Community
Designing Open Democracy is a community of process engineers, social architects, technologists, and engaged citizens working on how democracy can be better designed. We are based in Melbourne but operate globally online.
We are nonpartisan and agnostic to any particular democratic approach — the goal is to understand, build, and improve democratic systems, not to advocate for any party or ideology.
Join the conversation
| Channel | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Telegram | Day-to-day discussion, announcements, coordination |
| Meetup | Melbourne in-person events |
| Humanitix | Melbourne in-person events (ticketed) |
| YouTube | Recorded meetups and talks |
| Podcast | Audio discussions on democracy reform |
Active projects
Things members are currently building. Reach out via Telegram or contact the contributor listed on the project page.
An ongoing series in which AI systems from different national and cultural contexts review and critique DOD's governance philosophy framework — testing whether a standard claiming cross-cultural applicability can survive scrutiny from outside the Western liberal tradition.
A practical toolkit for building participatory civics structures in Australia, covering cooperative governance, party member funding, and ecosystem design.
A proxy advisory service that replaces opaque corporate governance recommendations with decisions made by randomly selected pension fund members — giving members real democratic power over how their retirement savings vote at company AGMs.
Internal tooling and processes for keeping the Democracy Landscape directory accurate, active, and machine-readable.
A self-hosted, modular research framework with a built-in policy scoring system — allowing communities to directly rate and analyse policies, politicians, and special interest groups using a participatory democratic methodology.
A prediction market platform that aggregates collective intelligence on policy questions — users stake structured predictions with reasons, and the system surfaces the informed consensus.
Building short, factual articles on core democracy topics so the wiki is accessible to everyone.
A Windows desktop app that creates a verifiable, auditable record of research and reporting — like a journalist's bodycam for their computer.
Contribute to this wiki
The wiki is a public GitHub repository. Anyone can contribute:
- Edit or add a page — fork the repo, make changes in Markdown, open a pull request
- Add a blog post — document a meetup, event, or piece of relevant news
- Add an organisation — if you know of a democracy-related org worth tracking, add it to the Democracy Landscape
- Flag an issue — open a GitHub issue if something is wrong or missing
If you're not comfortable with Git, post in Telegram and someone can help or do it for you.