Athens Democracy Forum, in association with
The New York Times

Citizens’ Assemblies are a method for finding agreement on solutions to a problem. What makes them different is that they take a representative mix of people chosen by lottery and give them adequate time, information and support to consider an issue deeply before finding common ground on an answer.

• Change Politics guide to Citizens'
• OECD Deliberative Wave Report Highlights

The purpose of the Connecting to Parliament project is to link a representative sample of constituents with their elected official in productive town hall conversations about the issues that are subject to parliamentary debate in Australia. The project seeks to involve more Australians in the democratic process, and to expand knowledge about the potential benefits and uses of deliberative democracy.

• Connect2Parliament Infographic

Polis is a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning.

• Website
• WIRED: "Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention."
• MIT Technology Review: "The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws"

Following years of decline in public confidence in local government and in the midst of austerity and corruption scandals in Spain, Madrid City Council designed and launched the Decide Madrid platform in 2015. The online platform is part of a new generation of open source civic technologies which can be used to engage the public in decision-making. Decide Madrid aims to ensure transparency of government proceedings in the city of Madrid and to widen public participation in Council decision-making and spending processes.

• Website
• CONSUL Summary
• CONSUL detailed brief

This paper introduces to Committee Chairs a new set of inquiry elements, made available to the NSW Parliament’s Committees, to address emerging challenges using deliberative processes.

These methods combine democratic lotteries that select a representative mix of everyday people with deliberative exercises that help them listen, weigh expert testimony, apply critical thinking, understand biases, have honest conversations, and find common ground.

• Advice Document
• Short 2-Pager
• Brussels Deliberative Committees Model

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money.

PB started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, as an anti-poverty measure that helped reduce child mortality by nearly 20%. Since then PB has spread to over 7,000 cities around the world, and has been used to decide budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions.

• What is Participatory Budgeting?
• Info Sheet
• Scoping Kit

These academic submissions were commissioned academic submissions to stimulate and inform some of the options and ideas about how to improve local democracy that might not be compliant with Victoria’s local government legislative framework to support any aspirational recommendations.

• Academic Submissions

When we think about Swiss democracy, we usually think about Switzerland’s frequent use of referenda. This is an important feature to learn from, but it is part of a larger pattern of power-sharing. This R&D note describes three features of the Swiss government that make power-sharing possible.

• R&D Note