Projects
Members of Designing Open Democracy work on various democracy-related projects. Below is a full record of projects past and present — join our Telegram channel if you'd like to get involved in any active ones.
Active
An ongoing series in which AI systems from different national and cultural contexts review and critique DOD's governance philosophy framework — testing whether a standard claiming cross-cultural applicability can survive scrutiny from outside the Western liberal tradition.
Charlie
A living reference comparing Australian political parties on internal governance structure, external reform advocacy, and ideology — with international comparators. Uses the Accountability Framework's 'how people participate in governance' test across both internal practice and external advocacy.
DOD
A practical toolkit for building participatory civics structures in Australia, covering cooperative governance, party member funding, and ecosystem design.
Brian Khuu
A proxy advisory service that replaces opaque corporate governance recommendations with decisions made by randomly selected pension fund members — giving members real democratic power over how their retirement savings vote at company AGMs.
Craig Lambie
Internal tooling and processes for keeping the Democracy Landscape directory accurate, active, and machine-readable.
BrianKhuu
A self-hosted, modular research framework with a built-in policy scoring system — allowing communities to directly rate and analyse policies, politicians, and special interest groups using a participatory democratic methodology.
Dausume
A prediction market platform that aggregates collective intelligence on policy questions — users stake structured predictions with reasons, and the system surfaces the informed consensus.
Hubertus Hofkirchner
Building short, factual articles on core democracy topics so the wiki is accessible to everyone.
Usmaan, Aya.elfadil
A Windows desktop app that creates a verifiable, auditable record of research and reporting — like a journalist's bodycam for their computer.
Austin
DOD's accountability standard: the framework used to decide which governance systems and organisations belong in the Democracy Landscape. Relocated from the old Philosophy page in June 2026 — see the note in the Soul Document — so the Philosophy section could be reserved for open human discussion.
Charlie
Idea — Seeking an Owner
A 'tick who you trust' voting guide aggregator: voters select orgs, parties, and commentators they already trust, and the tool displays those sources' stated positions side-by-side per race or policy — without DOD ranking anyone itself.
A self-declared map of podcasts, YouTube channels, and independent commentators showing their stated political/party affiliations — helping audiences read the independent media landscape, without DOD assigning labels itself.
A federated record of election promises versus subsequent votes and actions in office — closing the accountability loop on the other side of an election, by aggregating existing open parliamentary and civic data rather than DOD doing its own fact-checking.
Mothballed
A crowdsourced website to make it easy to find and share the next election date for any country. The project is currently mothballed.
BrianKhuu, Usmaan
A Melbourne-based platform for collaborative democratic decision-making — citizens raise issues, propose options, review research, vote on solutions, and track outcomes. Non-partisan and designed to complement rather than replace existing government.
Danny Johnson
A Melbourne-based online democracy platform focused on crowdsourced policy development — members raised issues, proposed and deliberated on policies, then voted in community referendums.
Guy Kennedy