying game mechanics to public life, asking when playful formats can deepen engagement and when they can trivialize democratic decisions.
Stephen Boucher discusses Dreamocracy and the role of collective creativity in solving complex social problems. The conversation explores imagination, policy innovation, facilitation, and democratic problem-solving, focusing on how creative processes can help communities and institutions move beyond predictable debates toward new practical possibilities.
Bjørn Bedsted discusses Democracy X, local transitions, and global participation. The conversation explores democratic experimentation, citizen engagement, climate and community transitions, and the relationship between local action and global democratic challenges, focusing on how participation can become practical rather than purely consultative.
Josef Lentsch discusses the Political Tech Summit and the potential of digitally assisted democracy. The conversation explores political innovation, parties, civic technology, institutional reform, and why democratic renewal requires both new tools and serious attention to the political organizations that connect citizens with power.
Marcin Woźniak discusses Swarmcheck, argument mapping, and ways to make democratic discourse more rational. The conversation explores structured reasoning, collective sense-making, disagreement, and how digital tools can help groups clarify arguments, evaluate claims, and move public debate beyond noise and repetition.