Podcast: Designing Open Democracy 2020 Primer

Google Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13O9gqVEa80E9mIBAmEqWBA9CgN1xAiftkQGf3NR3y3c/edit?usp=sharing

https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode?id=579413

In this episode, we will be officially explaining about the aims and goals of Designing Open Democracy for this year.

This was recorded as part of a February Designing Open Democracy Melbourne Australia meetup event "Designing Open Democracy 2020 Primer" that was held on 2020-02-21

During this primer, we were also joined in the Audience by a few members of other democracy related organisations. One was Kimbra White from MOSAICLAB as well as Willow from Coalition of Everyone.

Kimbra White (Director for MosaicLab) : http://www.mosaiclab.com.au/
Willow Berzin (Founder for Coalition of Everyone): https://www.coalitionofeveryone.com/

https://www.meetup.com/DesigningOpenDemocracy/events/268596525/

The summary and analysis below were drafted by Claude Code from the episode's automated transcript, to bring this older post up to the standard of the newer ones. The original meeting notes are preserved in the collapsible section at the foot of the post. Quotes follow the automated transcript (fillers dropped, … marks cuts) — verify against the recording before citing.

Five vectors, and where the room's interest landed

Hosts Brian Khuu and Alexar Pendashteh open with the basics: who is Designing Open Democracy, and what is it trying to do? Their framing is the one that still describes the project today:

"Designing Open Democracy is an Australian[-based] forum for engineers, social architects, as well as philosophers, who are aiming to explore the ways that democracy can be applied in the technology, engineering and design of social systems like governments and organisations. We are non-partisan and also agnostic to any particular democratic innovations that are out there... we want to get their voice out to the public and to see it implemented." — Brian Khuu

DOD's areas of focus are grouped into five vectors: governance (transparency, accountability, resistance to hacking/subversion of voting systems), structural (how a system accounts for differences between, say, city and country populations), technology, sociological, and economics (including co-operative, non-authoritarian business structures). Alexar polled the room for a show of hands on people's top two areas of interest: governance (2), structural (2), technology (3), sociological (7), and economics (3) — "17 votes, which means 10 people," roughly two interests per person. Sociological topped the poll, with technology and economics tied for second.

The 2020 programme: four topics, eight months

The plan for the year was a bimonthly format — one month a talk from an invited expert, the next month a hands-on workshop on the same topic:

Co-operatives / economic democracy (March talk, April workshop) — expert: Antony McMullen of Co-operative Bonds. As COVID-19 disrupted the original March date, this talk was eventually recorded online and became Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility towards Economic Democracy.
Building a "general democracy" with technology (May talk, June workshop) — expert: Adam Jacoby, founder of MiVote. Brian's framing was to learn "what has worked, what didn't work, and what are the impediments... for getting acceptance in society for this kind of solution." (A correction from the floor during recording: MiVote itself wasn't run as a registered party — Flux was the party, while MiVote backed independent candidates. Both recollections, offered off the cuff, had part of it: per DOD's MiVote page, MiVote was a registered party, but deregistered before the 2019 federal election, so it didn't stand in it. The fuller MiVote story, including its later UK chapter, is covered in Catching up with Adam Jacoby (2021).)
Citizen juries — expert: Nicholas Gruen of Lateral Economics, returning to DOD after his 2017 talk, joined by Kimbra White of MosaicLab. A hands-on citizen-juries workshop was planned for August.
Participatory budgeting (workshop planned for October) — with Bang the Table (the Australian community-engagement platform company; the automated transcript hears it as "Bank the Table") flagged as a participatory-budgeting platform worth investigating.

From the floor: how a citizens' jury actually gets its members (Kimbra White, MosaicLab)

Invited to expand on citizen juries, Kimbra White grounds the topic in MosaicLab's track record: "we've been running citizen juries in Melbourne since 2014" — Gruen himself sat in on their first one, for the City of Melbourne's 10-year financial plan — with "probably over 20" facilitated since, and three running concurrently at the time of this recording.

Asked how someone becomes a participant, she walks through sortition in practice: people are randomly sampled from a database — most commonly Australia Post's — and then those who express interest are selected again to match the demographics of the area. There are two broad methods:

"One is where a physical invitation goes out. Only those people who got the invitation can express interest, and that will be checked. You know, your address is checked. There's a second method that some people are using where you go out and you let absolutely everyone, you know, you just put ads out, you do social media, but you need to get hundreds and hundreds of people under that method to make sure you get the randomness in the next step… rather than just the usual people who turn up all the time." — Kimbra White

For local councils, the address list is often the rate base — but that misses tenants, so invitations go "to the householder" rather than a named ratepayer to ensure renters are included too.

From the floor: Coalition of Everyone and "Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport" (Willow Berzin)

Willow Berzin introduces Coalition of Everyone as an effort "to help reboot democracy for the climate emergency specifically" — not by running citizens' juries or assemblies itself, but by building public awareness and education for the policy-led change such processes could enable.

At the time of recording, CoE had just run six events at Melbourne's Sustainable Living Festival (the automated transcript has "Centre for Living Festival"), headlined by "Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport" — an interactive panel (with MiVote's Adam Jacoby among the panellists) combined with experiential exercises in "deep democracy" facilitation tools. A follow-up event the same week was a two-hour mock citizens' assembly — "a mini version" for people to experience what deliberation actually feels like:

"You have to do it, then you get it." — Willow Berzin

Willow's own focus within CoE is people's assemblies: bottom-up, community-led co-design workshops that use deep-democracy tools to create a "safe psychological space" for creative problem-solving — a complement, in her framing, to the more policy-driven, top-down citizen-jury model.

Participatory budgeting: from Porto Alegre to Pick My Project

The conversation turns to participatory budgeting, which Kimbra traces back to Brazil and notes has been "taken up quite widely in Europe, particularly in the UK" — but with little uptake in Australia, and none that she's aware of at a whole-of-national-budget scale. Two Australian examples come up:

The Victorian Government's "Pick My Project" — a pool of public money that community groups bid for, with the public voting online on where it should go (an online process, not face-to-face deliberation).
Melville Council (WA)'s "Robin Hood Project", running for five to six years at the time of recording.

Brian draws a parallel to SOUP — an event format that started in Detroit and was replicated in Melbourne, where attendees pay a flat entry fee, hear pitches from four community projects, and vote, with the pooled entry fees going to the winner — and to the Donkey Wheel precinct's Kinfolk café, where customers direct charitable donations by placing a token in one of several jars. Bang the Table is flagged as a participatory-budgeting software tool that's "very well known amongst the community engagement world."

Kimbra is careful about the boundaries of the term: some would call the City of Melbourne's 10-year financial plan deliberation (the same one referenced above) a participatory budgeting process because it deliberated over a budget — but in her view, "it was a deliberation, not a PB process." Where the line falls between a citizens' assembly, a people's assembly and participatory budgeting is, by her own account, genuinely contested: some practitioners promoting deliberation "would say that, you know, it's got to be five to six full days of deliberation" before it counts.

One small practice note from the same exchange is worth keeping. Describing who takes part in participatory budgeting, Kimbra says: "Sometimes we don't use the word citizens, because there's an assumption that they have got the paperwork." (Our reading: a local budget affects residents who aren't citizens too, and the wording of an invitation can quietly exclude them.)

A foundation for an underfunded movement

The episode closes with Alexar pitching DOD's organisational plan for the year — and it's the same problem the group returns to again and again (see also the "why can't democracy reformers unite" discussion from the previous episode). His diagnosis: Australia has several groups doing valuable, innovative work — DOD's podcast had recently covered Flux, for instance — but as a whole the space is "really disempowered," with no clear business model and "we can't even call it an industry."

His proposal is a foundation, deliberately not an association — the groups he'd spoken to weren't keen on an association, because it implies more work aligning everyone onto "another democracy thing of democracy." A foundation, by contrast, doesn't try to get everyone on the same page:

"We want to empower everyone in what they're doing because as a whole, we all need to be more empowered. And we thought a foundation would facilitate making this whole community one like a interface for this whole community so that it can financially interact with the rest of the world and receive funds and donations and having the basic legal foundation as well in place if they need to be a financial agreement, a contract, or if one of these groups that are doing some sort of experiments wants to engage with the research or conduct some research with the foundation…" — Alexar Pendashteh

A shared foundation would also make it easier for Australian groups to connect with equivalent organisations overseas, and to interact with state and federal government. For 2020 itself, the goals were more modest: get better organised, produce more outputs from events (like this podcast), and — "not going to be an absolute hard target" — aim for a podcast episode every month.

Original meeting notes (Google Slides outline)

# Designing Open Democracy Primer 2020 Meeting Notes (DOD, Feb 2020) Current actors in this space that we are aware of * MiVote, Horizon State * Flux, SecureVote * NewVote * Politico * Linux Conference Australia * Open Democracy (UK) * Can we find a way to get democracy R&D? (Network of international groups and orgs) * GovHack * AngryAussie (YouTube) was part of the "trust as a concept" panel last year. * New Democracy Foundation * Code For Australia (Civic Tech) ## 4 Elements of a healthy society? * Mechanism - Law - Finance * Cultural - Media - Education ## Changemakers? * Passions * High Schoolers

Detailed notes

A fuller, timestamped breakdown of this recording — who said what, transcription corrections, and claims worth checking before repeating them — is kept in the site's repository next to the transcripts: analysis notes. Speaker labels there are inferred from the automated transcript, not checked against the audio.