Article by Megan Mattes and Joanna Massie: “Although one-off democratic innovations like citizens’ assemblies are excellent approaches for tackling a big issue, more embedded types of innovations could be a powerful tool for maintaining an ongoing connection between public interest and political decision-making. Innovative approaches to maintaining an ongoing, meaningful connection between people and policymakers are underway. In New Westminster, B.C., a standing citizen body called the Community Advisory Assembly has been convened since January 2024 to January 2025. These citizen advisers are selected through random sampling to ensure the assembly’s demographic makeup is aligned with the overall population.... (More >)
What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do for American Politics?
Essay by Nick Romeo: “Last July, an unusual letter arrived at Kathryn Kundmueller’s mobile home, in central Oregon. It invited her to enter a lottery that would select thirty residents of Deschutes County to deliberate for five days on youth homelessness—a visible and contentious issue in an area where the population and cost of living have spiked in recent years. Those chosen would be paid for their time—almost five hundred dollars—and asked to develop specific policy recommendations. Kundmueller was being invited to join what is known as a citizens’ assembly. These gatherings do what most democracies only pretend to:... (More >)
Sortition: Past and Present
Introduction to the Journal of Sortition: “Since ancient times sortition (random selection by lot) has been used both to distribute political office and as a general prophylactic against factionalism and corruption in societies as diverse as classical-era Athens and the Most Serene Republic of Venice. Lotteries have also been employed for the allocation of scarce goods such as social housing and school places to eliminate bias and ensure just distribution, along with drawing lots in circumstances where unpopular tasks or tragic choices are involved (as some situations are beyond rational human decision-making). More recently, developments in public opinion polling... (More >)
The Bridging Dictionary
About: “What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently? That’s the deceptively simple-sounding idea behind a new experiment from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). It’s called the Bridging Dictionary (BD), a research prototype that’s still very much a work in progress – one we hope your feedback will help us improve. The Bridging Dictionary identifies words and phrases that both reflect and contribute to sharply divergent views in our fractured public sphere. That’s the “dictionary” part. If that’s all it did, we... (More >)
The People Say
About: “The People Say is an online research hub that features first-hand insights from older adults and caregivers on the issues most important to them, as well as feedback from experts on policies affecting older adults. This project particularly focuses on the experiences of communities often under-consulted in policymaking, including older adults of color, those who are low income, and/or those who live in rural areas where healthcare isn’t easily accessible. The People Say is funded by The SCAN Foundation and developed by researchers and designers at the Public Policy Lab. We believe that effective policymaking listens to most-affected... (More >)
In the hands of a few: Disaster recovery committee networks
Paper by Timothy Fraser, Daniel P. Aldrich, Andrew Small and Andrew Littlejohn: “When disaster strikes, urban planners often rely on feedback and guidance from committees of officials, residents, and interest groups when crafting reconstruction policy. Focusing on recovery planning committees after Japan’s 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters, we compile and analyze a dataset on committee membership patterns across 39 committees with 657 members. Using descriptive statistics and social network analysis, we examine 1) how community representation through membership varied among committees, and 2) in what ways did committees share members, interlinking members from certain interests groups. This study... (More >)
Participatory seascape mapping: A community-based approach to ocean governance and marine conservation
Paper by Isabel James: “Despite the global proliferation of ocean governance frameworks that feature socioeconomic variables, the inclusion of community needs and local ecological knowledge remains underrepresented. Participatory mapping or Participatory GIS (PGIS) has emerged as a vital method to address this gap by engaging communities that are conventionally excluded from ocean planning and marine conservation. Originally developed for forest management and Indigenous land reclamation, the scholarship on PGIS remains predominantly focused on terrestrial landscapes. This review explores recent research that employs the method in the marine realm, detailing common methodologies, data types and applications in governance and conservation.... (More >)
Citizen science as an instrument for women’s health research
Paper by Sarah Ahannach et al: “Women’s health research is receiving increasing attention globally, but considerable knowledge gaps remain. Across many fields of research, active involvement of citizens in science has emerged as a promising strategy to help align scientific research with societal needs. Citizen science offers researchers the opportunity for large-scale sampling and data acquisition while engaging the public in a co-creative approach that solicits their input on study aims, research design, data gathering and analysis. Here, we argue that citizen science has the potential to generate new data and insights that advance women’s health. Based on our... (More >)
My Voice, Your Voice, Our Voice: Attitudes Towards Collective Governance of a Choral AI Dataset
Paper by Jennifer Ding, Eva Jäger, Victoria Ivanova, and Mercedes Bunz: “Data grows in value when joined and combined; likewise the power of voice grows in ensemble. With 15 UK choirs, we explore opportunities for bottom-up data governance of a jointly created Choral AI Dataset. Guided by a survey of chorister attitudes towards generative AI models trained using their data, we explore opportunities to create empowering governance structures that go beyond opt in and opt out. We test the development of novel mechanisms such as a Trusted Data Intermediary (TDI) to enable governance of the dataset amongst the choirs... (More >)
Towards Civic Digital Twins: Co-Design the Citizen-Centric Future of Bologna
Paper by Massimiliano Luca et al: “We introduce Civic Digital Twin (CDT), an evolution of Urban Digital Twins designed to support a citizen-centric transformative approach to urban planning and governance. CDT is being developed in the scope of the Bologna Digital Twin initiative, launched one year ago by the city of Bologna, to fulfill the city’s political and strategic goal of adopting innovative digital tools to support decision-making and civic engagement. The CDT, in addition to its capability of sensing the city through spatial, temporal, and social data, must be able to model and simulate social dynamics in a... (More >)
