Why subscribe?
This is my personal substack, which is exploratory, meandering, and reflective. Most of my musings at the moment are about the paradigm beyond democracy, sortition (selecting decision makers by lottery), deliberation, more-than-human governance, our relationality with the living world and with technology/AI, embodied cognition, phenomenology, emotions, agency, language, perception, institutions, citizenship, identity, belonging, borders, collective wisdom, group collaboration and decision making, and (deep) time.
My organisation DemocracyNext has its own substack that is more oriented around the projects and work we are doing, if that is rather what you’re after. I don’t talk too directly about my work projects here.
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About me
I grew up in Canada and recently moved to Marseille, France after over five years Paris and a decade in the UK — mostly in London, and a little bit in Scotland. I would say I have a poetic soul, and you’ll often find some art and poetry in my reflections. When I’m not working on reimagining democracy, you’ll probably find me hiking.
I’ve been working on democratic innovation for over a decade, initially sparked by my research on populism and the extent to which it is driven by people’s disillusionment with the political system and with a lack of agency to shape the decisions affecting their lives and their communities.
I see the work I’m doing at the intersection between the worlds of theory, research, practice, politics, and policy.
In September 2022, I founded the international research and action institute DemocracyNext, which is working to shift political and legislative power to people through new democratic institutions that are based on citizen participation, sortition (representation by lottery), and deliberation - like Citizens’ Assemblies - and are advocating for these principles to be more widely applied in organisations and institutions of public life like museums, schools, workplaces, public banks, and others.
I was involved in designing the world’s first permanent Citizens’ Assemblies in Paris, Ostbelgien, and Brussels (on climate). I am also co-leading a pop-up lab on Tech-Enhanced Citizens’ Assemblies, a joint initiative of DemocracyNext and the MIT Center for Constructive Communication.
I am one of the 2023 Obama Leaders in Europe. I advise the Design & Democracy research platform, where we investigate the myriad ways in which design, culture. and democratic practices intersect and overlap, and explore possible new democratic paradigms through a design lens. And I am on the Global Advisory Council of The Data Tank, a think and do tank that work with people around the world to unlock data’s potential: gathering, accessing, and re-using it responsibly.
Before founding DemocracyNext, I set up and led the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation — establishing an evidence base of ~600 examples of citizens’ assemblies, setting standards for implementation, and establishing guidelines for institutionalisation. I co-authored the OECD’s flagship report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave and led the development of the OECD Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes. I also oversaw the development of the OECD Evaluation Guidelines for Representative Deliberative Processes (2021) and wrote the seminal OECD paper on Eight Ways to Institutionalise Deliberative Democracy (2021). I co-ordinated the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network, and edited the OECD blog Participo.
At the OECD, I managed five pilot projects of citizen participation in cohesion policy, supported by the European Commission, worked with Arantzazulab to advise on institutionalising deliberative democracy in the Basque Country, and advised on designing deliberative processes in Finland and Lebanon.
