What's ahead for DemocracyNext in 2025

New ways to take decisions in workplaces, cities, and public institutions

Dear friend of DemNext,

Happy New Year! I spent the holidays in Japan, where I discovered that deliberative democracy is both a remarkable part of everyday life in one of the world's best-run countries, but is at the same time strangely absent from the national agenda. More on that soon!

Motoki Nagano, Claudia Chwalisz, and Ayano Takeuchi; Nezu Museum; Meeting with Japan Deliberative Mini-Public Forum and Koso Nippon (Japan Initiative)

After a busy 2024 – here's our end-of-year round up, in case you missed it – we're firming up our plans for the months ahead. Please reach out if you have suggestions, contacts, or want your institution to be a part of any of these initiatives.

🖼️ Our first focus will be on Birmingham, UK, where we’ve been acting as a critical friend and advisor to Birmingham Museums Trust. This manufacturing city at the heart of the English Midlands has been holding the first citizens’ jury in a UK museum, facilitated by Shared Future, on the future of the institution. The citizens launch their recommendations later in January – watch this space!

🇩🇪 Following citizens' assemblies held last year in two German museums, a related exhibition on redesigning democracy moves from the national Bundeskunsthalle to the city of Dresden. Dresden and Bonn held groundbreaking four-day assemblies in 2023 in collaboration with Design & Democracy, nexus and DemocracyNext.

🏙️ We are now half-way through an 18-month cities citizens' assembly programme with Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg; Kerewan, The Gambia; and Vilnius, Lithuania. They will all hold their first citizens' assemblies later this year and we will be working with each city to institutionalise the assemblies adapted to their contexts. Our experience so far convinces us that cities are leading the way to build new institutions that strengthen trust and help us solve our collective problems better, and hope that even more municipalities will apply next time round.

🔬 2025 will see us in Spain's Basque Country at the unique workers’ cooperatives-based Mondragon Corporation, where we'll be collectively testing our ideas on the evolution of democracy in the workplace with our partners Arantzazulab. This is part of our ongoing work on bringing technology enhancement to deliberative assemblies in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Constructive Communication (MIT CCC).

🧑🏾‍🤝‍🧑🏻 Finally, a big welcome to new colleagues Hannah Terry, who becomes our first Programme Coordinator, and Jonathan Moskovic, who is a Senior Adviser on our busy Cities Programme. We'll be starting the search for our new communications support soon - watch this space!

With best wishes for 2025,

Claudia Chwalisz

CEO and Founder, DemocracyNext

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📡 What’s on our radar

🌐 Catch up with a look at everything we did in 2024 in A short journey round DemocracyNext's second year.

📚 Check out this addition to our list of new books in 2024: Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, by Alexander Guerrero, which sets out by showing how elections are broken and should be scrapped. In their place, Guerrero proposes that random selection of regular citizens be put at the heart of a comprehensive new lottery-based legislative and executive system.

👀 Take a look at the new video of the Deschutes Citizens' Assembly on Youth Homelessness that we helped organise in Bend, Oregon last year alongside the MIT CCC, Central Oregon Civic Action Project, Healthy Democracy, and OSU Cascades. We're especially proud that it is also now the subject of an excellent article by Nick Romeo in The New Yorker: What Could Citizens' Assemblies Do for American Politics?

🎤 Nick Romeo dove deep on his experience of the Deschutes assembly in Political Gabfest, the leading US podcast from Slate. Listen in from the 37-minute mark for more of what he and the presenters agreed was a "fascinating" story.

🗓️ Claudia will be in Taiwan for a conference and some meetings in late February. She’ll be taking time to learn more about that country's unique mix of tech and deliberative democracy from our International Council Member Audrey Tang and others. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, do get in touch!

🔤 Have you ever wanted other people – particularly in today's polarised political debates – to understand exactly what you are trying to say? Try this Bridging Dictionary invented last year by our partners at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology's Center for Constructive Communication. They call it the Bridging Dictionary, because it aims to give you linguistic workarounds (based on AI analysis of language use by Fox News and MSNBC) for words that are used very differently by the Democrat and Republican party camps.

⚡ Can a citizens' assemblies also work in times of crisis? Despite its ongoing war with Russia, Ukraine has proved that they can. Randomly selected citizens in November completed their first two citizens' assemblies, one on urban space renewal in the western Ukrainian town of Zvyahel and another on waste management in Slavutych, close to front lines north of Kyiv. Within weeks, the town council of Zvyahel adopted the citizens' action plan – a faster reaction time than in many countries at peace!