Advancing Democracy as a Digital Public Service

Last month at the Victoria Forum, a conference hosted by a Canadian nonprofit organization that seeks to develop challenges to global problems in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, we shared ideas on “Democracy’s Digital Future.” Even in this time of political turmoil and skepticism about the role of technology in society, a new class of digital democracy tools is helping people dialogue, deliberate, and make decisions together. These platforms bring greater legitimacy to policymaking, build trust in governance processes, and help the public appreciate policy tradeoffs.

We believe a democracy tech stack could supercharge public participation, harnessing polarized views and experiences into unprecedented levels of collective intelligence. Experiments in digital deliberative democracy are offering opportunities for collective sense-making and decision-making to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds.

The rapid scaling of technology, particularly systems designed by large tech firms, is exacerbating long-existing flaws in frail democracies. MetaGov’s Liz Barry highlighted that democracies typically fall from the inside, abandoned by constituents who lose hope in the speed of societal processes as currently tooled. Barry described democracy as a muscle and democracy technologies offering gymnasiums for exercising how we participate and hear each other. But we have better tools, many of which have been deployed in live contexts.