Skip to content

Current draft

This is a live, unreleased work-in-progress. It mirrors whatever this month's heartbeat post is accumulating, computed directly from that post at build time — there's no separate copy to keep in sync. It lives outside heartbeat/posts/ — the only path the RSS/JSON feeds watch — so this page is never in a feed and editing the draft never notifies subscribers. Treat anything below as unsettled: it may change, grow, or be deleted before release. For finished posts, see the heartbeat log.

Landscape update

The landscape holds 119 organisations: 100 active, 17 inactive, 2 deregistered, across 40 concept pages. This run verified 14 active orgs that had never been checked — CDDGG, CDD West Africa, Centro Gumilla, China Democratic League, CPPCC, Citizen Assemblies for South Australia, Citizen OS, Civil Network OPORA, Co-operative Bonds, Code for Australia, Community Independents Project, Conversations at the Crossroads, DEMOCRACY Deutschland, and Darkenu — all confirmed active. Four needed a web-search fallback after direct site fetches failed (Centro Gumilla and Darkenu returned 403; China Democratic League and CPPCC returned 503), mirroring the workaround used in earlier runs. Lateral Economics picked up a tribal-epistemology tag, grounded in its existing text on elections rewarding tribal loyalty over considered reasoning — closing one of the landscape's 9 orphaned concepts (8 remain; the rest were checked again this run and the closest candidates are still coincidental keyword overlap rather than genuine matches). Going into this run 57 active orgs had never been checked; 43 remain.

A follow-up pass the same week verified another 13 — Democracy Earth Foundation, Democracy International, Democracy in Colour, DemocracyCo, DemocracyLab, DiEM25, Démocratie Ouverte, E-Democracy, EISA, Ethelo, Fundación Solón, G!LT, and Grattan Institute — all still active, 30 never-checked active orgs now remain. Two needed a web-search fallback after direct fetches failed (Democracy Earth Foundation: persistent 503; DiEM25: 403, likely bot-blocked); DemocracyLab's homepage is a JS-rendered placeholder, confirmed instead via a sitemap lastmod of the same day. Democracy Earth Foundation's page picked up one addition: press coverage surfaced SAIRI, a new tokenized autonomous AI-agent project the foundation has since launched — noted on its page as a current-direction update, flagged as speculative and early-stage rather than an established governance tool.

A third pass this run verified the next 15 alphabetically — Healthy Democracy, HKDC, ICDT, Internet Freedom Foundation, Israel Democracy Institute, Janaagraha, Lateral Economics, LCPS, Liquid Democracy e.V., LiquidFeedback, Lismore People's Assembly, MEMO 98, MieuxVoter, MosaicLab, and MQG — all confirmed active, no status or summary changes needed. 15 never-checked active orgs now remain. One needed a fallback after a direct fetch failed: Internet Freedom Foundation's site returned HTTP 403 (bot protection), confirmed instead via web search. Lateral Economics' own site loaded fine but carries no dated content, so a supplementary web search corroborated continued activity rather than resolving a fetch failure. LiquidFeedback is a genuine edge case worth flagging on its own terms: the commercial site (FlexiGuided GmbH) is confirmed live and operating, but that confirms the business, not whether the underlying software has seen public development since its Pirate-Party-era peak — the page's pre-existing uncertainty note was left in place rather than resolved by inference.

A fourth pass this run cleared the rest of the never-checked queue alphabetically from NewVote onward — NewVote, None of the Above Party (Canada), PRS Legislative Research, Prediki, Proportional Representation Society of Australia, Rwanda Governance Board, Sortition Foundation (Australia), McKinnon, The Australia Institute's Democracy & Accountability Program, Ushahidi, Vietnam Fatherland Front, Your Party, and À Nous La Démocratie — all confirmed active, 14 in total. One org picked up a rename rather than just a check: the Susan McKinnon Foundation rebranded to McKinnon in 2025 (confirmed via the org's own site, LinkedIn, and ACNC charity records); title and summary updated to match. TEV-DEM's page got a substantive content update rather than a bare confirmation — see the AANES item below. Three tag gaps closed this pass: Ethelo (collective-intelligence — its own summary already describes it as exactly that) and both Loomio and Co-operative Bonds (worker-cooperatives — Loomio's page already linked the concept in its "See also" without the frontmatter tag matching; Co-operative Bonds discusses worker-cooperative ecosystem partners in its own text). Orphan count stays at 8 — neither collective-intelligence nor worker-cooperatives was orphaned to begin with (both already had at least one org reference elsewhere); this run closed gaps in existing concept coverage rather than orphaned pages specifically. One org — Pirate Party Australia, the last in the never-checked queue — wasn't resolved on the spot: Wikipedia records a 2021 AEC deregistration and merger into the Fusion Party (not in this landscape), but the page's own prior human check (2026-06-07, "known personally to be active") and a live site with 2024 content pointed the other way. Flagged in PR #112 for human review rather than guessed at, per HEARTBEAT.md's escalation path for merger/rename ambiguity — and resolved the same day: a DOD member with direct knowledge confirmed PPAU deregistered as an independent AEC party but merged into Fusion's federated structure rather than dissolving, continuing as a distinct internal grouping with its own membership, infrastructure, and incorporated-association registration (PPAU's site footer independently corroborates this: "Pirate Party Australia Incorporated," INC 9892436). status: active stands; PR #112 is merged.

In the world

Ukraine's first metropolitan citizens' assembly concludes in Lviv with 19 recommendations. The Lviv Agglomeration assembly — convened across 13 communities to recommend how to manage shared water resources — ran its opening session on 13–14 June 2026, its second on 27–28 June, and its final session on 11–12 July, where the 50 lot-selected members (half from Lviv, half from the 12 partner communities) delivered 19 practical proposals spanning joint water-management frameworks, sewerage infrastructure, ecological protection, and public-awareness campaigns. Local leaders received the recommendations with what the Council of Europe describes as positive feedback and have begun outlining first implementation steps. It's organised by the Council of Europe's Congress of Local and Regional Authorities alongside Kyiv and Rivne assemblies running in parallel. (Council of Europe — Congress; Mirage News — final outcome.) This extends the deliberative-democracy thread already in the landscape — wartime Ukraine ran a sortition-based assembly at inter-municipal scale through to a concrete set of recommendations, not just a single-city pilot, while under active invasion.

V-Dem's 2026 Democracy Report finds 44 countries autocratizing — a record share of the world's population — with six of ten new entrants in Europe and North America. The new 2025 autocratizers are Cambodia, Croatia, Italy, Kuwait, Madagascar, Slovakia, Slovenia, Togo, the UK, and the US; V-Dem's press release calls the US decline "unprecedented" for a long-established democracy. The specific indicators driving the score — media censorship (32 of 44 countries), civil-society repression (30 of 44), and worsening freedom of expression (44 countries) — are structural, not electoral: they measure whether avenues for dissent and oversight stay open between elections, which is exactly the kind of question the accountability framework's structural-inflexibility test asks of every entry in this landscape, liberal democracies included. (V-Dem Institute — press release; full report, PDF.) The framework says treat every system by the same yardstick — this is that yardstick turned on the wealthiest democracies in the sample, not just the usual subjects.

A different index reached the opposite headline the same year. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index, in the full report it released on 7 April 2026, found the global average score rising for the first time in eight years (5.17 to 5.19), classifying 26 countries as full democracies, 48 as flawed, 32 as hybrid regimes, and 61 as authoritarian across 167 countries and territories. (EIU — Democracy Index 2025 press release.) That's a genuinely different top-line story from V-Dem's record-backsliding framing above — yet on the one country both indices call out by name, they agree: the EIU places the US 34th with a score of 7.65, down from 7.85, its lowest since being downgraded to "flawed democracy" in 2016, attributed to the same functioning-of-government and civil-liberties weaknesses V-Dem flags. Two indices measuring democracy differently can both be right at once; citing only the one with the more dramatic headline would be the kind of selective framing the framework asks us not to practice on ourselves.

Connecticut's first state-level citizens' assembly convened its opening session on schedule. After the Connecticut Lottery Corporation drew members in a public lottery on 12 June 2026, 100 residents opened the assembly with a two-day in-person session at Yale on 11–12 July, the first of six sessions running through 26 September — split between in-person days in New Haven and Hartford and virtual sessions — to develop recommendations on how the state funds local public services, a problem the state has not substantively reformed since 1972. It's convened jointly by the State Comptroller's office, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, Yale, and UConn, with the Comptroller committing to present the assembly's findings directly to a State Legislature hearing. (Connecticut Citizens' Assembly — official site; CT Mirror — opening session.) It's a useful contrast to the Ukraine and EU assemblies above: a citizens' assembly convened by elected officials, inside an established liberal democracy, on a genuinely difficult distributive question that ordinary electoral politics has failed to resolve for over 50 years — exactly the kind of case for sortition-based deliberation that doesn't depend on a system being in crisis or being non-Western to be worth doing.

DemocracyNext published lessons from four years advising cities and regions on institutionalizing citizens' assemblies. From Projects to Permanence, released 15 July 2026, draws on DemocracyNext's Cities Programme work with Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), Vilnius, Kerewan (The Gambia), and Deschutes County (Oregon) to argue assemblies should be built as standing institutions with power delegated to them, not one-off processes dependent on a mayor's term or political will at a single moment — its central line is to treat the work "like a marathon, not a sprint." (DemocracyNext — paper announcement.) DemocracyNext is already tracked in this landscape; this is exactly the kind of institutional-design question the accountability framework's structural-inflexibility test cares about from the other direction — a citizens' assembly that exists for one cycle and then evaporates is no more structurally resilient than any other reform that depends on one administration's goodwill to survive the next.

Kazakhstan's new constitution took effect on 1 July 2026, replacing the 1995 document. Approved by referendum in March (nearly 90% in favour, 73% turnout), it abolishes the Senate for a single 145-seat Kurultai, adds a vice presidency, and creates a 126-member Halyk Kenesi ("People's Council") empowered to submit draft laws and initiate referenda. (Astana Times — what changes; Library of Congress — structural summary.) One provision cuts against incumbency entrenchment directly: the president is limited to a single, non-renewable seven-year term, textually entrenched against future amendment — a genuine answer to the structural-inflexibility pattern the framework flags elsewhere in this landscape. But the People's Council's entire membership is presidentially appointed, and the same package gives the president power to dissolve the Kurultai over repeated nominee rejections, rule by decree while it's dissolved, and appoint key officials without parliamentary approval. ConstitutionNet's analysis calls the parliamentary reform "a façade for presidential monopoly." (ConstitutionNet — analysis.) A wholly appointed consultative body that can propose but not check power is the same "bounded articulation" pattern the framework already uses to describe China's CPPCC — worth naming here rather than reserving the label for one country.

Israel's Knesset completed its full four-year term for the first time since 1988 — after a contested last-minute legislative blitz. Parliament dissolved on 17 July 2026 ahead of an election set for 27 October, itself notable as an exceptional instance of scheduled institutional continuity in a system where "fragile coalition governments regularly collapse early." But in the nights immediately before dissolution, Netanyahu's coalition passed a cluster of bills to secure ultra-Orthodox coalition partners' support: a communications law dismantling independent broadcast regulation in favour of government-supervised oversight (53–48), a Basic Law on Torah Study and draft-evasion immunity shielding ultra-Orthodox men from military service, and a restructuring weakening the Attorney General's authority — while separately blocking a mandatory state commission of inquiry into the October 7, 2023 failures. (Al Jazeera — dissolution; Ynetnews — legislative blitz and protests.) One attorney quoted at the protests put it in exactly the framework's own terms: lawmakers "created two classes before the law — those subject to the rule of law and those who are not." Media-regulator capture and selective legal accountability are precisely the hypocrisy and structural-inflexibility patterns the accountability framework asks to be named consistently — including, as the framework insists, in a system DOD's own membership is culturally close to. Israel Democracy Institute and Movement for Quality Government in Israel, both already tracked in this landscape and both reverified this run, are the two organisations most directly positioned to hold this to account domestically.

AANES's civilian institutions — including TEV-DEM, tracked in this landscape — are being absorbed into the Syrian state under the terms of a January 2026 integration deal with Damascus. Following a Syrian government military offensive against SDF-held territory beginning 13 January 2026, the two sides announced a comprehensive ceasefire and phased-integration agreement on 30 January: SDF forces merge into Syria's central defence and interior ministries unit-by-unit, the SDF hands over strategic assets (oil fields, Qamishli's international airport) to Damascus, and state control is restored over civil institutions and border crossings across the northeast — alongside Kurdish-rights guarantees under Presidential Decree 13 (citizenship for stateless Kurds, Kurdish as a "national language," Newroz as a national holiday). (Al Jazeera — agreement announcement, 30 Jan 2026; Middle East Council on Global Affairs — analysis.) The Council's analysis is blunt about what this means for the AANES governance model tracked on TEV-DEM's page: Kurdish political autonomy has been "forcibly narrowed" from territorial self-administration to "local administrative competences, localized policing arrangements and cultural guarantees" — implementation remains provisional and contested, but the direction is toward the commune-council structure being folded into, not preserved alongside, the central state. This isn't backsliding in the V-Dem sense above — nobody claimed AANES was a stable liberal democracy — but it is exactly the kind of structural transition the framework says DOD should track rather than look away from once a governance experiment stops being convenient to cite: the commune-council system was included in this landscape as a live experiment in non-statist democratic confederalism, and that experiment's institutional basis is now materially different from how the page has described it until this run's update.

Framework notes

While drafting the EIU working note above, an earlier version judged Sir Swag's "brand new" framing of the report against a policy-expert's publication-date awareness, implying the framing was wrong for its own audience — applying the framework's relative epistemology strictly to governance systems but not reflexively to DOD's own commentary about sources. A human DOD member caught this and it's now a proposed addition to index.md itself, at the end of "Relative epistemology": DOD's practice, including its AI contributors, is expected to hold itself to the same standard it applies elsewhere — using version control, this dialogue record, and working notes like this one to actually catch and correct lapses, not just claim the capacity in the abstract. See PR #110 and the corresponding update to HEARTBEAT.md's Voice section ("Empathy is graduated, not flat").

Working notes

  • Landscape update counts come from python util/stats.py, run 2026-06-29 and re-checked 2026-07-05, 2026-07-16, and again 2026-07-19 with no change (119 orgs, 40 concept pages). These aren't individually linked because they're the wiki's own data — verifiable via each named org's own page or the docs/data/organisations.json export, not an external source.
  • Fourth pass (2026-07-19, 14 orgs): all confirmed by direct fetch except Pirate Party Australia, Australia Institute's Democracy & Accountability page, Sortition Foundation Australia's membership page, and Your Party, which returned HTTP 403 to automated fetch (Cloudflare bot-block); Australia Institute and Your Party were re-confirmed with a plain curl using a browser user-agent (200 OK both), Sortition Foundation Australia via web search corroborating the parent org and chapter's ongoing monthly meetings, and Pirate Party Australia resolved via PR #112 (see Landscape update above) — its page was fetched directly by a human afterward, confirming the site's own footer identifies it as a distinct incorporated association. McKinnon's rebrand was cross-checked against three independent sources (site title, LinkedIn company page, ACNC charity register) before editing the org page, not inferred from the site alone.
  • Israel item: the coalition-bill list (communications law, Basic Law on Torah Study/draft-evasion immunity, Attorney General restructuring, blocked commission of inquiry) is from Ynetnews' protest coverage; the dissolution date, election date, and "first full term since 1988" framing are from Al Jazeera's dissolution report. The "two classes before the law" quote is attributed to an unnamed attorney at the Tel Aviv protest per Ynetnews, not a DOD characterization.
  • AANES/TEV-DEM item: the offensive start date, ceasefire/integration date, and military-integration mechanics are from Al Jazeera's 30 January agreement report; the "forcibly narrowed" autonomy characterization and the assessment that this move away from territorial self-administration is the Middle East Council on Global Affairs' editorial judgment, cited as such. TEV-DEM's own site (tev-dem.com) was checked directly and confirmed live with content through February 2026 — it does not itself comment on the integration deal's effect on commune governance, which is why the outside analysis is doing the interpretive work here rather than the org's own page.
  • Of the 14 orgs verified in the first pass, 4 needed a web-search fallback after a direct site fetch failed: Centro Gumilla and Darkenu returned HTTP 403, China Democratic League and CPPCC returned HTTP 503. The other 10 were confirmed by direct fetch.
  • Lateral Economics' tribal-epistemology tag came from a suggest_tags.py match, confirmed by rereading the org's own page text before adding it. The 8 remaining orphaned concepts were rechecked again this run (suggest_tags.py per concept) — all matches are still coincidental keyword overlap, not genuine fits; none tagged.
  • Third pass (2026-07-16, 15 orgs): Internet Freedom Foundation needed a web-search fallback after a direct fetch returned HTTP 403; Lateral Economics' direct fetch succeeded but had no dated content, so web search served as corroboration rather than a failure fallback. The other 13 were confirmed by direct fetch. Run in two parallel batches (8 + 7 orgs) for this pass.
  • Ukraine/Lviv item: structural facts on the opening and second sessions are from the Council of Europe Congress announcement; the final session's 19 recommendations and local-authority response are from the Mirage News report on the outcome.
  • DemocracyNext item: paper title, publication date, and the four Cities Programme locations are from DemocracyNext's own Substack announcement of the paper.
  • V-Dem item: all figures (44 countries, six of ten, the 32/44, 30/44, and 44/44 indicator breakdowns) are from the V-Dem Institute press release; the linked PDF is the full report, given for readers who want indicator-level methodology rather than as the source of a separate claim.
  • EIU item: surfaced by a DOD member flagging Sir Swag's "The current state of democracy worldwide" (published 4 July 2026) — a gaming channel that started a news arm to cover world events for an audience gaming content doesn't usually reach. Worth crediting: that's exactly the kind of accessible on-ramp into geopolitics the framework's own mission cares about, even for viewers who'd never open a V-Dem PDF. It's not the citation, though — every figure above was checked directly against EIU's own 7 April 2026 press release before being used. Worth noting for next time: "new" is relative to the audience — three months old is old news to someone tracking V-Dem release cycles, genuinely fresh to a viewer meeting the EIU report for the first time through the video, and neither reading is wrong for its audience. The discipline that matters here is DOD's own: date things by actual publication date in our own post regardless of how a tip presents them, since our dating convention isn't theirs.
  • Kazakhstan item: structural facts (Kurultai seat count, referendum turnout, Halyk Kenesi composition) are from Astana Times and the Library of Congress summary. The "façade for presidential monopoly" characterization is ConstitutionNet's editorial judgment, cited as such — not an independent DOD assertion.
  • Second verification pass (2026-07-05): of the 13 orgs checked, 2 needed a web-search fallback after direct fetch failed — Democracy Earth Foundation (persistent HTTP 503) and DiEM25 (HTTP 403, likely bot-blocked) — corroborated via WEF/GitHub/press for the former and continued Varoufakis publishing activity on-site for the latter. DemocracyLab's homepage returned only a JS loading placeholder; confirmed instead via sitemap.xml, which showed a same-day lastmod.
  • Connecticut item: assembly structure, convening partners, and full session calendar are from the assembly's own site (ct-citizens-assembly.org); the 12 June lottery-drawing mechanics are from the News 12 Connecticut segment specifically, not the official site.
  • The three orphaned concepts in the UK/US employee-ownership cluster (employee-ownership-trusts, employee-stock-ownership-plans, equity-compensation-plans) were rechecked: the concept page for employee-ownership-trusts names 888 Co-operative Causeway and Co-operative Bonds in its own "See also," but neither org is actually structured as an EOT or ESOP — they're member-owned cooperatives, a related but distinct governance form. Left untagged rather than forcing a technically inaccurate match; flagged here rather than in Framework notes since it's a concept-page accuracy question, not friction with the accountability framework itself.

What's next

The never-checked queue is fully clear. Next run's staleness queue shifts to re-verifying the oldest last_checked dates rather than first-time checks; the 4 known Wayback-exception orgs and the 8 orphaned concept pages are the standing items worth another look once enough time has passed for new content to plausibly exist.