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.
Australia's federal parliament passed the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 2025, receiving royal assent on 20 February 2025.1 The AEC describes it as the biggest update to the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 40 years2 — introducing donation caps and tightening disclosure requirements that have been debated in Australia for many years.
Taiwan is frequently cited as a place where digital deliberation actually worked at government scale. That claim deserves scrutiny — and the scrutiny is more interesting than the headline. The factual background is in the vTaiwan and g0v entries in the DOD Democracy Landscape.
In December 2025 the Victorian parliament completed an inquiry into the state's Upper House electoral system. Among its findings: it recommended that any reform process should involve either an expert panel, a citizens' assembly, or a constitutional convention before putting changes to a referendum.1
The Civics Ecosystem Toolkit v1.2 is now publicly available. This is a project that has been developing quietly for a while and feels ready to share more broadly.
Do you want to address society's biggest issues but not sure where you'd start? Or, perhaps you're idealistic but struggle with concrete planning? Or maybe you just want to make a positive difference with others who also want the same?
In this event, our special guest, Usha (with support from Nick) will use her expertise to guide participants in a workshop on how we can use Design Thinking to address an issue in society.
This process is being conducted in partnership with the Sortition Foundation, who are responsible for running the sortition selection to ensure independence and integrity.
Glad to see a political party in UK exploring this idea of sortition.
This event in victoria is of interest to us so passing around the telegram chat and to various other Designing Open Democracy members in Victoria, because it's about open governance but via Citizen Assemblies.
Sharing this podcast episode which details the application of peace polls, initially inspired by Inuit consensus practices, to facilitate peace in Northern Ireland and proposes their potential in addressing the Israel-Palestine conflict. Despite challenges in engaging all parties, notably an unresponsive Israeli leadership, the methodology's success in inclusively gauging public opinion on contentious issues highlights its relevance for promoting democratic dialogues and reform efforts globally, resonating with our focus on exploring innovative democratic processes
This was saved from the forum and is posted here to help him get his word out about his effort. See the Polari project page for a fuller overview.
Howdy ya’ll, my name is Dustin and I’m from America. I’ve worked for a while on two projects that interrelate.
I work professionally as a Full Stack Engineer and have for a number of years, my BS was effectively in Physics and CS, and I have partially completed an Electrical Engineering Masters which I’ve paused my studies on.
One is Polari, a Research Platform intended for the Open Source audience.
The other is a Democratic Platform approach for direct scoring and analysis of policies and by extension applicable for analysis of politicians and special interest groups involved in policy development.
This platform is also intended as an alternative route towards enabling people to directly design and develop policies in a particular/different kind of Direct/Participatory Democratic method.
Pitch decks for the platforms and how they operate in more general terms can be found through links provided.
A link to the GitHub for the python backend that acts as the core of the research platform, which integrates with the democratic system, is also included.
As well as the front end of the research platform, which includes capability for creating new objects through a UI.
One of my current focuses for development is getting a ‘no-code’ or ‘flow-design’ UI to work, the backend that can make this usable is already largely implemented on the python backend.
The general Database design and approach along with sample calculations and methods for the democratic approach are described in the pitch deck, however much of the functionality is shared between the platforms and is re-usable between them.
Research Platform Python Backend: https://github.com/dausume/Polari-Framework
Research Platform Angular Frontend: https://github.com/dausume/polari-platform-angular
Political Scorecard, Democracy Platform Pitchdeck
Polari, Open Source Research Platform Pitchdeck