Demos is leading the largest trial of digital democracy in Britain.
Waves is a €1 million project trialling new technology in local democracy launched to bring people together to tackle contentious local issues and strengthen trust in local government. Thousands of local people will have the opportunity to shape local government policy on an issue affecting their area.
New AI-powered technology is intended to make it easier, cheaper and quicker for participants to have their say, identify areas of consensus, discuss difficult issues and work through trade-offs together.
Waves is being delivered by a new coalition of partners, including New Local, a think tank and network of forward-thinking councils; technology innovators, CASM Technology; and digital democracy platforms, PSi and Remesh.
The project will be launched in partnership with two trailblazing councils who are both embracing the opportunity to put the public at the heart of their policy making. The trial will begin in the London Borough of Camden to co-develop an approach to adult social care. Then the trial moves onto South Staffordshire Council as they develop an inclusive engagement process to prepare for their next local plan. The partners will also support a further 25 councils to observe and learn from the process so they too can use the tools in the future.
Trust in politics and politicians is in crisis. Only 24% of people trust politicians to make decisions in the best interests of the country. Polarisation is increasing. At the same time, people want to be involved in the public policy decisions that affect them.
As a result, local councils struggle to meaningfully engage local citizens in the decisions that affect their lives, while communities are increasingly self-organising on Facebook and Whatsapp groups. This leaves a democratic gulf between local councils and their communities that this project is seeking to bridge. Demos’s work on Low Traffic Neighbourhoods identified this ‘democratic chasm’.
Participatory democracy is one answer to this challenge – finding ways for people impacted by an issue to work with local and national politicians and experts to understand the problem and develop solutions together. Methods like Citizens’ Assemblies are powerful but can be prohibitively expensive for governments to use which means that doing democracy differently isn’t mainstreamed. Civic tech platforms offer a way for more people to get involved but don’t bring people together to find consensus.
Waves will be a new digital deliberation process and tool that uses AI to enable participation both at scale and in depth. Waves will integrate existing digital tools – Remesh and PSI – with new open-source technology, developed by CASM Technology, to simplify and scale end-to-end deliberation for local governments. By simplifying the process and bringing down the costs, more people can play an active role in the policy decisions that affect their lives, local governments can hear directly from their residents and develop policies that work better for people.
We want to make doing democracy differently business as usual.
Waves was funded by Google.org in 2024.
To follow our journey, sign-up to our Waves contact list.
If you’re a Council that would like to join the learning network, contact New Local.
If you live or work in Camden and have a question about how this affects you, contact: [email protected]
If you have any other question about Waves, contact us at: [email protected]
