The Kettering Foundation's research program exploring the relationship between democratic practices and community life.
Democracy relies on healthy, inclusive communities where all are able to participate in shaping their future, yet many communities are fractured. The work of this focus area will amplify individual and community voices, promote mutuality, encourage collective action, and enhance democratic engagement. Goal: Strengthen community voices, mutuality, and collective action for greater citizen engagement and influence over local problem-solving and government.
True Causes is a web tool for group root-cause analysis at scale: everyone writes causes alone, the group links them pair-by-pair at 75% agreement into a shared map whose "roots" are what to act on, digitising the decades-old Structured Democratic Dialogue method.
The Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative is a new Harvard Kennedy School program (in the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, led by Danielle Allen) helping local governments use technology to strengthen democracy, transparency, and citizen engagement, with an early output being Open Book, a free open-source municipal budget-transparency tool.
Zeitgeist is a public-deliberation platform from Nesta's Centre for Collective Intelligence Design that combines qualitative group discussion with quantitative polling in one experience, letting governments and charities run scalable, engaging consultations.
Joycotter is a collaborative "worldbuilding game" for real-world activism, built around the "joycott", a conditional commitment ("if this exists or this change happens, here's what I'll do") that makes latent demand and support visible before anyone risks building the thing.
