Digital Democracy
Can digital technologies augment democracy?
At the Center for Collective Learning we design, test, and develop tools to support civic participation. Our team consists of talented engineers, lawyers, scientists, and designers, experienced in the design, testing, and development of digital tools.
Our contributions include the creation of collaborative government program generators, which we have tested experimentally in France and Brazil, and modular constitution builders, such as Constitutin, which allow citizens to create personalized and collective constitutions.
We are interested in exploring new user interfaces and paradigms of participation, that help augment deliberation and collaboration among politically distant groups. We are also interested in participation paradigms that can increase the fluidity of the boundaries of participation. This includes non-binding digital forms of participation for non-citizen residents (from international scholars to refugees).
Our work builds on our vast experience in the design and implementation of complex online platforms. This expertise allows us to take an active approach to research on digital democracy, where we can learn through the design, implementation, and deployment, of digital platforms. Using on the ground, and controlled experiments, we are helping develop a solid understanding of how digital tools can augment and support the ideals of democracy.
Augmented Democracy (2018) is the idea of augmenting the participatory and decision making capacities of people by providing them with a digital twin. Here, you can get a gist of the idea on augmented democracy.
Participie (2012) was a design experiment on direct participation with constrained choices (like budgets). Participie was developed by Ali Almossawi as part of an independent study class.