What’s the relationship between tech and democracy? What online spaces can deliberation take place in? What does open democratic innovation look like? On November 20th, we co-hosted an event with Dreamocracy to try and answer some of these big questions with key thinkers in the field. Here are our 5...
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Creative Bureaucracy is a thing now. It’s so much of a thing, in fact, that it has its own festival, where thousands of civil servants and policy-makers connect over talks and workshops. We tuned it to the online event to learn more about innovation in government, public service culture and...
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Every United States’ election cycle brings back the same question: will the youth vote? In recent American history, only two elections succeeded in obtaining a youth (18-29 years old) turnout higher than 50%: Bill Clinton vs George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Barack Obama vs John McCain in 2008....
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There are many ways for local governments to engage their citizens in decision-making processes. Those different methods tend to have varying purposes and work their magic in specific contexts. Participatory budgets, for example, involve citizens in another way and occupy another spot on the participation ladder than an online survey...
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Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1945: “The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form.” Today’s networks enable institutions to gain access to the wealth of creativity and insights that exists in the wider society. In a previous blog post we talked...
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By the time you finish reading this sentence, around 30,000 tweets have been posted and 200,000 searches have been made on Google. Technologically speaking, the world is moving faster than ever before. Advances in technology have changed the way people search, absorb, and share information; however, governments everywhere seem to...
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Peñalolén (241,599 inhabitants), a Chilean commune in the province of Santiago, launched a participatory budget to give citizens a say in their neighborhoods’ urban planning projects. In each neighbourhood, citizens could voice their opinions and vote on what they think deserves the municipality’s investment. Over 24,450 inhabitants participated in this...
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