Community Call: Deliberative & Democratic Tech hosted by Metagov x CrownShy (#6)
Our Sixth Community Call - Tuesday, September 22nd
Idealism in Practice: Making Open Civic Tech Sustainable
The case for open source in civic tech has been made over and over: for sovereignty, for public trust, and for open, shared improvement. The harder question is why these tools don't spread on their own the way Doodle does? A tool solving an obviously universal problem should disseminate almost by itself, no? Civic deliberation tools solve problems that are just as real, arguably more urgent, yet adoption remains desperately slow. Why is that?
Unlike scheduling a meeting, opening up real deliberation touches power, trust, and institutional risk. Someone has to convince the people who'd benefit most (public institutions, organizations, communities) that their problem is worth solving this way, walk them through the risks, and stay in the room for the outcome.
Agora Citizen Network set out to support civic dialogue: helping people navigate nuance and reach shared decisions. Since day one, it has been open source, free to start and product-first. It is built in the open and tested with real users. But building a good product wasn't enough to generate the kind of organic spread you'd expect from a genuinely useful tool. That gap led to a partnership with Lyfe Catalyst, facilitators who bring consensus tools into public institutions and companies, doing the human work software can’t: trust-building, framing, convincing and follow-through.
The other half of the answer may be structural. This year Agora launched the Decentralized Deliberation Stack, a proposal for how deliberation tools might interoperate instead of each fighting for adoption alone. It has since evolved into a W3C Community Group, open to different approaches.
Both teams will share learnings through concrete use cases, but the real discussion is: if usefulness alone doesn't drive adoption in civic tech the way it does elsewhere, what actually does? What kind of ecosystem (funding, facilitation, distribution, institutional buy-in) does open civic tech need to survive and spread, when it can't rely on the viral shortcut other tools get for free?
This call is part of a series of calls that will bring together people working on deliberative and digital democracy including researchers, practitioners, technology builders, academics, policymakers, and more. Our goal is to create a shared, professional space for folks to strengthen ties, cross-pollinate ideas, and reflect on how democratic infrastructure is being shaped in the real world.
What to Expect from this Series:
Featured presentations from practitioners, developers, and researchers
Open discussion through Q&A and breakout conversations
Community shout-outs - a space to share projects, ask for help, and find collaborators
A professional community focused on tangible insights and genuine connections
Duration: Each call lasts 75 minutes
Access: Free and open to the community
Recording: Sessions will be recorded and shared on the CrownShy and Metagov YouTube channels.
More about this Series:
The series is hosted by CrownShy and Metagov.
Crownshy is a U.K. and U.S. based team of recognized leaders in the domains of deliberative democracy dedicated to providing democratic tools and methods for communities of all shapes and sizes.
Metagov is a laboratory for digital governance cultivating tools, practices, and communities that enable self-governance in the digital age.
In the spirit of open-source innovation, these are free, community-first calls designed to support learning, collaboration, and critical thinking across disciplines, with a focus on how tools, platforms, and design choices affect power, inclusion, trust, and long-term democratic capacity.
We aim to:
Strengthen connections across the field, rather than within silos
Encourage collaboration and shared learning
Surface and showcase open-source tools and approaches
Support innovation and critical reflection on how democratic systems are designed and governed
Rather than focusing only on highly specialized technical or theoretical questions, the series is designed as a bridging forum - a place where people working in different domains can translate across disciplines, surface assumptions, and learn from each other’s constraints and priorities.
Who Is This For?
This series is for people working in, across, or between the following domains:
Practitioners & facilitators designing and running in-person deliberative processes
Developers & builders creating digital democracy platforms and tools
Researchers & academics studying, evaluating, and theorising democratic innovation
If you are working in any capacity to make online and offline public discourse and collective decision-making more thoughtful, inclusive, and impactful, this community is for you!