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Status active
Type 🔬 research
Country 🇦🇺 AU
Website www.designingopendemocracy.com
Concepts Meta Organisation Deliberative Democracy Accountability Sink
Last activity 2026-08-07 manual
This entry, and everything else on this site, is evidence of its own activity.

Designing Open Democracy

A note on this entry: every other page in the Democracy Landscape is DOD monitoring an organisation from the outside, arm's length, no formal relationship. This one is different — DOD writing about itself, on its own site. Read it with that in mind rather than as independent verification.

Designing Open Democracy (DOD) is an Australian-operated, nonpartisan forum of process engineers, social architects, and philosophers exploring how technology, engineering, and the design of social systems can be applied to democracy at every level of society. It is agnostic about which democratic model is right, but not about whether a system is genuinely trying to serve its people — see the Accountability Framework for how that distinction gets applied in practice.

DOD held its first meetup in December 2016, in the middle of the same wave of protest-born civic-tech efforts — Loomio, DemocracyOS, vTaiwan, Flux — documented in Occupy to Plurality. Rather than build a platform or run for office, DOD took a third path: podcasting, hosting meetups, and — since 2026 — maintaining this site as a public "Democracy Landscape" documenting other organisations' efforts, including the ones that came and went before DOD started writing any of this down.

Meta-organisation

Some in the group describe DOD as a meta-organisation — its role is to pay attention across the reform landscape rather than push any one mechanism, on the premise that most reform ideas being tried have been tried before and the lesson shouldn't have to be re-learned from scratch each time. It's a premise held by a few people in the group, not a settled institutional position — see Philosophy for it posed as an open question.

What DOD does

  • Podcast and meetups — recorded discussions with practitioners, researchers, and people building democracy-reform projects, going back to 2016
  • The Democracy Landscape — this site's organisations index, tracking who's working on what, whether they're still active, and what happened when they weren't
  • The Accountability Framework — DOD's standard for what belongs in the Democracy Landscape, applied non-partisanly and symmetrically, including to liberal democracies
  • Blog and retrospectives — analysis connecting DOD's own eight-plus years of discussion to what's happening in the wider reform space now

See also