About the network
We are an international network of organizations, associations, and individuals helping decision makers take hard decisions and build public trust.
Mission
We collaboratively develop, implement, and promote ways to improve democracy, from the local to the global level.
Vision
We envision democracies that incorporate everyday people in major public decisions which our present structures struggle to address – through processes that are representative, deliberative, free from manipulation, informed, and influential.
How we are funded
Principles
We form groups of everyday people using random selection in order to ensure a diversity of views. Selecting participants in this way also limits conflicts of influence and partisan pressures.
We give these groups time, wide-ranging information, and the opportunity to talk through differences. This facilitated process results in a weighing of trade-offs and sound policy suggestions.
We express no position on any policy outside of the need for democratic innovation, and we work hard to make our processes as fair and unbiased as possible.
We negotiate authority with decision makers in advance to increase the likelihood of action. Everyday people are unimpressed by tokenism and their efforts should have an impact on decision making.
Members
Organizations
Individuals
Name | Focus | Country | |||
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Ieva Česnulaitytė | Public Servant | Lithuania | Ieva works at the OECD on innovative citizen participation and writes for the OECD publication Participo. She is the co-author of Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020). | Twitter Project Page Participo |
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Claudia Chwalisz | Public Servant | France | Claudia leads the OECD's work on innovative citizen participation and co-edits the OECD publication Participo. She is the co-author of Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020) and the author of The People's Verdict (2017) and The Populist Signal (2015). | About Participo Personal Page |
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Mauricio Mejia | Public Servant | Mexico | Mauricio works at the OECD, on the transition to an open state in LAC and the future of democracy. He strongly believes in the need to design new democratic infrastructures and digital public spaces to better include citizens and redistribute power. Mauricio teaches at SciencesPo Paris. | LinkedIn |
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Graham Smith | Researcher | United Kingdom | Graham is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster, and Chair of the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development. He is a specialist in democratic theory and politics, with particular expertise in participatory democratic institutions. He is a recognized authority on citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative processes and was one of the organizers of the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit. | Faculty Page Centre for the Study of Democracy Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development |
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Oliver Escobar | Researcher and practitioner | Scotland / UK | Oliver Escobar is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh, Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and former co-director of What Works Scotland. He co-edited the new Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance. | Faculty Page | |
Jane "Jenny" Mansbridge | Researcher | United States | Jane Mansbridge has been active in social movements since the mid-sixties. As a scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, she specializes in democratic theory, particularly participatory democracy, deliberation, and representation. She is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy and other works. | Faculty Page | |
Nivek Thompson | Researcher | Australia | Nivek is undertaking her PhD looking at the contribution that deliberative mini-publics make to improving democracy. Nivek also runs a consultancy, Deliberately Engaging, which recruits mini-publics and facilitates online engagement. | Deliberately Engaging @DelibEngage @NivekKThompson |
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Center for Organizational, Strategic and Democratic Priorities (COSDP) | Researcher | Georgia | A Ph.D. candidate in Mass Communication and a director and a founding member of the Center for Organizational, Strategic, and Democratic Priorities (COSDP). Main research interests include mass communication, deliberative democracy, deliberative mini-publics. | ||
Wendy Willis | Practitioner, Writer, Network Director | United States | Wendy Willis is the founder and director of Oregon’s Kitchen Table at Portland State University and the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. Wendy is also a poet and essayist. Her most recent book of essays is These are Strange Times, My Dear. | ||
Tim Hughes | Practitioner | United Kingdom | Tim is a specialist in public participation, with over a decade of practice, research & capacity building experience. As director of Involve (2017-2021), he advised governments across the UK; facilitated 20+ citizens' assemblies, juries & panels; & developed guidance & standards. | ||
Tom Atlee | Writer, Researcher, Adovocate | United States | Tom researches and promotes the potential wisdom of whole collectives, communities, societies. Founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, creator of the Wise Democracy Pattern Language, author of 4 books incl The Tao of Democracy and Empowering Public Wisdom. NCDD member. | Blog Professional Page Institute Page |
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Simon Threlkeld | Advocate | Canada | Simon writes in favour of laws being decided by legislative juries/minipublics, and in favour of a wide range of public officials being chosen by juries/minipublics, starting in published form in the late 1990s. | Personal Page | |
Arantxa Mendiharat | Practitioner | Spain | Arantxa has co-founded and lead several collectives that promote sortition and deliberation since 2012. From 2017 to 2019, she has been involved in the design and implementation of Madrid's Observatory of the City. She has also developed the website Democracia Por Sorteo. | deliberativa.org democraciaporsorteo.org |
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John Gastil | Researcher | United States | John Gastil’s is a professor of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University. His research focuses on the theory and practice of deliberative democracy, especially how small groups of people make decisions on public issues. | Faculty Page | |
Prof. Dr. Patrizia Nanz | Researcher | Germany | Patrizia Nanz is Vice President of the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, director of the German-French Forum for the Future and Professor at the University of Potsdam. From 2016 to 2020 she was scientific director at the IASS in Potsdam. | ||
Ceri Davies | Researcher | United Kingdom | Ceri davis works at the intersection of evidence and practice on citizen engagement with policy making in the context of democratic innovation with a particular interest in the politics of knowledge. She is an Assoc. Editor of Research for All and a Fellow of the RSA. | Research |
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Stefano Sotgiu | President | Italia | Prossima Democrazia deals with promoting through design, implementation, dissemination, training and research activities, the culture of democratic innovation and deliberative participation based on representative samples of citizens drawn by lot in Italy, EU and globally. | Project Page | |
Patrick Chalmers | Journalist, film maker and activist | France | Patrick is a lifelong journalist who discovered, over the years, that the quality of political structures themselves was a more important issue to tackle than any other single topic that he might work on. That realization made him a reporter and advocate. | All Hands On Personal Page |
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Tiago C. Peixoto | Public Servant | Brazil | Tiago is a Senior Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank's Governance Global Practice, leading regional and global work at the intersection of technology and citizen engagement. | Professional Page Google Scholar DemocracySpot |
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Rosana Rodrigues | Public Servant | Brasil | Rosana is a sociologist with a master in Labour Relations, Social Inequalities and Trade Unionism (Coimbra University - Portugal). She is the manager of the Fortaleza Observatory, where she identifies and proposes innovative dialogues between society and government. | Observatiorio de Fortaleza | |
Tamara Ehs | Researcher, Practitioner | Austria | Tamara Ehs is a political scientist and consultant for democratic innovation. She is the co-creator of the 'European Capital of Democracy', a scientific advisor to the State Councillor of the Baden-Württemberg and a member of the Commission for Dialogue Processes at the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Protection and Innovation. Recently, she evaluated the Austrian Climate Assembly on behalf of the European Climate Foundation, and is now taking part in the COST-Action ‘Intergovernmental Coordination from Local to European Governance’. | Twitter Professional Page |
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Rosa Zubizarreta-Adai | Practitioner-Researcher | United States | Rosa Zubizarreta-Ada is an organization development consultant, author, researcher, and teacher of advanced facilitation practices. She has been learning about the Citizens’ Councils in Austria since they began in 2006, and as of 2023 is completing a dissertation on this topic. | Research website | |
Laura W. Black | Researcher | United States | Laura Black is a professor of communication studies and the past editor of the Journal of Public Deliberation. She also helped found the Public Dialogue and Deliberation Division at the National Communication Association. | ResearchGate Profile | |
Paul Gölz | Researcher | United States | Paul is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard. He studies democratic innovations through mathematics and has extensively worked on algorithms for the lottery selection of citizens’ assemblies. He co-developed Panelot, a not-for-profit software system for assembly selection. | Research website Panelot.Org |
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Lauren Howard | Public Servant | Canada | Lauren has worked in stakeholder engagement across private, public and not-for-profit sectors. She is a strong believer in creating spaces to foster dialogue from different perspectives, and is a champion for inclusive and participatory practices. | ||
Robin Teater | Advocate | United States | Robin was formerly with Healthy Democracy (Citizens' Initiative Review; Citizens Juries; Citizen Assemblies) as a practitioner. Currently she is an "unofficial" (non-affiliated) advocate for sortition-based deliberative democracy in the US. | ||
Mark Warren | Researcher | Canada | A democratic theorist interested in democratic innovations, Warren is currently working with an international team on The Participedia Project, which uses a web-based platform to collect data about democratic innovation and participatory governance around the world. | Participedia Google Scholar |
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Marcin Gerwin | Practitioner | Poland | Marcin Gerwin, PhD – designs and coordinates citizens’ assemblies. He is a specialist in sustainable development and deliberative democracy. A graduate of political science. Author of the guide to citizens’ assemblies. | climateassemblies.org | |
Stephen Elstub | Researcher | United Kingdom | Stephen is a researcher at Newcastle University and has two Parliamentary Fellowships at the UK and Scottish parliaments on linking mini-publics with parliamentary committees. He is part of the official research teams for the Citizens’ Assembly of Scotland and the Climate Assembly UK. | Faculty Page | |
Miriam Levin | Public Servant | UK | Miriam leads national community empowerment programs, including Innovation in Democracy using citizens' assemblies to open up local government decision-making. As a consultant she ran community engagement work around regeneration, and was Head of Outreach at English Heritage. | ||
Tin Gazivoda | Program Officer | Croatia | From the last 90's until 2010 Tin was engaged on human rights work, civil society initiatives (including as an activist) and developing democratic standards. In the last few years Tin has worked to support several citizens assemblies (Gdansk, Eupen, Belfast and now Budapest). | ||
Marjan Ehsassi | Practitioner | North America | Marjan is a believer in the potential of citizen engagement and impactful democratic innovations. A former litigator and international governance expert, she is pursuing a Doctorate in International Affairs at Johns Hopkins with a concentration on Deliberative Mini-Publics. | ||
Sanskriti Menon | Program Officer in a Foundation | India | Sanskriti is Senior Programme Director, at the Centre for Environment Education. She is currently a doctoral candidate with Curtin University, Perth, exploring traditional public participation and experiments with Deliberative Democracy in Pune, India. | Our Pune, Our Budget | |
Scott Lappan-Newton | Practitioner | Australia | Scott collaborates with newDemocracy and others to incorporate design thinking and program logic into the facilitation of Assemblies on resilience, energy, land-use, education and more, and helps run multi-stakeholder co-design processes that interface with these deliberations. | Project page |
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Patricia Benn | Advocate | United States | Pat Benn was one of the 4 founders of the Citizens Initiative Review in Oregon and has worked on many aspects of the Citizens Jury and democracy in the workplace and participatory stakeholder management in schools and school districts. | ||
Aviv Ovadya | Researcher, Advocate, Practitioner | United States | Aviv Ovadya works at the intersection of technology and democracy, supporting the use of deliberation for AI and platform governance. He is affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and is a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University (LFCI). | LinkedIn Project Page Newsletter Professional Page |
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Terrill Bouricius | Political Theorist, Politician (Retired) | United States | Terrill Bouricius is a political theorist and recovering politician. From 1981- 2001 he served as a City Councilor and then as a member of the Vermont House of Representatives. After working on election reform on a national level, his focus shifted to sortition around 2004. He works with FairVote, The Center for Voting and Democracy, and the Sortition Foundation US. | ||
Marianna Sampaio | Researcher | Brazil | Marianna Sampaio is Public Executive at São Paulo City. Ph.D. candidate in Public Administration and Government. Marianna is currently working on her dissertation about mini-publics because she believes they can deepen and improve Brazilian democracy and bring ordinary people into politics. | ||
Avinash Madhale | Researcher | India | Avinash has Ph D in Politics of Participation in Urban Governance. He has been facilitating citizen's participation in municipal budgeting. Avinash works with grassroots organizations working Environmental, Health, Education, Transportation, informal sector in Urban areas | ||
Yago Bermejo Abati | Practitioner | Spain | Yago Bermejo Abati works as an independent consultant in the field of democratic innovation involving new architectures with digital participation and deliberative democracy. He is co-founder of deliberativa.org. From 2016 to 19 he has been working in Madrid City Council. | deliberativa.org | |
Félix Romo-Gasson | Public Servant | México | Félix is the director of SESEA Chihuahua and member of the Academic Network of Open Government (Red RAGA).He strongly believes in transparency and accountability. Along with his team, he promotes citizen engagement across government initiatives as a tool to outweigh systemic corruption. | Anti-Corruption Secretariat Publications Page |
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Ned Crosby | Advocate | United States | Ned Crosby invented the Citizens Jury process in 1971 and conducted the first CJ in the US in 1974. He is the founder and former Executive Director of the Jefferson Center, a co-developer of the Citizen Initiative Review, a co-founder of Healthy Democracy, and the designer of several models of alternative democratic systems. Crosby is a major supporter of the Democracy R&D network. | ||
Kelly McBride | Practitioner | Scotland / UK | Kelly is a practitioner with over a decade of experience in design and facilitation of deliberative and participatory democracy, including citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting. She was previously Director of Policy & Practice at Democratic Society. | ||
DemocracyCo | Practitioner | Australia | DemocracyCo is a world-renowned team with a proven track record in using deliberative methodologies to guide governments and stakeholders in engaging and mobilising communities. Our work tackles the most complex problems of our time in Australia and Internationally. | Linkedin HomePage |
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Andrea Bernarte | Practitioner | Philippines | Andrea has been supporting the Bangsamoro peace process in the Philippines since 2016. In 2021, she helped pilot an online citizens' deliberative forum for constituents suffering from the economic effects of the lockdown. | Linkedin |
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Rose Longhurst | Program Officer in a Foundation | Germany | Rose works on issues of participatory decision-making, from grassroots groups to multilateral institutions. Her focus is mostly on meaningful participation - including deliberation and sortition methods - in philanthropic grantmaking. She works at OSIFE in Berlin. | ||
Brian Sullivan | Organizer | United States | Brian's mission is to develop and promote a universal capacity to think together in any group setting - a new form of communication that must be ubiquitous and D-I-Y. Self-governance, as an antidote to partisan politics, depends on developing this capacity in every context. | Web page |
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Angela Jain | Research based Practitioner | Germany | Angela advises decision-makers on process design for citizen deliberation. From a practitioner's perspective, she knows well how to organize/ facilitate dialogue & achieve impact. Interests: Smart Cities, Climate Change, Democratic Innovation, Planning Cells, Citizens Assemblies. | ||
Amarnath Karan | Programme Officer in an NGO | India | Amar works on themes of sustainability in urban sector like mobility, air quality, climate change and road safety apart from education for SD. He has worked on participatory budgeting & facilitating deliberative democracy process and interested to apply same in above sector. | ||
Gaëtane Ricard-Nihoul | Public Servant | Belgium | Gaëtane is Senior expert at the European Commission on citizen participation/deliberation. Previously member of the Secretariat for the Conference on the Future of Europe. Also worked in France on the Citizens' Consultations on Europe and the Grand Débat. Member of the board of FIDE. | Project page |
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Ed Cox | Public Servant, Advocate and Activist | United Kingdom | Ed is the Director for Inclusive Growth at West Midlands Combined Authority (the mayoral body for the Birmingham city region). Ed is also the chair of Involve, one of the UK's leading public participation charities. | Involve Project Page |
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Doreen Grove | Public Servant | Scotland | Doreen leads Scottish Government’s involvement in the Open Government Partnership at both a National and International level. In Scotland, Open Government supports the reform of public services, the renewal of democracy, promotes openness and transparency | ||
Teele Pehk | Practitioner | Estonia | Teele is a democracy artist who organises climate assemblies in Estonia. She promotes governance innovation for the sake of de-growth. | Linkedin Professional Page |
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Obhi Chatterjee | Public Servant | European Union | Obhi is responsible for Learning Technologies at the European Commission. He has developed a learning solution to co-create policies with citizens, as well as facilitating a co-design workshop for citizen deliberation related to the five Horizon research Missions. | EU Academy European Commission |
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Simon Pek | Researcher | Canada | Simon currently works as a faculty member at the University of Victoria and as a Board Member at Democracy In Practice. He is particularly interested in identifying and experimenting with deliberation and random selection in the contexts of education, coops, and workplaces. | Faculty Page | |
Carolyn M. Hendriks | Researcher | Australia | Carolyn is a researcher and educator at the Australian National University. She has published widely on public deliberation in contemporary governance. Her latest book (with Ercan & Boswell, OUP), Mending Democracy looks at how to strengthen connections in our democratic fabric. | Faculty Page Google Scholar |
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Dimitri Courant | Researcher | France & Switzerland | Dimitri is a researcher in political science at the Universities of Lausanne & Paris 8. His fieldwork compares case-studies: Citizens’ Assemblies (Ireland), High Council of the Military, Citizens’ group at CESE, Grand Débat, Citizens’ Convention for Climate (France), & Demoscan (Switzerland) | Professonal Page | |
Rachel Krust | Advocate | Australia / United States | Rachel recently graduated with a Master in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, where she wrote her applied thesis on deliberative democracy working with newDemocracy Foundation, worked as a democracy fellow and founded a group dedicated to democratic innovation. | LinkedIn Project Page |
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Niamh Webster | Public Servant | Scotland | Niamh leads on public engagement using digital technology as Digital Engagement manager. Her work is closely linked to the governments the role in the international Open Government Partnership. She is working to embed deliberative democracy and explore the potential of digital. | Twitter |
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Savaş Zafer Şahin | Organizer | Türkiye | As a University Professor in urban planning, he is heavily involved with participatory Practices and urban development in Türkiye. He is now Deputy Head of the Citizen Assembly of Ankara. He is the awardee of the IAF 2020 "Facilitation impact award" Gold Medal. | Research website | |
Claire Mellier-Wilson | Practitioner | United Kingdom | Claire is a freelance facilitator and researcher with a lifelong interest in citizens' participation and sustainability. She came to the UK in 2004 after working in France for an environmental NGO. That's when she realised she was a facilitator at heart rather than a campaigner. | Personal Page |