Loomio, DemocracyOS, Pol.is, Decide Madrid, Decidim, Democracy Earth, RadicalxChange — the Democracy Landscape already documents all of these individually. What it hasn't done yet is put them next to each other. Read as a sequence rather than a list, they tell one continuous story: a protest movement's decision-making problem, handed to software, again and again, for fifteen years.
If you're in Melbourne on Thursday 27 August, come meet RadicalxChange Foundation — the international movement behind quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and the "Plurality" philosophy — as it launches its Australian chapter. (This is a RadicalxChange event, not a DOD event — we're just pointing at it.)
The Democracy Landscape has a lot of advocacy orgs in it. Which is fair — we built it that way. But we're an Australian group, and at some point you've got to stop staring at the international reform ecosystem and take a good hard look at your own backyard. So we did.
We picked every Australian party with enough documentation to score, tossed in a few historical ones and international comparators, and rated them on three things: internal governance, external reform advocacy, and ideology. Then we put it all on a page with graphs and a data file and told ourselves we'd update it when things change.
The Australian Party Governance Comparison page is the result.
The Proportional Representation Society of Australia (PRSA) — tracing its history back to the 1890s and describing itself as Australia's oldest continuing electoral reform coalition — has circulated a formal notice of motion for its 12 November 2026 AGM: a 17-motion package that would rename the organisation, broaden its remit far beyond its traditional single-issue focus, and modernise its governance from the ground up.
Thumbnail from Andrewism's video, used here for editorial commentary — click through to watch on YouTube.
Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" (June 2026) argues that democracy — even "real," direct, consensus-based democracy — is not a fellow traveller of anarchism but one of its obstacles. It's a substantial, well-sourced essay, and the argument is worth engaging with directly, including the parts that cut against how DOD itself talks about its work.
If you've visited DOD's Philosophy page before, it just changed shape. The full accountability framework that used to live there — the rigorous, AI-reviewed standard for what belongs in the Democracy Landscape — has moved. The page itself is now something different: an open space for DOD members to argue about democracy.
The DOD podcast archive runs from 2017 to 2023. DOD is a discussion forum — these were working conversations among practitioners thinking through how democracy functions and fails, not policy proposals or predictions. Revisiting them from 2026 is an exercise in calibration: did the observations hold up? Where did the analysis prove accurate, where is it still unresolved, and what did it miss entirely?
Sunday 31 May, 2:00 PM — Kathleen Syme Library, 251 Faraday St, Carlton VIC 3053
Register here — free event, in-person, with video sent to those who can't make it.
Democracy means rule of the people. It says so in the etymology: demos (people) + kratos (rule). But who counts as the people has never been self-evident. It has been the central contested question of democratic politics across every era — and the history of how that question has been answered, and repeatedly re-answered, is both clarifying and humbling.