MYO Democracy (Make Your Own Democracy)
MYO Democracy (Make Your Own Democracy) was a project by Melbourne-based civic technologist Danny Johnson, presented at a joint Designing Open Democracy / Melbourne Geek Night event in May 2019.
What it aimed to do
MYO Democracy sought to give citizens a direct, structured say in the laws that affect them. The platform supported a full democratic workflow:
- Citizens raise issues and concerns
- Propose and prioritise options for addressing them
- Review relevant research to inform decisions
- Define expectations — what success looks like
- Vote for solutions most likely to succeed
- Track outcomes and measure whether promised benefits materialised
The platform was explicitly non-partisan. Its stated mission was to "support, promote, drive, petition, monitor and generally pester the existing incumbent government to actually listen to what citizens have said they really need, regardless of whether the solution is left, right or somewhere in between." The goal was to complement and pressure incumbent government — not replace it.
Context
Danny described the project as free-to-use and open-source, intended for everyday citizens rather than specialists. It was positioned as infrastructure for local centres and online communities to run collaborative democratic processes together.
Later development
A 2021 Medium article by Danny ("Open and United") showed the thinking evolving toward a broader vision: global democratic self-governance with collaborative decision-making, modular design, distributed implementation, and an economy tied to physical resource usage — bringing open communities together under a collaborative framework.
Status
The project appears to have gone quiet after 2021. The website (myodemocracy.org) is no longer reachable and no public code repository has been found. The Meetup group, Facebook page, and LinkedIn company page remain but are dormant.