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Archive · 68 conversations
Interviews and field notes from people building new forms of democratic practice.
Bruce Schneier discusses democracy through the lenses of cryptography, security, electronic voting, artificial intelligence, power, and trust. The conversation examines why technical systems cannot solve political legitimacy alone, how security thinking clarifies democratic risks, and why trustworthy institutions matter as much as trustworthy tools.
Tiago Peixoto discusses collective action and the difficulty of reforming democratic systems from inside existing institutions. The conversation connects participation, deliberation, political incentives, and institutional change, focusing on how democratic innovations can move beyond isolated experiments and become part of real systems of public decision-making.
Jonathan Moskovic discusses the future of deliberative citizen participation and the practical challenges of making participation influential. The conversation explores citizens’ assemblies, public administration, political buy-in, scaling, and how democratic innovations can avoid becoming symbolic exercises disconnected from actual policy choices.
Carol Romero and Andrés Pereira de Lucena discuss Decidim as a modular open-source participation platform and explain why technology is always political. The conversation explores platform governance, public institutions, digital participation, community control, and the design choices that shape who can participate and how collective decisions are made.
Alex Blaga discusses Trollwall and the use of AI to address toxic content and misinformation on social media. The conversation covers comment moderation, harmful narratives, platform dynamics, language models, and the democratic stakes of improving online debate without ignoring the risks of automated judgment and political manipulation.
Sonia Bussu discusses how arts-based practices can bring emotions, imagination, and lived experience into democratic settings. The conversation explores deliberation, participation, facilitation, and the limits of purely rational formats, asking how creative methods can help people engage conflict, uncertainty, and collective decision-making more honestly.
Graham Wetherall-Grujić discusses the work of the Innovation in Politics Institute and the challenge of improving political discourse. The conversation explores democratic culture, recognition of public innovation, political communication, and how institutions and civic actors can create better conditions for constructive disagreement and practical reform.
Richard Bartlett discusses Loomio and the difference between horizontal decision-making and the habits of hierarchical society. The conversation explores facilitation, consent, group culture, online collaboration, and the practical work required for communities to make decisions together without reproducing domination or endless process.
Martín Carcasson discusses the Center for Public Deliberation and the work of overcoming toxic polarization. The conversation explores deliberative practice, local public problems, facilitation, civic capacity, and why democracy needs spaces where communities can move beyond advocacy battles toward shared judgment and problem-solving.
Tomas Rakos discusses Participation Factory and warns against fetishising a single democratic method or tool. The conversation explores participatory design, institutional context, facilitation, and why meaningful engagement depends on choosing the right process for the problem rather than treating any one platform or format as a universal solution.
Margo Loor discusses CitizenOS as an open-source, community-based platform for grassroots decision-making. The conversation explores digital participation, civic ownership, open-source governance, community needs, and the challenge of building tools that help groups deliberate and decide without becoming dependent on closed political technologies.
Daniel Mackisack discusses ambitious political goals and experiments with new forms of governance in space. The conversation uses space governance to reflect on institutional imagination, long-term decision-making, collective rules, and how extreme environments can reveal assumptions about democracy, coordination, and public authority on Earth.