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Archive · 66 conversations
Interviews and field notes from people building new forms of democratic practice.
Magnus Strobel discusses Nexus Politics and the future of civic engagement. The conversation explores platform design, political participation, community organizing, and the challenge of creating digital spaces where citizens can coordinate, deliberate, and act in ways that connect everyday engagement with democratic institutions.
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.
Evelien Nieuwenburg discusses Dembrane ECHO and the challenge of mirroring insights from large group conversations. The conversation explores listening at scale, AI-supported synthesis, deliberation, facilitation, and how public engagement can produce usable collective intelligence without losing the nuance of individual contributions.
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.
Michihito Matsuda discusses the AI Mayor project and the need to rethink old democratic systems. The conversation explores artificial intelligence, political representation, public trust, experimentation, and how provocative civic technology projects can expose weaknesses in existing institutions while raising difficult questions about legitimacy and accountability.
Oliver Klingefjord discusses the Meaning Alignment Institute and how collective wisdom can be surfaced in groups. The conversation explores alignment, deliberation, group intelligence, facilitation, and the design of processes that help communities identify deeper shared meaning rather than simply aggregating preferences or arguments.
Gareth Farry discusses human rights advocacy, Amnesty International, and the possible role of blockchain technology in governance. The conversation explores documentation, accountability, trust, and the risks and opportunities of using distributed systems in civic and rights-based work where evidence, legitimacy, and protection matter.
Tate Berenbaum discusses Arweave and how blockchain-based permanent storage can affect governance. The conversation explores permanence, public records, decentralized infrastructure, accountability, and the political implications of preserving information in systems that are designed to resist deletion, censorship, and institutional control.
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.