Deutschland, was geht?
Inspired by the ground-breaking political economic research by Glen Weyl that got popularized around the publication of his book Radical Markets in 2018, Leon Erichsen - back then as an undergraduate student - started to work with the mechanism designs and ideology presented in the book.
Most recently, in 2026, Leon started a citizen participation project in Germany called Deutschland, was geht? working with SPRIND, the federal agency for breakthrough innovation in Germany, and the Ministry of Digital Affairs. They invited citizens to submit their perspective and feelings about navigating the German administration. This way they collected almost 28,000 citizen inputs, synthesized them using AI-sense-making technologies, and then invited citizens to prioritize their shared ideas using Quadratic Voting, incl. underlying accountable bridging algorithms.
What's unique about this citizen participation initiative is that the result isn't really focused on policy recommendations but that SPRIND is now opening a call for applications by civic hackers in Europe to solve these collectively prioritized problems together with the German administration. This effort is supported by funding as well as political buy-in from various ministries around the 13 ideas that made it into the election.
In this meeting at the Newspeak House, Leon and Glen will be presenting their research and ideas but also dive a little bit deeper into the ongoing citizen participation process in Germany as well as some of the related socio-technical details. It's going to be more of an open discussion of the project and ideas than a formal presentation. We hope to learn from each other and identify ways for collaboration, whether that's in research around these technologies or the political effort in Germany and adjacent political opportunities around Europe and the world.
Leon Erichsen is a research-driven product manager working at the intersection of political economy, mechanism design, and digital public infrastructure. His work focuses on translating ideas from the Plurality ecosystem into deployable institutions, products, and public-sector experiments. He has worked with RadicalxChange, Gitcoin, SPRIND, Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, and the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests include participatory governance, quadratic voting and funding, partial common ownership, digital identity, and the political economy of data and AI.
E. Glen Weyl is a political economist and technologist working at the intersection of economics, political theory, and digital public infrastructure. He is Founder and Research Lead of Microsoft Research's Plurality Technology Collaboratory, and co-founder and chair of the Plurality Institute, the RadicalxChange Foundation, and the Faith, Family and Technology Network. He is co-author of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Economist Book of the Year, 2018) and co-author, with Audrey Tang, of 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy. He holds a PhD in economics.