Designing Open Democracy

DOD is co-hosting a Melbourne panel for International Day of Democracy

Brian Khuu — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Event · 888 Co-operative Causeway & Designing Open Democracy

International Day of Democracy: democracy beyond the ballot box

Tuesday, 15 September 2026, 6:00–8:00 PM

The Kelvin Club, Melbourne, Australia

Co-hosted by DOD.

RSVP for 15 September →

View larger map / directions →

This one's ours: on Tuesday 15 September, DOD is co-hosting a Melbourne panel with 888 Co-operative Causeway on democratic practices that go beyond voting.

Could a Global Dictatorship Last Forever? A Video Worth Sharing With DOD

Brian Khuu — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shared link · Rational Animations

Could a Global Dictatorship Last Forever?

The video essay this post responds to

Could a totalitarian regime conquer the entire world and lock in its power forever? This is a particular type of unrecoverable dystopia: a future in which humanity survives, but forever loses its potential to grow and flourish. In this video, we explore which technologies might make this possibility more likely, but also how we might shape technological development in order to prevent it, without giving up the global coordination we need against threats like misaligned AI and engineered pandemics.

Watch →

Rational Animations' "Could a Global Dictatorship Last Forever?" (22 August 2026, ~20 min) asks whether a totalitarian regime could ever become genuinely permanent — global enough that no rival state can grow into a counterweight, stable enough that no internal reform ever succeeds. Philosopher Toby Ord calls this an unrecoverable dystopia: humanity survives, but permanently loses its capacity to grow, adapt, and self-correct. Ord, quoted in the video from The Precipice: a world "locked under the rule of an oppressive totalitarian regime... would have much in common with extinction: just a narrow range of terrible futures remaining, and no way out."[^ord-precipice]

The Habermas Machine: an AI mediator that beat humans at finding common ground

Brian Khuu — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shared link · Science

AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation

The study this post is about. Full text is paywalled, but the abstract is free — and the link is still worth clicking if you have institutional access or are willing to pay. DOD's write-up below draws on the secondary sources listed at the bottom for everyone else.

Finding agreement through a free exchange of views is often difficult. Collective deliberation can be slow, difficult to scale, and unequally attentive to different voices. In this study, we trained an artificial intelligence (AI) to mediate human deliberation. Using participants’ personal opinions and critiques, the AI mediator iteratively generates and refines statements that express common ground among the group on social or political issues. Participants (N = 5734) preferred AI-generated statements to those written by human mediators, rating them as more informative, clear, and unbiased. Discussants often updated their views after the deliberation, converging on a shared perspective. Text embeddings revealed that successful group statements incorporated dissenting voices while respecting the majority position. These findings were replicated in a virtual citizens’ assembly involving a demographically representative sample of the UK population.

Read the original → Paywalled

Someone in DOD flagged this one around and the reaction has been consistently "wait, this is actually interesting" — so here's the heads-up version. Google DeepMind built an AI system, named after Jürgen Habermas, whose only job is to write a group statement that a divided room can agree describes their discussion fairly. In controlled experiments with UK citizens, it beat human mediators at that job more often than not — published in Science in October 2024, with a follow-up essay from the same team a year later if you want the caveats too.[^science-paper]

Occupy to Plurality: what the 2010s civic-tech wave built, and where it stalled

Brian Khuu — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Loomio, DemocracyOS, Pol.is, Decide Madrid, Decidim, Democracy Earth, RadicalxChange — the Democracy Landscape already documents all of these individually. What it hasn't done yet is put them next to each other. Read as a sequence rather than a list, they tell one continuous story: a protest movement's decision-making problem, handed to software, again and again, for fifteen years.

RadicalxChange is launching a Melbourne chapter — here's what it is

Brian Khuu — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Event · RadicalxChange Foundation

An invitation to meet RadicalxChange Foundation in Melbourne

Thursday, 27 August 2026, 6:00–8:00 PM

Today, Collingwood, Melbourne, Australia

This is a RadicalxChange event, not a DOD event — we're just pointing at it.

RSVP for 27 August →

View larger map / directions →

If you're in Melbourne on Thursday 27 August, come meet RadicalxChange Foundation — the international movement behind quadratic voting, quadratic funding, and the "Plurality" philosophy — as it launches its Australian chapter.

We scored 21 parties on internal democracy and reform advocacy

Brian Khuu — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We scored 21 parties on internal democracy and reform advocacy

The Democracy Landscape has a lot of advocacy orgs in it. Which is fair — we built it that way. But we're an Australian group, and at some point you've got to stop staring at the international reform ecosystem and take a good hard look at your own backyard. So we did.

We picked every Australian party with enough documentation to score, tossed in a few historical ones and international comparators, and rated them on three things: internal governance, external reform advocacy, and ideology. Then we put it all on a page with graphs and a data file and told ourselves we'd update it when things change.

The Australian Party Governance Comparison page is the result.

PRSA Members to Vote on Rebrand to Australian Electoral Reform Society — AGM 12 November 2026

Brian Khuu — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Proportional Representation Society of Australia (PRSA) — tracing its history back to the 1890s and describing itself as Australia's oldest continuing electoral reform coalition — has circulated a formal notice of motion for its 12 November 2026 AGM: a 17-motion package that would rename the organisation, broaden its remit far beyond its traditional single-issue focus, and modernise its governance from the ground up.

We Need to Rethink Democracy: An Anarchist Critique, and What It Means for DOD

Brian Khuu — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shared link · Andrewism

We Need To Rethink Democracy

The video essay this post responds to

Watch →

Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" (June 2026) argues that democracy — even "real," direct, consensus-based democracy — is not a fellow traveller of anarchism but one of its obstacles. It's a substantial, well-sourced essay, and the argument is worth engaging with directly, including the parts that cut against how DOD itself talks about its work.

Why the Philosophy page just changed: moving the accountability framework to Projects

Brian Khuu — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you've visited DOD's Philosophy page before, it just changed shape. The full accountability framework that used to live there — the rigorous, AI-reviewed standard for what belongs in the Democracy Landscape — has moved. The page itself is now something different: an open space for DOD members to argue about democracy.

The small rooms: how DOD's podcast archive reads from 2026

Brian Khuu — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The DOD podcast archive runs from 2017 to 2023. DOD is a discussion forum — these were working conversations among practitioners thinking through how democracy functions and fails, not policy proposals or predictions. Revisiting them from 2026 is an exercise in calibration: did the observations hold up? Where did the analysis prove accurate, where is it still unresolved, and what did it miss entirely?

Event: People Powered Democracy Forum — Carlton, 31 May

Brian Khuu — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

People Powered Democracy Forum — this Sunday in Carlton

Event · Beyond Billionaires

People Powered Democracy Forum

Sunday, 31 May 2026, 2:00 PM

Kathleen Syme Library, Multi-Purpose Room 2

This is an external event organised by Beyond Billionaires — not a DOD event. We're flagging it because the topic and speakers are directly relevant to our work, and DOD member Craig Lambie is one of the speakers.

View larger map / directions →

Free event, in-person, with video sent to those who can't make it.

What Happens When You Ask AIs from Different Countries to Review Your Democracy Framework

Brian Khuu — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Who Are 'The People'? A Question Democracy Has Always Had to Answer

Brian Khuu — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Democracy means rule of the people. It says so in the etymology: demos (people) + kratos (rule). But who counts as the people has never been self-evident. It has been the central contested question of democratic politics across every era — and the history of how that question has been answered, and repeatedly re-answered, is both clarifying and humbling.

Australia's Electoral Reform Act 2025: What Changed and What's Still Contested

Brian Khuu — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Australia's federal parliament passed the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 2025, receiving royal assent on 20 February 2025.[^royal-assent] The AEC describes it as the biggest update to the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 40 years[^biggest-update] — introducing donation caps and tightening disclosure requirements that have been debated in Australia for many years.

Taiwan's digital democracy experiment: what it shows, what it doesn't

Brian Khuu — Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Taiwan is frequently cited as a place where digital deliberation actually worked at government scale. That claim deserves scrutiny — and the scrutiny is more interesting than the headline. The factual background is in the vTaiwan and g0v entries in the DOD Democracy Landscape.

Victoria's Upper House inquiry: the case for a citizens' assembly

Brian Khuu — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In December 2025 the Victorian parliament completed an inquiry into the state's Upper House electoral system. Among its findings: it recommended that any reform process should involve either an expert panel, a citizens' assembly, or a constitutional convention before putting changes to a referendum.[^inquiry-recommendation]

Civics Ecosystem Toolkit v1.2 Released

Brian Khuu — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Civics Ecosystem Toolkit v1.2 is now publicly available. This is a project that has been developing quietly for a while and feels ready to share more broadly.

Workshop - Using Design Thinking to Improve Society and Democracy

Nick Merange — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Workshop: Using Design Thinking to Improve Society and Democracy

Event Period: Saturday, Jan 31 · 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM AEDT
Event Address: Kensington Neighbourhood House

Do you want to address society's biggest issues but not sure where you'd start? Or, perhaps you're idealistic but struggle with concrete planning? Or maybe you just want to make a positive difference with others who also want the same?

In this event, our special guest, Usha (with support from Nick) will use her expertise to guide participants in a workshop on how we can use Design Thinking to address an issue in society.

Your Party is using sortition

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shared link · Your Party

Sortition

This is Your Party's own page, not a DOD or Sortition Foundation page — we're just pointing at it.

This process is being conducted in partnership with the Sortition Foundation, who are responsible for running the sortition selection to ensure independence and integrity.

Read the original →

Glad to see a political party in UK exploring this idea of sortition.

Q&A on deliberative democracy for council candidates (Victoria, Australia)

Brian Khuu — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Event · Dr Sonia Randhawa

Q&A on deliberative democracy for council candidates

Sunday, 29 September 2024, 5:00–6:00 PM

Melbourne (Online)

This was a Victorian council-candidates event, not a DOD event. Registration closed after the event took place.

View event (RSVPs closed) →

View larger map / directions →

This event in victoria is of interest to us so passing around the telegram chat and to various other Designing Open Democracy members in Victoria, because it's about open governance but via Citizen Assemblies.