Community Call: Deliberative & Democratic Tech hosted by Metagov x CrownShy (#4)
These calls 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.
Our Fourth Community Call - Tuesday, May 26th
Topic: Why is it important that deliberative and democratic technology is open source?
When communities use digital tools to deliberate, participate, and make collective decisions together, questions of ownership, transparency, and control are never just technical, they are deeply political.
Recent developments in the digital democracy space have prompted many of us to ask: who should govern the platforms that govern participation? What are the risks when open infrastructure moves into private hands? And what does genuine technological sovereignty look like in practice? This community call explores these questions. It will be a space to think through what open source software makes possible for the future of democratic tooling.
For this call we are fortunate to have Iñaki Goñi https://www.inakigoni.com as a guest presenter. Iñaki is an Assistant Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, whose work sits at the intersection of democratic theory and civic technology. He has worked on large-scale participatory processes including Chile's constitutional reforms, co-founded the Collective Intelligence group advising the Scottish Government on participation technologies, and led the data strategy of the Iswe Foundation towards a permanent Global Citizens Assembly. He will open with a 10-15 minute presentation before we open out for a community discussion.
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!